So You Wanna Be a Chef (2010)
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Last year, I saved up enough money to open a cafe in India. Soon, I realised how hard it is to be a chef. Person who is the head chef at the cafe works almost 10h a day, 7 days a week. You have to be on your toes all the life, deliver consistent food, deal with stress, deal with customers returning food, have no ego, make decisions on the stop, planning things ahead of time, foreseeing things short term and long term.
Being a good home chef does not make a ready to pursue chef as a profession. It is pretty brutal.
PS. This is the cafe https://www.instagram.com/maharishi_boutique_cafe/
I eventually chucked it in, went back to uni via an access course / foundation year (so greatful that it existed) and graduated with a good degree and started a career as a grad where my salary was over twice what I earned as a chef without even approaching the same level of hard graft.
It's an interesting perspective to have, and unusual amongst my peers.
Sounds like software engineering job. It just happens to pay better
It definitely isn't specific to working as a chef, and I didn't intend to imply it. My experience of being (adjacent) to software dev is that actually a _lot_ of things change. I am solving different problems week by week. Learning new things, making new mistakes.
Some of the bleakness was related to money though, and all of it was my personal experience. Bourdain covers it really well. There are people who love it. The Life. I was lucky enough to work briefly at a 2 Starred place and holy shit - they were working far harder than I ever had and loving it. It was working with them that really clarified for me that I had no future there, I didn't love it. I was just competent, not passionate.
More Meandering Thoughts, not sure what my point is xD
The experience will make you 95% less shitty to food service employees when something goes awry and give you a firmer, more true baseline for work difficulty : salary, to measure your subsequent jobs against.
I also learned a lot about how to deal with people, not only customers, but also the chefs.
Even 20 some odd years later, I have enormous patience when eating out and always tip well.
Maybe someone in the restaurant industry should write a book on tech org structures that models highly efficient restaurants.
Not even remotely true, BOH gets to work in near slave labour conditions, while FOH gets to be in much more relaxed environment: the deal with the clientele, which sucks, but most are well compensated and when ever the topic of tip-sharing is brought up they are the first to start the divisiveness that is rife in Kitchen work.
BOH gets screwed 99% of the time, there is very little to no parallel to FOH in anyway until you get to the GM level and that's only because they are often working late nights along with BOH staff, but the rest of FOH leave at reasonable hours and can hold down decent wages--there is no such thing in BOH.
> Back of the house tends to be paid poorly in food service. They essentially pay for the privilege of not interacting with customers and/or having personality traits that make putting them and customers in the same room a bad idea.
I've done both, and ran my Kitchens, I can guarantee you FOH have the same if not worst traits: substance abuse is one of the main reasons people go from BOH to bar-tending after all. It's one of the most desired transitions for alcoholics to make in their career: they're paid well to pour drinks and have several throughout their shift, but most cook personalities and aesthetics do not allow for it.
What I've encountered more was a total lack of comradery in FOH, it's all about personal gain and backstabbing is the norm whereas in the BOH despite the prison culture aspect of it all the comradery is the cohesive glue that keeps the thing from descending into chaos during a busy night.
It's all coordination and a constant reminder of how critical teamwork is in BOH, the same cannot be said as you get into higher end kitchens: I spent a couple of weeks in Michelin star kitchens, and all the back-stabbing, sabotaging etc... was not just lame it was pathetic--40 year old season vets of the Industry contaminating your mise en place was just sad.
It's the nature of the beast, I suppose and to be honest after finally retiring for the 3rd and last time, I'm glad to say I will never miss the Culinary World as it has become a ghost of its former self. Which in many ways is good but no longer has the allure that it once did for me.
Yes.
> assuming people are dicks by default
Also yes.
Not everyone. But on any given, sufficiently busy day, there would be at least one completely unreasonable person. Kudos to everyone else, but if everyone had the experience, I feel like it wouldn't happen.
Sure, bad service is not a punch in the face but it is in the same category of receiving something you shouldn't have received and don't deserve.
And, where do you draw the line on what's mean? I can be kind to the service person but then go leave a bad review on the restaurant. Isn't that also being unkind to people? (or maybe it's being kind to others, warning them against bad experiences).
That said, I do see people in the USA (not sure about other countries) that act entitiled. Example, they spill something an instead of cleaning it up they think "not my job. Someone is paid to clean here so no need to clean the mess I made". Even if it's just bussing your own table in a fast food place where it's clearly expected you're supposed to clean up after yourself lots of people will just leave their trash at the table with a "not my problem" attitude.
Yelling at a McDonald's worker about food is like complaining about the landscaping aesthetic of a prison to its inmates: not really their choice.
Labor laws now restrict this type of work for minors.
I was trying to figure out the best "dealing with filthy sludge" option. Probably plumber's assistant (and drop carpenter).
Nothing goes right in a busy kitchen. Every assumption you might have about your upcoming shift is thrown out the window. A busy kitchen is absolutely a meritocracy. There's no racism, no views on drugs and alcohol. You are 2 secs away from lighting your hair on fire, or stepping in a boiling vat of water or grease and headed to the urgent care.
You'll learn fast about being on the bottom, on the top, leadership, procrastination, laziness, scheduling, stock, product, financials, you name it.
None of these jobs are easy or predictable. A majority of jobs in the world require everything you said to be successful. Working in a kitchen might be hard but is hardly unique.
The reason I agree with the statement about working in a service job as opposed to all of the other examples you've listed is that the lessons learned in a service job are widely applicable to everyday life and interactions with everyday people.
No doubt, you will learn a lot about yourself being on the front lines of war, but you can't take those lessons back to deal with the variety of people you'll interact with day to day in normal society. In fact, it may be counterproductive to try that. Likewise, rarely will people need the specific skills required to perform hours-long lifesaving surgery in their day to day life. True, it may come up, but that is extraordinary. You might as well also start building a doomsday bunker in your backyard.
software sales -> FOH
software dev -> BOH
I think that if you want to say ""everyone should experience xyz" then it should be both a) instructive to all and b) accessible to all. This rules out anything with years of training required.
So, working in a kitchen is clearly far more accessible to "everyone" than the others. The bar to entry is far lower. You don't need a study program before you can wash dishes. If you can walk in, do the hard work for long hours and low pay then you're in, they need that and the rest doesn't matter. I think that's what parent poster means by "A busy kitchen is absolutely a meritocracy".
A kitchen being too tight and too hot is not a law of nature. It could be built with more space and better ventilation. Sure that costs more, but why are we accepting shitty work conditions just to save a buck? The shifts being 10 hours 7 days a week is not a law of nature. Hire 2 people instead with proper shift scheduling. Oh that's more expensive? Well, that's what it actually costs. It's just that your 7x10 hour chef stomachs that extra cost right now, driving them into drugs and alcohol, see the original article we're discussing here.
And similar arguments can be drawn for the other examples. Accountant in the middle of tax season? Start preparing taxes earlier. Nothing accounting does is sudden and unexpected. It's accumulated over a whole year. It's the accountant's (or client's) fault if that suddenly all needs to be taken care of last second. Engineer fixing a production issue for millions of users? Get designs and routines in place that let you sleep well at night, with redundancy, automation, testing. A soldier on the front lines? Prevent wars from breaking out in the first place. A class full of rowdy kids at school? Terrible school system, and society approves with "it is what it is", don't even get me started.
With very few exceptions all those problems are home made. It teaches good lessons to experience them, but the main take away should be how to prevent them in the first place.
Holy heck was it way more work and stress than I had expected. It was a lot of fun, and I think I pulled it off reasonably well, but I can’t imagine cleaning up from the evening and then starting again the next night, let alone managing multiple meal times in one day, having more diners, or a larger menu… and then trying to make money at it.
Gave me a lot of respect for folks who run restaurants.
But still, running a restaurant seems like super hard work and it really makes me appreciate people who choose to do it.
When main course orders came in and I had more orders than people, I had to ask my server what was up. Somebody ordered the beef but with a side of the pasta, and I had to suddenly figure out how to plate that to look good as I'd only worked on plating the dishes the way I had planned on. Stuff like that kept happening through the whole meal. To your point again, experience would have helped, but thinking on your feet is clearly a big part of the deal.
This is why the most successful restauranteurs tend to be some combination of perfectionists, savvy marketers, and wealthy. There tends to be a streak of ADHD too, where they thrive on being constantly in motion and moving from problem to problem - certainly I've seen that over and over again in restaurant kitchens and offices.
Coleslaw would go from 20 minutes to 2 minutes.
I absolutely loath cutting julienne carrots in a kitchen and the robot croupe is great at that for sure. Potatoes, too. But some things wouldn’t save a lot of time really, like slicing cucumbers which would be faster to do with a knife and cutting board.
You want to be a business owner first - and a chef second.
If you just want to be a "chef" - that's equivalent to being the head programmer at startup and not getting any equity and makes no sense.
Most new businesses fail, especially in the restaurant industry, where the equity will be worth 0 (maybe even less).
There will always be a constant stream of new restaurants needing a chef and will pay (cash) for their services.
Change restaurants for startups and chefs for programmers.
It's unclear what benefits a high-capital restaurant would have these alternatives, that would merit the increased risk. Fancy service? Nobody cares anymore. Economies of scale? Maybe, but seems dubious. Building a brand? Useless when your landlord is fine with selling the building for conversion to residential on any given year.
The rate of restaurant failures is lower than the average for all new businesses.
And it's possible to have hit after hit in the restaurant industry. Most restaurateurs are just shit at business.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2017/01/29/no-m...
There's other sources too covering different timeframes. It's all information in the public sphere. Stats Canada for example tracks a ton of stats about various businesses.
(Also, sorry to inform you I am not a Reddit user)
Thank you for linking an article.
/s (?)
I worked at some of the best restaurants, with some massive multi-unit restaurant groups, and some of the shittiest dives. I loved the work, and the fact that I was never the one scrambling to figure out where the build-out money would come from. I could go to work and focus on making great food.
My point is, it doesn't make sense for you, but there are thousands of people out there right now running restaurants they don't have an ownership stake in, and being happy with that choice. Jobs are different things for everyone. Some people want control and power and to show the world their vision, and some people just want to convert time into cash in a way they don't hate.
RIP mate, miss you all the time.
Highly recommended if you have an interest in professional cooking and restaurant business.
He went to a not-top-tier cooking school, and then worked in some respected but not top-tier restaurants. Now he's at the Big Company, where you don't have late nights and you don't have weekends (except as noted). It's mostly a day job. Or so it seems.
He was thinking of opening a pizza restaurant, and I mentioned the unending nature of it, and he said, "well, I'm doing that now." So maybe it's not as regular as it seems.
This isn't exactly idyllic, or typical, but it's not as hellish as Bourdain makes it seem.
2010|63 comments|259 points|https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709693
2018|72 comments|138 points|https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18375148
So You Wanna Be a Chef (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26012566 - Feb 2021 (10 comments)
So You Wanna Be a Chef (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18375148 - Nov 2018 (72 comments)
So You Wanna Be a Chef - Anthony Bourdain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709693 - Sept 2010 (63 comments)
CITATION NEEDED
$12+ for a beer is typically the high end of craft beer, not Bud Light.
There's cheaper properties a train ride away, around Brisbane.
Lot's of people all over the globe live in pretty terrible situations where they just scrape by. You just come to expect and accept a different quality of life.
The reason being is a bar/restaurant can have a symbiosis where the food encourages drinking and the drinking encourages food and this is great for business.
Selling drink is very profitable but you need a critical mass of people to to attract other drinkers -- pubs who serve food hit this critical mass easily.
This is a bit disingenuous. There was literally a law allowing pubs to open only if they served food.
That said, a huge amount of pubs in Ireland have added food to their offerings in the last 20 years, even before Covid, so it must make business sense.
I have a lot to say about those days vs. now, but I can’t emphasize enough how much I love my job as a software engineer. I’ve been doing it now for as long as I was a chef, and it’s better in every single way (for me) and going through those years has given me so much perspective and so many more ways to appreciate what I have now. I’m just so happy.
This is the most important quote in the whole piece. Restaurant Life is a thing people outside of it DO NOT understand fully. Most well meaning, normal people are not compatible with it.
Do you do recreational drugs? Are you an alcoholic? Do you have a criminal record? Are you in the country illegally? If no, how are you going to deal with the fact that 75% of your coworkers meet one if not all of those criteria? How are you going to deal with the intense pressure? How are you going to make your rent, because if you want to do this in a major US metro at this point, you're going to have a hard time affording housing. How will you adapt to your new role when, inevitably, someone rage quits during their shift and you get field promoted to running their station?
I've been out of the industry for 6+ years at this point, and when I get super stressed out at my current tech job, I dream about running a restaurant. That's not to say that I want to go back, but that my mind inherently links "you are stressed out" to "you are the chef of a 2 million/year restaurant". I have never had a stress dream that involved a computer, to the best of my recollection.
> Do you do recreational drugs? Are you an alcoholic? Do you have a criminal record? Are you in the country illegally? If no, how are you going to deal with the fact that 75% of your coworkers meet one if not all of those criteria?
This resonates so much. I was never able to connect in any long term sense with my coworkers due to these reasons. Not getting drunk or doing other drugs after my shift meant that I wasn’t bonding with my coworkers.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/15732097
Where a girl goes to Paris to learn to cook thinking it will be glamorous like the movie Sabrina and instead it's like military drilling to be efficient but even with all of that she says feeding people makes you feel like a god.
I think the concept is similar for software engineering. Not feeling like a god but some people think "how could you possibly stare at a computer screen for so many hours a day. Sounds mind numbingly boring" where as to some software engineers it's the most creatively freeing environment there is and they thrive in it.
There is very little in this article that is true for software imo.
I will admit though, more restaurants are the former since most restaurateurs aren't very business savvy not educated. There's a reason most restaurants fail while a few can have many outlets and grow to billion dollar companies. Most restaurants languish at 1-3% margins (the actual average is 3 I think) while some do 20% easily. It's a good business to be in, however you need a strong business model, good execution and very good people skills.