Pressure over panic: What it is really like being a chef

Wednesday, 3 January 2024

Some jobs make for good television, but how they are portrayed on our screens is often blindingly inaccurate. If Gordon Ramsay calling someone an ‘idiot sandwich’ is your idea of a chef, you’re in for a surprise. Mariné Lourens speaks to a chef about life in a professional kitchen.

It is indisputable: Watching cooks whip up mouthwatering creations under intense pressure makes for good television.

The sheer amount of cooking shows and films made on the topic is testament to our love of watching how glorious (or sometimes disastrous) meals are created - Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules, The Great British Bake Off, Burnt, Julie and Julia, Ratatouille… the list goes on and on.

But the trope of a bad-tempered head chef slinging insults at the rest of the kitchen staff as they rush around like headless chickens during dinner service is outdated.

“That is a very old-fashioned belief of what a professional kitchen is like,” says chef Hannah Cooper-Grieve.

Cooper-Grieve is co-owner and head chef of Christchurch’s Monday Room restaurant, and the brain behind its menu of popular modern European cuisine.

She has been a chef for just over 10 years having studied at what was then the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology. She worked in various kitchens over the years before ending up at Monday Room in 2017.

In 2021, Cooper-Grieve and her partner bought the restaurant and she was able to put on an owner’s hat along with her chef’s hat.

Monday Room has six chefs and a couple of kitchen hands. Cooper-Grieve explains one chef would be in charge of a section, like desserts or the grill, while she oversees it all.

A typical day starts around midday when they start “prepping for service”. This entails a wide variety of tasks, from portioning steaks to picking herbs. “Anything that you need to be ready to serve food when the customers arrive.”

The most challenging part of the job is the fact that no two days are the same, says Cooper-Grieve.

Surprisingly, she doesn’t rank stress as one of the challenges of the profession. She says people would likely be surprised to peek into the kitchen during dinner service and see a group of people “just doing their jobs”. There is none of the mayhem and panic so often portrayed on the TV screen.

“There is an element of pressure for sure, but I like being in those environments and I work well under pressure.”

Is there a lot of eating happening back in the kitchen? “There is a lot of tasting as we go, but usually you are too busy to actually sit down and have a meal,” says Cooper-Grieve.

She says the best part of the job is being part of special experiences in people’s life. Whether it is a birthday, an anniversary, or just a lovely night out, she enjoys playing that little part in someone’s happy moment.

Cooper-Grieve says one of the biggest misconceptions she encounters being a chef is that the career is something people generally “fall into” rather than choose, which is usually not the case.

She also doesn’t cook three-course fine-dining meals on her days off, and she struggles with the ‘what should we make for dinner?’ question just as much as anyone else.

But when the dinner parties and holiday season rolls around, she is usually the friend either tasked with cooking, or being asked for advice. “I will always have friends calling up and asking ‘how should I cook this or make that?’. That part definitely comes with the job!”