What a Good Crewmember Actually Looks Like

I've worked with hundreds of people in professional kitchens over the past two decades.

Some of them were talented. Some were fast. Some could break down a whole fish in under three minutes or turn out perfect brunoise without thinking.

But the ones I actually wanted to keep? They weren't always the most skilled.

They were the ones who made the kitchen work.

There's a version of this job that people imagine before they start. You show up, you cook, you learn some knife skills, maybe you get yelled at a bit, and eventually you become a chef.

That's not how it works.

The kitchen runs on people who do the things nobody asked them to do. Who see the low mise en place and fill it before service without being told. Who clean as they go not because the head chef is watching but because they understand why it matters. Who show up on time — actually on time, not walking-through-the-door-at-start-time — ready to work.

That's it. That's most of it.

Skills can be taught. I've trained people who'd never held a knife properly and turned them into solid line cooks. What I can't teach is the part that makes someone actually worth training.

You want to know what I notice in the first week with a new crewmember?

Do they ask questions or do they guess and hope for the best. Do they take feedback without making it weird. Do they watch what's happening around them or do they have tunnel vision on their own station. Do they care about the person next to them getting through service, or just themselves.

None of that is skill. All of it is character.

The hardest conversation I have with young kitchen workers isn't about their technique.

It's about their attitude toward the unglamorous parts of the job.

Cleaning the grease trap. Restacking the cool room at the end of a double. Peeling twenty kilos of potatoes because that's what today needs. The people who treat those tasks as beneath them — I can see it immediately, and so can everyone else on the team.

A kitchen is a small world. Your reputation in it forms fast and sticks.

Good crewmembers are not perfect. They make mistakes, they have bad days, they occasionally drop things or misread a ticket.

What separates them is what happens next.

The ones worth keeping put their hand up straight away. No excuses, no pointing at someone else, no conveniently forgetting it happened. Just — "that was me, here's what I'll do differently."

And then they actually do it differently. That's the part most people miss. Admitting a mistake once is easy. Not making the same mistake again — that's what tells me whether someone is actually learning or just going through the motions.

I have zero patience for the same error three times. But I have a lot of patience for someone who gets it wrong once, owns it fully, and never brings it back.

If you're new to a kitchen and you want to know how to get ahead, here's the unglamorous truth:

Be reliable. Be coachable. Give a damn about the person working next to you. Do the jobs nobody wants without being asked twice. And when you mess up — own it, learn from it, move on.

The skills will come. The reputation you build in your first six months is much harder to change.

— The Chef