Chefs Don’t Have to Be Jerks

When J. Kenji López-Alt landed a job as a line cook at the elegant No. 9 Park restaurant, he wasn’t expecting to spend his first day standing in the corner with a figurative dunce hat on his head. He was being punished by the chef for incorrectly chopping the chives. He later worked at other expensive restaurants too, even spending a few weeks working for the famously cruel Gordon Ramsay, where he watched another cook have a hot pan tossed at him. Now the head chef of his own restaurant, López-Alt is taking the lessons he learned from those jobs to run a kitchen that’s cruelty free. This week on Man Up, he talks with Aymann about kitchen machismo, and what it took for him to unlearn it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.