I just saw The Menu (very good) and the military regime-esque sycophantic "YES CHEF" chants repulsed me. Gordon Ramsay has made a career out of screaming insults at his workers. How much of this is true to life and what is the leftist view on it?
I worked as a dish-hand and started and quit in the same weekend. Unbelievably high pressure and aggression from your co-workers. Is the answer "if they're well paid and have adequate time off it's fine"? Can a high pressure environment work with politeness and tact? Is the grotesque heirachy inherent in these workplaces?
I haven't read much so I have no clue.
The solution to high-pressure environments is not to create them in the first place If a workplace is consistently a high-pressure environment then it's organised the wrong way, is understaffed etc.
Gordon Ramsay is all an act and actually he cares a great deal about cooking and the people who do it. It’s people like Alec Baldwin you have to look out for. He made a career out of abusing the little people and finally shot and killed one of them.
Watching Kitchen Nightmares UK you really get a good sense of this. He gives a lot of "Restaurant 101" advice over and over again, pretty much all of which is excised from the US version in order to make room for more yelling.
I prefer the US edition tbh because you get to see a bunch of entitled small business tyrants being bullied by some guy across the ocean
How much of this is true to life
Well, it's not totally accurate. You haven't mentioned cocaine abuse yet
i recommend boiling point if you want another film on kitchen work, this one's really realistic and relatable. It's all one shot, and about one really busy night. This way you only see snippets of the character's lives, conveying how everyone's life is on-going and devoid of an 'arc'. Chekhov's gun is fully loaded too, which I always enjoy.
I've never worked at a kitchen where they do the 'yes chef' thing and there's probably a couple fancy places that do it and TV and that's it.
IMO chef's don't really need to be assholes because the other cooks do it for them because they're already competitive and high strung. Also front versus back because they serve different interests. There's lots of yelling in kitchens but I haven't experienced much chef's yelling down.
Of course there's the obvious general things like better pay and more time off, but imo a kitchen environment kinda requires at least some form of hierarchical structure because of how high pressure it tends to be. Whether that hierarchy forms organically/naturally and a team is built around experience and chemistry or is rigidly enforced and built solely on which potential new hire management deems is the cheapest is what makes the difference.
The "YES CHEF" sounds cultish and is definitely on the more pretentious side, but it also serves a very important purpose. The role of the Chef is to translate a jumbled list of vague requests into a series of very specific instructions, ensure the final product conforms to those instructions, and to deal with any hiccups along the way. Having some sort of dedicated response to communicate to the chef that everyone's on the same page is crucial, and if someone isn't it communicates to the chef that they need to catch you up. "Heard" and "acknowledged" are also common, and I had one chef say my response could be "fuck you" as long as I gave one. A good kitchen should treat the title of Chef as just another role rather than a place at the top of the pyramid.
Biggest key problems are:
- FOH and BOH are usually seen as competitors when in reality they're both incredibly crucial and rely on one another. My last kitchen job had such good solidarity between the two that once, when management really screwed FOH over on a busy night both FOH and BOH threatened to walk out on the spot, and that's how it's supposed to be. If a Karen is yelling at a server, back of house needs to be ready to start a brawl over it.
- Half of the pressure comes from having to deal with asshole customers over non-existent problems. If we were allowed to take them out back and [REDACTED] them during our smoke breaks it'd be a lot better.
- Management serves absolutely no purpose if the kitchen is allowed to do their own thing. More often than not, management inserting themselves into the process in an attempt to improve it does the opposite. Getting rid of the position entirely and letting the people running the kitchen figure out how to make it work the best for them would solve this entirely. At my last place it was kinda like this. Even though we weren't officially unionized, management couldn't do shit all without our approval because we were such a close team that if they tried anything they'd have to hire an entirely new staff and the well oiled machine we turned that place into would break down in a second. I could, and did, literally tell the managers to get the fuck out of my kitchen on day 3 as the newest trainee purely because of how often we'd just straight up ignore them if they tried to push their little reforms. Once BOH sat down and came up with a better schedule than the one management made, walked into the office, and basically just said "hey boss this is our new schedule," and afaik it's stayed relatively the same ever since.
I worked as a bartender at this italian place for a few months, and the way you described the foh and boh as willing to go to war for eachother is spot on for my experience. The sous chef had a claw hammer on the wall, "in case any customer gets too touchy with the servers" was his reason.
The sous chef had a claw hammer on the wall, “in case any customer gets too touchy with the servers” was his reason.
That was me too except it was literally a comically large spoon
Management does everything in their power to split the restaurant vertically into two competing groups. The second both FOH and BOH turn that split into a horizontal one between themselves and management it becomes much much harder for them to fuck you over or retaliate against you. Capitalism is pathologically incapable of seeing the long-term and always prioritizes short-term profit, so even if it's not a formal union or strike the threat of even an afternoon of lost profit is often just enough to act as a shield. Remaining vigilant is very necessary, they'll try every subtle trick they can and the staff needs to be an immovable object in the face of it every single time. A hard "do what we say or we all walk this second" stance (ideally in less blunt and more plausibly deniable phrasing) can really put management in a deadlock. Having the chance to look my boss in the eye and say "hey, wouldn't it really suck if no one showed up on our busiest and most profitable day of the year?" was fucking euphoric.
Obviously this isn't legal or unionization advice, just stating how we ran the show at my last job. By the time I left the only purpose management really served was as cover. They kept up appearances because "we have absolutely no control over them, every decision is made by the staff, and our jobs are near-useless at this point" isn't a very good thing to say to a stingy cost-cutting boss if you want to keep your job, and we were fine with them taking the credit as long as it translated to regular raises and the owner was kept in the dark.
there is nothing about cooking that should make it inherently high pressure it's not like surgery. they could hire more people, get a bigger kitchen or simplify the menu
But that would require paying more money to workers :porky-scared-flipped:
Yeah I was talking about a post-revolution change in the industry. Capital is unconcerned with the mental health of the workers and so has no reason to improve their conditions. If those workers unionised then maybe we could see real improvement now however
There's a thousand things that can go wrong in a tiny space with lots of people.
Busted water line to the sinks? That affects everybody.
Burned the soup in a 3 gallon? That affects everybody.
Put knives directly into the dish pit when you aren't immediately washing them? You might need a good [redacting].
yes I get that which is why I identified the environment as the source of tension. I maintain if we changed the way restaurants work they could probably be less stressful to work in
I don't know much about restaurants to be honest I have friends who've worked in them and I've sold food at stands but I've never actually worked in a restaurant but I would be shocked if the environment could not be improved in some way to be less inherently stressful
Oh yeah... If you were to design a dish pit, cooking stations, prep stations, fridge/frozen storage areas with the same square footage as the Front of House it could be improved. Then it probably would only need a few extra bodies during the workday to make up for the increased distance between stations.
Wait fuck uhh restaurant workers bourgeois, the proletariat is when have hammer
I remember reading this cool story about the first restaurant to open after Mao died. By then, eating out was such a foreign experience that people did not quite know what to do. The customers washed their own dishes afterwards, for example.
Ah I thought it was the "service work doesn't actually add value to the product (dumbass statement) unlike the people who farm and process the beans and are therefore not a part of the proletariat". Tbf there was also the "expecting able-bodied people to go and pick up their own takeout instead of getting a gig worker to do it for them is ableist" discourse so it's not like there's a shortage of twitter restaurant discourse
Your twitter restaurant discourse I can at least see the reasoning behind. Like so many other things, it's not inherently exploitative but under capitalism it absolutely is. I agree that people who can cook for themselves should do so as much as possible, but no restaurants under communism is honestly laughable because I'd open one the second I could and make the food free if I didn't have to worry about survival. They might not be the exact same as what they are now but people are always going to want well-prepared food they don't normally have access to, and it's not like people are going to stop getting hungry at inconvenient times.
This would be a lot of wasted effort. One of the key steps Cuba took towards women's liberation was the collectivization of domestic labor through e.g. neighborhood canteens and cafeterias. Not exactly a restaurant experience, but absolutely still eating out!
Definitely, two completely different goals. In the same way that there will still be concerts and orchestras and things, there will still be room for lovingly made art-food. Just hopefully it is rationed and made fairly. Personally, I quite enjoy fast paced food service work when it's not understaffed!
under communism there would be no restaurants
I would cook for maybe like ten people a day that sounds nice
Restaurant kitchens are the perfect example of what happens when you let small business tyrants directly try to optimize for profits. The high pressure is due to understaffing. That understaffing doesn't just mean you're rushing during the rush, it means tons of pressure to come in sick, work long hours, take abuse from the top of the hierarchy, work through injury, and so on. And it should be no surprise that immigrant labor (documented or otherwise) shows up here very, very often, as it's the easiest to exploit aside from children. What, are they gonna go to the cops because you made them work through a second degree burn without treatment?
The hierarchy follows from a tradition in which the small business tyrant is the head chef. They're up in your work, they're seeing where you're going slower than they want, and they demand coordination through themselves. They can be highly competent and great chefs, but the system is very much set up to be this understaffed, high-pressure, top-down thing that serves profits for the owner first. That chef-owner is also pricing the menu, setting staff pay, doing scheduling, ordering ingredients, making sure to hit their numbers or getting stressed out because they're failing to do so.
Capitalism itself drives this through "competition", which in this case, as in most, means driving down wages and staffing. A well-meaning owner-proprietor can't escape this situation, nor could a co-op model: your food will be 1.3-1.5X as expensive if you created actually good and proper working conditions and pay. And by good working conditions and pay I mean doubling staffing and paying far over a living wage.Just like an individual's consumer choices do little to change the system, an individual owner's attempt to do so has limited power. Of course, the vast majority of owners are pieces of shit, but I just want to point out that you can't actually build truly good working conditions without addressing the problems of capitalism.
I worked in a non-fine dining place that would dip into yes chef over heard to cultivate calm and understanding. Usually one of the most experienced people would suggest it over shift beers and the next day it would trickle down from prep to nights.
There’s a lot of opposing interests in a kitchen workforce and it’s one of the few jobs you can hold down when you’re on the fuckup life path. That kind of place just breeds stress and conflict if a significant portion of the staff aren’t working to diffuse it.
Or you can just blow all the bad vibes out with psychedelics at the Christmas party. That works too…
That kind of place just breeds stress and conflict if a significant portion of the staff aren’t working to diffuse it.
Or you can just blow all the bad vibes out with psychedelics at the Christmas party. That works too…
The key to success is doing both
I still bark out a quick yes as a confirmation to anyone asking me to do anything(provided I actually do it ofc). I also once was sent home to iron my uniform because it was wrinkly. Depends on the kitchen though.
More people working less work volume fewer hours same or better pay
