Originally Posted by LordEden

Chefs are not over-glorified line cooks and I hope you never say that within ear shot of someone who cooks professionally in their restaurant. I'm guessing you fall under the "Food is nutrition then it becomes poop" category of thinking about food.

You ever ran your own business? I'm thinking you do, but I'm not sure about that. Let's say you do, do you want your business to succeed? Would you be come stressed if someone was coming into your business and fucking up the way you run it? How about to the point that people stop coming to your shop? How about if it got around town that your "goods" were of poor quality and you never ever shop there. How about if one of your employees was the cause of this? How about a group of them? This can happen everyday in the restaurant world. Every plate, every appetizer, salad, dessert, entree, drink, or even the rolls on the table represents YOU the chef/owner. Your name is on everything and if one item is wrong/messed up, tastes bad, that could be the beginning of the end.

Say a influential business person comes in and has a HORRIBLE experience because of a fucked up recipe, fuckwad server or a lazy cook. That person is going to badmouth the hell out of your business to everyone they meet which could be passed around to person to person causing you to earn a bad rep in your town. It could be because their plate was cold, a single hair in the food, an appetizer tasting wrong, or just not liking the food. It could even be the date, not the food. This can be a death toll for a restaurant that is trying to make a name in the world. Ever wonder why you see restaurants open up and the close a year later? In this business 4 out of 5 restaurants fail in their first year. This is because it is a high-paced, stressful, EXPENSIVE, unforgiving industry. People come in, expect the best food in the world for the cheapest price. They except to be treated as the most important VIPs on the planet. This boils down to a hardcore stressful environment full of micro-managers who have to notice EVERYTHING. Every plate HAS to be perfect or you are fucked. This is the mindset of a chef and it should be. This is why a kitchen is a stressful place to work, everything has to be PERFECT. Everything. To a chef, their kitchen is their home, their life, their baby. You spend 60-70 hours a week, 6 days a week, you consider that YOUR space and you don't like people fucking up your space.

Yeah, no one is shooting at you, but you are putting the most extreme level of stress up against life. I know when my name is on the plate of food going out, I want it to be prefect and god help anyone that is going to stand in my way of that goal.

I'm not sure about you, but when I've got my life savings, my credit line, my financial life, and my NAME riding on the line, I get stressed. Maybe you are the Zen Master, but I get stressed out at times other than when someone is shooting at me. I think most people fall in the same category as me.