Chef at Home

A recent post and some ensuing comments to it has led me to be thinking more about the current issues which restaurant kitchens face. This is not at all to say hotel and catering and test and bakery and private cheffing kitchens are excluded from these issues, but most of my experience is with restaurants, and since I cannot share with you what I don't know, I let you cross out one word and fill it in with the one you know. Let's make a deal, shall we– give me a few centimeters of poetic license and I'll give you a small country's worth of poetic comprehension?

Restaurant kitchens are what you see when the industry is X rayed.

As well, restaurant kitchens tend to be the ones cooks become chefs in. Independently owned restaurants tend to be the professional cooking environments chefs become recognized names in.

And restaurants, in the Isosceles triangle of professional cooking hierarchy, are considered to be the peak. In other words there's an unspoken rule in cooking: restaurant cooks are real cooks and everyone else is a hack. Restaurant cooks look down on catering the same way New Yorkers make fun of New Jersey. It's unspoken, but really it's not.

Because of this prevalent attitude, when someone wants to start cooking professionally, they are rarely introduced to the hundreds of thousands of other ways to get paid to cook. And because restaurant cooking is notoriously, unapologetically brutal, cooks who 'can't make it' in restaurants feel like, or are made to feel, both overtly & silently, like complete failures.

Is it true the first step of recovery is admitting?

Or is it what you do with your admission that counts?

Understanding the emotional and pschychological tactics the restaurant industry use to attract, keep & work to death its cooks is important if one hopes to gain entry into its labyrinth.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still in it. I love it. But I know it too.

Well.

Not a lot appears to have changed in the industry since I naively joined it 17+ years ago. What was true then is still true now ~

• most cooks do not get paid for all the hours they work
• most cooks work 6 days a week or more than 5 shifts in 7 days
• most cooks work an average of 60 hours a week, and chefs can be upwards of 120
• most cooks are not offered &/or cannot afford health insurance
• most cooks have to quit or get injured in order to 'get a vacation'
• most cooks experience at least one if not multiple injuries which take them to the emergency room
• most cooks are male and get paid more than their female counterparts, being 'Chef' is no exception
• most cooks eat less than one meal a day
• most cooks feel abused in their workplace & that abuse ranges from yelling to physical violence
• most cooks have legal and illegal substance abuse issues, whether past or present
• most cooks look as if they have not seen the sun in quite some time
• most cooks can not afford to pay off their culinary school loans on the wages they make in the industry
• most cooks who went to culinary school said it wasn't worth as much as they thought it would be once they began working 'for real'
• most savoury cooks know nothing of pastry & vice versus
• most savoury cooks/chefs do not like dessert, and think the making of it is below them
• many savoury chefs do not employ equally good pastry chefs for fear dessert will compete with their limelight
• most pastry chefs get treated like second class citizens by way of wage differential, equipment mistreatment or lack thereof, shortages in staff and in-equal billing/name mentioning on menu/website/press/cookbooks
• pastry chefs rarely get the kind of press savoury chefs do (when was the last time you saw a photo of a pastry chef on the cover of Food & Wine etc.)

I think you see my point.

You might ask why I still do it. Knowing what I know. Or seeing that, in almost 20 years, not much has changed.

And I say. Be the change you want to see in the world. Even if your world is only as small as restaurant kitchens. Even if your world is only as small as the cooks {?un}lucky enough to work with you. Even if your world is only as small as you think it is. Because making change takes a long time. Change can oft not be seen until it's become quite small in the rearview mirror.

Most of us only know what we've learned long after we've left.

Which brings me to the subject of this post.

In "Chef Advice. or when cooks say " ." chefs hear " ." " I imply something I do not say outright.

There has been a change in the industry I've called home in the last 17 years. And, to be fair, it had started long before I stepped on the foot of Reed Hearon who was the chef to kick my ass to hell and back all those years ago.

In a profession considered a craft considered a lifelong education considered a place where you paid your goddamn dirty dues in a workplace considered to be completely insane and without fairness or law or recourse or reason in a series of apprenticeships unpaid and paid with minimum wage and or easily let bodily fluids and not, what was discontinued to be, slowly, quietly, but methodically undermined by this thing we know as culinary school.

And not because all culinary schools are the root of evil.

But because a school system was built to more quickly train what it had taken others {who would be, no doubt, asked to teach in such facilities} dozens and dozens of years to learn.

And that, my friends, is what I was implying but did not say outright in my last post.

What has changed, because of culinary schools or the advent of them; because of tv chefs or the creation of themselves as products by mainstream media to sell you an image you'd rather swallow whole than the Real One (see bulleted list above); because of reality shows and the chefs they 'find' to play real ones on tv {all entendres intended}; because of all the glossy food magazines telling you how much luxurious fun it is to be a chef,

what has slowly crept in,   i n s i d i o u s l y   is the HURRY.

The speed at which everyone seems to want to be a Chef.

WHAT IS THE BIG HURRY?

To become something that one can't really become anyway? Because being a chef is a verb. It's about learning and growing and asking millions of questions and eating and smelling and tasting and listening and it's constant. Sometimes its the kind of repetition that makes you want to blow your brains out. Sometimes it's rewarding in ways you can not verbalize so you cry or do another line of coke or fuck your brains out or lay down on the floor and look up at the ceiling after a particularly grueling night of service. Most of the time only those who wear your uniform too can understand your accomplishments, albeit small or far between.

The hurry is disrespectful.

It disrespects every person who has come before you.
It disrespects those who have taken their whole life to learn.
It disrespects those who are attempting to teach you.
It disrespects the industry as a whole.
It disrespects the craft.
It disrespects every piece of food you touch, every animal you butcher, every service you try and set up for.
It disrespects diner, owner, dishwasher, waiter, busser.
It disrespects the finesse, the knife, the ingredients, the process, the uniform.

If you're in a hurry you're disrespecting yourself.

And that disrespect affects me and affects the kitchen as a whole, and in turn affects the entire industry.

The way a city begins to lose its soul when landmarks are destroyed, this hurry has eroded parts of a craft I love fiercely and wish to protect. 

And

to know a love, to be a craft, to walk a talk, to have and to hold dedication, to live a full life, to be brave and vulnerable both, to speak the truth despite circumstance and loneliness, to rally and advocate for the silenced, to write about those whose words will never be read, to listen, to know and still to speak out, to keep what I have by giving it away, to attract but not promote, to conjure stamina day in and day out, to learn and to teach, to mentor and to guide, to allow dissent, to practice anger without violence, to swim deeper and deeper into into the whys and the hows, to engage you, to bake and share delicious foods, is the hope of eggbeater, and its author.

Go to Source

Related posts:

1. Chef Advice. or, when cooks say " ." chefs hear " ."
2. Chef Advice. On ‘Giving Notice.’
3. Chef Advice. on what it means to be a worker among workers.
4. Pastry Chef Musings. on complacency, competition, worry & innovation.
5. Whats your favorite burger contest