Stolen tips, long hours, diminishing pay: the restaurant business has found itself in hot water lately. That’s just the half of it, reveal chefs, waiters and maître d’s
Things that are glorified in the hospitality industry: sleep-deprivation, tempers, drugs, projectiles in kitchens (especially sharp ones), hedonism, asceticism, camaraderie, martial law, all broadly clustered under the umbrella idea that perfectionism makes you inherently unstable, and that’s a good thing. Chefs are admired for being gits. “Street angel, kitchen devil” is used as a badge of honour, rather than identified for what it is, a description of a person who bullies where they can and sucks up everywhere else.
Random acts of violence are seen as proof that the person who got scalded by a hot knife has an authentic passion for the job, rather than that the person who scalded them has poor impulse control. Indeed, in a top-end kitchen, an environment of such precision that one is expected to care about the dimensions of a carrot at the level of the millimetre, the single area in which no control is expected is that of one’s own behaviour; but only if you’re in charge. You don’t see many waitresses calling people scum and throwing chives at them.
Related: Michel Roux to give thousands in back pay to Le Gavroche chefs
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