What does it take to be a a good chef?
I'm an excellent home cook and I can multitask like a beast. I love to serve people food and they love my cooking, so I'm musing going to culinary school to become a chef.
I keep hearing that great home cooks aren't always good restaurant cooks - so what else does it take?
If there are any chefs here: what do you like least about your job?
Do you like working 12+ hours 7 days a week in loud hot faced paced environments with drug addicts alcoholics and ex cons for menial pay?
If so you might have JUST what it takes
>>7671033
Who are the drug addicts and ex cons? The kitchen helpers? The waiters?
>>7671039
Literally everybody on the line and prep
>>7671058
huh... odd that a particular job would attract such a crowd.
In any case about the hours, if you own your own restaurant or cafe, can't you just insist that it's closed two days a week, then you only hvae to work 5? There are plenty of places around here that have restricted hours and days off.
>>7671039
Everyone including you (eventually)
My mother told me on serveral occasions that I should aspire to be a chef when I was growing up. I'm glad I never took that advice, knowing kitchen work would be shit. I was not wrong.
>>7671065
Lets say you're closed on mondays, that still leaves you with 70hours+ per week. And don't for a second believe that monday will be your day off, gotta do the paper work as well buying ingredients and fixing shit around the restaurant.
Drug addicts excons blah blah blah
These days you're more likely to be stuck with a bunch of culinary school grads who think they're good at this game.
To be a good chef is different. There's more to being a great chef than just cooking. You need to work in a team, be consistent under pressure, set goals and manage workflows. Sure you can multi-task, many can. Sometimes, it's a hindrance to be doing multiple things at once. So many cooks get lost in the multi-tasking game trying to do too much, instead of focusing and executing. Learning when you can juggle items and when you shouldn't is a skill that needs to be learned. Get better at cleaning, and learn to do everything faster. I was stuck at work an extra hour tonight because tonight's team has no idea how to clean and the executive sous-chef forced them to redo their stations. Being the team-mate I am, I obviously stuck around to show them the right way to do things in addition to closing my own station and getting the dish area unfucked.
Do good home cooks make good chefs/line cooks? Sometimes. It's a completely different experience though. If you just want to be a grunt working with idiots in shitty kitchens, sure any idiot will do. If you want to be good, or work in good places, you need to learn skills, techniques, and truly apply yourself to learning about food.
>>7671065
For sure you can close a day or two. But the times you're closed, you don't create any revenue. Rent and taxes don't magically disappear because you're closed. Any product you have will need to be properly stored or tossed if it won't survive. Juggling the inventory will be an extra burden. Deliveries need to be adjusted as well. If you ran down your garlic or herbs or veggies, do you have enough to start cooking on Tuesday morning? Or do you need to wait until a truck shows up.
Additionally, paperwork always needs to be done, regardless if you're open an hour a week or 24/7. The times you're closed you also need to make sure health codes are being met. Spill something Sunday night and closed Monday/Tuesday? If it gets missed, you will have a bunch of new friends when you get back.
>>7671033
a cook isn't a chef, loser.
9am-midnight or later, 7 days a week, 363 days a year if you're lucky.
>>7671026
>i'm an excellent home cook and I can multitask like a beast
Get a line cook job before you make any decisions, or decide to call yourself an excellent cook, a good multitasker, or a beast.
Most people have no idea how different restaurant cooking is compared to casually preparing a meal at home.
>>7671026
>chef
Can you work 90+ hours a week with no breaks, in a hot (think 40C at least), loud, fast-paced environment, and make very few mistakes despite the hours and speed? Can you time twelve different cooking tasks out so they all finish at the same time and are done perfectly? Can you run a kitchen, from scheduling to hiring to ordering/finding suppliers to designing the menu to making sure all the cleaning and such gets done well despite mostly being done by brainless drug-addled ex criminals? Can you do all that and then watch the servers, who worked less than half the hours you did, take home as much or more money- often two or three times as much as your line cooks?
Being a chef or professional cook is insanely hard. It's skilled, gruelling work with borderline illegal hours and extremely low pay. Do not do it.
>>7671499
Cook are the biggest bunch of self pitying self mythologising bell-ends on the planet. Wah wah. I work 24 hour days at 2000 degrees cooking 30 dishes at once and I'm a bottle of vodka and a gram of Colombian marching powder down. . Why do you take pride in getting fucked over by your boss? Biggest bunch of cucks ever. No, cooking food doesn't make you special, it isn't an art and people don't buy into your self-aggrandising.
>>7671513
>complaining about cooks on the cooking board
Why are you here, captain contrarian?
>>7671535
Hero's journey.
>>7671026
Don't listen to this guy
>>7671499
He just has a shit job, I've been a cook for almost 10 years now and while kitchens are certainly hectic environments it's nothing like what he's describing.
The trick is that to really further your career and make a lot of money you'll need to demonstrate skills other than cooking. Patience and good judgement are among the prized traits, if you don't have those then you'll rot away in a kitchen somewhere surrounded by incompetence and abuse.
>drug abuse
>insanity
>masochism
>poverty
>>7671644
thanks - so can you give an idea of how many hours you work in a week so I know what a superior kitchen job is like?
>>7671033
Sounds like my job as an emt
>>7671644
>further your career and make a lot of money
The only chefs I've ever known who've come anywhere near 6 figures worked their way up to becoming the head chef at hotels/resorts with multiple restaurants, and they described it as a living hell of back to back meetings and shit every day, only getting 4 hours of sleep every night.
>>7671718
Most restaurants don't want to pay overtime, so it's common to be scheduled for maybe 35-38 hours if you're lucky unless they're understaffed. Lots of line cooks work two jobs because they don't make enough with the hours they're given.
A chef is a salaried position who comes in for as many hours as he's needed.
>>7671073
>I stayed late to unfuck the dishpit
GOD BLESS
we need more people like you
dont listen to these turbo fags OP, being a chef is easy if you're good at it, I'm a chef with a crew of 11 people in a good place open 7 days a week, I change the menu every 2 months and me and my sous run daily specials, I haven't worked over 12 hours a day in a year, often I work 9 hours a day, only 10 or 11 if I have to butcher and elk or a hog or something.
All this ex con nonsense is fucking dumb, maybe in bumfuck no where middle america thats all you can find for employees but there are lots of good kids out there willing to work hard for you for a bit of pay and experience, trust me maybe in the 80s when everyone was a degenerate coke snorter making absolutely obnoxious dishes with retarded amounts of prep for shit food, thats when people were working 100 hours a week.
The only time I've ever worked that many hours in a week in my 13 year career was during a soul crushing week where we had 3 weddings booked for 250+ people on a friday/saturday/sunday while short staffed 2 people. literally the only time.
If you're a smart cook or chef you only work for people that treat you well, because if you have talent then you can work anywhere you want, if you're a shitty line cook who gets abused by your boss all the time, then you have only your self to blame.
>>7671822
>degenerate
If you didn't use that one word this would have made some halfway decent pasta...
>>7671822
this, though it strongly depends on where you work and what the owner wants your hours to be.
I worked at a place where I was prepping from 10am to 4pm each day, taking a 1 hour break, and then working the line from 5pm to 12pm, then cleaning for an hour or so, six days a week. Granted, that was by choice. I didn't HAVE to work that much.
The saute cooks were on salary and worked from 11am to 1am every single day for the entire season (five months), which was a requirement because they were the only people on staff competent enough to work the line. It was a low volume setting (80 seats), but extremely fine dining, very complex dishes and incredibly high standards. Average meal cost about 140 not including drinks.
>>7671884
Whoever ran that restaurant is a god damned slave driver.
Requiring people to work 14+ hour days, every day for months at a time is fucking awful.
>>7671026
quantity, speed, bad hours, and low pay.
>>7671863
seriously, only retarded chefs can't make a menu that is really good, easy to prep and easy to execute, places where you work 80 hours a week burn out kitchen staff in a few months.
>>7671039
When i worked as a chef in Copenhagen 3/4 og the chefs used Coke or amphetamine to keep them going, restaurant had Michelin stars.
>>7672369
Star would be More precise actually
