There was a blog post recently that was picked up and retweeted by Joanne Chang of Myers + Chang and Flour, which got me to thinking about the choice I’ve made to insert myself into the restaurant business. Am I a masochist? Why would I, as a highly intelligent, educated, more or less emotionally well balanced young woman, choose to enter a job that involves late and long hours, not insignificant expenditures of physical and psychological effort, little to no vacation time, certainly no sick days?
People ask me all the time and sometimes, for expediency’s sake, I say it’s because I can’t say no to challenge.
It is not, however, challenge alone which has brought me to restaurants. Rather, it is the particular genre of challenge, and the very particular result found in a restaurant, mentioned by Jenkins in her article: a particular stamina that is developed. This stamina is built, it seems, on a few things. There is physical stamina, sure. But the more crucial elements I realize, are an emotional and psychological stamina. An ability to do work with full attention and investment, but also to work with a clinical eye. Imagine a world class doctor: on the one hand she needs to be deeply committed to and caring for each individual patient who comes her way. On the other hand, she needs to stay appropriately detached so that she can properly deliver prognoses and do her work. It’s not very different for those of us running a restaurant. We need to be passionate and deeply committed to each person, each plate of food that comes out of the kitchen, every tiny gaffe and major coup. And we also need to be exceeding well balanced, level headed, we need to take pride in working hard but not to be prideful that we do…
Jenkins is right about the kind of fraternity which hinges on the “outsiderness” of working at a restaurant. This can be something to celebrate, this a special kind of fraternity born out of the long hours and hard labor. It is fraternity expressed in the way that staff, exhausted at the end of a night, will sit down at the bar and hash out that evening’s service at 1:00 or 2:00 am. And then there is a broader level of fraternity that gets expressed between those of us who work in restaurants meet for the first time. Like when, late night, I introduce two sous-chefs from different restaurants and they greet each other “hi, brother, nice to meet you.”
Privately, I’m thinking more deeply about the kind of personal growth that occurs for those who work in restaurants and how it seems to be a similar growth to those who work in health care and the healing arts. This has something, I think, to do with what happens when we are called into service for others. Jenkins is right to call out the “outsiderness” of that work — I would imagine that it can be similarly othering to be a night nurse in a hospital. My suspicion, however, is that the sense of otherness is not only due to the fact that it is night work. I’m describing also the outsiderness that comes, specifically with doing service work, because this is an important element to the ways that restaurant workers are othered. In most restaurants, the line cooks and bar backs and bussers are not acknowledged as the critical elements to the narrative of a night. What if this began to change? What if our restaurants were transformative places where new ways of being together, of serving and being served, were explored. I think this is why underground restaurants and secret dinners in places like Brooklyn and the Bay Area are so tantalizing. We don’t have to see our work as being outside. We’re already very much in.
