Squad Goals
I think I’m beginning to get a sense of what a well-functioning kitchen feels like. After just a few weeks of working together, my class is beginning to become a team, watching out for each other and cleaning up after each other and communicating much better than we did at the start. There are definitely certain people I flow better with, and others whom I find frustrating, but we’re all working it out.
There’s been a conversation playing out in food media about the role (death? transformation?) of the celebrity chef. It started boiling up last week after the James Beard Foundation’s decision to cancel their upcoming awards ceremony and not release the names of the already-chosen winners — potentially because no Black people won and some of the chefs who did have been called out for abusive or unethical behavior. I’ve seen different takes from people I respect, like Alicia Kennedy’s argument that the award structure is the problem, so we should boycott them altogether and redefine notions of success, versus the argument that boycotting at this point will only uphold the power of previous award winners, and burn the ladder for new and different people to enter their circle. All of them agree, anyway, that the teams who work for chefs don’t get the recognition they deserve.
These patterns prevail in other industries, of course. Tech has its glorified startup founders who overcome odds through genius and hard work. The whole idea of the superstar-celebrity founder/chef auteur is one that I react strongly against, probably due to having once been attracted to it myself, and then seeing it destroy company after company. The kind of abuse that happens in restaurants is more extreme than at tech companies (likely in proportion to the lack of power of its workers), but it all seems to come from our culture’s tendency to idolize individuals who think of their teams as simple enactments of their will, rather than the source of their success. I have dreams of running my own place someday but I would like to do it without being an autocrat.
So as I learn about cooking I want to also study healthy teams and the way power moves around a kitchen. One of my classmates is often disrespectful when he tells others how to sweep or mix or whatever, and the rest of us see that. So one practice I’m trying to cultivate is, except for extreme cases, to never tell someone how to do something. Either they already believe they don’t know what they’re doing in which case they’ll probably feel that you’re striking where they’re most vulnerable. Or, the way they’ve been doing things has worked for them in the past, and you’re only going to get through to them if you respect that but can demonstrate why another way will benefit them in the future. From what I’ve observed, the best teachers teach like this and the best bosses manage like this.
We’re only starting to feel the heat in the kitchen though (ha…) so we’ll see in the coming months how our courtesy holds up.