It was my third straight week of 7.30 a.m. starts and 1 a.m. finishes without a day off. As a new starter at one of Britain’s most famous restaurants, I was low in the hierarchy and it was evident that I had not yet earned the right to rest.

It is a level of exhaustion you become accustomed to. The young men – they were all young men – had the thousand-yard stares of the culinary trenches, and the crow’s feet and furrowed brows of men twice their age. Meals, prison perfunctory in all senses of the metaphor, were scoffed down between services and cigarettes. There was little laughter and not much chat. If you had time you would close your eyes for 10 minutes, then drag yourself back to consciousness at the sound of scraping plates and dragging chairs.

The workload at such a restaurant was relentless, almost insurmountable. Ten boxes of langoustine, to be peeled and packed. The foetid, necrotic guts of a dozen well-hung grouse to draw. Crates of garden produce to be gleaned from its heavy clay, trimmed, peeled, turned. A bucket of peas to pod; a normal day.

It was in the context of such a day that my prized Sabatier was hewing the crowns from a dozen wild ducks. Deft downward strokes that cleaved the backbone from the breast. A rhythmic meaty thwack that became mesmeric and slightly pleasing.

One such stroke and lapse in concentration took my protruding thumb knuckle with it. Conditioned to fatigue and desensitised to most mild kitchen trauma, I had the requisite detachment that comes with such things. I remember being struck by the whiteness of my severed tendons before the blood really started to flow.

Months passed before I could work again, and the years have relegated this to mere anecdote – a side-note in my career. A war story to tell the kids to show them how hard we were, and how lucky they are that things are different now.

That was the late ’90s in the UK and I’d seen enough. This type of experience wasn’t unusual. It was a system that used young people, with little agency, as fodder. Most of them had started in their teens, and by their early twenties – those who lasted – were hardened professionals. By 30 they were burnt out.

Many of those young men went on to be successful in their own rights and dragged the ghosts of the past with them. They perpetuated a brutal system to a fixed criterion, which was rewarded. I was older, better educated and also Australian, so I had the luxury of choice. More importantly, I had the objectivity to see that something was wrong.

Talking to my peers (the male ones, at least) on this subject, it’s interesting how much romantic attachment they have to their own war stories. They cling to a perception that great culinary art can only be produced under these most dire working conditions. It is a fiction.
 

Things have changed vastly in the past 10 years. Have they changed fast enough? Structural change has been glacial due to lazy habits and vested interests exploiting any advantage as a bulwark against ever-thinning margins. Exploitation has always been part of the financial model, manifesting itself in the form of underpayment or wage theft and the ungodly hours asked to earn an unliveable income.

COVID has brought into sharp relief how reliant we have been on itinerant talent. Legions of young overseas workers have been a panacea but also a smokescreen to our structural deficiencies. Decades of poor government funding for relevant training programs and archaic industry bodies have resulted in a massive recruitment shortfall that will take a decade to redress.

There is still much to be done, but the conditions are now in place to make sure that we continue to evolve. Those who do not are anachronisms and will not survive, because it is a buyer’s market. Staff now have a choice: a choice to be paid a living wage in safe and professional conditions.

Food Network television has brought about an unprecedented interest in cooking and culinary celebrities, yet we are in the middle of a recruitment crisis. For every positive message in the medium there are those shows glorifying the industry’s scars. Gordon Ramsay is an interesting case in that his flagship restaurants now appear to be models in workplace reform and gender balance. Yet his media career has been built around kitchen-rage porn, with vehicles like Hell’s Kitchen, in which abuse is served piping hot off the pass. Given the size and global nature of his operation, it is unlikely that all of his businesses are models of equity, but there is certainly recognition within his own enterprise that being an employer of sound reputation is good for business.

We now have a marketing issue. We need to give the general public a different narrative; move beyond the tired tropes and tell a story of a diverse and dynamic workplace fraught with promise. I know chefs who still think of Gordon’s breakout ’90s hit, Boiling Point, as a call to arms. Is it any wonder that we find it so difficult to recruit the numbers of young chefs required for our ever-expanding $20 billion industry?

We need to attract young people to that vibrant and rewarding industry. Not just as an interim measure or student sabbatical, but as a career. The substantive changes already in place mean hospitality is now increasingly offering a career of opportunity and sustainable working conditions. Gone are the days of the industry attracting those with little choice and less agency. Young chefs today have more opportunity, are better educated, more informed and better paid than they have ever been. They are the future change agents who will continue to reform and thrive.

We remain a work in progress on a slow arc towards wage and cultural equality. But one thing all of us can do is try to tell a different kind of story. To glorify a different kind of experience. To lay down our arms. It is incumbent on those within the industry to forget the folklore, acknowledge the sins of our fathers and get on with the hard work of promoting what a wonderful and diverse career the kitchen can be.