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May 12 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
The pressure of TV work, running her restaurant and family issues led Monica Galetti to quit the show — yet she’s back on television tonight thetimes.co.uk/article/monica…
Running a restaurant is hard work at the best of times. Now is not the best of times. A short-term labour shortage in the hospitality industry has turned into a full-blown crisis.

And one of those affected is Monica Galetti
👩‍🍳 Most people know her from her 14-year stint as a judge on MasterChef: The Professionals.

BBC audiences and television executives have fallen in love with her no-nonsense approach and obvious skill behind a stove
🍰 It’s no surprise that Galetti will be among the judges tonight — alongside Mary Berry — on the broadcaster’s #TheJubileePudding, an attempt to find a dessert worthy to mark Her Majesty’s 70 years on the throne

thetimes.co.uk/article/monica…
But that will be it.

Although Galetti was meant to be back in the studio this month to start filming her 15th series of #MasterChef, she will be passing the baton so that she can concentrate on her family and running her restaurant, Mere, in Fitzrovia, central London
🗣️ “The struggle is getting staff,” she says.

🗣️ “There is such a small pool of chefs. The shortage was already there before the pandemic. Then after the pandemic, and after Brexit, that small pool of talent has gotten a bit smaller”

thetimes.co.uk/article/can-yo…
🍝 Before Covid, she employed 28 staff at Mere, with 12 in the kitchen, and about 16 front of house. Now it is about ten front of house and just six in the kitchen
🗣️ “I’ve had to drop the [separate] lunch menu. I’ve reduced the à la carte menu. I’ve gone from six to four starters and six to four mains”
🗣️ “I probably left home at 6.30 in the morning … We do the filming and they are 12-hour days. So, maybe at 6pm or 7pm you’d be back on a motorbike taxi and get here for the evening service.”

She would work until at least 10.30pm in the kitchen Galetti’s own take on a Jubilee Pudding is a delicate pist
🗣️ “People think I’m just showing my face — when I come out at the end of service, people are surprised I am actually here”
🥗 Mere — pronounced Mary and named after her late Samoan mother — is not the only restaurant suffering from staff shortages.

There are an estimated 164,000 unfilled jobs in the hospitality industry, according to the Office for National Statistics
After the 2022 she has endured, she’s looking forward to putting her feet up. If only for 48 hours.

Read the full story 👇

thetimes.co.uk/article/monica…

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More from @thetimes

The Times Profile picture
May 14
Jeremy Hunt has just invented a whole new genre of political memoir.

He is about to publish a book detailing how the organisation he ran for nearly six years managed to kill thousands of people. And it was not even the Ministry of Defence
thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy…
Hunt was Britain’s longest-serving – and very possibly most unpopular – health secretary.

As if in observance of the “duty of candour” he imposed in 2014, he writes in his new book that the NHS harms 10% of its patients and that there are 150 avoidable deaths a week
More than one million “clinically significant” medication errors are made weekly. Twice a week, the NHS operates on the wrong part of somebody’s body.

With around 500 such Never Events every year, Hunt put up a whiteboard in his office to record the previous week’s toll Image
Read 10 tweets
The Times Profile picture
May 14
The voice of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, @Emmabarnett gave birth to her son four years ago after a single round of IVF. But her attempts to have a second child have so far failed.

She shares her experience 👇
thetimes.co.uk/article/emma-b…
🗣️ "Over the past 18 months, I have been struggling with secondary infertility. I have had five rounds of IVF, one miscarriage and more internal examinations than I care to recall. There is still no second baby"
"Undergoing IVF treatment when you already have a child is a totally different experience from the first time round."

"Of course it is," Barnett writes Image
Read 13 tweets
The Times Profile picture
May 13
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: The government is severing all ties with the National Union of Students (NUS) after accusing it of suffering “antisemitic rot at the heart” thetimes.co.uk/article/govern…
Michelle Donelan, the minister for universities, has reported the union to the Charity Commission and ordered her department and affiliated bodies to shun the NUS and “deny it a seat at the table” until it takes “tangible” action
None of its members will be allowed to sit on government panels within the Department for Education, Office for Students or the Student Loans Company.

The suspension of the organisation, which is marking its centenary year, is without precedent
Read 12 tweets
The Times Profile picture
May 13
The voice of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Emma Barnett gave birth to her son four years ago after a single round of IVF. But her attempts to have a second child have so far failed thetimes.co.uk/article/emma-b…
She shares her experience 👇

Over the past 18 months I have been struggling with secondary infertility. I have had five rounds of IVF, one miscarriage and more internal examinations than I care to recall.

There is still no second baby
Undergoing IVF treatment when you already have a child is a totally different experience from the first time round.

Of course it is, Barnett writes Image
Read 13 tweets
The Times Profile picture
May 13
A hospital in Ukraine has shared the harrowing account of a mother and her 11-year-old daughter who both lost legs in a missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station last month thetimes.co.uk/article/kramat…
Natalia and her daughter Yana were among thousands of people who had travelled to the station from the surrounding Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in response to calls for civilians to evacuate before an expected Russian offensive
thetimes.co.uk/article/civili…
Waiting for a train, Natalia and Yana went on to the platform to get some tea from volunteers, leaving Yana’s twin brother, Yaroslav, to watch their luggage
Read 11 tweets
The Times Profile picture
May 13
The singer talks to @edpotton about mental health, his new art show at Sotheby’s — and why he’s playing his older self in a biopic of his life thetimes.co.uk/article/robbie…
Robbie Williams sums up his first foray into art with splendid bluntness.

🗣️ “People say, ‘What’s it like?’ and I say, ‘It’s not shit.’ ”

But don’t take his word for it, take the word of the American collector who recently paid more than £40,000 for one of their artworks
Ed Potton visited the Sotheby’s warehouse in west London with Ed Godrich, Williams’s collaborator, for a preview of their pieces for an upcoming show in London.

Each painting is 8ft x 4ft and depicts densely packed characters in white brushstrokes on black polystyrene At work on his art in Shrop...
Read 12 tweets

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