There’s more to food than recipes. We’ll approach the answers to growing questions, and new ways of taking on tricks of the food trade, and Boil It Down for you.
I caught the first couple of seasons of FOX’s reality series, Hell’s Kitchen, but lost interest when I got sick of hearing chef Gordon Ramsay scream at the poor bastards every week; from what I hear, it hasn’t changed. One thing I’d noticed in nearly every episode was that EVERY one of the contestants smokes during the breaks outside. It’s well reported that smoking negatively affects one’s sense of smell, which in turn affects one’s sense of taste. Shouldn’t those senses be a chef’s greatest assets?
Fellow writer Bob Sassone once mentioned to me that, during his time working in kitchens, he noticed the same thing: everyone smoked. The dish washers, the waiters, the chefs. Everyone. He wasn’t really sure why, himself. So, I did a little digging around. The answer isn’t concrete, but I’ve narrowed it down to two main reasons:
1. The kitchen is stressful. Working in a busy restaurant is stressful business, no matter what your job happens to be. You’ve got order after order to be taken and served, meals upon meals to be prepared and cooked, and dishes upon dishes to be cleaned. On any given day or night, it can be a seemingly never-ending cycle. In the instance of Hell’s Kitchen, add a screaming Gordon Ramsay into the mix and you’ve got a stress cocktail that — in the limited time you have outside of the restaurant — only a nicotine fix seems to fix.
2. Smoke breaks are tolerated, but “fresh air breaks” are laughable. Even with smoking taking a decline in American society due to health concerns and banning from most public establishments, an employee smoke break is not only tolerated, it’s met with understanding. Let’s say you’re a busy waiter and you just need to take a step away from the mania within the restaurant, just to compose yourself so you don’t go insane. Tell me which request will be laughed at and which will be allowed with little hesitation:
“Hey boss, I’m going to take a smoke break. Be right back.”
“Hey boss, things are getting stressful around here. I just need ten minutes of fresh air. Cool?”
I’ve never even worked in a kitchen before and I’m already laughing at that second one.
In short, the smoking is simply a byproduct of stressed out workers simply wanting to step away and, in some cases, be social with their coworkers, outside from where the craziness is happening. Perhaps there are more restaurants out there that happily allow for fresh air breaks in hopes that it will keep their top chefs’ senses honed for their awesome dishes. Maybe screaming maniacs like Gordon Ramsay should see what their spewing rants of stress are doing to their workers and understand why, sometimes, the stuff they’re cooking “TASTES LIKE SHIT!!!”
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on Aug 26, 2009 @ 11:00 EST5EDT
(Sorry for the first comment being two weeks after the post but I’m ridding my RSS reader of posts I’ve been “flagging for later” for weeks.)
Reason #2 is sort of why theatre technicians smoke. Someone once told me that smoking is their excuse for a break and without smoking there’d be no breaks. Not that they need to request them. It’s a way to justify it to themselves.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of kitchen staff smoke pot.