Take one seething chef and reduce to a simmer: Blistering heat, long hours, fear: it used to take grit to survive working in a kitchen brigade. Chef Alasdair Gill finds that, although times have changed, the allure of ego-fuelled chaos sizzles on
- Alasdair Gill writes about the fascination with chefs and boisterous kitchens
- He speaks about the changing nature of the industry and its mental wellbeing
- READ MORE: I’m a chef with six Michelin stars and I give all my staff their weekends off
Ever since the late Anthony Bourdain began exposing the passion, sex and grit behind the grills in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, the idea of chefs as tortured, rock-star artists has grown in the public imagination.
And despite Gordon Ramsay claiming recently that kitchens are calmer, there remains a fascination with what happens behind the swing doors ‒ see as evidence films The Menu and Boiling Point and the Disney+ TV series The Bear.
The curiosity is less about the food and more the lifestyle.
I am reminded of this one night in a West London members’ club. The lighting is almost nonexistent, the décor is wicker and red velvet.
It presents as dystopian with a dash of colonialism – as if a horrific genocide is happening outside the black slate doors, but everyone inside is safe slurping Carlingford oysters by the dozen.
Alasdair Gill writes about the fascination with chefs and boisterous kitchens. He speaks about the changing nature of the industry and its mental wellbeing
Food is the by-product here: a gritty side salad or stale bread basket to the grand dish of gossip and picantes.
The tables are occupied by mobs of dolled-up, twitching meerkats, their eyes darting everywhere except at each other, inspecting who else has come to their exclusive burrow.
I can sense how much this gathering means to the skimpily dressed woman on my right. She attempts to fill my glass with house red before I inform her that I don’t drink.
Irritation floods her foundation-caked face and she rolls her eyes to her boyfriend sitting opposite. I am the teetotally boring turd in her belvedere punchbowl of a night out.
‘So, apart from drinking green tea at dinner parties, what do you do?’
It’s jasmine tea, actually, but I doubt she cares about the subtle difference between blossoms and leaves. I tell her I work as a chef. Her head slowly turns to face me as she makes her first eye contact of the night.
‘You’re a chef? Really?’
I have triggered something of a reset in her low opinion of me.
Actor Jeremy Allen White (pictured) stars as frenetic chef Carmy Berzatto in Disney+ drama The Bear
‘Kitchens are really hardcore, aren’t they? Do you get abused?’
She edges her velvet chair closer. Her pupils are dilated, her jaw mildly gurning, whether from too many trips to the loo or the thought of me being beaten with an egg whisk I cannot tell.
The mere mention of ‘chef’ has garnered an intense and libidinous interest. What does it for her, I wonder. The unholy hours? The jaw-clenching stress? The blistering heat and lawless berating of co-workers?
A year ago I jumped back into the heated chaos of a restaurant kitchen, having taken time out to work in private catering, a section of the industry that leaves most chefs unimpressed. I understand why; to them, it is cheating. I was no longer on the battlefield, but continued to carry the title of soldier.
Upon my return, I dedicated my coarse hands and trusty knife to the Sloane Square French brasserie Colbert, forged by restaurateur royalty Jeremy King. I was taken aback at the well-oiled machine Colbert rapidly became. A kitchen still heated with passion, pace and energy, but proving Ramsay’s point: it was now devoid of the cloud of fear following every slice, dice and chop.
One shift, I was butterflying chicken breasts as the blurry wobble of a commis chef took shape in my peripheral vision. He was attempting to shift a ten-gallon pot of veal stock off the counter but let it slip from his clammy chipolata fingers. A deep baritone thud echoed as it connected with the floor. It took just one blink for the dense gelatinous mass to begin swarming around my Crocs.
Ever since the late Anthony Bourdain (right) began exposing the passion, sex and grit behind the grills in his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, the idea of chefs as tortured, rock-star artists has grown in the public imagination. And despite Gordon Ramsay (left) claiming recently that kitchens are calmer, there remains a fascination with what happens behind the swing doors
I clenched my knife under white knuckles waiting for the tsunami of abuse. It never came. No cocaine-fuelled, deafening rage from the head chef, not a single profanity about what he intended to do to the boy’s mother. Just a calm instruction to clean up and take a smoke break.
We are an odd breed, chefs. For many of us, there wasn’t any other option. We are often pedigree nomads who could never compute the education system or embrace the stability of an office routine. Life bemused us. The kitchen took us in and installed a chaotic drive to create magic between a knife and fork. Although the struggle for perfection prevails externally, it sits more poignantly internally. A hurricane of slurs could have struck that commis chef for dropping the veal stock, but it wouldn’t have begun to scale the shame he felt beneath his fat-soaked, buttoned chef whites.
There’s something in kitchen life for the malcontent who failed to gel with school. I stumbled out of childhood with neither qualifications nor the faintest sense of direction. Restaurants showed me I was capable.
From Michelin hotspots to a farm café or a late-night Chelsea club, earning your stripes in this industry takes thick skin and drive. Stereotypes of pressure and fear in kitchens are not fiction. I’ve seen a bloke who looked like he belonged in a Guy Ritchie movie brought to hysterical tears over burnt garlic. A dissatisfied head chef once drenched all the cooking equipment in fryer oil and screamed ‘Again!’ after a late-night clean-down. I’ve witnessed countless walkouts by gifted chefs who’ve reached their boiling point.
Unsurprisingly, it’s always been a problematic industry when it comes to wellbeing. More than 80 per cent of chefs experience poor mental health, and simply bearing the title puts you in a bracket of being more likely to die of lung cancer.
Yet it’s also this stacking of the odds that seems to attract us. On some level we crave that gruelling, eroding pressure and neither do we need praise in order to function. Anonymously, we create dishes to be consumed by customers we will never meet, leaving us to be judged only by ourselves.
No matter how the industry changes, every kitchen keeps some essence of a lawless battlefield. The dawn of a more progressive attitude doesn’t alter the lust for chaos encoded within our veins ‒ pumped by ego, fury and solidarity. It is also the reason that the dolled-up meerkats in their exclusive members-only habitat will jitter to attention for the beautifully lonesome chef.
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