Possibly, depends on location, niche, and various other factors outside of your control like if there's going to be a pandemic that forces restaurants to close. Plus it's still a big risk in the upfront investments you need to make.
The upfront capital requirements and lock-in to choices seems more flexibly balanced with those approaches, vs a traditional "heavy" brick and mortar restaurant. Or as we say around here, better to fail small and quickly.
It's unclear what benefits a high-capital restaurant would have these alternatives, that would merit the increased risk. Fancy service? Nobody cares anymore. Economies of scale? Maybe, but seems dubious. Building a brand? Useless when your landlord is fine with selling the building for conversion to residential on any given year.
Liquor, and the ability to sell it. So many places would go under if not for their ability to sell you marked up beer/cocktails. Now, depending on local it may be hard to get a liquor license (shout out New Jersey!!!) for a building and in others you may be able to sell drinks from a truck. But that's one major profit center advantage that building have over trucks.
Come on, this is a startup news board... Failure rate of startups is 90%, restaurants 60%. Both well known facts. You can verify in 2 minutes on Google.
Asking "Source?" on a topic where some prerequisite knowledge should be required is a lazy Reddit tactic. But here, since it took me 30 seconds to find:
There's other sources too covering different timeframes. It's all information in the public sphere. Stats Canada for example tracks a ton of stats about various businesses.
Hello there. I can't speak to everyone, but I can speak to my personal journey. In my late teens I was working in food service, both of my parents had run restaurants or been bartenders/servers. I had seen the issues that came from that, and when I went to culinary school in my mid-20s, on the first day they asked everyone "Why are you here, what is your goal?" Most people said "I want to be a chef-owner, I want to open my own restaurant, etc.". My answer: "I want to work in an industry where there is always demand and never open a restaurant on my own dime". And that's what I did.
I worked at some of the best restaurants, with some massive multi-unit restaurant groups, and some of the shittiest dives. I loved the work, and the fact that I was never the one scrambling to figure out where the build-out money would come from. I could go to work and focus on making great food.
My point is, it doesn't make sense for you, but there are thousands of people out there right now running restaurants they don't have an ownership stake in, and being happy with that choice. Jobs are different things for everyone. Some people want control and power and to show the world their vision, and some people just want to convert time into cash in a way they don't hate.
This is quite close to my heart.
I have been cooking since 15. At one point in my life I wanted to be a chef, but ended up in CS and now in engineer.
Last year, I saved up enough money to open a cafe in India. Soon, I realised how hard it is to be a chef. Person who is the head chef at the cafe works almost 10h a day, 7 days a week. You have to be on your toes all the life, deliver consistent food, deal with stress, deal with customers returning food, have no ego, make decisions on the stop, planning things ahead of time, foreseeing things short term and long term.
Being a good home chef does not make a ready to pursue chef as a profession. It is pretty brutal.
I went the other way, working full time at night when I was a teenager through high school. I got out of cooking when I was in my mid-20s (mid/late-90s) because of a health issue and pursued computer science (was programming as a hobby). The pay is significantly better and I don't have to work evenings and weekends.
I failed school (personal/motivation reasons) and went into Kitchens full time as it was the only skill I had. Working 50+ hours a week for borderline minimum wage as a salaried employee is hard. Knowing that next week will be exactly the same, and the week after and the week after is just kinda bleak.
I eventually chucked it in, went back to uni via an access course / foundation year (so greatful that it existed) and graduated with a good degree and started a career as a grad where my salary was over twice what I earned as a chef without even approaching the same level of hard graft.
It's an interesting perspective to have, and unusual amongst my peers.
> Sounds like software engineering job. It just happens to pay better
It definitely isn't specific to working as a chef, and I didn't intend to imply it. My experience of being (adjacent) to software dev is that actually a _lot_ of things change. I am solving different problems week by week. Learning new things, making new mistakes.
Some of the bleakness was related to money though, and all of it was my personal experience. Bourdain covers it really well. There are people who love it. The Life. I was lucky enough to work briefly at a 2 Starred place and holy shit - they were working far harder than I ever had and loving it. It was working with them that really clarified for me that I had no future there, I didn't love it. I was just competent, not passionate.
More Meandering Thoughts, not sure what my point is xD
Everyone should work in a kitchen (back of the house, not wait staff) for at least a couple months at some point in their life.
The experience will make you 95% less shitty to food service employees when something goes awry and give you a firmer, more true baseline for work difficulty : salary, to measure your subsequent jobs against.
Until my first programming job I was a bus boy and eventually worked up to a fine dining waiter. IMO, it doesn't matter if you work front or back of house, it will give you a huge appreciation for how much work and stress it is to be in service.
I also learned a lot about how to deal with people, not only customers, but also the chefs.
Even 20 some odd years later, I have enormous patience when eating out and always tip well.
This just made me realize there are some interesting parallels with technology jobs actually. Front of house roles = PM, sales, executives, back of house roles = engineering. Sales compensation is quite similar too, where the front of house roles have more variable incentive and back of house are paid more up front with less variable comp.
Maybe someone in the restaurant industry should write a book on tech org structures that models highly efficient restaurants.
Back of the house tends to be paid poorly in food service. They essentially pay for the privilege of not interacting with customers and/or having personality traits that make putting them and customers in the same room a bad idea.
> IMO, it doesn't matter if you work front or back of house...
Not even remotely true, BOH gets to work in near slave labour conditions, while FOH gets to be in much more relaxed environment: the deal with the clientele, which sucks, but most are well compensated and when ever the topic of tip-sharing is brought up they are the first to start the divisiveness that is rife in Kitchen work.
BOH gets screwed 99% of the time, there is very little to no parallel to FOH in anyway until you get to the GM level and that's only because they are often working late nights along with BOH staff, but the rest of FOH leave at reasonable hours and can hold down decent wages--there is no such thing in BOH.
> Back of the house tends to be paid poorly in food service. They essentially pay for the privilege of not interacting with customers and/or having personality traits that make putting them and customers in the same room a bad idea.
I've done both, and ran my Kitchens, I can guarantee you FOH have the same if not worst traits: substance abuse is one of the main reasons people go from BOH to bar-tending after all. It's one of the most desired transitions for alcoholics to make in their career: they're paid well to pour drinks and have several throughout their shift, but most cook personalities and aesthetics do not allow for it.
What I've encountered more was a total lack of comradery in FOH, it's all about personal gain and backstabbing is the norm whereas in the BOH despite the prison culture aspect of it all the comradery is the cohesive glue that keeps the thing from descending into chaos during a busy night.
It's all coordination and a constant reminder of how critical teamwork is in BOH, the same cannot be said as you get into higher end kitchens: I spent a couple of weeks in Michelin star kitchens, and all the back-stabbing, sabotaging etc... was not just lame it was pathetic--40 year old season vets of the Industry contaminating your mise en place was just sad.
It's the nature of the beast, I suppose and to be honest after finally retiring for the 3rd and last time, I'm glad to say I will never miss the Culinary World as it has become a ghost of its former self. Which in many ways is good but no longer has the allure that it once did for me.
You're making the assumption that without that experience, people are going to be dicks to food service employees. That is, assuming people are dicks by default, which I don't believe is the case. Maybe American culture instills that in people though, I dunno.
I think they mean it will give you life experience that will make you more sympathetic rather than just empathetic. An inoculation against casual or accidental rudeness if you will.
> assumption that without that experience, people are going to be dicks to food service employees
Yes.
> assuming people are dicks by default
Also yes.
Not everyone. But on any given, sufficiently busy day, there would be at least one completely unreasonable person. Kudos to everyone else, but if everyone had the experience, I feel like it wouldn't happen.
Probably two words: American tourists. They're almost as notorious as British or Chinese tourists in the countries that I've visited. It seems to be a trend.
It's hard not to get frustrated with a bad experience and it's hard not to take it out on the person who is the business's representative (the service person). I'm not making an excuse, you should be kind to everyone, but it's hard to get punched in the face and turn to the puncher and say "I'm sorry but did you mean to punch me in the face because I don't think I deserved to be punched. Are you having a bad day?" instead of "F you!"
Sure, bad service is not a punch in the face but it is in the same category of receiving something you shouldn't have received and don't deserve.
And, where do you draw the line on what's mean? I can be kind to the service person but then go leave a bad review on the restaurant. Isn't that also being unkind to people? (or maybe it's being kind to others, warning them against bad experiences).
That said, I do see people in the USA (not sure about other countries) that act entitiled. Example, they spill something an instead of cleaning it up they think "not my job. Someone is paid to clean here so no need to clean the mess I made". Even if it's just bussing your own table in a fast food place where it's clearly expected you're supposed to clean up after yourself lots of people will just leave their trash at the table with a "not my problem" attitude.
I worked in a kitchen at a summer camp for a number of years when I was a teen. That was one of the hardest jobs I've ever had in my life: waking up at 5:30am to get breakfast prepared, cleaning up, moving on to preparing lunch, cleaning up, take an hour or two break, then prep for dinner, cleaning up, and we'd be done work around 8pm or so. We had fun.
Labor laws now restrict this type of work for minors.
If you made a list of all the "everyone should work in <xyz> at least once" that people proclaim as universal rules, we'd be doing nothing else but switching between all these jobs our entire lives.
Maybe some janitorial work, cleaning toilets, cleaning cess pits. Ofc, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, road work, list goes on and on. Maybe also teaching various subjects like, math, physics and chemistry, Just to get some basic understanding of world.
I'll tell you straight up, right now, that the parent poster is correct. I, like you, tend to roll my eyes at the "everyone should work in <xyz>" proclamations, but the parent is correct.
Nothing goes right in a busy kitchen. Every assumption you might have about your upcoming shift is thrown out the window. A busy kitchen is absolutely a meritocracy. There's no racism, no views on drugs and alcohol. You are 2 secs away from lighting your hair on fire, or stepping in a boiling vat of water or grease and headed to the urgent care.
You'll learn fast about being on the bottom, on the top, leadership, procrastination, laziness, scheduling, stock, product, financials, you name it.
What about a doctor performing an hours long life saving surgery? A soldier on the front lines in a warzone literally dodging bullets? An accountant in the middle tax season? A lawyer fighting a case where failure could mean death? An engineer fixing a production issue with millions of users angrily knocking at your door? Competing in the finals of a sporting event? A nurse assisting covid patients not knowing if they'd be affected next? A schoolteacher herding a class full of rowdy kids every day?
None of these jobs are easy or predictable. A majority of jobs in the world require everything you said to be successful. Working in a kitchen might be hard but is hardly unique.
I often say "everyone should wait tables once in their lives." I think that encapsulates most of the things people are saying about BOH work, but also includes actually needing to make people happy (I've worked BOH and FOH extensively, and successfully at both; you don't have to make anyone happy from BOH–except chef–to be successful, but FOH you literally depend on it if most of your income is from tips).
The reason I agree with the statement about working in a service job as opposed to all of the other examples you've listed is that the lessons learned in a service job are widely applicable to everyday life and interactions with everyday people.
No doubt, you will learn a lot about yourself being on the front lines of war, but you can't take those lessons back to deal with the variety of people you'll interact with day to day in normal society. In fact, it may be counterproductive to try that. Likewise, rarely will people need the specific skills required to perform hours-long lifesaving surgery in their day to day life. True, it may come up, but that is extraordinary. You might as well also start building a doomsday bunker in your backyard.
> What about a doctor .. soldier ... accountant ... lawyer .. engineer ... athete .. teacher.
I think that if you want to say ""everyone should experience xyz" then it should be both a) instructive to all and b) accessible to all. This rules out anything with years of training required.
So, working in a kitchen is clearly far more accessible to "everyone" than the others. The bar to entry is far lower. You don't need a study program before you can wash dishes. If you can walk in, do the hard work for long hours and low pay then you're in, they need that and the rest doesn't matter. I think that's what parent poster means by "A busy kitchen is absolutely a meritocracy".
Of the top of my head, kitchen and construction are the only universally available jobs that will take you without any educational or criminal record requirements.
While working any of these jobs will teach and grow you a lot, I would argue that most of them deal with entirely man-made preventable problems.
A kitchen being too tight and too hot is not a law of nature. It could be built with more space and better ventilation. Sure that costs more, but why are we accepting shitty work conditions just to save a buck? The shifts being 10 hours 7 days a week is not a law of nature. Hire 2 people instead with proper shift scheduling. Oh that's more expensive? Well, that's what it actually costs. It's just that your 7x10 hour chef stomachs that extra cost right now, driving them into drugs and alcohol, see the original article we're discussing here.
And similar arguments can be drawn for the other examples. Accountant in the middle of tax season? Start preparing taxes earlier. Nothing accounting does is sudden and unexpected. It's accumulated over a whole year. It's the accountant's (or client's) fault if that suddenly all needs to be taken care of last second. Engineer fixing a production issue for millions of users? Get designs and routines in place that let you sleep well at night, with redundancy, automation, testing. A soldier on the front lines? Prevent wars from breaking out in the first place. A class full of rowdy kids at school? Terrible school system, and society approves with "it is what it is", don't even get me started.
With very few exceptions all those problems are home made. It teaches good lessons to experience them, but the main take away should be how to prevent them in the first place.
I agree that working in a kitchen will tend to make one more humble or misanthropic. However, most of these calls for "everyone should work in <XYZ>" are just asking for a reasonable dose humility and empathy. Not a lot really in the scheme of things. We often make these calls from having experienced the verbal, emotional, or physical abuse that come in these positions. Anyways, thanks for your time.
People should be kind to others in frustrating situations by default. This is the basic social convention of politeness, which seems to have not been properly learned by the vast majority of people.
Not to mention the myriad of injuries you can get by working in an environment where there are dozens of hot items around, boiling liquids, knifes, slippery surfaces, open fires, and whatnot.
Like Anthony Bourdain said " People who follow their passion into the restaurant world are delusional.."
Good luck to you, hope you are at least enjoying it.
I'm convinced that if you've actually read anything Anthony Bourdain wrote and it made you want to work in a kitchen then you are either a narcissist or masochist. There's no way around it.
I wonder what a correspondence between Anthony Bourdain and David Foster Wallace would have been like. My impression is that they were pulling water from the same well.
I lived in SF for 15 years and would talk to many of the restaurateurs there. What I hear almost all of them say: "I should have never opened a restaurant - I should have just opened a bar." Every. Time. Apparently the margins on food in restaurants is close to zero. However, any money they manage to make is from alcohol sales. So - eventually they realize - just sell alcohol.
The other side of this coin (as the maxim goes) is that the margin on drinks in bars is close to zero and that the only way they make any money is by selling food.
This is completely false. The standard measurement bars use is called the "pour cost" which is inventory usage(in cost) divided by sales. The pour cost average for a bar is between 18-20%. That's a gross margin of 80 to 82 cents on each dollar a customer spends on drinks. That's a pretty spectacular margin. A well-run bar on a busy night is practically printing cash.
A bud light at a bar is like $12 now at most bars. The case at the gas station across the street is $18. The splash of coke in the $10 well drink that begins with a cup scooped full of nearly free ice must have been about five cents of syrup and one cent of CO2, the pour probably came out of a bottle that costs like $15. Maybe that maxim was true back in the day when people could actually afford to get drunk at bars, but not anymore.
That's an awfully high cost for well liquor. The 'good' well liquor will be about $10 max, and the rotgut can be as low as $4 if you but a couple cases at a time.
I run a restaurant. A regular domestics (bud, miller, coors) run about $1.10 per can/bottle if you get a single case. Busy bars ordering 10 cases at a time will be getting discounts. Unless you're going to the shittiest dive bar in town, a $3 domestic bottle is nearly 200% markup.
I've always wondered how restaurants in SF can find employees. I've never lived in San Francisco but everyone tells me you can't survive there unless you make at minimum $100k. So where do these cooks making $15/hour live? These days nobody will rent to you unless you make 2.5x rent so how does this work?
You cant live comfortably... But there is a differance in literally starving and being able to just scrape by.
Lot's of people all over the globe live in pretty terrible situations where they just scrape by. You just come to expect and accept a different quality of life.
There's a large cohort of people that have grown up in the Bay Area, working from ages 16-28 (primarily, but also beyond) at their parents' home in low paying jobs. Plus, SF is connected via BART to a few much cheaper areas like Hayward, Richmond, and Antioch where renting a room could be something like $600-$800 / month.
As corollary -- as soon as a recession hit in Ireland the bars and pubs that are most likely to survive were ones that served food -- gastropubs. Many bar owners who closed during Covid will tell you they should have served food.
The reason being is a bar/restaurant can have a symbiosis where the food encourages drinking and the drinking encourages food and this is great for business.
Selling drink is very profitable but you need a critical mass of people to to attract other drinkers -- pubs who serve food hit this critical mass easily.
> Many bar owners who closed during Covid will tell you they should have served food.
This is a bit disingenuous. There was literally a law allowing pubs to open only if they served food.
That said, a huge amount of pubs in Ireland have added food to their offerings in the last 20 years, even before Covid, so it must make business sense.
From the article and every other bit of info I hear, working as a chef sounds like a terrible career by most metrics: low pay/benefits, long hours, high stress, low job security.
There's a deep love for cooking in many people, raising the de facto salary of being a chef. For the most devoted it raises it astronomically high. So competition drives down prices in the only way it can-- nominally and through intangibles like negative perks and job security. You can see at jobs where it's the opposite those same things are through the roof.
Where a girl goes to Paris to learn to cook thinking it will be glamorous like the movie Sabrina and instead it's like military drilling to be efficient but even with all of that she says feeding people makes you feel like a god.
I think the concept is similar for software engineering. Not feeling like a god but some people think "how could you possibly stare at a computer screen for so many hours a day. Sounds mind numbingly boring" where as to some software engineers it's the most creatively freeing environment there is and they thrive in it.
My dad used to work as a maitre at a five star hotel/restaurant some decades ago. Payment was excellent, but everything else was crap. I always remember him coming home beat from exhaustion. You spend too many hours standing up, the environment is always under pressure because everyone needs to be served in a limited time frame, you have to organize a myriad of people who are also overworked and exhausted, and on top of everything the kitchen per se is a very hostile place because you can really hurt yourself if you’re careless.
I grew up in a restaurant family, and it's a rough business. Long hours, often seasonal revenue swings, subject to forces outside your control, etc. Sadly, many of the things that make your life easier or increase your revenue often decrease the quality of the restaurant. Buying pre-chopped cole slaw saves time and effort, but it's never as good as what you chop yourself. Making your own stock is 10x better than buying stock, but it requires bones and time and labor to make it happen.
This is why the most successful restauranteurs tend to be some combination of perfectionists, savvy marketers, and wealthy. There tends to be a streak of ADHD too, where they thrive on being constantly in motion and moving from problem to problem - certainly I've seen that over and over again in restaurant kitchens and offices.
you’re forgetting time for cleanup, assembly, put everything back, move shit out of the way, precut veg into pieces which fit in the machine.. etc etc.
Specialized equipment in a kitchen is all about the time trade offs.
Robocoupes are easy to clean and setup and take up little space when not in use. An amateur making coleslaw (or whatever) can process 10x the amount of produce then an average pro chef with a knife and cutting board. Yes, some gadgets are not worth the hassle but there is a reason these are in near every professional kitchen.
Totally agree with you as well. I’m just saying that two minutes vs 20 for coleslaw isn’t quite right. A mandolin can process quite a bit, too.
I absolutely loath cutting julienne carrots in a kitchen and the robot croupe is great at that for sure. Potatoes, too. But some things wouldn’t save a lot of time really, like slicing cucumbers which would be faster to do with a knife and cutting board.
I got a culinary degree after high school and worked for a chef for nearly a decade before I changed careers to CS. I actually read Bourdain’s book while I was in school and he described life in the restaurant industry, and it just fueled my desire to do it more. I wanted to prove myself, I think.
I have a lot to say about those days vs. now, but I can’t emphasize enough how much I love my job as a software engineer. I’ve been doing it now for as long as I was a chef, and it’s better in every single way (for me) and going through those years has given me so much perspective and so many more ways to appreciate what I have now. I’m just so happy.
"I’m not telling you that culinary school is a bad thing. It surely is not. I’m saying that you, reading this, right now, would probably be ill-advised to attend—and are, in all likelihood, unsuited for The Life in any case. Particularly if you’re any kind of normal."
This is the most important quote in the whole piece. Restaurant Life is a thing people outside of it DO NOT understand fully. Most well meaning, normal people are not compatible with it.
Do you do recreational drugs? Are you an alcoholic? Do you have a criminal record? Are you in the country illegally? If no, how are you going to deal with the fact that 75% of your coworkers meet one if not all of those criteria? How are you going to deal with the intense pressure? How are you going to make your rent, because if you want to do this in a major US metro at this point, you're going to have a hard time affording housing. How will you adapt to your new role when, inevitably, someone rage quits during their shift and you get field promoted to running their station?
I've been out of the industry for 6+ years at this point, and when I get super stressed out at my current tech job, I dream about running a restaurant. That's not to say that I want to go back, but that my mind inherently links "you are stressed out" to "you are the chef of a 2 million/year restaurant". I have never had a stress dream that involved a computer, to the best of my recollection.
I have stress dreams about working in a restaurant all the time! It’s insane. I haven’t worked the line in almost 10 years at this point, yet I still have nightmares that the tickets are overflowing.
> Do you do recreational drugs? Are you an alcoholic? Do you have a criminal record? Are you in the country illegally? If no, how are you going to deal with the fact that 75% of your coworkers meet one if not all of those criteria?
This resonates so much. I was never able to connect in any long term sense with my coworkers due to these reasons. Not getting drunk or doing other drugs after my shift meant that I wasn’t bonding with my coworkers.
I think I just hit a point in my life where I needed to grow up to get the things I wanted and restaurants aren't a mature place. I got married and wanted a life with my wife, so when I got a seasonal layoff from a beach restaurant I worked at, I took the chance and switched to tech. I loved the late nights and drinking and partying until I didn't, and then I was mostly able to put it all behind me (I still smoke very regularly but much less problematically). I have always been one of the misfit toys, but luckily not in a self-destructive way.
Seeing Bourdain pop up always hits the feels. His show inspired me to pick up my shit and travel the world to experience food culture. As someone that also struggles with chronic depression his passing was also a wake-up call to start doing something about my own problems.
how so? Software is significantly easier physically, you can sit the entire time. The hours are far more reasonable, often <8 hours a day. Unless you work in a very early stage startup, the pressure is relatively low. It is very easy to switch jobs today and move around.
There is very little in this article that is true for software imo.
The part that resonated with me is the ageism and general suspicion (by your potentially younger boss) of those with families and responsibilities. Startups tend to expect you to put everything you have into work, but for some folks that's just not possible.
Yeah, I'm 2 years into my new career as a software engineer after 20 years of working in restaurants and couldn't be happier, for pretty much all of the reasons explained in this piece. I can say will 100% absolute certainty that I do not want to be a chef. People love the idea of these types of jobs, but half of them wouldn't last a month doing the actual work and the other half wouldn't put up with the lack of income
I was curious what it might be like to run a restaurant, so as a limited experiment just to get a small piece of the feel of it I tried running a little private ‘restaurant’ for a night. I spent about a month creating a menu of three courses each with three choices of dish, then invited three couples over, bought a ton of food and supplies, set up tables and lighting out by my pool, enlisted my wife to be the waitress, and waited for the guests to arrive.
Holy heck was it way more work and stress than I had expected. It was a lot of fun, and I think I pulled it off reasonably well, but I can’t imagine cleaning up from the evening and then starting again the next night, let alone managing multiple meal times in one day, having more diners, or a larger menu… and then trying to make money at it.
Gave me a lot of respect for folks who run restaurants.
It's certainly very hard but it also is certainly easier than doing it once. You had to buy supplies for 1 meal instead of supplies for say 10 (so 10x the work). You had to setup tables (those would already be setup in a restuarant). Much of the stuff you did it was probably your first time so you were likely both not used to it and inefficent.
But still, running a restaurant seems like super hard work and it really makes me appreciate people who choose to do it.
You make a good point that inefficiency due to inexperience likely increased the workload. Although a lot of the stress only came after the guests arrived, as suddenly everything had to be timed correctly and the guests seemed to be doing everything they could to screw up my predetermined plans. I don't think they really were, it just felt that way.
When main course orders came in and I had more orders than people, I had to ask my server what was up. Somebody ordered the beef but with a side of the pasta, and I had to suddenly figure out how to plate that to look good as I'd only worked on plating the dishes the way I had planned on. Stuff like that kept happening through the whole meal. To your point again, experience would have helped, but thinking on your feet is clearly a big part of the deal.
Personal experience: I'm related to a youngish (now) executive chef, who works for a very large food service company that runs cafeterias for companies. I've driven with him down to his place of employment on an off-day, so he could take a load of chicken out of the freezer. His job is mostly managing the young, fit people that Bourdain describes, and sticking to his budget.
He went to a not-top-tier cooking school, and then worked in some respected but not top-tier restaurants. Now he's at the Big Company, where you don't have late nights and you don't have weekends (except as noted). It's mostly a day job. Or so it seems.
He was thinking of opening a pizza restaurant, and I mentioned the unending nature of it, and he said, "well, I'm doing that now." So maybe it's not as regular as it seems.
This isn't exactly idyllic, or typical, but it's not as hellish as Bourdain makes it seem.
As someone who's been a cook/chef (still am, ish) in some legit good restaurants (including a world's 100 best spot), plus done business school (finance/economics), some consulting, been self-employed and so on, being a chef is a very mixed bag. It can be everything Bourdain describes and worse. Or it can be a lucrative career (does require you to have ownership however) with pleasant working conditions.
I will admit though, more restaurants are the former since most restaurateurs aren't very business savvy not educated. There's a reason most restaurants fail while a few can have many outlets and grow to billion dollar companies. Most restaurants languish at 1-3% margins (the actual average is 3 I think) while some do 20% easily. It's a good business to be in, however you need a strong business model, good execution and very good people skills.
110 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] thread2010|63 comments|259 points|https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709693
2018|72 comments|138 points|https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18375148
So You Wanna Be a Chef (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26012566 - Feb 2021 (10 comments)
So You Wanna Be a Chef (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18375148 - Nov 2018 (72 comments)
So You Wanna Be a Chef - Anthony Bourdain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709693 - Sept 2010 (63 comments)
You want to be a business owner first - and a chef second.
If you just want to be a "chef" - that's equivalent to being the head programmer at startup and not getting any equity and makes no sense.
Most new businesses fail, especially in the restaurant industry, where the equity will be worth 0 (maybe even less).
There will always be a constant stream of new restaurants needing a chef and will pay (cash) for their services.
Change restaurants for startups and chefs for programmers.
It's unclear what benefits a high-capital restaurant would have these alternatives, that would merit the increased risk. Fancy service? Nobody cares anymore. Economies of scale? Maybe, but seems dubious. Building a brand? Useless when your landlord is fine with selling the building for conversion to residential on any given year.
The rate of restaurant failures is lower than the average for all new businesses.
And it's possible to have hit after hit in the restaurant industry. Most restaurateurs are just shit at business.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2017/01/29/no-m...
There's other sources too covering different timeframes. It's all information in the public sphere. Stats Canada for example tracks a ton of stats about various businesses.
(Also, sorry to inform you I am not a Reddit user)
Thank you for linking an article.
/s (?)
I worked at some of the best restaurants, with some massive multi-unit restaurant groups, and some of the shittiest dives. I loved the work, and the fact that I was never the one scrambling to figure out where the build-out money would come from. I could go to work and focus on making great food.
My point is, it doesn't make sense for you, but there are thousands of people out there right now running restaurants they don't have an ownership stake in, and being happy with that choice. Jobs are different things for everyone. Some people want control and power and to show the world their vision, and some people just want to convert time into cash in a way they don't hate.
Last year, I saved up enough money to open a cafe in India. Soon, I realised how hard it is to be a chef. Person who is the head chef at the cafe works almost 10h a day, 7 days a week. You have to be on your toes all the life, deliver consistent food, deal with stress, deal with customers returning food, have no ego, make decisions on the stop, planning things ahead of time, foreseeing things short term and long term.
Being a good home chef does not make a ready to pursue chef as a profession. It is pretty brutal.
PS. This is the cafe https://www.instagram.com/maharishi_boutique_cafe/
I eventually chucked it in, went back to uni via an access course / foundation year (so greatful that it existed) and graduated with a good degree and started a career as a grad where my salary was over twice what I earned as a chef without even approaching the same level of hard graft.
It's an interesting perspective to have, and unusual amongst my peers.
Sounds like software engineering job. It just happens to pay better
It definitely isn't specific to working as a chef, and I didn't intend to imply it. My experience of being (adjacent) to software dev is that actually a _lot_ of things change. I am solving different problems week by week. Learning new things, making new mistakes.
Some of the bleakness was related to money though, and all of it was my personal experience. Bourdain covers it really well. There are people who love it. The Life. I was lucky enough to work briefly at a 2 Starred place and holy shit - they were working far harder than I ever had and loving it. It was working with them that really clarified for me that I had no future there, I didn't love it. I was just competent, not passionate.
More Meandering Thoughts, not sure what my point is xD
The experience will make you 95% less shitty to food service employees when something goes awry and give you a firmer, more true baseline for work difficulty : salary, to measure your subsequent jobs against.
I also learned a lot about how to deal with people, not only customers, but also the chefs.
Even 20 some odd years later, I have enormous patience when eating out and always tip well.
Maybe someone in the restaurant industry should write a book on tech org structures that models highly efficient restaurants.
Not even remotely true, BOH gets to work in near slave labour conditions, while FOH gets to be in much more relaxed environment: the deal with the clientele, which sucks, but most are well compensated and when ever the topic of tip-sharing is brought up they are the first to start the divisiveness that is rife in Kitchen work.
BOH gets screwed 99% of the time, there is very little to no parallel to FOH in anyway until you get to the GM level and that's only because they are often working late nights along with BOH staff, but the rest of FOH leave at reasonable hours and can hold down decent wages--there is no such thing in BOH.
> Back of the house tends to be paid poorly in food service. They essentially pay for the privilege of not interacting with customers and/or having personality traits that make putting them and customers in the same room a bad idea.
I've done both, and ran my Kitchens, I can guarantee you FOH have the same if not worst traits: substance abuse is one of the main reasons people go from BOH to bar-tending after all. It's one of the most desired transitions for alcoholics to make in their career: they're paid well to pour drinks and have several throughout their shift, but most cook personalities and aesthetics do not allow for it.
What I've encountered more was a total lack of comradery in FOH, it's all about personal gain and backstabbing is the norm whereas in the BOH despite the prison culture aspect of it all the comradery is the cohesive glue that keeps the thing from descending into chaos during a busy night.
It's all coordination and a constant reminder of how critical teamwork is in BOH, the same cannot be said as you get into higher end kitchens: I spent a couple of weeks in Michelin star kitchens, and all the back-stabbing, sabotaging etc... was not just lame it was pathetic--40 year old season vets of the Industry contaminating your mise en place was just sad.
It's the nature of the beast, I suppose and to be honest after finally retiring for the 3rd and last time, I'm glad to say I will never miss the Culinary World as it has become a ghost of its former self. Which in many ways is good but no longer has the allure that it once did for me.
Yes.
> assuming people are dicks by default
Also yes.
Not everyone. But on any given, sufficiently busy day, there would be at least one completely unreasonable person. Kudos to everyone else, but if everyone had the experience, I feel like it wouldn't happen.
Sure, bad service is not a punch in the face but it is in the same category of receiving something you shouldn't have received and don't deserve.
And, where do you draw the line on what's mean? I can be kind to the service person but then go leave a bad review on the restaurant. Isn't that also being unkind to people? (or maybe it's being kind to others, warning them against bad experiences).
That said, I do see people in the USA (not sure about other countries) that act entitiled. Example, they spill something an instead of cleaning it up they think "not my job. Someone is paid to clean here so no need to clean the mess I made". Even if it's just bussing your own table in a fast food place where it's clearly expected you're supposed to clean up after yourself lots of people will just leave their trash at the table with a "not my problem" attitude.
Yelling at a McDonald's worker about food is like complaining about the landscaping aesthetic of a prison to its inmates: not really their choice.
Labor laws now restrict this type of work for minors.
I was trying to figure out the best "dealing with filthy sludge" option. Probably plumber's assistant (and drop carpenter).
Nothing goes right in a busy kitchen. Every assumption you might have about your upcoming shift is thrown out the window. A busy kitchen is absolutely a meritocracy. There's no racism, no views on drugs and alcohol. You are 2 secs away from lighting your hair on fire, or stepping in a boiling vat of water or grease and headed to the urgent care.
You'll learn fast about being on the bottom, on the top, leadership, procrastination, laziness, scheduling, stock, product, financials, you name it.
None of these jobs are easy or predictable. A majority of jobs in the world require everything you said to be successful. Working in a kitchen might be hard but is hardly unique.
The reason I agree with the statement about working in a service job as opposed to all of the other examples you've listed is that the lessons learned in a service job are widely applicable to everyday life and interactions with everyday people.
No doubt, you will learn a lot about yourself being on the front lines of war, but you can't take those lessons back to deal with the variety of people you'll interact with day to day in normal society. In fact, it may be counterproductive to try that. Likewise, rarely will people need the specific skills required to perform hours-long lifesaving surgery in their day to day life. True, it may come up, but that is extraordinary. You might as well also start building a doomsday bunker in your backyard.
software sales -> FOH
software dev -> BOH
I think that if you want to say ""everyone should experience xyz" then it should be both a) instructive to all and b) accessible to all. This rules out anything with years of training required.
So, working in a kitchen is clearly far more accessible to "everyone" than the others. The bar to entry is far lower. You don't need a study program before you can wash dishes. If you can walk in, do the hard work for long hours and low pay then you're in, they need that and the rest doesn't matter. I think that's what parent poster means by "A busy kitchen is absolutely a meritocracy".
A kitchen being too tight and too hot is not a law of nature. It could be built with more space and better ventilation. Sure that costs more, but why are we accepting shitty work conditions just to save a buck? The shifts being 10 hours 7 days a week is not a law of nature. Hire 2 people instead with proper shift scheduling. Oh that's more expensive? Well, that's what it actually costs. It's just that your 7x10 hour chef stomachs that extra cost right now, driving them into drugs and alcohol, see the original article we're discussing here.
And similar arguments can be drawn for the other examples. Accountant in the middle of tax season? Start preparing taxes earlier. Nothing accounting does is sudden and unexpected. It's accumulated over a whole year. It's the accountant's (or client's) fault if that suddenly all needs to be taken care of last second. Engineer fixing a production issue for millions of users? Get designs and routines in place that let you sleep well at night, with redundancy, automation, testing. A soldier on the front lines? Prevent wars from breaking out in the first place. A class full of rowdy kids at school? Terrible school system, and society approves with "it is what it is", don't even get me started.
With very few exceptions all those problems are home made. It teaches good lessons to experience them, but the main take away should be how to prevent them in the first place.
Highly recommended if you have an interest in professional cooking and restaurant business.
CITATION NEEDED
$12+ for a beer is typically the high end of craft beer, not Bud Light.
There's cheaper properties a train ride away, around Brisbane.
Lot's of people all over the globe live in pretty terrible situations where they just scrape by. You just come to expect and accept a different quality of life.
The reason being is a bar/restaurant can have a symbiosis where the food encourages drinking and the drinking encourages food and this is great for business.
Selling drink is very profitable but you need a critical mass of people to to attract other drinkers -- pubs who serve food hit this critical mass easily.
This is a bit disingenuous. There was literally a law allowing pubs to open only if they served food.
That said, a huge amount of pubs in Ireland have added food to their offerings in the last 20 years, even before Covid, so it must make business sense.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/15732097
Where a girl goes to Paris to learn to cook thinking it will be glamorous like the movie Sabrina and instead it's like military drilling to be efficient but even with all of that she says feeding people makes you feel like a god.
I think the concept is similar for software engineering. Not feeling like a god but some people think "how could you possibly stare at a computer screen for so many hours a day. Sounds mind numbingly boring" where as to some software engineers it's the most creatively freeing environment there is and they thrive in it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029002/
This is why the most successful restauranteurs tend to be some combination of perfectionists, savvy marketers, and wealthy. There tends to be a streak of ADHD too, where they thrive on being constantly in motion and moving from problem to problem - certainly I've seen that over and over again in restaurant kitchens and offices.
Coleslaw would go from 20 minutes to 2 minutes.
I absolutely loath cutting julienne carrots in a kitchen and the robot croupe is great at that for sure. Potatoes, too. But some things wouldn’t save a lot of time really, like slicing cucumbers which would be faster to do with a knife and cutting board.
I have a lot to say about those days vs. now, but I can’t emphasize enough how much I love my job as a software engineer. I’ve been doing it now for as long as I was a chef, and it’s better in every single way (for me) and going through those years has given me so much perspective and so many more ways to appreciate what I have now. I’m just so happy.
This is the most important quote in the whole piece. Restaurant Life is a thing people outside of it DO NOT understand fully. Most well meaning, normal people are not compatible with it.
Do you do recreational drugs? Are you an alcoholic? Do you have a criminal record? Are you in the country illegally? If no, how are you going to deal with the fact that 75% of your coworkers meet one if not all of those criteria? How are you going to deal with the intense pressure? How are you going to make your rent, because if you want to do this in a major US metro at this point, you're going to have a hard time affording housing. How will you adapt to your new role when, inevitably, someone rage quits during their shift and you get field promoted to running their station?
I've been out of the industry for 6+ years at this point, and when I get super stressed out at my current tech job, I dream about running a restaurant. That's not to say that I want to go back, but that my mind inherently links "you are stressed out" to "you are the chef of a 2 million/year restaurant". I have never had a stress dream that involved a computer, to the best of my recollection.
> Do you do recreational drugs? Are you an alcoholic? Do you have a criminal record? Are you in the country illegally? If no, how are you going to deal with the fact that 75% of your coworkers meet one if not all of those criteria?
This resonates so much. I was never able to connect in any long term sense with my coworkers due to these reasons. Not getting drunk or doing other drugs after my shift meant that I wasn’t bonding with my coworkers.
RIP mate, miss you all the time.
There is very little in this article that is true for software imo.
Holy heck was it way more work and stress than I had expected. It was a lot of fun, and I think I pulled it off reasonably well, but I can’t imagine cleaning up from the evening and then starting again the next night, let alone managing multiple meal times in one day, having more diners, or a larger menu… and then trying to make money at it.
Gave me a lot of respect for folks who run restaurants.
But still, running a restaurant seems like super hard work and it really makes me appreciate people who choose to do it.
When main course orders came in and I had more orders than people, I had to ask my server what was up. Somebody ordered the beef but with a side of the pasta, and I had to suddenly figure out how to plate that to look good as I'd only worked on plating the dishes the way I had planned on. Stuff like that kept happening through the whole meal. To your point again, experience would have helped, but thinking on your feet is clearly a big part of the deal.
He went to a not-top-tier cooking school, and then worked in some respected but not top-tier restaurants. Now he's at the Big Company, where you don't have late nights and you don't have weekends (except as noted). It's mostly a day job. Or so it seems.
He was thinking of opening a pizza restaurant, and I mentioned the unending nature of it, and he said, "well, I'm doing that now." So maybe it's not as regular as it seems.
This isn't exactly idyllic, or typical, but it's not as hellish as Bourdain makes it seem.
I will admit though, more restaurants are the former since most restaurateurs aren't very business savvy not educated. There's a reason most restaurants fail while a few can have many outlets and grow to billion dollar companies. Most restaurants languish at 1-3% margins (the actual average is 3 I think) while some do 20% easily. It's a good business to be in, however you need a strong business model, good execution and very good people skills.