Guillaume Zika

Conversation with a chef: Bonjour, Guillaume. We won't speak in French, but I just need to always try and get it in there.

Guillaume Zika: My English is actually better than my French.

You've probably been overseas for a large part of your life, haven't you?

Maybe 16, 17 years? I'm okay with talking to friends and family and things that. As soon as it gets complicated with words that I don't use every day, especially kitchen language and things, I get a bit lost.

You're from Paris. And I heard on another podcast that your dad was a chef. You were just telling me your mum's Spanish. Did those things influence the food you ate? What happened at home in the Zika household?

My mum was mostly cooking because my dad was a chef. So being a chef, and especially back in the day, he was working a lot. He actually didn't spend a huge amount of time with my brother and I. He was there for family events and Christmas. Thats how I actually really realised how good a cook he was because he was cooking for the whole family and showing off his cooking and everyone was loving it. But otherwise, the everyday cooking was my mum doing it. And not so much Spanish influence because she's Spanish, but she arrived in France when she was six so she's pretty much French.

So, your dad was the celebration cook. Do you have any memories of the food that he made?

There is one dish that I always have in my head and it's duck a l'orange. It's so tasty and so special as well. A lot of people would say, oh yeah, in France, we eat foie gras and duck every day at home but, no, we don't. It's a bit of a celebration dish.

What do you think it was that made you want to become a chef? Was it because your dad was?

I think it was. I was very inspired by my dad, not especially from him being a chef, but by him being loved and cherished by people around him and family and friends and all that. That probably came from his personality, but for me, I thought people loved him because he was a chef and I wanted to cook for people and have that reaction from my friends and family. It's rewarding to get cheered when you do something like this. I was not the best student. I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I grew up and my school suggested I become either a chef or other things that were not really inspiring. So I thought, sure, I'll give it a go.

That's interesting too, because I know that your first job was in a Michelin star restaurant. You thought, oh, I'll give it a go. But then you go straight to fine dining in a top restaurant. What are the steps? How do you get to start working your first job in that level of restaurant?

Well, especially when you don't have a CV, you just walk and knock on restaurant doors. I wanted to be a chef, but I just didn't want to be any chef. I wanted to be a really good chef and I wanted to make a career out of it. I started knocking at some good restaurant doors and I got my first job when I was 16. I just started being a stagiaire and doing the dishes and doing some very basic cooking skills. There was a one Michelin star restaurant in a suburb of Paris, not far from where I was living. After that, I started the proper cookery school. From there, I thought, I want to be working in in a three Michelin star restaurant. Because this is the top of the top and I want to learn from all those very talented chefs. Then I had a very, very small CV and I had started an apprenticeship, so that was good. I went to knock at every three Michelin star restaurant in Paris to see if they were looking for apprentices. That's how I started and I didn't manage to get a job in a three Michelin star, but I got into a two, which was the Relais Louis XIII, managed by a chef called Manuel Martinez. He's probably still around, but he was already quite old at the time, but a really good chef. He was a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, and it was a pretty intense kitchen. Very intense, but I learned a lot of structure, a lot of good things. I even talk about it now. It was a small family owned restaurant and he was so tight with his money and trying to save everywhere and making sure we were not throwing anything in a bin, any peelings of carrots, onions, celery, everything went into a bucket and we were just using it for stocks. The cool room was downstairs, and when we went down the stairs, we would turn on the lights, then at the end of the stairs, turn them off, and turning off the lights in the cool room so it was dark. That was that crazy. Going to Rungis to the big wholesale market twice a week to get better prices.

That is a good start, though, because it sets some really good standards, doesn't it? If that's what your baseline is.

This is the whole point, I think, of working in those really high-standing restaurants right at the beginning. You don't know anything, so you learn all the good things from the start, and I'm not saying that at restaurants that are not Michelin star, you don't learn the right thing, but you've got more chances to learn the right thing in a Michelin style restaurant.

Do you think it's harder to work your way up then if you don't start in a Michelin star restaurant? If you did your apprenticeship in a brasserie or bistrot, would it be more difficult to then get to that standard?

I think so. There's some really good bistros and brasseries where you learn very like, you know, and they'll also managed by ex-Michelin style chefs and they're really doing the right thing, but if we talk about the basic brasserie, from a little corner in a suburb in Paris, they probably cut a lot of corners and they don't learn the right thing, and then when they try to get a job in a good restaurant, they're going to struggle. But also if they manage to get the job, and they are asked to make a brunoise or a chiffonade and if they don't know how to do it right, they're going to be told they can't cook. Rather than you learning how to use your knife properly and learning how to work in a clean environment. Those little habits are very important for your base of cooking, I think.

So if you were learning to make a brunoise or whatever at cooking school, do you have to then relearn or is it refined once you are in a Michelin star restaurant?

That is interesting. I think it's the same, actually in every restaurant. You have your basic knowledge. You're going to learn how to make a brunoise in cooking school, but it doesn't mean you're going to do it correctly and fast, it takes practice. Brunoise is probably not the best example. I always take this example, actually of turning an artichoke. Turning an artichoke is quite complex. I dont remember but you probably learn that at school and then some restaurants are doing it one way, some restaurants are doing a different way. Sometimes it doesn't matter if you come from a strong Michelin star, if you jump in another one, you have to do a different way. Even if the result ends up the same. I have peeled a lot of artichokes in my life, and when I arrived at a Per Se in New York, and they still have three Michelin stars now, I had to peel artichokes and I couldn't do it the way I had learned, and I had to do it their way, even though the result was the same. You need to learn the other way, regardless. It's like making your chicken stock. Chicken stock is a very basic recipe that you learn at school, but every restaurant's got a different way to make a chicken stock. There is a good way and there is a bad way, and the bad ways is what you learn in a small standard restaurant.

Do you think every chef can be at that Michelin star level not as the head chef necessarily, but working in the kitchen or is it not for everybody?

No, they can. It's all about attitude. If you want a job in a Michelin star restaurant, you can walk in and get a job, even with no experience. If you have the right attitude, they're going to put you into it and they're going to like you. But if you've got the wrong attitude, thinking that you know it all because of all your knowledge and everything, you're not going to get accepted and you're probably not going to keep the job. It's the same in every industry. If you're willing to learn and to fold yourself into the culture of the business, it's good. Back in the day, it was, not necessarily hard conditions, but long hours and a lot of pressure to work in Michelin restaurants. The standard it was really high, so it was pretty intense in the kitchen. There was a lot of fighting, not physical fighting, but a lot of tension in a kitchen within the chefs.

Why was that? Because you want to be ahead of the others?

Exactly, yeah. To protect yourself in the kitchen, sometimes you had to be a bad person. This is just some restaurants that I worked in. It's not every one, especially not these days.

You hear all these stories of the brigade and the hard times and the shouty chefs and I think certainly in Britain at certain stages that's been glorified. But I always like to feel like the food is coming from a place of goodness. So, it's sad to know that the people making the food were tense. I do understand why. Just as a little sidestep, because I liked hearing you talk about artichokes, and I feel like it's not something we really eat so much in Australia. Learning how to turn an artichoke would not probably be high on the list of chef skills here, do you think?

No, I don't think so.

And yet, that's what I love about France. I remember when I lived there, I used to always just have to sit back and wait and watch how people ate things because invariably I would do it wrong. In spring when there's asparagus, we just probably use knives and forks. They would get their knife and put it under the plate and make a little vinaigrette in the little hollow and then dip each spear in and eat it with their fingers. And with the artichoke as well, I just hadnever eaten an artichoke and they did them in the pressure cooker and then had the little vinaigrette and you'd go scraping the flesh off each leaf with your teeth until you got to the heart, which was the treasure.

I love artichokes.That artichoke dish is one of the dished that brings me so much memory. It's such a simple dish. It is a pain in the arse to peel an artichoke, but you can just simply eat it whole like this. It's just incredible putting this spoon under the plate, just so the vinaigrette stays on the side and peeling every leaf.

That's a real lesson in taking time, I think, that we might have lost.

You started in Paris, but then I loved to see you went down to the South of France. I like to believe that perhaps in a past life, I might have been Provencale. I lived there for a year and I love it.

I was at a place called Mougins. It's inland of Cannes.

Beautiful country around there. The light down there is so stunning, isn't it? What made you decide to go there?

My parents, when I was 18, moved to the south of France from Paris, and at that time, I was not having the best time in the restaurant I used to work in. So, I decided to move down there with them. In Paris I was an apprentice and I got my first real job down there at a place called Le Moulin Mougins. It was a two Michelin Star restaurant at the time. It was a very different experience. I learned a very different type of cooking and the team was just family. It was pretty amazing.

Still long hours, though, I imagine.

Yes. But it's not longer hours if you don't think it's long hours. It's all perception. If you think it's normal to do 60, 70 hours, you just do it without complaining. These days it's not normal to do that many hours. These days people work 38 hours, and as soon as they do 40, which is only an extra two, and it's still very little compared to what we used to do, they're like, oh, I had a big week this week. Jesus. But this is all in your mind.

All those things came to a head here in recent years, fairness and all of those things. But I think if there's anything that you're learning, for example, me learning French, it takes hours to become really good at something. Hours and hours and years to become good at something or if you're an artist, or whatever it is that you're doing, I think it's difficult to master things in an eight hour day and I think, sadly, some things seem to have been pushed aside because they just can't pay people to teach butchery or proper fish work or all those things that perhaps you could do when you were learning, because there was time in the day to observe and maybe to teach as well. Are they teaching in the Michelin star restaurants or do you just have to observe and learn?

You learned by doing it. But it's very interesting what you're saying, and it's true. Technically, if you look at back in the day, we were working 80 hours a week, which is twice the amount of hours that we do today. That is one thing. First, you learn twice more, because you spend more time doing it. But there's another thing. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a chef and I was telling him that it's actually a little bit more than this. Back in the day, in the industry, when you do so much of one thing, that's all you do. So your mind is fully ingrained in it. So if you work 80 hours a week in a kitchen, automatically, if you like what you are doing, obviously, it becomes a passion and all you do is think about it. You live it, you breathe it. So you are really embraced by it. This is your life. Being a chef is literally your life. These days, working 38 hours in kitchen, it is not your life any more because you've got so much more time outside of cooking, which can be going to the gym or it can be painting, or it can be going cycling, or it can be anything. That is also part of your life. So when you clock off work, you've got all the passions going on, you've got time for a girlfriend. You travel and all these things, which back in the day, you didn't have time to do all those things.

So it is healthier these days.

It's healthier, but what I mean is you're not as passionate about cooking anymore, which means you don't learn as much. It's quite interesting to see it from this perspective.

There are also lots of distractions these days in terms of places to learn cooking, because there's all these YouTubers and people on TikTok who have all these hacks and things, it must be a confusing world for young people trying to seek information, if they want to better themselves as a chef, to know where to look. Obviously, it would be great to look to the great chefs and learn from them.

There's a lot of different sorts of information and there's a lot of wrong ones too. Internet is just very crazy. I think you also become a good cook by practising and the more you do it, and this is like everything practising your French, practising a musical instrument. And the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. And again, it's when you need to break down that many fish in a day and you do it for 80 hours a week, it just becomes automatic. You know it by heart. It's like singing a song so many times and you don't even think about it. You just sing it. You know all the lyrics. At the Burleigh Pavilion where I used to work, sometimes the chefs would say to me, hey, we' got two fish, lets do a competition to see who can fillet it the fastest, or a chicken, who's breaking down the chicken the fastest. I haven't broken down a fish or a chicken for so long because after seven years at a Pavilion, I was not really cooking anymore. I was just managing 60 chefs. I was not really doing all the day to day things, and those guys were doing it every day. But even with me, with no training, because Id done it for so long, I was faster than them.

That's amazing. That's that muscle memory, isn't it?

It's crazy. You just know it by heart because you've done it for so long. It's a very different environment today any kitchen and 20 years ago. 20 years ago, you had to be quick in the kitchen and you were getting pushed hard by the person on top of you to go faster and faster and faster all the time. Today, you can't push people anymore. Not physically push, but it's really hard to tell them to go faster. And even if you tell them, its hard to make the whole team go faster. And then even if one person go faster it is like, oh, why would I go faster if no one else goes faster? But maybe this was happening 20 years ago as well, and I didnt notice because I worked in those high standard restaurants. Today people don't work really fast. They work pretty much for the clock, and they don't try to knock out a job as quickly as they can to go on the next one. They're not as productive as I think the places were where I used to be.

There must be still top restaurants here where there are really passionate chefs who seek that, but I understand what you mean.

It's really hard to instil that culture of working hard. It's very different.

After the south of France, did you go back to Paris before you went to New York?

Yes. I went back to Paris for three years. I worked at a place called Le Grand Vefour, and this place was a three Michelin star at the time. Three Michelin stars in Paris is very full on. This is where I realised that there was no place for weak people in the kitchen.

I was going to say, you finally achieved your goal. Did you wake up every morning going, "Yes, I'm working in a three Michelin star restaurant! Or were you thinking, ok, let's do this.

It was hard. But that builds strength.

Three years is a good stint. And then you were ready to move on after that? Did you always think, I need to go overseas to get that next challenge?

Not especially. I think I just wanted to move, to have a bit of sea change. We were closed during summer. Most restaurants in Paris close in August, at least the high end one closes, because everyone leaves Paris in August. I had four weeks off, so I asked my boss to find me a stage in New York. So I went to Le Bernardin. It had three Michelin stars at the time, a fish restaurant, and I really enjoyed New York.

You must have learned a lot about fish there.

It's funny because I had that mentality of that restaurant in Paris, which was pretty aggressive. If you wanted something, you just got it. When I was in New York at Le Bernardin, I was really trying to push everyone to try to do more things and I got in trouble. I got in big trouble and pretty much got kicked out of the kitchen. I said, can I do fish with the one guy that does fish the whole day in there. They said, sure, you can go there. You can spend time with him. So I was pretty much two or three weeks with him, just filling fish. It was so fast. Really impressive. When I finished there, I went back to Paris but I thought, I want to go and live there, so I'll applied to work at Per Se. I was very lucky to get a job.

Was Thomas Keller there? Do you actually get to see him?

Yes he was there. He was based in French Laundry. But in the six months that I was there, he came a few times. He's very calm. He's very self-controlled. A few times when I was doing something wrong, he just showed me very nicely how to do it.

Oh, gosh, that kind of interaction. That's great. And then London?

Yes. Then I went to London and I worked with Claude Bosi. At the time he had a restaurant called Hibiscus and we had two Michelin stars. I started as sous chef over there, and I stayed there for four years and I ended up being he head chef, the chef de cuisine. That was probably the hardest place I worked in. But I met some great people. It was intense. The amount of hours that I worked there was pretty crazy. London was just done another level.

You started as sous chef and then became head chef. Obviously when you're a sous chef, you've got some responsibility, but that head chef role is just that next level of not justthinking about the food that you're doing, but then overseeing a team, you've got to think about your leadership style, you've got to think about costs. Was that a natural progression for you or did you really have to stop and think about, what is my leadership style? How do I do the numbers?

Yeah, we were a small team. We were maybe 10, 12 people, in the kitchen. But because I was there for so long, naturally, you're already sous chef, so you're already kind of leading people, but more in the pans and things. I spent so much time cooking as well, I had a lot of respect from other people, because they knew I could cook. and then I became head chef. I think it was easier to lead people. I never really had any problem leading people. I had some bad interactions, not everyone liked me, but that's okay. But most of the time they respected me and we were working well as a team. And then all the costing you just learn as you go, learn how to use the spreadsheets, learn how to do all the things. It's funny because you never learn how to do those things until you get to that position, but you don't become a head chef because you know about costing, you become a head chef because you can cook. And then you're in that position and suddenly the financial aspect of the restaurant is in your hands, and it is not just about cooking anymore. You also need to make sure that kitchen is profitable. It's a big responsibility, and you just need to learn as you go. Claude Bosi had some structure in place and we had spreadsheets, so we were doing things properly.

That's what I find fascinating. Many chefs will say to me, I wasn't very good at school, so then I decided to become a chef. For me, those things don't go together, because I could not be a chef. Number one, I like cooking, but I could obviously not cook at the level you cook. But number two, I can't do spreadsheets. The amount of things that you have to think about as a chef, I think it's a redundant statement for people to say. It's just a different set of skills and perhaps the school didn't fit you, because I think this idea, as a chef, there is so much going on and the cognitive load is huge.

But you learn it through time in a kitchen. Because when you start as a cook, your job is very limited, but when you become a head chef, you have been through so many different situations, dealing with pressure, dealing with problems that happen; if a machine breaks or if something burns or if an order doesn't come through. You become a problem solver. By the time you go through all that and you become a head chef, you are just a machine. I strongly believe that someone that works in hospitality in general, because restaurant managers, general managers as well, they're just problem solvers. You just know so many answers to so many problems and soon there are not problems anymore. For a lot of people, they're problems, but they're not problems for you anymore because you've got an answer. I've always said a chef or someone who works in hospitality can go work in any other industry and they will thrive. Because they just put their heads down and they just go for it. They don't get stopped by little things. When you are a head chef, you have so much going on. You need to know how to cook and you need to know how to lead people. You need to know how to put a dish together and to communicate it to the team. You need to know how to talk to the suppliers and to manage good prices as well, and to find new products and you need to know your costings, the financial part of the business, which is pretty important. In general, 60 to 70% of the revenue of a restaurant comes from the kitchen, the food and if you don't get it right, the restaurant is in trouble.

Absolutely. It's a lot of pressure. It is mind boggling. I think nowadays, where the dining public might complain about the cost of things and restaurants, and the menu, you only need to look at how much you spend when you go to the supermarket and then consider what'sbeing done to the food in the restaurant, plus the overheads and all that kind of thing. People need to be a lot kinder, I think.

It's very tricky. Because you're right, the cost of living is super expensive, but the problem is for a restaurant to survive, it needs to be super tight, especially in two things that you can control, which is wages, and the cost of goods and it can be drinks or food, you need to be super tight because food is expensive these days, wages are expensive these days, and there is only so much you can charge for food. If you go to a restaurant and you see a burger for $40, youd never buy it. What's in it? But a burger for $40 is pretty much what we should sell a burger for.

It's like the whole conversation around banh mi, people think they should be some kind of cheap snack. It's just cannot be. There's so much in a banh mi.

It's crazy. There's so much more cost involved when you buy a sandwich. There's so much more cost involved than just the bread and what goes in the sandwich. Packaging is expensive these days. It's super expensive. Wages are expensive. Everyone's rent went up, restaurants rent went up. Electricity is the same. Insurance is expensive. So, when you buy a sandwich, you also pay for the rent. You also pay for the electricity. You pay for the packaging, you pay for the wages. And you don't see all this, you say, well, I can't go to Woolies and make this sandwich for a quarter of the price. It's like, sure.

Off you go. Please do.

No, but you know, but it's tricky because for the industry to be healthier and more sustainable, almost the only way is to charge more money. But if you charge more money as a restaurant, you're taking the risk to lose customers, because people won't be able to afford to have a sandwich. The margins in the restaurant industry are so much smaller compared to the margins in the building industry or the clothing industry. It's incredible.

What brought you to Australia?

A girl.

Oh, that's so often the story. I love that.

We met in London and worked together and then she's Australian, so we came together to Australia.

And Sydney was your first stop.

Sydney was the first place I went to, yeah.

It sounds like you were in a really beautiful place; Cottage Point Inn. And that's in a National Park. I feel like you're really coming from the other side of the world into full Australian mode. There'd be snakes and spiders.

Yes. Snakes and spiders and seagulls. A lot of things happening in the water. It's pretty incredible.

And that was a head chef job?

My first real head chef position. I was head chef in London, but it was not my menu. It was Claude's menu. This one was really about creating recipes on my own and creating a style create yourself as style.

How do you go about that? Because you're in a new country as well.

It was stressful. There was a lot of learning. You're in a country where the seasons are different, the produce is different, the fish looks completely different. You don't know the produce any more. I came from London where I knew everyone, and arrived in a country on the other side of the world where I didn't know anyone. I didn't know any chefs, I didn't know anyone. It was a very challenging experience. On top of that, you need to build yourself a reputation and build yourself a style and learn how youre going to make a difference in the industry with your cooking. People had a lot of expectations for me because I obviously had a big background and so there was a lot of pressure. I remember when I just arrived in Australia, Scott Bolles, was writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, and he wrote an article about me, and he called me the Michelin Man. That was a lot of pressure. I thought, okay, I'd better do well then.

How long were you there?

Three years?

And then Queensland from there?

Actually, I went to Bali for six months and opened something very different from what I had ever done before. It was a beach club. That was only a six month gig. Then when I came back to Australia, I didnt want to go back to a busy city after being in Bali, so I just wanted something a little bit more relaxed. Especially because I had a young family and so we decided to go Burleigh Heads in Queensland. My boss from Bali was opening the Burleigh Pavilion.

That was a big place, as you say, if you're overseeing 60 chefs.

It was a big place. This was probably one of the biggest challenges of my life.

I just saw on your Instagram that you recently finished there. I was going to ask you what you're doing now. And I know part of it, but I also wanted to ask you about running 2025 kilometres. Is that what you're doing this year?

I love being challenged and if people don't challenge me, I challenge myself. I follow this guy called Jesse Itzler on Instagram and he is a strong athlete and he gave himself a challenge this year to run 2025 miles, which is just over 3000 kilometres, 3200 or something for the year. I thought, that sounds fun. It's only an average of nine kilometres a day, so it's not too bad. If you miss a day, you need to run 18 kilometres the next. If you miss two days, you need to run 27. It goes quick. But yeah, that's one of the challenges. I'm also training for a marathon on the Gold Coast in a few weeks. And I'm trying to do a really good time as well. So this one is another big challenge because running a Marathon, I'm not saying it's easy, butit's manageable. It's a big mental challenge but running it fast is different. It takes a lot of mental strength and muscles and training and some training isnt fun.

Wow. But now in terms of culinary pursuits, are you now concentrating more on Chef Notepad? Is that the idea?

Correct.

Is that an app or a program?

It's software, online. It's not an app, but it's very phone friendly. It's pretty much the same.

And that's to help chefs out with those things we were talking about before, so costings and so on?

Correct. It's to help chefs and restaurants having a more sustainable kitchens in terms of being sustainable financially, so profitable. Also sustainable to have a way to track all the wastage which brings awareness to what actually goes in the bin, and also being more efficient in communication with your chefs and giving clean recipes. Technically what it is, it's a recipe book. Online. That you can share as a link, or you can print them and it's a very user friendly recipe book and on the side it also calculates your food costs of those recipes. This is like a simple explanation.

Well, everyone should want that, shouldn't they? Every chef, every restaurant. It sounds like it's great. And it feels like it's bringing together all of your experience, right from the start with the wastage and the food costs. I love that.

I've always said that the program started in in a three Michelin star restaurant in Paris and here it is. These days, a lot of restaurants are using spreadsheets for their food costs. It's a very old school way to do it. A lot of restaurants are not doing it, for the reasons we talked about; they don't have the skills. Theyve never learned how to do it. And if no one's there to teach them, it's very hard to learn it yourself. So, when you become a head chef, you've never had to deal with costing, you've only had to deal with cooking, so what you do is you cook. And even when you apply for a position, quite often, you're asked, can you lead the team? Can you put a menu together? More than, 'can you make my business profitable and what tool you use for it?' Everyone knows Deputy, which is software that helps with rostering. 10 or 15 years ago, everyone was doing rosters on spreadsheets, and it was very limited, it was just putting a name in a box and putting times in a box next to names. Then Deputy came along and took rostering to a different level because it brings clarity to how much you spend a day, how much this person costs you, you can put all these different perspectives in that you can't on a spreadsheet. Chef Notepad is pretty much the same. It does the same job as the spreadsheets, but it gives you a different dimension because it really breaks down everything and it makes you realise what's going on in your food costs and in your kitchen. I always say it's a tool that brings so much clarity to what's going on, that it actually makes you a better chef because it makes you calmer and more understanding. When you're in control, you're just calm. When you're not in control, that's when you get a bit stressed. When you can communicate with your team properly and you know that the food that you're serving, you're making money out of, suddenly, you're peaceful. You know that you're doing a good job. Cooking is easy. When you're a head chef, cooking is easy, but that other part is a little bit more complicated.

What do you do to still feed the passion for cooking? Do you cook at home?

I cook at home, yes. The less I was cooking in a restaurant, the more I started cooking at home. I love eating. And restaurants are expensive. So, I love cooking at home. More and more I cook from recipe books, and just random recipe books. It doesn't have to be a famous chef or anything, just a good recipe book.

Nice. My final question is usually this question, with all your experience in mind, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

I'd ask him the question, why does he want to be a chef? I think that is pretty important. If you want to be a chef, you need to be passionate. If you're not passionate about cooking and also about the industry itself, you should probably pick another job. It's a hard industry. And even if the hours are not as long anymore and even if it's a pretty healthy environment to be in, you still work on weekends. You still work at night, early mornings, you are still standing the whole day. You're still dealing with cleaning the floor, cleaning dishes, cleaning pots, burning yourself, cutting yourself. It's a hard environment, and if you're not ready for this, because you're not passionate about the industry, you probably shouldn't do it. I'm not trying to discourage people, but it's easy to be like, oh, I want to become a chef when you're 20, and then you turn 30 and want to build a family and suddenly being a chef is not appropriate anymore. Then what do you do? You start from scratch again another industry? It's a hard one. I don't want to discourage anyone because it's a beautiful industry, and we need manpower these days because there's more and more restaurants opening and it's not going to stop. But it's also important to have passionate staff in a kitchen and there's not enough of them.

Chef Notepad