mypantry (member) posed some interesting questions in her comments and I decided to write a post to answer her questions
Love being in the kitchen. I just love the smell of my kitchen, from everything I cook really that probably makes me a chef myself. Is it hard being a chef? I mean, you'll deal a lot with people taste and you know everyone has a different appealing to food, etc. I’m very interested in cooking and I’m always a student who's eager to learn. I cook for my family and friends, and neither of them saying that they don't like what I cook. But who will know that? I mean, yes they're my guests, probably it's a courtesy to say 'it's nice'. But I mean, is it really nice? I think it is nice, but people have different taste buds. How do I know it's nice?
BBC Good Food Show 2004
Cooking for a living is very different to enjoying the passion of cooking at home. That is not to say that professional chefs/cooks don’t enjoy their cooking.…they do. But there are many pressures; both physical and mental that is not often understood by people outside the industry.
Even successful chefs often work 12 hours or more a day, usually 5 ½ days a week. If there are shortages in staff the job somehow still has to get done, which can lead to chefs working 3-4 weeks 7 days a week until the situation is corrected.
There are great profits to be made in catering but also there is no other business where your profit turns to loss so quickly. For example if road works affects a row of businesses after a slow couple of days the hardware’s stores stock of hammers and nails are still worth the same amount of money but that is not true for the restaurant. They may have to throw away lots of perishable fresh foods if they wish to keep their standards high.
In the UK in relative terms *eating out is cheaper than it was 30 years ago. The competition is much greater thus the pressures to keep costs like wages down are very high.
When I was 18 if I took my girlfriend to the local steak house for £9 (about $15) you could get a steak, go at the salad and a coffee. 30 years later in some pubs you can still get a steak, salad and coffee for £9. Now if I try to buy a car at 1976 prices…I can’t or if I need a lawyer he wont work for 1976 prices either so we should recognise that food prices have been very stable and low for a long time. The up side of that is most of us can afford to eat out often, the down side of cheap food and the pressures that drive it are things like BSE, E numbers and chemicals to enhance poor and cheap ingredients.
Never the less there are many aspects of my chosen profession that give me lots of joy because there is always something new you can learn since food is such a wide subject.
In regards to your question about whether your friends & family are being kind or honest,
Remember to enjoy the cooking yourself, don’t angst about it too much, explain to your guests that you don’t mind criticism as long as it is constructive. Also you did not mention your own opinion of your cooking. This is something you should value above all else……….you don’t to be a gourmet chef for you taste buds to know that something tastes good…trust them.
As for pleasing different tastes of customers, it’s always a minefield; the best you can hope for is perhaps 90-95%. Because we all eat we all think our opinions on the subject of food are qualified and valid, unlike other professions where as patients we would not dream of telling a doctor what our diagnosis is (except for my some of my friends).
I do hope this piece gave you all a few new insights into what it is like to be a chef, thanks.
Regards
Kevin
Nice entry, it really reflects what it's like to be a chef. I'm a chef myself although I'm now back at studying. I've worked 2 years in a hotel restaurant in England and while I enjoyed it very much, I sometimes found it boring, especially because the menu doesn't change that often. Well, thanks for talking about it, it's very interesting.