If my own visitor tracking is correct, more people in the world are interested in becoming a Chef themselves than anything else on this site. Which is, let’s face it, exciting and scary at the same time. On one hand, there used to be a time when “I am a Chef” was answered with “my condolences” and a quick hint that whomever we talked to knew someone who knew someone who was hiring for a construction job, and we could see if there was something for us in it, if we wanted out.

On the other hand, what being a Chef is all about is rarely known. As I wrote elsewhere, we’re less and much more obscure at the same time, thanks to Food Network, Kitchen Confidential, and celebrity chefdom. Sure, people seem to understand, finally, where their food comes from (it doesn’t magically appear at the expo, 15 minutes after you ordered it), but the same kind of people seem to think we’re all a bunch of TV celebrities, wearing glisteningly white coats while whipping op yumm-o meals in 30 minutes.

So, you want to become a Chef? There’s a short and a long answer. Let me give you the short one first:

The Short Answer

You Don’t.

Here, I said it. No, I am not saying you shouldn’t try to become a chef, I am telling you, no one sets out to become one. For all that, and more, read the long answer…

The Long Answer

First, let us take a brief glimpse at what it takes to become a Chef at a good restaurant or above. At some time in your life, you decide to enter the world of commercial food preparation. It doesn’t really matter if you’re 16 or 35, the way is always the same.

You take a job, maybe as a dishwasher, maybe as a server, or – if the owner is really desperate – as a prep cook. From that day on, every day, rain or shine, Monday or Saturday, we will see you in that kitchen. Early morning, you’ll arrive to unpack and wash produce and meats. Before lunch, you’ll have chopped more onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, and tomatoes, than you’ve eaten the past ten years. Just in time for the line-cooks to arrive, you’ll bring a big bucket of sanitizer around the place, cleaning grease traps, hoods, mise cups, and whatever else needs cleaning.

Don’t think a second about staying home one Saturday for your daughter’s or wife’s birthday. Don’t even think to call in sick unless you’re on a stretcher in the ER. Competition is fierce, jobs are scarce, and there’s a host of prep cooks just waiting for you to miss a day to step in and do your job.

Six to nine months later, thousands of sea bass, filet mignon, onions, carrots, leeks, celery stalks, and much more later, all of which you’ve never even brought near a source of heat, you’ll have a chance. If you shone, if Chef likes you, if the GM likes you, if your coworkers like you and don’t think you’ll break under the fire and the tone in the kitchen, there might be a spot opening up on the line. Someone called in sick and wasn’t on a stretcher, maybe? It’s between you and the three other ladies and gents on prep, one of you will get a line job.

Welcome to the line. You’ll spend most, for many people it’s “all”, of your culinary career here. Line jobs vary, from grill to “garde manger”, from sauteing vegetables to making sauces and soups all day. Often, in modern and small kitchens, you’ll do some of each. Congratulations, your life just got harder.

Line is important. Where prep is, more or less, a self-serving kind of dependability, people come in every day because there’s ten applicants waiting for that job to open up, line is a question of making or breaking a restaurant’s operations. If one of four line cooks calls in sick .. well, even well maintained restaurants have been known to crack under that pressure. You’ll still come in early, doing your “mise” for yourself and older line cooks. That means getting all the things prepared by prep, augmenting where it’s needed, starting stocks and reductions like demi glace, checking spice and herb racks, cleaning.

After a few years in the industry, spending every weekend and high holiday in a windowless room at boiling temperatures, one of the line cooks may be approached by the Chef and offered a job as, either, Chef de Partie or Chef Tournant. Chef de Partie “run” a specific part of the kitchen, saute for example, and have one or more line and prep cooks underneath them. CdP is, generally, a dead-end job. Sometimes, with a lot of luck, a Chef Tournant is needed. CT are what you’d call a “runner” in other jobs. Someone capable of doing every job on every station. If you are offered this job, congratulations, we’re moving on.

A year or so as CT, and a Sous Chef position might open up. This is, by and large, the first “real” Chef job. If you get it, welcome. This is my world and I’ll write about it another day. Suffice to say, being a Sous Chef is the greatest thing inside a kitchen (IMNSHO ). It is, however, light years away from being “the” Chef and even further from being Bobby Flay. Not that anyone would ever want to be Bobby Flay.

Culinary Schools

You might have noticed that I didn’t use “apply your mad French Cooking skillz to various ingredients” above. That’s because until you become that Chef Tournant or Sous Chef it doesn’t really matter. Where, in cooking school, you’ll be trying a new dish every day, restaurant kitchen cooks tend to do the same dish, over and over, sometimes 150 times a night. Practice here makes perfect, though it doesn’t teach Escoffier’s sixteen principles of egg cookery.

Cooking schools have their merit. Often its graduates skip over the prep cook months and enter the line right away. They also convey a lot of knowledge in a short amount of time, giving its students a chance to grow a thick skin and get used to being told to do-over things until they’re right. In big kitchens, getting four filets a day sent back due to wrong doneness or lack of seasoning is pretty much the end of a cooks’ career. In culinary school there’s a do-over.

Culinary schools also live on the edge of a very, very, blue collar job and a decidedly Hollywood/white collar image. The latter brings in the students, the former is the reality outside. Schools cultivate this culinary conundrum by acting and forcing to act their students like “professionals” while knowing, darn well, that nothing out there comes even close to the kumbayah atmosphere of their kitchens.

That all said, I am fond of hiring culinary students. The cost, financially, emotionally, and in time spent, of breaking them of their expectations, making them understand that there’s no deviation from Chef’s dishes, that consistency matters over experimentalism, beats having to train someone on knives, kitchen tools, and food safety.

So! Are you ready to be a Chef?

Let’s see…

Do you have a family, friends, a social life, maybe children? Are they ready to not see you on Saturdays, Sundays, Christmas, the 4th of July, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, and pretty much any other day?

When others party, we work. We make the party work, more or less. Your friends, though understanding at first, won’t always understand. How can they? How can someone whose job doesn’t go away the first day he’s sick or has an errant to run and takes a personal day? Your first two years will be that way, regardless of culinary school or not. The good news, here, is that whomever sticks with you through this is truly worth of your friendship, love, and dedication.

A personal story, if I may… when I decided to go back into the kitchen, after six years of dot.com, to many “friends” I disappeared off the face of the planet. What few people actually stayed in touch, still exist. At the same time, long forgotten friendships are slowly re-emerging in the past years, and new ones are forged. Not at all a bad thing.

Are you currently living “comfortably”?

Let’s face it, despite the cheflebrity fad, cooks and chefs still make much less than most other jobs in the United States. In fact, a McDonalds burger-flipper or Starbucks barrista may, just may, make more than you’ll see in the first few years of your new endeavor. Many line cooks work two jobs, filling in lunch and off-days at other places to make ends meet. Of the six line cooks in my shop only one, Jose, works only one job. He’s been with the place since start, makes a little more than the $8 minimum wage he’d make anywhere else, and has a wife with a rather successful career running an at-home daycare. Let’s look at some EDD and FTB survey data for California (we’re the second best paying spot in the U.S. after Illinois):

• Prep/Line Cook: $8.50/h
• Line Cook (5+ years): $9.00/h
• Chef de Partie: $9.50-$10/h
• Sous Chef: $11/h or salaried.
• Executive Chef – salaried.

If salaried, Sous Chefs earn on average $31,000 a year, Executive or Head Chefs with less than ten years of experience make between $40,000 and $55,000. Let’s say you miraculously get a job as an Executive Chef right out of cooking school (which, btw, no one ever counts as “job experience”), consider this graph:

They didn’t tell you that in cooking school or on Food Network, did they?

Ok, so I am kind of antisocial and have no friends to speak of. My family is OK with me not being around ever, I am financially independent or can live on $20,000 a year, and I don’t mind working thirteen hour shifts of which only eight are paid.

Perfect. You might be Chef material. One last thing, though. And this one is as controversial as it is important…

You see, all attempts to the contrary failing, kitchens are still very much a harsh environment. Even in sunny San Francisco, pot smoking, kumbayah singing, granola grinding, muesli eating, tie-dye shirt wearing Chefs will reduce their employees to rubble on the mere presumption of inadequacy. There is no arbitration room, no time to “talk things out”, and the tone is military and harsh. Individualism is as frowned upon on the line, as taking anything serious is.

Your main language will likely not be English. Unless you work in one of those rare restaurants (I have never seen one, but people insist they exist), your staff will be predominantly from one region south of the U.S. border. Which, by means of majority, makes English not a kitchen language. That said, I started working in Europe, and Kitchen French as well as Kitchen Italian worked for me, there, in the U.S. you should at least be able to keep up a conversation in Spanish.

There are no ombudsman complaints, no “escalating this up”. Kitchen are harsh environments (it bears repeating), and stress brings out weird things in all of us. Simply said – if you are currently in culinary school and there’s this one guy or gal who just CAN’T accept any criticism without falling into a self-defensive stance and tirade, or that other guy or gal who broke into tears for whatever reason at all, they’ll have a really, really, hard time.

You are an insanely negative individual. You just don’t want anyone to become a Chef and you think you’re better than anyone else for being one. You are making all of this up just to elevate yourself and tell us “look how I had to walk uphill in the snow, every day”.

(original email).

That all said, let’s talk about the flipside. Being a Chef is an intensely rewarding job. I’ve worked construction, I’ve been a bouncer, I wrote computer games for a living, sold sandwiches in a brothel, and I used to be a military cop. None of these jobs was as exhilarating, satisfying, exhausting, yet refreshing, as being a cook and now Chef.

If you can work, work hard, and take criticism and orders well. If you got through basic training by focusing on the day you’ll be able to sleep more than four hours a night, and you made it. If you love doing things for other people and knowing that you just brightened their day. If you can buckle up and take the wild ride that is a job in a kitchen – you belong to us. And, who knows, email me and maybe you belong in my kitchen, too.

In six, seven, years, you might even open your own joint. Send me an email, then, and let me know how much I was wrong.

But whatever decision you make, before you even think about becoming a Chef, attending culinary school, do me one favor: go into a restaurant kitchen. Really. Not just to gawk, talk to the Chef. Tell her or him that you are considering what you are considering. Ask them to stage or trail for a week, maybe ask them if there’s a chef’s table and if they’d be willing to seat you for cheaper on an off day so you can see what’s going on.

You wouldn’t believe how many dedicated culinary students leave the business after their externship… don’t be one of them. And, hey, welcome to the clan – we’re tight here.

Next up: A day in the life of chez Geek – follow me into the daily routine at the House on The Hill Restaurant and Grill.