Working for a Celebrity Chef Ruined My Career

Welcome back to Restaurant Confessionals, where we talk to the unheard voices of the restaurant industry from both the front-of-house (FOH) and back-of-house (BOH) about what really goes on behind the scenes at your favorite establishments. In this installment, we hear from a preliminary judge from a popular primetime cooking show.

If you took me back in time to roughly a year and a half ago, I was doing well. After recovering from a nearly career-ending leg surgery, I'd landed a highly coveted job. I even beat out a cook I used to work beside at a prestigious restaurant to get it. I was getting back on my feet, losing weight, and getting ready to take on my next challenge.

Now? Well, I've put back on most of the weight I've lost, I'm single, my self-worth is in the toilet, my next challenge makes me want to vomit, and I find myself looking around to see how I could live on a Walmart greeter salary. Hubris had to kick in at some point though, right?

I'd seen an ad for a nearby restaurant opening a third location. It was for a kitchen manager job. "Kitchen manager" is how you describe a chef de cuisine who has no control over the menu, or any creative input. It's a job that, by hospitality standards, tends to pay well above the average, and certainly more than you're likely to find in fine dining. They offered me the gig on the spot. I was, frankly, overqualified for the job. But, after a long lay-off of actual cooking, I figured this would be a lucrative way back.

We opened in June. And those first few months were amazing. We were slammed. The hottest ticket in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Our brand strength seemed irrepressible. The executive chef (read: marketing guru who'd turned himself into a celebrity chef via the world's most obvious lobster roll) had a cookbook coming out with a major publishing house, even an ill-conceived Food Network show in the offing. No one could stop us. We were a team on the rise.

The first summer was a blast. It wasn't without hiccups, but we had a lot of fun. We'd hired an alcoholic GM, one of those guys who never wanted the party to end. He fed us booze while he lived on a diet of cocaine and not-quite-line-crossing sexual advances on our more attractive female staff. It worked out well for me. He couldn't handle the financials of the restaurant. Turns out, spreadsheets are hard to navigate when you're snowblind. So, occasionally he'd hand me huge envelopes of cash and tell me they were "kitchen tips" and ask me to divide them. My first week he handed me an envelope with over $3,000 in it! Sure, my spidey-sense tingled. But I was working 70 hours a week. Who am I to ask questions? He was my boss after all. My kitchen guys loved me after that week. It was a small kitchen. So, most got an envelope that eclipsed their paycheque.

Like most good things, it didn't last. The weather turned. The patio shut down. The seasonal layoffs began. And then the creditors started calling. Not before the oblivious owners got around to firing our first GM. Thank god, he was a mess by the end. We were falling behind on bills. Suppliers were putting me on COD. It was looking grim after four short months. Then they brought in a pro. A guy with serious restaurant management experience. A steady-hand-on-the-till type, or so we all thought.

He turned out to be a heavy drinker who also liked to sleep with the staff. We used to close the bar down and lock the doors, then drink till five in the morning. There's no better bartender than a drunk, entitled GM who doesn't want to go home to a failing relationship. He will get you fucked up. But inevitably, his dark side surfaced one night. It climaxed in a night of him waving a knife around at the bartender he was shagging, trying to force himself on her sexually after close one night—in front of other staff members and a bank of cameras, no less. He quit after that. There's no way to regain the respect of your employees after a night like that, I suspect.

I, on the other hand, was about to take a job as the corporate chef—a job that entailed overseeing a multi-unit operation. A big promotion, and one to which I was really looking forward. I was supposed to take the job the day GM #2 quit. That torpedoed my promotion. So there I was, in a meeting with the owners discussing the future of the restaurant, and I was given a choice: take the GM job, or we'll have to shut the doors. Our illustrious executive chef-cum-owner was unwilling to take any responsibility. His partner, who owned several night spots throughout the city, was never a hands-on operator, but he was the kind of guy that would joke, "If you're going to burn the restaurant, burn it right to the ground." They left it to me. Almost like being bequeathed your great aunt's dog you never wanted. But I took the gig. Salary bump, small bonus, new title—it would be fine.

I didn't have a drinking problem, so at least that had to be a nice change for the staff. I had FOH experience. Sure, I was dating a girl in the kitchen, but it was serious and I wasn't playing around. So, I became general manager #3. I wasn't completely unqualified for the job, but was completely without support—I got no training. While our executive chef travelled Asia and promoted his new cooking show, I was left to my own devices, trying to muddle through the accounts of a failing restaurant without any support. I started to drink. Every day I got calls from creditors. Each day I wanted to be at the restaurant less and less.

I spent the next six months of my life destroying my love of restaurants. There is nothing quite so demoralizing as running a restaurant that is doomed to fail. The kind of restaurant with a menu so out of whack and ownership so out of touch that you're celebrated for 40 percent food cost. It was lobster, they said—what can we do? Impotent to effect change, you end up falling into a rhythm of apathy. With each pay period, your drive to succeed—or stave off the inevitable closure for a few more weeks—wanes. Your apathy increases. You start to do the bare minimum to collect your cheque. Then you stop even doing that. You pray for termination. It's soul-wrenching. A once-promising cooking career sullied by the name of a restaurant that would inevitably flop. Your staff become hollow shells of themselves.

That's before you all start fleeing, of course. In the same week I left, 40 percent of the staff announced their departure. The smell of death hung around that place. It was a relief to get laid off. They could no longer afford me. And it was a blessing. If they ever pay me the severance pay they owe me, doubly so. But, I suspect I'll go down in the long history of employees who'll end up submitting their names to the Labour Board—if they're not in bankruptcy by then.

So, now I'm left to drag myself back to the stoves—to see if I can recapture the fire and passion for service I once held deeply. To see that it wasn't extinguished by watching my old boss hack his way to Celebrity Chef status—all without ever having ever been able to cook. Another product of The Food Network generation. God bless us, everyone.