An Unvarnished Job Description for a Line Cook

Are you tired of the public's romanticized ideas about what a cook or chef does for a living vs reality?  Me too. It seems to have gotten worse recently, but it is definitely nothing new.

Way back in the 1980s (well before the celebrity chef craze really took hold), I was working as Food and Beverage Director (F&B) at a hotel. They tasked me to rewrite the job descriptions for the positions in my department, including all kitchen, dining room, room service, and bar/lounge positions. I was then to present and discuss them with all prospective employees to make sure they were able and willing to do the jobs for which they were applying. 

Talk about re-inventing the wheel!  Can you imagine how many times my predecessors at his property (and every other F&B manager at every other hotel in the world) had done this same task?.  I thought it was a complete waste of time but, apparently, this onerous little task was an exercise designed to make sure that every F&B was intimately familiar with each of the job positions in his department. Well, I was more than familiar, having done most of them firsthand, so I went at it.

To be honest, I did a pretty half-assed job for all the service staff positions, and the bar positions and the dishwashers, etc. My heart just wasn't in it.  But for the cooks, the job positions I knew most about, I had some fun.  I ended up sending the GM a 2-page, single-spaced typed (remember typewriters?) document.  It went something like this…

Job Description for a Cook

The primary job for a cook is preparing the food served in our restaurants. Duties and work conditions include -

• Cooks work in widely variable physical environments for extended periods of time including sub-zero degrees F while working/cleaning/stocking/organizing/ and/or inventorying in the walk-in freezers and 120 degrees F-plus temperatures on the hot cooking line. “If you can’t take the heat; stay out of the kitchen” is not just a cute saying.
• The work environment for cooks is also usually slippery, often wet. Cooks must wear comfortable, grease-proof, non-slip, steel-toed shoes at all times in the kitchen.
• The kitchen can be very cramped and is always full of very sharp tools and extremely hot equipment. 
• Cooks can expect occasional cuts and burns at work. These are part of the job, and the cook needs to tolerate them with minimal interruption to the workflow.
• Cooks must be able to stand on their feet working for 2 to 3 hours at a time under these conditions without a break during service periods. 
• Cooks can expect to do a great deal of physical heavy lifting daily with regular tasks involving moving 50-lb (plus) containers up and down stairs, along narrow hallways and through the above-described wet/hot/cold/slippery environments.
• The kitchen work zone is a fast-paced, intense, and testosterone-rich environment that can be adversarial. Exposure to "colorful language", "rich metaphors", "sexually charged" statements, and a certain amount of physical and mental stress that is out of place in most work environments is all in a typical day's work for cooks.
• We also expect cooks to be available to work all weekends and holidays as these are the restaurant's busiest times.  Normal work shifts for cooks either begin at 5am or end at midnight (sometimes both).
• While Cooks' shifts will technically include the periodic meal and shift breaks mandated by law, the nature of the business may prevent any time off the line during meal services. A management team member will sign you on- and off- shift if you are too busy to do it yourself.
• We also inform you that cooks and chefs have the highest suicide and divorce rates of any profession except for law enforcement.

I broke down each of the individual positions (breakfast cook, dinner cook, prep cook, etc) in ridiculous detail, highlighting, in meticulous detail, every difficult or unpleasant task they might face.

The GM apparently didn't like my work very much and told me not to use my descriptions for my interviews. Imagine that!  Probably a good thing or I’d never have been able to get anybody but crazed masochists to fill my job openings.

The following year, they handed me a packet of generic F&B job descriptions to use.  They had sent them down from corporate headquarters, where the company lawyers apparently had a large part in writing them. The job descriptions were vanilla, vague and effectively useless as a hiring or training tool (but I guess it kept guys like me from getting the company in trouble).

Conclusion

But times have SO changed! Commercial kitchens are not at all the same places they were nearly 40 years ago. I'm happy to report that the job is NOTHING like this job description which is COMPLETELY outdated and TOTALLY unacceptable in today's sensitive, inclusive, modern restaurant paradigm.  <wink, wink> (psst, Hey buddy, want a sweet line cook job?)