Have you ever been to a fancy restaurant and sat close to the swinging kitchen door and wondered what was behind it? What a kitchen really looks like and the lives of the cooks behind the meals that our entire world craves?
Put lightly, cooks are a different breed. To peek behind the door into the kitchen one would see a group of individuals so unique, yet with one missing, would be similar to a cake without flour. Every part of the kitchen works together like a well oiled series of gears. For the one meal you consume, as many as five people could have had a hand in it.
There are two types of cooks. One, The Early Bird. These are your bakers, your breakfast cooks and sometimes even your lunch cooks. While people are driving home from the bars, The Early Birds are rising and tiredly putting on their kitchen clogs and buttoning their chef coats. There is no greater feeling than being the first to arrive in the kitchen. Turning on the fluorescent lights and seeing clean stainless steel stare back at you, while breathing in the cool air, soon to be laced with waves of heat from ovens. At this time of day the kitchen is quiet. So quiet. The Early Birds live for this. Working hard early, and best of all, getting off early.
The second type of cooks are The Night Owls. Obviously your dinner cooks. These are the folks leaving the bar while the Early Birds are headed to work. The Night Owls are responsible often for multiple courses, including dessert and are usually the busiest cooks, especially in fine dining establishments. They stay up until three or four a.m. pumped from an insane night of service, just looking to unwind from working their asses to the bone. Equally as satisfying, there is no greater feeling the being the last to leave the kitchen, checking every burner is off, every floor is clean and finally turning off the fluorescent lights knowing the day was successful.
Cooking has recently in the last hundred years become something of a respected skill or craft. It used to be that kitchens were hidden in basements, and cooks were servants. Though cooks are not considered servants anymore, does not mean it has become easy work. Food preparation means long days, hot environment, and laboring as well as dangerous work. For females, hair pulled back, little make up and perfume as well as uniforms that look like white potato sacks. The industry does not put these regulations in place just for the sake of it...I will never forget the day my eyelashes fused together from wearing too much mascara and opening a 400 degree oven.
I often say that there should be a REAL reality show in a kitchen. Though dressed in pressed chef whites, cooks are often anything but polite. Topics of conversation are often related to food, sex or just plain shit talking, every other word being of the four letter kind. While proudly comparing burn and knife cut scars cooks share stories like old sailors from sea.
A kitchen brigade is a place of respect and sense of family. No one understands foodies like, well, other foodies. Cooks spend more time in the kitchen with co workers than they do their own families, so there is a sense of true bonding that often takes place amongst a tight knit group of cooks. They are not there for an easy job, or good money. They are there because they are artists. The plate the canvas, the food the paint, and the chef knife the brush. All coming together to create a masterpiece of culinary delight. Working through sweat, blood and tears because they love to see people enjoy their art and crave more.
So next time you see the door to the kitchen, imagine the type of cooks behind it, the scars they bear and the stories they tell. And keep in mind that without innovative and cutthroat chefs, people would be eating nothing but watery soups for survival, rather than pleasure.
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