qlGM3iJVl3
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, kitchens often encourage and reward masculine behaviour. You need to be loud and self-assured, but I was neither of those things in the beginning. My earliest memories of working a line are being told to speak up or, worse, being mocked for speaking softly. I hated calling in dockets because I hated raising my voice. Over the years I have gotten more comfortable with taking up space in a kitchen in a manner that I feel comfortable with. I have been privileged to work alongside a host of other strong, driven female chefs which has done wonders for my confidence. However, I can’t help but feel that this convention of compartmentalisation can be extremely jarring for women in the kitchen.
Feminine traits like softness and sensitivity are hard pressed to find a home amongst bravado and stoicism, though the kitchen atmosphere may well benefit from them. I have spent years trying to suppress them, beating myself up for being too emotional when no one else was. The simple fact is: I cry in stressful situations. Just as other people shout when they get angry. They are one and the same: emotional responses, removed from logic. I am constantly frustrated by the narrative that women need to master their emotions in the kitchen while men shout, curse, and slam their way through a pressured service.
Fast forward six years, and I am now miraculously two years sober from both alcohol and cocaine. Recovery seems to have found a permanent home in my personal vocabulary, and for that, I am extremely grateful. The journey to get here was long and arduous, not just for me, but for my friends and family. While I was busy presenting one version of myself at work, they had to deal with the fallout from my real self—an addict and alcoholic. Behind the facade, I was a gas stove firing on all cylinders, a frying pan just on the cusp of catching flame. Being organised for service was the closest I came to any sense of control, and I clung to it for dear life.
Working in hospitality allowed me to ignore the parts of myself that I couldn’t face. For years I worked through vicious hangovers, my head and heart pounding, the shame within me growing exponentially. I was depressed, isolated, and permanently miserable, but as long as I could muster up a smile at work, the charade continued on. That is, until it didn’t. Until one particularly grim evening, alcohol led me to self-harm, and the insanity of it all finally became self-evident. I had reached breaking point and hoisted the white flag high. It was time to take stock of all those compartmentalised pieces.
So, how do you build a person back up from nothing? Ironically, you start with the parts you like the least. Walking through the doors of a rehab centre at twenty-two years of age, there was a lot I didn’t like about myself. During my time in kitchens, I had syphoned off and refused to address so many aspects of my being it was hard to know where to begin. Honestly, I barely even knew who I was anymore. But this was just about as good a starting place as any. For the first time ever I was breaking myself down constructively, not to hide from those indigestible parts, but to put myself back together as a whole person.
In a post The Bear era, even those outside the spheres of hospitality are familiar with the idea of mise en place. In layman’s terms, it simply means ‘having everything in its place,’ and my time in residential treatment allowed me the opportunity to achieve this on a personal level. In order to execute a dish for service, to have all the components aligned and in place, you must first focus on them individually and decide how to express them on the plate as a whole. Each element will bring a different flavour, texture, or visual aesthetic. Some may be bitter, others mouth-wateringly acidic, but when combined in the right amounts, the results will dazzle your palate.
Across five weeks of self-examination, I had to explore every facet of my personality in detail. In that short space of time, I came to realise that, in order to appreciate myself as a whole, I had to first accept all of the unappetising pieces. In doing so, I discovered something magnificent. For every piece that brought me pain, there was another that brought me joy. The sweet, sour, salty, and bitter parts of me all come together to make something uniquely beautiful and balanced. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and though it has taken some time, I have finally made peace with my own complex seasonings. Just like cooking, life in recovery is a balancing act. Some days I thrive, others I merely survive, but I’d rather struggle in truth than get by on a lie. I even managed to be a sober chef, a concept I foolishly thought was a contradiction in terms.
With all of that said, I don’t want to be a cautionary tale for young chefs; I want to stand for their empowerment. I want them to know that there is another way to do things and that they have the power to challenge industry norms. Talk about mental health. Talk about substance abuse. Go to therapy and ask your coworkers in earnest if they are okay. It is the perpetual silence that keeps us bound to cycles of destructive and destabilising behaviours.
Head chefs, please be mindful of the kitchen culture you are endorsing and mentor your younger team members. Choose compassion over confrontation and look at people as though they are more than just a collection of disparate parts. Everyone, no matter where they work, deserves to be seen as a whole person.
