You love to cook? DON'T BE A CHEF!

Everyone thinks that almost every cook wants to move up, to be in charge, but the most important aspect that people always forget is simply, you don't. It's totally fine to just be an extremely good line cook, in fact, I feel like it's almost in demand. Everyday I get indeed emails (gotta keep a lookout just in case of that unicorn job y'know) for almost every kind of cook there is from hospitals to restaurants, even Mcdonalds keeps telling me I'm a good fit (I've already done that for five years, I'm good Ronald) and it's almost always for the most ridiculously cheap price. You want 5 years experience but want to pay a dogshit rate, you are gonna get dogshit workers that fit that experience minimum, how have hiring managers not figured this the fuck out by now!

If you are starting out in this hellish industry, welcome! The stoves are hot and the people are overwhelmed and underpaid, the creativity is all looks no substance and you'll probably be yelled at for the most inane shit that will not make any sense until you hit a managerial role. Good kitchens are hard kitchens, you start and they are all laid back hanging around, run don't walk to the next nearest cook job. In my experience if everyone is working and in a rhythm, minimal leaning and chit chatting, you are most likely find a sweet spot of people who care. You won't find this at your first job and sadly you'll most likely have to dip out of a few places to find one you'll stay at for a unspecified amount of time, it sucks but it's a tough industry for a reason and the reason is the turnover. If you are smart, you'll take your terrible three or so years and leverage that to a hospital, university, cruise or anything that's not a restaurant if you aren't the kind of person to deal with the onslaught of service day in and day out while maintaining some sort of passion for food outside of that. Passion has a short life span for a cook, you'll be short eyed bushy tailed and learning about Marco or Ferran all the way to every obscure chef, sending staging emails to any michelin starred restaurant that would take you so you can do your three days unpaid peeling vanilla beans for a single component for a single dish out of their twelve courses. Then you'll start getting dragged everywhere, you'll want to create and experiment, challenge yourself beyond your skillset and it'll either beat you down or it will drive you. I honestly had a hard time wanting to devote any more time to chasing that upper echelon of cooking, at the time my girlfriend was pregnant and was wanting something more homely to be able to spend more time with them. It was a hard decision but ultimately was something I had to do to bring myself inner peace while avoiding the whole 'the restaurant needed me so I was never home' trope. This is all personal experience of course, so miles vary but the same work ethic applies, it's a thankless, unapologetically tough, rewarding career.

Every cook thinks they need the title to feel any sort of recognition for their work, but honestly it's the job of their bosses to give them that sort of recognition right then and there. Everyday I clock in as the Sous Chef at the University I work at, I'm thankful for my crew that steps up everyday, maybe I let them slack too much but to be honest they are not nearly as monetarily rewarded as they should be. I'm also thankful cause it's not my job to cook, well, unless there's call outs. Or people quitting. Or on the rare occasion they get fired. My job is truly mentorship and leadership, something I'm constantly learning everyday, I know how to make a beurre blanc sauce but do I know how to talk someone down from a panic attack? Or how to motivate a team to move faster and accurate? How to have professional one on one's with people's work ethics and how to help them succeed?

FUCK NO. I didn't know how to do any of that, truly all on the job training and basically telling myself, "how would I want my chef to handle this?", truly a rollercoaster where it was just endless death drops and twists to keep you disoriented enough to realize being a chef isn't all it's cracked up to be. You're not coming up with amazing recipes everyday, you are too busy to be doing that between the meetings, filling out corporate paperwork, meeting with your supervisors, making schedules, it grows tiresome and old.

You know who avoids all that nonsense completely, cooks! All you got to do is show up, make the recipes, clean and be done. It sounds easier said than done, I know but in the end that's it. The problem is, no decent cook wants to be doing what they are good at for minimum wage, so they go to those chaotic kitchens to make their buck and go home. Honestly, I don't blame them, I wish I had that amount of 'not giving a fuck' but I was young and wanted to prove to everybody I can run a kitchen so most bosses hated me. Just another cook wanting to move up and show that he can do it better, a tale as old as time.

In the end, this isn't meant to discourage you but to remind you of what you want to do, to put the reality in front of what chef's really do when it's not in front of a camera for TikTok. There's far too many people who call themselves chef's that it's almost lost it's meaning, you are not a leader of a brigade, you are some Joshua Weissman fake ass nobody who knows what the mother sauces are and can make a roux. I digress maybe I just don't respect anyone who carries that title (besides my ride or die Exec), honestly maybe I just respect the cooks more at this point that work hard and get the job done than to see a fancy pants chef with a clean cut white coat.