Chef Whites in The Kitchen

 

Iconic Chefs Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, head chefs and proprietors at The River Cafe London, 1990's.

We dress to survive the heat and constant kitchen-burpees of lunging and dropping 8 inch skillets of burning, sloshing fats into 400 degree ovens, over and over-- until our arms go numb. We bounce on oily rubber mats all day long in sweaty clogs covered in a light film of kitchen grease and food particles that are barely recognizable. We sweat our faces off over hot grills as we dump bucket after bucket of heavy mesquite over white coals and push firewood to the back of an 800 degree pizza oven. We sweat like pigs, though I have never seen a pig sweat. Chefs sweat. We toil. We bruise and burn and twist and turn our bodies like unpaid, unseen Baryshnivkovs. We are athletes with all the wrong uniforms--uniforms of poly-blends, at best. Starchy check-pants with boxy starchy two-sided work jackets called chef coats, we make it work and find it funny that 'civilians' find it 'cool.' Our do-rags, wrapped around our sweaty, dehydrated skulls, paired with an apron hung tight around the neck is not only uncomfortable but ugly as hell. But people mimic. They want to be us. They want to wear the coat, the clogs and the unfitted apron and feel like the rockstar chef that none of us ever feel like, EVER. We feel saggy in the butt and rashy around the waist. We dream of cool air flooding our overhead hood and icing us out; like our quick trips to the walk-in. We dream of iced water and cold beer and cold wine after a six hour service and a twelve hour work day... We dream of a soft cotton tank-top and a pair of clean denim jeans, with the scent of Tide, to saddle-up at the bar across the street, until 2AM...