The Solitary Cook
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

I worked as a chef for a well-known international hotel chain. For all of its espousing their mantra of, “We take care of our employees because they take care of our guests,” the fact that they outsourced management of groups of their hotels (at least in the U.S.) to management companies led to arbitrary rule-bound cultures which did not become evident until one had been hired. There were the Hotel’s standards, and the management company’s standards. The latter might or might not bear any relation to the former. It tended to attract managers who loved rules, loved enforcing rules, and loved catching people breaking rules.

That was especially true of the executive chef I worked for. Not with. It goes without saying that he followed no rules himself, which everyone in the hotel, including the general manager, knew. When I realized that the exhausting atmosphere of eternal suspicion and surveillance, changes to and improvement of which were always promised (usually during the dreaded and pointless performance review), yet never materialized, was literally driving me to drink, it was time to pack up all of my own equipment I’d brought in, and go. Thank you, Lolly Daskal. Well said.

The Solitary Cook

Written by

A chef writing about cooking & eating in the Northern Rockies. Food for hundreds? No problem. For one? A different story. My story.