Hotel)
Even though some might see cooking as a solitary activity only mediated by the food itself, professional cooking, like many occupations embedded within organizations, demands teamwork and coordination, particularly in restaurants that attempt complex presentations. The work team is as much the unit of analysis as is the individual worker.
The division of labor is not a given but must be negotiated with more or less strain. Flexibility is, of course, desirable, but when interests diverge or when communication is ineffective, tension results as workers have different ideas of what is expected of them and their colleagues.
FLEXIBILITY IN A COMMUNITY OF INTEREST
One means by which a division of labor becomes flexible is through explicit or implicit expectations of direct and reciprocal cooperation. Even though a division of labor exists in midsize restaurant kitchens, this is negotiable in practice. As noted in numerous descriptions of the informal organization of occupations, workers perform each other's jobs and cover for each other. They do so willingly because they assume that later this cooperation will be reciprocated. The articulated structure of the kitchen need not be repeatedly negotiated, because of an unstated assumption that others will be available for future aid. Flexibility is built into institutional relations of co-workers. Cooperation is required, and when it is not easily given, there is surprise and tension. A lack of cooperation demands an account. For an occupation to operate efficiently, a community of interest is assumed, which makes patterns of aid flow through a network without a specific debt and obligation incurred.
In smoothly functioning organizations, workers are socialized to believe that asking for help is both expected and desired. In kitchens this is explicit in occupational rhetoric, but elsewhere mutual aid may be more sub rosa. As the head chef at the Owl's Nest comments to his workers, “Don't be afraid to ask for help.” A fellow cook chimes in, “It's always easier to ask for help before you get in the shits” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). When describing the kitchen as a work community, I note that this instrumental cooperation is tethered to expressive friendships and perquisites—cooks getting drinks from the bar, dishwashers being served steaks, and servers eating fancy desserts. A “favor bank” operates in most occupational worlds.
Perhaps cooperation in the kitchen is most dramatically evident in the surprising reality that cooks regularly work unpaid overtime to help peers. Day cooks often choose to finish tasks that they have not completed during their paid hours to prevent inconvenience to the evening staff. Evening workers routinely remain until everyone has finished cleaning up, even though only one of them—or none—is paid for that time. A breakfast cook at the Blakemore Hotel regularly arrived an hour early to complete his assigned work. A norm of community lightens the establishment's labor costs, but this norm can disintegrate if workers believe that management is consciously manipulating their fellowship for profit.
THE TENSION OF DIVISION
Although cooperation is far more frequent than the lack of it (Gross 1958, p. 387), anyone who has worked in kitchens can attest that they are not settings of eternal harmony. Yet, in my observation, emotional displays are rare, not the rule. As a result, whereas emotional outbursts in kitchens are notable when they occur, they typify the scene for outsiders.
In one tense restaurant a kitchen staff meeting diffused much interpersonal annoyance through negotiation and clarification:
The structural positions of the cooks were clarified by the chef in response to the complaint of Larry, a cook, who claimed that “we used to know what was expected.…I got upset. I walked off the line. I was upset about what was happening…. People don't know what they should do.” The problem was a function of role ambiguity: the role of the “middleman” (aka the “slouch cook,” or “swing cook”)—a “backup” for the other cooks. After Paul, the head chef, detailed how the middleman should collaborate with the broiler cook and the stove cook, the tension lessened. That evening every cook made a special effort to demonstrate publicly that [he or she] could cooperate. Each man pointedly commented to me privately on how effective the meeting was. As Larry explained, by the end of that evening: “I felt a lot more relaxed and a lot more free. Jon [the cook with whom he had been annoyed] understood…. It's funny that's all it takes, fifteen minutes of talking and everything's different. It's the way it should be every night.”
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
The point is not that cooks always work harmoniously, but that—in American kitchens (and much of American culture [Stearns 1987])—an ideology of harmony prevails.8 Americans believe that cooks should be able to get along with each other, and that if anger is evident and full cooperation absent, the organization is “dysfunctional” and needs help. A therapeutic model applies to organizations as well as persons. Cooperation is a central ideological tenet of the lived experience of work.
BEING A COOK
To understand the experienced reality of cooking as a practical activity, we need to address how cooks and chefs see their work, how they perceive public attitudes, and how they were recruited to kitchen work. Occupational identity is tied to the pleasures and pain of work, and the imagined responses of the “other,” the consuming public.
Cooking is demanding work; it is experienced as hard labor. Like athletes, cooks must “play” in pain; like a policeman, a cook only rarely has the luxury to call in sick. Those cooks employed by small organizations find their presence is required daily. One cook described his severe back pains, necessitating physical therapy, but continued cooking (Field notes, Owl's Nest). I was often told that cooks must work no matter what:
I ask Mel if Paul will be in today. He seems surprised by the question and tells me that as far as he knows Paul will be here, adding “In this business, you don't get sick. You're either drunk or shacked up. You gotta drink or shack, so you better decide which. When I was young and working at the Lexington, I called in sick one day, and the next day the manager called me in and said that to me. Cooks don't often get sick.”
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
Paul, Jon, and Mel joke about one of Jon's absences. Mel is cracking eggs, and Paul tells him: “You should let Jon do it. He was the best breakfast cook we had [at the hotel at which they both worked]—when he would come in.” This is a reference to one occasion on which Jon didn't show up; Paul jokingly accused him of shacking up with someone. The cooks then talk about the excuses that cooks use, including one who said that he was late because his mother tripped over the cord of his alarm clock. This joking colloquy has a strong element of social control.
(Field notes, Owl's Nest)
This reality would surely be disconcerting to customers, who might be horrified to realize that all too often the cooks are sniffling, sneezing, exhausted, hungover, distracted, or bleeding.
THE DOWNSIDE
In addition to being required to be “iron men,” other structural drawbacks mark cooks. They face challenges of time, pressure, working conditions, and a lack of personal satisfaction. Food preparation, although currently a trendy job for children of upper-middle-class baby boomers, will never have wide appeal.
Hours. Those in some occupations labor while their clients play—restaurant workers are among them. As the head chef at the Owl's Nest notes sarcastically, “What an exciting way to spend a Saturday evening!” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Some cooks like least “the long hours, weekends, holidays…. Everybody else is out having fun, and you have to work” (Personal interview, Owl's Nest). Others most dislike “having to be here when you'd like a little time off to do some of your own things. Take time to be with your family. Things you should be doing, but you can't be. Being involved more with community things, home things, PTA meetings, kids'
