I watched the show last night. I felt like i was back in the 19th century sniffing edible flowers, inventing words and polemicising reason with Lord Byron, the Shellys, Wordsworth, Blake and my personal favourite; Keats.
Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly entertaining. Especially with all the exciting music. And surely, the fact that reality TV has been successful for this long shows that watching others make fools of themselves is always depressingly great fun.
But there was more romanticism in this show than blood plasma in a Big Ben pie. I mean could you imagine a reality TV show called ‘Master Carpenter’, or ‘Master Bricklayer’??
I think even Channel 44 would reject it.
There is something about being a chef in popular culture that brings forward connotations of vibrancy, artistic flair, youth, open-mindedness, radicalism and sensuality. I think the popular mind imagines chefs constantly tucked away in a kitchen full of fresh, organic and exotic ingredients, spending all day creating dishes that wage genocide against tastebuds with an affinity to traditionalism.
If you’re wanting to be a chef, i don’t want to break your heart, but i reckon the job sucks arse. I grew up in a restaurant and every chef or cook i came across was more highly strung than a Bouzouki.
And no wonder.
They work in a restaurant packed full of people, highly volatile people with too much money who have come to have a good time, and if their food is late, or if it’s got flavour in it, and they’ve had a few drinks on an empty stomach, they get angry, the waitstaff agree with them and the chef’s the one that gets beaten with the wooden spoon. But it’s not just the stress, they work the most depressing hours of any job – when their friends and family are off work, they work. Good luck in having a life. Sure you can cook great food, but you’ll be too depressed and lonely to taste it. And the idea that chefs spend all their time creating dishes is a load of dog food too. You create a menu, if you’re lucky, a seasonal menu, and pretty much stick to it. Sure a dish every year or so will change, but the vast majority of the time, you’re cooking the same thing, again and again. And that’s if you ever get to be a head chef, if you’re not a head chef, then you’re just cooking your boss’s same thing, again and again. And as an assistant chef, the hysterical ramblings of the customers will stop with you, making you feel like you’re constantly stewing in a scapegoat curry loaded with so much chilli it makes you cry. Finally, restaurants are highly risky businesses. So many of them fail, and even if they have found a niche, they are the first to be hit by economic recessions and changes in fashion. This means, any idea of job security for a chef is an idea floating in the acrid mist arising from the organic compost of this stupid romanticism.
What a rant. Felt good.
For a great post on ‘How to get a reality TV judge to like you’ check out the fountainside.
good post! I agree. A friend of ours is a chef and left the game because of the stress.
What about a reality TV show of the Christian ministry? I wonder what that would do to the Moore college intake?
its a wonder that there are not more stories of chefs’ behaving like Catherine Zeta-Jones in ‘No reservations’ – aka – you didnt think that last stake was rare? – try this one – plonks down an uncooked stake!
Hey Soph, yeah i think it’s fairly common. I think when it’s not, senior chefs tend to open their own business and then get someone else to do most of the bad shifts and kitchen work. Great post too (the one i linked to).
Earngey, what channel you thinking? Christian channel? Comedy Channel? Probably the latter huh.
Dawg, thanks for the comment. Haven’t seen the movie, but know what you mean. I reckon worse than that probably happens. I remember seeing an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares where this one little angry Welsh restaurant owner kept challenging his customers to punch ups whenever they complained. Surprisingly, his business was, well going out of business… A friend and i once dreamed of opening a cafe called the ‘A***hole Cafe’. The gimmick was that you come in and get verbally abused by the staff while you were there. Staff would love it. Maybe it would work for a week, but then i reckon people would get sick of it, or the cops would get called for biffos starting all the time. Haha.
Nick