Attitude Defines a ‘Committed Chef’

There is no single pathway for culinary professionals, chef and author Judit Glasyer explains in The Committed Chef, an authentic look at the pressures, sacrifices, challenges, and rewards of the industry featuring in-depth expert interviews. 

The title was inspired by U.K. job advertisements that often say they are looking for “committed chefs,”  she added.

“Anyone who works in this profession knows exactly what level of commitment it requires. They also know that their skills alone are not enough. In this industry, attitude and approach to the job can matter far more than technical ability. That tension is what interests me about the phrase. It sounds like a simple requirement in a job advert, but behind it is an entire way of thinking about the profession.” 

Glasyer discussed the realities of culinary careers, AI’s impact on restaurant operations, shifting industry standards, leadership, and more with Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine.

Why did you want to write this book?

I suspect I’ve always been a writer who happened to become a chef, rather than a chef who happened to write a book. And perhaps that’s why, instead of simply accepting the profession for what it is, I felt the need to step back, look at it properly and try to understand what keeps us doing it.

This industry moves at such an extraordinary pace that most people in it are too busy getting through the day to make sense of what is happening to them. There is very little time to reflect, sometimes not even enough to put an experience into words before the next one takes over. Years pass like that. Things happen, people come and go, kitchens change, and before you know it, a whole part of your life has become the past without ever quite becoming a memory. A chef has to keep moving. A writer has the luxury, or perhaps the bad habit, of stopping to ask what it all meant.

What do you feel is the “relentless beauty” of being a chef?

I think the beauty and the relentlessness of this profession come from exactly the same place. What feels like unbearable pressure one day becomes flow, wordless coordination, absolute focus and elation the next. The intensity doesn’t change. Your experience of it does. And perhaps part of it is that none of it lasts. You spend hours creating something that disappears in minutes. You have a brilliant service, then you clean down, go home, come back the next day and start again. The reward for getting everything right tonight is the opportunity to get everything right again tomorrow.

The reward for getting everything right tonight is the opportunity to get everything right again tomorrow.

When you're in the middle of a tough service, you're not thinking about the connection you hope to create with someone in the dining room. You’re fully switched on, running on instinct, with no room for anything else. You’re thinking about timing, consistency, the next plate, the next table. The chef experiences the relentless part. The guest, hopefully, the beauty. And that’s where the chef’s pride comes from. There is a certain selflessness in enduring the pressure so that the guest only ever sees the pleasure.

How did you choose chefs to interview?

I wanted different points of view, even disagreement, more than representation. If everyone had given me the same answers, I’d have chosen the wrong voices. Beyond that, the selection process involved being curious about someone and the gradual discovery that asking a chef or industry leader for hours of their time is an extremely optimistic thing to do. At some point, the book began to find its own people. One conversation led to another, one introduction to the next, until I realised I wasn’t really searching anymore. The right people simply kept appearing at the right time.

What did you learn from the interviews with other chefs?

How differently people reveal themselves when you give them enough time. The first answer is often the one we’ve all learnt to give. The more interesting ones come later, when the polished versions run out. Many of the interviews went in directions I hadn’t expected. Of course, everyone has their own limit as to how far they’re willing to let you into their thoughts, whether because of their position or simply their personality, and you can usually sense where that line lies for each of them. Still, there wasn’t a single conversation that didn’t leave me feeling I understood them and the world they represent a little better. People are always more interesting than the first version they show you.

Did any themes or threads come through?

There’s a real shift happening in the profession, and you can feel it on several levels. What we consider a healthy working environment is changing, but so is the way chefs think about the food itself. There seems to be a move away from overcomplication towards food that is simpler, more honest and more confident in the quality of its ingredients. That simplicity is no longer just the destination of an individual chef’s development. It is increasingly becoming an expectation of good cooking itself.

There is a certain selflessness in enduring the pressure so that the guest only ever sees the pleasure.

Naturally, that shift is being shaped by a greater commitment to sustainability and a growing respect for food in the form nature gives it to us, rather than constantly feeling the need to transform it into something else. But perhaps it is also a way of recalibrating expectations. Diners have become accustomed to increasingly spectacular, intricate dishes, and part of this movement towards simplicity is a reminder that complexity and spectacle are not necessarily measures of quality. There is value in allowing an ingredient to remain recognisable, and in letting the quality of the produce, rather than the amount of work visible on the plate, speak for the cooking. Simplicity, after all, doesn’t mean something is easy to achieve. Preparing even the simplest thing perfectly can require years of practice, repetition and experience. The difference is that, at its best, none of that effort needs to announce itself on the plate.

“Every single day I carry the thought of uncertainty and the risk of failure. Strangely enough, that’s what inspires me and keeps me moving forward.”– How does that phrase from one of the chef interviews resonate with you?

People outside the profession rarely understand words like failure in this context. “Failure? Come on, it’s only food.” And yes, it is. But then these are only words on a page, that’s only a broken leg in hospital, and that person is only an actor performing a story about something that happened centuries ago, to people who are long dead. You can reduce almost anything to who cares? if you stand far enough away from it.

Experience doesn’t remove uncertainty. In some ways, it makes you more aware of it. The more you know, the more variables you notice, the more ways you can see something going wrong, and the less convincing simple answers become. If the outcome were ever guaranteed, there would be nothing left to prove, to yourself or to anyone else. The moment you accept that things can go wrong no matter how well you prepare, the pressure shifts from avoiding failure to being present enough to catch it and respond.

You mention AI as not replacing chefs, but the way they do things is evolving? How do you see that playing out?

AI is already finding its way into kitchen operations, even if it isn’t always obvious. It can help with everything from recipe development and costing to stock control, ordering, waste tracking, compliance, scheduling and production planning. It can analyse data, identify patterns and take a surprising amount of administrative work off a chef’s plate. Even something as mundane as turning handwritten notes into usable documentation or pulling information together from different systems can save a great deal of time.

Beyond AI itself, automation and increasingly intelligent kitchen equipment will continue to take on repetitive physical tasks and make precision easier to maintain.

In the near future, I think much of this will become far more integrated and increasingly automated. Instead of using separate systems for stock, purchasing, recipes, staffing, allergens and sales, chefs could increasingly work with tools that connect those things and respond to what is actually happening in the restaurant. If bookings change, a system could adjust demand forecasts, prep requirements and purchasing accordingly. If an ingredient price changes, it could immediately show the effect on dish cost and margins. Recipes could be scaled to expected covers, while stock levels, waste and previous sales help determine how much actually needs to be prepared. I’m really into this at the moment, particularly how you can make a kitchen’s collective knowledge immediately accessible to everyone, so that standards don’t depend on who happens to be working that day.

I also think AI will become a much more useful creative assistant. Not something that creates a dish for you, but something you can think with: exploring combinations, researching techniques, comparing approaches, testing ideas on paper, calculating ratios or adapting a recipe before you start physically experimenting in the kitchen. And beyond AI itself, automation and increasingly intelligent kitchen equipment will continue to take on repetitive physical tasks and make precision easier to maintain.

What do you think keeps so many people in the restaurant industry?

For most people, the first answer is simply that it provides a living. If we put aside those genuinely driven by passion, the ones who would still be properly filleting the fish they’d just caught on a desert island and carefully plating it on a banana leaf, for the majority, this is a job. And I don’t think there is anything lesser about that. You don’t have to love your job to be very good at it, to take pride in doing it properly, or to become someone whose work is respected and valued. Professionalism, skill and reliability don’t become less meaningful simply because they aren’t driven by passion. In fact, I think the industry sometimes does itself a disservice by treating passion as a prerequisite for excellence.

What becomes more interesting is what makes people stay beyond necessity. Restaurants have a peculiar way of distorting your idea of normal. After enough years, eating dinner at dinner time can feel strangely unproductive. Sitting down for too long feels suspicious. A quiet room can make you wonder what you’ve forgotten. You become very good at things that are enormously valuable inside a restaurant and slightly baffling everywhere else. And somewhere along the way, what began as a job can become a world you know exactly how to function in. Leaving it then means more than changing jobs. It means becoming a beginner somewhere else. I suspect that keeps more people in the industry than we like to admit.

The book doesn’t shy away from detailing how much work is involved in working in a restaurant. Was that emphasis intentional?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, I wrote the end of the book first, the part that deals with the darker side of the profession and the conditions that can grow out of such an intense workload. Only after I had done that did I feel I could go back and write honestly about its beauty.

What troubles me most is how easily bad conditions can become ordinary. Particularly when you’re young, you have very little with which to compare them. If the person teaching you to be a chef also teaches you, consciously or otherwise, that humiliation is instruction, exhaustion is proof of commitment, or asking for help is weakness, you may not immediately recognise any of those things as a problem. You may simply think: this is what a kitchen is. And once something becomes normal, people can become remarkably good at adapting to it. Sometimes too good.

That’s why I’m interested in fairly unglamorous solutions. We promote people because they can run a kitchen, then suddenly expect them to know how to run people. Those are not the same skill. A head chef can be technically exceptional and still have no idea what their behaviour does to a room. Leadership can be taught. So can recognising stress, communicating under pressure, and knowing when something has stopped being manageable. These things sound obvious once you name them, which is perhaps why we are so bad at teaching them. We assume adults somehow arrive knowing how to do them.

For me, that was important to put in the book because the difficult parts of this profession are not all inevitable consequences of the work itself. Some are. A restaurant will always involve pressure, physical work, awkward hours and things going wrong at precisely the wrong moment. But other difficulties survive simply because they have been repeated for long enough to look like part of the job. I wanted to distinguish between the two.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

That there is no single correct way to have a life in this profession. There are kitchens where you will flourish and kitchens where you will slowly become a worse version of yourself, and the dangerous thing is that both can look like career progression from the inside. A better title, a more prestigious restaurant or more responsibility doesn’t necessarily mean you’re moving in the right direction.

There is no single correct way to have a life in this profession.

Kitchens are small worlds with unusually strong gravitational pull. Spend enough time in one and its rules begin to feel like the rules. The person whose opinion matters enormously at 8.30 on a Saturday night may have no authority over your life at all once you step outside the back door. That sounds obvious, but it can be surprisingly hard to see when you’re inside it.

I’d like readers, particularly younger chefs, to keep some part of themselves outside the kitchen. Enough to be able to look back in occasionally and ask: is this still working for me? Am I actually becoming better, or just better adapted to this particular place?

What advice do you give to those interested in pursuing a culinary career?

It’s a great career if you land in a good kitchen, and a valuable education if you land in a bad one – provided you recognise it and move on. Either way, it's never a dead end. It can branch off in more directions than you'd think.

Most of my advice probably applies to almost any career. Once you’ve started, don’t be in too much of a hurry to become impressive. Early in your career, being useful is probably more valuable. Learn how a restaurant actually works, including the parts that have nothing to do with cooking. Notice who fixes the problems, who keeps things moving, who knows what’s about to go wrong before anyone else does. Some of the most useful things you can learn in a restaurant won’t be taught to you by a chef.

That also means being willing to spend a while without much recognition. The ego can do wonders for your self-esteem and provide a fairly reliable supply of dopamine, but if you’re serious about making a career of this, it’s worth learning to keep it under control. You can be very good at something without making sure everyone in the room knows it.

Part of that is accepting how much you don’t know without being overwhelmed by it. Don’t make the mistake of looking at everything you don’t know at once. There will always be too much. Narrow your world down to the task in front of you and the day you’re in. Learn that. Then take on a little more tomorrow.

And as that world gets bigger, pay attention to what kind of chef the job is turning you into. Not just whether your food is getting better. Kitchens reward certain behaviours very quickly, and not all of them are worth keeping. You can become faster, tougher and more confident while becoming someone nobody particularly wants to work with. Technical progress can hide quite a lot.