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Lived experience, Think Autism Sydney 2025
Quinn Jones on why commercial kitchens push out autistic learners
In short
At Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, a Hotel Etico graduate turned apprentice chef said kitchens mistake a different way of processing instruction for not caring, and that his training hotel showed another way.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Quinn Jones has a precise account of how autistic people lose their place in a commercial kitchen. Speaking at Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, the apprentice chef said the trouble often starts with the way information goes in. While someone is teaching him a task, he said, he may start thinking about how he could use it in another context, and lose track of part of what is being said. In a kitchen, the panel agreed, that can be dangerous. He described the response from teachers in their own words, “You weren’t listening to me. You obviously don’t care”. From there, he said, autistic trainees are told the job is not for them, and they get pushed aside.
Jones graduated from the program at Hotel Etico, the Blue Mountains training hotel, and by the time of the conference had moved into what he called the real work environment, as an apprentice chef at the Fairmont Resort. Andrea Comastri, speaking for the hotel, told the panel he had been one of its first six trainees.
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Sources the story draws on
- Multi-informant International Perspectives on the Facilitators and Barriers to Employment for Autistic Adults (opens in a new tab), Autism Research, vol. 13(7), pp. 1195 to 1214 (Black, Mahdi, Milbourn, Scott, Gerber, Esposito, Falkmer, Lerner, Halladay, Ström, D'Angelo, Falkmer, Bölte and Girdler)
- Hotel Etico (home page) (opens in a new tab), Hotel Etico
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics
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