Jackfruit burgers, soya kebabs, seitan fried “chicken” – it’s easier than ever to find appetising plant-based dishes in the UK. But as the number of people embracing a vegan diet grows, restaurants are scrambling to recruit enough chefs.

Now a new vegan cookery school which opened in London last week has launched a fast-track course to train more people in the art of plant-based cooking.

Chantal Di Donato, co-founder of the Vegan Chef Institute, said the scheme was in response to restaurateurs who have to train their own staff. “There’s a lot of really good chefs in the industry, but it’s really hard to find enough of them because it’s so new,” she said.

Di Donato said that while the market for innovative ethical foods was booming at the lower end of the scale, managers at traditional eateries struggled to recruit staff with professional vegan experience.

“A lot of the food on offer was uninspired. But vegan food can be more than just a salad or a roasted cauliflower – that’s why we think this is important,” said Di Donato.

Chico Francesco, owner and trainer at the London Vegetarian and Vegan School in Bermondsey, will also be launching a professional vegan cooking course in January. “We have to, there’s so much demand for it,” he said. Though the workshops are only a day long, their focus is upscale catering. “We often get inquiries from restaurants and hotels asking if we have any students we can recommend to them,” said Francesco.

JJamie Taylor, head chef at Acorn, an award-winning vegan restaurant in Bath, has found recruiting accomplished staff so problematic he’s launched an apprenticeship scheme in order to teach people on the job and promote from within their own ranks.

“There’s an abundance of people in the industry who aren’t trained, who don’t know how to cook professionally,” said Matthew Nutter, who recently relocated his restaurant The Allotment from Stockport to Manchester. “It’s an ongoing theme of average food being thrown out there. It’s giving vegan food a bad name.”

Interest in upmarket vegan cooking is also coming from unlikely sources, including restaurants that made their name on the back of their dairy and meat dishes. Gauthier in Soho, a Michelin-starred French restaurant, is six months into a two-year plan to become completely plant-based. The driving force behind the move is owner Alexis Gauthier, a classically trained chef of 25 years, who stopped consuming animal products himself two years ago.

But highly skilled French chefs with experience in vegan cooking are almost unheard of. “Very few of my chefs imagine it’s even possible to be a French chef making purely plant-based food,” he said.

“Even more for the pâtissiers, because French patisserie is full of butter, it’s full of eggs.” Gauthier believes chefs are “the most powerful people within the veganism movement... At the end of the day, you can’t convince someone to turn vegan with all the goodwill on Earth by selling them tofu and a green salad. That’s just not possible,” he said.

One in eight Britons are now vegan or vegetarian, according to a report released last week by Waitrose.