be an asshole too.
- Try not to lie. Remember, this is the restaurant business. No matter
how bad it is, everybody probably has heard worse. Forgot to place the
produce order? Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and
move on. Just don't do it again. Ever. - Avoid restaurants where the owner's name is over the door.
Avoid restaurants that smell bad. Avoid restaurants with names that will
look funny or pathetic on your résumé. - Think about that résumé! How will it look to the chef weeding
through a stack of faxes if you've never worked in one place longer than
six months? If the years '95 to '97 are unaccounted for? If you worked as
sandwich chef at happy Malone's Cheerful Chicken, maybe you shouldn't
mention that. And please, if you appeared as "Bud" in a daytime soap
opera, played the Narrator in a summer stock production of Our Town,
leave it off the résumé. Nobody cares—except the chef, who won't be
hiring anyone with delusions of thespian greatness. Under "Reasons for
Leaving Last Job", never give the real reason, unless it's money or
ambition. - Read! Read cookbooks, trade magazines—I recommend Food Arts,
Saveur, Restaurant Business magazines. They are useful for staying
abreast of industry trends, and for pinching recipes and concepts. Some
awareness of the history of your business is useful, too. It allows you to
put your own miserable circumstances in perspective when you've
examined and appreciated the full sweep of culinary history. Orwell's
Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's
The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine
account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and
Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Read the old masters: Escoffier,
Bocuse et al as well as the Young Turks: Keller, Marco-Pierre White,
and more recent generations of innovators and craftsmen.