A Shot of Whiskey or a Shot of Reality: Addiction in the Service Industry

5 PM, Saturday night. Dinner service is about to begin. The kitchen is heating up, flames spit from the broiler, and the sound of steel scraping against steel fills the air as knives are sharpened. The kitchen staff and I rush about the kitchen stocking the line as Chef looks on. The energy in the kitchen is electric. This is what we live for, what we train for. This is weekend dinner service. In the middle of a pep talk to the staff, Chef is interrupted by an urgent message from the the hostess: “Forty open menus.” The laughing stops, and the conversation transitions from friendly to serious. Service has begun.

6PM. The dinner rush is in full swing. Those forty menus were served and another forty have swooped in to take their place. Sweat soaks our jackets, timers go off, hot oil pops on the grill, and flames leap as the steaks sear on the broiler. Communication is key, but above all the people yelling orders back and forth, Chef’s voice rises above the rest. He expects perfection in every dish, but as the hours tick by, mistakes are made. The exhaustion and dehydration are beginning to set in.

11 PM. The last order was a half hour ago but the line is still bustling, and the cooks have found their second wind because they are less than an hour away from freedom. At 11:30 PM the fires are doused, the line mopped, the lights turned off, and the cooks—now out of their uniforms—are let out into the night. Now, the drinking begins.

I did not write this article just to describe what kitchen staff do on their off time. I wrote it because I want to address the often overlooked fact that a horrifying number of people that work in kitchens and the restaurant industry find themselves susceptible to burnout, substance abuse, and mental health issues. The aim of this article is to explore how deep the issue goes, and why so many people in the service industry are afflicted with these issues. I want to start by telling you my own story by sharing my history as a line cook.

I have worked eight hour days where I did not leave my station for anything. Eight hours without using the washroom, getting a drink of water, or escaping from the intense heat. Eight hours in 120° Fahrenheit heat (yes, we measured it) getting burned by splattering oil and cut by knives. I have worked ten and a half hours with no more than five minutes to sit on a milk crate and wolf down a cold burger in the middle of cooking orders.

I have worked in the kitchen for so long that I have very little feeling in my hands. I can grab pans with searing hot handles and carry them to the dish pit. I have put my hand in the deep fryer twice (accidentally), and gotten second degree burns on my hands that melted my skin away. My coworkers will laugh when they read this because their injuries are much more extensive. I once watched my chef cut off the tip of his thumb, bandage it up and finish his prep work because the kitchen culture breeds a strong work ethic and a stubbornness rivalled by no other.

When you work in a kitchen, your body is in a constant state of stress. Standing for eight, ten, even fourteen hours puts a strain on the body. If you are constantly burning and cutting yourself and always dehydrated, your body goes into overdrive trying to maintain a level of functionality. Top it off with all the noise, smells, and people jostling you and shouting in your face—often about things you have no control over—and you have the perfect recipe for poor mental health.

With all this in mind, it is not hard to understand why kitchen staff look forward to that first sip of beer or liquor, or that first puff of a joint. As many night shift kitchen workers will tell you, it is very difficult to get to sleep for about three hours after work because your body went from overstimulation to zero in a matter of minutes. There is nothing better than feeling numb after being in a constant state of overstimulation, and nothing gets some people numb faster than alcohol or drugs.

Beers and bong rips at a coworkers house. Pints and pool cues at the local pool hall. Ten people exhausted from the day’s work pound shot after shot of liquor as empty glasses slowly fill the bar. This is an all-too-familiar ritual. That first sip of beer, so crisp and cold, has a soothing effect I still can never fully describe.

My first kitchen job was at McDonalds, which admittedly had the least amount of alcohol or drug abuse. But, the one exception was when my co-worker took more than five minutes to prepare a sandwich that normally takes no more than a minute to assemble. When I asked him if he was okay, he said, “I am high as a kite right now…” with a glazed look in his eyes that I would come to see with grave regularity in the kitchens I’ve worked in since.

It was also while working at McDonalds that I found myself afflicted with work related nightmares. These nightmares began with an endless array of timers that would not turn off, and soon escalated to me frantically swinging my arms and babbling to my girlfriend about rotating the product, ensuring the oldest product is used first. By the time I left McDonalds, I began to question what I had gotten myself into.

A year and a half later, I found myself working at a local breakfast institution. There, I was introduced into the subculture of working in a kitchen. I began to recognize that kitchens attracted a certain type of person. The people I worked with ran hot with short tempers and either thrived or withered beneath the pressure that manifests during a dinner rush. I learned cuss words I had never heard before and once watched a co-worker shatter a plate against the wall and walk away fuming.

One coworker invited me to his car on a break, where he produced a bottle of vodka which he proceeded to drink shot by shot. I once reached for a bottle of cranberry juice in the kitchen that someone had brought from home only to discover that it reeked of vodka. From 9AM to 2PM, the workers in that kitchen slaved in heat. Strong words were exchanged between the staff, fights had to be broken up, and more than one person showed up to work hungover… or still drunk.

Some time later and armed with a newfound ability to recognize these signs in a kitchen, I switched jobs and moved to a new fine dining restaurant since my experience now qualified me to enter the big leagues. Chef was a great teacher, but he was hard on us. He expected perfection in his dishes. If the plate was messy, the salmon a little charred, or the fries overdone, back the dishes went, usually accompanied with choice expletives thrown at the responsible line cook. Sometimes, we would have thirty dishes cooking at once, making it very difficult to consistently put up “perfect 10” dishes.

There was never a reprieve from the pressure and relentless heat. I regularly worked 5 PM to 2 AM and even considering taking a break was laughable. While this new kitchen was run like a tight ship, it was not without problems. It was not difficult to tell who was nursing a horrible hangover among the staff. One only had to listen to the hushed whispers of “What happened last night?” or “Did you really push me into the river in a shopping cart?” to realize that after work most of the kitchen seeked an escape through various numbing agents.

While at this job, I was introduced to the concept of a Whippit. The nitrous oxide put into whipped cream cans keeps the product fluffy and stable, but when the can is empty my coworkers would take turns “hitting it” by- inhaling the nitrous oxide at the bottom of the can which creates feelings of extreme euphoria and a massive head rush. The experience, I am told is akin to huffing glue

My coworkers have told me they have watched people take six or seven hits and black out. Whippit is a very common product in most kitchens, so there are often whipped cream cans aplenty offering an easy way to get a cheap high, perhaps before going to the bar. A very cheap, but very dangerous, high.

Shortly before Christmas one year, our supervisor grabbed the wrong water bottle next to his station and promptly spat out what he had drank (it sure wasn’t water) . Another co-worker was loopy and slightly slurring his words. The next day he was escorted out, fired for cutting rum into his iced tea for the past several weeks. It was the first time I had witnessed someone’s use of alcohol actually get them into trouble.

I left the fine dining in pursuit of a different challenge and found myself at a franchise restaurant where the owner has cracked down on incidents like this, but I have no doubt that workers still use everyday products to get high. Once the tills are closed and the bar fills with empty glasses, those line workers go home or to a friends house until the early hours of the morning. The rooms would fill with smoke, while beer bottles and cans litter the counter and floor, and the bottle they had bought a few hours earlier would be empty.

Why are so many people in the service industry susceptible to burnout and to mental health issues that commonly stem from extreme work environments and low self-esteem? There is an age old saying, “if you don’t go to school, you are going to be flipping burgers at McDonalds.” This creates a stigma and villainizes the restaurant industry and those who work in it. Even if somebody’s talents and abilities make them suited to work in a kitchen, they may be driven to feel as if they are less than the person who works at an office. Combine this with the extreme working conditions of a kitchen, and it explains how someone can quickly burn out, find an affinity for illicit substances, and maybe even develop mental illness.

The service industry is relentless, taking in staff and putting them through the grind. Having a drink after work can sometimes be an integral part of the kitchen culture. As a kitchen worker, or a friend of one, often all you can do is make the decision to NOT take that next shot with your coworkers. The memories I’ve made with my kitchen staff colleagues, the jokes we’ve shared in the kitchen and bar afterward, are priceless. But they don’t mean much if you can’t remember them the next morning.  

So what can be done about the substance and mental health issues to curb the after hours binge drinking, and crushing Adderall pills into Monster energy drinks? Is there hope for line cooks and kitchen staff, who frequently hang in the balance between horribly twisted or nursing a wicked hangover?

Amid a dinner rush, the kitchen is an ecosystem full of complex characters under extreme stress who happen to be the creative masterminds behind some of the most beautiful and delicious dishes. But if you take just one dishwasher, line cook, or sous chef out of that environment, the entire ecosystem is liable to collapse.

Someday, kitchen owners may make working conditions for their employees better, but in the meantime all we can do is look out for each other. We have to take care of our fellow brothers and sisters in the kitchen. Whether you’re on the line or you’re a customer waiting outside those double doors, we can all do our part to help make things a little better.

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