Kitchen Bad Days: Building Emotional Honesty

TL;DR: Bad days in the kitchen are inevitable, but silence makes them dangerous. Normalising emotional honesty in your brigade reduces burnout, errors, and staff loss. Stoicism isn’t professionalism; it’s a retention risk.

Bad days happen in every kitchen. The question is whether your brigade feels safe enough to say so.

I remember a prep cook. I worked with years ago; he was a quiet lad, technically gifted, and never complained. He came in one Tuesday looking like he hadn’t slept since Friday, made three errors before noon that he’d never have made otherwise, and said absolutely nothing. Neither did I. That was the culture. You got on with it. You didn’t bring your feelings to work any more than you’d bring your duvet. Looking back, I wish I’d handled it differently. We lost him three months later, not to another kitchen, just to the industry entirely.

That story isn’t unusual. If anything, it’s embarrassingly ordinary. And that’s precisely the problem.

Why Kitchen Brigade Culture Makes It Hard to Speak Up

The brigade system, that rigid, quasi-military hierarchy that Escoffier gave us, has genuine merit. Clear roles, clear accountability, a chain of command that keeps a busy service from descending into chaos. I’ve no quarrel with structure. What I do have a quarrel with is the emotional baggage that got smuggled in alongside it: the idea that stoicism is professionalism, that showing strain is showing weakness, and that a chef who admits they’re struggling is somehow less fit to stand at the pass.

Kitchen brigade culture carries years of inherited toughness. Some of that toughness is genuinely useful. Some of it is just old cruelty dressed up as tradition. The two are not the same thing, and we’d do well to learn the difference.

When people cannot name what they’re feeling, the feelings don’t disappear. They come out sideways: snapping at commis chefs, sloppy prep, and calling in sick when they’re not quite sick but simply can’t face it. The bad day doesn’t vanish because it goes unacknowledged. It just costs you more later.

What Emotional Honesty in Hospitality Actually Looks Like

Emotional honesty doesn’t mean group therapy before a family meal. It doesn’t mean soft furnishings in the dry store or a feelings jar by the pass (though if someone genuinely wants a feelings jar, I suppose I’d rather that than silence). It means creating conditions in which a person can say, “I’m having a rough one today,” without fearing it will be used against them.

In practical terms, that starts with the head chef or kitchen manager modelling it first. If the chef never admits a bad day, the brigade won’t either. But if the chef can say, quietly, “I didn’t sleep well last night, so I might be a bit short; bear with me,” it gives everyone else permission to be human too. That’s not weakness. That’s just honesty about the fact that you’re a person and not a piece of equipment.

It also means listening when someone does speak up. Not immediately pivoting to solutions, not saying “we all feel that way” and moving on, but actually pausing for thirty seconds to acknowledge what was said. You’d be surprised what thirty seconds of genuine attention does for someone who expected none at all.

Managing Stress as a Chef: The Practical Side

The hospitality industry has a well-documented relationship with poor mental health, long hours, physical exhaustion, irregular sleep, and the particular pressure of service, which is a deadline that arrives every single day without exception. Managing stress as a chef isn’t a nice-to-have. For most people working in kitchens, it’s survival.

Here are some things I’ve found actually useful, not aspirational, just real:

• Acknowledge the rhythm of the week. Mondays after a double weekend shift are different from Wednesdays. Build some awareness of when your team is typically most depleted and adjust expectations accordingly where you can.
• Give people a way out of the spiral. If someone is clearly overwhelmed, a brief task change, a different station, or a five-minute break outside can interrupt the cascade before it becomes a bigger problem. This isn’t indulgence; it’s damage limitation.
• Brief and debrief properly. A family meal isn’t just about eating. It’s a moment to calibrate before service. A short, calm briefing that includes a human check-in (“anyone got anything they need flagged before we go?”) costs nothing and catches problems early.
• Don’t confuse composure with suppression. A calm kitchen isn’t one where nobody feels anything. It’s one where people manage their feelings well because they feel safe enough to know what they’re feeling in the first place.

Emotional Wellbeing in the Kitchen Is Not Separate From Performance

There’s a version of this conversation that frames emotional wellbeing in the kitchen as a kind of concession, as though attending to how people feel comes at the cost of standards. I find that argument thoroughly unconvincing, mostly because I’ve seen the opposite in practice.

A cook who is chronically stressed, unheard, and running on empty makes mistakes. They cut corners not because they’re lazy but because they have nothing left. They leave. And then you spend six weeks training someone new while the rest of the team absorbs the gap. That’s the actual cost of ignoring wellbeing, and it shows up plainly on the rota and in the food.

Kitchens where people feel genuinely respected tend to have better retention, fewer accidents, more consistent output, and a more honest working environment where problems get flagged early rather than hidden until they become crises. That’s not sentiment. That’s just how people work when they’re not running on fear.

Chef Mental Health: What Leaders Can Do Right Now

If you run a kitchen and you’re reading this thinking, “Right, but where do I start?” the answer is start small and start honestly. You don’t need a wellness programme or a consultant. You need to change a few habits and hold to them consistently.

1. Check in with your team as individuals, not just as roles. A thirty-second conversation that begins with “How are you actually getting on?” is different from “Where are we on the mise en place?”
2. Respond to disclosures with care. If someone tells you they’re struggling, thank them for saying so before you do anything else. That moment of acknowledgement matters more than the solution that follows it.
3. Make chef mental health a normal subject, not a crisis response. Talk about it before it’s urgent. Mention Hospitality Action or similar organisations in the staff room. Normalise the language so that asking for help doesn’t feel like pulling a fire alarm.
4. Review your own behaviour honestly. Are you creating a climate where people can speak up, or are you unintentionally punishing those who do? Most chefs who create a culture of silence don’t do so deliberately. They do it by never examining the signals they send.

Chef Ian McAndrew’s specialist eBooks and guides are available directly on ChefYesChef, including his technical titles and autobiography. If you want more practical, chef-led reading beyond this article, you’ll find the full collection here.

Chef Ian McAndrew works with chefs, businesses, and individuals on a wide range of culinary projects, from concept development to practical problem-solving.

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