#NoChef
An initiative of the Culinary Institute of Barcelona to dignify the profession of chef in accordance with the values of 21st century society.
The CIB's value proposition
“Working 60 hours or more a week, Saturdays, Sundays, mornings, afternoons and evenings. Working at Christmas, missing your children's birthday and having no time for yourself.”
A cooking school should not only teach you how to cook. At the CIB, we teach students that the gastronomy sector is changing and that they are the catalyst for this change. In addition to specific workshops, all their training sessions help them develop lateral skills that allow them to look for solutions in a creative way, solutions that will determine the future of the gastronomic sector.
“The consumption of drugs and alcohol breaks down personal relationships and leads to exhaustion during a service”.
We need to change this image of the rock&roll star chef who pushes themself to the limit. When these situations occur, our CIBers will know how to deal with them thanks to the skills they have acquired during their training and the mental health sessions, which give them tools to detect potentially risky situations.
“Making yourself understood amidst shouting, taking orders in bad form and putting up with humiliation from customers.”
At the CIB, students learn to manage themselves and others by developing lateral skills and effective communication techniques. Valuing yourself, valuing your work, valuing your team, knowing how to communicate effectively and conveying your opinions assertively, is all part of being a good chef.
“Restaurateurs who want recognition above all else by paying their employees a very tight salary.”
At the CIB, we instill teamwork from day one, whether it’s on our creativity and innovation bootcamps or part of the challenges. Everything is focused on teamwork. We believe that in order to grow and achieve success, this growth has to be sustainable and collaborative.
Manifesto
There’s two sides to every story. And gastronomy is no exception.
On one hand we have burnt-out chefs, closed restaurants, minimum wage, violence, and excess. And on the other, more and more restaurants, glamour, money, fame, and success…
Is it possible for some to have so much, without subjecting others to suffering and ridicule?
Most kitchens are not the idyllic work environment that some reality shows or TV series make them out to be, where chefs work in creative harmony to provide the best service they can. Sometimes, more often than not, kitchens are hellish places, full of shouting, swearing and authoritarian orders that creep into everyday life.
The famous “Yes, chef!”, a compliance inherited from the army, with jackets and stripes, is grating on a world that is increasingly global, more diverse, more empathetic and more sustainable.
Therefore, the Culinary Institute of Barcelona says “No, chef!”, in order to build a new paradigm together.
As a cooking school, we are obliged to tell our students about the reality of life in most kitchens today. But as an educational center, our purpose is to transmit values, skills and tools that will prepare them to lead the changes needed to transform the future.
Our students come from all over the world with a great passion for gastronomy, and want to go beyond cooking to communicate and effect change through their own projects. Our mission is to train them to do just that, so that they can build their own future; so that they can work inspired by values and ethics that will make them, their team and the world, a better and fairer place.
This made us question things, so we launched our No, chef! initiative with the aim of questioning the sector’s prevailing status quo and start scraping away the dirt to allow new ways of understanding and engaging in this profession to grow and flourish.
From the moment a student sets foot in the CIB, our goal is to transform them. Here we do not teach them recipes. They can go to YouTube for that, or to another school. Here we teach them to think for themselves, to be critical, to question and to take on challenges. We teach them to be humble, but we also teach them to lead. We teach them that to go further they have to surround themselves with a team that trusts them. We teach them that to succeed, everyone must succeed in equal measure.
Leaving behind what we have learned to learn something new is not always easy, but it is the only way to move forward. Otherwise we will only repeat our mistakes of the past.
NO, CHEF!
📱😧 CIB students reacting to real mean Tweets & Comments about their profession
Education as a lever for change
We are born of change and we continue to change incessantly. If you don't change, you don't evolve, and that's what education must be for: to teach how to evolve.
