The Era of the Line Cook | Hacker News Reader

The Era of the Line Cook

newyorker.com

48 pointstintinnabula33 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://archive.ph/8x3LK

upvote for both the username and the public service

I'm holding up 8 fingers right now to avoid the wrath of the Van Buren Boys

Hahaha, there’s more to that than Seinfeld :-)

Someone should honestly script this. Assuming this is not already that

just treat archive.ph as a 2nd level browser.

if url doesn't work in the regular browser -- copy url into that.

maybe add that as a feature request for Brave.

I just check the feature requests for the iOS client I’m using and this has been requested [1] …three years ago.

[1] https://github.com/dangwu/Octal/issues/228

Not a script but if you're reading on phone with the Harmonic app, there's a "View on archive.org" button for every post. It works pretty well for me.

What I hate about cooking is all the articles are focused on these top .1% of kitchens that have a completely different model from the rest of them.

Example: Sunday morning breakfast service, the guys at your local diner will do say 500 plates during the rush. Swap them out with a few highly educated Michelin star guys and they would struggle to break 100 until they learned how to work in a real kitchen. Some of them would quit, I've seen tears in this situation before.

Programming has a similar problem with most of the "day in the life of a programmer" sort of things being focused at big tech companies.

> Sunday morning breakfast service, the guys at your local diner will do say 500 plates during the rush. Swap them out with a few highly educated Michelin star guys and they would struggle to break 100 until they learned how to work in a real kitchen.

You don't think "Michelin star guys" had to start as line cooks and could easily do 500 plates...?

Typically no. It's a different career path. They would start as the low guy in a big kitchen, probably go to culinary school as well, like this article is talking about.

My experience cooking at michelin contenders and a couple michelin star restaurants in the 2000s was that pretty much every single cook had started their career as a line cook or dishwasher at a no-prestige restaurant, even a chain. "Low guy in big kitchen" if you're talking about a locally notable restaurant is not a job available to people who don't already know their way around a kitchen.

The two normal paths both start from cooking as "just a job" in or right after high school, decide you want to do it seriously. And then either go to culinary school or beg your way into a better kitchen and start grinding your up way. It was about 50/50, I only ever ran into a handful of people who went straight into culinary school with no experience.

Is the kitchen life as bad as it looks on TV? Like stressful as hell and some ultra aggressive chef chewing you out constantly (and for low pay), or is that just for TV drama?

Also how often are people getting severe injuries (chopping bits off their hand, getting severe burns)?

Depends on the kitchen, I worked 3x lunchtime-midnight shifts per week (most weeks) at an Italian function kitchen for 18 months.

It was focused grind; prepping, then plating, dishwashing, then cleaning for 250-300 seats for weddings | engagements | etc.

I enjoyed it, steady work all the way through with little to no drama other than some occassional wait staff drama (the 20 something overly privileged offspring of owners and their circle being made to work "a real job" were the usual problem, mixing social lives with prancing for tips with insta-drama).

No real injuries during my time there, on one occassion the front glass window was taken out with a shotgun before start of day (some drama with business owner family member sleeping with someone they shouldn't have) - no injuries, no police called, window replaced within hours, no sign of damage by opening time.

The worst are the chefs who watch the TV drama and think that's ok behavior

> Also how often are people getting severe injuries (chopping bits off their hand, getting severe burns)

Not every day, but it's not super rare. I've worked with cooks that have had mandoline accidents and bad fryer oil burns.

I don't really watch tv but so can't compare too well but yes it's stressful as hell and you get treated like shit a lot of the time. Some of it is just the normal dehumanizing situation of american wage labor eg no paid time off, no healthcare, etc. But the culture of cooking is particularly bad even within that. I understand this has improved somewhat since I left but from what I hear it is still not good.

I only knew of one genuinely life changing injury in a kitchen I was in, a very bad burn to both the cook's feet. But I saw plenty of cuts that needed stitches, and a few graft-worthy burns. Quite a few concussions too, from slips or accidentally pulling down more than expected from a high shelf. IMO the real menace is just chronic health stuff: substance abuse and other mental illness are common and no one has the resources or support to deal with it adequately.

You don't get even unpaid time off to recover from illness or injury and it really takes a toll over time. Most of those injuries I described, the person finished their shift and was back at work the next day. If they even went to the hospital in between, it was at the expense of their own rest and family responsibilities. Line cook was one of the most deadly jobs during covid, up there with frontline healthcare workers in the beginning. They only got overtaken by police & fire in the second half because so many cops refused to get vaccinated. Which, lmao.

"You don't think "Michelin star guys" had to start as line cooks and could easily do 500 plates...?"

Very few were forged right in the fire of the kitchen. The vast majority went to a culinary school.

I started my taxable life in the kitchen of a combination Chinese restaurant and grocery market.

When/where did you experience that? When I cooked at this level in nyc in the 2000s only about half of the line cooks had been to culinary school. And of the ones that had, almost all had been serious line cooks before going, I only ever ran into a handful who went straight into school first. Shit I don't think most of the good cooking schools would even take you without experience? Maybe this has changed in the last decade, but probably not completely.

In france and probably the rest of europe yeah almost all serious cooks have formal education in it. Mostly because "formal education in it" is a specific track in vocational high school that everyone has access to.

I think GP is saying that Michelin star chefs come from culinary school, not line cooks.

And that's completely false. You don't leave culinary school as a chef if you're going into the restaurant business, you're a line cook or prep cook, and your knowledge lets you advance much more quickly than everyone else. Sure you can get a "kitchen manager" sort of job in a hotel or cafeteria or something, but any restaurant hiring people into non-entry-level positions out of culinary school aint winning no awards. A huge portion of the famous chefs never went to culinary school. When I graduated, I was a line cook working for a guy who never went to school and he was one of the most talented chefs I've ever encountered.

I mean, both kitchens are "real" kitchens. They have slightly different parameters, sure, but I don't think there's any need to dump on fine dining like that. A greasy-spoon cook would also experience a period of adjustment if dropped onto the line of a Michelin-starred restaurant.

For that matter, the kitchen in my house is a "real" kitchen, and if I put a flat-top on the stove and parcooked meats in the oven any decent cook could probably put out several hundred egg breakfasts. The real bottleneck would be toast, I don't think my vintage Sunbeam is up to the job.

"A greasy-spoon cook would also experience a period of adjustment if dropped onto the line of a Michelin-starred restaurant."

I've worked both. The greasy spoon cook would fare better thrown into Michelin-star service vs the Michelin star cook going into general food service. General food service is ROUGH. In a Michelin starred joint (let's take Curtis Stone's 'Maude' for example) things are prepared quietly, quickly yet slowly enough to allow for precision in presentation. You often have quite a bit of time between courses, so you can collect yourself and prepare for the next course for your guests. Courses generally don't exist in general food service, and you aren't getting any real self-collection time unless you're on your break, as short as that may be.

Out of interest, how does someone who's worked as these cooks end up frequenting HN?

Not the GP, but I've worked fast food and 2 starred kitchens. I don't at all agree with his assessment, or rather I think the failure mode goes similarly both ways.

How? I screwed up my schooling and fell into cooking. Mum had taught me to cook as a child and I'd had after school/weekend jobs since I was 14? So I did it for a while until 50 hour weeks and no money got old. I was lucky, university had an "access" course for the degree level maths and offered me a place. 4 years later I had a degree in maths from a tolerable university and got a job doing mathematical modelling...

I did ten years in the industry, started working almost full time as a dishwasher at 13. Towards the end I did consulting for restaurants.

Not OP but I worked in restaurants through my 20s. Didn't get into tech until 2nd half of my 30s.

What process did you go through to make that transition?

Kitchen rat from 16-27 years old, worked shitty dives to fine dining. Realized working kitchens is not healthy or profitable long term so I made my hobby (tech) my career. Overall it was a great decision, but I still deeply miss the kitchen. If I could have a sense of normalcy and decent pay I would strongly consider going back to the line.

I was a computer nerd starting around age 5 and I started my taxable life in a Chinese restaurant and Oriental market combo at age 15.

Uh, that was very very much not my experience working in high-end fine dining. I worked as a bouncer at some really violent nightclubs and working as a fine dining cook was consistently WAY more pressure. Working in lower-level cooking jobs could be insanely fast-paced, but it was way more even and the staffing levels made way more sense.

Being a short-order cook is a trade you can be trained for in a few shifts. Sure, you can get great at it over many years, but you're done learning most of what you need to learn in a year, tops. Working a station at a fine dining restaurant requires YEARS of knowledge built through experience, and usually, a culinary arts degree. That someone working a station in a Michelin starred restaurant wouldn't be as good at short-order cooking as an experienced short order cook is like judging an automotive engineer by comparing how quickly they do oil changes compared to a guy working at jiffy lube. Beyond that, those fine dining cooks have probably worked at paces that would make those short order cooks heads spin. Manhattan restaurants will easily do 500 covers on a weekend night and the amount of work that goes into each dish is absolutely incomparable. In the last fine dining place I worked in, one of my shifts was always in the pastry station-- those plates involved made-to-order tuiles, made-to-order sugar decorations, foams... and that all needs to be coordinated with everybody else in the kitchen. At a diner, they put stuff on a hot surface to make it hot and put it on a plate and the whole process takes about a minute, so you don't even have to talk to anyone, let alone calmly strategize while you're literally on fire. Those line cooks could walk into a diner and get dragged for the first two shifts by guys that have been cooking the same 15 dead simple dishes for a few years, and then by the third shift they'd be everybody's boss. One of those diner guys would walk into a michelin starred restaurant for a stage and ten minutes later, after failing to chop onions with the requisite precision, they'd be handed a mop or told to go home.

If every resturant was a michelin starred restaurant we couldn't feed everyone.

The manner of working is very wasteful in terms of time and product.

It's not a realistic service, they exist only for the very wealthy.

a) That is completely irrelevant. You're making assertions about those cooks skill level and it's just utterly false.

b) Most fine dining restaurants use EVERYTHING they get. The roots from the herbs that get trimmed, the bones and scrap from the meat, the stale bread-- all have a purpose. Do you expect them to dye some clothes with the onion skins or save their burnt flatbread? Learning how to do that is a huge part of what you learn in a classical cooking education. You want to tackle food waste, look at distributors, grocery stores, cafeterias, and caterers, in that order.

c) Those restaurants are selling a luxury product. In terms of economical efficiency, going to a diner doesn't hold a candle to eating rice and beans at home. Are you fundamentally against luxury products? Because your criticism applies to every handmade luxury product in existence. High-volume low-effort products will always be more economical. That doesn't mean they're more legitimate than better products. Not by a long shot.

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