Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Hotel Cooks Are Doomed?

Hotel Cooks Are Doomed?

Who knew hotel cooks and country club cooks had it so good?

Of course, spending a decade as a hotel cook with an eight hour shift, benefits and free-time is not going to get you the experience you need to one day be working in a Michelin 3-star restaurant.

But maybe it’s not that hotel cooks are doomed to their life. Maybe they chose their life.

Because – I dare say – Que será, será:

There are more important things in life, if you ask me, than working in Michelin 3-star restaurants.

Time cooking at Applebee’s may get you paid—but it’s a period best left blank on the résumé if you’re planning on ever moving to the bigs. It may just as well have never happened. Country clubs? Hotel kitchens? These are likely employers straight out of school—and they promise a pretty decent, relatively stable career if you do well. It’s a good living—with (unlike most of the restaurant business) reasonable hours and working conditions—and most hotels and country clubs offer the considerable advantage of health insurance and benefits. But that sector of the trade is like joining the mafia. Once you enter the warm fold of their institutional embrace, it’s unlikely you’ll ever leave. Once in—rarely out.

-Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw

Cooks Are Misfits?

Cooks Are Misfits?

Is it true that cooks are misfits?

Maybe not all. But I’ll say this.

My first job was working in a kitchen at a large camp / conference center. And it was not just the cooks who came across as misfits. The entire kitchen staff had this air of deviance to it.

I was only there for the summer, but the permanent staff was without a doubt a group of rebels and weirdos that would have just as easily fit in at the circus.

The 25% of the kitchen that barely spoke English were the most normal of the bunch.

In my life, in my world, I took it as an article of faith that chefs were unlovable. That’s why we were chefs. We were basically … bad people—which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work followed by hanging out with others who lived the same life, followed by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody loved us. Not really. How could they, after all? As chefs, we were proudly dysfunctional. We were misfits. We knew we were misfits, we sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities, and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made us what we were.

-Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw

Sterling Terrell