As a cook, you may well struggle to get a minimal 40 hour workweek. This is a constant headache, as you cannot reliably predict your income. If you are fortunate to have a health plan (rare) you may lose it if you drop to less than 32hrs a week.
As a chef, You can find yourself working many, many hours in excess of 40/wk. And very often you will be on salary and not recieve any overtime.
Home life? In general, not good.
If you aren't working you are exhausted.
If you aren't working OR exhausted, you worry about getting enough hours to pay the bills.
Look, I got into the business at 43. I'm 49 now, and and left it six weeks ago.
I have been an exec, and a sous chef. I gave it maximum effort, total commitment. I went way beyond what was required.
My top wage was 36K/year. I averaged less that one day off per week. I had a health plan as a sous, but it was crap. AND I was on salary, with no overtime.
I was broken, exhausted, and broke. The end came when the exec refused me two weeks off at the slowest time of the year. I had not had a vacation in six years. I was in my last job for 2 and a half years.
I NEVER called in sick. Ever.
I never took time off.
It came to this:
Unreasonable workload.
No overtime.
Crappy health plan.
No Vaction.
No sick leave.
Insufficent time off to recuperate.
My health was being impacted, small illnesses turned into major infections. Pain was constant. I missed my wife.My home.
Exec turned on me when I started to slow a little due to pure fatigue and sickness.
In short, I had to do something, or I wasn't going to be working anywhere, for anybody.
So I got out.
If and when I go back, I will either be a cook (if I can afford it), or chef owner. I will never be anybody's sous ever again.
Actuall cooking was great, very rewarding. It was totally overshadowed by cheap idiot owners and tyrannical chefs.
As far as the worklife side, it all sucked, all of it.Pay, benefits, working conditions, ......respect. Every place I worked was the same. Bad.
Would it be the same for you?
I would say the odds are better than 50/50. You propose to get in a few years younger than me. That might help you in the long run. But right now, if a teenager askes me about career viability in this business, I tell them:
Unless you are totally committed with every fibre of you being that this is what you want to do, don't. It's more akin to a career in the military or entering a religious order. You are going to give up a lot. Money, time, health. You cannot maintain a family on cooks wages. Nor make a mortgage payment. If you are lucky, you can afford your own high deductable health plan. Retirement? Forget it. Pipe dream. To attain that stuff you have to hit the non-working executive chef level. You write menues, do the ordering, hiring,firing, training. But you give up most of what it what that got you in.....:cooking.  |