Taking the Heat

[Jmahl]

I don't see a lot of talk about the guy or gal sweating it out every day and very night in front of the stove. Not the big name talent - but that working cook. How they are treated, how they are paid - what life is like - and the tensions between the back of the house and the front.

We all enjoy what they do, but do we think about them or pay them their due.

What are your thoughts?

[M.X.Hassett]

I see ones who are underpaid and those that are overpaid, if they make me good food or a drink I love them all ='y.

[Jmahl]

You guys and gals who sweat it out every day -- tell us about your life. Your glories, your beefs. We eat your food - let us hear from you.

Jmahl

[FabulousFoodBabe]

You guys and gals who sweat it out every day -- tell us about your life.  Your glories, your beefs.  We eat your food - let us hear from you.

Jmahl

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I have a feeling they're too wiped from sweating it out to read/post here much. I absolutely loved line-cooking; the heat, the pressure, focus, even the butt-kickings (because that means Cheffy cares ). I learned quickly that if you were taken into the chef's office for a bitching-out, you were in big trouble. Not that it happened to me.

And dammit, I NEVER cried! (Some of the guys I've worked with can't say that ... )

[annecros]

I worked front and back back in the days when I was young and athletic. I can promise you, the back of the house is the heartbeat of the establishment. These were the first people I made friends with when I went into a new place to work in the front, because honestly, 99% of the back of the house makes less money than the new wait person with the tiny section.

Not to mention, it is invaluable to be able to go back and ask a favor. What does it matter if you turn your tables and there is no clean silver? What does it matter if you reccomend that great food and it comes out of the kitchen a dissappointment? What does it matter if you step and fetch and know your customer's drink preference if the expeditor lets your food sit under the heat lamps? Bring the plate back because the customer doesn't like it? You had better be on good terms with the chef. Otherwise, he will take it out on you, because he cannot, must not, should not take it out on the customer.

The back of the house should be better taken care of in most places than they are. I always bought a round at the end of the night, or made sure to say please and thank you, or found out about their families and friends, who they are and what they are doing. A little kindness and consideration goes a long way. Unfortunately, many in the back are not treated so.

[gini]

I'm sure I don't speak for any line cooks out there, but I'm not sure who has time to post on this stuff. Working a double, or working from 2pm - 1am leaves little time for online posting. Anyway, I worked in a seafood joint in Maine, an upscale restaurant in NH, and a pub on a golf course. I worked both front and back of the house, and have to say I preferred waitressing. Less stress, higher payout. That was more than 5 years ago though....

1) what is life like: Lining at a seafood shack is by far the worst job ever. Imagine smelling like a fryolater for your entire summer. No wonder waitresses always end up dating line cooks - we all smell the same! We started out as dishwashers- also in charge of steaming clams and lobsters. Then moved to fry cook - french fries and onion rings first, then the more complicated seafood items. If you were good and wanted to make above minimum wage you finally graduated to broiler - first during lunches then finally at night (only Matt made it that far - he was a lifer and had - the keys).

2) the tensions between the back of the house and the front/ how they are treated: Annecros's comments hold true. I think any waitress worth her salt tries her best to treat the line well. The front of the house manager is usually the bone of contention with the line (or the owner). The major issues were indecipherable orders and slow pick up time. If your fried lobster role is sitting on the counter for more than 30 seconds, all my perfect frying skills are lost, sweetheart. In hindsight - changing menu items and how things are cooked was also annoying - not because it ruined the chef's vision (it was a seafood shack, come on), but because it ruined the system and the timing.

3) how they are paid: Not well. In fact, waitressing/waitering yeilds about 10X more per hour than a line cook (bottom on the totem pole does). A few of my excutive chef buddies seem to have the right idea - take the kids under your wing, mentor them, teach them.

[andrewB]

I don't see a lot of talk about the guy or gal sweating it out every day and very night in front of the stove.  Not the big name talent - but that working cook.  How they are treated, how they are paid - what life is like - and the tensions between the back of the house and the front.

We all enjoy what they do, but do we think about them or pay them their due. 

What are your thoughts?

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the is a lengthy, painfelt question to answer... As a cook spending 14hours a day working your ass off, you can feel life whisking by. I remember working in SF and on my day off every other week, i would walk down market street in a blur, disconnected from the rest of the world. There became this irony that the only thing seen out of the one window on the pastry side of he kitchen was Alcatraz.

To cook on a professional level at the top, takes everything you have and more. You pour yourself into what you do and its still not enough. Every plate has a piece of your soul on it, a cry to express your humanity to the world passing you by. Time passed is not marked by etchings of charcoal on a cave wall, but by the burns, nicks, and cuts on your hands and forearms.

Sleep when it comes is a restless one. Tired by the day, but caffeine and adrenaline still course through you. Staring at the ceiling, your mind races with the days events, calculating what happened, what you could do better, how chef freaked out on you, why table 32 got the wrong app, how hot the new food runner is... You wake in a panic that you didn't turn the oven off or the stock rolling in the kitchen as you sleep is reducing too much. On a good night, you wake from a dream with a new recipe and write it on the notepad you keep under your bed.

We are all creatures of our surroundings and as a cook, these surroundings mold us into a different creature from the rest. you become oblivous to pain, sometimes not noticing you've cut or burned yourself. ADD is augmented in the kitchen: give a cook one thing to do and he'll take all day and stare at his oil stained shoes, give him a full prep list and watch him chiffonade herbs, mound a sauce, and close the oven with his foot. You subsist on what i used to call see-food (see the food but don't eat the food)...

Anthony Bourdain became such an icon to cooks around the world because he put into words and on paper OUR lives. It was what we felt and could never express, let alone have people listen to it. The first thing he said when he came back into the kitchen during service was "COOKS RULE!!.. its nice to be able to go to any city in the world, walk into a kitchen and find people like you..." Those words for me say it all...

Thanks for reading this...

Edited January 26, 2006 by andrewB (log)

[Luckylies]

I'm a cook right now. not yet on the hot line. I'm a garde manger at avery good nyc restaurant. It's grueling and tough. Sometimes we get our asses handed to us. We get very busy and we work very long hours (for me 2:30- 1ish) five days a week...no set schedule...any five the chef picks.... At the restaurant I work at the people are actually quite civil (most of them) but can be tough and mean. my whole bedy hurts most of the time and I'm only 23. i actually only been in the business for six months and am honored to still be working at this great chefs namesake...but man sometimes I just want to sleep, or have some creative expression.... more later pizza's here.

[Jmahl]

You working cooks, what keeps you going? What makes you go in every day -- and take the heat. Is it the craft? Is it the only thing that you know? or, is it because you can?

This is your chance to tell the the folks who sit out there what it is really like.

I ask the questions because I admire what you do.

[andrewB]

Cooking is a passion which has its consiquences i suppose. I can say the reasons for me to be a cook would be because i can, because i was born to be, and because i need to...

Some people were born with a silverspoon in their mouths, i was born with a heat treated spatula. My mother runs a catering company and my whole childhood was surrounding food. For me to spend time with my mother meant i was in the kitchen. At the age of eight won a bread baking contest at the local cooking school and was also the year i met Madeline Kamen. In retrospect this became the most pivitol year for my emerging career.

Throughout high school i worked in the catering company, doing everything from waiting to cooking. I started to despise it, loathe the thing that literally put food on my table and clothes on my back. I left home after high school and went to college. I had no intentions of ever going back to the life i was trying to leave behind. I took jobs in bookstores and shoe shops instead of back in a restaurant and tried to avoid it all...

Leaving school with a degree in humanities didn't leave me with many interesting career choices and so i became a snowboarder and professional bum in Colorado. As fate had it, i began working as a waiter in a chinese restaurant in Snowmass and also a dishwasher on top of snowmass mountain at Gwyn's High Alpine. One of the cooks for the restaurant broke his arm skiing, leaving a hole in the line and the owner panicing. I told George i could work the line and he just laughed. After that day though, my fate was sealed. I couldn't continue to run from what i knew i needed to be doing in life, cooking..

Cooking for me posesses everything in life i need to be sane. I need to be creating, to be inspired, to throw myself into things, to go big or go home. In all those years of wandering, my life was incomplete until i returned to cooking.

For me food is an emotion, an expression, or a place in time. I may be biased as a chef, but I feel it is the higest obtainment of art. I would define art as the creation of beautiful or significant things and food is an art to be touched and quantified by every single one of our senses: sight, touch, sound, smell, and sight. When was the last time you saw someone salivate to a Chagall, or dine al fresco on a Basqiat? I wouldn’t call myself a chef, I would call myself a sensualist. Each dish is a piece of me, an expression of myself, and a timeline of my history...

from my last menu

Today, i am an executive chef in Europe with two restaurants and in the process of my second book. There is not a day that goes by where i don't think, feel, create, and try to understand food. I look back on the odd twists and turns of my life and know it couldn't have happened any other way or me to get where i am today. Food is what keeps all of us alive and food is my life...