I can cook eggs. A lot of them, and really quickly too. I can cook more eggs in 10 minutes than the average person eats in two weeks. I can feed 20 people a full breakfast in as many minutes, and barely break a sweat. Burgers and steaks, all cooked to exact temps? Can do. Pan frying thirty pounds of potatoes an hour, keeping them uniformly seasoned and perfectly crispy? All day, every day. When you work brunch service every day for 2 years, you learn a few tricks. I learned how to work three stations, call the board, and expedite the window all at the same time. I learned how to be an absolute breakfast monster.
For all the stress and turmoil, being a chef is incredibly rewarding. I wouldn't trade my time in the kitchen for anything.
I would love to say that these skills were gained in a nurturing way, with professional chefs taking their time to train and build each member of the crew into a tight and well oiled machine. That, however, is not how the restaurant game is played. For those of you who have never played the in service industry, you might not have a very substantial understanding of the goings-on within your favorite restaurants. Let me give you a little insight. The whole damn place is a finely orchestrated dumpster fire, and nobody knows how to put it out. The staff roster is never full, and the ones who are around are almost never fully trained. The people in charge are essentially running around in circles in constant damage control mode. When the management finds the time to stand still for a few seconds, they are hit by a barrage of stupid questions and bad news.
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Running a kitchen is hard. The concepts and craft that coincide with managing a kitchen are relatively simple, but the physical and mental strain of constantly babysitting a bunch of grown children takes a heavy toll on chefs every single day.
 Burns are a struggle in the kitchen. This is me after taking a face-full of hot bacon fat. | These problems are amplified almost exponentially when the restaurant stays open for 24 hours. If you think that keeping a crew together through a busy dinner service is tough, try keeping up with three separate crews running three separate shifts, supervised by three separate chefs. Every shift has different strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. Every shift is understaffed and under-trained. But between all three shifts, the expectations from the customer remain unchanged and almost impossibly high. Because the 24 hour restaurant requires a much larger staff than most restaurants, the compensation for these cooks also remains staggeringly low. These are actual working professionals working for single digit wages. The salaried chefs maintain a low, yet survivable salary, but factoring in the 60-70 hour weeks and lack of salaried overtime, they aren’t bringing in much more than minimum wage. It’s not an easy life, no matter which way you slice it. And those poor bastards who went to culinary school? They’re struggling to pay off student loans from $60,000 to upward of $100,000 with a job that starts them off at less than $10/hour. |
| Now, I don’t want this post to come across as some sort of industry bashing hate piece. I absolutely love being a chef. In fact, when you spend long enough in this field, the long hours and crappy pay become a part of your identity. Your co-workers become a second family. You begin to fetishize your lack of sleep. You wear your broken body and burn scars as a badge of honor. You do everything in your power to strike as much fear into that new kid as you can, because this industry is not for the faint of heart. If they have a thick skin and a high pain tolerance, then he or she has a shot. If not, it’s better that they quit now, lest they become someone else’s problem later. The stress becomes a part of who you are. When you aren’t frantically balancing 5 simultaneous tasks, life seems slow and boring. The heat of the grill, and the deafening roar of sizzling pans and vent hoods, the clatter of plates and tongs and everything stainless steel become the sounds of your second home. It’s one of the most sado-masochistic careers that anyone could find themselves in, and I love every minute of it. |  Sometimes, you need to wear a watermelon hat. I have the wife to thank for this one. |
But then my son was born. I took real time off for the first time in my adult life to stay home and help with the baby, with every intention of getting back to the grind as soon as the wife was healed. As the days turned to weeks, something very unexpected happened: I started to miss the rush less and less every day. An equally profound and unprecedented shift of priorities was turning my whole world upside-down. The thought of going back to the gruelling pace of The Diner, just to work toward a promotion which carried even more stress and even longer hours sounded downright terrible. How can you justify working 70 hours a week to make someone else rich? Missing my child’s infancy while breaking my body for the sake of my restaurant group seemed like a pretty poor decision. So I quit.
Spending Christmas with the second family. Missing out on holidays is just part of the "fun."
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It took me just under three months of staying at home to realize that being a chef doesn’t mean you have to ruin yourself physically. You don’t have to choose between your food and your family. There’s room in your life for both, and I couldn’t be happier with the notion of this new balance. Stepping away from my former restaurant made me realize, finally, that the world of food is a big place, and nobody gets anywhere working for someone else. I’ll put in a 70 hour week, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be for anyone but my own family. Had I gone back to the same old grind, I would have never given myself the time to come to this conclusion. Leaving The Diner was the 3rd best decision that I’ve ever made, and I couldn’t be happier.
-MC