“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene I

At the end of his own weird and raunchy comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare lets us in on his own thoughts regarding passion and madness. Passion, Creativity, and Insanity are the coin of the realm in culinary arts. The work of food writers, celebrity cooks, and media like The Bear parade our damage for the public and make us heroes, horror stories, characters, and even martyrs when we die.

I don’t think for a second it’s somehow undeserved. That’s the part of our lives that kitchen veterans miss and swap stories about. What some people think needs to be done about- or with- that passion, however, has me wondering. How to do you temper, train, guide, and coordinate that kind of raw passion and madness? History would tell us we need to be like the military. Owners and executives who spend more time owning and eating in restaurants than actually making them work tell us we need to lead and manage like a business or a factory- possibly one that turns Dirt into Diabetes.

Personally, I think that the answer to leading and managing cooks is to stop seeking “employees” as much as finding acolytes.

I finally saw the movie “The Menu” about a week ago. The black comedy-horror flick stars Anya Taylor-Joy as an implacable customer at the ultra-fine dining restaurant run by a mysterious, fanatical, and radically broken chef Ralph Finnes, and it had me nodding and wincing in turn. “Go to an extreme and then take one step back” means that I was quietly wishing death on every future victim in the movie and simultaneously begging the Chef to pick up a hobby and go touch some grass. There isn’t a service worker alive who hasn’t just once dreamt of throwing a problematic customer out of a building and sending the bill after them, ideally demonstrating skill in the ancient art of defenestration. The question of the movie, however, was the difference between passion and obsession. At stake were consequences of leaving obsession unchecked- namely broken people, theatric menus, and murder-suicide dessert courses.

Passion is when you love something enough to make your life about it. Obsession is when you forget the “love” part. The best people I know in this world are passionate about something or other, and pretty much every unhinged psycho that I wouldn’t trust around a roll of masking tape is obsessive- occasionally about the exact same things. The ideal baker to me is passionate about the craft of baking but loves it even more for its place in the whole. The best bakers and workers I’ve ever had didn’t just love baking- baking was their medium for saving the world. If I could have my way, I would find and encourage as many such people as possible- those who want to save a broken world by feeding it well. That will mean finding and nurturing the happy medium between passion and obsession, guiding others to their calling, and offering a vision and philosophy for us all to pursue. Already that sounds more like a religion than a restaurant, and I hope to be the High Priest.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In a chef’s meeting recently, besides going over numbers of the last month (an admittedly good and important thing to do- useful data is always good) and talking through organization practices that the top brass want us to start using in the kitchen (a book report that really could have been an email, my personal grievances with such “bestseller” advice notwithstanding,) the topic of cleaning projects came up. There was an issue where one of the stewards, tasked with cleaning an appliance, had essentially “missed a spot.” This was personally corrected by one of the chefs who pulled the steward back, asked him to finish the job, and thanked him afterward.

On the whole, that’s not a big deal. It’s a manager doing what a manager ought to do- making sure a task is done correctly. Speaking from personal experience and pet peeves, however, I can understand feeling frustrated at having to go over finished tasks a second time due to delayed or poor communication. A former manager and I became frustrated at each other when they would ask me questions but insist “they didn’t need all the details” and called them a “waste of their time.” I, in turn, was frustrated by the feeling of my time being wasted when they would inevitably interrupt me later in the day seeking clarification- those same details that preemptively were deemed unnecessary. The line between “disrespecting others’ time” and “being impatient” apparently blurs based on how high up you are in an organization.

With that in mind, I questioned whether such situations could be avoided by “painting ‘done'”– clearly stating what expectations were at the outset, making sure that tasks only needed to be done once and that personal correction may not be necessary. The chefs’ rebuttal was “No, that’s our job to show and inspect for what our expectations are. Besides, the staff might use that list of expectations and say ‘Well, it didn’t say we had to do that…'”

I can understand the logic well enough and where such logic comes from. Kitchens (and businesses in general) contain all types of people, and one’s personal mileage in an industry may vary. A long time surrounded by crooks and cutthroats will leave a person looking over their shoulder in church. All the same, my initial reaction was the same- “this person actually believes his team, the people he leads and trains, will screw him over on cleaning tasks through rules-lawyering.“

When it comes to running a kitchen, chefs make comparisons to the military. There is, after all, a reason Escoffier called it the Brigade System. A general in the Head Chef, lieutenants in the sous-chefs, the chef of their various stations, captain and sergeants, all the way down the ranks to the chef de parties and commis. Everyone has a rank, an order, and discipline (ideally) flowing throughout. It’s that kind of thing that makes management books like “Extreme Ownership,” “The Unstoppable Sales Machine” or “The Goal” laughable to the average cook- even borderline insulting. One of the few but powerful upsides to this life of ours is that we don’t work in a stuffy office or on a factory floor. This is craft and calling and art as much as it is industry, efficiency is already the name of the game, and how dare some pencil-headed prick with a book who can’t tell a saucepan from a stockpot come down from on high and tell us we’re doing it all wrong?

When it comes to my bakers and I, however, comparisons to the military feel off. It feels insulting to them and even self-deprecating to assume that people I chose to lead would casually screw me over for the sake of getting on to the next task a little faster. Yes, I am their leader. I do need to set an example, inspect work, correct it when it goes wrong, and impose discipline. That shouldn’t, I think, start from the point of view of “You are going to undermine me, I’d better head that off and keep my authority secure.” Instead, I think it needs to start the opposite direction- “This is what I expect, and I trust you to do it right and bring it to me if there’s a problem. I trust you because I work and act to earn your trust and because we have the same vision and belief in what being a professional is.” In that way, I don’t want mindless soldiers- I want acolytes. I want paladins of the Church of Pastry. I want the way we work, the way we treat each other, and the way we maintain our spaces to be articles of faith as much as discipline. If I am in charge, it is less as a commanding officer and more as a kind of Elder or High Priest leading by trust, faith, and deed instead of rules.

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Not long ago, I found a simple Hebrew prayer that can be invoked whenever one starts performing their craft. It invokes Shechinah– the feminine, creative, nurturing aspect of God- and asks that that spirit “reside in the work of my hands.” Meaning, it asks The Creator that whatever project you are working on be a worthy addition to all of Creation.

יהי רצון שתשרה שכינה במעשי ידי
“Yehi ratzon shetishreh shekhinah bema’asei yadai.“
“May it be Your will that Shekhinah reside in the work of my hands.”

Source

I don’t really believe in the “Power of Prayer” regarding its ability to change the course of events or cause miracles, or even the idea of talking to God/gods. For me, prayer functions more like a mantra by focusing the will and grounding a person to help align their intention with what they want. Begging God to win the lottery, I imagine, has considerably less success than asking for help managing one’s personal affairs.

Whether it works or not, though, I say the prayer when I start to mix my first recipe of the day in the winery. To my knowledge, it hasn’t magically made my work better or kept me from screwing up in the kitchen. I still make mistakes all the time. I still get frustrated and pissed and angry when events go pear-shaped or the day feels like a game of Hurry Up and Wait. I say it anyway just to remind myself that I am about to practice a craft that I have learned, trained on, and practiced for years. That, and the ability to practice a craft well, are blessings in themselves. I am one of a comparatively small segment of humanity that gets to make a living doing what I am passionate about. I even get a couple of people who look to me to lead and train them in that work. I don’t need to be some majordomo of the kitchen or grand enlightened sage to do that- but I need to be as passionate and diligent and in love with the work as I want them to be. I may be in charge, but I need to be as much an acolyte of the Cult of Pastry as either of them.

Stay Classy,