Rules of the Chef

  • The Chef is always right.
  • The Chef does not sleep, he rests.
  • The Chef does not eat, she nourishes herself.
  • The Chef does not drink, he tastes.
  • The Chef is never late, she is delayed.
  • The Chef never leaves the service, he is called away.
  • If you enter the Chef’s office with your own ideas, you leave with hers.
  • It is forbidden for chef’s to have children, in order that their numbers should not increase.
  • The Chef is always the Chef, even in his swimming costume.
  • If you criticize the Chef, you criticize the Almighty.
  • Chef is always spelled with a capital C.
 

The Reality of Being a Chef

People looking for jobs are frequently unreasonable. People looking for people can be equally demanding of things that don’t exist. The hard, cold math of the food and beverage industry include the algorithm that income has to equal or exceed outlay, that space and time are finite quantities, that family restaurants far outnumber five star winners, that people behave in human ways and that all food and beverage business is dependent on the whims and desires of customers.

Everyone thinks they are special, that the rules of physics and economics do not apply to them, and some people are right in believing this. On the whole, however, the rules of probability apply to most of us. For over twenty years I have been repeating the same obvious truths to people who want a day job in a high end restaurant (high end diners eat sandwiches for lunch), who want to replace the top chefs of the country on graduating from culinary school, who want to reinvent a wheel which has broken great people and spaced out dreamers in it’s unstoppable roll thought the annals of restaurant history.

Read more...
 

So You Want to be a Chef?

Chefs often question, warn, or even outright discourage individuals from seeking to join their ranks. I believe this emanates from the people frustrated with their dead-end, cubicle-trapped jobs, plopped on their Sunday couches watching Emeril “bam” his way through a couple dishes, and saying to themselves: “I could do that.” These amateur cooks naively believe that there is a correlation between preparing homemade or TV meals and the professional kitchen. Worse yet, they may have stars in their eyes. My friend Claudia who teaches culinary journalism, often comments about how the pupils in her class “all think they’re gonna be the next Ruth Reichl.”

Last Updated ( Thursday, 21 June 2007 03:13 ) Read more...
 
Webbestcuisine.info

More Articles

Food Talk

Who's Online

We have 4 guests online