10 Reasons You Can't Be a Professional Chef (Even if You Make Really, Really Good Lasagna)

The food service industry has been decimated in America over the last 5 decades thanks mostly impart to cheap GMO food and our want for inexpensive food. Trying to keep a budget in a restaurant has become an impossible task without the support of a corporation or the public minority paying attention to what they are actually putting into their mouths. Americans are learning as we are getting so unhealthy and sicker that we might need to pay a little more for food in our homes and while dining out. This in turn would allow culinary professionals to have more of a support staff and allow for proper management( including vacations and heath insurance) in an environment that has the potential to poison hundreds or thousands of people( I would pay extra if I knew someone was there just to keep the place clean. How many people out there have seen someone send you dishwasher to clean the bathrooms in the middle of a rush only to have them go right back to the dish pit? Where does the public think these people come from ?)  As far as what you see on T.V. it’s all a show for the rest of the world who has never been in food service in America. Please support your local home grown restaurants , farmers and butchers ( if you have them) and remember it’s better to be able to eat a real hamburger made with from 30 miles of where you live, twice a week, than to eat what some corporation calls a hamburger( that's only 10% cow) 5 times a week. In my 20 + years of food service this is why you can't be a professional chef and other than the desire of good people to want and need to be a part of an experience to bring people together over great food why would you want to.  

The food service industry has been decimated in America over the last 5 decades thanks mostly impart to cheap GMO food and our want for inexpensive food. Trying to keep a budget in a restaurant has become an impossible task without the support of a corporation or the public minority paying attention to what they are actually putting into their mouths. Americans are learning as we are getting so unhealthy and sicker that we might need to pay a little more for food in our homes and while dining out. This in turn would allow culinary professionals to have more of a support staff and allow for proper management( including vacations and heath insurance) in an environment that has the potential to poison hundreds or thousands of people( I would pay extra if I knew someone was there just to keep the place clean. How many people out there have seen someone send you dishwasher to clean the bathrooms in the middle of a rush only to have them go right back to the dish pit? Where does the public think these people come from ?)  As far as what you see on T.V. it’s all a show for the rest of the world who has never been in food service in America. Please support your local home grown restaurants , farmers and butchers ( if you have them) and remember it’s better to be able to eat a real hamburger made with from 30 miles of where you live, twice a week, than to eat what some corporation calls a hamburger( that's only 10% cow) 5 times a week. In my 20 + years of food service this is why you can't be a professional chef and other than the desire of good people to want and need to be a part of an experience to bring people together over great food why would you want to.  

I am a Chef working one of the busiest fine dining establishments in charleston sc. I work long hours, get paid like crap and have no benefits. I do, however, love my job and the people I work with. I have no desire to be on Top Chef because as far as I am concerned I am a top chef. Not because I can rock a mystery box out every single time, rather, because I show up for work and rock out great meals for 400 - 500 people a night. P.S. you forgot to mention deck oven burns and the cleaning that happens every day. :)

Thank you, thank you! As a former chef/owner of 2 restaurants and now a culinary instructor- I have been preaching this to all. The karaoke analogy is a good one.

Thomas Smith :) This is why I have the utmost respect for you!

I recently met someone who said that he did not care about making good food only being a celebrity chef. He felt that was the only way he would get respect.

Fuckin' a-right. 

Who the hell are the people in those pictures???

This article is spot-on and hilarious! I can vouch for all of the above. And I'm still in the industry, because I'm driven to do it. I wouldn't want any other job.

Who would really want to become a chef after reading this article? I guess your job security is safe isn't it? What a recommendation. I'll stick to being a damn good home cook, and I will send myself cudos every freakin' day, or I'll blog about how great my meals are, and I'll make money off the Google ads. Hey that is an idea, isn't it?

all is true. i love my job. full time. no need to write more....

There are ways to run kitchens more efficitiently in Today's modern society with all the advancements that have been made and technology is contributing to it more and more as well. However kitchen's are definitley labour intensive but it can teach you a lot of life skills and nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it.

Having spent half of my adult life working to get out of food service I would add.

11. You have to love (something. I never figured out what it was, because it sure as hell wasn't cooking) or hate yourself to work fulltime in a kitchen.

the difference between being a pro chef and insert "policeman" "firefighter, "nurse" etc is that most of them or close to all get holidays, holiday pay, vacation, AND BENEFITS. There's nearly none of that in most restaurants unless you go corp. and no, we chefs don't say all this because we need validation, we do it all for the PASSION of THE FOOD! NOT for validation, the real true chefs are just happy to feed people who love food.We would never stick with it if it wasn't for that! Plus, besides only fisherman i would say (and other weather related issue jobs) noone has it has hard as chefs! Ever try working in a 135F  kitchen plus standing in front of a hot grill and stove with humidity  that can get as bad as the tropics for 3 months of the year and in the winter walking into a kitchen that's 30F (if you're lucky) and for 3 hours until it warms up, having to use a knife sharper than a scalpel while you can barely feel your fingers? Don't think so. As for the "drugs n' drink"  that's is NOT  a professional kitchen WHATSOEVER! I'm been in the biz for 16 yrs and have barely ever seen that go on, if it did their ass is gone ASAP. As for Guest987, dude, that's not a restaurant, that's a shitty  hell hole that's doomed due to lack of any proper hiring or preparation from the top of management down. This article is the TIP of the iceberg, everything can AND WILL go wrong but the best of us do it with one hand tied behind our back and juggling with the other while thinking of specials for the weekend, what bills need to be paid at home, and who can come in for your dishwasher that didn't show up,  all at the same time. 

Its always an awkward moment when you tell someone that you cook for a living...  They'll ask, what do you cook?  Um....well, I could recite the menu, I could list a few things and move on.  But, really, what we do is so much more.  We plan.  We prep.  We talk.  We fight.  We sweat.  We CLEAN.  We scrub.  We lift. We endure.  We babysit. We laugh.  We organize.  We list.  We count.

Yes, cooking is what we "do for a living," but it is such a different world than tv shows and cooking blogs make it out to be.

I love what I do.  I feel like I cheated life to get paid to play all day.  But, I am a sick and twisted individual. Great article.

OMG! This is so true!!! My husband and I own a restaurant (he being our chef) and this is so FREAKING TRUE!!!! LMAO! Thank you, thank you, thank you! 

Agree and disagree - the problem with the Food Network is that it makes the average home cook believe that being a chef is easy and glamorous. I loved this article, but I'm not sure it really captured how hard it actually is to work in a professional kitchen. The average person has no concept of what it is like to be going about a normal day and then suddenly have a tour group of 100 show up and only have 45 minutes to eat. It also did not capture how gratifying it is when you have helped make someone's event special and memorable. All of the long hours and hard work are totally worth it when you know you have been a part of something that people are going to remember and memories that they are going to cherish.

Yes it is normal, it's the rest of the world thats out of whack!

I love it! It is very true!!!

Brown355 will be broke and out of the profession soon!

I rather be a garbage man than bobby flays dumbass

You mean normal people dont shotgun beers at 6am in the walkin just to stay awake, or run all their errands for an entire week in that half hour on a tuesday afternoon in between services, or have to.call in your order while cooking for a 18 top. all with out running water cause some idiot with the city hit a watermain. oh and the motor on your freezer just froze up again. thats not normal?

Great one - tere is such a diference between the amateur and the professional.  You got it down.  Thank you.  I grabbed your article headline for my blog.

I read this and begin thinking I'm in the wrong profession. I've never considered being a professional chef, but every reason as to why I couldn't hack it is something I'm really good at.

I love this article. Every time someone tells me "Oh you bake so good, you should become a professional!" I am going to refer them to this article. I am honest with everyone and tell them there is no way I could make it, its stressful and competitive! I cook and bake for fun, its entertaining and relaxing for me. Becoming a professional would rob me of that. I'd rather stick to doing it for fun, because I know for a fact I couldn't handle it, lets be honest people, just because you can follow recipes, create your own, or even recreate recipes from restaurants just by tasting the food, does NOT mean you can handle being a professional chef! 

What a delightfully patronizing article! Golf claps!

As someone who hasn't really thought about the living hell being a chef apparently is, and doesn't really care, I thought the article's tone was a bit over the top. She seems to be preaching to the choir, though. Substitute any number of jobs in the title and change some of the tortures around and you could right a book about "Why You Could Never Be a [Insert Your Job Here]."

All depends on what you are looking for, and what you can do...some of them will amaze, and some will be thrown under the wheels, it's passion people, it's passion...

That is so fucken true!!!

I'm going to work and taking away everyones name and giving them a number.

All yall shitty... You think you goid but you ain't... If anyone told you your good at what you do.. They lied to you... Sorry yo

Yeah, yeah... Everybody thinks their job is so hard, and most people couldn't do it. The profession doesn't matter, take out the words 'professional chef' and insert words like 'police officer' or 'commercial fisherman' and you get the same results. All the chefs like this article because it helps them feel validated- like they're special. Everybody wants to be special... blah, blah, blah...

You forgot: "And never have a weekend or a holiday off. Ever."

So true...have been a line chef for almost 20 years and this is pretty much spot on. All the other cooks I have worked with have either been drunks,drug addicts,potheads(myself included),or living through marriages that were just falling apart. It does take a certain kind of person to live this life......finally looking for my way out!

* you work while everyone else is playing* whats a weekend?* the only friends you have are also in the business* the friends you used to have don't understand why you work so much* you see your family only at weddings and funerals* you sleep, drink and eat your 1 week of vacation away, f**k sightseeing* good luck keeping a partner who isn't in the biz* you cut a finger tip off, put on two latex gloves and continue to work

I could go on but my coffee is getting cold and today, my day off, I get to drink it hot