Why Kitchens Call People Like Me
When I was young, I thought I had discipline from playing sports, but I was wrong. I learned it on the line, in suffocating heat, shoulder to shoulder with people who didn’t care about your excuses, only your output. Kitchens have a way of stripping you down to who you really are. No titles, no ego, just fire, timing, and trust. You either show up for the team, or you don’t last.
Looking back, those years weren’t just about food. They were about finding a sense of purpose before I even had the language for it. I thought I’d found my place, but what I really found was a standard. A way of operating. A belief that what you do, and how you do it, matters.
This right here, is a piece of that.
There is a certain kind of person who ends up in kitchens. Not by accident. Not because it was glamorous. And definitely not because someone’s guidance counselor pointed at a stainless steel prep table and said “that’s your future”. Well, now days, I have encountered that from a school teacher, but that’s another story for later.
People like me don’t choose kitchens. The kitchen chose me.
The kitchen called my name because I felt like I was a misfit at the time. I was an immigrant who felt un-wanted in society, somewhat of a screwup with habits that were not approved by society. Proper people whispered “stay away, you’ll get in trouble if you hang out with him”. I just didn’t know how to tell my story yet. I didn’t know that the driving force inside me were chips on my shoulder. And you know what? Kitchens didn’t ask where you came from. It only asked and care about one thing only:
Can you show up, and can you carry your weight?
that’s it. No resume, no pedigree, no polish required.
A kitchen doesn’t care about your past. It doesn’t care about your accent, your last name, your bank account, or how broken things were before you walked through the back door.
There is no time for that.
Orders are firing. Tickets are stacking. Someone is bleeding, someone is yelling, and service is coming whether you are ready or not.
If you survive that, you earn your place and you belong. The sense of belonging, that’s the drug. It is all about the trust, psychological safety, and shared purpose. It is that plain and simple. It is being part of a gang without being in a gang. It is that weird psychology that draws people. If i screw up, you cover me. If you are drowning, I jump in. If we win the night, we win together. That’s the tribe.
For people like me, kitchens are order in the chaos. Some of us grow up in uncertainty; there is a language barrier, cultural unbalance, not feeling wanted or desired, feeling unloved, financial pressure, being told directly or indirectly that you don’t belong or that you are not destined to amount to anything. Kitchens fix that.
The kitchen gives you rules that make sense:
- show up early
- respect the craft
- don’t cut corners
- don’t leave your station dirty
- have discipline
- take care of the person next to you and the person coming after you
- be consistent
You learn fast that titles mean nothing. Respect is earned with burned hands, long nights, and consistency. It re-enforced my WHY: feed people, take care of the team, and survive service. It is purpose stripped down to its bones.
Kitchens don’t lie, they expose who you are under pressure. Kitchens show whether you fold, fight, or figure it out. There is no hiding behind buzzwords when the fryer’s on fire and the printer won’t stop screaming.
For people carrying anger, insecurity, or a chip on their shoulder, kitchens give you a place to burn it off in the only language that really matters: heat, steel, and motion.
You spend enough years channeling anger into something structured. When in high school and college, the field was that for me as I used sports to let the anger out. But eventually, that last game comes and then what? you are left without an outlet. The desperation and anxiety was tremendous at first thinking of what is going to happen next.
But then you start to understand it’s never really been about the outlet. Sports gave it rules, boundaries, and a scoreboard. The kitchen gave it heat, consequence, and nowhere to hide. Different arenas, same quiet agreement: bring your chaos, and we’ll turn it into something useful.
On the line, you burn it off. In prep, you bleed it out, nick by nick, hour by hour, until what’s left isn’t anger so much as focus. Discipline isn’t something you find; it’s something forged, under pressure, in repetition, in showing up when you don’t feel like it and doing the work anyway. That’s the trade.
And somewhere along the way, almost without ceremony, you change. You get sharper. Calmer. More capable. Not because the anger disappeared, but because you finally gave it a job.
Kitchens teach leadership the hard way. It is not granted, and it is tested daily. The best chefs protect their people. They create space where mistakes are corrected, not weaponized. Where standards are high, but loyalty is higher. They create a circle of safety, where you hear daily “I’ve got you”, “we’ll fix it”, and “get back on your feet”. That’s why so many of us carry kitchen lessons into every other career. We’ve seen what real leadership looks like when the stakes are hot, loud, and unforgiving.
You never really leave a kitchen, even when you move on. When you get an office job, pushing the mail cart, or have a cubicle, or when you get your own office and have to present to a board room or a room full of team owners, or industries that wear nicer clothes, the kitchen stays with us. We miss the clarity, the honesty, the unspoken language, and the tribe that didn’t care who we were yesterday.
Kitchens give people something rare, a place where efforts matters more than egos. A place where belonging is earned. A place where broken people are allowed to become useful, and sometimes great. To borrow from Anthony Bourdain, the kitchen is where the outsiders find order, the angry find purpose, and the lost find a map.
And once you have felt that kind of belonging, you spend the rest of your life chasing it, or trying to build it again, wherever you land next.