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Did not want to open a new thread for this, but I just saw that Mercedes Benz in Germany canceled the contracts with the kitchen service companies (run under the name of a 'celebrity chef')in its museum and customer center. In an audit they found out that sometimes kitchen staff worked over 10h per day - major violation of labor laws and reason for immediate contract cancellation. Certainly not the reality for the small restaurants, but it shows a difference in appreciation compared to what I read here.

Stefan
 
If every kitchen were closed that had staff working over 10 hours there would be nowhere to eat! 10 hours is considered a half day at some restaurants :)
 
I cook to keep 25 families healthy, happy and employed. The passion left me a few years ago. It's about legacy now. Trying to raise some baddass Chefs.

P.S. You have to remember I started cooking professionally in 1976. I feel I'm allowed.
 
I'll tread lightly here but from my read it appears that as a result of being "appreciated", the kitchen staff that was working 10 hrs/day is now working 0 hrs/day. I wonder if they appreciate the appreciation.
 
Sounds much like what U.S. companies (e.g., Nike) say they do when they discover that overseas contractors are making their goods under conditions considered oppressive (e.g., so-called "sweat shops" or using child labor). Debate has always been whether nevertheless those laborers are better off voluntarily working and helping provide for their families than being unemployed.

And I won't get into the U.S. minimum wage debate here, and some of the potential adverse consequences often cited by opponents.
 
I've just recently become officially burnt out. I turned 30 in last week and had my first child in november. My career as a cook was relatively short. I started as a line cook at Momofuku Noodle Bar about 3 years ago. I had incredible teachers, we had such a motivated crew and i was just young enough to live the lifestyle a bit (though i was even then the oldest line cook). Spent 15 months there getting brutalized and learning a lot and moved on to Kajitsu, a shoji-ryori kaiseki straight outta kyoto michelin star type of place. that was also amazing, everyone taught me so much, and was patient with my ignorant a$$. Left after a mere 6 months because well, japanese kitchens are for learning very very slowly in a very different way and i had realized my goal was not to become a high class japanese chef. Went to help my buddy turn around a failing restaurant in Brooklyn. He offered to make me the head chef and we tried to open a caribbean restaurant, in a caribbean neighborhood, as two white boys in crown heights. It actually did pretty ok and we had a killer summer. And aside from about a dozen other trails that's it for me.
I got to the point where I didn't even like cooking anymore. I hated the guests, which isn't fair, and I hated cooking at home. I drank way too much, was never home and was miserable all the time. I'd eat cheese and drink during the day on my days off and was just fried. I personally think the business is so wacked out it's unreal in terms of how the labor is treated and how impossible it is to make any money even running a restaurant. I absolutely love the kitchen and a lot of it's culture. I just can't get into not being around for my son for what, 50, 60, 70,000 a year? For me it was unsustainable and I hope the industry can change for the better so that cooks and chefs can have better quality of life and people with talent can actually make money running a place maybe.
I recently trailed at a top chef type restaurant looking for a couple days work and when i walked on the line (which was the filthiest place i'd ever seen) and found myself in the middle of a bunch of enthusiastic 20 somethings working their ass off for $12/hr I was just like, no, I'm done.
 
TheDispossessed said:
I hated cooking at home. I drank way too much, was never home and was miserable all the time.
Click to expand...

I know this will sound familiar to most of us. It does for me.

A lot of respect to you for being honest with yourself. I know that there's no way I could be doing this if I had children.

It is a brutal lifestyle. I have a ton of respect for guys like Salty who have been doing this for 20+ years.

It's funny how your perspective changes. I've only ever had jobs in restaurants. I really don't know what to do otherwise. Saying that, I didn't take cooking seriously until I was 20. And I loved everything about the lifestyle. It was exciting and allowed me to literally travel across the country and see a lot. I've made a lot of great friendships through it. I grew up never thinking I would leave my hometown. So being able to do something that gave me options everywhere was very liberating. But it does wear you down.

I've only been doing this a short while as well. I'm 25 now and funnily enough I still feel like I'm at square one. And what was cool at 20/21 is not looking so attractive anymore. I'm definitely tired of sleeping on floors, getting hammered nightly, and being dead broke. I still enjoy cooking. I'm living in Chicago now and working for a really cool restaurant that does some great food (and is always busy), which is fun. But in the back of my mind, I do start to wonder. I reckon I will give it another good 2-3 years and if I don't see any sort of success (personally & professionally speaking)... well, it's time to find something else to do. The money & stress isn't worth it. I don't want to be that dude who is holding down a station in his 40's with two children. I can't be.

These were things I never gave a second thought to before. Holding down a serious relationship/marriage & raising children, with all the hours & stress, is next to impossible. I've seen it time and time again with people that I've worked with or for. At the end of the day it comes down to priorities. The vast majority of us are not going to be wealthy or successful at this. It is is what it is...
 
Fortunate enough to of married a saint! Believe me I have battled all of the aforementioned tribulations, and some. Pretty sure I'm the luckiest guy on earth. A whole lot of, one sided, understanding. She was raised in the business, "gets it", a little better, I guess.
 
If you just had a baby in Nobember your gonna be burnt out. It is hard. Really hard.

It doesn't really get a whole lot easier. But, if you stick with it, you will have the opportunity to get much much better at it. And you will get much much better at it.
 
I didn't feel like starting a new thread about this, so sorry about TJ'ing somewhat, anyone hate "HACKS" as much as i do?
 
Non cook here, no restaurant experience. Reading this thread, I have a few questions. At what level does a person move from hourly to salary in a kitchen?

For a line cook, assuming that's hourly, what's an average hourly rate? For s sous chef, what's an average yearly salary?
 
Tough question vesteroid, like you said when you move on up from just being a typical "line cook" that is when you start becoming salary , or i noticed as well when you work a TON In the summer tthey will out you on salary , I think it also depends on where you are working, like corporate compared to a chef just owning the place and putting out good food, know what I mean
 
Line cook anywhere from $9/hr for a small fine dining spot to $30/hr for a NYC union gig. Sous Chef anywhere from 28k to 60k depending on the restaurant. Restaurants can be so different. A small fine dining operation might do 1.5 million or less a year in sales while a big busy restaurant could do 25 million or more.
 
Yeah being a cook with kids is hard!
I was still working fine dining when we had our first baby.
70 hrs p/w for peanuts. We actually couldn't afford to live off that bs salary and I had to essentially sell out of fine dining for a higher paying job with less prestige. Basically I went from working with a bunch badass professionals at one of the best places that everybody knows and respects to working with a bunch of muppets somewhere no ones heard off. That to this day kills me ! But I get more time with my family greater flexibility and more money so we can Live! Still a hard move to make .
 
I'm a new dad and now i work part time as a cook. When i was full time and staying up all night with the baby i could have been an extra for a zombie movie and would have saved them the need for makeup. Although i love my job it's hard when you have to pay the babysitter more per hour than you make. The worst part was not being able to give 100% to my baby. Now that i have more time for him I'm much happier even if I'm little poorer.
 
Tough thread.
I've been an expat for many years now and back in the 80s/90s you could see the writing on the wall in the States. Wages were staying still and you just knew that it wasn't better anywhere else. Obviously I'm not talking the star chefs and or top flight joints. I'm talking about the 95% of the rest of us.
Back in 2006 a friend who was a bleeding magician in the kitchen was having trouble landing a job for $12 hour! He was getting under bid for $8 hour.
Here in Europe the wages are considerably better, but what gets me and I just will never get used to it is that you are expected to do clean up after closing. I'm not talking about your station, I'm talking about the floor scrub, trash. drains, etc. Never did I do this in the States, ever. No cheap labor to be had here I guess, so they figure, you did it, you clean it. Lol.

So back to the original posters comment.
What kills me is not the shift, its the freakin' major clean up afterwards. the prep, cooking and plating are a breeze by comparison.
Cheers to my old knees.
 
Cooking is my passion. I've worked a few lines and an odd bakery job but I work FoH, managing currently. I save the cooking for home and it really lets me keep the passion in the kitchen. Making/exploring what I want to make when I want to make it. Hours aren't better but the pay is with salary and bar tending a few nights. I'm 25 and look at what my time is worth and unfortunetely take the pay over passion. One interesting gig I just did was cater for the movies. 17-20 hr days feeding 150-250 (some movies it goes to 350+) people twice a day at sometimes two different locations each day. It was re shoots so I was told its not always that crazy moving locations. Pay was there, 19/hr for the first 8 hours and time and a half after that, the lead (chef) got double that.Food isn't that great but when all you have is a food truck and 2 moving trucks with 3 or 4 hours of prep inbetween each meal you cut some corners. There were 4 or 5 of us on the crew depending on the day and 2 of the guys had been going for a month straight. The job gave me a clear line between tired and exhausted and I'll take tired any day hehe. Ill stick to my 50-70 hr weeks, 100+ hour weeks you really can not have any kind of life. The chef who called me with the job is a friend of mine and we worked together for about 3 years so we talk as friends. He's told me he's burnt out and a sell out. He's a good cook and doing some of the things he has to do to put out a 20 chafer buffet and cold line isn't what he likes but has to be done to make it happen. Not sure how they do it, gluttons for pain I guess. My gluttony does not go that far hehe.
 
That's interesting to hear. To me, it's normal that we clean up after our shift. We usually spend an hour cleaning everything up and once a week we'd do an even more thorough cleanup (taking out all the shelves from the fridges and store room, pulling out the freezers to get all the way behind them etc.) I found it tough when I began, because we are required to clean up rather quickly yet properly what is a rather big kitchen, but I got used to it.

In regards to the original question in this thread, I have problems with focus/attention and get bored very fast, thus demotivated in doing things in general. With cooking, I am always learning and seeing new things; be it at work or on the Interwebs, and even though I have a very, very long way to go, I look back at where I started and I can already see a (modest) progression. I hope to continue to learn much more; I guess that's my drive.
 
How do we do it?

Well as many said we just do . Most of the times a chef has to make a decision one way or another, for this or that or the other thing , it aint matters , as long as you can get it done.You just do , and if you fail making a decision or question the circumstances or etc the game is lost.

Since i became an "executive", i try to build teams that understand the concept of under promise and over deliver . That means that you buckle down , you don't make statements of grandeur of any sorts and you really deliver when its go time. That is the only way to do this.

As far as how difficult this is; it is more difficult the older you get and i think the newer generation understands it more now because they had seen how bad this job can bend you physically , and emotionally sometimes and how much of your life it can consume and how bad it can hurt you and your surroundings.
 
I've enjoyed this thread though it has reminded me of challenges I failed to surmount as well as moments of inspriation.

As a home cook it is important for me to see this perspective as it helps me temper my words with due respect. A kitchen knife forum is likely full of professionals leaving my skill set (or lack there of) in the minority.

I broke down 15 pounds of butternut squash one afternoon and found it arduous. I've felt the burn in my back after cleaning 250 squid...I know enough to know I don't have what it takes...

I tip my hat to you all
 
after a while you just get used to the busy environment
 
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