Five years working the Thanksgiving-dinner shift can make you rethink everything.
Daniel joined the Serious Eats culinary team in 2014 and writes recipes, equipment reviews, articles on cooking techniques. Prior to that he was a food editor at Food & Wine magazine, and the staff writer for Time Out New York's restaurant and bars section.On the fourth Thursday of this November, families and friends across the United States will sit down to Thanksgiving dinner.
I know all of this because I used to be one of those cooks. And working the Thanksgiving shift for five years straight is what eventually convinced me to quit the restaurant industry altogether. For several years I worked at a restaurant on the Upper West Side where the kitchen opened up to a bustling dining room. Each night I'd look out from my station and observe amorous couples on date nights, extended families celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, or ruddy-faced executives ordering up their third or fourth bottle of wine.
Throughout my time as a restaurant cook, people would always ask, "So, you want to open your own place someday?" Not once did I say "yes." I had a lot of reasons. I didn't love the idea of having to run a business on such low profit margins. I didn't want to deal with the stress of shelling out ungodly amounts of money to fix equipment that never stops breaking. I didn't want to wonder why one of my line cooks hadn't shown up to work for three days straight.
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