So You Wanna Be a Chef - Anthony Bourdain | Hacker News Reader

So You Wanna Be a Chef - Anthony Bourdain

ruhlman.com

259 pointsjkkramer63 comments

i lived the life for 8 years when i was young. everything tony says about cooking, and cooking education is 100% true.

i was far too broke to get into drugs, and thereby did the waitresses stay away too, so i have no entertaining stories of fevered cutting-board liasons. i do have many marginally interesting stories of burns, lacerations and unbelievably horrible working conditions for very little money.

interestingly, the experience has served me very well in the software business. i rarely complain about my chair, monitor, lighting, keyboard or anything else that isn't actively burning.

I love his writing. Some of it is uneven, but it's mostly good. I first got hooked when I read the first pages of "A Cook's Tour" where he begins

"Dear Nancy, I'm about as far away from you as I've ever been... There's one lightbulb, a warped dresser, and a complimentary plastic comb with someone else's hair in it. In spite of the EZ Clean design features, there are suspicious and dismaying stains on the walls. About two thirds of the way up one wall, there are what look like bloody footprints and - what do they call it, arterial spray? How they got there, so high up, I can only guess. The wall opposite has equally sinister stains - evidence of a more opaque substance - these suggesting a downward dispersal. Having seen the bathroom, I can't blame the perpetrator for anything."

I can read that letter over and over.

Bourdain's earlier book, Kitchen Confidential is great and I highly recommend it. It also has a "So You Want to Be a Chef" chapter (perhaps they are the same).

http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Updated-Adventure...

There was a time in my life when I aspired to be a chef and/or restaurateur. Later I concluded that it's better if some of your passions are simply left as that ... passions without the added burden of depending on them for your livelihood.

But I do think everyone should work at a restaurant at least once in their life. It's a customer-service learning experience and gives you an appreciation for the staff when you patronize restaurants later.

> But I do think everyone should work at a restaurant at least once in their life. It's a customer-service learning experience and gives you an appreciation for the staff when you patronize restaurants later.

Done that and I agree with you 100%. Also "Kitchen Confidential" is an excellent book and you will enjoy it more if you ever worked in a restaurant.

Agreed. Experiencing the "other end" of things provides an appreciation of how it feels to be the one performing the service rather than seeking it. You tend to treat people differently after getting treated like shit a couple of times.

It's a customer-service learning experience

Maybe if you are part of the waitstaff. If you're a cook, it's mostly a lot of cursing, lewd comments, alcoholism, drug use, etc...

The place I'm at right now has an open kitchen, and this is greatly minimized (at least the cursing). Being right off the dining room means it's also very cool (only kitchen I've been in that's refreshing to walk into right in the middle of summer) and has good lighting.

Depends what one's passionate about exactly. My passion isn't cooking, it's cooking in professional kitchens with dynamic menus. This is why I can't work at a software company, it's waaay less fun. Conveniently, restaurant sw almost universally sucks, so I'm now growing my startup with former and current employers to solve a major pain point in a lucrative, untapped industry that I love and deeply respect.

Do you need a co-founder or angel investor?

Can I run some ideas by you? (email in profile)

I'm not ready for collaboration beyond working with chefs yet, but I'll shoot you an email, love to hear any ideas.

Very much agreed - I worked in the kitchen of a family run Chinese restaurant during my junior and senior years of high school. Did everything from taking orders, to chopping tons of cabbage, mopping up a drunk assholes puke to de-veining shrimp. All at the same time! J/K ;)

Although it sucked some of the time, looking back at it, I would have done it all over again. Learned a lot (I can cook Chinese and can put together a great dinner very quick), made long lasting relationships (the same family still owns the restaurant and I stop by whenever I visit my parents) and the customer service aspects have been ingrained in me since.

At the end of the article, Bourdain admits he succeeded primarily due to luck, and that "luck is not a business model". I suspect many here have heard the more famously quoted "hope is not a business model", which is also true. Perhaps less famous, but more dangerous to entrepreneurs: "passion is also not a business model".

Interestingly, although each of those is certainly not a business model, all of them are ultimately required for a startup to reach a [VC|FU-money] level of success.

You need to read that final sentence in context. It is part of a very carefully written passage in which Bourdain attempts to convey the following message:

Do not get addicted to drugs. You will fuck up your life.

to the audience that most needs to hear it without coming off as judgmental, or holier-than-thou, or hopelessly clueless and naive, or unaware of his own good fortune, and without angering the people -- many of whom he probably counts as friends -- for whom self-medicating with drugs and booze is the least fucked-up of a number of fucked-up alternatives.

My paraphrase accomplishes none of these things, which is why Bourdain is Bourdain and I'm just a drive-by commenter on HN who cooks only as a hobby.

"Look at the crews of any really high-end restaurants and you’ll see a group of mostly whippet-thin, under-rested young pups with dark circles under their eyes: they look like escapees from a Japanese prison camp—and are expected to perform like the Green Berets."

At some point in my life, working in a bakery, i - a 19 yr old and very fit back then - still had very hard time to keep the pace with and not fell behind the middle-aged women who'd been working there for years (it was a temporary summer job for me, and in general no man had been able to work there for more than a couple of month in a row)

I think his references to weight are a bit vague. What I get from the piece is that when he says 'fat' he literally means it, not necessarily overweight but with a ludicrous body-fat percentage.

I grew up in England, I visited a lot of bakeries and nearly all of them had several large kids in the back working. Not fat but a sort of padded-muscular. Similarly this is what I've seen in most restaurants since I moved to Canada.

Perhaps his comments hold true to, like he said, really high-end restaurants, but in my experience they don't serve food they're serving a garnish on an inedible ceramic surface. When you're lifting dishes into an oven that only weigh a fraction of a pound, of course you're going to be whippet-thin, you could be the anorexic king and still be able to lift those plates with grace.

If anyone's watched any of Gordon Ramsey's shows, you see him truly move with things a lot of the lean-contestants struggle like hell with. Why? Because he's 210lbs, he's well built. He's literally ran around the kitchen doing everyone's job when it's an emergency. He also serves dishes that the plate doesn't weigh more than the food.

I used to work as both a line cook and a pantry "chef." The pantry person is the guy who puts the scoop of ice cream on the baker's pies. Thus, I am familiar with bakers. The bakers usually start out small but end up ENORMOUS.

I wonder if this is a case of building endurance. If your work level doesn't increase dramatically (IE you have to carry say 5 bags of flour, 3 bags of sugar, etc. several times a day every day from day 1 to day 3651) you're eventually going to build the right combination of muscle to minimize the expenditure of energy. I know there's a term in exercise for this, but I work in construction so I get about 8 hours of vigorous exercise a day, so I've never been interested in going to a gym and doing more repetitive tasks than my day job and actually cost me money.

I would think it's more a case of eating 8000 calories worth of cakes and pies every day...

The bakers usually start out small but end up ENORMOUS.

Another data point for discussions of low-carb diets.

Look at the crews of any really high-end restaurants and you’ll see a group of mostly whippet-thin, under-rested young pups with dark circles under their eyes.

That's because they work 10-16 hours a day, during the times when most people...eat. That, and all the cocaine.

I was a dishwasher for about a year in highschool. I never did drugs, but I threw away leftover food for 10-12 hour shifts (usually one to three 55gal trash cans of waste food). Working in a restaurant was the most unappetizing thing ever, even in the slow periods, I just never really got hungry,

Wait, you didn't eat the leftovers?

In many places, there's too much left over for the staff to eat (even if they wanted to), and it can't be donated to the hungry either because of sanitation regulations. The amount of food that gets thrown out every day is enormous.

Wow...Whether you agree or disagree with his opinions, that is a fantastic read...

He writes like he talks - straight to the point, with a lot of style. He's also one of the few judges on Top Chef that I can stand to listen to. Too many of them are finicky little shits, but he's truly appreciative of talent.

I'm not even sure I _could_ agree or disagree. I know nothing about the restaurant business, and I don't really care to. It was still a very engaging article.

"... fantastic read... ..."

If you liked this try AB interviewing Ian Rankin, "Criminal masterminds" ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/15/crime.ianrankin

No, his books hammered this in my head. I don't want to be a chef.

I read Kitchen Confidential and loved it. Is there a similar non-technical book I could read on another line of profession that would be just as interesting?

Studs Terkel's _Working_ is a collection of short essays about people in a whole variety of professions. Most of the writing is people talking about their own jobs in their own words. It -- like all of Studs' work -- is incredible.

And if you want more in the style of Terkel, "Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs" (Edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, 2001) is also a good read.

There's an astounding range of jobs profiled from Crime Scene Cleaner to Porn Star Actor to Tofu Maker.

Po Bronson also wrote a surprisingly good book that I picked up from the bargain bin.

"What Should I Do With My Life?"

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/45909/print

If you get the book, read the one about the catfish entrepreneur

Agreed re: that being a surprisingly good book. It's definitely worth a read, if for no other reason than for the sheer variety of jobs that he ends up encountering. That, and the part about the catfish entrepreneur.

You might enjoy George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Among many other things, he describes his experiences working (in the 1930's) in the kitchens of a big Paris hotel and a small Paris restaurant -- I was reminded of Bourdain when I read these.

Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School is a great read about getting through medical school.

What a terrific career advice! Go after hard to get skills in your early career, work with the best even if you have to work for free! Don't let the better pay to lure you into dead-end jobs.

I wish my parents taught me this when I was 18. I’m thirty-two, a consultant developing in-house software for insurance industry. Well-paid and in demand for the best part of my thirteen year professional journey, getting well above average programmer’s pay I suffered so many sleepless nights thinking about where I really dreamt to be: working for the likes of Adobe, MS or Google. A real software company that makes a difference in the world!

Just to think that would have I made some better choices thirteen years ago, I could have been part of the core Skype team right now breaks my heart. But I can’t, I’m just not fit for the job, after thirteen years of hard work there is nothing on my CV that would make a head hunter working on behalf of a real software company to pick up the phone and give me a call.

So far the strongest driving force behind my career, the litmus test for any prospective job was financial viability; it was always about the better pay! I had to support myself and increasingly my family since I was 19 and I just couldn’t afford to go into full time education, I had to stay on the path scattered with lucrative but essentially mundane in-house programming jobs. The beast I had to feed was getting bigger and bigger as I was getting older and I didn’t know any better nor had anyone given me the timely guidance to get off the money needle and hunt down the hard-core programming skills and experience needed to hack Linux kernel, write a sound processing library or a come up with a better search algorithm, the skills that would have opened so many doors to me, the doors that now matter so much!

The advice I’ll be giving my kids is not to let the financial considerations alone to guide your early career choices, go for awesome skills what will pay off in a fulfilling job later in your life.

That's great advice to give your kids, but you should also be teaching them by example that it's never too late to make a change!

If you really want to work for one of those companies, don't wait for a headhunter to contact you! Fix up your CV, figure out a way to get your foot in the door (Hint: You're posting in a community filled with employees of the companies you want to work for. Be resourceful, but don't be annoying.), and brush up on your programming interview skills. It's really not that hard.

"If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel—as far and as widely as possible."

This is the best advice. People that never traveled, settled with their first girlfriend and took the first job, can be happy and fulfilled. But they miss out on so many good things..

This is possibly the best "don't get into startup in any form unless you're designed for it" article I've ever seen. I've known a lot of people who want to either own a restaurant, or open their own web design firm, or do something entrepreneurial when they just don't know what they'll be in for. I could even use this as a form letter for many other areas (except for the "too fat?" part).

Some good analogies with the main business of hacker news, here. It's worth thinking about some of the connections, especially:

1) Working in places where you will learn and acquire respect subsequently, if you care about that sort of thing. Yes, you can get more doing chintzy jobs, but there are plenty of high-paying jobs in computers that are the equivalent of Bourdain's 'country-club kitchens'.

2) Coming in with the right attributes (e.g. not being fat), and not mistaking attributes of people in at the end of their careers with the ones that you can get away with when you are young.

I have seen many, many people who have decided in computer science to emulate some famous guy who is wildly opinionated and a bit obnoxious and have it work out far less well for them than it did for the Grand Old Man of computer science.

It's absolutely a take-away for any career. You can chase bucks when you're young, but there's a good chance it will cost you bucks in the long run. It's more important to get a solid start to your career and be associated with quality operations than it is to take the cuhiest, highest paying graduate jobs.

But the other take-away is, it's never too late for a reinvention if you've got the risk appetite.

Some good analogies with the main business of hacker news

I thought so too, and as a result wrote a post about my own "business," so to speak, in the form of writing: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/20/so-you-wanna-be-a-writer-what...

I bought and ran a restaurant as part of my mid-life crisis/being bored with the computers.

I can vouch that pretty much everything he says is true

How did it work out for you?

In terms of business I did well, I turned the place around and it started posting positive cashflows (excluding my take)

In terms of personal toll it was very high, had it gone for few month longer it would have ended in a divorce and hospital most likely, due to physical and mental exhaustion.

I sold the restaurant and moved on back to the start-up world

It sounds a lot like the video game industry.

He says "The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy," yet his own career has greatly benefited from his talent for writing and self-promotion.

Aye. But as a writer, not a chef. He complains quite often about following the money instead of the experience during his tenure as a chef for many a failed restaurant.

I think you have to differentiate between a chef and a restaurateur. Bourdain's success as a chef comes from hard work, skill and merit. His success as a restaurateur has on the other hand benefited from his writing, self-promotion and no doubt luck.

It's been awhile since I've read Kitchen Confidential and have some timelines mixed up between that and his new book, so I'm not sure about this, but I believe Bourdaine had already become head chef at Les Halles in NYC before KC was published.

He is now a writer / TV personality and is no longer spending his career in a kitchen. Certainly, he is making more money now than he would have been able to do while only being a chef, but he advanced pretty far in the restaurant industry before he wrote the book that launched his second career.

Les Halles is a mid-tier business lunch place as far as NYC restaurants go (BTW, they have great frites moules). I wouldn't say working that kitchen indicates far advancement.

I think the draw of his book & tv show has more to do with his persona rather than his resume as a chef. This is consistent with what he is saying in this article. To survive as a chef, you have to be crazy. And to be mega-successful, you have to be lucky to boot.

I believe Bourdain had already become head chef at Les Halles in NYC before KC was published

That is correct.

EDIT: You also need to read the article, in which he says:

If I hadn’t enjoyed a freakish and unexpected success with Kitchen Confidential, I’d still be standing behind the stove of a good but never great restaurant at the age of fifty-three. I would be years behind in my taxes, still uninsured, with a mouthful of looming dental problems, a mountain of debt, and an ever more rapidly declining value as a cook.

Bourdain is under no illusions about his own value as a cook, as opposed to his value as a writer. And he'll be the first to tell you.

In a manner of speaking, he found his true self. It's a great piece of writing.

I think, too, that this is said about quite a few professions, by people working in those professions.

But wasn't his success not really "in" the kitchen, but outside it?

Exactly. He succeeds through luck and accident in being a writer, but not in being a great chef.

I think one might miss the point here, if one would take his writing too literally, that he ended up on an amazing success by just following what was good for him no matter how long did it take. The idea that you have to be willing to kill yourself in the process of being successful is a dangerous one, and will only be true measured by others standards.

Kitchen Confidential got me into the life and I.T. got me back out. This guy is one of my heroes.

I also agree with callmeed, in that passions sometimes shouldn't be one's livelihood... I ended up leaving due to burnout and doubt that I would have been as successful opening my own gig based on the highly competitive environment where I live.

That was very well written.

http://www.cookingforgeeks.com

Nice hack on the gray text thing.

Was I the only person that wondered when cooking stories became news for hackers?

It's Anthony Bourdain. When he talks, you listen.

It's also a talk about the facts of life, getting into careers that you think are fun but in reality will suck hard for the average joe, much like a computer career.

This is exactly the kind of non-programming link that should end up on hacker news. I was fascinated by this glimpse into another world, it's similarities and differences to the world of software. It's a world where entrepreneurs, artists, technicians, grunts, and others all try to work together, often in a brutally competitive environment. I'm also fascinated with the decision to go to a culinary academy or not (like programming, this is a field where you certainly can get an expensive degree, yet you need nobody's permission to code or cook... it's right for some, not right for others... though obviously, an academic background in computer science is more likely to pay off than a 60K culinary degree). You can try to do an end run around the entire establishment, and with enough capital, talent, luck, passion, you just might win... or you go about it with the almost the same highly structured process of academic degree and apprenticeship that a dentist would take. There are the dangers of a cushy job, but one that you need for the money.

All in all, it sounds remarkably similar to the software world. Probably a little harder, and lower paid for the winners and losers, but with a different kind of glory if that's what you're going for.

Great read, great post for a tuesday morning on HN.

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