For the chefs I interviewed who have cooked for forty and fifty years, yes, though every one of them was honest about the price. The work costs hours, health and relationships. What it returns is a team you built, a craft you keep learning, and a person you would not have become any other way.
Anyone asking this question deserves both columns of the ledger, and the chefs I interviewed were unusually willing to fill in the first one. The hours are long and the calendar does not bend. The body absorbs decades of standing and stress. Family life gets whatever fits around the operating tempo of the restaurant, which is often very little. David Kinch, after two decades at Manresa and more than forty years of cooking, told me that the older he gets, the harder it is to accept the kitchen’s old creed of work at all costs, and that resting hard has become as important to him as working hard.
Cristina Bowerman, the chef of Glass Hostaria in Rome, paid an additional price the field is only beginning to acknowledge. She described vividly how she was treated by her peers early on as a professional chef in a man’s world: some could not see her talent, and others did not grasp that she was prepared to study and work twenty hours a day to become a good cook first and a good chef second. She had arrived by an unusual road, with a law degree, foreign languages and a decade as a graphic designer behind her, before a career change at thirty two and culinary school in Austin. The field made her pay twice the entry price. She is nevertheless unwilling to leave the subject at the cost.
“In Northern Europe, Spain and elsewhere, food has changed the economy and the way people approach life. It has given us women a way to reach equality.” Cristina Bowerman, chef, Glass Hostaria, Rome
That is the first answer to whether it is worth it. The work that extracts the cost is, done at her level, the work that changes the terms for the people who come after.
The second answer is what the work does to the person over time. Pedro Subijana of Akelarre in San Sebastián has cooked for fifty years and holds three Michelin stars. Looking back, he told me he had always been dedicated, curious, humble, responsible, idealistic and patient, and that he became a leader and a businessman without noticing, because at the beginning he had no choice but to take on the responsibility. The young cook became the elder statesman of his region’s cuisine without planning any of it. The discipline produced a person, and the person turned out to be worth more than the body of work.
The third answer is the one Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca gave in a single image.
“I live on top of my restaurant kitchen, or I have my restaurant kitchen under my house” Joan Roca, chef, El Celler de Can Roca, Girona
Roca has arranged his whole life around the work, and in doing so has removed the seam between work and life that is the source of so much of the cost. That arrangement is available to very few, and it is also a clue. The chefs who find the career worth it are the ones for whom the ambition eventually turned into purpose: cooking because the team depends on them, because the craft is what they want to keep contributing to, because the next generation needs someone who has done it for a long time to show them what they have not yet learned.
Worth it, then, is the wrong frame if it means a calculation made once at the start. The chefs who lasted made the calculation honestly, kept remaking it, and found that the compensations arrive late and arrive in people: the brigade they built, the cooks they trained who now run their own kitchens, and the capacity for attention the work trained into them until it became their nature.
Chapter 13, The Long Game, lays out the full accounting of cost and return, and the shift from ambition to purpose that marks the second half of a serious career.