Pirates don't explain themselves

Efficiency is a morale choice

It’s Christmas Time plays over the Alexa in the kitchen, and of course it is Christmas time once again in the world of the chef. This year I find myself working in a bog-standard hotel in the countryside of Ireland, not some super-prestigious restaurant in a city. At first it felt like a comedown, or at least my highly strung arrogance told me it was. What do I know.

The reality shock hits like a wave. A tsunami even. Hotels are numbers-based. As many customers as possible, as few people as possible, highest return on investment. That’s just good business sense. And Christmas — I’ll never call this time “holiday season” — is when places like this make thirty to forty percent of their nut. But I’m not here to talk numbers. I’m here to talk about the chefs.

It would be easy for me to take a huge shit on these guys. They make gravy from powder, buy in almost everything they need to get the job done, and have little to no regard for Michelin. Most of them don’t even know what the guide is, or why anyone would bother chasing something so abstract. And yet the food still has to come out in a timely fashion and be both hot and pleasing to look at. Tonight there are eight hundred guests booked into the function suites and I’m looking down the barrel of approximately two hundred covers with just two other chefs standing next to me.

A kitchen porter will help with plating at the very apex of tonight’s performance, aptly named, Chefs massacred by heavy machine-gun fire — in this case, the rat-a-tat-tat of the ticket machine — but lucky enough to survive so they can return to the trenches tomorrow.

Look, I know I’m prone to over-romanticising the life of a chef. That’s because I love my job. I love the people in it, for the most part. The customers, for the most part. The suppliers too — again, for the most part. Life’s not perfect.

But here, among these people, I feel alive in a way no Michelin kitchen ever managed. In high-level places you spend weeks perfecting a single element. Repetition. Focus. Painstaking refinement, one fragile detail at a time. In places like this it’s one person doing a hundred things at once. One hundred plates, one hundred decisions. High-end kitchens chase perfection. High-volume kitchens chase efficiency. Both demand everything.

There was a study years back. Business students asked to make a teapot. One group told to make the perfect teapot. The other told to make as many teapots as possible, as efficiently as possible. The perfect teapot was beautiful — and useless. The efficient ones worked, could be reproduced, could live in the real world. I think about that as I watch a Bangladeshi lad knock out finger sandwiches for two hundred people and then think about the tiny, exquisite sandwich at The Fat Duck. The Fat Duck’s is better, no question. It’s also a pain in the arse to make.

Talking to the two guys who run the kitchen here, their thinking is brutally simple. “Look, we don’t have the time or staff to make everything fresh. So we decide what actually matters to the customer. Take turkey and ham — it’s all bought in, pre-portioned. We could roast turkeys, boil hams, make stuffing, carve everything, build the plates. It would take hours. And it would taste more or less the same. So we focus on the roasties. Because that’s what people remember.”

That logic runs through the whole place. Custard straight from the carton — because that’s the taste people grew up with. Veg prep outsourced. Desserts mostly off the back of a truck. Sauces and condiments the same. But chips are cut and cooked from fresh. Fish is fresh. Steak, duck — good raw product where it counts. You don’t waste effort where it won’t be felt.

The à la carte menu — the “fancier one,” as it’s called here — has something for everyone. Buttermilk southern fried chicken stacked on champ with pepper sauce. Filthy. Perfect. Almost a sin. I love it. Steak, obviously, with the ubiquitous triple-cooked chips. Sea bass with hollandaise — carton sauce, no shame. And their take on Duck à l’Orange, sitting proudly on the menu, spelling be damned. You can see it immediately: the menu has been shaped around what people want.

High-end kitchens are the opposite. This is what we cook. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

Again, I’m about to watch all of this theory put into action. A four-hundred-cover function is about to be served. The team has been building it since 0900. Service is at 2000. They’ll heat, serve, and finish this fully plated affair in under ninety minutes because a band is booked for 2200. It’s genuinely something to watch. Better than any episode of The Bear.

The team is six people. Three barely speak English. In a world where communication is everything, that should be a crack in the armour. It isn’t. There’s a system. Numbers. A blue marker. If words are a problem, remove words from service.

The General Manager walks in and shouts, “Soup away.” The kitchen detonates. Not a metaphor. Cabinet ovens fly open. Steam and noise rush the room as four hundred and twenty plates roll in on jack stacks to finish heating. Three chefs stand shoulder to shoulder filling soup bowls to a line of black-and-white-clad servers. I don’t know how many servers there are. A lot. The volume rises as table after table disappears.

Before the soup has finished leaving the kitchen, empty bowls start coming back. The starter is ending before it’s even begun.

Then come the adjustments. The chicken goujons. The sudden vegans. The child no one mentioned. The last-minute realisations from people who think the world reorganises itself around their plate. In most kitchens this is where service bends or breaks. Not here. All the nonsense gets fired straight into the restaurant kitchen next door. They’ve been warned. They’re ready. It’s still a pain in the arse — that kitchen has its own war to fight — and you can’t just bury these checks at the back of the queue. They need action now. Flow gets dented. Nobody panics.

Back in the function kitchen the soup is done and it’s all hands on mains. Shouting now. Plates start coming back to wash and the call goes out: “Ali, get dessert.” Ali’s gone and back again with more jack stacks, this time loaded with desserts, each one built to match the pre-orders. The team syncs to the stacks. “Push hard,” the chef in charge shouts. They do.

Mains finish. Desserts fly. Other hands are already breaking down, cleaning as they move. By the time the last dessert leaves the pass, the kitchen is clean and the staff are fifteen minutes from home.

It’s fucking intense to watch. And I can see it — that familiar look on their faces. The high that comes when a group of people lock in, absorb pressure, and pull off something difficult together.

The next morning we’re back at it. The tips of my fingers tingle as the nerve endings get slowly burned away by heavy pans and open gas flames. I’ve picked up a few clean burns. There’s a low-level pain that’s almost enjoyable — the hum of last night’s service still living in the body. I like it.

In the kitchen the big Latvian guy is making Finn McCool’s pot of mash for the endless piping of duchess potatoes. He seasons. He mixes. His mixing tool is his arm, wrapped in tea towels and cling film. I ask why he does it this way. The answer is simple. “It’s faster.” He tastes. He nods.

The kitchen porter asks what the mash is like. In a heavy Latvian accent the answer comes back: “Good.” The porter grabs a small bowl, scoops some mash, tastes. In a Polish accent: “Yes. Very good.” A few more chefs grab bowls, one scoop each. They stand there in silence and eat. No words. Six countries represented, minimum. Looks get exchanged. Approval shared.

The Latvian doesn’t stop for praise. He grabs a piping bag and starts banging out duchess — uniform, tight, perfect. The rest finish their bowls and drift back to their stations without a word. Everyone knows their role today. Same as yesterday. Get your piece of the puzzle done as fast and as clean as possible.

Tonight there are two functions. One for three hundred and fifty. One for two hundred and seventy-five. Six hundred and twenty-five if you’re weak at maths. On top of that, ten smaller functions scattered through the day — births, deaths, and everything in between.

I respect these guys. I admire them. They’re in every kitchen across this island and far beyond it, and I imagine the choreography is the same everywhere. Do I want to spend my life here? You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way I could — or would — do this job every day. It’s too hard. And at the same time, too simple.

Bourdain once said chefs are pirates — and he was right. Not heroes. Not artists. Pirates. Functional outlaws. People who don’t fit cleanly anywhere else and end up here because the rules are clear and the consequences are immediate. Kitchens don’t make you noble or broken. They just reveal what’s already there. Ego goes first. Then language. Then excuses. What’s left is usefulness — can you feed people under pressure without becoming a problem. Some stay. Some burn out. Some carry it forever. Long after the noise dies and the burns fade, the body still remembers the rhythm. Heat. Timing. Repetition. Do the thing properly. Do it again. Don’t get in the way.