I don't know if you've watched The Bear. If you haven't, I can recommend it. The story of a chef used to working at the pinnacle of three-star perfection taking over his dead brother's sandwich shop, it's really compelling TV. Really good dialogue, characters you get emotionally invested in, a shifting timeline, interesting, clearly well thought out set piece episodes. There's clearly a lot of thought and effort gone into it, it's very good.
What it isn't, however, is in any way representative of what working in a professional kitchen is actually like. Okay, I can't speak for the three-stars, but I've worked with a few that can, and they, too, smile at the lack of realism. It falls into the same trap that nearly all kitchen-set films and TV programmes do, of imagining that a kitchen is a place of constant stress and yelling, where there are at least three disasters a shift each of which, in real life, would see me stopping service and phoning for actual professionals to come and sort it out. It's yet another drama which read Kitchen Confidential and only remembered the cool stuff. hi
I've never actually seen a drama that did get it right, though. The Beeb's Boiling Point was fun, and I gave that points for giving the KPs lives, too, but it was tosh. No one holds a kitchen down behaving like that. Head chefs, if they're any good, have a grip of the situation. They can prioritise, they can organise, and they don't break off every five minutes for a line/swig of vodka/ill-advised dalliance with attractive staff member*. Some of the comedies come a little closer maybe, kitchen life tends more towards the absurd than the dramatic.
Working within TV drama's constraints of having to be interesting and gripping will do that to you, though; but a lot of professional cooking is tedium. It's peeling carrots, roasting bones and making stock, it's making tub after tub of mash (the same way every time thank you very much, do it the way I have it written down in the big book on the shelf over there because it's taken me twenty years to get this far and that's how I make mash), it's telling KPs for the millionth time the best way to mop a floor (I cannot emphasise enough the importance of hot water), working out how to fix the walk-in freezer when it goes down, patiently explaining to suppliers that no, the broccoli was delivered today, so should not yet be turning brown, patiently explaining to customers that no, that offer which is on on a Tuesday is not on today, because today is Saturday, which is not Tuesday.
And you do all this without screaming fuck fuck fuck at people, because that is somewhat unprofessional, and you have to deal with all of these people on a daily basis, and calling them a fucking arsehole every time they get on your nerves will leave you in a short space of time with no staff, no suppliers, and no business to speak of. It's counterproductive.
This is not to say that shouty chefs are a myth. I've worked for a few, I've also sacked a few when they tried it in my kitchen. I rarely shout. Every once in a while I might indulge in a tactical shout, just to remind everyone that it's in my locker should I need it.m, but 99.9% of the time I find carrot works better than stick (it also means that when you really need stick: it works).
Where the dramas do get closer to the mark, though, is obsession. This is, I'm afraid, a job that can consume you. I have lost count of the hours lost to refining sources, working out the exact scaling I need for a pastry recipe, trying, failing, trying again, and this is why I referenced The Bear at the start of this piece.
The third series became available this summer (I am too English to say "season" and far too old to say "dropped), and, as with the previous two, I rattled through it. It was weaker than the first two, but that's not really the point of this piece. The first episode was the closest, in terms of tone, to evoking kitchen life of anything I've yet seen.
A plotless, looping meander showing the chef at various stages of his career, working at different restaurants, with interventions from various star chefs to get this viewer geeking out a kittle (Daniel Boulud! Rene Redzepi! Thomas Keller!) it captured better the fleeting, fugitive pleasure of cooking professionally than anything else I've seen. Its dreamlike, almost hallucinatory sequences of restaurants past felt more like professional cooking than any stagey screaming match with front of house.
Because it's a process of constant learning and constant improvement, and you'll always fail. It will never be quite the way you imagine, and even if you get it close, it won't always be perfect every time. It's a matter of showing up every day and keeping chaos at bay. It's all the people you ever worked with and for, and who worked for you, all of it, coming together in the pan in front of you, that moment of magic as the sauce emulsifies, that brief moment if the universe in balance as the dish is completed on the plate. It's what keeps me coming back for more
*I am not saying that these things don't happen, ahem, but it's impossible to run a place like that. The people who are good at their job learn that sharpish.
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