Chef’s Diaries 4: Don’t Ask Me if I Like My Job

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. You can read his first diary entry here.

I recently published an article about how certain people think chefs are sexy. The article was written off the back of a bad date some months ago, where I tried to lean into the appeal, and was justifiably rebuffed. It’s a few months later, and I can happily report that things are going better. I think this may be due to a newfound reluctance to ever talk about my job to anyone who doesn’t work in hospitality. This is not an effort to cultivate some kind of mystique, nor is it due to a lack of interest in my job. Rather it’s because of the fact that you, dear reader share this interest, and I’m getting suspicious as to why. 

My frustration is with readers of underground food magazines, middle class lawyerlings, budding consultants, and casual diners. The kind of people who were raised wealthy enough to be able to eat out, and having secured a place at the university of their choice discovered the pleasures of flicking through an Ottolenghi book, going to their local eastern supermarket, and stocking up on dukkah, ras-el hanout, and harissa for an evening meal with their boring partner. The kind of person that wants to talk to me about some startup that teaches soufflé-making in some knife-riddled neighbourhood, sermonising about giving back while sat in their gentrified Hackney loft. The kind of person who holidayed in Italy as a child and when the spirit of mother Theresa courses through them, tells me how important food is for human connection between swigs of Stella and keys of uppers. The leather jacket, knee high socks, tattoo-of-a-worm-with-a-great-story girls, and grey trench-coat, acid wash jeans, half-read-Orientalism, please-let-me-tell-you-about- my-SOAS-thesis guys. And I get it, this could never be you, inasmuch as it could never be me, but people are rarely cognisant of their own conditions. 

I’m going to say some things that make me seem dislikable, entitled and arrogant. I want to talk about talking about food because I feel guilty. I get fantastic reactions from people at parties, from friends, family, literally anyone with two ears and pulse by giving them a cutesy view into the depravities of this job. I can write all about people getting burnt, about celebrity maniacs hurling pans, and greatly play up the prevalence of class-A drugs at work. But whenever I do I feel like I’m doing something dirty, like I’m degrading myself and those I work with by reducing them to caricatures that a reader can lap up for a cheap laugh. I also feel like I’m lying, 99.9999 percent of what I do is soul crushingly boring, I scrub, sanitise, and wipe twice as much as I cook, I peel kilos of potatoes, I curse the tiny print of order sheets which tell me that I’ve no garlic for the day. 

There are two forces at play here.The first is that food is something that everyone has participated in, and so have some understanding of. This means that my labour is something you can come to wrongheaded options about. The second, is the picture of the industry that exists in the culture; that stress, fear, and personal abuse are used to create an experience that is pleasurable and comforting to the consumer, and that this abuse is linked to a chef’s transcendental journey towards greatness. The combination of these two gives me the howling fantods. Performatively moral groups of foodies dish out recommendations for restaurants they love, and in the same breath chunter about how it must be so hard to work under such tough conditions. What I find shocking is that I have never had a single person make the leap that those same conditions are likely behind the meal they so enjoyed, literally not one, ever. Young people who eat out a lot are also usually the  kind of people who’s instagram stories are populated with colourful infographics sporting the latest social cause. In the same evening these people post about boycotting Shell, defunding the police, and update their bios with handy links, and then go for a glass and a bite two meters and a screen door from a crying commis chef who’s been called a feckless virgin for dropping a scalding pan. Where’s your call for a boycott here? Why do I not see a little neon square demanding justice for tiny chef Tim? It’s because you don’t like restaurants, you like eating. 

So people don’t stop to think about who is making their food, they also actively lionise chefs who behave badly. Explain to me how a chef can make the GQ shortlist for chef of the year, when literally the first article you look up about him describes him pouring dry ice down a woman’s back. People love the danger, because this industry is one of the last where you can freely commit G.B.H and be lauded for your commitment to perfection.  It’s because the abuser is the tortured artist, and the objects of abuse are just minimum wage nothings. Don’t worry about the girl who’s now permanently scarred, she’s just an expendable piece of a chef’s epic story. 

He can do this because the perverse hype generated around him means he could swing the battered corpse of this chef, and hit another one waiting to fill her spot. I know of a chef who committed suicide a few years back. The restaurant didn’t close, the celebrity chef at the helm made the bereaved team work a man down, telling them at the end of a harrowing day that it was all an exercise to prove that they didn’t need the dead team member in the first place. The spot on the roster was filled the next day.

 I could rattle off another ten stories just like this, but I’m just not sure whether they would actually sink in. And you might say I’m exaggerating, surely this can’t be the case at all restaurants. You’d be right, most of these are fringe cases, in general hospitality is brimming with truly extraordinary people. But bad shit happens, and its frequency increases exponentially the further you go up the Michelin food chain. So it's not every kitchen, but every single person i’ve worked with has a story about being groped, belittled, abused mentally, racially, physically, about cultish kitchens, sobbing on the tube daily, friends lost to addiction, friends lost period. If I told you that there was a 1 in 50 chance that a sexually violent psychopath was going to come over and cook us dinner you’d ask me a million questions. So why this total lack of curiosity when it comes to forking over eighty pounds and going for a bite at their place? It’s because you don’t like hospitality, you like eating.  

There are genuine heroes in this industry, and with some bias I can commend the efforts of London groups like Super-8, JKS, St. John, Arnold & Henderson, Beatie and Roberts, and the gang behind Bright, Peg, and P. Franco for their progressive mindset. But it isn’t enough, because the people who are trying to do the right thing are doing it quietly, despite the fact that a facade kindness is among the most marketable of qualities. The lack of journalistic rigour covering this issue is appalling. I know for a fact, that one of London’s highest flying chefs is known to drag juniors up and over the pass by the throat daily, but has several articles in progressive magazines where they talk about the need for a quiet, nurturing style of training. Dirt is not hard to find, everyone in this industry knows everyone, it would take two minutes and less negronis to get horror stories from any group of chefs. So why doesn’t it bleed out, why are critics going to keep taking the words of psychopaths at face value, in barefaced violation of the ethics of their trade? Because they also like eating, they like telling you where to eat, and you like being told where to eat. Because they can make someone up a culinary supernova, make it impossible to get a booking, and then make you feel great about securing one. You can sit there, dazzling your date, because you half read some article and for added smugness can privately criticise. In disagreeing with the hype you can establish your palate as above those who eat and cook all the time. It doesn’t actually matter whether there’s a storm of abuse occurring one screen door away from you, the point is that you likely don’t care to find out. You don’t like food, you like eating. 

So this isn’t cute, why should it be, why do I have to round off an article where I feel genuinely enraged, with a counterpoint and sort of twist, where we can let the rawness simmer, and I send off with a message about how we all have food and humanity, and need a better future for the industry. I’m not going to because that lets you off the hook, it’s back on me to try to make the kitchens I work in kind, productive environments. It allows you to start reading columns and plan your next night, happy in the knowledge that you don’t need to worry about anything I’ve pointed out , because everything is going to be all right, someone else is on the case.  And I know if I tell you to get informed, or boycott, or have a little think you’re not actually going to do it, and  why would you, it isn’t your problem, you just like eating. Instead I’ll settle just for the frank understanding between us both that you don’t care about me, and thus are relieved of the obligation to ask about how my work is going.

Mateo will be back soon with another diary entry.