Social Media & Chef Reputation: Hired Before a CV
Tuesday morning. Half past six. The delivery lorry is late, one of the commis called in sick, and someone left the soft herbs uncovered overnight, so they look like something you’d find at the back of a forgotten greenhouse. This is what being a head chef actually looks like. Not the tasting menus, not the television appearances, not the artfully plated scallop that ends up on someone’s Instagram before they’ve even tasted it. Tuesday morning is the truth of it.
People imagine a head chef’s week as something close to a cooking show. Calm, purposeful, full of revelation. They picture someone standing at a pristine pass, tasting sauces with quiet authority, occasionally offering a nugget of wisdom to an attentive brigade. That picture exists, I suppose, for about eleven minutes on a Thursday afternoon when everything has gone right. The rest of the time is rather more complicated.
Let me walk you through what a week in a working kitchen actually involves, and we can compare it to the version people seem to have constructed in their heads.
Monday in a professional kitchen is administrative. There is ordering to do, rotas to check, a conversation with the supplier about why the celeriac this week is the size and density of a cricket ball, and roughly forty emails to work through. Nobody films this bit. Nobody frames it as the romantic heart of restaurant life, which is a shame, because getting your ordering wrong is the fastest way to have a catastrophic Friday service.
There is also the menu to think about. Not in the daydreaming, notebook-and-fountain-pen sense that food writers tend to romanticise. More in the sense of: what’s coming in, what’s left over, what can we do with a box of slightly tired beetroot that still has dignity if treated properly. Seasonality isn’t an aesthetic choice. It’s a practical one, and Monday is when you honour it or ignore it, with consequences either way.
Tuesday is where I’ve always felt the real measure of a kitchen sits. It’s not a glamorous service night. The restaurant might be half full. The brigade is settling back into the week’s rhythm. And this is precisely when you learn who actually knows what they’re doing, because nobody’s performing. There’s no Friday adrenaline to carry anyone through. You either know how to make a proper stock or you don’t.
On a good Tuesday, you get prep done properly. Stocks on early, aromatics sweated without rushing, bones roasted until they’re the colour of conkers rather than the pale, apologetic beige that produces insipid results. The herbs are picked carefully, the vegetables cut to a consistent size (because uneven cuts mean uneven cooking, which means one bite is perfect and the next is not, and that is not good enough). It’s unglamorous work. It’s also the most important work of the week.
The test I’d apply to any kitchen, any chef, any brigade: watch them on a Tuesday. Watch them when the adrenaline isn’t running, when there’s no critic booked in, when it’s just the work. That tells you everything.
Here is a rough approximation of what people imagine when they picture a head chef’s week:
Here is what actually happens across a working week:
None of this is a complaint. It’s the job, and the job is worth doing. But the gap between the imagined version and the lived one is significant, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours, least of all the young cooks who arrive expecting theatre and instead find themselves peeling thirty kilograms of shallots.
By mid-week, the kitchen has its rhythm. Prep is accumulating in the walk-in. The menu is confirmed. The team know what they’re doing, more or less, and the focus shifts toward execution rather than organisation. These are often the best days, if I’m honest. The work is clear, the pressure is building but manageable, and there’s something deeply satisfying about a cold room that looks well ordered and properly stocked.
This is also when the creative work actually happens, and it looks nothing like inspiration. It looks like tasting something, deciding it isn’t right, adjusting, tasting again. It looks like a quiet ten minutes with a new ingredient trying to understand what it wants to be. Creativity in a professional kitchen is almost entirely iterative. You try things. Most of them don’t work. One of them does, and that’s the one that goes on the menu, and by then the romantic struggle is entirely invisible to the person eating it.
Yes, the weekend service is what people picture. The heat, the noise, the controlled chaos of a busy pass. And yes, there is something extraordinary about a service that goes well, when the brigade is sharp and the food is going out as it should and the whole thing hums along like a well-maintained engine. There’s nothing quite like it.
But here is the part nobody tells you: a good Friday service is built on Tuesday’s prep. The stocks made properly, the sauces reduced to the right consistency, the mise en place done with care and precision rather than haste. The glory of a Saturday night pass is almost entirely the product of three days of quiet, unglamorous, thoroughly unsexy kitchen work. That’s not a lesson they teach on cooking shows, but it’s the most important one there is.
Most kitchens are closed on Sunday, or running a reduced operation. For a head chef, it’s rarely a full day off. There are menus to think about, seasonal ingredients shifting with the weeks, supplier calls to return, and the persistent, low-grade awareness that Monday is coming and the cycle begins again. You learn to rest within the noise of it, rather than waiting for the noise to stop.
The weeks do blur together after a decade or two. But they also accumulate into something, a kind of knowledge that you couldn’t get any other way. You know how a proper stock smells when it’s ready because you’ve made hundreds of them. You know when a sauce needs another ten minutes because you’ve rescued (and failed to rescue) enough of them to have a feel for it. That knowledge lives in the hands and nose and memory more than in any recipe book.
If you’re considering a career in professional cooking, I’d say this plainly: it is genuinely one of the most rewarding things you can do. It is also relentlessly physical, sometimes thankless, and built on a foundation of repetitive tasks done well rather than occasional moments of brilliance. The brilliance, when it comes, is earned through the repetition.
Fall in love with the Tuesday mornings as well as the Saturday services. Find satisfaction in properly made stock and evenly cut vegetables and a cold room that’s organised sensibly. Learn to taste with genuine attention rather than performing the act of tasting. And if someone shows you how to do something the right way, do it that way. The shortcuts reveal themselves much later, once you understand why the longer route exists.
The week of a working head chef is mostly invisible to the people who eat the food, which is exactly how it should be. The meal should feel effortless. The work should not. That gap, between what the guest experiences and what went into it, is where the craft lives. And it starts, as it always has, on a Tuesday morning with a late delivery lorry and a box of herbs that someone left uncovered overnight.
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.
If you’d like to talk through an idea or need informed guidance, you’re welcome to contact him.
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