When lying to your chef is like lying to your parents
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Well, we all lie. Psychologists have charted that from the age of about six months, human babies ‘lie’ for attention with fake cries to get what they need; a learned and practised behaviour.
By age five years, we are pros. There is even extensive research into the positive effects of lying and human growth; that it can be a powerful social-evolutionary tool that can even save one’s life. More remarkable, still, are the statistics on ‘believability’ of lies — greater than three in five lies told are swallowed hook, line and sinker.
But not so in families. Here the ratio of success to lies told is diminished to almost naught. Families, it seems, share a bond that betrays the ‘knowing unknown.’ When someone in the family is lying, everybody knows something is crooked.
The exact same thing can be said for tight-working kitchen brigades, where lying to the chef is like lying to your parents. Whether about screwed up mise en place, broken equipment or trickery with schedules, lying in kitchens is something that just doesn’t stick.
These days some lies are easy to discover. If the worker in question is so clueless as to call in sick for a shift, only to post their ‘to the minute’ photos on Facebook of their awesome day in Muskoka …
Of course, the most common lies told in kitchens, as in families, come from a place of not wanting to let down the chef, not wanting to let down the parent. If a cook screws up a recipe or forgets a step in a procedure or in ordering, they feel foolish and considering disappointing the chef may fib and cast the blame elsewhere in order not to disappoint.
I try to coach my team around the familial certainty that I will know when a member of the brigade is lying, so please just save us all the stress of the game and come clean and we can move forward. I even pull a trusted weapon from parent mode in confronting the brigade, not with screaming tantrums or effluviant diatribes, rather with the downcast and demure: ‘I’m disappointed.’
And even this powerful chestnut sometimes fails to bring truth. Just last week I worked a service with only four cooks and, walking down the hallway to the main kitchen I passed a spilled over bin of cocoa powder; remarkably, not one of the four had any notion of the spill happening.
I need to be clear with my brigade that no matter how much they may not want to disappoint me, there are sometimes when lying can do more damage than they would ever intend if their duplicity were to go unmentioned. I am reminded of a story told to me about my sister-in-law’s restaurant where a young cook substituted Clamato juice for tomato juice in the beef barley soup recipe. Had the innocent switch-up not been noticed, the otherwise ‘shellfish free’ beef barley soup could have been a deadly poison for shellfish allergy guests.
Sometimes lying to the chef is just a knee-jerk reaction to buy time for a better explanation. I remember working one morning with a cook who tripped on the stairs, planting his face into the just-out-of-the-oven brownies he was carrying, immediately blistering the skin off his nose and leaving his visage in chocolate on the pan. Worried for him I asked, “Did you trip into the brownies, Tom?” “No, Chef ” was his reply. And like a parent must do, sometimes, I let it slide. — Ross Midgley moved from P.E.I. to Niagara in 1999. Since then he has held the lead position in several of the region’s top kitchens. He is passionate about his family, all things Niagara and good rock ’n’ roll. He can be reached at chefrmidgley1968@gmail.com.