to speak about the total satisfaction of killing the line, the way scrubbing down your station afterward puts your mind right, about “the third shift,” the drinks after work. I wanted to say that we are all not sitting around in our naturally woven fibers eating our organic quinoa salads and thinking up our next sustainable charity project. Some of us are actually cooking. And enjoying cooking. But I had shut down and couldn’t muster for this part of the panel, where my supposed peers were gassing on about themselves, giving these young women the impression that each day in a kitchen is like going to some priggish church.
They were speaking as women who were thirty years into an industry, and the young women we were meant to address had yet to experience even their first day of it.
Why didn’t a single one of us mention cooking? Why didn’t we say, If you want your cooking career to be recognized, be a good cook! Cook, ladies, cook.
Defeated, I thought about what I had had to do to arrange getting to the conference that day in the first place. If I had just told them about that small journey, from my apartment with two sleeping children to their campus, as the chef and owner of a restaurant and the mother of two little kids, wouldn’t just that answer all of their questions about family and career and motherhood?
If I told them about the pan-pipe player and the full day in which I would never see my boys awake. If I told them how I joke that I now pity the women who start families who have not been chefs. How I wonder earnestly, how does the office worker woman who is so accustomed to her forty-hour workweek, her daily lunch hour, her inbox, and her out-box, handle all the pain and the physical contortions, and the mayhem of suckling, crying, ear infections, and working if she has never had to skin a live eel, placate the angry patron at Table 7 who finds his rabbit a bit stringy, and carry an epileptic line cook off the mats who has suffered a grand mal seizure during service? How will the woman who is accustomed to great personal and bodily integrity suffer the cannibalizing feeling that nursing constantly can leave you with, as if you were being eaten alive, not in huge monster-gore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf?
I thought of telling them how changing a diaper reminds me, every time, of trussing a chicken. How sleepless nights and long grueling hours under intense physical discomfort were already part of my daily routine long before I had children. How labeling every school lunch bag, granola bar, juice box, extra sweater, and nap blanket with permanent Sharpie is like what we’ve been doing every day for thirty years, labeling the foods in our walk-ins. How being the chef and owner of a restaurant means you have already, by definition, mastered the idea of “systems,” “routines,” and “protocols” so that everyone who works for you can work smart-hard rather than work stupid-hard. So that by the time you are setting up your household and preparing yourself for adding children, you have a tendency toward this kind of order, logic, and efficiency.
Multitasking—answering questions on the phone, cooking something, and trying to monitor a line cook, while hearing your name repeated possibly six or seven hundred times in less than eight hours—is exactly like trying to run a family and a business. A choking patron, a grease fire, a badly cut employee—once you have been through that, figuring out how you will get your injured child to the emergency room of a hospital in the nearest Italian town where you are alone on vacation should come a little easier to you.
Not to give the impression that if you’ve been a chef, then adding parenthood to your day is just as easy as running a lamb shank special on your menu. Days go very badly and there is never balance. Everybody gets shorted, everybody gets hurt, and you, the mom, not the least. But it does give you a leg up, I often think, because the restaurant family is a perfect starter family. It’s such an accurate in-flight simulator that I have grown to feel sorry for anybody who enters parenthood and a domestic project without having first run a restaurant. From the earliest stages of family life when you