A Line Cook's Rant about Chef Life
In which I think about how things might get better
An essay about suffering and being a chef.
Next week we’ll do something more light-hearted, I promise.
Love,
Wil
NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But—
NAGG (shocked): Oh!
NELL: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame
I wish I could tell you more about the biggest wanker I ever worked with.
Unfortunately, he started shouting and throwing plates not long after we were introduced. I kept a polite distance after that and didn’t step into his kitchen again.
It was early 2016. I was at culinary school then and I was in the kitchen of a well known Central London restaurant for work experience.
Oh, I could tell you about how silent his “team” of cooks was. I could tell you about the cold section cook who piped an evening’s worth of gougères full of parmesan cream at 6pm with absolutely no interest in how they’d all go soggy within minutes. And I could tell you how they all kept their distance from the head chef, pointing their heads down if he ever came within an arm’s length of them.
But let’s focus on the head chef himself.
He stood alone at the long, polished-steel pass, his tight-fitting chef jacket with the sleeves rolled up to accentuate his ever so impressive biceps and generic tribal tattoo.
The only talking came from him. And the form that talking took was that of various loveless orders barked with the delicacy of a bulldog eating a jar of mayonnaise.
And things were about to get worse.
An hour after I arrived, service kicking off, the kind of thing I’d only seen in Gordon Ramsey documentaries or Full Metal Jacket happened right in front of me.
For a reason I couldn’t tell you, the head chef picked up some plates, hurled them into a plastic crate set aside for dirty dishes, kicked it across the floor in the direction of a young, now trembling, waiter before he grabbed him by the shirt and called him a “fucking cockwomble”.
It’s a decade since I started cooking professionally and that guy remains the biggest wanker I ever worked for.
Before I was a restaurant cook, I worked what many would consider a “normal” job in which you could never even imagine such violence. In fact, during my twenties, instead of crouched over a stock pot or a hot grill, I was a delicate little marketing professional who wore skinny jeans, pointy shoes, and always enjoyed a (very long) hour for lunch.
This might explain why the question I asked the universe more than any other when I started cooking was why life as a cook needed to be so damn hard?
Why, despite my having to be on my feet for 16 hours a day while burning, cutting, and grilling myself, was my lunch “hour” now only 15 minutes?
I know now of course it’s because restaurants make almost zero economic sense unless cooks like me are overworked, underpaid, and, often in fine-dining’s case, not paid at all.
The price of labour, not the steak you’re eating, is what restaurants really struggle with. And until the world is happy to see restaurant prices go up the same way, say, concert tickets have, my guess is line cooks will need to keep pulling 50-60 hour weeks in most places for restaurants to even exist.
And those are the kind of hours at a restaurant trying not to overwork their team.
But what about the hardship and suffering of the job that is not so clearly linked to bottom lines and overheads? Despite being so professional in some regards, the deep expertise involved, the precision, what is it about chef life that makes it so susceptible to deeply unprofessional treatment between people, particularly those of different levels of authority?
And, I wonder, is there anything that can be done about it?
Now I want to take you back to the end of my very first week as a cook 10 years ago.
I’d worked three double shifts of 15 hours each and two single shifts of about eight each that week. It was brutal.
As I went to leave the restaurant on the Saturday afternoon, my evening off ahead of me, I heard the unmistakable tone of the Australian sous chef calling from behind me.
“You done already?” he said.
“Uhuh”, I replied, looking to his hands to see if he was hiding any potatoes for me to peel.
“You’re a fuckin’ part-timer, Reidie,” he said.
I smiled.
And then I left.
With that, let’s call it “friendly”, tease from my Aussie friend, I caught sight of an important chef tenet for the first time, which in a sentence probably sounds something like:
The job is hard. You better like it hard. And if it’s ever not hard, then you’re not doing it right.
If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean after all.
Prove you can take this hardship and it can even become a valuable currency with which you can legitimise, comfort, and further yourself.
Which sucks for me because my time as a cook has always been pretty damn good. I’ve spent it almost exclusively with supportive and generous colleagues who only wanted to cook nice food and have a good time doing it. And, thanks to powerful unions in Sweden and Finland, my working hours have even been much shorter compared to what you’d expect in, for example, London.
So if suffering is a necessary step on the path to being a Proper Restaurant Cook, can I even call myself a “chef”?
You might think I’m being overblown here, exaggerating for effect.
But for all the improvements in the industry over the past decade, it turns out such thinking might still be as prevalent as ever.
A little over two years ago, after six years of research across the industry involving interviews with over 60 chefs worldwide, Cardiff University released a report called “Bloody suffering and durability: How chefs forge embodied identities in elite kitchens”.
The report opens with a look at the structure by which kitchens are traditionally run: the brigade de cuisine. They describe this system as:
“Military-inspired thinking applied to the management and organization of kitchen work… defined by authoritarian structures, asymmetrical, sometimes abusive power relationships, and highly prescriptive working practices.”
The report suggests that “suffering of one form or another is omnipresent” in modern kitchens, particularly fine-dining ones. It highlights how figures of authority, not just the long hours and painful work, can be responsible for this suffering. The interviews they share detail stories of young cooks being verbally threatened, with others subject to harsh physical discipline.
In a summary to the report, lead author Dr Robin Burrow says something I’d always suspected, but assumed was simply my imposter syndrome talking. She says:
“What we found during the course of our research was that […] chefs who neglected to suffer had little claim to membership of the culinary community, in the truest sense. They were not true and proper chefs.”
And that:
“Incidents of violence and abuse were viewed as a way of building standing in the industry, demonstrating an individual’s work ethic and character”
Is there an explanation emerging here as to why work environments can be so bad in restaurant kitchens?
Could it be that by holding on to traumatic work experiences like trophies, one-upping each other in the suffering stakes, restaurant professionals are helping create an environment in which such experiences continue?
The restaurant industry, particularly the high-end corner of it, hasn’t escaped the scrutiny of workplace rights and abuse over the past decade. From Mario Batali in the US to Dan Doherty in the UK, well-known and once beloved chefs have faced the consequences of wildly inappropriate behaviour behind the closed doors of their kitchen.
I suppose this is why any interview you see with a Head Chef nowadays will likely include some reference to how important a “nice, friendly, calm, nurturing environment” is, or that staff must be made to “feel valued”.
Those particular phrases are in quotation marks because they come from interviews with two Head Chef/Patrons of popular London restaurants open today.
In the very same interviews in which the above is said, however, they “red flag” themselves when they add:
“I scream and shout, you know what I mean? You can’t play a game of football quietly.”
And then:
“Discipline isn’t a bad thing, I think the problem is the bullying – and there’s a fine line between the two. Applying that discipline is the thing that can lead to bullying.”
You’d think there’d be something to learn from that realisation, but moving on:
“The welfare of people in the kitchen is very important, but [ed. There’s always a ‘but’] it goes a little far sometimes when people don't understand that they need that hierarchy and structure. They need to understand to work your way up and if someone tells you off, it isn’t such a bad thing.”
I can’t help but feel these head chefs demonstrate how the industry is very nearly there but still a lifetime away.
They can almost see what their kitchens could be. They just can’t break out of that brigade system thinking that treats line cooks like they are either on a battlefield or, probably worse, toddlers that require “disciplining”.
Why, then, from almost the very first day, was my cooking career spent doing rewarding tasks and, despite my many fuck ups, not characterised by discipline and hierarchy?
I’m sure it is to do with how different kitchens in Sweden feel to those structured by the rigid hierarchy of the traditional brigade.
If you look at a job listing for cooks in London they always specify whether they want a commis or chef de partie, or sous chef, some even being so granular that they throw in demi chef de partie.
The same listing in Sweden will broadly list the generic term Kock for anything other than the head chef (Köksmästare).
This is reflected in the experience of working in a typical Swedish kitchen. Seniority exists of course, with certain experienced cooks running the pass, completing orders after service, scheduling work timetables and typically running things more proactively. But the hierarchy is infinitely flatter than what I saw, for example, in that miserable kitchen during my college work experience.
Kitchen tasks are shared more equally. Young commis chefs can expect to work service in their own section, not just do prep work. And each cook, not just sous chefs or the head chef, encouraged to know how to run each section.
I’ll keep this brief but the benefits of this were enormous. Since nobody “owned” a specific section, it meant everybody did. And this, I believe, far more than the intimidating eye of a plate-wielding head chef, kept standards high. Your work would be in someone else’s hands tomorrow. You better not let it be shit.
This was precisely the system I knew at a restaurant called Oaxen in Stockholm. I genuinely believe that if you spent a day there with us you’d need to think hard about which of us was the head chef.
Some cooks reading this will think that’s an insult to the craft, but it was the best restaurant I ever worked at.
I’m judging that by both the fun we had and the quality of the food we sent out.
This flattened system isn’t just a figment of my rose-tinted glasses looking back on my time cooking in “Socialist” Sweden I’ll add.
Back in London, chef Asha Khan runs a female-run restaurant kitchen that she describes as:
“A kitchen where there is no competition, there’s no aggression, there’s also no hierarchy. And that is where the most beautiful food comes out from.”
And on the French brigade system specifically, she elegantly describes it as:
“Shit. Because it’s really based on oppression and being mean to someone who’s below you.
From my time cooking in Sweden and Finland, I know it isn’t just women-only kitchens that can function in this less hierarchical way.
I’ve seen for myself it can happen with kitchens made up of every type of person.
One of the joys of being part of the chef community online are the hilarious memes, videos and pictures that often share the horrors, pains and frustrations of #cheflife. This sharing brings cooks everywhere together in what you might call a shared collective suffering.
This has always been a source of fun and connection for me, even with the limited suffering I experienced in Swedish kitchens.
But the more I’ve reflected on it, the more I wonder whether this act itself, an act meant to make us chefs feel better, might be a benign symptom of a more malignant condition.
In laughing about the very worst of our experiences, as opposed to calling them out, do we not normalise what should often be unacceptable workplace standards?
Once again, the Cardiff report shows evidence this might be so.
They quote a chef called “Louie” you says:
“If I sat down here today and you were a chef who’s been on a similar path or a more experienced path and you worked in a one star, two star, three star, and I was the same, but we didn’t know each other, we’d [still] have this connection between us. I can guarantee you one of the first things we would talk about is our bad experiences, and we’d joke about it. I guarantee. ‘I was working in this restaurant, and fuck, he did this’ and ‘wow it was crazy’. But we’d be laughing about it, looking back.”
Worryingly, the report authors found that:
“The ability to endure suffering was bound up with notions of employability.”
And so what about the people who don’t have such stories of suffering? What about the people who are no longer in the industry with us to look back and laugh because they didn’t put up with the suffering in the first place?
Are we marginalising such potentially great colleagues? The people who might actually make better, healthier, working environments more likely?
I don’t mean to put responsibility on line cooks, commis chefs and trainees for the sins of genuinely abusive head chefs or owners responsible for poor working conditions. Pain loves company, and sharing stories is a powerful act of healing.
But perhaps a change in our relationship with the hardest parts of our job might help us not only heal better, but help stop the need for healing in the first place.
Perhaps we shouldn’t laugh with the chef who suffered a badly infected burn because it happened during the dinner rush and he had a double the next day and never could get it checked by a doctor.
Maybe it isn’t actually smart to joke along with the guy who impaled his hand on a ticket spike, was rushed to the Emergency Room, only to go back to finish his shift an hour later because they had an engagement party booked that night and the guy on the grill section had called in sick with a hangover and he “didn’t want to leave the team ‘in the shit’”.
Because, really, these aren’t examples of heroism. They’re examples of workplaces that, in letting employees do such things, have failed to look after them.
The godfather of kitchen stories to many remains Anthony Bourdain. But when Mario Batali was found out for being an arsehole, Bourdain himself wrote:
“To the extent which my work in Kitchen Confidential celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about all too frequently is something I think about daily, with real remorse.”
I wonder if we fail to head his words when we continue to “glamourise” and even fetishise the deeply unglamourous aspects of our work, or at least make light of them. I wonder if we too, in continuing to regard suffering as a genuine form of social currency, prolong a culture that deems it acceptable.
Maybe you are proud of the 14 day stretch of double shifts you worked. Maybe you think you are Bourdain’s heir having gone back to “The Line” after getting your finger sewn back on.
But being a role model isn’t just the head chef’s job. We cooks can be role models to each other, too.
And what we agree to put up with influences what our colleagues are forced to.
They say only a certain type of person can be a restaurant cook. I just don’t see why that has to be so. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that if the British Army ever need to enlist me they’ll have scraped right through the barrel.
But restaurant kitchens aren’t battlefields.
They are places where dinner is made.
The sooner we agree on this, the sooner all types of people will feel able to walk through those kitchen doors.
And when that happens, I think we’ll have to worry a lot less about wankers in tight shirts who have a habit of throwing plates around.
Thanks for joining me this week, I hope to see you in the comments!
And if you like my work and can afford to support me, please become a paid subscriber today. It’s only $30 a year.
Wil
Will, this is a really helpful post for me to read today as I ponder a new job opportunity. So many pros and cons of all the many ways of being a chef! I often think of Edward Espe Brown's words at the end of his Tassajara Bread Book, "And, weary of food and kitchens, now I build rock walls." Thanks so much for all your thoughtful insight.
"Is there an explanation as to why work environments can be so bad in restaurant kitchens?"
Yes. A sadistic person in charge paired with a performance management system that ignores and enables that abuse. I've seen this in hospitals, manufacturing plants, law firms, police departments and schools. It's a big problem that causes a lot of damage, and the only "solution" is for workers to quit if they are able.