In 1990 the top single was Milli Vanilli’s Blame It on the Rain, George H.W. Bush was president, and Cheers was the number one tv show, that should tell you a lot about how the 90s were starting and how the 80s had ended. I was working in a warehouse for Ace hardware, and even though I was making good money as a truck driver/forklift operator I knew that this wasn’t really a career. I had skipped college, for reasons I’m still not sure of to this day. At the time I theorized that I would probably party too much and waste my parent’s money, which might have been true at the time. So my career choices were somewhat limited. I knew I was still young enough to go back to school, but honestly, I had been out of school a long time at this point and the idea of homework just was not exciting to me. ( To be honest, I do regret not going to college)
Cooking school in the 90s was much different than it is today, at least I think so. I had some amazing teachers and also some that often left me scratching my head. First of all, we had to wear those floppy chef toques, never a good look.
By the way, this picture demonstrates how I felt, ridiculous. We also all wore chef pants with crazy prints.
Yes, we really wore this stuff. Not only did we wear these pants we thought they looked cool. We felt like part of a gang when we walked down the street. Chefwear was located right across the street from CHIC on Orleans Street and we all would go there and buy discontinued chef pants because they were like $9. I had a pair with fish on them, yes fish.
Our days were divided between lab and classroom, the lab being the kitchen. I loved being in the kitchen, the classroom not so much. Right away one of the things I noticed about working in the kitchen with about 20 other students was how many didn’t really seem all that interested and motivated. The career changers seemed really annoying to me although I was one of them I guess. One woman that was a former architect told me one day she didn’t have to clean up after herself, after all, that’s what dishwashers are for. Later on, she told the chef instructors they were mean to her because they told her she was going too slowly and in professional kitchens, you need to move much faster. I ran into her a few months out of school and she told me she went back to being an architect, that there was no money in being a cook. NO shit.
There was one guy that saw how the chefs put their hand over the grill to see where the hotspot was, a very common practice. You hold your hand about an inch above the hot grill and move it around to see which area is hottest, every grill has a hotspot. He thought that they were putting their hands directly on the grill to check for the hotspot and so that’s what he did one day, he put his whole hand directly on the grill, I saw him do this and felt a wave of panic and fear rush through me. He ran screaming out of the kitchen, one of the chefs chased him down and administered first aid, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. He never came back though.
It seemed to me that all this stuff we were learning was pretty basic and not all that hard, but most people struggled. My lab partner worked as a line cook at a bar and grill and he would tell me how easy it was compared to the real world. He told me how slammed he would get on Saturday nights that he felt like crying sometimes. He was going to cooking school in the hopes he could get a better job at a more upscale place, he was tired of flipping burgers. We worked really well together and were always the first ones to finish our assignments and usually ended up doing the dishes and cleaning up for everyone. At first, we were kind of pissed about it but then we just got into it for some reason and would clean the shit out of everything, we liked to be busy.
A few months into cooking school I got a job working nights in an Italian restaurant in Evanston. It was an awful commute but I needed experience so I went with it. It was after I started working in a professional kitchen that I saw how not in touch with reality school was. I guess you could say that about any school not just cooking school, but there seemed like a huge disconnect. In a professional kitchen, you had to do so many things in such a short amount of time and you needed to learn how to juggle multiple tasks or you were not going to make it. When I got to work most days and saw the prep list they had left for me I would hyperventilate after seeing how much was there. But eventually, I figured out how to get everything done in time, although it took me a while.
At cooking school, you were typically given an hour or longer to prepare a dish from start to finish, and there were many kids that couldn’t do it. The chef-instructors usually gave me extra work to do, they got tired of seeing me standing around. I was fine with it as long as I felt I was learning something new. Once I started working nights, however, everything started to get much harder. I had to be at school by 7 am, and I would leave at 2 pm, take the train to Evanston and start work around 3:30 pm. I usually got off work around 11 pm and took a train back to Bridgeport, getting home around 1 am or so. It was a grind. I needed the money though and I felt like I had to get some experience as well if I wanted to work at a fine dining restaurant.
The more I went to school the more unnecessary I felt it was. In fact, I decided to try to get a job at Charlie Trotters. I showed up at the back door, (I had heard that was the thing to do) and asked to speak to him. One of the sous chefs asked me what I wanted and I told him I was looking for a job but I would work for free for a month, just to let him know how serious I was. ( Something I was also told to do). Sure enough, Charlie Trotter actually did come to the door and talk to me. He told me to quit cooking school and come work there full time, that I would learn so much more. He was right, of course, but I had paid for school and I wanted to get my money’s worth. I asked him if I could come to work after school and he said if I was really serious I would be there at noon every day so I could train with the other cooks. I pleaded with him to let me come after school and he told me maybe I wasn’t serious about being a chef. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to sleep on it. I knew it was an important decision. When I thought about it, I knew that I would learn so much there, meet the best of the best, cook with amazing ingredients, (the place smelled like black truffles when I was there) but in the end, I decided to finish school. I had taken a school loan to pay for it and if I was going to pay it back I wanted to at least get my degree, even though I knew that working at Charlie Trotter’s would have been an amazing experience.
I have mixed emotions about cooking school. A part of me feels like it was a huge waste of time and money. Another part of me feels like it was worth it to help get my foot in the door of the restaurant business. I have no regrets, and I do tell young people interested in being a chef that they should go to school. But I also tell them to go work in a restaurant for a few days, just to see what it’s like, because the restaurant business can be harsh, and not everyone is going to thrive in this environment. One thing I regret though is actually not being able to attend my graduation ceremony, my mom would have loved it. But that’s a story for another day.