As A Culinary Pro, I Answered 9 Of Your Most Burning Questions About Working In The Restaurant Industry

Hello, curious cooks and gourmands! I’m Meg, a culinary professional and lover of restaurants and restaurant people, and I’m here to answer all your questions about working on the line!

With years of kitchen experience and a degree in culinary arts, I’m eager to share the insights and expertise I’ve gained from working with some remarkable chefs.

Since 2020, I’ve noticed a long-overdue shift in the culture’s perception and affection for cooks and restaurant workers. The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments and society to recognize food service workers as essential. In 2022, the hugely popular series about kitchen culture, The Bear, dramatized the non-stop work of running a restaurant and the diverse life experiences of the people working in kitchens.

What was once viewed as the “underbelly” of society is suddenly being given a bright spotlight with an Emmy Award-winning dramedy series. People have had a kind of voyeuristic interest in kitchen culture for a long time. It’s why we have TV shows like Top Chef and everything starring Gordon Ramsay. As someone who’s worked in kitchens for years now, people ask me a LOT of questions about what it’s really like, so I thought I would open the forum up to our BuzzFeed Community and let you ask me anything about my experience.

So without further ado, here are your questions, and my best responses…

QUESTION: I’ve heard from a lot of people, “You don’t want to know what goes on in a restaurant kitchen.” So my question is: How dirty are most restaurants really?

ANSWER: Good line cooks take a lot of pride in working clean and having an organized station — your cleanliness shows everyone in the kitchen that you know what you’re doing. The same goes for chefs; their kitchen reflects their leadership. That’s how it works.

All that being said, mess and dirt are occupational hazards in the professional kitchen; sauces spill, hot pans get dropped, and cooks with dirty clogs shuffle around the kitchen for 10+ hours daily. So yes, kitchens get dirty, but whether or not they remain that way at the end of the night is a reflection of the chefs working there.

If you are nervous about food safety when dining out, check the state of the restaurant’s dining room and bathroom when you arrive. If the managers care about the cleanliness of the kitchen, the dining room is definitely spick-and-span.

Also, I advise getting to know the people cooking at your favorite places. Make an effort to thank the chef if you see them walking through the dining room and introduce yourself! Look out for how the chef interacts with their employees and other guests. I’ve worked in kitchens that deck-washed* the floors every night and places that mopped mayyyyybe once a week. You can guess which one was led by a respectful chef who cared deeply about their restaurant and which was run by a chef who didn’t.

Moreover, word-of-mouth is still the best way to find solid restaurants with good people working there. Trust your friends’ and locals’ recommendations over Google and Yelp reviews!

*Deck-washing — yes, like what sailors do to the deck of a ship. Some professional kitchens have drains in the floor that allow you to deck-wash with soapy water, deck scrubbers, and big squeegees. It can be fun, lobbing buckets of soapy water across a kitchen while other cooks raced to scrub dirt from the tiles into the drains.

QUESTION: I once heard that hollandaise sauce often sits around for hours, so one should only eat eggs Benedict if ordered before noon. Is that true?

ANSWER: I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. This is mostly true.

Hollandaise is an emulsion of egg yolk and melted butter. It has to be held at a temperature warm enough so the butter doesn’t solidify and cool enough so that the yolk doesn’t scramble. And what else loves warm but not too hot temperatures? Food-borne illness-ridden bacteria! Yuck!

Anthony Bourdain famously exposed the unappetizing truth about hollandaise in his memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Restaurants serving hollandaise should ideally make a new sauce every hour or so, but during a brunch rush, pausing service to make a delicately emulsified sauce is nearly impossible.

So, to be safe, I would advise you to get your order soon after the restaurant opens or save eggs Benny for brunch at home. Sauce-making is intimidating for many home cooks, but the reality is that hollandaise sauce has few ingredients and takes minutes to make; plus, any breakfast guests (wink, wink) will be SO impressed if you whip up eggs benedict for them. Being cooked for is always sexy.

QUESTION: If a dish becomes popular, are you happy or bored with making it over and over?

ANSWER: This is an infuriating answer, but it really depends on the dish. Some dishes are more fun and easy to plate than others. I worked the grill station at a restaurant that sold a lot of flank steaks, and I always got stressed out during pickups* that had a bunch of beef orders. I do not miss making that dish.

*pickup — a word used by line cooks and chefs for an order during service that is being cooked and plated all at once.

Working on the line is the ultimate expression of the flow state. Once you’ve worked a station for a while, hopefully, most of what you’re doing during service is muscle memory. As the ticket machine prints orders, the expeditor* calls pickups and your body moves synchronously with the rest of the kitchen. So, while you may get tired of a dish on your station occasionally, you never get tired of that flow. That invigorating feeling is part of what keeps many people in the industry despite its less savory qualities.

*expeditor (aka ‘expo’) — a back-of-house role, often the chef, who is responsible for tracking, organizing, and calling incoming food orders (aka tickets or ‘chits’). For sports analogy folks, they are like the quarterback, making decisions about how and when the dishes will be cooked and sent to the dining room. They are also the kitchen point person for the front-of-house. They inspect and zhuzh every plate that makes it to the pass. ‘Expo-ing’ is a role some people thrive in and others find supremely overwhelming. I fall somewhere in the middle: both overwhelmed and somewhat skilled on expo.

*The pass — an area of a kitchen where cooks place dishes to be approved by the expeditor and sent into the dining room. It is the bridge between the front and back of house teams and the site of much strife and distress.

QUESTION: What is the best way to ask somebody working in a restaurant what is made fresh vs. in advance? And, what should we, as diners, only ever want to eat fresh?

ANSWER: I would take a page out of Whitman/Lasso’s book and ask your server about the freshness of the food with curiosity, not judgment. Rather than ask, “Is the mayonnaise store-bought?” you could ask, “How does the chef prepare the sauce for the chicken salad?” Or, you can try a more general question and ask, “Is there anything the chef really loves making or talking about that we should try?”

In general, I think, we are a lot more excited to tell you about the food if we feel like you are genuinely interested in the restaurant and not just interested in what you can get out of it. If something is local and/or homemade, most restaurants will want to tout that and put it on the menu, unless you are at a swanky farm-to-table place, in which case they want diners to assume everything is local and homemade.

Don’t hesitate to ask about the food you’re paying for, but be conscientious and kind when asking!

Freshness is crucial when it comes to seafood. If you’re craving fish, go to a restaurant that specializes in seafood, rather than a chophouse or some other kind of restaurant.

At a steakhouse, maybe one in six guests orders a seafood dish, so most of the time, the fish just sits in the kitchen, waiting to be ordered. The longer it sits, the more bacteria grow. At a (hopefully popular) seafood restaurant, most people order fish dishes, and with that high turnover rate, the fish isn’t sitting around for long between when it’s delivered and when it’s cooked. Also, seafood restaurants are more likely to work with trusted seafood purveyors instead of wholesale food distributors who are less discerning with their seafood products.

Dishes like fried calamari or fish and chips are mostly safe to eat because the fish is cooked into submission, but if you worry about foodborne illness, steer clear of room-temperature sashimi and raw oysters.

Fresh greens and sprouts are another food safety concern that many people aren’t aware of. Because they are often served raw and stored in plastic containers that retain heat and moisture very easily, lettuce and sprouts can become playgrounds for bacteria like E. coli. Just be mindful of this the next time you’re debating getting a side salad or fries with your burger; fries might actually be the safer option.

QUESTION: This is a really broad question, but what things change for you when cooking at home vs. in a restaurant?

ANSWER: Simplicity is the most significant difference between cooking at home and work. I won’t cook a dish for myself if it requires more than one pan.

When I’m working full-time in restaurants, I don’t really want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen at home, but I still want to eat comforting and simple food that’s good for me. The great irony of being a chef is that we are surrounded by food all the time but often don’t have time to eat ourselves, with the exception of family meals, which are prepared before service by one of the cooks for everyone working in the restaurant.

Family meals are usually comfort food, and while grilled cheese and fried rice will feed a group of cooks enough energy to get through the night, I still like to get my greens in somehow. I usually eat those at home (often by whacking a bunch of spinach into a blender with a frozen banana and calling it a day).

Another difference is that home cooking is mostly spontaneous, while restaurant dishes are composed, revised, and edited according to the chef’s tastes and the customer’s desires. They are carefully crafted, with multiple components that can take days and even weeks to make.

When cooking at home, I don’t plan out days ahead for what I want for dinner. When I enter my kitchen, I am typically trying to answer three questions: What do I have in the fridge/pantry? What am I craving? How quickly can I make something to satisfy that craving?

QUESTION: What happens to the untouched food that gets sent back? Does it get thrown away or given away, or do you sometimes get to take it home?

ANSWER: In my experience, partially eaten food is always thrown out, but if untouched food is sent back and can’t be salvaged or re-plated to suit the guest’s needs, it will most likely be eaten by someone who works at the restaurant.

No one wants to see delicious food in the trash, especially not the cooks who prepared it. I’ve seen servers argue over a half-chicken that was too browned for the guest. So yes, food that is sent back and gets re-fired* will still end up in someone’s belly.

*re-fire — when the expeditor decides a dish is unacceptable to give to a guest or a dish gets sent back to the kitchen and needs re-making, the line cooks ‘re-fire’ by making it again per the chef and guest’s specifications.

QUESTION: I have worked in restaurants but always in front-of-house. I have dealt with my fair share of harassment from cooks, which is standard in the hospitality industry. My question is, how is it working as a woman in the back of the house? Do you feel like you have to have balls made of titanium and put up with no bullshit? Does it depend on your co-workers?

ANSWER: Anita, I’m so sorry you’ve had to experience harassment at work. Thank you for highlighting this issue; gender discrimination and sexual harassment have no place in any professional setting, including restaurants.

Some kitchens, like lots of other businesses, are used to running like “old boys’ clubs,” which creates unfair and often dangerous work environments. Harassment and hazing have been norms in the industry for a long time; I won’t pretend otherwise. People, particularly women, have been made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe in the restaurant industry, but this culture is becoming less and less tolerated in professional kitchens.

Working on the line has been incredibly empowering. That power has less to do with having “balls made of titanium” (I am pretty sensitive) and more to do with the confidence I gained as a member of a kitchen brigade that people relied on and supported.

Although I have had my moments crying in the walk-in,* I am usually empowered enough not to listen to any negative noise from cooks or people in my life who may have thought I didn’t belong on the line. I knew that I did, and so did the chef.

I have been lucky enough to work for incredible chefs, and many of them happened to be women. They showed me the ropes of success and how to command respect in a male-dominated industry.

My advice for people entering the culinary world trying to find healthy and sustainable work is to trust your instincts and not settle for a toxic environment. When I started working in restaurants, I felt like I had to “pay my dues” and put up with bad behavior because it was all part of the job. It is NOT. Your job as a cook is to show up, stay organized, and push out some food you can be proud of. Everything else? The jokes, the hazing, the drinking, the harassment… that is a dying culture of an unhealthy industry. It is not the job.

To men in the industry, don’t turn a blind eye. Speak up when you notice your coworkers harassing others at work or being inappropriate.

All that said, there are many kitchens with positive, empathetic chefs who will allow you to thrive as your authentic self. Some of my best friends are men I met working in kitchens, and most of my experiences with men in kitchens have been supportive and positive.

*walk-in — the giant walk-in refrigerator in a professional kitchen, and a favorite spot of mine for handling difficult emotions. Tears may heat your cheeks, but the walk-in air will always cool you down.

QUESTION: Some say there are two kinds of chefs: those who constantly try to achieve fame and acclaim in any way possible — be it competitions or trying to get on TV in any way possible — and those who choose to toil away day after day, constantly trying to improve their craft while seeking no other applause than a truly satisfied customer… What do you think?

ANSWER: I would argue there are as many kinds of chefs as there are grains of sand on a beach. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either of the two kinds of chefs you’ve mentioned here. Choosing to work on your craft, provide nourishment and service to members of your community, and train the next generation of cooks and chefs is far more than “toiling away.”

Seeking acclaim for hard work is completely human, and most people have ambitions for their careers. Still, in the culinary industry, everything is heightened. Where others seek career acclaim through promotions and financial compensation, chefs achieve celebrity, television, book deals, and social media followings.

If you’ve spent time with chefs, you know they tend to be competitive, often restless in their pursuit of excellence; at the same time, they are, at heart, in the business of service and spend their careers nourishing others. Rather than slotting chefs into the categories of ambitious and toiling, I think we should respect the service aspect of their work and commend them for dedicating their life to it, whether or not they received accolades for it.

QUESTION: How do you personally deal with the drinking/drug culture that exists in restaurant kitchens, and what should people know about it?

ANSWER: The industry has evolved so much over the past few decades, but food service is still, to a certain extent, a “pirate profession,” and some behavior, especially around alcohol, is tolerated in professional kitchens that would never slide in typical 9-to-5s. I know some industry leaders who want to abolish shifties* from kitchen culture, and I know chefs who insist that shifties and casually socializing with your fellow cooks are critical for creating a sense of comradery and purpose among a kitchen crew.

The work of a line cook is incredibly grueling at times, and it makes sense that some people would want to “let off some steam” at the end of a long night with a drink. But, when you’re working five to six nights a week, “letting off steam” quickly becomes a full-fledged dependence and an unhealthy coping mechanism. I’ve seen this happen more times than I care to say, but at some of the places I have worked, the restaurant’s owners and leadership supported the people and helped them get the help they needed. That is the kind of commitment to staff that the industry needs more of, in my opinion.

I don’t have all the answers to this question, but I do hope that substance abuse continues to become a more normalized conversation in the industry and mainstream culture.

*shifties — (aka shift drink) a free drink, typically an alcoholic one, offered to the kitchen crew at the end of a night of service

To be completely honest, my feelings about the industry are constantly evolving. While there are many things I wish I could change about restaurant work and the status quo for chefs, I still love the work. To anyone considering joining the culinary ranks, I hope I did not dissuade you. It is difficult, messy, tiring work, but it is also incredibly fulfilling. You just have to decide if it’s right for you.

And that’s it! 86 questions. The kitchen is officially closed. Do you still have queries about working in professional kitchens? Ask me anything in the comments, or use this Google form to share your thoughts.