I was 16 the first time I stepped foot into a commercial kitchen, back then a once a week volunteer opportunity provided through my catholic high school that had a select few of us feeding the impoverished of Houston. With a long lineage of amateur cooks, my whole extended family was somehow prouder of me "working" as a cook and the wavering possibility that I might pick gastronomy as a career than they were about me studying natural sciences and shooting for medical school. Go figure. So when I went to college and had to start looking for a second part-time job apart from my mail room clerk overnight gig, having kind of done it for a couple years, cooking seemed like the logical move.
Over the course of five years, I've done my time in four more kitchens: a fast casual, a short order, a full service, and a counter serve. All in the effort to work hard for my dollar, to count on at least one meal a day by the very nature of the job, and slowly but surely to garner letters of recommendation from my supervisors. Any decent kitchen worker will tell you they've given blood, sweat, and tears to do the job well and with pride, and I'm no different. But by the time this article reaches publication, I'll have worked my last day ever in any type of kitchen, and I can't remember ever being happier over professionally abandoning a skill set.
It's a job I'm thrilled to leave, knowing I'll never have to cater to some customers who quite obviously think they’re better than me. Put aside any agonizing over the poor quality of organic kale in the summer. That I can say goodbye to terrible owners who would tell me to quit bitching and expo it anyways when I said I would rather be out of souvlaki for a few more minutes than serve people pink chicken. I won't need to slave over the creativity of a dish versus it's potential popularity in order to keep making rent for a new restaurant ever again. No more explaining mysterious cuts, burns, and bruises to friends and family. Knife callouses will fall off. Scars will fade. The undue stress from managers will cease.
It wasn't long ago that I wrote an article on management, using my personal food industry background to describe how it can mold you as a person. And while I still believe you learn so much in this business, I think the majority of the people in it lose focus on what it is we're trying to do -- feed people. The quality and efficiency in which it's done obviously separates a fast food joint from a Michelin star restaurant, but at the end of the day, the person going in to either of those places knows what they want when they go there. They're not going to barge in to a James Beard awarded chef's brasserie and expect a deconstructed Big Mac. They're not going to waltz in to a Taco Bell and expect a duck confit. You crave something, you go out and find it, and hope service is on par relative to the caliber of the place. That's it. The food industry is trying to give customers an experience looked for, and naturally, to get paid for giving them that experience.
Unfortunately, this is something I've seen glazed over and forgotten in every restaurant I've worked. It didn't matter if it was family owned or corporate. And while I don't intend on getting into the nuances of how capitalism fits into this seemingly simple back-and-forth exchange, because I understand it's a business, my final message to the food industry is to always keep in mind that we’re trying to provide an experience. In the same way medical professionals should go into their field, not with the intention of making stacks of money, but to perform the essence of the job and help sick people. The same way stage performers typically go into their work, never with the definite notion they'll break out and make good money, but to live out their passions through song or dance or acting. And maybe that's naive of me. Maybe it's having spent enough time working illegally off the clock on otherwise understaffed lines to make sure the customer’s experience wasn’t lacking. Maybe it’s getting berated by higher-ups, having them project their faults with the business onto your shoulders. Maybe it’s the insufficient resources, the pressure to output the same work, when you’re also trying your hardest and failing to keep a crew from leaving that doesn’t feel like they are heard, helped, or have long run significance. Maybe it's having been disillusioned with why some people go in to the business at all – disappointed when I can take the owner shadily buying $3 supermarket rotisserie chicken and then selling it as his own for a 400% profit, and I can compare him to the executive chef locally sourcing all his ingredients who's excited when he gets to put purple potatoes in the nightly special. Maybe I’m not being practical. Maybe this largely unreached idealism is what has me so genuinely happy to leave, that I saw the food industry as this holistic event with centuries of history but ultimately a practice consistently tainted by greed and miserliness.
Whether the mission of the restaurant's service is fast or casual or fine dining, the people in the Industry should put aside for a moment that they're trying to earn money from these consumers when their service's arguably highest priority is to feed them what they're looking for at a rate relative to the ingredients and quality of work put into transforming said ingredients. If the job was done well, then receive due payment. And really, my intention wasn’t to write a sermon on keeping the sanctity of the experience food can give a consumer in this exchange intact, but is that really so much to ask for?
