Dishing out reality to hungry dreamers

A reminder to the next generation of cooks: Kitchen labor is actual labor.


When you reach a certain age, a couple of 70-hour weeks are enough to raise questions about your career choices. In youth, most body parts maintain a certain silence, simply accepting whatever indignities one’s ambition heaps upon them. Now I find that quite a few of them are speaking up about the virtues of desk jobs, and asking if I think I’m still 19.

I did consider an office job once, some years back. I was doing some piecework copy-editing for a closed-circulation magazine for librarians, and thought I was managing pretty well with it. My assignments were English-language reviews of Spanish-language books, written by bilingual librarians for the benefit of their colleagues who wished to build their foreign-language collections. They were paid no money for this, so it was not permissible to reject a review. This meant, of course, that quality ranged from superb to its opposite—but all submissions in each batch of 30 had to be made publishable.

One afternoon I finished work in my cockroach-infested San Francisco kitchen knowing that I had 12 atrocious articles to edit by the following morning. I had always tried to maintain the integrity of each author’s voice, no matter how much cutting and rejiggering I might do, but I knew that this bunch was going to be special. I walked a block to my favorite bar, had five cocktails, and caught the train home. With all traces of editorial honor in an induced coma, my work was quick and painless, and the final copies bore not even the faintest aroma of what I’d been sent. I quit not long after.

You never really know what an industry is like until you’re in it. I can remember sitting at a meeting of the Minnesota Restaurant Association years ago, when one of the guys at the table was saying we needed to combat the pervasive image of our business as one of long hours, hard work, and low pay. The association’s rep at the table looked at him like he was crazy, and pointed out that our business is indeed one of long hours, hard work and low pay. He agreed that she was right; he just didn’t want the world to know about it.

Now, thanks to the Food Channel and the plague of ads for culinary schools that seems to reach more parts of the state than the zebra mussel, we have achieved this noble ignorance. At the college where I teach part-time, we decided to interview our incoming fall class to assess their fitness for the profession and their expectations of it. You folks, as their future employers, will be pleased to know that 30 percent of my interviewees expected to be paid $50,000 to $60,000 dollars annually upon receiving their associate’s degrees. Got your checkbooks ready? At a full-time average of 2,000 hours per year, this comes to $25 to $30 an hour for your new, entry-level line cooks. I disabused them of this idea. Don’t thank me; it’s part of the job.

We have had, in the past, students who couldn’t stand on their feet for long periods, couldn’t lift 50 pounds (can anyone guess what a sack of onions weighs?) and who couldn’t handle an environment of high heat (Does no one listen to clichés any more? If you can’t stand the heat, go to cooking school?).

So, this time we asked them the same questions that they’ll find on a job application. We spoke to them about salary expectations (so they don’t plunk down their tuitions without at least being able to spell ROI), about environmental considerations (it’s going to be warm and you may not wear shorts), and hours. All the strange, long, crazy hours.

By the time we get done with them, they’ll be industry-ready. They may still harbor dreams about spotlights and book tours, but they’ll know how to clean a fryer and where to buy arch supports.