Dear Chefs (This Is For You) By Chris Hill

Dear Chefs, They won’t understand you. They won’t. I know this, because I used to be on their side, stuck in a dead end office, working a shitty job, making decent pay. My family and friends were convinced I’d lost my mind when I gleefully leaped into the unknown abyss of cooking. I suppose they thought it was a phase I’d soon grow out of. Could this be you? Maybe finishing high school and are contemplating a life in the kitchen, or already in culinary school. Maybe its not you, but rather someone close to you. Whatever the circumstances, if you’ve gotten this far, I implore you to keep reading. Chefs are a rare, often misunderstood breed and if you’re among the naysayers, I don’t blame you, I really don’t. However if the smallest piece of you is debating a life in the kitchen, or have already taken that plunge finding yourself needing reassurance, you might find that here. There’s also plenty of ample evidence to scare you away. It just depends on the way your mind works. Most will never know what it’s like to make a living as a professional cook or chef, and that makes me smile. It’s something of which I am arrogantly proud. No, not because I think we’re better than anyone, but because of the fact that, to be a really good cook or chef, it takes tremendous physical, mental and emotional fortitude. Most people don’t have, nor appreciate the gifts we’ve been given, and this often includes our front the house counterparts. Seven days a week, we show up willing to get our asses kicked. We sign up for this in exchange for an opportunity to express ourselves through food. There’s no such thing as weekends or holidays. We might get a random Tuesday off, and if we’ve put in the proper dues and happen to be in cahoots with the chef, we just might have the good fortune of being exonerated from working the dreaded Sunday morning brunch shift. We work longer days than just about anyone. Days start early and end late, typically when the rest of the western world is changing into their PJs, brushing their teeth and hopping into bed. The length, isn’t the hard part though, its the depth. Fifteen hours on your feet is grueling enough to scare away some fence-straddlers, but on top of that, consider the kitchen atmosphere where everything is either excruciatingly hot or sharp as hell. Cooks scurry around cussing, the printer spewing out tickets as fast as it can, and for hours every inch of one’s body is physically tested. Emotions are tested, and sometimes you will fail that test. You’ll break into frustration mid-shift, relying on a teammate to help pull you through. Your mental strength will be tested, misreading tickets, overcooking steaks, undercooking pasta, or completely blanking the fuck out on any number of things, once again having to rely on a teammate to pull you through. You’ll do the same for him, it’s how we survive. Close call finger-nicks and tears shed while chopping onions don’t phase us, not even secondarily. Screaming hot 50 pound pots of salted water simmer away, not boiling fast enough most of the time. When the potatoes or pasta are ready to come out, chances are a dry towel is nowhere to be found, and lacking time to search, we somehow make do, most likely further searing the callouses up and down our already damaged hands. Pain is an after thought, it doesn’t phase us. It can’t, or the whole ship sinks. We owe it to the warriors next to us to keep going. There will also be a point mid-shift, when you’ll have to make a dash to the dry storage pantry, or the walk-in cooler. Darting across the obstacle course of the kitchen typically includes maintaining one’s sense of balance while leaping across oil-slicked tile, dodging pans flying in the vicinity of the dish pit, and having to weave in and out of fellow line cooks, then back into our place on the line. This is all to be done without dropping your supplies, or worse, disrupting the rhythm of the team. Disrupt the rhythm, and we all go down with you. This takes serious skills. To create the rhythm necessary for success on the kitchen line takes hours and sometimes years working together as a unit, in the trenches, slugging it out, together. Next to the military in full fledged combat, a group of guys and gals in the kitchen know teamwork better than anyone. Let’s say you made it to the end of the service. By now several hours have elapsed since the first tickets came chirping through the printer, and the apron draped around your neck now resembles something your dog might have chewed to hell after having splashed through the mud. You are filthy, but pots are done flying across the kitchen, flames from