linuxmemes

18 years in restaurants checking in: Gordon Ramsay is not very far from the mean at all. In fact, I'd say he's a mean mean man of average rage, and it's the nature of the industry that does this to us. It's flat-out abusive even in its best implementation, and the far and away vast majority of restaurants are purposefully exploitative. This goes double for back of house. I was usually a server or bartender, though I did work every hourly position at some point in my career. Front of house at least gets compensated more the busier they are. Back of house gets what they get whether they sell two orders of fries in an evening or they spend all shift with ten tickets on the rail and 30 open menus. Back of house also doesn't get paid all that well, outside of a few rockstars. It's a super high stress position, and that stress level is completely unpredictable. Any random Tuesday afternoon you could find yourself behind the line all alone as the third bus pulls into the parking lot. The extremely variable nature of the stress means two things:

1. You don't cook as a career unless you love turning out great food. You might do a couple years just because you need a job but it's so hard on your mind and body that after a while you literally either love it or leave it.

2. Eventually everyone in the kitchen becomes what Robert Anton Wilson called "...the walking wounded...slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief." There's a lot of PTSD in kitchens and, because hurt people hurt people, it tends to spread to new people and reinforce itself in veterans. In the highest volume store I ever worked in we used to joke that sexual harassment and bullying were just how we said "Hello". It's not okay, but it's the reality on the ground. It tends to develop spontaneously because of the way restaurants work and once it takes root it's really hard to get rid of.

So the average restaurant worker is half Anthony Bourdain, here for the love of food and people, trying to experience new and great things and build new and great things for other people to experience just out of a general enthusiasm for humanity. He's also half Gordon Ramsay, throwing an overcooked steak back at you because a cow had to die to make it and our guest had to sell a little bit of their life to afford it, so you will fucking respect both of their sacrifices and turn out some good fucking food. It's love, and it's pride, and it's trauma, and it's passion for what is essentially an unrecognized folk art. And if it paid the bills I'd go back in a heartbeat.