Chef’s Diaries 1: Why am I Here?
Mateo Austin is a new chef living in London. Chef’s Diaries shares extracts from his journals, documenting the beginning of his exciting career in professional kitchens.
30th January 2022
“I get asked why I chose to be a chef constantly. While I think sometimes it’s meant with genuine curiosity, more often than not I get the sense that what I’m really being asked is why did you choose to do this. I get it from prospective employers that look up baffled from my CV. I get it from my well meaning friends, who now comfortably pull down fat corporate salaries. My choices are an oddity among pretty much everyone I know, betraying impulsiveness at best, and a wickedly powerful narcissism at worst.
For context, I graduated from Cambridge university last year, I’ve got an accent that would put most newscasters to shame, and have had all the luck anyone could ask for. In my first job interview I was told that the kitchen was not a place for people like me, which is to say, people with other options. I had my pay cut for the first three months purely because the owners thought I’d bail, and they didn’t want to take a risk on some lost boy that had stumbled on the foolhardy idea of cooking for a living. I’m not asking for someone to queue the smallest and saddest of violins, the expectations were fair, I didn’t have a clue what I was in for.
To be perfectly honest, it’s a question I’ve often asked myself. It’s hard when you’re sweating, deep in a stack of delayed cheques, with an increasingly irate sous chef on your back, not to wonder how the fuck you ended up here. Over the last seven months I’ve worked 6-7 days a week being paid minimum wage, or nothing at all. I’ve worked 18 hour shifts fuelled by nothing except black coffee, nicotine, and fear.
So why bother, right? I could make a lot more doing a lot less. The answer is pretty simple- It’s because I love it like nothing else, for better or for worse, in health, or as is more likely, in sickness. It’s a totally paradoxical love and certainly on its first blush, but it’s there, and as far as I can tell, it’s real.
I think “real” is the key word in all of this. Kitchens are zero sum, you can do a thing, or you can't. You say you can make a banging mayonnaise? Well, if it turns out split and runny, even one time, the egg is on your face as much as it is in the bowl. Not only that, but someone in the upper ranks now dislikes you, and wants to make you fail; they’ll wear you down publicly without anyone batting an eye. There’s no complaining, and the only way to get back at them is to work so hard that your position, and the position of your now uniquely perfect emulsions, are unquestionable. This high standard of behaviour runs headlong into the lived experience of most chefs I know. The popular idea of our industry is of a bunch of ill-adjusted misfits, hopped up on adrenaline and god knows what else. But what’s rarely touched upon is the depth of life experience most high level chefs have. To make sous-chef at a Michelin star takes a lot of extra work. A friend of mine told me he used to buy kilos of mackerel each week, eating little else, just so he could practice filleting.
People talk about kitchens being the last true meritocracy, which is true to a point. But I think the real difference is that the kind of bullshit that usually infects corporate structures tends to be impersonal. In high level kitchens, you spend anywhere between 60-80 hours, locked in a hot cramped space with the other chefs each week. You succeed, grow and fail together. You see these people more than anyone else in your life, some are friends, some are foes, fewer still are family. On an average day, you might get in at 7:30, work until midnight, then stay and drink until the early hours- only to stumble into bed in the knowledge you’ll get up soon and do exactly the same tomorrow.
For a kitchen to work you need to resolve your personal issues on an intimate level, with a real understanding of others, because the stress of the job exacerbates people’s underlying dysfunctions like nothing else. This is especially true for younger chefs, coming into a softer industry. The chefs in the higher ranks have endured absolutely brutal conditions through the 90’s and early 2000’s. One of the best chefs I’ve ever worked for told me that a well known celebrity chef used to stick his knife in a fryer and burn him so he’d work faster. They’ve got an eerie steel to their eyes, that comes from years of taking the worst shit imaginable. When you come in, wet behind the ears, messy and slow, you’ve got to take into account that their inexplicable rage is a manifestation of lessons sometimes literally beaten into them.
Performance becomes a compulsion, many of the more seasoned chefs I know would sooner stop breathing than leave their section dirty. For some I believe it is a genuine drive to do well, but just as often it’s a result of fear based conditioning. You might ask why anyone would willingly subject themselves to this. Why would I subject myself to this? I’d say it’s a mix of things, foremost among them is a testing of one’s own resolve, to see how far you can go, how much you can take, before you cave. But there is a wonderful camaraderie that’s also baked in. There’s very little that’s genuinely new when it comes to making food, each lesson connects you to a line of millions of other cooks, and forges you as part of long chain of teachers and students. There’s something wonderfully mystical about folding bread, measuring flour, and stirring yeast. It’s taken thousands of years of work to get you your sourdough toast. Millions of bollockings, dead starters, fired bakers, to get it to sit next to your bottomless mimosa. It’s a little overly prosaic, but if anything I want to convey the way you can get swept up by the world of kitchens. In this world, I can see the fruits of my care directly, without need for abstraction. I get to see it in the relief of my section partner’s face, when they arrive and everything is ready to go, when I get to see some kid wolfing down a birthday rice pudding, when I collapse onto the sofa and know I’ve given all I can.”
Mateo will be back next month with another diary entry.
