"Are your parents siblings or are you that stupid?" - How I survived my training as a chef and still benefit from it today

Silence. A dark room. In my chef's jacket, apron and with my eyes closed, I sit in the corner. Twenty minutes to go. I enjoy every second of it to the full. Colleagues frown when the new apprentice (the word "trainee" was not in use back then) arrives far too early every day and sits alone in the dark. But I couldn't do it without this time of mental preparation, of inner preparation.

Before the next ten hours are ruled by noise, I soak up the morning calm. Mental mobilization to withstand the verbal attacks, insults and humiliation, to be able to endure shouting, yelling and the unfriendliness and vulgar language that is apparently considered to be professional ethics. Despite this inner contemplation in the morning, I am regularly caught off guard and after the first scolding of the day, my speech center can only manage incomprehensible babble. And so I sit there, outwardly stupid, early and senseless, but in reality like a cornered animal: frightened, vulnerable, shy, wide-eyed and completely overwhelmed.

I didn't yet know what advantages this first professional socialization would bring.

Humiliation, insults, strong language

"You're such a huge asshole!" The boss stomps towards me. I instinctively step back half a meter. Adrenaline shoots through my veins, my pupils probably dilate. Completely shocked, I stand in front of the vacuum machine. Yes, I had messed up. I was only supposed to seal the brioche, not vacuum it completely, otherwise there wouldn't be much left of the airy yeast pastry. I pressed stop too late, I didn't yet have a feel for the machine in my first year of training. All that's left of the five brioches is a compressed lump.

"Get away!" The boss jabs me in the flank with his finger, I wince and bump into the fridge. A pot falls to the floor with a clatter. "Jesus Christ! Don't make such a racket!" My mouth is dry as dust, my hands are shaking. The chef grabs the plastic bag from the vacuum machine, tears it open and places brioche next to brioche. But nothing happens. The squashed lumps of dough no longer unfold into the original brioche.

"You goddamn idiot! Do you think I'm standing in the patisserie all morning for nothing? All the goods up your ass! How stupid can a person be?"

I didn't notice his transformation back into a choleric boss, he always flipped his switch so suddenly.

After six months as a trainee chef, my hearing became so finely tuned that I could unmistakably hear my boss's mood from his morning greeting. The snappy "Tomorrow!" was the verdict on my day. Tone and voice, hardness of expression, with eye contact or thrown down in passing like a dead carcass or quiet and neutral - every day for three years I lurked like a cat ready to pounce. "Morning!" with the hope of being able to relax a little. At least for the time being. Days without a morning greeting were the worst.

Bang!

"What the fuck?! Do you have a brain in your head?" The tray bangs on the work surface and a few pieces of meat fall off. I had forgotten to top the pork medallions with ham and cheese the day before so that they could be baked today. I immediately rush into the cold store. "Where are you running to? We're sending table 12!"

Lunch service. Three meetings of approx. 15 to 20 people plus parallel à la carte business in the restaurant. Service staff rush into the kitchen, attach orders to the receipt bar, the chef shouts them through the kitchen: "Two cover 3, one cover 5, one fillet of beef medium, one well done, one pike-perch and one sole, but with pasta instead of potatoes!"

What was table 12 again? There it is, the worst of all bad moments. At first, I couldn't even dream of concentrating in this environment. So I regularly forgot all sorts of things, and even more so when I was stressed. I was in shock. Think! Think! Think! Table 12...? I waved a frying pan as camouflage, trying to scrape out seconds before all hell would break loose on me once again. Nothing. My head is blank. Is the gazelle chased by the cheetah thinking about its escape route? I open the oven, grab something, put it on the stove, start cooking something. That's when I fly up.

"Dude! You're so stupid! What can you actually do?" The boss storms over to my workstation, my body immediately switches back to autopilot and I take a step back. "Where are you going? Here!" He grabs me by the chef's jacket and pulls me towards him and the stove. To avoid tipping over forwards, I reflexively stretch out one arm and hit the ball of my hand on the gas stove's stone plate, which is several hundred degrees hot. In a fraction of a second, I get a burn that will torment me for weeks. For example, when mixing fruit salad. Gloves, possibly in black to contrast with the white chef's jacket, were not yet common back then. Too dangerous on the stove, the plastic would have to fester from the wound. Unattractive. It was much more common for such accidents to be met with ignorance. If not a scolding for being so incredibly stupid again.

The chef reaches for the side dishes and prepares them. I stare blankly in front of me, not noticing anything. Suddenly, there's a sharp push and the chef hits me on the shoulder. "Hey, are you awake? At least watch when I show you something!" After he's finished the plate, he asks me: "Are your parents actually siblings or are you that stupid?"

"Only the tough get into the garden. The very tough go to the rock garden."

It went on like this for three years. It didn't always need the famous stress and hectic pace that you often see on TV. Even during hours of relatively relaxed preparation work, when the dishes were being cooked for service times, things could be brutal.

"Of course your parents are divorced! With offspring like you, I'd divorce them too. Even from my dog. Ha ha ha!" Escapes the newcomer with such When a verbal attack drains the color from your face and makes way for a shocked thousandyard stare, it's an immediate opportunity to go one better. "Yes, your mom may cook delicious food, but in the end she stinks of fish and cooks salty food. Here you'll learn how to cook properly!"

Years later, a Michelin-starred chef explained to me how a proper chef training program works: "You have to break the young person first. You have to break their will, their idea of good cooking, drive the fluff out of their heads. Today, they all come from school and are as stupid as tinned bread. And there's nothing going on physically, they collapse when they have to carry half a deer from the cold store to the chopping board. So you always have to hit them with a hammer right from the start. And when they are completely exhausted and about to throw everything away, the time has come. Then you can rebuild them properly according to your own ideas and train them to be clever cooks."

Vicious comparisons can also be drawn here. A trainee colleague once pointed out to me: "As long as they're screaming and shouting, they still have hope with you. Only when they stop freaking out and say nothing at all have they completely given up on you."

And so it was no coincidence, but a method of throwing non-swimmers (trainees) into the deep end in a more or less controlled manner, both in the kitchen and in service. The better someone swam - no, the longer it took for them to sink, the less badly they were treated from then on.

Hierarchy is everything

When I read in the media about the case of star chef Christian Jürgens, one reader commented that the professionalization of the kitchen is said to have taken place in the French military. Hence the many French technical terms used internationally today and the division of the kitchen into different posts, i.e. areas of work. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything reliable on this in my research, and this type of history was not part of the training either. But it seems obvious: what is called a kitchen team today is also called a kitchen brigade. The dictionary defines a brigade as a troop unit consisting of units from different branches of the armed forces; a quarrelsome (army) group. There is the white brigade, i.e. the kitchen, and the black brigade, the service. The hierarchy is not flat:

Sexual harassment or a friendly gesture?

It was normal for female service staff in particular to regularly receive a pat on the bottom. An all-encompassing, morally clean definition of a slap on the bottom would have been difficult. There were colleagues who sweated and toiled together for years, knew each other inside out and could communicate unmistakably across meters with a quick glance. A pat on the bottom was a sign of friendly, collegial solidarity. If this solidarity didn't exist, self-assertion took hold: "Touch me here and you're guaranteed a salty slap!" I have heard female colleagues say this several times in unmistakable tones, not only to chefs, but also to restaurant and hotel managers. In response to an appreciative look, they would say: "But listen! I don't understand those girls who immediately start crying about every little thing but can't open their mouths."

"You hurt my feelings!" vs. resilience Society is becoming more sensitive, people are being gendered - or not - and arguing about what is better. Marginalized groups are gaining a new and ever stronger lobby. (Is it actually still allowed to write marginalized groups or are the fringes immediately offended?) The sensors for discrimination are becoming ever more sensitive, hurt feelings are communicated more often and more directly. At last, chefs with questionable or even illegal egos are getting a slap on the wrist. For far too long, too many people have suffered as a result of kitchen culture - if what happens there can be called culture at all. To a certain extent, all of this can be seen as a positive development.

But perhaps there is a point at which heightened sensitivity no longer has any advantage and can make a fulfilling life difficult. You also have to distinguish between clearly illegal behavior and an unfriendly, insulting, vulgar communication culture. And even if nothing is further from my mind than defending or justifying this (I suffered the most from it among my six colleagues at the time), I would like to highlight the advantages of this experience and gastronomic training.

They undoubtedly created a reliable armor that has made my life much easier in my everyday professional life and in various industries to this day. Once you've been through hell, it's hard to catch fire again. Resilience has been a fashionable topic for a few years now. The Duden dictionary defines it as: psychological resistance; the ability to survive difficult life situations without lasting impairment.

The aforementioned being thrown in at the deep end, which is still common in the catering industry (probably to this day) - and will not be 100% avoidable - turned out to be a great advantage. This way, I learned to learn without being constantly dependent on detailed explanations, to work things out for myself, to understand them in the first instance without help. Where occupational health and safety became relevant, an experienced person stood by and observed. (Burnt palms were not worth mentioning back then.) Educationally, it was basically old hat, because how can a person learn to walk if they never trip and fall?

Years later, when I worked in the medical sector as a surgical positioning nurse (unskilled worker), nobody prepared me for my first encounter with a deceased person. Of course, this is part of nursing training, but this was not the case for the OR nurses. We were sometimes responsible for heavy lifting. And that's how I also helped move a large, heavy man from the operating table to a hospital bed. It wasn't until I was holding his arm that I realized: "Strange, there's no breathing tube in his neck and what's that rough skin stitch? Oh shit! He's dead!"

My knees went weak for a moment and I watched my reaction with curiosity. A colleague asked: "Are you OK?" But I immediately regained my composure and said to myself: "Hello? You wanted to work in the operating theater, so don't cry!"

Even when senior or head physicians, surgeons, who are also known for their healthy egos, shouted because something didn't suit them, it didn't affect my pulse rate at all. And of course, the swearing of an academic is very different from that of a chef. It has more that could be construed as fact or argument, rather than just vulgar language. Even later, during his training to become a paramedic, the stress returned. But the gastro armor withstood that too. It also withstood the subliminal malice that I experienced as a desk jockey in event management and self-employment, which was the norm of immorality in this world: constantly interrupting meetings, stealing ideas and denigrating the boss.

Conclusion:

Over the past ten years or so, the hospitality industry has slowly begun to understand that its unspoken work ethic of unfriendliness was ultimately damaging itself. It's probably not even the specific working hours of this industry or the physically hard work (both of which also exist in medicine), but ultimately this very particular tone amongst each other that drives new recruits away and can one day become too much for even the most experienced.

But today's hyper-excitement and sensitivity is also too much, to which the (former?) gastro tone can form a good counterbalance.

If you didn't already work as a waiter during your studies, so you know the world of gastronomy and want to save yourself expensive resilience seminars, look for a medium-sized restaurant or hotel with four stars or more, grab a silverback who knows all the tricks of the trade, and maybe you can still pick up something from the old school.

In the meantime, it remains exciting to see how a society is becoming increasingly sensitive and at the same time celebrating resilience skills.