Yes, if the kitchen gives you structure, honest correction and a chef patient enough to hold you back until you are ready. The chefs I interviewed describe those years as the most formative of their lives. What is no longer worth tolerating is the cruelty that older kitchens confused with rigor.
The chefs I interviewed answered this question in two parts, and both parts matter. The years in a serious kitchen were worth everything to them. The abuse that sometimes came with those years was not, and the best of them have spent their later careers proving the two can be separated.
Start with what the years give. Aaron Silverman of Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury still calls his first kitchen the toughest he has ever worked in: long days, no breaks. What he took from it was not technique. It was the experience of having survived it, and a nervous system trained for the pressure he would later run his own restaurants under. Chan Yan Tak, the first Chinese chef in the world to hold three Michelin stars, began as a junior cook out of family necessity and describes those years as a test of endurance and patience. Neither man would trade the time. Both are clear that the reward was who they became inside it.
The chapter names three things a great kitchen gives an apprentice. Structure: a station, a sequence, a set of tasks repeated in the right order until the order lives in the body. Correction: a senior cook who sees the work, measures it against a standard you have not yet internalized, and tells you where it falls short. Patience: a chef who declines to promote you until you are ready, and lets you spend the months in pastry or the year in butchery you would have skipped if given the choice. A kitchen that delivers all three produces masters. One that delivers none produces nobody.
Now the harder part. The traditional kitchen was built on the idea that friction was the only way to sharpen a cook, and friction often meant fear. Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin is unusually honest about having inherited that model. He yelled at his cooks and had little patience, because that was how he had been trained. Around 2000 he was losing employees and the kitchen was unhappy, and he made the rare decision to abandon the style that had formed him.
“I couldn’t be happy if I was angry. Those emotions cannot coexist. A cook can’t make delicious and beautiful food if his hands are shaking from fear.” Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin
Chan arrived at the same conclusion from a different tradition. Chinese kitchens, in his telling, ran on shouting rather than affirmation. He decided early to build something else, and his brigade eats late night suppers together. Some of his colleagues have worked with him for thirty years, which in a Michelin kitchen is close to unheard of.
“Because I experienced it the hard way, I want my staff to feel respected and happy at work.” Chan Yan Tak, Lung King Heen, Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong
So the honest answer depends on which kitchen you are asking about. The chapter is explicit about the practices the contemporary apprenticeship has shed: humiliation as a teaching method, fear as the operating register, exhaustion as proof of seriousness, wage structures that asked young cooks to subsidize the restaurant with their own livelihoods. None of these were ever the substance. The substance was a senior person telling a junior person the truth about work that was not yet good enough, in a way the junior person could absorb. A kitchen that still does that, calmly and often, is worth years of your life. A kitchen that confuses cruelty with standards is asking you to pay for something it is not delivering.
The test is simple to apply from inside. A kitchen worth staying in corrects you rather than merely shouting at you, moves you through sections on purpose rather than leaving you where it is convenient, and has a chef who is building something in you that you cannot yet see. If that describes your kitchen, stay, and bring the corrected plate back tomorrow.
Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, sets out the three gifts of a great kitchen and the list of what the apprenticeship has rightly left behind.