So You Think You Want A Culinary Career?

The following is my advice in list form. If you are thinking of going to culinary school and pursuing a gastronomical career, then I urge you to carefully consider these points:

1. What exactly do you want to do? The world of gastronomy is large. You can work any position in a restaurant; be a restaurateur; be a sommelier; be a private chef; be a sous-chef or an executive chef; be a cook; be a caterer; own a vineyard; be a food writer; be a restaurant consultant; and any number of others. You should first decide what really turns you on. You should really decide this firmly before you proceed.

2. Are you sure that you do not want to do anything else? A food career is really, really hard. Ask anyone involved in it. Is there anything else you could do in life that would make you happy and fulfilled? If so, for God’s sake, do it!

3. Do you really need to go to culinary school? In France, longstanding tradition for chefs is to begin washing dishes as children, and to work their way up in the kitchen through the years. Experience is the best teacher, right? Culinary school is a good way to learn the science behind the gastronomical arts, but to really know food, and kitchen work, takes years of doing it. I do personally think that culinary school is a great advantage, though.

4. Are you willing to work 10 or more hours per day, 6 days per week, and sometimes 7? Are you willing to work odd hours, sometimes into late night and early morning? If you choose a pastry career, keep in mind that most bakers start their day at about 3:00 am. And no matter your specialty, you will be working very long, hard hours. A culinary career is nothing like office work. Rather, it is manual labor in a very real sense.

5. Are you willing to have (probably) a boss with a very strong personality, who will often become enraged and yell at you? Traditional French kitchens have formed the basis of Western kitchen and culinary culture for decades. Most European and American restaurant kitchens today are still based on the traditional French model. This means that kitchens can be very tough, harsh places. Kitchens are still a man’s world, so if you are a woman, keep in mind that you will have to prove yourself more than men. And no matter your gender, be prepared to be yelled at, cursed at, belittled, burned, injured, and generally slapped around like a piece of meat. Many modern chefs are working hard to change that culture, but it is still very real in many places.

6. Are you willing to start at the very bottom and work your way up? My first culinary job — after having finished culinary school — was peeling garlic. And even after years of experience, I have still had to wash dishes many times because a dishwasher quit or did not show up. I think that many people have a romanticized version of working in a kitchen, something along the lines of working in a bright, white room with Martha Stewart, casually and leisurely making small portions of dainty dishes for friends. Nothing is further from the truth. You will likely have to work for years as a line cook, working your way through the stations until the chef trusts you enough to give you more responsibility.

7. Are you able to work for very little money for years? While some restaurateurs and executive chefs become millionaires, the reality is that you will be working as a line cook for a few years on very little money. When I worked in Verbena, I made $60 per day, certainly not enough to live very well in New York City. Many kitchen jobs pay very little over minimum wage. Are you willing to live on that sort of income in order to get experience? Are you willing to be a dishwasher for six months or longer, until you are allowed to join the line cooks?

8. Can you fit into an environment filled with strange misfits? Look, I am not trying to insult anyone, but I think most people who have spent years in professional kitchens can agree: the job attracts strange people. This is not to say that they are bad people: to the contrary, many of them relate to one another and offer great support and friendship. But the sort of people who work in kitchens are not the same sort of people who, say, work in a large corporation.

9. Are you totally obsessed with food and cooking? There is a vast army of people who take restaurant jobs because they need money, or because they are putting themselves through school. They never last. Unless you are a culinary fiend who is infatuated with food and cooking, then you should never consider a culinary career. Trust me — you will hate it. But if you quite literally eat, drink, and breathe food and cooking, then you will probably never be satisfied with anything else.

Make no mistake: working in gastronomy is a tough, all-encompassing, life-controlling career. It is only for people who thrive on food and cooking, who are good at heavy labor, and who can multitask like the devil.

People with those qualities, who are willing to put in the time, will likely become restaurateurs themselves, some of them very successful. But if those traits do not describe you, then you probably want to avoid a culinary career. The choice is in your hands, on your chef’s knife’s blade, on your cutting board, in every bite of food that you take: do you like food, or do you truly love food?