Sad, sad, sad, sad,
Establishment: NYC restaurants
Location: NYC
Twenty years ago I started to work as a line cook at China Grill (53rd and 6th Avenue) I was making after taxes 600 dls per 40 hrs. week. Wow! I thought this is a great job, I want to be a chef to make lots of money.
Thank you food network,
Thank you celebrities chefs,
Thank you Compass group,
Thank you big restaurant chains,
Thank you Culinary Institute of America,
Thank you Culinary Schools, etc.
Now everybody is an iron chef.
What an absurd joke. 10 to 16 (if you are lucky) dls per hour. for a line cook position. i was making more 20 years ago.
How sad it is, now you come out of a culinary school and you’ll be working for a celebrity chef who is going to pay you 12 dls per hour and for how long? 10 years then what? you think that you’ll be famous. A word of advice Good Luck. You are going to be a slave. Welcome to the real world.
A better advice for young chefs, fuck the celebrity chefs. Work for small restaurants make yourself present, do not stay under the shadow of a David Burke, Daniel Boulud or a Jean-Georges. Be yourself, work with the spanish people, people that are going to respect you because you work as hard as they do. Make yourself dirty, our love for food goes beyond what you see in the food network. Fried mayonnaise my ass, food is sacred not a freaking joke, Oh! What is that in the center of the plate? a deconstructed strawberry ice cream. not is aereted foie… Wow! the chef is a genius. Ha, ha, ha,…
After all Gordon Ramsay is right look for kitchen nightmares and make them dream restaurants or at least help them out, make them honorable. Believe in our love for food. Do not sell your souls to the devils. I hope that you are listening. Right now I have 15 immigrants working for me and I’m teaching to each one of them every single aspect of the kitchen for free. Old school but though cooks sorry they have no papi who can pay for their culinary school. Just imagine how many cooks I have trained after 20 years in the restaurant business. Be positive stay away from famous.
Comments
Hey Sean,
Just wanted to let you know that there is a place where you can ask any question you want about the NYC Rest’nt Industry. It’s a forum that is run by people who used to work for Jean-Georges, David Bouley, Danny Meyer, etc, and has alot of people that work for some of the most famous restaurants in the city. You will always get honest feedback from experienced staffers there, even if it’s not always what you want to hear.
http://pxthis.invisionzone.com
Good luck!
Fried mayonnaise… aereted foie… you seem to have it in for Wylie Dufresne in particular. Did he do something to piss you off, buddy?
Now that you’re a business owner and employing people, you think you’d be happy the cost of cooks has come down. Cheaper for you.
People like all kinds of food. Me, I dug the fried mayo. It was part of a delicious dish, one that sadly is no longer on the menu.
Make the food YOU like, and hope customers like it too. Hating on everyone else isn’t going to help your cause. Whatever it is.
Hey Seth,
Pretty smart there is not hate in fact I like WD at some point we worked together. But maybe there is love, it seems to me that you are defending him actually when I read your comment I thought that you were Wylie. Anyway I’m not an owner just a simple chef who likes to teach immigrants or young cooks to learn how to cook properly. And in fact I’m very unhappy because great chefs are paying cheap salaries (greedy bastards) about my rant I’m pointing out the absurdity of the whole enchilada and that my friend is the nature of my blathering. Thanks keep the good vibe alive.
This poster is not lying about the current situation at all. These days our professional chef trade has been bulldozed into the garbage pile by “our” industry. There is no respect anymore for the blood, sweat, and tears, back-breaking work, unpaid O/T, turmoil and turnover, discriminatory employers, unsafe/unsannitary conditions, crappy pay, competition from illegals, demanding bosses, rising costs, glut of untalented “professionals”, competition amongst the “better” chefs, and the idea that someone with NO experience can graduate(?) from a Culinary school, and land a dream job, working for a “celebutard Chef making ridiculous money. This is a major disservice to, real, talented chefs, who with one or two small breaks, can find themselves in a rewarding position of steady employment. A chef, or any chef, is threatened by the maxim of “Your only as good as the last dish you made…”, because if that one suckked, your half out the door. I remeber being a very young diswasher some 30 years ago, and being in awe and fear of the Chef. They schooled me on my trade. I was told to “learn this”, as one day in the distant future, I can buy a house, raise some kids, have two cars in the driveway, and a yard for the dog to run around in. They may have been right, back then; but our “trade” has been destroyed by the very things we worked to establish. Now any Mexican is a chef, if he has the houndstooth pants and a Chef coat. The average quailty level has sunk to a new low, and the pay has followed.
I think its time to take back our trade, or have the chefs just open their own places, then become the person that we all rant against.
hi
Thank you for putting this up.
Just what I kind of needed.
Although, I do have questions to ask you if that’s ok.
I’m 31, and have been working as a food runner for a few years. Right now, unemployed.
I’ve been thinking about becoming a cook and thought about going to culinary school.
But the thing is, I don’t know if I have what it takes. I don’t know if my palate is good enough. Do you think it’s too late? Is culinary school worth it?
Thank you so much and would really appreciate your response.