Late Nights, Long Hours, and Low Pay

Why would anybody want to be a chef?

I am going to be honest with you, every time someone tells me that they want to become a chef, I cringe a bit, and a small part of me dies for them. Why? It’s because I think about the late nights, long hours, and low pay. But just like any bad relationship, you start to remember the good times and appreciate the struggle that got you there.

What made an entire generation of people want to work in a kitchen?

For this, you can blame what I call the “chef boom”. This was the surge of popularity and interest in culinary careers. This can be attributed to various factors but it didn't happen overnight. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact point in time where this all began but the increased fascination with chefs and the culinary profession can be traced back to the late 20th century and has continued to grow ever since.

Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the food network was becoming more popular than ever and the celebrity chef began to emerge. Which I discuss in my article the cult of the celebrity chef.

Chefs such as Emeril Lagasse, Gordon Ramsay, and Anthony Bourdain brought cooking into the mainstream media, showcasing their skills, personalities, and the artistry of food. By bringing cooking into the mainstream these celebrity chefs made cooking cool and turned the chef into a badass superhero with competition shows like Iron Chef and Chopped.

When I think about what makes someone want to become a chef, I have to think about what made me want to become a culinary badass. I think it was the struggle to the top that made me want to be a chef. Although I considered going to culinary school, I didn’t. It seemed like every time I thought about going to school I had to go to work, which for me was more like an apprenticeship.

Going to school may have been a more structured path of culinary education but in my opinion, I was getting real-world experience and learning through osmosis from a chef who had been doing the job for a long time and he learned from another chef and so on. I started at the bottom of the kitchen in the dish pit. From there I saw the line cooks and chef every night rocking out a few hundred plates of American steakhouse fare.

From the dish pit, I tried to absorb as much kitchen knowledge as I could, learning various prep tasks and asking questions when the rush slowed down. Eventually, I was given what I call a “field promotion” to prep cook, I think this only happened because the scheduled prep cook didn’t show up and the line cooks were in the shit that night but I still volunteered for everything.

Learning on the fly in a completely foreign and chaotic environment was right where I wanted to be. I found the adrenaline rush and the sense of camaraderie in the kitchen to be very addicting, it kept me coming back every single day.

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For me working my way up through the restaurant kitchen was so much more than learning the skill of cooking. Although I didn’t realize it at the time I quickly learned that the professional kitchen is more like a pirate ship with loud music and surly people than it is a kitchen. When the rushes would end the bar would send beers back to us or we would go and smoke weed in the walk-in as we cleaned up our stations. I came to learn that this was pretty much a standard thing in most kitchens.

This sense of camaraderie came from accomplishing a difficult task as a team while working in a hot stressful environment. At this point in time, the kitchen staff was getting tipped out in cigarettes instead of money, for some reason we all thought this was ok until we realized that we were kind of getting screwed over. Thankfully we had a chef that fought to get tipped properly. For me, the personal satisfaction of this sweaty and difficult work far outweighed the downsides of working in a kitchen.

Photo by Oliver Cole on Unsplash

The culinary industry can be an incredibly demanding and thankless job, but being in a place where I could constantly learn and grow professionally coupled with the opportunity for advancement made it all worth it. There may be easier career paths for some people but I enjoyed the challenge of doing it the hard way and putting in years of work and dedicating myself to mastering a craft.

At the end of the day despite the challenges and the demanding nature of the job, the culinary industry allowed me to find fulfillment and satisfaction in my craft, and if someone has decided to dedicate themselves to being a chef it’s definitely not going to be about money or accolades, it’s about the personal challenges and living up to the standards and traditions that have held our industry together for decades.

If the kitchen is calling you then go for it. If you have a fire that burns inside your blood that nothing but the kitchen can extinguish then go ahead. But remember, if you are willing to jump in head first then the late nights, long hours, and low pay won’t matter at all.