They do good work and I appreciate what they do, but I really don't recommend it as a career path. You're going to work long hours, make relatively crap pay with very little room for advancement, and working in a commercial kitchen is dangerous, difficult, often uncomfortable work.
My brother is a cook who has worked at a number of reasonably high end restaurants, and the only time he's gotten ahead at all is now that he just owns a bar. Someday you'll be 40, 50, 60, and that's a lot of cuts, a lot of burns, a lot of double shifts on your feet.
No disrespect for anyone who works in it, just my opinion seeing what it looks like from a second hand perspective.
It has been a 35 year journey for me. Good, bad and ugly, but I couldn’t fathom doing anything else. There are so many different aspects to the industry it has always been interesting.
Military cooking, culinary school, Hotels, Fine Dining, Casual Dining, Private Clubs, Catering, Banquets, Corporate Dining, Private Catering. International work, work in all four corners of the US, finally settled in the place (EU) we will retire in and have a small mom & pop BBQ shop that opened 4 months before covid and is still kicking. Been there, done that, AMA (lol).
@xc2215x the irony that some the improvements made to modernize the version of PHP it runs on were contributed by Facebook and the fact that it's Twig template files can be modified by anyone familiar with HTML and CSS. You don't need to know PHP to contribute improvements.