Let’s return to eateries and kitchens with more grace
Oh for the good old days in the restaurant industry,” chefs, patissiers, managers and vegchopping battalions alike are surely murmuring wistfully to themselves. Bring back the halcyon days — a mere few months ago — when only pest control, customers giving you trouble, blocked fat-traps, seven-day work weeks, Eskom-related stock loss, sore feet and the odd armed robbery were your problems. Bliss!
At least there were actual paying customers, even if they did ask for the dressing on the side and became gluten intolerant halfway through the meal. There was revelry amid the grind; that lovely word bonhomie hung in the air. Air that had nobody scared. Now, of course, apart from cooks working in a hospital canteen or similar area of need, those who usually cook for money can’t.
That much we know. It’s like that for most industries. What’s fascinating is the ways in which each industry’s absence or morphed form throws light on the equally varied ways we all live. We see things through a different prism; we consider things we never did before. Those in the food industry, for example, realise that they cope better with this situation than most: working in a commercial kitchen is about almost constant stress, broken only by moments of emergency and hyper-stress (it’s hilarious that only a few months back that emergency was table 2 getting their salad a few minutes late).
Obviously, restaurant workers don’t face the sort of real emergencies that are the daily bread of the military or medics, but it still makes one pretty “stress fit”.
Couple the stress with the boot-camp physicality of the job, and you see why kitchen workers sometimes refer to everyone outside the industry as civilians. Having a less than cushy job will stand us in good stead right now.
On the less positive side, people who make their money from cooking (both those who chose the path, which is a special sort of unreasonableness, and those who fell into it because they didn’t have a whole lot of choice) tend to bitch about their lot, a lot. Perhaps, for those whose place of work can weather this time economically
— God knows how — a return to the stress, the speed, the whole blessed minefield, will generate less moaning (guilty as charged).
And there may be other benefits (humour me, it was a struggle to put on the silverlining hat). As restaurant workers have a cooking life taken from them, a curiosity of this time is how former eaterouters are dipping their toes into that life. I’m not talking about the outbreak of suburban sourdough bread making, but the involuntary dipping.
Many middle-class homes are now living with quite a few realities of the restaurant industry: acute stress is ever present, weekdays are hardly different to weekends, you have no social life, cooking is something you’re required to do all the time rather than when the whim takes, and the success of your day relies heavily on the strength of supply chains.
That’s just the sneak preview. I don’t wish the anxiety or the workload on anyone not in the industry. Nor do I wish bad attitudes from restaurants on diners. Restaurants should appreciate their support more than ever. But I really hope that this time of changed realities and flipped lives, of taken less for granted, will mean that when meals can once more be eaten out, we’ll all be better versions of ourselves, whichever side of the equation we’re on.