Are you thinking about going to cooking school with dreams of working in the best kitchens in your city or the world? Are you debating between going to culinary school or staying at your current miserable job? Well, before you tell your boss to go screw off, a few words of advice to mull over.
A little background on myself – I come from a hard working family, and I’ve never been one to turn down an opportunity that I wanted because it was difficult or whatever. In my second to last year of high school, I took 11classes and volunteered 40+ hours a week, and directed two school plays. I have never not had a job since graduating. Going in to culinary school, I’d read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and reasonably thought I knew what to expect. Work would be long and tough and yeah yeah burns blah blah blah. It will be different for me. I really somehow thought it would. I thought well, maybe I wasn’t that interested in working at a place like that, and labour laws have to apply to kitchens, and most importantly I wanted to do pastry, and that’s all girly and easy.
All though school (all 6 hours a day), I cruised through. It wasn’t that tough a school, but it was the best that Vancouver had to offer. The first big shock that I encountered was my fellow classmates. Out of 25, at most 8 had aspirations to actually do pastry as their career. A couple were cooks looking to pad out their resumes, a couple were housewives who were bored of looking after their kids all the time, and most of them just loved to bake at home and thought doing what you like to do in your spare time as a career sounded easy.
A year after the end of the program, I was the only one still working as a pastry cook. A lot of people found the field too competitive, or found that almost anything pays more than an entry level cook position does, others simply decided they didn’t like it. One out of 25. Now that percentage may not be typical, but from talking to other people in the industry, it doesn’t actually seem that strange. Especially for pastry. People seem to think of pastry as something so inherently different from cooking that it’s an entirely different job, but it’s not. It’s still life in a kitchen, and working the pastry line can actually mean you are the last to leave for the night, but probably not the last to arrive.
Don’t think you’re cut out to work in a high stress environment like a restaurant kitchen? Want to do pastry anyway? Work at a bakery. Maybe a small catering company. The reality is that most small, family run, easy to work in kitchens don’t employ a dedicated pastry cook. If they aren’t buying in their desserts, they are probably made by someone who is also doing garde manger. Places that employ people to just work on pasty are: hotels with decent restaurants attached or large banqueting facilities, high-end restaurants, busy catering companies, and bakeries.
Think your favourite restaurant might have a pastry chef, but aren’t sure? Have a look at the dessert menu – does it have apple (or cherry) pie and ice cream, brownie and ice cream, and maybe a cheesecake of some sort. Yes? No pastry chef. At best maybe, maybe an over worked garde manger CDP who has no interest in pastry, yet has to run that section too, and tries to keep the menu simple and boring to keep prep time down and so not too many customers are interested in the menu enough to bother ordering from it.
So, somehow you’ve found yourself at pastry school and are looking to make the best of it, what can you do to improve your chances at getting into somewhere decent to learn right off the bat? Talk to your chef instructor, and ask if they know anywhere that you can stage. Staging is basically volunteering, but without any of the glory. Staging, especially when you are in school will most likely be potato peeling, veg chopping or lemon curd making. If where you are staging is famous for their clafoutis, you can be pretty sure you’re going to spend a lot of your day cracking eggs and making pie dough. That’s not to say it’s not good experience. It is, but more than the skills you will learn, it’s an early opportunity to see if you like the kitchen atmosphere.
Nasty scarred arms
As a workplace a kitchen is most like a…..construction site would be the best analogy. But with more towel slapping and inappropriate sexual comments and touching. Like a construction site it’s a high stress environment with a tight schedule, a very strict hierarchy, and danger everywhere. Unlike a construction site, everyone is living very close to the poverty line, and has the arms of a cutter. Also unlike a construction site, the odds of getting something thrown at your head by your boss are significant. That all said, staging is also really good for making connections. After your third cooking job, most likely, every job you get after that will be through someone who knows someone who knows that you did pastry at wherever, so you might as well get started meeting people early.
Got kids that need looking after? Got family obligations? Like your evenings and weekends to yourself? FIND A NEW CAREER. It’s almost that simple; especially at first. If you are very lucky and get to write your own schedule, and you are the pastry chef somewhere, many many years down the road, maybe then you might get weekends off. But not evenings. And defiantly not Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s day or any other occasion that people like to spend with their loved ones.
Do you need to eat every 4 hours? Can you only work 8 hours a day before you go all loopy? Do your feet hurt after a couple of hours of standing? FIND A NEW CAREER! The only place in town that I know of where you will actually get your legally owed break time each shift and food to eat during it is at a unionized hotel that is very difficult to get a job at for precisely that reason. Also, if you are actually busy during your shift, that break time may go out the window. If you are working the line – forget about it entirely. There is never, repeat never a time when you are working on the line that you will be able to take a break away from your station. When was the last time you were stuck waiting minutes for a salad because “the cook is on a break”?
Just because you like to cook at home or bake cupcakes for your office co-workers, it doesn’t mean that you should become a cook. I have yet to meet a career changer who had a normal job before cooking, that has the broken-ness that it takes to work a line. However proficient they become at using their knife, or making a perfect butter sauce, there is still that thing inside that tells them that they need a sit down or that they’ve been here a long time and they are tired and isn’t it time to go home soon? Maybe you’re different. But I doubt it.
I started cooking at 21 and now at 25 I feel like a senior citizen in the kitchen, with a 21 year old as my sous chef. If you go in with an attitude that because you are older, or even more experienced than someone, you should be the boss, you will get your ass beat. Even if all of that is true, that youngster is still technically your boss and the more you fight them the worse your day will be. Your chef and sous will almost undoubtedly side with your boss because they are part of the same hierarchy, and you will have made a lot more enemies than you ever intended. The best thing you can do is be humble but confident. Know what you know well and have enough balls to speak up when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Work cleanly and efficiently. That was the best advice I ever got about working in a kitchen: You can work too hard, or not hard enough; you can work too fast or not fast enough, but you can never work too clean. The more time I spend in kitchens and watching other people work, that seems to be the great measuring post of exactly how good you are – how clean you work. Commis work like a hurricane is sweeping through their station and they are lost inside it, along with everything they have touched all day. Second cooks make a mess with what they are doing now but clean it up before they move on to something else, and Chefs de partis work like machines, having nothing out of place and everything right where they need it. If you are stuck at a point in your career and don’t know how to move up – work cleaner. If I ever found a commis or stagiere who worked clean I would go out of my way to find them a job or a promotion. If you are just one of those people who can’t seem to keep themselves or their stuff clean and tidy, maybe life in the kitchen isn’t for you.
L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon - A spotless kitchen
The higher up the fine dining ladder you go, the more cleaning you will have to do. That may sound strange, but it seems to be true. At a casual family restaurant, there are probably not going to be too many influential friends of the owner or chef getting a tour through the kitchen, nor is the famous chef from out of town going to ask to see the back of the house when they come to eat, because they probably aren’t going to be coming to eat. More and more high end kitchens are being built open so that the public can see the cooks making their meals. People don’t want to watch their food being cooked in a dirty mess. So, be prepared to get down on your hands and knees and scrub the floor, be prepared to scrub the inside of your vent hoods down at the end of every service if you’re working somewhere really fancy. A full scrub down of every surface on your station at the end of the day is par for the course.
I’ve made the job sound horrible and miserable and awful, which just isn’t the case. Cooks form friendships with other cooks in a way that only combat veterans seem to. If you work somewhere nice, and go out to eat, drop the name of where you work (preferably to a server who knows what they are doing) and you will be treated like royalty. I have had meals almost on the house that would have cost other people hundreds. It’s one of the few jobs that will allow you to travel to your hearts content, will let you be creative and methodical at the same time and the only thing I can think of where you use all your senses. Your job is to create memories for your diners and as long as you do that well and never lose sight of that as your goal, there is nothing better in the world. But no whiners please.
