Question

I am not a pastry chef, but it is what I am passionate about and I'm doing everything to get there (except go to school). If you are not passionate about pastries, why would you want to pay for school to do it? Perhaps you are passionate about it and you haven't explored that area too much?

What I'm saying is, pursue the cooking if that's what you like. I worked for a pastry chef who is a regular chef and thought it would be fun to do pastries. He wasn't very creative, and you could tell he didn't like doing it everyday. It is VERY different. It's a lot of money to go to school, and I wouldn't dive in assuming that you will fall in love; why not do the regular cooking classes?

There are always options if you want to control your hours... Can't think of any right now, but I'm sure there are :smiles:

Go with what truly makes you happy... just keep in mind that your suspicions might be right about cooking being a "job".

Line cooking is not so much about creativity, innovation, or screaming "BAM", as it is about perfect repitition. It becomes in your routine to put mashed potatoes on the center of the plate, salmon at 12:00, veggies at 3:00, sauce at 6:00.

It is, unfortunately, slightly ridiculous to think that you'd secure a personal chef position for anyone worth working for (ie: someone who will encourage your creativity and compensate you accordingly) without some serious restaurant experience and the resume to back it up.

If it's bistro work you're seeking, apply at one. Find the best bistro in town and ask if you can wash dishes or maybe do some prep. You absolutely need to get into the kitchen to see if you could even stand it for that shift.

Stay there for 6+ months.

If you love cooking, and if you want to become the best cook you can possibly be, closing yourself off before you even start with regards to something as transient as scheduling is not the way to go. Excellent chefs look for people that want to learn, not dictate an endless list of demands to them. Trust me, I've done it. It doesn't help you at all.

Also, I can't forget to mention that lunch rush is amazingly difficult. Just think about how fast and how amazing you want your lunches to be, multiply that by 100, and imagine what the kitchen looks like.

If you have any interest in pastry at all, consider pursuing a culinary arts school (AFTER your 6+ months of experience in a working kitchen) that has a heavy emphasis on pastry in their normal culinary curriculum. That might give you enough knowledge to get an entry level pastry position. Pastry chefs enjoy better hours, less rigor, and generally being able to work at their own pace but also have a lower paying positions(in some cases), extremely redundant tasks, and very very stringent standards they have to compete against to achieve any level of notoriety.

I'm not trying to be mean at all, just passing on the info I wish someone had given me. I've burned alot of bridges figuring it out the hard way.