A couple of weekends ago, I found myself back where it all began — standing in a commercial kitchen again.

Not consulting.
Not talking food cost.
Not doing meetings or presentations.

Cooking.

Some dear friends needed help in their pub kitchen over Mother’s Day weekend, and somehow I ended up doing two straight 14-hour days back on the tools.

And let me tell you something…

I absolutely loved cooking for people again.

But I also remembered very quickly why chefs are a special breed of human.

Because commercial kitchens are brutal.

You forget until you’re back in it…

When you’ve been out of the day-to-day grind for a while, you tend to romanticize kitchens a little.

You remember the camaraderie.
The buzz of service.
The satisfaction of sending good food.
The banter.

You somehow forget the heat, the stress, the sore feet, the sweat dripping down your back, and the fact that your brain turns into mashed potato after 14 hours of service.

By Sunday night, I was so exhausted I put my phone on top of my car, slammed the boot shut… and crushed the phone.

Which honestly felt like the perfect ending to a Mother’s Day double shift.

The kitchen won. Again.

Kitchens are controlled chaos

People outside hospitality often think chefs are just “cooking.”

That’s like saying pilots are just “driving planes.”

A commercial kitchen is constant pressure and decision-making at speed.

You’re managing:

• timing 
• stock 
• temperatures 
• prep 
• communication 
• workflow 
• staffing 
• cleaning 
• ticket times 
• customer expectations 

…all while someone yells:

“WHERE’S TABLE 24?”

And somehow, you’re expected to answer calmly while holding hot pans and trying not to burn the chips.

The mental exhaustion is enormous.

You don’t stop thinking for a second.

Even driving home, your brain is still firing:

• Did we defrost enough chicken? 
• Did someone turn the fryer off? 
• Did we prep enough gravy for tomorrow? 
• Why did Table 16 order six well-done steaks at once? 

The kitchen follows you home.

Respect the Physical Toll

I’m not 25 anymore.

My body reminded me of that somewhere around hour 11 on Saturday.

My feet hurt.
My back hurt.
My knees hurt.

I made noises sitting down that sounded like an old timber staircase.

And yet chefs do this every single week.

Owners and managers really need to understand the physical toll kitchen work takes on people.

This isn’t sitting at a desk.

You’re standing all day on hard floors in heat while carrying heavy things at speed under pressure.

There’s a reason chefs are exhausted.

But what surprised me most was how exhausting the mental side was.

Cooking professionally isn’t just “making food.” It’s sustained concentration under pressure for hours on end.

You are solving problems constantly while trying to stay calm and organized.

It’s physical chess played at high speed in a hot room.

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The Junk Food Trap
One funny thing about kitchens is this:

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The people making food for everyone else usually eat the worst food themselves.

Not because they want to.

Because there’s no time.

You tell yourself:
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“I’ll eat properly after the rush.”

Then the rush never stops.

So you end up surviving on:

• chips 
• Coke 
• Red Bull 
• cold bits of schnitzel 
• fries stolen off plates 
• random toast at midnight 

At one point over the weekend, I think my nutritional intake was approximately:

• caffeine 
• salt 
• regret 

And honestly, that’s pretty standard kitchen life.

It’s one of the hidden problems in hospitality that people outside the industry rarely understand.

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The Skills Never Really Leave You

What surprised me most was how quickly it all came back.

Once the orders started flowing, something in my brain just switched on again.

The timing.
The movement.
The rhythm.
The ability to read the kitchen.

That part felt really good.

It reminded me that once you’ve truly worked in kitchens, it never really leaves you.

You can step away for years, but the instincts are still buried in there somewhere underneath the sore knees and lower back pain.

Old School Meets New School

Now here’s where I felt ancient.

I grew up in the era of handwritten dockets pinned to rails.

Then printers came along.

Now kitchens have KDS systems — Kitchen Display Screens.

No paper.
No tickets.
Just glowing screens everywhere telling you what’s happening.

I spent the first hour looking at it like my dad looks at Netflix.
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“Where’s the buttons?”
“What happened to the paper?”
“Why is it beeping at me?”

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To be fair, they’re brilliant systems once you get used to them, but it definitely reminded me that kitchens have evolved a lot.

Although I still reckon nothing gets your heart rate up like seeing a printer suddenly spit out a ticket longer than your arm.
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Cooking Is Only Half the Battle

What people also don’t realize is that cooking itself is only part of the job.

The setup is everything.

A kitchen lives or dies by its mise en place.

Where things go matters.
Which fridge holds what matters.
How many squeeze bottles you’ve got matters.
Whether the tongs are where they should be matters.

A badly organized kitchen creates stress before service even starts.

Experienced chefs understand this deeply.

Good setup reduces panic.
Bad setup creates chaos.

And chaos gets expensive fast.

What I Took Away From It

That weekend gave me enormous respect for chefs all over again.

Not Instagram chefs.
Not celebrity chefs.

Real chefs.

The ones grinding through doubles.
The ones missing weekends.
The ones standing in hot kitchens on Mother’s Day while everyone else is out celebrating.

Hospitality is one of the toughest industries in the world.

And yet the people in it keep showing up.

Because despite everything — the stress, the pressure, the burns, the smashed phones, the aching backs — there’s still something magical about feeding people well.

And honestly? Even after all these years… Part of me still loves the madness and misses it.