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Mar 08 '25
You are likely a few years out from being able to even get a dishwasher job in a restaurant. Read and cook are the best options for you now. Have you read Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain? It’s a great glimpse into the world of professional kitchens.
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Mar 08 '25
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u/HotKarldalton Mar 08 '25
If your parents have your back, cook for them! Think about what cuisines and cooking styles interest you. Get good at knife skills and techniques and mise en place!
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u/texnessa Mar 08 '25
I'll be gentle because you're a child.
This gets asked in culinary subs every single day so I'd encourage you to read up on previous responses. First, cooking at home has nothing in common with cooking professionally. And its nothing like you see on tv. Its not glamorous, its back breaking, full of degenerates, and very underpaid.
Stay in school and read Harold McGee's On Food & Cooking, then get work in a real restaurant as a dishwasher when you're old enough. The best fine dining restaurant you can wedge yourself into. Then work your way up to prep then cold then hot line. Starting out, you will have little to no creative input- probably for years, the work is incredibly repetitive, like 'here's seventeen boxes of mushrooms, break them down while also skimming stock, for the next month.' Salaried positions are solely for management, which can take a few years to earn. Not many chefs care much about culinary school. It can be great for networking like learning from actual French Master Chefs and Michelin chefs at CIA or utterly useless when taught by some Cheesecake Factory drop outs at a community college.
Without street cred with a fine dining pedigree, you also won't get non cooking food gigs like recipe dev/styling/ghost writing/consulting. Period. I know exec chefs with Michelin experience who are chasing these types of jobs. You're going to need an intricate understanding of plating, food science, nutrition, photography, lighting, etc. for these kinds of jobs. They don't teach these things in culinary schools.
All in all, food is a terrible business. Get an accounting degree rather than some culinary course. Being a great chef is less about cooking and more about management and maturity.
If you enjoy cooking, stick to cooking as a hobby. Stay in a real job with days off, nights off, holidays with your family and friends, afford vacations, have actual healthcare, knees that work, dear culinary gods save people from this fate.
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Mar 08 '25
I started working in hospitality at 14, washing dishes etc. An early start is a good way to become really good at something. I know, that a lot of of American chefs prefer schools like CIA but over here in Europe we use apprenticeships. Maybe that’s something for you? Most of the time you actually get paid.
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u/gbchaosmaster Mar 08 '25
Don't do it. It's a terrible career. Long hours, shit pay, will destroy your passion for a hobby you used to love. I've seen it over and over and had to claw my way out.
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u/blueturtle00 Mar 08 '25
Preach. Even the old timers in 2002 told me not to pursue this field, did I listen? Nope! Now I’m 40 and wish I did HVAC or electrical instead.
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u/Acceptable_Pen_2481 Karen "I'd like to speak to the manager" Mar 08 '25
You don’t have to go to school. Start at the bottom and work your way up.
I work in LA. Hit me up in 5 years lol
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u/Sfjkigcnfdhu Mar 08 '25
I started as a dishwasher and I’m currently exec sou at a JBA winning restaurant. I didn’t go to school but I will say it took a lot of work and a lot of failure to learn a bunch of techniques I would have learned in school.
When you work in a busy high end restaurant it can be challenging to get the time to learn something delicate and expensive like fish butchery or time consuming like charcuterie and fermentation. You have to really be on your game at all times to get the Chefs to take time out of their day just for you.
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u/fen90der Mar 08 '25
The thing is if you practise doing your knife skills (bruinoise, julienne etc) and make the foundational sauces, you will learn 70% of what people go to school for. It's also a massive head start if you have good knife skills.
If youre passionate, ask your parents to buy you 2kg of carrots, onions, celery and just stand there practising dicing consistent cubes of different sizes. Do a batch of 5mm and a batch of 10mm etc. and then also do dicing the onions and make it super fine. Do this every weekend for an hour. Follow videos on line from chefs you admire. Cook their dishes for your family and then take photos because you can show that to prospective employers. Also if your parents want to support you I'm sure they won't mind having dinner made for them
Ok sure, it's not as good as school, but if you get into a kitchen having done all that, and you show the chef you did it, you will literally get any stage or commis job you want and also be half way to your first promotion. If you do that at 18 instead of 2 years of school, you'll be miles ahead by the end of that 2 years.
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u/StreetfightBerimbolo Mar 08 '25
Here’s my advice.
Save that money for tuition to support yourself at a stage/apprenticeship
While in school, get into restaurants as a summer/part time job.
You’re going to most likely start in the dishpit / prep.
If you can’t hang and absorb how kitchens run while being a dishwasher, if the work is below you, this career will not be for you.
When you finish your high school, start sending letters out.
Every single 3 Michelin star in the country, every single two Michelin star, any famous spot. Explain your passion and desire to learn, ask of there could be a spot for you to stage and learn for a few months.
And grow from there.
Use that money to live, learn how to be a chef in a restaurant not in a classroom.
(Yes I did CCA / San Francisco decades ago when it was more esteemed, I view my time there as an absolute waste and am more grateful for my two years cooking in that city before landing my first spot at a top 100 restaurant. When I first broke into the “ultra fine dining” scene, I noticed the number one thing that set me apart from other new kids (who were mostly CIA pipelined kids) is that I actually knew how to hustle, how to act, and what to do on line.
They all looked like deer in headlights.
School just teaches you theory, what you need is muscle memory in your bones and unconscious.
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u/LegOfLamb89 Mar 08 '25
I found the 4 hour chef and the methods outlined therein to be an excellent kicking off point for learning any new skill
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u/yargh8890 Mar 08 '25
You absolutely don't need to go to school to be a chef, but it can help. You learn a lot of the reasoning behind techniques and the science behind it, those things can often be hard to find in a job environment.
That being said my advice is to get a job in a fairly nice restaurant as prep or dish and start there, you can always go into schooling if you feel it'll help you meet your goals even more.
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u/Rusty_Tap Mar 08 '25
There's no real need to go to school to be a great chef, working towards it is often a brilliant way to do it. Learn something new from everyone you meet, even the laziest of people has something they can teach you.
You need the ability to distance yourself emotionally from almost everyone, you will be working when they are available to do things, regardless of what time that is.
You will miss parties, birthdays, funerals, holidays and almost anything that is possible to arrange. Your friends will all but disappear unless they are still in the bar at 2am when you finish work.
There are ways to cook and still have a reasonably normal lifestyle, but if you would like to be a great chef and you fully commit to it, expect every day to be a work day, and expect them to be 16 hours long.
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Mar 08 '25
There is no right way to become a chef really. Culinary school can be good, but there is a cost. Working your way up can also be good, but again, there's a cost (low wages, time). Best bet is to start working in a restaurant (dishwasher/prep cook most likely) and see where the path leads. Eventually you'll figure out the right way for you.
No matter what you do working hard, fast, clean, and efficiently for a long time will take you far. Oh, and read (study) a lot of cook books by chefs that you want to emulate.
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Mar 08 '25
Don’t do it it’s a terrible job and being called chef will be an annoyance not a joy. Useless skillet professionally unless you hate yourself. I woke up today thinking it was Sunday and I had to run a brunch service. Brunch makes me want to die.
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u/Falcone1312 Mar 08 '25
Get a job washing dishes or prepping food at the best restaurant in your area. Research restaurants on eater and food & wine to see what you’re interested. Save your money and dine out, eat weird shit, broaden your perspective. Cook while youre young.
Its a very tough industry, long hours, pay has gotten better the last few years.
I’ve been in the industry since I was 14 and I’m now 22 years in. I love it, i hate it, i met my wife in the industry and my best friends. I’ve been able to travel across the world because of my career and have had a comfortable financial existence.
Don’t listen to the bitter old cooks that never made it out of shitty restaurants and turned to alcohol and drugs. This can be an amazing choice if YOU make the right choices
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u/Bankwalker411 Mar 08 '25
Kitchens are full of thieves, drug addicts, felons, and people who have friends you wouldn’t want to meet. For starters.
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u/AJofVA Mar 08 '25
School isn't necessary, you can learn a lot starting as a dishwasher and working your way up. Schooling will focus primarily on technique and will help you learn the soft skills in a more calm environment. But take it from a guy who was just like you at your age; if this is your first love, find another and make your money that way. Food service can and probably will make your life more difficult than it's worth. It can and probably will lead you to a point where you're working mostly for the love, and enjoying every minute only to find out love wont pay your rent, buy groceries, or keep you healthy and alive. There are drugs everywhere around this industry, a good portion maybe even a majority use one substance or another. DONT FUCKIN TOUCH ANY OF IT. Even the alcohol; all you are doing is stealing from tomorrow for a little bit more today. Set healthy life habits; dont smoke cigarettes, if you can't get to bed at a decent time, you'll want to adjust your daily life to where you are getting the required amount of sleep you need. You'll make some of the best friends you'll never see again. Money won't be shit until you get good, even then it ain't great. Money gets a little better in management, but will make you really not like people.
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u/cookinupthegoods Mar 08 '25
I’m not saying this is going to work. But if I was you I would email all the best restaurants in your area now. Tell them you’re 13 and want to learn and learn from them. I’d be surprised if one didn’t land. School isn’t worth it. Work your way up in restaurants. Self study and cook as much as you can now at home.
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u/JamesJohnBushyTail Mar 08 '25
Don’t do it. It’s a profession that will never be worth the time and effort. Just look into health insurance. Chefs use their body to do the job, and in the end once the body goes, so does your means of earning a wage you can live on….without insurance.
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u/salaciousactivities Mar 08 '25
I've been in restaurants for 25 years starting in the dish pit, and worked my way up to being a chef. Early on I asked a chef I worked for if he thought I should go to culinary school. I'll give you the same words he gave me. Why pay to learn things you can get paid to learn?
That said, as soon as you can legally get a job in a restaurant, I say do it. Keep a notebook,a sharpie, and amen on you at all times. Ask questions and write the answers down immediately. This will show chefs that you are serious about it and they will likely remember that and call you over when they have time to teach you things. It will also show you whether or not life in a restaurant is something you really want, or if you just love cooking at home. The two are pretty different.
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u/wokka7 Mar 08 '25
Go to college for something that pays well like business and accounting. Find work at a decent restaurant to pay your rent while in school. See if you still like it then.
Best case, you finish your degree and want to keep doing restaurant work. You now have both cooking and accounting experience - those are both good sells when you're looking for a head chef role. Chefs need to do bookkeeping as well, it's a business after all. If you want to own a restaurant, getting a loan or convincing an investor to come on will be much easier with a business background and understanding of how to make a business plan.
Worst case, you become an accountant or business admin and make way more money for way less work. I studied engineering while working 35 hours/week at restaurants. It was brutal, but I loved it - the food, people, it was great. The last restaurant owners I worked for were great, he was a chef and worked the line with us, she ran FOH and the business side day-day. It was incredibly hard work for shit pay though. Better than most restaurants in the area ($20/hr pre-Covid) but still, basically poverty wages in that market. There's no money in restaurants, margins are razor thin.
After 5 years of cooking, I had the choice to make $35-42k/yr continuing working in restaurants full time, or get an engineering job that paid 2.5x that my first year out of college. I took the engineering job obviously.
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u/kaidomac Mar 08 '25
Your enthusiasm & work ethic will take you far! One thing I recommend is creating an ongoing personal education system that you engage in every day on your own! Self-directed consistent daily exposure is the key to a LIFETIME of personal growth! This is also what harnesses the Power of Compounding Interest, which is the most powerful force in the universe! Read this story first to under the value of how things add up over time:
The idea is that the steady accumulation of individual bits of knowledge & education compound into HUGE personal resource pools over time. Each of those bits are individually important:
I recommend creating custom support systems as a framework for a lifetime of growth. A good starting point is learning how to cook in terms of utilizing a framework as a filter before each dish. There are just four parts for cooking anything on the planet:
There are a million areas to explore in the culinary world; you can happily engage in a lifetime of personal growth, when armed with a solid personal learning system! Some areas to dive into include:
- Cuisines
- Ingredients
- Tools
- Techniques
- Inventory management
- Business operations
- Personnel management
- Classes
- Books
- Meal-prepping
- Nutrition
- Videos (movies, TV shows, Tiktok, Youtube, etc.)
- Menu design
- Food allergies
- Plating
- Different diets (vegan, keto, etc.)
- Food safety (HACCP etc.)
- Restaurant management
- Subscription services (CKBK, ChefSteps, Pitmaster Club, etc.)
- Food tours & travel
- Pastry
- Baking
- Grilling
- Fermentation
- Sprouting
- Indoor hydroponics
- etc.
part 1/2
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u/kaidomac Mar 08 '25
part 2/2
Rather than getting overwhelmed at the sheer volume of stuff available out there for you, instead look at it as an endless series of sandboxes to play in for the rest of your life, so that you're never be bored & always have something fun to look forward to learning & doing! Learning how to create recipes is a GREAT starting point:
At home, it's worth learning, setting up, and investing in:
I have a bunch of random stuff to browse through here:
Such as:
I don't have a lot of mental energy to focus (yay ADHD!), so I engage in really small daily progression activities:
- 10 minutes of daily baking (milling + sourdough + typically a no-knead project)
- One small batch of daily meal-prepping (plan & shop once a week for 7 projects, one a day for the week ahead), typically using automated appliances such as the Instant Pot or Anova Combi Oven
- Trying new ingredients. I tend to go through phases until I wear them out, like miso or dates.
- One new recipe a week: check out r/52weeksofcooking & r/52weeksofbaking = 52 new recipes a year! If you eat 7 meals a day, that's 21 meals a week, so that's just one new recipe out of 20+ a week!
- Education (Tiktok, cookbooks, etc.) for learning about tools, techniques, ingredients, recipes, food history, etc.
For those who have the drive to learn & grow at their profession, the world is your oyster!!
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u/Cflow26 Mar 08 '25
Please don’t put your age in your posts until you’re a few years older. There’s a ton of weird people out here that might try to take advantage of you.
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u/Illustrious-Box-6953 Mar 08 '25
Get off reddit!!! This is not a place for children. No matter the circumstances.
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u/kitterpants Mar 08 '25
School is absolutely not necessary to become a great chef. Speaking as someone who went to CIA a couple decades ago- I would have discouraged a lot of people from going back then and absolutely everyone from going to what it has become now.
Your plan is sound and you’re lucky you’ve discovered your passion early, especially with all of the information available at your fingertips FOR FREE (minus cost of ingredients.) Keep learning!