So you want to be a chef?

By Times staff

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 6, 2000

Here are New York chef and author Anthony Bourdain's 14 tips for wanna-be chefs, excerpted from Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

1. Be fully committed. If you're going to be a chef some day, be sure about it, single-minded in your determination to achieve victory at all costs.

2. Learn Spanish! The very backbone of the industry, whether you like it or not, is inexpensive Mexican, Dominican, Salvadoran and Ecuadorean labor -- most of whom could cook you under the table without breaking a sweat.

3. Don't steal. In fact, don't do anything that you couldn't take a polygraph test over.

4. Always be on time.

5. Never make excuses or blame others.

6. Never call in sick. Except in cases of dismemberment, arterial bleeding, sucking chest wounds or the death of an immediate family member. Granny died? Bury her on your day off.

7. Lazy, sloppy and slow are bad. Enterprising, crafty and hyperactive are good.

8. Be prepared to witness every variety of human folly and injustice.

9. Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance.

10. Try not to lie. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever.

11. Avoid restaurants where the owner's name is over the door. Avoid restaurants that smell bad. Avoid restaurants with names that will look funny or pathetic on your resume.

12. Think about that resume! How will it look to the chef weeding through a stack of faxes if you've never worked in one place longer than six months?

13. Read! Read cookbooks, trade magazines -- I recommend Food Arts, Saveur, Restaurant Business.

14. Have a sense of humor about things. You'll need it.

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