I tend to think too much.

There was a time I wanted to quit working in restaurants. This was many years ago and the nature of working at a restaurant was becoming a grind to me. To be honest, I never really liked the idea of getting home from work at midnight or being broke all the time because line cooks aren’t paid very well. I remember working so many hours I didn’t have a chance to do laundry and would just go out and buy new clothes. The kind of places I worked they expected you to come in early and work on your own time, usually this was a necessity if you wanted to be set up by service time. So you might be scheduled at 2 pm but show up around noon, or even earlier. There was a terrine at Spiaggia that took at least four hours to set, if you showed up at your scheduled time there was no way you were going to be ready. When we ran this swordfish terrine as a special I would get there at 9 am so that I had plenty of time to get it done and in the cooler so it could set before service at 5 pm. I felt at the time I was learning so much, so I didn’t mind putting in extra time. But over the years that began to change.

You see at this time becoming was a bit different. You were expected to work for a long time before you became a sous chef or executive chef. Most of the sous chefs I worked with had at least five years of experience, often more. Now it’s much different, there are sous chefs with much less experience running kitchens. This isn’t really a bad thing, the whole idea of paying dues is overrated I feel, but at the time there were also much fewer restaurants than there are now. Now there is a much higher demand for qualified people so you can move through the ranks faster. But for me, in the 90s, I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever get that sous chef title. Being a line cook is fun, but there comes a time when you just want to do something else. I was beginning to tire of the line cook lifestyle.

Being a line cook is hard. You have the physical part of being a cook, bending, stooping, kneeling, standing in one place for an hour cleaning produce, cutting, chopping, sauteing, putting away deliveries, working the line, cleaning, etc. At the end of the night there were many times I would come home, make myself a sandwich, and fall asleep watching tv, or just take a shower and go to bed. Or I would go out for beers with the other cooks and servers, get drunk, wake up horribly hungover, eat some greasy food, go to work and just be miserable for ten hours and pass out when I got home. I still was so passionate about food I would buy a new cookbook every paycheck, often two, and read them on the bus or train before or after my shift. But doing this day after day can take a toll and I never really took much time off, so I think I was burnt out, something no one really talked about at the time. There wasn’t much in the way of health and wellness being discussed. I was over the restaurant business in general, I felt like maybe I should just go back to school or do something else.

I remember all this going through my head one day while riding the train home after an exhausting day. It was Saturday night, and I had a clopen. Clopen is when you have the closing shift at a restaurant then the opening shift the next day, close + open = clopen. If you work a clopen, it’s a test of mental and physical endurance. I had to work brunch the next day and I felt like I could sleep for three days straight. The thought of waking up in six hours to make frittatas was not making me enthusiastic about my career choice. I had managed to avoid the rest of the cooks who were headed to a bar, they insisted I join them but there was no way I was working a busy brunch hungover, I had done it before and it was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. Every time I opened the oven and a blast of heat hit my face I felt like I was going to faint or throw up or both, no thanks. But all this was sort of running through my very tired brain and I remember leaning my head on the train window, watching the buildings go by as my brain raced. A crazy thought popped into my head.

Instead of focusing constantly on all the things I didn’t like or annoyed me, what if I just embraced all this bullshit? I felt that maybe I was swimming against the current a bit, maybe if I just went with it. I should just accept the fact I work nights, weekends, holidays. Accept that I am probably going to spend a large chunk of my time in a kitchen somewhere, accept how hard you have to work to become a chef, and just let it all go. Maybe I should embrace everything that was gnawing at me and see it as a means to an end. If this is what becoming a chef is like then fuck it, this is what it takes. So I did. Instead of getting annoyed with my schedule I just accepted it, it was freeing. When I got to work the next day brunch service was as big a cluster fuck as it always was, but I found myself laughing at the chaos instead of getting angry and resentful. When I left, I was still tired but wasn’t as agitated. I grabbed a few tacos on the way home and managed to catch the afternoon football game, it was a good day.

The funny thing is not long after all this I started a new job, making more money, and eventually got promoted to sous chef in a fairly short time after they saw what I could do, it was astonishing. About a year later I was offered a really good sous chef job at a new restaurant and the pay was very generous, it seemed like it was all coming together. I found that this embracing the bullshit thing really worked well and I felt so much better about everything. There have been so many times I had to tell myself to just accept the things that upset me the most and it has worked out for the most part.

But now am older I see this industry as somewhat broken and in desperate need of change. Accepting things as they are isn’t going to change anything. There are people trying hard to work on these issues but not enough in my opinion. After the past year and a half of social upheaval, I thought leaders in the hospitality business would try to make drastic changes and some have, most haven’t. It’s business as usual for most, which I find disheartening. This could have been a chance to reset, to rethink the standard business model of a restaurant, but so few people have attempted to try embracing new ideas, which I understand, I owned a restaurant once too, and I can’t imagine going through this past year and what a toll it must have taken. But the time is ripe for changing the game, not just getting back into it.