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5 Things I Learned as a Line Cook

The Kitchen Doctrine

By Greg SanchezPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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"cooking for kings" Ian Kelly's book cover.

Like most people, at some point in my life I was a teenager. I wanted to move away from my parents and experience “real life.” In order to do all that I needed a steady source of income, but it wasn't so easy since I had no high school diploma, no college degree, and barely any knowledge of the English language. Somehow, all that that didn't seem to disqualify me from snagging a kitchen job. The food industry employed over 5,000,000 people in 2017 and, with a growth rate of 14%, remains the fastest-growing industry. Finding a job wasn't hard; keeping it was the challenge. My coworkers always had more experience than me. I was the youngster, the green guy. Fresh meat. It always interested me how their seemed to exist some sort of behavior that only made sense inside the kitchen. Over the years I picked up on a simple set of rules that can make sure your Chef won't fire you before service, even if you aren’t that great of a cook:

1. “Yes, Chef.”

You do not speak back. Ever. You must do exactly as you are told. Your Chef is not paying you to think or question his/her ability, or even to do the right thing. For the longest time I never understood the reason or the behavior which cost me many jobs, but ultimately it built a sense of deference towards whoever ran the kitchen that decided to employ me at the time.

2. If you can stand up, you can work.

Unless you are part of the management team, you are paid by the amount of time invested in the kitchen. So if you catch a cold and have to call out sick, you are losing a fifth of your income for that pay period, and chances are your boss will start looking for someone else if you don't come back the next day (someone who doesn't call out sick). Remember: Your boss doesn't like to do your job (it's a hard job), and very few commercial kitchens offer benefits such as health insurance and paid time off. To them it is not worthwhile to include that since the turn over is so high (10% a month, on average). Unless you are working inside a corporate kitchen where no local produce is being used, where you have to use a ''cut glove'' to chop onions, where your job doesn't require a strong set of skills, chances are you’re not receiving a full benefits package or even a retirement plan. I understood that for more mature people that weren’t there because they loved cooking such employers make sense, but I wanted something more. I fell in love with my job, I wanted to be good at it.

3. The Kitchen Ladder

The hierarchy in the kitchen is pretty simple. In most cases the Chef is the head, the sous (sometimes one or two) are below the chef, and then everyone there’s everyone else. That includes line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers, bussers, polishers, food runners, and even sometimes front of the house staff and managers. The more voices with authority the kitchen has, the harder it is to perform tasks accurately. Ultimately, as a cook, I signed off to be loyal to my Chef. He is the only authority inside the kitchen that should count. This philosophy seeded the idea of commitment towards my job, even if I knew someone wasn't right I was not the one in charge to do something about it.

4. Trust no one.

Once you reach a certain level of experience and start going from kitchen to kitchen, you realize your co-workers don't have as much seniority in the kitchen as you thought. For example, if you are the new cook and need to roast cippolini onions for the new steak dish, they are won't be of any help finding the onions inside the cooler. You'll be left in the weeds. At that point, your only other resource is the sous (which by Friday evening has probably worked over 50 hours), and he won't be happy about bailing you out (it’s 5 o' clock and you still haven't set up your station?). They will let you know how little help they receive from the rest of the kitchen and how badass they are for still making things happen. Even something as little as finding a handful of cippolini onions can escalate out of control and become a reason for the whole kitchen to hate you. That is just the way it is, you are taking away their space to work and slowing everybody down. How dare you to not already know everything? Over the years I grew exponentially more resentful at this. I was my only friend at work. I kept interactions with my co-workers to a bare minimum—I didn't want to give them any excuse to look down on me. The job was hard enough before I was constantly thinking I was going to get fired at any given time for being a fuck-up.

5. Foul Slang

Even though you cannot direct it exactly to who you want to, throwing things around and kicking a few steel doors might help you cool off. I went from not being familiar with the English language to being able to buy drugs from the dishwashers and making the new prep guy cry because he didn't concasse my tomatoes properly. It was not my best behavior, but after almost a decade inside a kitchen it built some character in what was once a wimpy version of a cook.

Maybe I am crazy for falling in love with my craft. Maybe I was never given the glorious opportunity of working for someone that valued me as a human being with rights and responsibilities outside of work. But after losing many friends to depression, overdoses, murder, or simply never hearing from them again after they failed to show up to work one day, I realize the food industry has a big problem: it is us cooks that keep putting up with it. It is the line cook that puts up with working fourteen hours daily to make the boss happy. WE are the problem. Some of us love cooking so much that even working for The Devil wouldn't make us flinch. Deep down we know it could always be worse (we could be forced to wear a cut glove). Chefs are far from admitting that they deserve better. The average cook can make up to ten dollars per hour (twelve if you have some skills) and will then turn around and spend $50 on a bar tab after work. Suicide rates are on the rise within the industry, and depression is still something cooks are ashamed of talking about. At some point in the equation someone traded talent for humanity and nothing is being done about it.

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