‘I’m constantly frustrated by the narrative that women need to master their emotions in the kitchen’
Given that a chef’s secret weapon is their capacity for compartmentalisation, the wellworn path towards addiction is all too easy for those working in hospitality to slip down. Here, Áine Budds examines an industry where efficiency is paramount and perpetual silence reigns supreme.
The greatest piece of practical advice I received as a fledgling chef goes as follows: Always have three jobs on the go at once, and start with the ones you like the least. Fresh from my first year of culinary college, my cooking expertise began and ended with the five mother sauces. Now, no disrespect to Carême, I can attest that knowing your béchamel from your hollandaise is an excellent starting point, but moving from the classroom to a real, live kitchen is a steep, steep learning curve.
In the world of professional chefs, it’s not enough to be a stellar cook; it’s about being militantly organised. Precise plates and the perfect cuisse are all well and good, but if you can’t race the clock and win? Good luck to you, chef! The ability to multitask is the difference between swimming or drowning, and in today’s climate of staff shortages and dwindling budgets, you may well just find yourself responsible for double the workload.
There is nothing quite like the gnawing anxiety of composing the prep list from hell, knowing full well you will have to stare down that same scrawly handwriting the following morning. I have spent many a bus ride home meticulously plotting my plan of attack for the next day. It is often said that women are natural-born multi-taskers, a hypothesis that originates from our time as hunter-gatherers, where we gathered food while also tending to the young. Evidently, I proved the biological exception to the rule, and those first few months were nothing short of an uphill battle.
Some days, I found myself the esteemed conductor of a well-tuned orchestra. Others I resembled Sisyphus, stumbling back downhill under the weight of burnt purees and onions that weren’t so much caramelised as cremated.
For a novice, the “three jobs at once” approach is much easier said than done, and in the beginning, results varied widely. Some days, I found myself the esteemed conductor of a well-tuned orchestra. I floated gracefully from task to task, my quartet of pots and pans bubbling and sizzling in perfect rhythm. Other days I resembled Sisyphus, repeatedly stumbling back down that hill under the crushing weight of burnt vegetable purees and onions that weren’t so much caramelised as cremated. In the first restaurant I worked at, on a particularly unfortunate day, I quite literally tripped down a flight of stairs with a large Hobart mixing bowl full of sticky toffee pudding. Thankfully I was fine, but my pride took an unmerciful battering. Safe to say during service things didn’t run much smoother.
My absolute favourite party trick was to forget freshly spun ice cream in the Pacojet machine (a high-speed blender for perfectly silky frozen desserts) only to remember it thirty minutes later, just as the first dessert dockets graced the pass. There is a certain pathetic fallacy to feeling one and the same with a container of melted, slushy custard as you retreat to the freezer and try to compose yourself. Kitchens are a masterclass in time management, and you quickly come to learn that every second counts.
This ability to manage multiple tasks at once takes practice. It is a skill you must hone, much the same as using a knife or opening an oyster. Trial and error are essential while cuts, scratches, and burns are an occupational hazard. Little by little, you will find it gets easier. From doing three jobs at once to working on multiple dockets at a time, order slowly prevails over chaos. This is the essence of a well-oiled kitchen: multiple processes happening all at once. While chicken bones brown in the oven, bread rises slowly in the fridge, and each chef arranges their day according to a delicate ecosystem of active and passive cooking.
In ways it is paradoxical—a kitchen staff operates as a team, yet the path to success is one of dividing to conquer. After seven years of cheffing across multiple restaurants and much time spent multitasking, I have come to realise that a chef’s secret weapon is their capacity for compartmentalisation. This process of mental separation allows you to attend to multiple tasks at once, where one does not interfere with the others. It is fundamentally embedded in kitchen life, and while it makes for a bloody efficient workforce, it is often difficult to leave this mentality at work (partly because you spend most of your time there anyway).
When you spend hours on end breaking things down into their component parts, dividing your headspace between today’s tasks and tomorrow’s orders, it is easy to become short-sighted. It is easy to forget that the person in the middle of it all is more than a walking to-do list and can’t be separated into neat little pieces to be dealt with at a more convenient time.
The language of efficiency manifests in sharp words and tall orders, and for the purposes of survival, you must separate emotion from the work.
The kitchen space itself is a site of temporal and physical division, where each section becomes a well-worn cog in the restaurant’s body clock. Workbenches are designated according to their task. In one corner, balls of unruly pasta dough become wafer-thin lengths; in another, the bread rests soundly on a pastry station; elsewhere, whole animals become clean, consumable parts on a bloody butchery bench.
This division of labour, both mental and physical, extends across the entire kitchen landscape. Menu preparation is carefully separated on a course-by-course basis while entire dishes are dissected into the sum of their core parts. During the heat of service, as the orders pile in, it is not uncommon to find yourself disassociating entirely from the world around you. The restaurant guests become a complex recipe of quantities and instructions. A two-top here, a four-top there, no dairy, no gluten. Your ear becomes attuned to the frequency of commands and callbacks, your eyes fixed on the docket rail as it expands and contracts.
Service moves at an unforgiving pace. More often than not, it is a crucible of fire and steam, where there is no time for feelings or polite instruction. The language of efficiency manifests in sharp words and tall orders, and for the purposes of survival, you must separate emotion from the work. For the most part, nothing said is ever personal, and those moments of tension do not define the relationship with your colleagues. However, that doesn’t make it any less hard to hear in the moment.
As a female chef, controlling my reactions to stressful, aggressive situations is something I have failed at time and time again. I’m pretty much done trying at this point. For the majority of my early career, I was used to being the only woman in the kitchen. In ways, this forced me to repress more feminine traits and section off essential parts of myself as incompatible with kitchen culture. I tried as best as I could to be “one of the boys.”
When you’re young and unsure of yourself, it is notoriously difficult to challenge the status quo. I harbour much regret over staying silent in conversations that were derogatory towards women. This desire to be accepted, to fit in, made me complicit in upholding a culture of misogyny that I couldn’t reconcile with my own personal values.
