The Late Night Gourmet
Home kook
- Joined
- 30 Mar 2017
- Local time
- 6:46 PM
- Messages
- 5,634
- Location
- Detroit, USA
- Website
- absolute0cooking.com
As I mentioned elsewhere. it's a dream of mine to retire by the time I'm 90 or so and open a restaurant. So, the thought of going to culinary school naturally occurred to me, and I looked up how much it costs. In the search results, I found this amazing article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-daily-meal/10-things-before-applying-culinary-school_b_978132.html
The great thing is that it does so from the perspective of a home cook who works in an office and dreams of a glamorous life of running a restaurant. @Ashley22: I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this!
To summarize, here are the key points:
1. Working in a Restaurant - try working at an actual restaurant before you decide to open your own. If you can survive and you still want to pursue your dream, then maybe you have a future in the industry. You may realize you like eating at restaurants more than you like cooking in them.
2. Not Every Chef Went to Culinary School - some are quite accomplished...and they don't have a $40,000 loan to repay.
3. The Reality of Working for a Chef - Traits that would render someone unemployable in other industries are generally considered pluses in the restaurant world. Gordon Ramsay is only the most famous chef with anger management issues. There are a lot of lunatics out there who know that there's no human resources to dictate proper behavior.
4. Speed is Everything - How quickly can you clean 10 pounds of squid? If your answer is, “by tomorrow,” forget it.
5. The Pay - you didn't think you'd still be able to afford your mortgage on a chef's salary, did you?
6. Work/Life Balance - You can just forget about that!
7. Difficulty of the Restaurant Business - The 25 percent first year failure rate should raise some hairs. And in three years, that rate shoots up to 60 percent.
8. Alternatives - Not everyone goes to culinary school to be a chef. A culinary degree will help in catering jobs and other lines of work.
9. Flawed Curricula - Most topics are only reviewed once and if you don't get it, too bad. And, forget about missing a day.
10. Crazy People - Anthony Bourdain’s said it a million times over in one form or another, but to summarize, this industry is a magnet for crazy people. The chefs aren't the only ones: this is a business about people, and some of them are really weird.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-daily-meal/10-things-before-applying-culinary-school_b_978132.html
The great thing is that it does so from the perspective of a home cook who works in an office and dreams of a glamorous life of running a restaurant. @Ashley22: I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this!
To summarize, here are the key points:
1. Working in a Restaurant - try working at an actual restaurant before you decide to open your own. If you can survive and you still want to pursue your dream, then maybe you have a future in the industry. You may realize you like eating at restaurants more than you like cooking in them.
2. Not Every Chef Went to Culinary School - some are quite accomplished...and they don't have a $40,000 loan to repay.
3. The Reality of Working for a Chef - Traits that would render someone unemployable in other industries are generally considered pluses in the restaurant world. Gordon Ramsay is only the most famous chef with anger management issues. There are a lot of lunatics out there who know that there's no human resources to dictate proper behavior.
4. Speed is Everything - How quickly can you clean 10 pounds of squid? If your answer is, “by tomorrow,” forget it.
5. The Pay - you didn't think you'd still be able to afford your mortgage on a chef's salary, did you?
6. Work/Life Balance - You can just forget about that!
7. Difficulty of the Restaurant Business - The 25 percent first year failure rate should raise some hairs. And in three years, that rate shoots up to 60 percent.
8. Alternatives - Not everyone goes to culinary school to be a chef. A culinary degree will help in catering jobs and other lines of work.
9. Flawed Curricula - Most topics are only reviewed once and if you don't get it, too bad. And, forget about missing a day.
10. Crazy People - Anthony Bourdain’s said it a million times over in one form or another, but to summarize, this industry is a magnet for crazy people. The chefs aren't the only ones: this is a business about people, and some of them are really weird.
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