‘The insults and screaming took their toll’: the worst time of my life as a chef | Food

‘You’ll never amount to anything, young lady.” These are words that no one, no matter what industry they are in, ever wants to hear. If you’re a chef, it’s likely someone will have screamed them in your face at least once. For me, it happened at a restaurant I don’t include on my CV. I have never admitted that I worked for this chef in interviews and rarely speak about my experience, even to friends and family. Because I don’t want to trash someone’s reputation for the sake of my own, I’m not going to use the real name of the restaurant or of anyone who worked there. However, people need to understand that places like this exist, and that the experience was formative, if awful. So, let’s call the restaurant “Jeff’s” after the chef patron, then let me tell you about the worst time of my career.

I wanted to work at the Ledbury, a restaurant in Notting Hill that everyone was talking about but after trying to arrange a trial a couple of times and not being able to make the dates work, I looked elsewhere as my notice period at Claridge’s was coming to an end and I needed to have money coming in. I settled on Jeff’s.

From the outside, the food Jeff’s produced looked amazing, and it was the step up that I was looking for, or so I thought. My trial shift included standing at the edge of the pass with Michael, the head chef. Michael was a methodical guy with a lovely smile; he seemed friendly enough. He offered me the job and in the absence of other offers I accepted, swallowing the £3,000 pay cut to go back a rung down the ladder to demi chef de partie. Even though I accepted the position I knew something wasn’t right. I’m a believer in gut instinct and I should have trusted mine at that moment.

Innocence and arrogance are intertwined when you’re young. Having two years’ experience was a far cry from the knowledge I would need to navigate a well regarded kitchen, and yet I felt I was a pretty competent cook. I believed that because I had worked through all the sections at Claridge’s, I’d be a dab hand at anything thrown at me at Jeff’s.

On my first day, I changed into my whites and was ushered to the kitchen. I was met with blank faces. No one went out of their way to introduce themselves. Most of the gaunt-looking chefs didn’t even look up from their chopping boards. The feeling was very different to Claridge’s. The atmosphere was devoid of the friendly chatter during the morning’s prep. I was used to talking about who had won the football, or who had got the most drunk at the weekend – but there was none of that here, no camaraderie. Even when I asked about how things were cooked I felt that I was being a nuisance. My presence was too loud, my personality too big.

I had been allocated to the garnish section. Here, two chefs would work with support from another who stood downstairs all day doing prep and mise en place. Our official start time was 7am, a full hour earlier than my previous role and of course everyone got in even earlier than that, so it was back to 6am starts – who needs sleep?

I’d convinced myself that the stultifying ambience of the kitchen would lift once service got under way. To my alarm, it was almost as quiet as prep time. If you’ve ever been in a kitchen during service you’ll know that this is not normal; when it’s going well, this time of day is lively, buzzing. Not so here.

At Jeff’s, the sous chef on the pass would call the check in a monotonous manner, everyone would reply with a short, sharp “Oui!” and that would be it until the table was counted down. No talking. Nothing. The fast pace of Claridge’s soon became a memory. It was the pressure and electricity of the kitchen that had drawn me into this world and made me fall in love with it. Without that buzz I was surrounded by a room full of tired, grumpy chefs barking orders and putting food on plates – hardly inspirational.

I knew I just needed to be patient. At Claridge’s we were doing upwards of 200 covers a night, at Jeff’s covers were significantly fewer. The food was much more intricate, which required a level of precision I hadn’t encountered before.

Even though Claridge’s had been busy, we would always eat at around 5pm. If you weren’t hungry you would at least go down the canteen to get a fizzy drink, then nip outside for a cigarette and see what was left of the daylight you’d once again missed. Five o’clock came and went on my first day at Jeff’s and there was no whisper of a break or anyone getting food. I think the whole kitchen was so low it didn’t even occur to them. Worse, I’d held a wee in all day; I hadn’t seen anyone else go to the toilet and was too afraid to ask, for fear of seeming weak.

Lunch had been pretty quiet but dinner was fully booked. It should have been a walk in the park but it turned out that my first day coincided with a big shake-up, with chefs on meat, fish and garnish all moving to a different section. Section-change day in any restaurant is a challenge, especially when three sections move in one go. There’s a lot of firefighting done by the senior team to prevent mistakes from being made while people learn the ropes. But this was like nothing I had seen before. As it got busy, one by one the chefs started to struggle, falling further behind with each “Ça marche!” (“coming up!”) that Jeff called out.

When you start to go down during service eventually you reach a point of no return. It’s impossible to get back on top unless someone jumps in to help, to make sure you’ve got the right amount of everything cooked off waiting to be called away, helps you tidy up (organisation goes out the window when you begin to fall behind), and generally get your head back in the game. This did not happen at Jeff’s. Instead, the sous chefs stood there, screaming at the cooks, calling them names with every mistake, watching the car crash happen without doing anything to help or prevent it. I couldn’t look away from the unfolding horror. Petrified, I was wiping the same square metre of worktop over and over again until I could see my face in the stainless steel, trying my best to avoid getting in the line of fire.

The kitchen edged and bumped its way through service, food going out in fits and starts, and, after the last main course went out to the unsuspecting guests in the dining room, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. It was over. We began the clean down, changing mise en place containers, wiping out fridges and washing down benches. I was then informed as the junior chef on the garnish it was my job to clean the stove, solo, and I was equally surprised to see the commis chef from the cold sections summoned over to clean the stoves of meat and fish. Some of these poor sods had spent the whole 15-hour day in a basement room with no windows doing mind-numbing prep tasks and they were now expected to do someone else’s cleaning. This didn’t sit well with me. I could tell a storm was nearly ready to break. The atmosphere was unbearable.

The cleaning was extensive, and as I watched the clock roll past midnight I hoped we were getting to the end of the day. Just as I thought we were finished, one of the sous chefs summoned the whole kitchen downstairs into the basement. We dutifully filtered into the prep kitchen, standing in a line like privates waiting for an inspection. Jeff stormed in with a menacing look on his face and started to berate the team, one by one, telling them what a bad job they had done and how they had let him and the restaurant down that night. (This is affectionately referred to in some restaurants as the “You’re shit” chat.)

The dressing downs were intensely personal. Jeff deliberately insulted the way people looked and their personality traits. I could see he was getting right inside their heads, which by this point were hanging, eyes on the floor, and the only sound anyone made was, “Yes, Jeff!” I realised what a mistake taking this job had been. The quietness in the kitchen that morning hadn’t been because everyone was hard at work – it was because they were terrified. Even being heard in the kitchen marked you out as a target and offered more ammo for Jeff and his generals to use on you. It was better to be a void of a human being than have any sort of identity.

When everyone had their turn in the spotlight, we were free to go. I was relieved that I was too new to have received a bollocking – I hadn’t been there long enough to do anything wrong. It was 1.30am, long after the Tube had stopped running, so I boarded the night bus and spent the journey home wrestling with what I had just witnessed. Alarm bells were screeching in my head and a big part of me didn’t want to return the next morning but I didn’t want to be one of those people who just walked out after a day. I hated those people and, besides, I couldn’t afford not to be working, even for a few days. I decided to write it off as one horrible day.

It never got much better: 6.30am starts stretched to finishes after midnight, and typically 2am on Saturdays, when we had to deep clean with a toothbrush (seriously) after service. Sunday was the only day the restaurant was closed, which meant that the chances of getting two days off together were slim; split days off coupled with double shifts every day meant that any time I did get off was spent sleeping. I kissed what little social life I’d had before goodbye.

The junior sous chef, Sarah, was only a few years older than me and a product of her environment. Nothing was ever good enough. One of the jobs on my station included carefully using the meat slicer to cut wafer-thin sections of cauliflower florets, which splinter into tiny pieces. Cleaning was a nightmare. Sarah would wait for me to clean the machine, go back upstairs and just as I was starting to get on with my next job, call me downstairs to do it again. The first time this happened, I agreed she had a point but after the fifth I could only imagine she was getting a kick out of it. I later learned that the previous head chef had completely broken her before “building her back up”; she had been bred to behave this way.

At Jeff’s, you would normally have to spend time in the prep kitchen before being granted the “privilege” of working upstairs. I had protested and I’ve never been more glad of my powers of persuasion. What the chefs downstairs did was demeaning and it was no wonder most recruits only lasted a few weeks. I didn’t blame them.

Despite the atmosphere, I still managed to find a partner in crime. David was a tall, gangly young man with a nervous personality and a massive grin he deployed to cover this up. He wasn’t so far down Jeff’s rabbit hole that he couldn’t see the light. He recognised what was really going on in the kitchen.

Every day was a slog. The combination of dizzyingly long hours, no breaks and being treated like something nasty on the bottom of someone’s shoe quickly took a toll, both physically and mentally. David and I used to have a running joke: we wished we would get hit by a car on the way into work, not enough to kill us or do permanent damage but just enough to mean we could have a few weeks off. The thought of actual, hospitalising, bodily harm was preferable to the daily treatment at Jeff’s. It wasn’t just banter; a huge part of us meant it – we dreamed of lying in bed eating ice-cream.

After several months I’d given up hope that life was going to get any better. I’m a positive person but all joy had evaporated. The final straw was being screamed at for forgetting a sprinkle of finely chopped chervil in a portion of baby carrots, resulting in my being verbally dressed down in front of the entire kitchen. At the end of that night, I packed my knives and took them downstairs to the changing room. I didn’t intend to go back the next day and I could feel the eyes of the other chefs on me as I did this. It means only one thing when a chef takes their knives from the kitchen and it happened so often we were used to the signs of someone walking out.

I got home and cried, as I did most nights. I never wanted to set foot in that kitchen again, but my partner, Matt, convinced me to do things properly, give my notice and walk out with my head held high. He wanted me to be happy and had the faith that I had lost that I would find another job. I had barely seen any of my friends and I was exhausted. I was done.

I was too apprehensive to give my notice to Jeff himself. I handed it to the senior sous chef, the only senior member of the team who was remotely friendly. They tried to talk me round and offered me the chance to do fish or meat. Once, I would have jumped at that but I knew it was no solution. I needed to get out of this place before I started to turn into one of them.

This is an edited extract from A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen by Sally Abé, published by Fleet on 6 June (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply