Working as a Cook

Cooking and working in kitchens taught me many surprising things, not necessarily in the Bourdain style of "my god the bread is dirty!", but rather that cooking can require very different skillsets. Baking is a game of calculations, where a small variance leads to huge differences. A good baker is as much of a nightcrawler as they are an alchemist of yeast. For all the attention to detail there's a separate artistry required. Shaping dough/bread is the opposite of technical, more like learning the footwork to a choreographed dance that takes many repetitions to feel natural.

I also learned how fun it is to work in a flow state and optimize with constraints. Given 30 tasks as a prep cook, how can I optimize across my 6 burners, 5 oven racks, and industrial mixing bowl. It was an incredibly fun game of chess with people shouting, 500 degree ovens, tight spaces, and hard deadlines. Getting finished with my prep list 4 hours early on my last day is an enduring moment of pride.

Possibly unsurpsisingly, cooks are often extremely industrious. The prep cook I worked under named Mario had all these ingenious tricks for making our 5am shift habitable. He'd order the line cooks to make us chilaquiles or French toast, methodically plan out tasks, and cut plastic bags so that you could tie them shut with a twist.

Oddly, restaurant jobs also gave me a love for utilitarian hardware. My ideal kitchen is pretty much cambros, striped rags, and steel mixing bowls. Whenever things got really busy that level of simplicity was necessary. Even since I stopped working in restaurants, I've been looking for the simplest versions of things and I think that's where that began.

On net, I always enjoyed working in restaraunts despite how physically demanidng it was at times. There's few better jobs to let your mind spin while running through ambient tasks. I'm happily out of the restaraunt industry but doubt I will ever work with more interesting people in my life.