Being Humble & Young Again

So, there’s this nineteen year old kid at work who has said time and time again in the kitchen to everyone that he wants to be a chef someday, an executive chef he mentioned to me today, by the time he is twenty-four or twenty-five.

I had asked him what his long-term goal was. His eyes grew wide and bright with disbelief at the hotel with a $20 million dollar monthly budget I worked. The wine bar, the restaurants, grocery, education accounts. Hospitals and B & I’s. And that’s all before catering gigs.

What’s a B & I? Business and innovation. Office building cafes.

But I also warned him. I warned him that burnout was real. That there are support groups for chefs for the lives they lead and the sacrifices they give. Sixty hour work weeks, late nights, broken relationships. Service. Food service. And that’s before even getting scalded, burnt or twisting an ankle or getting a cut.

I told him about the Floridian executive chef I had in fine dining where we made scratch creme brulees, fried julienned leaks for garnish–the guy who loved Caribbean cooking. He just also happened to love cocaine, closing the bar downstairs down, and was obese. I wanted to show him the darker side to the industry–that you and the work will always be needed, but at a cost and that some of these things were that cost.

He nodded his head and I looked up at him at nineteen and just sat back in my mind thinking about all the places I’d been, all the scenarios, the changes and experiences of life. I was grateful. There are times on a kitchen line or shift in my lifetime that I’ve literally felt I’ve gone to battle with my co-workers, like literally holding the line, station by station. I’m becoming a veteran at this point. He’s so naive not knowing what he’s getting into. But he is firm. He wants to be a chef. He’s a blank canvas and I love that about this kid even if he is cocky sometimes.