Not sure where this topic belongs, so mods move at will. I’m hoping professional chefs and those who work in restaurant kitchens will comment.
I’m fascinated by the shouting that goes on in professional kitchens as seen on lots of TV programs these days. I never worked in a kitchen or even in a restaurant, and it’s a revelation to see* and hear* the controlled, choreographed chaos that goes on in a busy, professional restaurant kitchen, from the 2-3 person shops on Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives to gigantic hotel kitchens seen on No Reservations and the like.
On the restaurant makeover shows Kitchen Nightmares and Restaurant Impossible, one of the things that Gordon and Robert tell their people is to communicate with each other, with the head chef doing most of the shouting. If the head chef is working quietly, Gordon can get very ugly! When things are going well and the kitchen is “cooking,” these guys are always very pleased when there’s plenty of shouting back and forth. I can see where being part of that well-oiled (EVOO, naturally) machine could get quite addictive.
Is this something you learn in culinary school? Or do you learn it on the job? If you’re the head chef do you know what to shout on your first night in your new kitchen? Does the staff know what you’re doing? Is it like learning basic ballet positions, so that right away, you know your steps?
Maybe it’s like pilots talking to each other or air traffic controllers or something… I remember once, many years ago, I took a cab home from the airport late at night and the driver had his dispatch radio on and the dispatcher carried on this sing-song chant with my driver occasionally chiming in… I don’t remember what they were saying, but it was quite mesmerizing… this rhythmic, repetitive, back-and-forth cadence, which, I’m sure, conveyed plenty of information to someone who knew what they were hearing.
I’ve eaten in plenty of good restaurants on busy nights and I can’t recall I’ve ever heard them screaming and bellowing in the the kitchen the way they do on TV.
It’s communication. It’s a noisy place to work, and you need to be heard. There’s a lot of callback for acknowledgement. Someone is in charge of making sure meals get prepared, and they’ll call out “I need a steak medium rare”, and someone on the grill will call back with “Steak on the grill, medium rare”. Things need to be coordinated, so as you move behind someone you say “Behind you”, and you say it loud so someone doesn’t turn around and drop a pot full of boiling water on you. Someone shouts “I need more fries”, and someone has to shout back “French fries” before he tosses a bag of them across the kitchen. Some of it’s also about developing a rhythm that keeps people going. The dinner rush can be very hard work, and cooks drumming out a rhythm with spatulas and spoons helps maintain the spirit. It’s a lot of hard work, and fun.
There’s pretty much a code as to what you shout out so there’s no need to learn something new in a new kitchen. Unless they have lingo for the dishes or something.
I worked in a restaurant for about 4 years without culinary training, so I don’t know if you learn anything in culinary school. Every chef I know worked restaurants before school anyway.
I was taught just some basic stuff and just followed along. It’s actually not as hard or confusing as it looks on TV, as long as the person manning the tickets knows what he/she is doing. You just gotta be at your station and give them what they ask for.
I really really miss the rush of working in a kitchen. I love working on a team like that.
What TriPolar said, pretty much. During the heat of service, nobody has time for flowery sweet talk and conversation - it’s all about efficiency, keeping the machine running smoothly and everyone in sync. All the screaming you see on TV with Ramsay and those other twats is manufactured drama and abuse that isn’t really part of the culture. It may have been at some point in time, but is completely unnecessary nowadays. Sometimes you do get kind of loud, just because you’re swinging with your crew and everyone is feeling kind of “on”.
I do recall working under one chef who was more or less “trained” to bitch people out in French, so at least when he had to verbally intervene in some novice’s huge fuckup during service, it sounded more elegant and continental-like - not so much drill sarge, spitting in your face type. I still laugh thinking of him running through the kitchen shouting “Jamais! Jamais!” at some poor sod who was unwittingly using the wrong utensil to move the caramelizing onions around in the pan.
Yes. IME, culinary students get experience working every position in the kitchen, including being the sous-chef calling out orders. If they are soft-spoken, they will be taught how to be command attention and be heard in a noisy kitchen. If they can’t do that, they will be encouraged to think about a career in catering or private cooking.
That said, the TV shows are way played up for drama.
Communication is key, when it starts to get hot, your tone turns steely and tight, but keep it courteous. Of course cursing fits are not to be taken personal!
Heh. I’m always amused when some management-type hears all the back-and-forth crap in the kitchen and thinks he or she needs to break something up or order the cooks to get along and be pleasant. I’ve learned that people who don’t work in the kitchen — even if they’ve worked in restaurants for years in other aspects — just don’t get how cooks communicate. I’ve had a few surprised coworkers over the years who had an epiphany about it and mentioned it to me, usually in the context of telling me they figured out that everything was just fine if I was bitching and complaining; it was when I was very quiet that they knew I was honestly mad about something.
At my current job, one of the cooks is an older lady who can be snarky as all get out. Last November we had a couple “guest chefs” working with us on a big special event, and our hotel’s general manager wandered into the kitchen and heard her barking at one of the guest chefs. She told her, “Be nice!” Not ten minutes earlier, this same guest chef had commented to me with a grin, “Man, I could work with her all day, every day.” More recently, my coworker had to take some medical leave after emergency surgery (right as we were heading into our busiest season). She returned last week. A few days before she came back, one of the waitstaff asked me, “So, are you glad Carol’s coming back?” And I was all, “Oh hell yes!” (because I was effing exhausted). He seemed honestly puzzled when he replied, “Really? I thought you two didn’t get along.” :rolleyes:
Sit at the bar at a PF Changs on a busy night. You can get a clear shot of the kitchen. While it is extremely loud from all the sizzling food, banging pots and pans, and clanging plates I rarely hear yelling back there.
I think they ramp it up for TV drama also.
I’ve never worked with professional chefs but I wonder it it’s a self-fulfilling phenomena. People starting out as professional chefs act this way because that’s the way they’ve seen professional chefs act.
As for how it started, I’ll look to another situation - professional sports. Professional athletes used to be expected to be modest and respectful in their public demeanor. Young people, looking to emulate the sports heroes they admired, would follow their example.
Of course, many athletes were not naturally modest and respectful by nature. And with time, some of them started letting their true arrogance show in public. Now if they were an average athlete, the higher-ups would intervene and tell them to behave when they were in public. But if they were a top-tier athlete, the higher-ups would make an exception and look the other way while that athlete publicly displayed his arrogance.
Young people watched and saw that some professional athletes were now acting arrogantly. And they noticed that only the top-tier athletes were acting this way - the average athletes were still behaving themselves. And instead of seeing that only a top-tier athlete could get away with arrogance, they saw arrogance as an attribute of being a top-tier athlete. They saw the tail as wagging the dog.
And young people entering sports still emulated their heroes so they adopted the arrogant attitude they saw their heroes displaying. Arrogance became a standard feature of an athlete, regardless of whether or not he had the skills to back it up.
Which brings me back to professional chefs. I think at one point, there was probably a time when chefs were expected to act like decent human beings. But some chefs, because of their superior cooking skills, were allowed to get away with acting like jerks. Young students entering the cooking field saw that only the top chefs acted like jerks and so they emulated this behavior. And with that, acting like a jerk just became a standard attribute of being a professional chef.
That’s a real factor. But there is a difference between yelling, and being a jerk. The yelling is necessary to be heard, the being a jerk part is mostly TV drama.
Yelling is a sign of lack of control and proper preperations, assholery, and learned traits. Many cooks and chefs are assholes for no good reason. I do not allow it nor condone it in my kitchens. I find most chefs and many cooks to be pretentious dicks.
Away they go.
Shouting is different. If you must raise your voice in order to send a clear message it can be understandable but usually not nessasary even in large busy hotel kitchens.
86 haddock? I only have 80, go tell John he can finish smoking later and have him grab the 3 biggest ones and cut them in half the long way. Now, if I’m gonna cook 86 haddocks in 15 minutes I’ve got to go powder my nose.