SPECIAL:


THE PEOPLE EDITION


“I fell in love with cooking instantly. Creating a dish that somebody else would enjoy was a great experience”


MICK JARY SPECIFICATION DIRECTOR MEIKO UK


Known for his jovial nature and friendly approach to colleagues and friends in foodservice, Mick Jary, specifi cation director with Meiko, is a familiar face at trade shows and industry events. Not many will know that Jary, the Allied member rep on the FCSI Worldwide Board, has a history as a chef and few will be aware of the challenging journey that saw him move from manning the stoves in the kitchen to working with consultants from a manufacturing perspective. Jary says he became a chef out of


defi ance to his parents. He’d wanted to study history at university but his parents insisted he pursued a more academic path such as law. In response he quit school and went to catering college. “My grandmother had two hotels on the Isle of Wight and she worked every hour God gave her to keep them going and she never had any money,” he says. “My mother always told me to never go into catering


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because I’d end up like my grandmother.” Yet, this was where he found his passion.


“I fell in love with cooking instantly,” he recalls. “Creating a dish that somebody else would enjoy was a great experience.” He worked in country house hotels in his home region of Suff olk in the East of England before moving to London where he worked at several restaurants, including a couple that held Michelin stars. His career was on the ascent when


disaster struck. “I had worked myself up to head chef level and was off ered a head chef position with Holiday Inn, but while I was working out my notice period, one night I slipped in the kitchen and landed on a couple of glasses and severed everything in my forearm apart from the bone,” he says. He spent 14 months having extensive work done on his arm, including tendon transfers and nerve grafts to the hand, but it soon became apparenwt that he would not regain the dexterity to function at the same level as before. “I had worked as a chef for 16 years and this was very hard; psychologically it took its toll because I just didn’t know what to do,” he says. Looking back now he knows things could have been worse. Years later, a doctor commented that had he been presented with the accident he would have amputated at the elbow, so despite it all, Jary says he


feels lucky. “It does put perspective on it, and it made me realize how lucky I was. I had a brilliant surgeon who had his own physio team and it is only now that I realize the magnifi cent job that he did.” With the cheffi ng dreams in tatters,


Jary moved fi rst into food buying with a pioneering vegetarian restaurant group and later joined Conran Hotels. Next came a sideways move into sales in manufacturing with Williams. It was during this time he started work with consultants, a relationship that his experience as a chef has prepared him for perfectly. “I understand how a kitchen works and what a chef would look for from that kitchen and I can have that discussion with the chef as to what he is looking for – the ergonomics and the fl ow of the kitchen and the necessity to have the right equipment in the right place to do the right job.” He moved on from the disappointment and embraced new challenges not too long after the accident. “I found peace with it quite quickly and cooking is now a hobby. We have some reasonable meals at home and we do a lot of entertaining,” he says. As for work, staying within the industry


has allowed him to keep all the things that attracted him in the fi rst place. “I spend a lot of my time with people who have the same love of food and foodservice as I do.”


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