You don't think "Michelin star guys" had to start as line cooks and could easily do 500 plates...?
The two normal paths both start from cooking as "just a job" in or right after high school, decide you want to do it seriously. And then either go to culinary school or beg your way into a better kitchen and start grinding your up way. It was about 50/50, I only ever ran into a handful of people who went straight into culinary school with no experience.
Also how often are people getting severe injuries (chopping bits off their hand, getting severe burns)?
It was focused grind; prepping, then plating, dishwashing, then cleaning for 250-300 seats for weddings | engagements | etc.
I enjoyed it, steady work all the way through with little to no drama other than some occassional wait staff drama (the 20 something overly privileged offspring of owners and their circle being made to work "a real job" were the usual problem, mixing social lives with prancing for tips with insta-drama).
No real injuries during my time there, on one occassion the front glass window was taken out with a shotgun before start of day (some drama with business owner family member sleeping with someone they shouldn't have) - no injuries, no police called, window replaced within hours, no sign of damage by opening time.
> Also how often are people getting severe injuries (chopping bits off their hand, getting severe burns)
Not every day, but it's not super rare. I've worked with cooks that have had mandoline accidents and bad fryer oil burns.
I only knew of one genuinely life changing injury in a kitchen I was in, a very bad burn to both the cook's feet. But I saw plenty of cuts that needed stitches, and a few graft-worthy burns. Quite a few concussions too, from slips or accidentally pulling down more than expected from a high shelf. IMO the real menace is just chronic health stuff: substance abuse and other mental illness are common and no one has the resources or support to deal with it adequately.
You don't get even unpaid time off to recover from illness or injury and it really takes a toll over time. Most of those injuries I described, the person finished their shift and was back at work the next day. If they even went to the hospital in between, it was at the expense of their own rest and family responsibilities. Line cook was one of the most deadly jobs during covid, up there with frontline healthcare workers in the beginning. They only got overtaken by police & fire in the second half because so many cops refused to get vaccinated. Which, lmao.
Very few were forged right in the fire of the kitchen. The vast majority went to a culinary school.
I started my taxable life in the kitchen of a combination Chinese restaurant and grocery market.
In france and probably the rest of europe yeah almost all serious cooks have formal education in it. Mostly because "formal education in it" is a specific track in vocational high school that everyone has access to.
For that matter, the kitchen in my house is a "real" kitchen, and if I put a flat-top on the stove and parcooked meats in the oven any decent cook could probably put out several hundred egg breakfasts. The real bottleneck would be toast, I don't think my vintage Sunbeam is up to the job.
I've worked both. The greasy spoon cook would fare better thrown into Michelin-star service vs the Michelin star cook going into general food service. General food service is ROUGH. In a Michelin starred joint (let's take Curtis Stone's 'Maude' for example) things are prepared quietly, quickly yet slowly enough to allow for precision in presentation. You often have quite a bit of time between courses, so you can collect yourself and prepare for the next course for your guests. Courses generally don't exist in general food service, and you aren't getting any real self-collection time unless you're on your break, as short as that may be.
How? I screwed up my schooling and fell into cooking. Mum had taught me to cook as a child and I'd had after school/weekend jobs since I was 14? So I did it for a while until 50 hour weeks and no money got old. I was lucky, university had an "access" course for the degree level maths and offered me a place. 4 years later I had a degree in maths from a tolerable university and got a job doing mathematical modelling...
The manner of working is very wasteful in terms of time and product.
It's not a realistic service, they exist only for the very wealthy.
b) Most fine dining restaurants use EVERYTHING they get. The roots from the herbs that get trimmed, the bones and scrap from the meat, the stale bread-- all have a purpose. Do you expect them to dye some clothes with the onion skins or save their burnt flatbread? Learning how to do that is a huge part of what you learn in a classical cooking education. You want to tackle food waste, look at distributors, grocery stores, cafeterias, and caterers, in that order.
c) Those restaurants are selling a luxury product. In terms of economical efficiency, going to a diner doesn't hold a candle to eating rice and beans at home. Are you fundamentally against luxury products? Because your criticism applies to every handmade luxury product in existence. High-volume low-effort products will always be more economical. That doesn't mean they're more legitimate than better products. Not by a long shot.
Example: Sunday morning breakfast service, the guys at your local diner will do say 500 plates during the rush. Swap them out with a few highly educated Michelin star guys and they would struggle to break 100 until they learned how to work in a real kitchen. Some of them would quit, I've seen tears in this situation before.
Programming has a similar problem with most of the "day in the life of a programmer" sort of things being focused at big tech companies.