The Restaurant Chronicles: Part One – There’s a Reason Why Nobody Wants This Job

I grew up in the restaurant business.  One of the earliest memories I have as a toddler is being in the kitchen of the fine dining restaurant where my father was the executive chef.  I remember how loud it was; how the smells were a conflicting mess of appetizing and gross.  I particularly remember the little receptacle where the ice cream scoop was kept which was continually fed with a stream of warm water and wondering to myself why the water never overflowed.  It was overwhelming.  It was normal.

Over the years, I worked a slew of restaurant and other food-service related jobs.  My first job in high school was as a dishwasher, but I’ve also worked as a prep cook, line cook, pantry cook (this is the appetizer and dessert station), baker (in an actual restaurant, which is different from baking in a bakery) server, bartender and manager.  I’ve worked in every type of food service establishment except for fast food.  So, that includes everything from fine dining to casual, to family restaurants, to catering, to pizza delivery places.  All of these jobs are distinctly different in their own ways, but they are also exactly alike in one particular way:  these jobs fucking suck.  They are hard, stressful, anxiety-inducing and rarely rewarding in any kind of personal, much less monetary, sense.  Kitchens are full of assholes that you have to work with if you’re going to keep your job; and the dining room…is full of assholes that you have to serve with a smile if you’re going to keep your job. 

These days, we keep hearing about The Great Resignation—this phenomenon of people quitting their jobs en masse and seeking greener pastures.  Many of these stories tend to focus on the pandemic as a proximate cause of this new willingness of workers to break free of their terrible job and seek freedom in the form of a new, more fulfilling job—or at least a terrible job that pays better.  The reality is that, at least in terms of the restaurant business, those jobs have always sucked and many of the people working in them have always hated it.  The pay sucks, the working environment is simultaneously hostile, abusive, demeaning, exhausting and soul crushing; benefits are rarely offered—and among those jobs that do have benefits, they are pretty paltry.  Customers are rude, racist, sexist, entitled shitheads who have no problem letting their little terrorist children run roughshod all over the place.  Managers are rude, racist, sexist, entitled shitheads who have no problem telling you any number of blatantly illegal things while simultaneously never standing up for you when a customer is out of line.

Do you know what the federal minimum wage is for restaurant servers?  Nope, guess again.  Nope, guess again.  Nope…fuck it, I’ll just tell you:  It’s $2.13 per hour and it’s been that way since 1991.  There have been five increases to the standard minimum wage since that time, while the tipped minimum wage remains stagnant.  Yes, the standard minimum wage still sucks.  Yes, the fact that it has actually been increased five times while the tipped minimum wage has remained the same for 30 years is still bullshit.  It’s such bullshit, in fact, that thirty-four states have changed their laws over the years to pay tipped workers more than the federal rate.  Think about that for a second:  thirty-four states.  That means not only places like California and Massachusetts, but also places like North Dakota, Arkansas and Montana.  Granted, some of these increases are themselves bullshit (looking at you, Delaware, with your whopping $2.23 per hour rate), but the fact that this many states (plus a bunch of other US territories) have collectively agreed in principle that people working for tips need to have a better floor wage is not a small thing.

That’s not to say that the kitchen employees are raking in the big bucks either.  According to ZipRecruiter, the annual average salary for kitchen workers in this country is $22,619, which breaks down to $10.87 per hour.  Yes, this is an average, which means people get paid different amounts depending on the type of kitchen job or the location, but the upper end of that equation is still only $29,500 per year which is still only $14.18 per hour.  No, we are not counting Guy Fieri in this equation—grow up.

“But,” I hear you say, “bar and restaurant worker wages have increased by 12% over the past year!” That’s true—but inflation has likewise increased by 6.8% this year, which is the sharpest rise in 40 years.  Yes, a 12% wage increase is much better than a 6.8% increase in prices (I’m not getting into core vs. headline inflation here because this is not an economics class), but workers at the bottom of the wage scale are the most sensitive to inflation, particularly because the costs of energy and food take the biggest inflationary hit.  Let’s also not forget that the $10.87 wage for the average kitchen worker is inclusive of the overall wage increase in the past year, which is garbage. 

Holidays.  Holidays essentially do not exist in this line of work.  Once upon a time, you could expect to get two days off per year:  Thanksgiving and Christmas.  By the time I was 17 years old—a full year into my life as a working stiff—Thanksgiving had become a mainstream dining holiday.  Just before the pandemic, it was quite common for me to see signs and advertisements for restaurants (not just the Chinese ones) stating that they were open on Christmas.  For anyone who has worked in one of these jobs, it is really difficult to plan time with family and friends, because essentially all of your time is at the whim of the restaurant schedule—and most places don’t schedule more than a week or two ahead.

We haven’t even gotten to the alcohol and drug use yet.  According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, food service workers have the highest rates of addiction among any other profession in the United States.  Is it any wonder why? 

So, once many of the restaurants were forced to close in the early days of the pandemic, it forced a lot of those workers to either seek other work, or think more critically about the work they were currently doing.  As a result, the fact that all kinds of food service businesses are now either offering limited hours, services, or just closing down entirely is not surprising at all.  The entire business model is predicated on the ability of employers to pay criminally low wages, offer little to no benefits, treat their workers like shit, and pressure policymakers to absolutely, positively NOT raise the minimum wage because that would “cost jobs”.  Well, guess what?  It looks like the joke is on the employers now because those low wages and shitty conditions are costing them the ability to actually stay open.

For my part, I got out of the food business about 10 years ago, but I got out of the restaurant business about 13 years ago and I’ve never looked back.  Even when Mrs. Butcher and I were having some really bad financial years and needed to rely on the tender mercies of the local food bank, and rent out part of our house, to make ends meet, I still could not bring myself to go back to restaurant work, and stuck with the shitty job I already had at the time.  If I was going to be poor, I’d prefer to be poor while not getting kicked in the nuts at work on a daily basis.  Instead, I worked as a janitor, landscape laborer, and retail worker because those jobs sucked but not as much as restaurant work.

Case in point:  One of my jobs was at a hotel near a national park, which operated on a seasonal basis, so all of the employees were there on a contract for anywhere from a month to five months.   I did three seasons over the years with them, but by far the worst year was the last one.  They had hired a new chef who had just graduated from The Greenbrier, which is this luxury resort in West Virginia that also has a super hardcore three-year apprenticeship program.  He was 22 or 23 years old and was put in charge of an entire hotel kitchen.  Most men that age can barely eat properly without sticking their fork in their eye and this guy was now responsible for a staff of over 20 people, in addition to the menu and all of the other shit that goes along with being in restaurant management.  Needless to say, his maturity was…lacking.  I was an Old Hand, having been there for my 3^rd season—and was, in fact, the one person in the kitchen with the longest tenure—but I was only 19 years old.  Now, to be clear, my maturity was likewise just a half step above that of your average toddler, but I knew that hotel and that kitchen inside and out.  So, I also tended to be the person who answered questions (whether they were directed toward me or not) which it seems irritated our Fearless Leader.  There was also more than one occasion when I tried, in my less-than-diplomatic way, to clue him into some of the subtleties of working there which I knew he didn’t like.  So, he and I did not get along at all.

This chef (let’s call him Pierre, because that’s a great name for an arrogant chef) exhibited all of the idiotic, stereotypical tropes that people hear about chefs.  He yelled a lot.  He was angry all the time.  He was continually stressed out.  He had absolutely no filter.  He threw things.  He also had no sense of when to take a goddamned day off.  He was there for the long haul—all five months—and didn’t take a solitary day off.  As a matter of policy, the hotel provided everyone with a regular five-day schedule (which, I might add, is the only time I’ve ever encountered this, but they made it work without any trouble.  So, when restaurants bitch and moan about how they have to be allowed to schedule people “flexibly”, they are full of shit.).  But he had no sense of delegation (he had a sous chef who could have handled some of these responsibilities—and probably much better because he had been around the block a few times) and behaved as though he had to have complete control over everything all the time.  It became a running joke within the kitchen that Pierre never took a day off, so people would ask him if he’d been inside the national park yet, at which point he would always utter a surly “no”.  At one point, about halfway through the season, during the middle of a dinner rush, someone says, “hey, Pierre, have you been to the park yet?”  Pierre yelled “WHAT PARK?!”  That’s who this guy was, from beginning to end.

Anyway, he and I didn’t get along, and he was my boss so he got to decide my fate on a daily basis.  I was regularly assigned Shit Detail, which is basically whatever is the crummiest, most disgusting job he could think of to keep me occupied while the kitchen got slammed.  Considering I was a kid myself I did not handle this treatment well and was a total asshole.  I probably could have asked for a transfer, but I didn’t want Pierre to know that I couldn’t eat what he was dishing out.  So, instead, I would poke the bear every chance I got.  If he told me to do something I would stand there and, like a kindergarten teacher, ask him “now, what’s the magic word?”  Sometimes I would just half-ass whatever he told me to do because I was a petulant little shit.  Sometimes I would be the one throwing things and screaming.  Most of the time, however, I operated in sullen silence and offered one syllable answers to questions because I was also that much of a dick. 

There were a couple of guys (they were all guys) in the kitchen that year who were decent people and I worked well with them.  One of them (we’ll call him Scooter because he reminded me of the Muppet if that Muppet was high on cocaine all the time) was this real screwball who would affect this odd and theoretically ethnic accent while saying things like, “clean as you go…or YOU will go!”  When the two of us were matched up on pantry duty, we would churn out appetizers and desserts like nobody’s business.  A dinner rush at most restaurants is a chaotic scene.  You’ve usually got about 5 guys on the line trying to coordinate dozens of meals at the same time so that the appetizer doesn’t go out 30 seconds before the entrée, or that the pasta dish isn’t dying under the heat lamp while the steak finishes cooking on the grill.  If you can imagine combining hockey with ballet and the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, then that’s what it’s like.  However, dinner rushes at tourist locations like this hotel are an entirely different matter.  The day doesn’t start slowly and then build up to a climax.  It starts, and ends, at full climax for six hours straight.  You might get a few seconds to swig a drink of soda, or shove a mouthful of food down your throat, but you had damned well better have used the bathroom before your shift because there is no time for breaks of any kind.  But Scooter and I absolutely fucking rocked that pantry station during our shifts.  Watching us work must have been like watching those highly choreographed Kung Fu films because we were in constant motion within two feet of each other, but never got in each other’s way.  Server forgot to put in the appetizer order, and the entrées are two minutes from heading out?  No problem.  Server put in the dessert order too early and the table won’t be ready for them for another 10 minutes?  We’ve got your back.  Almost everyone took note of how well we worked together as a team.  But, Pierre, being Pierre, didn’t want me getting too big for my britches so he would try to find some kind of Shit Detail, or relegate me to prep or (on the days when he really wanted to get to me) dishwashing.  He didn’t give a shit that the performance of the kitchen as a whole is completely interconnected.  Break one part and the other four suffer.  He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him, and he had the power to make shit happen.  So, while I didn’t ask for a transfer or risk trying to break my contract, that was my last year at that place.  I knew Pierre would get a new contract for the following year and I wanted no part of his crap.  I am certain that nobody shed any tears when I decided not to come back.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one who hated that job.  Hell, I know Pierre fucking hated it because of the way he behaved.  The sous chef likewise was a miserable prick.  One day he discovered that someone had used one of his spatulas (yes, chefs of this caliber bring all their own tools) and had damaged it.  He flipped out and demanded to know who had done it.  Of course, nobody was going to own up to that, so instead he demanded that the hotel reimburse him the $40 that he paid for it.  I haven’t even mentioned the servers, who were essentially viewed as The Enemy by everyone on the kitchen staff.  There was one server in particular who was the target of open sexual harassment every single time she walked into the kitchen.  This was…1990, I think.  I say that not because this was “a different time”, but as a marker to point out that, when I finally left the restaurant business in 2008, shit like this was still going on.  It’s very likely still happening today.

So, why did we all work there?  There are lots of individual reasons, to be sure, some more plausible than others.  But the common denominator among all of us was this:  we took the job because we wanted to work at a place that would allow us to explore one of the last truly wild places on the planet.  The nearest populated area that could reasonably be called a “town” was 10 miles away—and that place had no paved roads and could be traversed by car in a couple of minutes.  We got to see natural phenomena that most people only hear about.  You could hike for 30 minutes and be in a location where there was neither sight nor sound of any form of civilization.  Of course, you had to be careful because there was wildlife out there which would not hesitate to wreck your shit if you surprised them.  It was a beautiful place, and our regular work weeks allowed for us to explore as we pleased.  If you wished, it was incredibly easy to disconnect yourself from the outside world for weeks or months at a time.  When my contract was over and I would go back home each season, I would feel like someone who had been in a coma and needed to be reintroduced to all of the things that had taken place while I was out. There were benefits to the job that had nothing to do with health insurance or paid vacation—because those didn’t exist—and for people like us that was a good trade at the time. 

But the reality is that most restaurant work doesn’t even offer these nominal benefits.  Most restaurant work is a spirit annihilating experience.  I would like to think that most restaurants in this country would have a collective epiphany and start paying much better wages and benefits, that they would stand up for their employees when entitled asshole customers start shitting on them, and that the environment as a whole wouldn’t be so hostile.  But I would also like us to have single payer healthcare, universal basic income, free undergraduate education and for the Republican Party to be designated as a terrorist organization.  Both scenarios are just as likely to come true, which is to say not at all.  So, instead, maybe we’ll all just have to live with fewer restaurants.  I’d be perfectly happy to watch a lot of these poverty peddlers go out of business because they couldn’t be bothered to treat their employees like human beings, and customers couldn’t be bothered to spend an extra $10 per person on a night out.  It’s become pretty obvious now that the workers have recognized they no longer need to eat shit and ask for seconds.  They’ll be fine.

Here are some of the things I’ve witnessed in my various and sundry restaurant jobs:  fights, fires, backed-up sewage, sexual harassment, sex, tears, threats, rage, tears, hazing, severe injuries, theft, sabotage, tears, and more tears.  The thing is, by the time I’d left the business, working conditions were actually better by leaps and bounds over what they were like when I started.  When I was a little kid, I had no reason to pay attention to a lot of this stuff, but by the time I began working in these places I came to recognize almost immediately that labor laws stopped at the kitchen door.  No breaks, no time to eat, wage theft, retaliation for making a complaint, you name it.  Most people who got their first job in those days wouldn’t last a full pay period.  This means the ones who stuck it out were either lifers like me who didn’t know any better, or total fucking assholes, or just people who wanted an easy place to score drugs. 

About 10 years in, things started to shift noticeably.  I remember working sauté at this Italian restaurant in another tourist area, and a few hours into my very first shift we were so deep in the weeds that the manager stopped keeping track of how long people had to wait until they got a table.  Right around this time, the kitchen manager calls out my name and says it’s time for my break.  “My what?!” I said.  I was certain that whatever he’d said, I’d heard it wrong because I knew that breaks didn’t exist. 

“I said it’s time for your break.  Head out back for 15 minutes.” 

“Nah, I’m good.  I’m getting killed over here and need to get these orders out.”

“I didn’t ask you if you wanted to go on a break.  I said it was time for your break.  Bodie will cover you.  Now, beat it.”

I just sort of blinked at him for a few seconds, trying to make this compute in my head.  Then I walked off the line, expecting this to be some kind of hazing ritual (because those were still quite prevalent), but it was for real.  There was another guy outside who crushed out his cigarette and went in as soon as he saw me.  I breathed some outside air (I wouldn’t call it “fresh” air because the exhaust fans were nearby), sat down on the steps, and marveled at the fact that I was getting an honest-to-God break at a restaurant job.  By the time I left the business, it was pretty ubiquitous—especially at the corporately owned restaurants—but I never quite got used to it.

It was also around this time—maybe a year or so later—while working at a different place, and the general manager told everyone that we were all going to be scheduled to come in for a half day within the next few weeks to attend a mandatory sexual harassment training seminar.  Of course, the first thing someone said was, “we don’t need a seminar to know how to sexually harass people.  We do it just fine.”  The GM laughed and said, no, that’s not how this worked.  When the day came for me to attend the seminar, the consultant who was leading it started by asking anyone if they had any questions.  One female server raised her hand and asked him what the seminar was for.  He answered that he was going to train us to be able to spot sexual harassment (because the notion of “workplace harassment” hadn’t yet been born, so at the time the only type of harassment that was recognized was sexual), report it, and/or stop ourselves from engaging in it.  Her response to his answer was, “you do know you’re in a restaurant, right?”  Everybody laughed.  Everybody, that is, but the guy leading the seminar. 

So, I have seen conditions change for the better over the course of about 21 years, but the fact is that conditions still suck mightily.  I am not, and never have been, one of those people who say, “things were terrible for me, so by God they need to be terrible for everyone else too.”  That’s bullshit.  If something is going to change, then it will mean at some point that the people who got shit on will get to be the last people to get shit on.  The whole point of progress is for nobody to get shit on, which means someone will always be last, and they will need to be good with that.

However, the fact that working conditions and wages in restaurants aren’t as bad as the Dark Ages in no way means that the people working in those jobs now need to just “be grateful”.  There is so much more that needs to be done for improving those jobs.  Will it mean that some restaurants close?  Yup.  Will it mean that some people will lose their jobs?  Yup.  Will it mean that those who lost their jobs will never find work again?  Nope.  In fact, if our current state of affairs is any indicator, many—if not most—of those newly unemployed restaurant workers are finding new jobs.  Some are even taking jobs at other restaurants for lower pay, but where they aren’t treated like garbage all day long.  Given the choice between more money and more dignity, lots of people will go with the dignity.

My exit from the restaurant business came as more of a slide than a hard split out the door.  I shifted from restaurants to professional audio (which is a terrible way to make a living), and when the Great Recession hit, I switched again full-time baking.  Baking, generally speaking, is not nearly as stressful as restaurant work (provided that the baking I was doing wasn’t in an actual restaurant).  It’s certainly not easy work.  In fact, I’d say the physical demands are much harder than restaurant jobs.  But it was definitely a calmer environment which was no small thing. 

Eventually, I’d had all the fun I could stand as a baker and wanted to get into a career with real benefits and actual holidays off.  I had a connection with someone to get an introduction to the company where I currently work.  It was an entry level job, which I expected considering that I didn’t have much of an office resume.  During my interview, one person expressed concern I would feel that the job was beneath me.  My response: “At any given point during the day, I am literally up to my elbows in cake batter.  You don’t have to worry about whether I think a job is beneath me.”

I’ve been with this same employer (although in different departments and different jobs) for the past 10 years.  Currently, I am paid quite well for the work that I do—but when I first started, I took a wage cut in exchange for the benefits and an eye on the long term.  I have good benefits, which include an absolutely obscene amount of time off, TWO retirement plans (a standard 401(k) and a real pension), and so many holidays off I honestly can’t remember them all.  During my first year there, I actually commuted all the way into work on Memorial Day because I’d forgotten that we get that day off.  With my current position, I’ve been transitioned to working from home for all but two days per month.  It is glorious.

However, getting to my current position was itself not easy or simple.  On my way here I had to endure two terrible bosses.  The first was a control freak with serious anger issues—to the point where she was actually sent to anger management.  The second was straight up insane.  This one would randomly pick people to make miserable until they quit (this is called “constructive discharge”, which is illegal—assuming you have the money to hire a lawyer and sue).  I would be asked, over and over again by my coworkers, why I was sticking around and putting up with it.  My response was always the same:  these people were bad bosses—bad enough that their bosses should have been fired for allowing these two to keep abusing their employees—but they didn’t even rank in the top 10 compared to some of the psychopaths I dealt with in the restaurant business.

So, the next time you go out to eat, or order a delivery, keep in mind that the people doing this work are putting up with enough shit as it is.  They don’t need any more from you.  I can already hear it: “then they should go find a better job.”  Well, smartass, if all these restaurant workers who hate their jobs (and that’s the vast majority of them) go find other work, who is going to serve your drink or deliver your pizza?  It’s really not that hard to refrain from being an asshole when dealing with people in the restaurant business.  If a server or bartender or delivery person happens to not be all smiles and just LOVING to serve you, perhaps it’s because they’ve already eaten their fill of bullshit for that particular day.  Grow up, tip well, and be nice.  You might just be the person who turns their day around.