A path to becomming a Chef

Five young men go to cooking school full of idealism, principle, creativity, and dreams of putting their mark on the world. As they go through school they are taught all of the reasoning behind cooking food, how to cook food, and how to meld flavors, and create food and become an artisan in their craft.

They then graduate and apprentice in local restaurants that don't practice anything they learned in school, which is not unusual in any case as it's real life application no matter where you go, but yet they find that none of the principles and technique they were taught or believed in are being used in the restaurants that are available to learn under in their area they live in.

Cook #1 decides he really has the love for food, stumbles upon a guy who thinks like him and is moving to NOLA to work in a serious restaurant, and so moves with him.

Cook #2 also follows Cook #1 and they all share an apartment together and land jobs at respectable restaurants to learn and practice their craft.

Cook #3 has a serious girlfriend but still has a dream of cooking and wants to stick close to home and continue the path to becomming a chef but is forced to work at places that don't let him create, but rather reheat bags from sysco.

Cook #4 and #5 are in a similar boat to Cook #3


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Some years later, what has become of our five culinary graduates?



Cook #1 continued in his path and never lost sight of his dream to be a real chef. After many years of working as a line cook, sous chef, and finally a few executive chef positions in very serious establishments all over the country that challenged him to be the very best he could be, he is now a very bad arse chef in Las Vegas being nominated for James Beard Awards and recognized and respected by his peers as a person to be taken seriously in cooking.

Chef #2 still has a love for cooking, and is still working toward becoming a chef, but time is ticking and he's losing sight of what initally inspired to become a chef in the first place. Meets a girl from his home town and is wondering if it's worth it anymore.

Chef #3 married his girlfriend and quit his job after his girlfriend conivinced him that he needed to make money and provide for her and a family they wanted to have, so he became practicle and got a job at a bank.

Chef #4 became a kitchen manager at a chain restaurant got married and can't even remember culinary school. He's seriously thinking about becomming a Sysco rep to make more money and is convinced the only way to make a restaurant operate is to buy more shortcut products from Sysco. Loves the concept of paying low wages and knows the low wage earners can't pull off real cooking.

Chef #5 often wavers between putting a bullet in his head and getting hammered every night as he's still a glorified food ditch digger in a place that only wants ditches dug so to speak and he has lost all purpose but feels helpless because he's spent so much time on chasing a dream that he'll never see come to fruition and doesn't know anything else to do with his life.







Moral to this story? Well, not sure there's a moral, but the reasoning is this. For culinary graduates to be successful some things have to happen.

1) Either they move from the area that places a low importance on their craft or work to change it by moving away to learn, and then move back to change the area in leading by example and getting said people of the area to taste the difference and then pick real cooking over bullshite cooking, or in another sense understanding the difference between a painting and a very poor print of said painting.

2) The people of said area have a culinary epiphany of sorts and begin placing a value on the art of cooking and so cause the place to become a place where not only chefs are respected, admired, and wanted, but a place where they can do what they originally set out to do rather than becomming an underpaid food ditch digger.

3) They move away, and never come back.