HOW TO BE A PROFESSIONAL IN COOKING

Hands-on cooking is what people most immediately associate with the food industry, particularly with the rise in popularity of chefs over the last decade. The countless television shows and print-media features that offer behind-the-scenes looks into the life of a professional kitchen have glamorized the work that takes place there and driven aspiring culinary professionals to enroll in culinary schools in droves. This is ultimately beneficial for the industry as it raises the status of the cook’s work and makes it a valid career choice. Parents, friends, or significant others are much more likely to support your decision to obtain a culinary education and go work in a kitchen than they were twenty years ago, when such jobs were still largely marginalized and not considered career tracks. 
Even if your ultimate goal is not to work in a restaurant, spending a couple of years on the line will give you skills—from technical abilities to efficiency and creativity—that will be of use for the rest of your life in this industry. Many alternative occupations, such as certain media positions, teaching, and consulting, also look for professional cooking experience. Working in a restaurant will also be an asset on your résumé and provide you with experience that can be a source of income for the rest of your life (you might travel and find yourself with opportunities to cook professionally if you run short of money, for example). As you advance in your restaurant career, you will need increasingly strong creative and management skills. You will need to come up with dishes and recipes and will be in charge of a team.
The high points of working in a professional kitchen include the adrenaline rush you’ll feel during service, the teamwork that takes place and builds camaraderie, and a sense of accomplishment at the end of a good night. The downsides are that for many years, you will work long hours for low pay. If you want to work in a kitchen, you’ll need thick skin—both figuratively and literally. Burns and scars are the marks you’ll earn for the hours spent opening and closing ovens; chopping vegetables as accurately, consistently, and rapidly as you can; cooking sugar; deep-frying all types of preparations both savory and sweet; grilling meats; and baking. They are the marks of an experienced cook or baker, but they can also be the marks of someone who doesn’t pay enough attention in the kitchen or someone who does things too quickly and not well enough. If you need to be coddled after the smallest amount of pain, take that into consideration when you decide whether or not a restaurant kitchen is the place for you.
Thick skin is useful beyond the ability to work past the pain. Kitchens are places where teasing and ribbing take place, even if the days of kitchens as hellish work environments are long gone. Some of it is funny and humorous; some of it might be downright nasty. Many of the cooks who tease in the kitchen do so expecting a reaction from the object of their joke. If you are sensitive and tend to react to everything that is said to you, you might find yourself subjected to even more teasing. But if you can look past that type of attention, not care about the silly nickname you might acquire, and remain focused on your work, those who tease you will tire of it. You may find yourself joining in on the fun of joking about others. This is a form of release in the tense environment of a professional kitchen and one way to build a camaraderie that will be useful in the middle of service. Think of the teasing as a form of team building, and it will become much more bearable.
That type of work environment will initially require adjustment if you come from a corporate job, for example, which usually has very strict boundaries of what is acceptable or not and what is legal or not.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Statistics indicates that in 2006, the last year for which such numbers are available, “chefs, cooks, and food preparation workers held 3.1 million jobs”—a number that is expected to grow by 11 percent by 2016 to reach more than 3.4 million.

Being a chef requires more than cooking knowledge. Leadership and teaching skills are essential if you want to make it up the line all the way to the pass. These are skills required for any position as the head of a team, of course. But in the close quarters of a kitchen, weak leadership skills and the inability to teach someone how to replicate what you do are both more noticeable and more costly. If you cannot train a line cook to make a dish you just put on the menu or the sous chef who takes over on your night off to plate the dish as perfectly as you do, you will be trapped having to do everyone’s job without delegating and will burn out. Being a leader and a good teacher will also earn you the respect of your team, who will trust you during the rush of service, will want to earn your respect by doing their jobs well, and will take as much pride in cooking your food as you do. As a novice in the kitchen, you will not be expected to demonstrate those skills right off the bat, of course. 
What you will need to show is that you can listen, focus, and do your job well, hour after hour, shift after shift, week after week. That’s what your chef will require of you. But once the chef sees that you are capable of that, he or she will move you to the next station, and throw more challenging tasks your way. When working in a restaurant, you have to remember that you have two audiences: the staff and your customers. Regardless of your position, the way you do your job, the way you show others how to do theirs, and the way you collaborate and lead will reflect in the diner’s experience. And through your food, your wine selection, and your service, you get to teach diners about taste and hospitality. This means that your teaching skills need to extend beyond the people who speak the same language you do.
To be an effective culinary professional, you need to be able to translate your craft into words that are not jargon, that are not just for other professionals, and make it easy for everyone to have access to your knowledge.

The Kitchen 

The hierarchy of the kitchen is less strict than it used to be (see the organization that Graham Elliott Bowles has chosen for his restaurant Graham Elliott, for example) but is still very much in place. As it is in any industry, you do not get a job out of college as CEO, unless of course you launched your own company. This organization ensures that everyone knows exactly what he or she has to do and that dishes arrive on diners’ tables in a timely fashion. A kitchen functions like any system; every component needs to be in its place for everything to run smoothly.

While all kitchens might not have all of these positions, because of their size or style of cuisine, the general organization of a kitchen brigade—a French term, which here refers to the crew—is as follows:
Commis/apprentice/prep cook
Garde-manger
Entremetier
(Line) Cook
Chef tournant
Chef de partie
Sous chef
Executive sous chef
Chef de cuisine
Chef/executive chef

A more Americanized list might go as follows:
cold apps/hot apps cook
fry cook
grill or pasta cook
sauté cook
roundsman
sous chef
executive chef

The rapidity with which you will be promoted from one position to another depends a great deal on the attitude you display. If you appear eager to learn; do your work without attitude, well, and fast; and ask your chef for additional tasks when you are done so that you can help and learn more, you will progress at a steady pace. Do not be in a rush either; soak in all the knowledge that you can, even if you are ready for a change in title. If you don’t get promoted, it is likely that you are not quite ready for it. Of course, some exceptions apply, and it is possible that your boss is not noticing all your efforts. In that case, it is time to move to another restaurant.

Be prepared to work with people of varying education levels, ethnic identities, life experiences, and work ethics.

A commis or prep cook spends time preparing the ingredients that the cooks will need throughout the day. This position involves a lot of grunt work, as you spend much of your time on tasks such as peeling vegetables. However, with the right skills and attitude, you will not stay there for long. You might start at that level even with a culinary school education. Use it as an opportunity to hone your skills and show your chef what you can do.

A garde-manger takes care of dishes like salads and other cold appetizers. That position typically does not handle hot foods, which are prepared by a line cook or on stations that are in charge of the dish’s primary component, such as meat or fish.

An entremetier, or the “hot app” station, will often take care of warm appetizers and vegetable dishes.

Line cooks do just that—cook on the line. Depending on the size of the restaurant, they might be in charge of a particular station—such as grilling, sautéing, pasta cooking, or frying—or assist the cook who handles it. As a line cook, you will likely work every station in the kitchen before being assigned or promoted to one. If you work as a line cook in a seafood restaurant, you might not get much experience cooking meat, however, so you might consider spending some time in a restaurant with a more extensive carnivorous menu to round out your skills at this stage of your career or one just above.

A chef tournant (“tournant” is the French word for “revolving”) has experience with all the different stations and can jump in wherever he or she is needed during service. The same is true for a roundsman. In larger restaurants with multiple cooks per station, chef de partie is typically in charge of a specific station, which might be the grill, sauté, meats, sauces, or fish and seafood. The saucier, who handles sauces and most often the cooking of the meats they garnish, is one of the highest positions to attain on the line because of the finesse and skill it requires. Certain cuisines require stations for specific items and might have additional or substitute stations. An Italian restaurant might have a pasta station, for example.

A sous chef is in charge of all the line cooks and chefs de partie, and as such takes on some managerial duties while still cooking every day. In this position, you will be in charge of the kitchen when the chef or chef de cuisine is not there and will work very closely with the chef at the creative level, helping to come up with new dishes. You might also expedite dishes (finish them right before they are handed off to a server). Some larger operations also have executive sous chef positions for people who are not quite ready to be chefs de cuisine but have long proven their worth in the kitchen.

Are You Too Old? 

This is a blunt question but one that you have probably asked yourself if you are over thirty. Are you too old for a kitchen job? Kitchens are notoriously young places: According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2009 “Restaurant Industry Forecast,” “about half of today’s restaurant employees are under age 25.” Why are young people more prevalent in kitchens? One reason is that restaurants often attract transient workers who are trying to figure out what to do as a career. Another is because the work is so rigorous and demanding. You will be on your feet twelve to eighteen hours a day, five or six days a week, depending on where you work. And all this for very low wages. If you are used to working at a desk, being able to take sick days when you don’t feel well, and browsing the Internet when there isn’t much to do, the rigorousness of a kitchen will be challenging. That has nothing to do with age but more to do with attitude, of course.
But if you’ve spent fifteen years in an office position, it is harder to make the switch than if you started working in a kitchen at eighteen and have never known anything else. When you are younger, it is also easier to accept these grueling schedules and tasks because it is unlikely that you have some of the other responsibilities and time commitments that come with age.

A chef de cuisine is second in command to the chef or executive chef and in certain kitchens might even be the most highly ranked person. He or she handles many of the day-to-day managerial duties of the kitchen, including training, hiring and firing, ordering, and other administrative tasks. He or she may not cook on the line on a daily basis but is there every day. He or she has a strong hand in the creative conceptualization of the restaurant, and the name of the chef de cuisine might appear on the menu.

The chef or executive chef (the top title varies) drives the creative vision of a restaurant and is the person who will represent it to the public. Some chefs still cook daily, if only for a few hours, but more often than not they spend more time in their office dealing with paperwork pertaining to their employees, answering media queries, designing and costing menus, and poring over financial statements to make sure that their operation is profitable. The chef might be the owner of the restaurant or might answer to a larger executive team as part of a restaurant group. When not an owner, the chef is typically at the same level as the restaurant’s general manager, and the two collaborate on large-scale decisions that ensure that the business runs smoothly.

You might take a step back at one point in your career, moving back from sous chef to chef de partie, in order to learn different skills or join a larger or more prestigious operation than the one where you are at the time of your move. Do not be afraid to make such a change; it will pay off in the long run as you build your résumé. Similarly, do not be tempted if someone offers you an executive chef position too early in your career, before you feel ready for such a task. You might be better off continuing to move between restaurants in order to learn from others rather than taking that step too soon.

Being a Woman in the Kitchen 

One of the topics of discussion that often comes up in the media is the role of the woman chef in the kitchen. Many pieces that address this take on a sensationalistic tone, looking for evidence of poor treatment and inequality. The women chefs themselves often don’t care to discuss the subject because for them, the job is the same regardless of gender.

It is certain that men and women work alongside each other in the kitchen; but then, they do in most work environments. You will hear women cooks and chefs talk about not having a separate locker room to change into and out of their work clothes. Once in those clothes and on the line, they might have to prove themselves to colleagues who might not be willing to admit that women can do the job just as well as them. They may be subject to wisecracks, verbal abuse, grabbing, or general hazing. Ignoring those attitudes is a way to deal with them, focusing instead on work, according to the women who have been subjected to it. Having a brash attitude and a big mouth, becoming one of the guys, is another strategy preferred by some women. Confronting the teaser or abuser or talking to one’s chef or manager about it is yet another way to handle the problem.
Generally, all this is changing, and such behavior toward women and minorities is no longer prevalent or tolerated. The professionalization of cooking and the proliferation of women cooks have a lot to do with this change in attitude. Sexism is much less tolerated than it used to be, just like screaming and throwing things are no longer common practice. The kitchen is becoming a much more civilized place, and women—as well as men—are benefiting from these new standards.

Some larger operations might have a separate staff for events, which will carry its own hierarchy and titles. A hotel might have a banquet chef and a banquet sous chef, for example, while a restaurant might have a private events or special events chef. Small operations might only have a couple of cooks on the line, and in those cases titles become irrelevant since each person does everything.
Cooks, unless they work in a restaurant located within a hotel or in institutional dining, are rarely unionized. If you work in Las Vegas, however, or in a handful of New York restaurants, you will join a union. Union representatives will negotiate on your behalf in case of conflict with your supervisor, for example. Union wages are also at times higher than nonunion ones. However, the free-spirited mentality of the kitchen means that many resent the strict rules that unions impose and prefer not to operate within their constraints.

Because life on the line takes its toll on cooks and chefs after many years spent cooking day in, day out, and working nights, weekends, and holidays, many of them turn to jobs where cooking is still the main task but that are not as taxing as feeding hundreds of people over the course of an evening. Such options include research and development, teaching, working in a test kitchen, corporate food service management, club management, and many of the jobs that are profiled in other chapters.

Chefs with years of experience in the industry also turn to consultancy when they no longer want to be in the kitchen full-time. As a consultant, you will work with restaurants and companies to develop menus and dishes. You will need a high level of creativity and a broad culinary knowledge in order to be able to work in all types of kitchens, and you will also need to have a strong command of food costs, since that will be one of your responsibilities as you create a menu or a product. You might be in charge of staffing a kitchen and training the staff to replicate your creations. Once the project is over, you move on to something else but might come back seasonally to develop new dishes as the need arises.

Salaries 

An entry-level cook will make between $8 and $10 an hour, while a line cook can expect to make around $12 an hour. According to the 2008 StarChefs salary survey, national average salaries are $44,205 for a sous chef, $56,367 for a chef de cuisine, $74,869 for an executive chef, and $85,179 for a chef-owner. An executive chef for one of the country’s top restaurants, a large restaurant group, or in certain research and development positions will make about six figures. In bigger cities, salaries tend to be higher but so is the cost of living. In a chain restaurant, the kitchen manager or chef will receive a median salary of about $51,000, with potential for a bonus, according to HVS Executive Search’s 2008 “Chain Restaurant Corporate Annual Report,” with a minimum listed at about $22,000 and maximum at around $372,000.
A 2006 American Hotel and Lodging Association survey lists a hotel sous chef’s median salary as $36,000 and that of an executive chef as $65,300. Ultimately, the way to gain operational and financial leverage is to own several restaurants.

By Rick Smilow and Anne E. McBride in the book "Culinary Careers, published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers,2010, excerpts p.135-142. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.