Anthony Bourdain’s seminal book Kitchen Confidential came out in the year 2000. An expose of restaurant practices and kitchen culture, this intelligent and gossipy text changed the way the average person thought about the folks behind the line cooking our dinners when we dined out. From that point forward, Bourdain felt like a cool cousin to many of us who were drawn to hospitality, food, traveling, and writing. He was our guide into the many hearts of darkness and light, who showed us the world up close on his documentary style television shows, and let us peek behind the curtain into an industry that suddenly seemed full of sex and intrigue. The story of how chefs became celebrities perhaps didn’t begin with Bourdain but with his rise to fame, chefs became America’s favorite anti-heroes, misunderstood creatives with a compassionate streak.
The whole point of chefs, after all, is to feed us. There are numerous career options for bright, antisocial, dexterous humans who resist the mainstream and scoff at the conventional, right? Well, there are a few. And those who ended up in the kitchen chose to make food, to nourish people, to use seasoning and heat and magic to transform disparate ingredients into meals. There is an inherent sensuality in the work. It’s tactile. It’s sensory. Smelling and tasting and chopping and grilling is a pleasurable activity. There is a thrill to it, to the fire, the heat, the urgency, the shouting, the physical closeness, the energy. Every night is a new show. On your feet. In the weeds. Getting sworn at and shouting. Getting it wrong. Getting messy. The victory of a tough night with little acknowledgement or recognition. It really must be an act of love, or at the very least passion, this chef life. Otherwise, why enter into this line of work, why take on the stress and pressure?
Chefs at Work.
In the wildly popular and award winning television series The Bear, brilliant chef Carmy Berzatto leaves the fine dining world of Michelin stars to take on the burden of the family food business after the death by suicide of his beloved older brother. At its root, this is a classic tale of a not fully developed hero going home, man versus himself, the one who believes he has outgrown the people and the place who made him, who must then confront the reality that he knows nothing, and there is more work, valuable and gratifying work to be done breaking generational curses and confronting the past. Casting a beautiful person is always a smart move if you want to elevate the status of a profession. And certainly Jeremy Allen White’s smoldering appeal has been a boon to the show. But would there be the exhuberant cultural response, “Yes, Chef!” if Carmy’s family owned an auto body shop or a plumbing business? Something about the kitchen itself is inherently sexy.
The dark underbelly of society or the mind is a common theme in professional kitchen narratives. Those of us drawn to acts of resistance or prone to depression are compelled to the back of house life. Why do we think of chefs as tough, as independent, as mavericks? What is the culture that created them? Are they so different from home cooks, from our mothers and grandmothers who feed us every day? Certainly, we have seen female chefs rise to celebrity status in recent years, though rarely with the intensity of their male counterparts. Maybe these men who would have been mercenaries, or musicians or detectives, went into the field of food service as a means of cooking their way out. There is something cathartic to the process. And the hope, I suppose, is to be improved, better than you were before. That by cooking hard every night of your life your demons may be exorcised through the secret work of transmutation.
For Anthony Bourdain, it was his darkness that won, in the end. And his legacy, the character that he created for the media, is that of an infinitely curious and restless soul, a dreamer more soft hearted than he might have first suspected, less a cynic and more empathic collaborator, despite the solitary tendencies. He taught us to look for the beautiful and the good in the midst of the complicated and the unjust. In the case of The Bear, the protagonist stumbles and miscommunicates, misunderstands and makes mistakes and presumes to know better. He is an outsider who has gone home, whereas Bourdain was an outsider who left home behind, and perhaps longed to return. Certainly there are tangled and deep seated issues of mental health and addiction that are beyond the capacity of this writer to illuminate here. The thing I hope to convey is that this archetype is appealing for a reason. The chef is a figure of suffering, hope, and transformation; a persona we can all relate to.
The chef is intoxicating, a keeper of secrets, a wounded healer, a dark knight. We all want to be a chef or know a chef, all sinew and tattoos and making something delicious and extraordinary from humble ingredients. The kitchen appreciation fee is often questioned and misunderstood. There has been pushback and discontentment. It is our feeling that chefs, cooks, runners, and dishwashers deserve to feel seen (even if they prefer to stay behind the scenes) and appreciated, compensated fairly for the work they do. Tipping your server in a restaurant is de rigueur. Why can’t we normalize paying a far smaller percentage to the folks in the back who are preparing the food? It seems important. Considering how integral they are to the operation and the human story behind each chef, whether he is famous, or telegenic, or martyred, do they not deserve our recognition as well as our infatuation? If you are at all into great chefs, make a reservation at The Causeway as soon as humanly possible.