Future stars of Villa Park in the kitchens and hospitality suites
Cooking's coming home... to Villa Park. Richard McComb reports on an innovative apprenticeship for budding hospitality stars.
Can a monkfish masala turn a young person’s life around?
Talking to 18-year-old Abdul Hussain Shabed you start to believe it just might.
Abdul lives two streets away from Aston Villa Football Club but his personal motivation could not have been more different to the Premier League stars, just a few years older than him, who he would see driving Mercs and Ferraris towards the players’ private car park.
“After I left school, I was sitting on the couch all day, falling asleep, waking up. I was pretty unmotivated,” says Abdul.
What a difference a few months – and the understanding and enthusiasm of others – can make.
Abdul is among the first intake of recruits on one of the country’s most innovative social change hospitality schemes. Bankrolled by Villa’s philanthropic US billionaire owner Randy Lerner, and supported by local training providers, Villa Midlands Food, or VMF, is unique.
VMF is the first hospitality training establishment to be set up by a football team. Three days a week, the formerly unemployed run a restaurant for fee-paying customers in the club’s swanky directors’ suite.
Villa’s top chefs take over the reins on match days, and, should Villa be playing Manchester United or Chelsea, this is where Sir Bobby Charlton and Roman Abramovich dine. It’s the same lay-out when the trainees take over.
So it’s posh, with crisp white linen, sparkling cutlery, fine glassware, flowers for up to 50 covers. Expectations are high and the restaurant has set its sights on achieving AA rosette status.
Like all great ideas, the rationale behind VMF was beautifully simple. Aston Villa may have generated £84 million in revenue in 2009, according to Deloitte’s latest Annual Review of Football Finance.
But the club is located in one of the poorest districts in Birmingham. Aston is the eighth most deprived ward out of the city’s 40. Its population of 31,000 has a large proportion of young people; children under school-leaving age represent 35 per cent of the community.
Three-quarters of the population is non-white. The infant mortality rate is double that of England and male life expectancy is falling. If you are a man living in Aston, you are likely to die aged 71 – more than six years before the average Briton, according to health service data.
