It’s almost 10pm on a Saturday night, and the last main courses have left the kitchen. The printer is still spitting out dessert checks as my colleague steps outside for a smoke. With the fish garnishes put away, it’s my turn to handle staff food. Spicy sausages are already cooking at 200C in a top-of-the-line combi oven. I quickly fry some frozen chips and prepare a tray of salad. To top it off, I bring out a large tub of Heinz tomato ketchup. When my colleague returns, we each grab a sausage and a handful of chips and eat them standing up as we clean our stations, make our prep lists, and prepare orders for the next day. It’s always humorous to see the contrast between what the customers and the chefs eat in the same restaurant. If you sit down for a meal where I work, you can expect a starter of ajo blanco with pickled crab and fresh green basil oil, followed by a perfectly cooked brill with sea greens, confit tomatoes, shrimps, and beurre blanc. For dessert, I recommend the brown butter custard tart, if it’s available. Yet, the chefs who create these dishes survive on licked spoons, scraps of carved meat, sprinkles of dessert garnishes, and half a dinner eaten after 10pm. Ten years ago, when I briefly considered working in fine dining, I spent two weeks in a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in the north. The only meal I saw prepared for staff was a sausage sandwich, with a brown sauce. Those of us volunteering, known as “stagiaires,” would hide packets of pre-sliced cheese and bread in the cloakroom and sneakily visit our secret stash a few times a day, like weary mice. I never found out how the paid full-time staff managed to eat. However, witnessing them work over 60 hours a week during my time there convinced me never to return to high-end kitchens like that one to find out. Earlier this year, I urged Joel Fearnley, a chef from North Yorkshire, to conduct a survey on his popular Instagram account, @for_the_chefs. Fearnley asked his 100,000-plus followers about their eating habits in the kitchen and received 242 responses, ranging from “nothing” to “anything I can get my hands on”. Chips were a common response, as were scraps and leftovers, bread, coffee, Red Bull, and cigarettes – a meal for many people in the hospitality industry. During a dinner with other chefs one Sunday night over plates of syrupy chicken and egg fried rice in Chinatown, I asked everyone at the table about their eating habits at work. One former colleague told me that she never received any food at a job she had in Manchester. To eat, some of the staff would hide leftovers in corners of the kitchen out of sight of the intricate CCTV system. Another friend, who worked at a high-end restaurant in central London run by a well-known chef, said that staff food was an afterthought at best. “For a while, we had a lot of leftover pork trim because everything had to be perfectly cut,” he said, while scooping up heavily glazed strips of duck breast onto his plate. “And they never ordered anything in. So every day it was pork belly curry, pork belly and rice, or pork mixed with leftover apples from the pastry section and pasta. It was weird stuff like that.” On occasion, when the chef-owner visited, he bragged about how much money he was making and then ordered cheeseburgers from an upscale chain to prove it. “I wouldn’t say they were amazing burgers, but those meals were a relief.” The more we drank Tsingtao, the worse the stories became. Another friend told me about a restaurant where they would roast lamb carcass bones for stock, and the entire kitchen staff would gather around as they came out of the oven. “We would munch on the meat and toss the bones into the pot. I knew it was gross, but we all did it because there wasn’t much else to eat.” When it comes to healthy eating, a chef’s diet does have some redeeming qualities. We eat a wide variety of plants, although in very small amounts. Every time I make green sauce, I’m consuming small quantities of basil, parsley, tarragon, garlic, capers, mustard, lemon, and olives (through the oil). This dietary diversity aligns with the current trend promoted by gut-health scientists like Tim Spector. Fasting, which is also believed to promote longevity, is another skill that chefs excel at, going for long stretches of time with nothing but black coffee and Diet Coke. However, the long hours and demanding work often take a toll. Chefs, in my experience, are known for drinking excessively and, when given the chance, indulging in rich foods. Robin Burrow, an academic at Cardiff University who studies “extreme work”, spent 10 years researching the working culture of elite restaurants and found that suffering, including eating poorly or not at all, can become an integral part of a chef’s identity. “While society may be moving towards minimizing suffering,” Burrow tells me over Zoom, “some chefs believe that greatness comes from enduring pain.” During his research, Burrow spent three weeks in a kitchen where chefs worked from 7am to 11pm without breaks. “Many of these individuals didn’t stop to eat at all,” he says. “And I expected there to be staff meals because I definitely needed one.” Burrow believes that chefs purposefully subject themselves to suffering, often to live up to an ideal image of a heroic, highly productive, and fearless cook. “If you’re in an environment where strength and stamina matter, you need to prove to others that you embody that ideal.” But why does that environment exist? Burrow speculates that it is partially due to the brigade system, popularized by renowned French restaurateur Auguste Escoffier, which introduced a military-inspired mindset into the kitchen and fostered a hyper-masculine culture where chefs, like soldiers, willingly endure whatever it takes to get the job done. He also believes that it is driven by economics. The slim profit margins in high-end restaurants result in low wages and force workers to embrace the long, grueling hours as a badge of honor. A status of heroic martyrdom substitutes for fair compensation. Troubled chefs, grappling with their own demons along with stress and exhaustion, captivate the public, from Anthony Bourdain to Carmen in The Bear. “There’s an expectation that chefs should work this way,” says Ian Hodson, national president of the bakers’ trade union. “But, in my opinion, this is driven by greed and poor management, as well as a failure on the part of the wider public to value the roles that [chefs] fulfill.” Hodson shares research with me that shows the ongoing labor shortage in the hospitality industry, partly due to chefs wanting shorter and more sociable hours. “Not everyone wants to be a martyr,” he says. And indeed, not everyone is. Based on my conversations with past and present staff at various restaurants, particularly those within the trend of relatively informal, middle-class establishments that draw inspiration from peasant food cultures rather than royal ones, such as the River Café and St John in London, the staff meals are usually positive experiences. In these restaurants, I’m told that staff meals are important moments in the day, a chance for the team to sit down together and share a meal. The way chefs eat is most heavily shaped by the culture of the kitchen…
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