Why the Bear reminded me that working in kitchens is chaotic yet fun
We tried watching The Bear at the start of this year after hearing good things, but my partner Maddy got fed up with the intensity of the kitchen scenes and didn’t enjoy it. Fast forward to this week, and the Guardian have named it TV show of the year. Maddy suddenly wanted to watch it again…
Three more episodes and it took me back to my youth working as a dishwasher in a large (200+ covers) Cantonese restaurant in suburban Nottingham. I spent the latter part of my teenage years working Friday and Saturday nights there, washing dishes for £50 cash each week. My best friend Nathan worked with me and between us we saved enough cash for our teenage band—Doomed Youth—to record our debut EP at a local studio.
Now obviously washing dishes isn’t the same as the drama of The Bear, and as far as I know nobody shot themselves or spiked soft drinks with Xanax at a children’s party. But it made me think about what a masculine space the kitchen I worked in was. There were no female chefs, and only a couple of women who worked in front-of-house (my sister among them). It was ugly, physical work: we finished each shift covered in grease, water and sweat… but fifty quid richer.
Language was a challenge in the kitchen: most of the chefs didn’t speak English and either had to depend on the head chef (who did) to translate, or resort to basic sign language to express which type of plates they needed us to clean. We’d sometimes get shouted at for not understanding (or taking too long), and we usually got tasked with the dirtiest jobs.
We had to empty the enormous kitchen bin a couple of times per shift as we scraped an entire restaurant’s worth of leftover food into it. This took a fair amount of coordination and planning: we had to pick our moment tactically because it involved us abandoning our posts for at least five minutes while we manoeuvred the bin outside the restaurant and braced ourselves to lift something heavier than we were above head height into the industrial waste bins outside. I still remember crying with laughter once when we picked the bin up on the count of three, and heard a noise like a tap being turned on. I looked over and saw a stream of filthy bin juice—coloured bright orange with congealing sweet-and-sour sauce—pouring out of a crack in the bottom of the bin and directly into Nathan’s face as he struggled to keep the whole thing upright. I don’t think too many women would put up with that…
The Bear shows the kind of messed up relationships that people working in kitchens can have (and happily theirs is a mixed-gender team). When the chaos of service ends and the kitchen is cleared up, everyone forgets the tensions and confusions and the highlight of every shift for us was sitting down to a late dinner at 11pm when the restaurant closed, and the chefs would prepare platters of off-menu food cooked home style for the majority-Chinese workforce. Nathan still talks today about the incredible pork and potato meal they served on our very first shift there, twenty years later. They never cooked it again.
In the end we quit once we started getting old enough to find more lucrative work (both of us ended up making websites for money, which entailed less chugging of bin juice, but also less opportunity to nick spring rolls all evening long). I go back to the restaurant on occasion and wonder who’s in the kitchen dish pit while I’m sitting in the restaurant, scraping plates and wondering about where their life is going to take them.
Mini feels this week
Paying it forward
We went to collect our Christmas food this morning from the supermarket. As I queued to get the pre-booked stuff, Maddy picked up a few extras we needed and we went to the checkout to pay. The cashier kept handing me stuff and I packed it quickly into the trolley, paid, and we headed out. “Excuse me, please?” someone said, following me. “You’ve just paid for £20’s worth of our shopping”.
I thought at first this was some random act of generosity which I could pass of as deliberate, but instead it turned out the last half a dozen items I’d packed and paid for were from someone else’s shop – and they hadn’t used the little conveyer belt divider, natch. We had to go back to the cashier and return their items (and refund me) before moving on, while I stood there grumbling and complaining about breakdowns in communication. Maybe I’m a bit of a Scrooge at heart.
Thanks for reading Man Feelings – share it with your friends! See you after Christmas.