For the same reason so many cooks and chefs smoke, drink, do drugs, have a rather “varied” sex life, and aren’t generally considered mainstream.
My tats
I’ve answered some of this but I’m in the mood for a long answer, so here it is…
It starts not with “what makes chefs get tattoos” but with “what makes people who are more likely to get tattoos chefs”. Our job isn’t, despite what you might think, glamorous. Even the most accomplished chefs and virtually all cooks are in the shadows of restaurateurs or figure head chefs. Do you really think Keller, Chang, Flay, or any of the “big” chefs still cook? With notable exceptions (Achatz, etc.) few do. The work, the hard and grueling work, is done by chefs whose name will likely never be in a paper. We’re the dark, shady, figures behind glitz and glamour. It takes a particular person to like and work that life.
We’re adrenaline junkies. When table six’ app comes back, nine wants special mains, twelve has been waiting because someone dropped the spinach on the floor, and there’s 14 chits on the board we’re happiest. Not that we LIKE being in the weeds but we shine there. Outside of work we live the same life. We drink, we do drugs, we spend our spare time in a circle of people who work the same hours as us, cops, nurses, hookers, crooks and swindlers, fire technicians – all adrenaline junkies, too. We friend and date in this pool of crazies. Fancy cars and big houses, expensive clothes and fat wallets aren’t what passes as attractive here. Instead it’s personality, individuality, and a knack for having wild stories to pass the night in a low down tavern at the end of the pier in a dark city.
One doesn’t simply walk into Chefdor. Going from goon to boss is hard labor. Lowly paid, virtually thankless, labor. Over the years you’ll experience pain and defeat more than you like. Your hands are arthritic from constant exposure to extremely hot followed by freezing temperatures in short order. Your back is screwed up, you have cuts and burns. Kitchens have the second highest on the job injury rate in America. And, if you’re male and want kids, you better start early. There’s something about standing in front of a hot stove all night…
Those who stay with it for 5+, often 10+ years to become chefs, are freaks. Dedicated, crazy, extremely weird, freaks. They’re also smart and hard working. Who wouldn’t want a smart and hard working person in their job? Yet, for many reasons, they stay in a low paying, socially disruptive, job, working weekends and holidays and anniversaries. Why? Some because no one else wants them. Most because they love the work, love the food, love working with it. With freakdom and that kind of dedication come the food related tattoos. We are members of an exclusive, fire tested, crazy, secret society of people who are stuck behind walls, away from society, when everyone else is awake, only to be let out into the dark of the night when no one cares. And those tats tell that story.
That’s not to say that these days you won’t get cooks and chefs that will just get tats and shave their heads because “everyone else is doing it”. But the grizzled veterans of this business, like sailors, are just broken shells adorned with pictures telling their life behind a stove and in bars when the only company is a washed up hooker from New Jersey who is really a film star and just does this until she is discovered – for the last 20 years of her life.
So Paula Deen has diabetes. Had it for a while, I am told. But once the news leaked to the press (and by “leaked” I mean she signed a freaking contract to be a highly paid spokesperson for a diabetes drug), the “foodie” world went into asshole overdrive.
Now, let me be clear about this. I strongly dislike Paula Deen and everything she stands for. Her food is shit, her restaurants suck, she’s genuinely annoying, gives us Southerners a bad name, and she is a parasite on the beauty that is culinary arts. She is a commercial sellout whose “products” are overpriced and underwhelming. She is, in short, not someone I’d spend an evening cooking with or whose food I’d want to eat.
But she has diabetes. And, suddenly, everyone sees an “in” to assail her. As if she hadn’t given us enough reasons to dislike her, this is the big one, the one we supposedly can all agree on. Butter and fat and lard and boxes of sugar and beer battered bacon made her sick.
Bullshit. Unless you’re the very physician who got her diagnosis and knows her story there’s nothing to reasonably suggest why she has diabetes. Tens of thousands of Americans, living healthy and abstaining from pounds of butter and sugar, every year are diagnosed with this illness. Sure, there’s some ways to speed up or even cause diabetes and weight, diet, and lifestyle in general are not rarely a cause. But we do not know this. We don’t know the medical backstory. And unless you do, unless you’re looking at a chart and an anamnesis and her blood work and more it’s best to shut the hell up and work with things we know.
We know she’s a bad cook. We know she’s as fake as a three dollar bill. We know her food is crap. We know she employs more ghost writers and message massagers than cooks. We know that. All that makes her a bad role model and an even worse cook. Isn’t that enough?
Steve Jobs lived a mostly vegetarian, often fruititarian, life. So, does this mean his diet caused his cancer and killed him? Jay Hewitt has diabetes and is one of the healthiest people on the planet, otherwise. Billy Mills, Marine and world class Olympic runner, has diabetes. Surely he must have wrecked himself with bad food. Halle Berry is a vegan. She has diabetes. The list goes on.
Don’t assume. Assumptions are for idiots and schmucks. There’s more than enough on this buttered plate of Paula Deen’s to dislike her, there’s no need to attack her on something she may, or may not, be completely not in control of.
I am publishing a cooking book under a Creative Commons license. All of April and most of May I’ll be on the road, cooking and promoting the book in independent book stores and cooking supply stores around the country.
A little more than a year ago I started writing longer posts on this site and spent considerable time on websites such as eGullet and Quora writing and answering questions about food. Soon people started telling me that I should write a cook book. There’s only one snag – I don’t like cook books. Food and cooking are too cool to be reduced to recipes.
Will you look at that map. What kind of mentally unstable individual would willingly subject themselves to 16,000 miles of open American road without being paid millions in return? Me, of course.
What you see here is the first incarnation (7,000 miles) of my planned spring food tour. Sometime around the first I will be jumping into my trusty 2009 Cooper Convertible, roll down the roof, turn on the Ramones on my radio, and drive.
Originally posted on Quora, replicated here. Please let me know what you think, I am genuinely interested in your thoughts.
I presume for this write-up that “success” means to make more money than you spend, have a steady and predictable diner ecosystem, enjoy your work, and are – if not plastered with awards – at least regarded as a good choice to spend money on food.
I originally wrote this for a magazine that should remain unnamed to protect the guilty. After riding my ass for six weeks I had it sent back to me because it was “not in line with our readers’ wishes”. So it’s (in a trimmed and slightly less in line with their readers wishes version) here, now.
Resolve to make 2012 your “food for me” year. Change your eating and cooking habits for the better. Join me and everyone else who will in a move to make the world a better place, help local farmers and ranchers, and live healthier.
Granted, it took lowering the price from $40,000 to $25,000 (click image for larger version, link for a G+ post I made in December) but Todd English managed to sell a few hours of his time for the equivalent of many families’ annual budget. Considering he owes somewhere in the area of $5 million to landlords, employees, and purveyors, he can really use the money, too.
This isn’t about the megalomania of a mediocre chef who managed to squeeze into Boston’s food diaspora and turn “good enough” into good. Despite being “broken up” with by the people of Boston as represented by Boston Mag he’s maintained a rather, shall we say, self-centered attitude I kind of envy him for. Few chefs have the balls to bravely declare themselves “the best chef in America” and sleep well knowing their employees are being foreclosed on after not having been paid for weeks.
This isn’t about tanking Bonfire in Boston and then blaming everyone, from your cooks and servers to the city for your failure to understand that $30 appetizers that look and taste like the greasy spoon two streets over delivered them for reheating just don’t cut it.
This isn’t even about Groupon selling what you are offering.
It’s about the dimwitted losers who paid $25,000 to a mediocre cook just to see him cook. I don’t know who you are, but that amount of money would have, without enriching Groupon or English, bought you a seat next to Jamie Oliver, flight, hotel, and food, at one of Fifteen‘s dinners. AND you’d have done good with it. If you’d spent it on a trip to Napa, $25k would have bought you a visit by Thomas Keller who, while also quite the megalomaniacal egotist, at least knows how to cook and keep restaurants running and employees paid. Heck, $25k would have sent you around the world to watch René Redzepi and Claus Meyer cook in the best restaurant in the world, noma.
THIS is, simply, what’s wrong with the world of food.
It is hard to pinpoint when exactly tips in the United States moved from a voluntary acknowledgement of good service by patrons to a mandatory aspect of a waiter or server’s income. Love them or hate them, think it’s ridiculous that undereducated students make six times as much as trained cooks for half the work, tips are here to stay. Since I have to constantly explain how tips work (it’s not as easy as you think), here’s a quick primer…
Tips are by no means mandatory. Despite being an integral part of server incomes they are still classified as voluntary and can be witheld for bad or non-existing service, or really any reason at all. They belong to employees. Servers can not be required to give a part of the tip to the restaurant or employers, though horror stories about such practices in the recent years have shown that this is practiced in some chain restaurants. Where it becomes public it’s often a cause for civil actions.
How's that for a popup - dining 60ft above ground...
Most everyone agrees: pop ups are a good thing. While the trend itself has been largely co-opted by the very brick and mortar restaurants it once so efficiently attempted to compete against, the individual restaurant, built quickly, serving traditional and experimental food that could not be served in more conventional places, still provides value.
Most everyone. The largest holdout group are the owners and managers of suitable spaces, often currently “cold” restaurants who have their doubts. Short term rental seems, at least at first glance, a bad investment and management strategy.
Not so. After dozens of negotiations with management and rental companies, real estate executors, and individual proprietors the objections thrown in my direction are most always the same – while the restaurant is “hot” it won’t sell. While it’s occupied it can not be shown. And, most of all, a fear of damages and vandalism. Those objections might be strong enough to stop newcomers to the business of non-permanent food service operations. Luckily arguments for pop up restaurants are much stronger and much more persuasive.
I still can’t get my head positively around Klout. On one hand it’s being well hyped as the place to find influencers in specific topics, on the other hand it just recently released a list of the ten most influential “chefs” containing precisely one chef.
Which, of course, puts this one in a different light:
Tour De Food
