I worked in some restaurant kitchens in Melbourne, started as dish washer then to a chef. There are quite a lot of stuffs I learned from this pathway. As Austin Kleon said, ‘You should share your knowledge and trade secrets to public’, and being a great fan of his work, I am sharing a few things I learned. I am a bit sceptical about this post about kitchen work, as this is not the type of job, I ever wanted to do in my life.

If you ask me, why I started working in kitchen, well that was the first and only job I got after coming to Australia. If you ask me, I will say international students are the main workforce here in hospitality industry. They work as barista, front of the house staff, waiters, dish washers, kitchen hand, delivery drivers, taxi drivers and so on.

So, coming back to my story, it was really a painful day for me the first day at work, even though I had a great supporting team at the restaurant. It was a Mexican restaurant. It was painful mentally and physically. Physically because it involves a lot of physical work which I am not very used to. Mentally because of this constant thought in my mind that I was always been one of the best students in class, who always given education the prime importance than anything, worked in so called ‘white collar jobs’ and ending up in front of dirty greasy dishes. It took some time to adapt but later I understood that non one cares about what you do for living and all you need is money to pay bills and buy grocery.

Soon, I started help chef in prep (Prep involves cutting, chopping, making sauces so that the dishes can be made quickly when customer place an order). The he taught me some easy items of menu and I started making then every time. Then learned almost everything in the menu. Soon I started as chef in non-busy days like Monday to Thursday and then covering busy shifts. Later I also worked in an Italian Restaurant as pizza maker. Cooking in a restaurant is not the hardest part, everyone can learn those in a couple of months. You got recipes for everything, and also people to help. There are many other things harder than that.

Kitchen is a place equivalent to a pressure cooker. The amount of stress you have to manage is too high. Even though we prep stuffs anticipating big orders, the moment you see the big order kicking in, you lose your cool. No wonder why Gordon Ramsey swears to much in Kitchen shows (He is a celebrity British chef and a television personality.). The technique I used to cope up with this was to concentrate only on one order at a time and forget the rest. Concentrating on multiple orders can often lead to mismatching of customer requests like no mushroom with additional mushroom and end up wasting time and energy at a peak busy time. It can be avoided. Once I started following this, I started to like the busyness of the kitchen. I often think it as an opportunity to show off other what I am capable of handling.

Long hours of standing. Initially I used to have leg muscle cramps at night during sleep. It was really painful. Nothing miserable than having a bad muscle pain in sleep after a long work shift. I didn’t do anything special and I think my body adapted to it. Till this day, I strongly believe it’s only because of those long-standing hours, I could lift a 100kg deadlift at the gym.

Learning to take criticism. You are instantly criticised for your bad works or mistakes. Often no one will appreciate if your food was good. It’s was heartbreaking for me to take criticism as I was not very used to it. Thanks to my chefs, who taught me how to take those criticisms. According to my experience, complaints in hospitality is a common thing. But to handle, it requires a great skill. Listening to them, understanding, taking ownership and asking them what they would like you to do can solve the problems to a great extent. One thing I always keep in mind is the quality of the food which I make. If anything goes wrong, I always ask the question to myself picturing myself as a customer who ordered the order, ‘Will I accept this kind of service from a place where I am charged this much?’. Asking self-questions at a different point of view has improved my quality to a great extent. Even in my university, I used the same methods to improve my quality to assignment submissions.

Organisational skill is a great key take away from the kitchen experience. I remember the initial days of mine where I used to keep my workstation messy and dirty. I used to have at least 4 spoons and 3 knives on my kitchen bench when I don’t even need one. Having a clean and tidy kitchen table is as important as a neat computer table and chair for a techie. It improves your productivity to a great extent. Tidy up everything after the use, clean as you go were a great life lesson to me. Having a smaller number of sharp objects near you, can also save you from getting hurt and hurting others.

Nothing like weekend. Yeah, weekend availability is a must for any hospitality industry jobs. As I didn’t have any family here, it was okay for me. But working in weekends means you get weekdays off. That was a boon for me. I could concentrate on my studies with no distractions on weekdays. It also gave me more ‘me time’. As my life was busy with study, work, assignments, I had to plan each day (sometime to each minutes) to get things done. Life became more systematic and organised which never was. It’s a joke in our restaurant that they are giving day-offs for doing our laundry and for the mental and physical recovery.

I never had a workplace experience where team works, appreciation, gratitude are valued this much. These are life skills one should have to his fellow beings. Everyone is more or like equal in kitchen and were ready to take one for the team. People do care for one another. You can hear the words like, ‘thank you’, ‘please’, ‘hot coming through’ etc often in kitchen. 

Some funny stories: It’s hard for us to cook small portion. Yeah, there are times I failed miserably when I tried to cook same dish but smaller portion for my friends. Absolutely zero personal space and time (even to cry). At times, I had to go to cool room which is mostly around 2-degree Celsius temperature for the personal space to cry. Even though we can eat anything in kitchen, we hardly eat. I think it is due to the continuous exposure of different flavours and taste checking of the dishes, makes us feel our stomach is full. I also used to have ‘kitchen dream’, where I am working in kitchen and something really bad happens. We absolutely hate the last-minute orders before closing. By that time, we might have cleaned the workspace, bench table, utensils and kept the remaining stuffs on to the cool room. We may have to redo everything because to this last-minute order. So, one restaurant tip to you: try not to order at last minute before restaurant closing.

As I said, it was a life changing experience for me. Not only I learned many things to cook, but also many skills in kitchen. Stress management, time management, care for others, team working, gratitude, admitting and learning from mistakes, asking for help, being responsible not only for what you do, but also for your team are a few of them. I also liked to show off kitchen skills like chopping really fast, flipping foods stuffs on pans to my friends. Altogether it was amazing experience and I cherish each moment. I hope you enjoyed my story.

Thank you so much

Sreedeep Ramesh