When you embark on the path to becoming a chef one generally accepts the fact that their personal life is over. You don't know for sure how this will affect you at first, you only hope that your passion and love for food is greater than the need for any relationships, regular sex, time to get haircuts or holidays. As a line cook you're probably doing 6 days on at 70-80 hours, and if you're lucky enough to have a 5-day week you get two uselessly broken up days off to sleep, sharpen your knives, buy groceries and rigorously masturbate.
Yes, yes I hear you over there complaining from behind your ergonomic desk chair with your lunch breaks. You only get 10 paid vacation days a year and all the federal holidays, I've heard it all before. Oh, and the bankers of course, who indeed work the same kinds of crazy hours but are effectively making quintuple and some of what your average New York City line cook makes. Anyway, you're only in it until you make manager or head to business school, right? It's a high-risk, short-term strategy. No line cook knows how long they might have to remain a line cook. They just hope they can move up before their mind and their body gives in, and the need for a long-term life strategy becomes urgent. Like say, retirement or your kids' college tuition.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that this was a conscious choice. Nobody put a gun to our head and said "Thou must cook! Or may thy flattops be uneven, your pans smote, and your spoons stolen!" I mean there was a time when the lawless and the uneducated were relegated to this life, no other career choices made available to them. But that has largely been eradicated as a bunch of college-educated, white-collar douches watched Food Network one day and thought "Oh hey! This should be fun! And I can be famous!" Career changers and misguided high school graduates now inundate the industry. And while they are the preferred employee in the sense that you don't have to worry about bailing them out of jail before Sunday brunch, or having them bump a line of coke in the staff bathroom, they are a bunch of soft, whiny bitches.
"Oh, I don't wanna stay and clean the walk-ins. I just DVR'ed The Voice and my girlfriend will be asleep."
"Stop yelling at me, I'm trying my best, you're hurting my feelings."
"Why do they have to be so mean? Don't they know I'm working so hard."
While no self-respecting cook would ever say any of that out loud (lest they seriously face the wrath of God/Chef), I can tell a lot of them are thinking it. And thus the basis for my grand Line Cook Half-life Degradation Theory. (Those were the only terms I could remember from high-school physics.)
Professional cooking is hard. Professional elite cooking is very hard. Professional elite cooking in New York City is just about as hard as it fucking gets. But anybody with the a fantastic work ethic, a decent head on their shoulders and fierce determination can do it. A well-mannered orangutan with that skill-set could do it. But what sets the boys apart from the men, the dabblers from the lifers, the kidding-yourselves from the true-born is endurance and the possession of that dangerously close duality of passion v. insanity.
While I believe there is little in terms of talent to being a good line cook (note that I didn't say chef), there is a whole lot to do with endurance. Sacrificing your personal life and giving your self wholly to a kitchen for the sake of learning, perfecting the machine that is your skills should ideally take at least 8-10 years.
But being a line cook for 8-10 years is a rough gig. Giving up so much to get $10 an hour back is harsh. That's just one of the reasons why this is a young man's game. If you've got a family or a biological time bomb AKA a serious girlfriend, prepare for them to leave your broke ass or earn some serious bread-winner points plus pants-wearing rights. Even if you're exceptionally frugal, have a loving partner willing to suffer through your indentured servitude, you then have to ask them to suffer your horrendous lifestyle. Minimum 12-hour days, all weekends and major holidays devoted to the kitchen, plus obligatory kitchen-crew bonding (read: misery drowning in copious alcohol) ... honey, you sure that nine-to-fiver at Happy Hour with the 401k isn't better for you? Debbie is totally willing to talk to his ugly friend for the team, and Joanna's boobs are out to play. He probably runs a lower risk of heart disease and of "getting-fat-disease" than that asshole in the kitchen.
So while theoretically anybody can cook, as we learned from the timeless tale of Ratatouille, it takes an exceptionally crazy and tough asshole to do so for any respectable amount of time. Though I suppose the suburbs should be thankful for harboring so many half-finished chef refugees who found an investor, a low-competition environment and a yard-with-a-dog. Otherwise I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any decent restaurants outside of major metropolitan areas.
That's LCHLD Theory Part I; cooking is hard and non-conducive to a healthy lifestyle, most people will eventually bail before getting the proper training to either start building their own brand (impatience, but some exceptional talents will soar), or bail because the toll on their personal life is no longer sustainable (giving in to reality, the desire to reproduce, not be alone with your knives and alcohol), or they jump ship for corporate to get reasonable holidays and a greatly inflated salary (what Nas would call Jay-Z, i.e. being a punk-ass nigga that sold out).
Part II to this formula is the counterpoint. While we have witnessed that this lifestyle is highly draining and taxing, it can be less so or even the exact opposite if you're...
a) insane,
b) just that passionate,
c) have no personal life to concern yourself with,
d) all of the above.
It is my firm belief that chefs in the (D) category are the most successful.
I think there's really no other way to cut it. Being a line cook sucks. The only thing that makes it suck less is if for some god forsaken reason it energizes you, makes you feel alive, turns you on, makes you hard, gives you the fucking rush during your successes and crushes you in your failures, only you keep going back for more, more, more, and baby burn me, slap me, choke me...
Ahem. Excuse me.
Yes, cooking is not unlike a really abusive girlfriend. That girl with whom you know you have no sustainable future with, but god DAMN is it fucking great right now. You treat me like shit, you flirt with other guys in front of me, and then at home you want me back and you tell me you love me, and then it gets weird...
And frankly, you either break up with this girl because you grow up and realize "WOW, this doesn't make sense," or one day, eight years later you think "Wow... I want to marry this woman."
It all depends on what kind of crazy you are. If you're the normal kind of crazy, then god bless you and all your future, healthily socialized children. If you're the fucked-up kind of crazy... then god save your wretched soul.
What a lot of it comes down to is this; are you an adrenaline junkie? Do you love pressure, dire situations and the need to fucking PUSH every day of your working life? Do you love seeing the clock blur by, have people breathing down your neck telling you you're not worth a thing, cook hard, move fast, test the fire, burn your hands all just to SERVE. SOME. FUCKING. FOOD?!
We try to make it better by telling ourselves that. "It's just food, guys." But yet we know, deep down, it's so much more than just food, than just a meal, than the $300 shit you're about to drop down that toilet later (we probably don't provide much fiber, and we use a lot of butter, so let the mudslide roll). It's about yourself, it's about integrity, it's hating yourself but loving the process of making yourself better.
You either got it or you don't. You're not a bad person for not being the stuff line cooks are made of, as you can see those aren't exactly qualities we look for in a friend or lover. But you will be yelled at nonetheless. It won't make sense, sometimes it will be so clear that someone's lashing at you just cause, it will hurt sometimes and make you feel like an asshole, but whether you come back for more is what determines if you've got what it takes. The environment is harsh to test you. There is no room for tears, appealing to other's humanity and being soft is not tolerated. While some chefs are wholly capable of sympathy, and human understanding, there simply isn't time. Cooks live a life of efficiency. The most efficient way to whip someone in to shape and see what they're made of is to break them open and look inside. If they come back together, looking for more with a smile, then damn you've found a tough nut.
I'm still not sure where I lie. The jungle that is a high-level kitchen is exhausting. If you work the AM shift, like I did, you wake up every morning in the dark, under-rested and miserable. Every hour of your free time is devoted to "Shit, I should be sleeping" and eventually you hit that point in the season where you never see the sun. You get one day off, you use most of it just to sleep. You're not sore, you don't got a case of the D.O.M.S., but the work is fatiguing. You run up and down stairs carrying big containers of chicken stock, you do hundreds upon hundreds of knee dips to get shit out of your lowboys, you focus and accelerate your hand speed to cracked-out-zergling-status for hours at a time. Let's just say there's no energy left to go to the gym. If you work the PM shift, you may get enough sleep to battle back a hangover, but suddenly there isn't time for anything else in your life. You're never going to see your civilian friends again, everything as mundane from a haircut to doing your laundry becomes a huge ordeal. You have cleaning and polishing your lowboys to look forward to on a Saturday night.
But yet, here I am. On vacation. And while I am thankful for the sleep and the time to organize my life, it has become ... boring. It's too peaceful, you start worrying about the stupid little shit in life. Maybe it's been exacerbated by the storm shutting us in, but there's no push, there's no drive, there's none of that crazy-tinted fever you hit every day.
I'm not saying this is some Hurt Locker scenario, where I leave a child, a domestic life and Evangeline Lilly for the life-or-death tension that is bomb defusal. Because who the hell would ever leave her for bomb defusal? But life has somehow lost a great deal of its challenge, of its edge. I don't think I'm in that certain category of crazy, the kind that becomes energized by the fury. But maybe I have left this job fundamentally different. Maybe I am not the same, maybe they've not just made me better. Maybe it's made me crazy. Maybe I've fallen in love, and yet found more hate and exhaustion. Maybe none of it makes sense and it never will, food is so visceral, so emotional, so primitive. All I know is we're together. Maybe one day, I'll sell out. Go to the suburbs, call it quits, cook under control and in peace, make sandwiches for grandmas. Or maybe I'll continue the grind. Working for an elusive and oft-failed dream, cook with legends-to-be and flirt with greatness.
I don't know if I'm that tough. But I know the job makes you tougher. We'll just have to see what I'm made of.
EP6
