Our private chef chat group truthfully jokes that "the food is only good if the chefs are suffering." This is not confined to one famous chef. It's endemic in the industry at the Michelin level....
Our private chef chat group truthfully jokes that "the food is only good if the chefs are suffering."
This is not confined to one famous chef. It's endemic in the industry at the Michelin level.
Ridiculously long shifts, few to no days off, enormous pressure, no room for anything but perfection, no life outside of work, huge mental stress, constant verbal abuse, comically bad pay, incredible ingredients and food.
Everyone puts up with the abuse because of the industry connections and networking that working a year in such a place affords. Having a Michelin starred restaurant on a CV means any future workplace takes you far more seriously. But you won't need to apply for jobs, the jobs will come to you, and they'll be better than anything that's advertised.
Even working a year or two at a Relais & Chateaux gives a resume a bump, but going into Michelin territory is the highest level. It opens doors that would normally be closed: tv/media spots, product endorsements, social media clout, private chef gigs to the rich and powerful. So everyone puts up with it, and the abuse continues.
I want to point out that this article explicitly highlights the physical violence. This chef was punching people. We gloss over all the things you listed because it's "worth it" but you can't omit...
Ridiculously long shifts, few to no days off, enormous pressure, no room for anything but perfection, no life outside of work, huge mental stress, constant verbal abuse, comically bad pay, incredible ingredients and food.
I want to point out that this article explicitly highlights the physical violence. This chef was punching people. We gloss over all the things you listed because it's "worth it" but you can't omit the repeated physical violence/assault/abuse if we're going to talk about how worth it things are.
We shouldn't gloss over emotional and mental abuse, horrible work conditions, etc. either.
And while the article focuses on the highest levels of the craft, this is par for the course in every corner of the hospitality world. One of my first chef's favourite "pranks" to pull on me as 16...
And while the article focuses on the highest levels of the craft, this is par for the course in every corner of the hospitality world. One of my first chef's favourite "pranks" to pull on me as 16 year old dishwasher at a chain restaurant was to leave the handles of a dirty pan over an open flame for a little while before handing it to me, handle first. This was on top of the traditional verbal and financial abuse that you expect from most kitchens.
Luckily, I only had a handful of violent chefs in the rest of my career, and while I never worked at the Michelin level, the highest-end places I worked also tended to be the most supportive while still being able to enforce the exacting standards that fine dining requires.
I won't defend it by any means, but a lot of intense work environments where deadlines are so strict, poor performance is immediately obvious and has a direct effect on the rest of the team is going to have some sort of "vetting process" like hazing. You see it in high level team sports, the military, and probably a lot more. While a careless mistake in a kitchen can serious hurt someone or cost a lot of money, a lot of chefs have a very inflated sense of how important their work is since the industry demands that you make it your entire identity if you want to make it to the top of the hill.
I am not particularly empathetic to the comparison of kitchens to the military as far as how the teamwork is so important that hazing is an obvious outcome. I'm of course also opposed to hazing,...
I am not particularly empathetic to the comparison of kitchens to the military as far as how the teamwork is so important that hazing is an obvious outcome. I'm of course also opposed to hazing, abuse and violence in all of the other areas as well. I don't think it's a coincidence that these are all fields that think exploitation of the lowest levels of its workforce is not just acceptable but ideal no matter the physical or mental cost. And everyone feels the need to prove they can hang, especially those who are breaking gender (or other) barriers to be there.
That's not reasonable, and even if you could make the case it was for the military, sports and cooking don't really come close to that in theoretical importance. Lots of people can cost their industries lots of money with a mistake, or even kill someone. I haven't seen anyone need to get beaten or abused in the ones I've worked in to take it seriously.
It seems far more that no one has held anyone accountable for it until relatively recently and even then not really. And everyone willing to let it slide contributes to that.
Do you have any insight on how random consumers might be able to change horrible kitchen culture from the outside? From my perspective, it seems that ratings and general outward perception are far...
Do you have any insight on how random consumers might be able to change horrible kitchen culture from the outside? From my perspective, it seems that ratings and general outward perception are far more important than worker health, and so as long as critics and social media keep lauding these horrible people, there's no obvious recourse for the staff until the abuse is so bad that it becomes impossible to overlook (although I'm sure there are some famous people who get away with it). I don't want to contribute to that culture if I can help it, but I'm also not seeking out luxury dining experiences in the first place.
I've heard through a few food podcasts too how this sort of behaviour is really rife among male chefs and in specific cuisines, especially French. In French cuisine, hazing and maltreatment for lower tier workers also apparently is a huge barrier to entry for women, and causes many of them to leave to avoid the abuse, and so "survival of abuse" becomes a necessary trait to make it to the top, and then gets passed on to the next generation of newbies. Aside from reporting on it and consumers making different choices, though, what can you even do about that? I definitely would rather stay at home and cook for myself than go eat an amazing meal made by miserable, depressed, and abused staff, but how do you even know it's happening? Should I just assume that's normal?
I wish there were easy answers, but the problems around all the forms of abuse are so baked into the industry and society's definition of how a fine dining chef is supposed to act. Gordon Ramsay...
I wish there were easy answers, but the problems around all the forms of abuse are so baked into the industry and society's definition of how a fine dining chef is supposed to act. Gordon Ramsay doesn't have a food and media empire because he's a great cook, he's on TV because people love to watch him yell at donkeys who try to serve raw salmon. Anthony Bourdain's autobiography, Kitchen Confidential was simultaneously the best and worst thing that could have happened to the industry. It shed light on the reality of kitchen life, but it inspired a whole generation of cooks and "foodies" to completely miss the point he was trying to make. He wasn't celebrating his drug-fueled past, he was telling people why the industry needed to change. As long we romanticize that sort of behaviour in our fiction, we're going to accept it in our reality.
You mention French cuisine being especially bad for abuse, which probably isn't too far off the mark. I've read biographies of some of top French chefs who apprenticed in the 1950s and 60s who talk about being treated only slightly better than livestock when starting their careers as teenagers. Like I mentioned in my earlier comment, this isn't even unique to fine dining. The people in your run of the mill, local takeout spot may have it worse. In my case for example, "survival of abuse" wasn't even about reaching the top, it was about keeping a roof over my head. It felt like there was some progress being made in the early 2000s, but maybe it was just me leaving the restaurant world, moving to cooking for seniors, and leading my kitchens differently, but it seems like there's been a huge backslide since the pandemic. I had left the industry entirely by then.
How much responsibility you're willing to accept as a diner is your choice. I guess it comes down to how much you're willing to separate the art from the artist, so to speak. Even if you give up on dining out, it's hard to eat much of anything without exploiting someone. Can you buy an avocado and a couple of limes from the grocery store knowing that at least some of that money will eventually wind up in the hands of a cartel? Upton Sinclair wrote about the conditions that food workers endured 100 years ago. Things may be better nowadays, but there's a long way to go. At a bare minimum, I would suspect that even if nobody is being punched, most restaurants commit varying degrees of wage theft and ignore at least a few safety and labour regulations.
I don't think that you as an average diner really bear any responsibility for it, especially when you have no way to know what goes on behind closed doors. By all means, call it out when you see it and support places that prove they line up with your values when/if you can. I barely eat out anymore, but I buy a ton of grey market homemade food from people on Facebook Marketplace. This may or may not be legal where you live, but I would much rather break the law by giving cold hard cash to a person for feeding me than legally buy food from someone who's stealing from their cooks.
Our private chef chat group truthfully jokes that "the food is only good if the chefs are suffering."
This is not confined to one famous chef. It's endemic in the industry at the Michelin level.
Ridiculously long shifts, few to no days off, enormous pressure, no room for anything but perfection, no life outside of work, huge mental stress, constant verbal abuse, comically bad pay, incredible ingredients and food.
Everyone puts up with the abuse because of the industry connections and networking that working a year in such a place affords. Having a Michelin starred restaurant on a CV means any future workplace takes you far more seriously. But you won't need to apply for jobs, the jobs will come to you, and they'll be better than anything that's advertised.
Even working a year or two at a Relais & Chateaux gives a resume a bump, but going into Michelin territory is the highest level. It opens doors that would normally be closed: tv/media spots, product endorsements, social media clout, private chef gigs to the rich and powerful. So everyone puts up with it, and the abuse continues.
I want to point out that this article explicitly highlights the physical violence. This chef was punching people. We gloss over all the things you listed because it's "worth it" but you can't omit the repeated physical violence/assault/abuse if we're going to talk about how worth it things are.
We shouldn't gloss over emotional and mental abuse, horrible work conditions, etc. either.
And while the article focuses on the highest levels of the craft, this is par for the course in every corner of the hospitality world. One of my first chef's favourite "pranks" to pull on me as 16 year old dishwasher at a chain restaurant was to leave the handles of a dirty pan over an open flame for a little while before handing it to me, handle first. This was on top of the traditional verbal and financial abuse that you expect from most kitchens.
Luckily, I only had a handful of violent chefs in the rest of my career, and while I never worked at the Michelin level, the highest-end places I worked also tended to be the most supportive while still being able to enforce the exacting standards that fine dining requires.
I won't defend it by any means, but a lot of intense work environments where deadlines are so strict, poor performance is immediately obvious and has a direct effect on the rest of the team is going to have some sort of "vetting process" like hazing. You see it in high level team sports, the military, and probably a lot more. While a careless mistake in a kitchen can serious hurt someone or cost a lot of money, a lot of chefs have a very inflated sense of how important their work is since the industry demands that you make it your entire identity if you want to make it to the top of the hill.
I am not particularly empathetic to the comparison of kitchens to the military as far as how the teamwork is so important that hazing is an obvious outcome. I'm of course also opposed to hazing, abuse and violence in all of the other areas as well. I don't think it's a coincidence that these are all fields that think exploitation of the lowest levels of its workforce is not just acceptable but ideal no matter the physical or mental cost. And everyone feels the need to prove they can hang, especially those who are breaking gender (or other) barriers to be there.
That's not reasonable, and even if you could make the case it was for the military, sports and cooking don't really come close to that in theoretical importance. Lots of people can cost their industries lots of money with a mistake, or even kill someone. I haven't seen anyone need to get beaten or abused in the ones I've worked in to take it seriously.
It seems far more that no one has held anyone accountable for it until relatively recently and even then not really. And everyone willing to let it slide contributes to that.
Do you have any insight on how random consumers might be able to change horrible kitchen culture from the outside? From my perspective, it seems that ratings and general outward perception are far more important than worker health, and so as long as critics and social media keep lauding these horrible people, there's no obvious recourse for the staff until the abuse is so bad that it becomes impossible to overlook (although I'm sure there are some famous people who get away with it). I don't want to contribute to that culture if I can help it, but I'm also not seeking out luxury dining experiences in the first place.
I've heard through a few food podcasts too how this sort of behaviour is really rife among male chefs and in specific cuisines, especially French. In French cuisine, hazing and maltreatment for lower tier workers also apparently is a huge barrier to entry for women, and causes many of them to leave to avoid the abuse, and so "survival of abuse" becomes a necessary trait to make it to the top, and then gets passed on to the next generation of newbies. Aside from reporting on it and consumers making different choices, though, what can you even do about that? I definitely would rather stay at home and cook for myself than go eat an amazing meal made by miserable, depressed, and abused staff, but how do you even know it's happening? Should I just assume that's normal?
I wish there were easy answers, but the problems around all the forms of abuse are so baked into the industry and society's definition of how a fine dining chef is supposed to act. Gordon Ramsay doesn't have a food and media empire because he's a great cook, he's on TV because people love to watch him yell at donkeys who try to serve raw salmon. Anthony Bourdain's autobiography, Kitchen Confidential was simultaneously the best and worst thing that could have happened to the industry. It shed light on the reality of kitchen life, but it inspired a whole generation of cooks and "foodies" to completely miss the point he was trying to make. He wasn't celebrating his drug-fueled past, he was telling people why the industry needed to change. As long we romanticize that sort of behaviour in our fiction, we're going to accept it in our reality.
You mention French cuisine being especially bad for abuse, which probably isn't too far off the mark. I've read biographies of some of top French chefs who apprenticed in the 1950s and 60s who talk about being treated only slightly better than livestock when starting their careers as teenagers. Like I mentioned in my earlier comment, this isn't even unique to fine dining. The people in your run of the mill, local takeout spot may have it worse. In my case for example, "survival of abuse" wasn't even about reaching the top, it was about keeping a roof over my head. It felt like there was some progress being made in the early 2000s, but maybe it was just me leaving the restaurant world, moving to cooking for seniors, and leading my kitchens differently, but it seems like there's been a huge backslide since the pandemic. I had left the industry entirely by then.
How much responsibility you're willing to accept as a diner is your choice. I guess it comes down to how much you're willing to separate the art from the artist, so to speak. Even if you give up on dining out, it's hard to eat much of anything without exploiting someone. Can you buy an avocado and a couple of limes from the grocery store knowing that at least some of that money will eventually wind up in the hands of a cartel? Upton Sinclair wrote about the conditions that food workers endured 100 years ago. Things may be better nowadays, but there's a long way to go. At a bare minimum, I would suspect that even if nobody is being punched, most restaurants commit varying degrees of wage theft and ignore at least a few safety and labour regulations.
I don't think that you as an average diner really bear any responsibility for it, especially when you have no way to know what goes on behind closed doors. By all means, call it out when you see it and support places that prove they line up with your values when/if you can. I barely eat out anymore, but I buy a ton of grey market homemade food from people on Facebook Marketplace. This may or may not be legal where you live, but I would much rather break the law by giving cold hard cash to a person for feeding me than legally buy food from someone who's stealing from their cooks.