5 Reasons to Keep Your Kids Out of the Food Business

While I really loved working in restaurants for many years, there comes a point at which everyone must assess their work environment and make some broad decisions. The buzz and adrenaline which dominate the commercial kitchen are exciting when you are young enough to believe you can maintain that sort of stress level. Eventually, most of us, calm down. At that point we are considering a family or need to get above the average pay scale offered to most chefs. Bring on the revelation...unless you own the business, very few chefs will ever really make good money. Forget about great money. You can do slightly better if you go corporate or institutional but that sounds like about as much fun to a young chef as a party with no cocktails. Worse is that, if you make the jump to chef/proprietor , kiss your life goodbye. You just bought a 24/7 kind of, never ending stress with a very crappy profit margin.

Here are some good arguments to present your kid when they insist they want to go to culinary school.

1. The industry enjoys one of the highest incidences of drug and alcohol abuse you can find.

Long hours, unreasonable stress levels, and constant scheduling problems drive the average restaurant employee to need to have a few after work. Why not? Generally its a perk of the industry and its free.

2. If you complain, you will be earmarked for dismissal or told you are in the wrong business. Now what will you do with your culinary degree?

Drink that cool aid! You need only look online at mainstream job postings to find several food related positions who proudly state front and center that they expect you "to drink the punch". I found one myself this morning. (Yes, it actually said that in the body of the job listing.) It prompted me to write this article.

Translation - get it done any way you must; work overtime, cancel vacation, fire people or threaten to, take shortcuts, work with the flu...whatever.

When you break down the average salary of $70,000 for a chef, its works out to about $23 an hour. That is if you can keep your work week below 60 hours... somehow, I think that's not so much for the commitment. The other missing piece of this puzzle is that you will have to work your way up for at least 5 or more years at an hourly that will never cover repayment of your student loans.

3.You are unlikely to become a celebrity chef.

Most chefs no matter how talented or hard working will never rise to celebrity status. This is unfortunate since most young chefs clearly aspire to this. Thank you food television. Few people will ever actually see the less glamorous parts until they are well indoctrinated.

4. You will have a hell of a time maintaining relationships outside the industry or even inside it. The professional restaurant business has one of the worst track records for divorce. If you are lucky enough to find someone compatible inside the industry, you will still never see them unless you work in the same place. Which brings me to point out how incestuous the industry really is. I already blogged about that.

5. You can't do it when your body starts to go south.

You will butcher in refrigerated rooms, cook on lines that exceed 120 degrees, and stand in excess of 15 hours a day for years on end. Get back to me after your 38th birthday and we'll discuss how much you still love it. Its backbreaking, physical labor. If you are unlucky enough to have arthritis or any other disabling physical condition, I hope you saved enough to retire cause there are few places to go.


My 2 year old asked us to make her cardboard hut into a restaurant a few weeks back. Shortly thereafter, we were playing and she demanded $14 for pizza and fries. When I said that was expensive and asked for something else, she responded indignantly, "go to somebody Else's restaurant if you want that."

Oh God NO! Kinda sounds like a young chef's perspective. I hope it passes.