Or do you just like the uniform?

When I first decided to walk down the long, doubt-ridden road to chefdom, I was fortunate. I'd already worked for about 18 months, under three very different chefs. Each of them, and at least one of the chefs at the Italian Restaurant gave me The Talk.

The Talk goes something like this:
"So you want to be a chef."
"Yup."
"Do you know what that means?"
"Yes."(Note to aspiring chefs: your answer does not matter here. Get used to that; in the future, you will be given the answer, whether or not you know it.)
"You will never spend New Year's Eve with your friends, Christmas Eve with your family, Valentine's Day with the one that you love, or Mother's Day with your Mom. You will not get a Friday or Saturday off for a party, no matter how important. Every Halloween, people will ask if you're dressed as a chef, and the answer will be no. You'll work 12 or more hours a day. You will get burns and cuts, and still have to work, and the scars probably won't go away. People will scream at you. A lot. You will fuck up. A lot. You will not have a successful relationship, unless you find another chef, or a saint. And no one will understand what it means when you say 'I'm a chef.' They'll think that you cook really well."

There are certain things that I would add to this, though it might scare potential chefs off from the gig.

You might never earn the right to be called "chef." More and more people get called chef--hell, I get called chef--without the responsibilities that real chefs have. You might find yourself as a line cook at 45, and line cookery is a young person's game. Your job is not just to cook: you must manage people and costs. You need to understand what happens in the dining room, and when it's broken, you must fix it. You need to know food: you must know how to fabricate meat, fish and veg, you must know not merely ethnic, but regional cuisines, and you need to know how to create at least a basic version of most dishes on command. You need to get every red cent (or pence) from every item in your kitchen, and you need to be comfortable harassing slackass cooks into doing the same. You need to be willing to stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning as a restaurant chef, and if you want to be a pastry chef, you'd better be ready to wake up at 3 A.M. You need to know how food gets to your kitchen, how to make that path more valuable to your bottom line, and where something exciting is that your competitors haven't found yet. You need to understand that if people call you Chef, everything that comes out of your kitchen has your name on it. You need to taste everything. All the time. And you need to be brutal with whoever made it, even if it was all you.

If you don't want to do that, if you're convinced that surely there's an easier way, I have to ask: Do you want to be a chef, or do you just like the uniform?

Recently, our breakfast commis, admittedly a kid, was bitching about the hours in December. When I put the above question to him, everyone else on the line assumed I was taking the piss, but it's a question to ask not only other cooks, but oneself.

I have a degree in journalism. I was a smart kid. My parents always wanted more for me, and I like to think that I have the mind for this nebulous "more." Nothing makes me feel better than working well in the kitchen, but I regularly burn bread, make basic procedural mistakes, and need advice for simple processes. I want to work my way up the line, but it's impossible both to be aware of my limitations and assume that I can go where I want to.

Being a chef requires both suspending doubt in one's abilities, and being painfully, constantly aware of one's limitations. The best chefs teach you this, and how to overcome it. They punish mistakes, lend confidence in the face of the unknown, and encourage you in your experiments. And even with the best chefs, you'd better be your own worst critic.

Tomorrow, what a chef, or aspiring chef needs in reading materials.

December in 101 words

Landing from Atlanta, straight to work for nine days, sous chef quits, day off, seven days, friends from Brussels get embarrasingly poor service at the restaurant, day off, pork soup, carolers in an empty restaurant, easiest set menu EVER, wine for Christmas, new sous chef, grease fire with 26 guests in the restaurant, the show goes on, hockey game, ordering gifts for family back home, contracting the plague, day off, poker win, slow Christmas Eve, drinking with friends in their pub, waking up to potato pancakes, scrambled eggs, tomato sauce and pecorino and Authentic Mexican and The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.
Happy Christmas!