Kiwi chefs battle health crisis
The pressure to perform in the restaurant industry can come at a terrible cost, writes Alice Neville.
Long hours, relentless pressure, isolation, lack of sleep, drug and alcohol abuse, a culture of harden up or get out – the restaurant kitchen is not always an easy place to be.
Is it any wonder, then, that the industry is said to be in the grips of a mental health crisis worldwide?
The suicide of top Australian chef Jeremy Strode in July 2017 prompted an outpouring of grief from those in the industry on both sides of the Tasman. Strode, who died days short of his 54th birthday, had battled depression for years and had been an ambassador for suicide prevention charity RU OK.
The ‘‘sad loss to the industry’’type posts filling up his social media news feeds left Auckland-based chef Jamie Robert Johnston feeling frustrated at what he felt was a failure to properly address an issue that is far too common in kitchens.
So he wrote his own post, which he shared on Facebook and Instagram, revealing that he suffered from bipolar disorder – something he had never discussed openly beyond close friends and family. ‘‘Maybe it’s time we all stand together, look for the warning signs, or just ask the question ‘Are you OK?’’’, Johnston wrote.
‘‘The industry isn’t the kind of industry where you talk about stuff,’’ reflects Johnston, 34, who runs pop-up Chinese eatery Judge Bao with his partner Debbie Orr.
‘‘It’s a mainly male-oriented industry and we have a terrible habit of not talking. It’s like harden up, have a concrete pill – you come in when you’re sick, you don’t take the day off because you burnt your hand or something.’’
Strode’s death, sadly, was far from isolated. Other big-name chefs to have taken their own lives in recent years include Frenchman Benoıˆt Violier, whose Swiss restaurant, Restaurant de l’Hoˆ tel de Ville, had recently been named the world’s best when he died in early 2016, and Homaro Cantu, a Chicagobased chef famed for his use of molecular gastronomy, who died in April 2015.
The intense pressure to perform was pointed to in the inevitable search for explanation in the wake of the above chefs’ deaths. It was certainly considered a factor in the suicide of another Frenchman, Bernard Loiseau, who died in 2003 following widespread rumours that his restaurant La Coˆ te d’Or was about to lose its third Michelin star.
We may not have the pressure of Michelin stars to contend with, but New Zealand kitchens are far from immune from the mental health crisis afflicting the restaurant industry. In early November 2017, Auckland chef Matt Bing died suddenly after a long battle with depression.
Bing, 30, had a new baby with his wife Sarah and had recently started a job at My Food Bag, which he seemed to be enjoying, his friend Brendan Kyle says. ‘‘He was so stoked to be out of chef life – he’d made a post on Instagram about how he was never working a night or a Saturday or Sunday again.’’ Kyle, a sous chef at Cazador, first met Bing when they worked together at Dida’s Wine Lounge and Tapas in Devonport.
He didn’t know his friend had struggled with mental health issues until after his death.
‘‘Whether Matt’s problems came from the kitchen environment, I don’t know, but I think it can easily exacerbate that sort of thing.
‘‘I’ve worked in a lot of places in the last 10 years, and there are places where I felt really emotionally bullied and ruined by the time I’d left. Whereas in other places I’ve felt part of a family, had a really supportive team and formed lifelong friendships.’’
Kyle is confident the old-school attitudes are changing, though. ‘‘I think it’s a dying thing – people aren’t as willing to accept it as much as they were when it was the norm. It is old-fashioned.’’
The old ‘‘harden up’’ attitudes were certainly the norm for Johnston, who trained in the UK.
‘‘It was still that very militant, bullying, scream-in-your-face kind of rubbish – that’s what I grew up with. And you have to train yourself out of it.
‘‘We work in the most highly stressed industry in the world. There’s so much stress and pressure and if you’re like myself – and I’m sure many of us are the same – you’re so overly critical of your own work, and with the internet coming into it, you can read negative reviews all day long.’’
Monique Fiso, a Wellington chef who worked in some of New York’s top kitchens before coming home to start her modern Ma¯ ori pop-up Hiakai, agrees kitchen culture needs to change.
‘‘It’s a vicious cycle because you’re getting yelled at and you yell at everyone below you and it filters down to the point that everyone’s miserable. I look back at some of the ways I treated line cooks and I feel bad about it, but it had a lot to do with the fact that I had no outlet – I was getting screamed at all day.
She says the old ways are not sustainable. ‘‘You can’t yell and scream at people and expect them to deliver you Michelin stars while making them feel like the most useless person on the planet.’’
Fiso, 30, who also suffers from depression, says she bottled it up for years. ‘‘It’s almost worse to show emotion, especially as a woman – you got crushed more for showing any kind of vulnerability.’’
Brody Jenkins, chef de partie at The Grove in Auckland, agrees the mentality is changing. ‘‘It’s how the older chefs have been trained and it just comes down.
‘‘Somebody like Ben [Bayly, executive chef at The Grove] has learnt in that environment, and I think he’s understanding now that it’s not how it should be done.’’
Jenkins, 24, suffers from depression and says he went through a bad patch when he started at The Grove six months ago, his first time working at a finedining restaurant. ‘‘I got in a dark space because of how stressful it is. It got to the point where I just needed to tell Ben and Josh [Barlow, head chef at The Grove] so they didn’t see me as just slacking off.’’
Jenkins admits he was worried about how his bosses would react if he revealed he suffered from depression. Luckily, both Bayly and Barlow were supportive and he’s now back on track. Ben Bayly says building a good work environment comes down to one word – empathy. ‘‘Walk in someone else’s shoes, make them feel welcome, make them feel valuable, find out what they’re good at,’’ he advises.
‘‘Take care of your staff like you’d take care of your customers. You have a big responsibility in their lives and how they turn out. ’’
Michael Meredith, of Auckland’s Merediths restaurant and the Eat My Lunch social enterprise, agrees. ‘‘The more we talk about it, the more we normalise it. It has to come from the top. For years we’ve been conditioned to ‘harden up, or it’s not for you’. I feel in hospitality sometimes there’s that pressure of camaraderie – you don’t want to be
"It’s a mainly male-oriented industry and we have a terrible habit of not talking. It’s like harden up, have a concrete pill – you come in when you’re sick, you don’t take the day off because you burnt your hand or something." Jamie Robert Johnston
the weak one, so you just brush it off.
‘‘If you struggle and don’t want to share with people, it will eventually get to you.’’
Restaurant Association of New Zealand chief executive Marisa Bidois says the industry has lost several people to suicide recently, noting that the association has been told of more such deaths in the past 12 months than in previous years.
She isn’t sure whether that’s due to an actual increase or simply because people are talking about it more openly, ‘‘but we’ve definitely heard of more this year than any other year and, either way, it’s good that we’re talking about it’’.
Bidois says wellness in the workplace was a focus at the Restaurant Association’s hospitality summit this year, and she’s increasingly hearing of business owners trying to facilitate a better work-life balance for staff. The association also operates a help line for members, and offers discounted sessions with workplace counsellors. ‘‘Our industry can be isolating – people work long hours and they don’t always have that connection with people outside of their own business.’’
Alcohol abuse has long been reported as a problem in kitchens, and Bayly says that addressing this risk is something he takes seriously. At his restaurant Baduzzi, they’ve recently changed their policy around staff and alcohol. ‘‘People can disguise mental health issues with alcohol abuse,’’ he says.
Other measures restaurant owners have taken to promote wellness include holding yoga classes for staff, as in the case of Coco’s Cantina in Auckland and La Rumbla in Arrowtown.
Johnston, who started the online conversation, says ‘‘the plus to social media is it’s easier to talk about things. I had a chef I worked with in the UK who sent me a message saying he was really struggling, saying thank you for your post. I hadn’t heard from him in about five years.’’