By Theresa Baxter

I have “enjoyed” many different career paths in my life, from managing a small commercial art gallery to working in a one-man printing shop, to waitressing, to part-time editorial cartoonist,  to becoming an HR generalist and recruiter for a very success video game developer. However, no job has ever been as personally rewarding as the one I have taken on, relatively late in life; cooking in a commercial kitchen.  I do not consider myself a chef, just a cook.  I am a bonafide, hands-on kitchen worker, from simmering the soup and making the rice first thing in the morning, to mopping the floor and taking the garbage out at the end of the night.

Cooking is a job, a function, a set of tasks, a necessary and ubiquitous type of employment that at once can be utilitarian, mundane, rote, yet also incredibly immersible, expressive and creative.  The jobs are as varied as the types of restaurants that dot the landscape of every city in every country of the world.  Some are lofty, some are demeaning, some come with celebrity, most with obscurity.  But one thing all kitchen jobs have in common, is they are hard.  Hard on the body, requiring a physical investment that many, especially at my age, will have a hard time sustaining for any significant length of time.  It is also not financially rewarding.  It is definitely one of those jobs that the pay can be incommensurate with the effort required.  So why do it?  Why do I do it, when there are many things that I have done in the past that are physically easier and pay better? The hours more forgiving, the holidays paid, the weekends off.  What the hell am I thinking as I soak my hands in epsom salts at the end of a particularly grueling week?

I don’t know.  I can’t articulate it.  But the feeling I get, when I walk out the doors at the end of the shift, if it’s six hours or twelve, is a sense of satisfaction.  Like after a workout, which my job is definitely a form of, you have an endorphin rush, an adrenaline high, especially if the shift was particularly busy, which lucky for me, the restaurant I work at is bustling.  And I have turned out to be the kind of person that likes that feeling, likes leaving the job at the door, even if cooking stays on my mind in one form or another every waking hour (or more accurately, eating).  I can’t explain it any better than this.  I get off on watching through the small pass, discreetly of course, because otherwise it’s weird, the customer’s enjoying of a dish I made.  I frequently ask the servers if the customers are happy, do they like their food.  I like that there is a mutual appreciation, an exchange going on, not just money for menu item, but a gift exchange.  I make it, you enjoy it.  Everyone leaves happy.

I work alongside people who do not share my viewpoint for the job, but they do work hard regardless.  Trust me, if they were just dialing it in, which we will on occasion, I would not stay.  But my coworkers are good people, hardworking, and we are a team.  I have come to accept that having or requiring passion for your job is kind of a first world conceit.  You definitely don’t need to feel passionate about your job, most people don’t, but you still have to want to do a good job. Simply for personal pride, for your own self-worth.  You will not succeed, nor will be able to stay in a kitchen job without it.  And I know there are many that had passion and still abandoned the grind.  I tip my hat to them, as I said this job is hard, the pay insubstantial and the hours obstacles to a balanced quality of life.  But if you got cooking in your blood, the restaurant business in your veins, then there is no other job like it.

It is worth noting that my parents were restaurant managers when I was a child.  I only have one vague memory, of sitting at a counter on a high stool, with a bear claw (only those of a certain age will know what that is) and a mug of root beer as a snack.  Probably waiting around for one of my parents to get off work and take me home.  They finished with that career when I was seven, and never returned.  But I think those first formative years implanted something in me, a heightened regard for the sounds and smells of a restaurant, for the noise, the bustle.  And now, a little past middle age, I am returning, or seeking out that familiarity.  It’s like coming home.  Only now I’m coming home kind of late, really tired, but feeling oh so satisfied.