Ask Julia: How do I get started in the food business?

Dear Julia:

My daughter is a senior in high school and is seriously considering a career in the culinary field.  Two summers ago, she worked at a new bagel shop in town, and helped the owners start it up. Since last summer, she’s been working at a local coffee shop.  She’s interested in cooking, but also other aspects of the business.

We’ve been discussing what her next steps after high school should be, and she expressed a desire to know what the requirements to get hired are.  Would you share your perspective?

Sincerely,

Proud Papa

Dear PP,

The culinary industry has changed a lot since I went to school. For starters, tuition to culinary school can be upwards of $60,000 (!!!!!) and starting wages are $12 – $15/hour. If you need a student loan to finance the degree, the numbers just don’t add up.

That said, learning to cook in a restaurant kitchen is one of the best life skills.  Besides the basics of being able to cook quickly, the skills of restaurant cooking translate well to other life areas:

• Working through pain: Your daughter will burn herself, cut off a fingernail or two… and she will need to keep working. She’ll be hot, sweaty and tired and need to keep working. The restaurant kitchen is a “hostile” environment, but you learn how to work in less than ideal circumstances.
• Following through on commitments: In the restaurant industry, you can’t postpone your work to the next day. Customers come in and expect to be served within 20 minutes. Unlike office jobs where you can finish something up the next day with no great consequence, you can’t tell a restaurant customer to come back the next day for their meal because you’re too busy.
• Mastering mental multi-tasking: Even a small, 10-table restaurant can have many meals working. A table of four may have ordered a 3-course meal, each with different appetizers and entrees. The next table of six may have ordered a large array of dishes, to be served all at once. In the kitchen, you must keep track of how many orders you have working at any given moment, and in what combination you need to serve them. There’s a constant flux of dinners starting and finishing meals, and you have to keep track of where everyone is.
• Frightening Efficiency: Given that all meals need to be served within a few hours, you’ll need to Figure out how to work as efficiently as possible to get the job done properly and as quickly as possible.

These are skills that you won’t necessarily learn in culinary school. But culinary school gives you the foundational knowledge and the scaffolding to latch new concepts onto. Real world experience is irreplaceable, and you can pick up skills more quickly with the culinary school foundation. If you can find an inexpensive program (like Bunker Hill Community College or Framingham State), then it’s certainly a useful education.

Your daughter shouldn’t have a hard time getting a job. Most restaurants I know are short-staffed. If she’s willing to start at the bottom (likely just making salad), be humble, work hard and take in everything like a sponge, she can move up quickly.  A lot of “kids” graduate from cooking school expecting to be the next top chef; it comes across as arrogant and off-putting to chefs and owners who’ve been in the industry for a long time. It takes a lot of hard work to move up in the ranks and be successful.

Even if your daughter decides to abandon professional cooking, as I did; she’ll have incredible skills and work ethic. More importantly, she’ll have great experiences that will help if she follows a path in the food business. As I’ve worked as a consultant in the ag industry – the biggest thing that’s held me back is that I don’t have “real-world” farming experience.  Even though I have tons of experience working with farmers, and certainly know what it’s like to work under physically challenging conditions for low pay, I’m missing that little bit of street cred. By contrast, I have that extra bit of street cred in the food business from having worked in restaurants for 5 years. If your daughter wants to work in any aspect of the food industry, having a few years’ experience under her belt will be huge.

Best of luck!