ABSTRACT
Mehmet Aksel, 1 age 44, is many things – college drop-out, professional race-car driver, serial entrepreneur – but a cook is not one of them. A man of fine tastes, Mehmet’s limitations in the kitchen led him to see early on that there was a dearth of highly skilled restaurateurs and chefs in his native Turkey. In 2004, he started Mutfak Sanatları Akademisi (MSA), 2 which translates literally into The Academy of Culinary Arts, to fill this gap. His vision was to meet the demands of the growing hospitality sector and the country’s unemployed people, which typically generate 700,000 new jobs per year, including the agriculture sector, in spite of a population with 12 million youth.
