Things You Have to Explain to People Who've Never Worked in Kitchens

A healthy restaurant ecosystem has many components: a charming front-of-house team, cunning managers, and a motley crew of underpaid misfits that are actually cooking your food.

Unless you've worked in a kitchen, it's hard to understand the chaotic dance of a dinner rush. Coded language, constant personality clashes, and thick-as-blood camaraderie are side dishes to every entree you've ever ordered.

To turn the world of cooks into an open kitchen, we asked back-of-house staff from around the country to enlighten us on some of the things that they're always having to explain to their friends who they only get to hang out with on Monday nights.

But always unsalted butter. Also, half-sticks of butter look downright cutesy compared to 1lb blocks.
 

If you're going by the book, it's illegal to force employees to pool tips for back-of-house workers. Therefore the kitchen is always making way less money than the servers.
 

Not Friday either. But are you free on Monday?

Most jobs are either physically draining or mentally draining, not both.
 

No other excuses. You're expected to perform flawlessly at all other times, even if you're sick, hungover, grieving, or heartbroken because you found the person you love screwing someone else because you're "never around."
 

Sometimes you need things to be hot, hard, and fast. Sometimes you need it gentle, slow, and easy.
 

Also, say goodbye to the feeling in your fingers.

It's crucial to say things like "corner, behind, sharp beside, hot."
 

Being a good cook at home with friends and family is absolutely nothing like cooking in a restaurant kitchen.
 

That's not to mention dead-lifting a 50lb box of frozen chicken while stooped over in the freezer while your non-slips are freezing to the ground and you are rushing to put away the order because you are now down a guy because he took two fingers off in the Robot Coupe and your kitchen manager had to go with him to a hospital because he doesn't speak English and may be in the country illegally.
 

Unless they're wearing a chef's coat, people in kitchens are generally treated like they don't exist. Treat them like human beings, and you'll likely be rewarded.

This is manager-speak for "There are innumerable things to do constantly in a professional kitchen. Rarely is there time to chill."
 

Anything else is too ambiguous.
 

It's OK if Bob in finance doesn't have that report ready yet. It does matter if Mikey on fish doesn't have that sole cooked at the right time and for the right amount of time, because if it's there a minute too long, the 50 other items and dishes stacked behind it begin to slip into oblivion.
 

It's for doing laundry. Really, really smelly laundry.

Most cooks eat like 3-year-olds. You're tasting a dozen things at all stages of cooking, sweet after savory. It makes you not want to eat, and when you do it's generally hunched over a trash can.
 

After you're used to cooking for hundreds of people a night, making one cup of rice seems impossible.
 

Kitchens spend all day prepping for dinner, so while a special order might not seem like too much trouble, it puts a wrench in six hours of prep and the next six hours of muscle memory.
 

They may seem masturbatory, but you're actually screwing someone else over.

Unless you like the taste of dish water.
 

Surplus goes into the family meal. More often this is to test out new menu items.
 

There's only so much space on the grill. A grilled salad might sound like a great idea, but odds are a small kitchen needs those grills for steaks.
 

Odds are cooks didn't choose their careers based on finances.

So without thinking about it, you're balancing yourself constantly. That's why your legs feel like you've run a marathon when you get home and your calves have wicked definition.
 

If you can't keep up, you had better find some sort of use for yourself to avoid becoming a weak link.
 

And they're all pretty okay as long as they don't screw you over or steal money.
 

Just "the dance."
 

Refer to the note about losing feeling in your fingers.

Always.
 

The kitchen is already cleaning up.
 

For God's sake, call ahead.

Consider how hot it gets in your kitchen. Multiply that by eight hours and hundreds of plates.

The cost of that entree also pays for the electricity, bussers, napkin-cleaning service, dish washers, cooks, and waiters. You're not paying so much for the food, but rather for the fact that you don't have to clean up after your damn self.

The hours are long and hard and irregular and late. And once you get off at midnight, you're both equally exhausted and amped up, a problem generally solved by silent beer drinking.

Either by snapping at someone or making a joke. Each have different applications, but both are equally important.

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Dan Gentile is a staff writer at Thrillist. He worked in a kitchen for a year during college, which is the equivalent of one week in cook years. Follow him to unevenly julienned tomatoes at @Dannosphere.