When I published the Noma series, I did not expect the response to come so quickly, or so honestly. Sam Coleman, head chef of Waterhouse Project, wrote to me the same week. An email that is direct, unfiltered, and real in a way that formal writing rarely is.
I am publishing it as he sent it, because that is exactly what this platform is for.
Sam writes from inside the industry, from the rough and tough era, as he calls it, the generation of chefs who normalised shouting, fear, and physical intimidation as part of the job. He is not writing to condemn but to make sense of it, to trace the line between where kitchens were and where he wants his own kitchen to be now.
What struck me most is his honesty about the contradiction many chefs carry: the desire to lead differently, while still asking whether it is possible to achieve greatness without the old brutality. That question does not have an easy answer, but it is the right question to be asking out loud.
This is not just a hospitality story. As Sam points out, it is a story about pressure, culture, and what we ask of people in the name of excellence. It happens in kitchens, in the NHS, in a lot of places nobody writes about.
He wanted to put his experience on record. Here it is.
Hi Andreja,
Your article really made me think. Along with the stories that are being written about Noma, I suppose it opens up the doors for stories about us, normal workers in everyday life in kitchens, not just the best restaurant in the world.
I come from an era of kitchens where pressure, shouting, kicking things, threatening language, and fear are ‘normal’ things we all stand alongside and think the industry is about. People I knew would tell me tales about their head chefs doing things that weren’t right and swallowing it up and carrying on. That’s something that a whole generation of chefs lived with, whether that’s correct or not.
One thing that I would say, though, is that through this dying era, the people who have come out the other side of it are now leading kitchens in ways that they want to run them.
I feel like, as a head chef, I want to treat people fairly. If something goes wrong, all I want is honesty and realness. Unfortunately, through the fear of previous kitchens, some chefs feel obligated to lie in case their mistake gets them ‘in shit’ or makes them ‘look bad’. To be honest, I don’t give a f**k. I just want to find out what happened, and we move on from there and fix it.
In every workplace, there is such a thing as accountability and accepting or acknowledging when you do something wrong. But at the end of the day, we aren’t fighting the front line, we aren’t talking about lives, so you don’t need to argue, punch or shout about it.
When something such as a dietary requirement or a dish coming back to the kitchen goes wrong, that is where normal workplace discipline applies, and that’s fine. You fix it, you sort out the issue. But even then, it doesn’t warrant discipline of a violent nature. You don’t need to shout or scream, as I have seen in the past.
Does shouting, screaming, throwing things, burning people and treating people like shit make you good? The answer is no.
I do not like or promote stroppy behaviour or riding people, no matter where you have come from. It could be a three-star, two-star, one-star kitchen, I don’t give a f**k. Working with people who have come from high-accolade kitchens can come with an attitude that carries through into the way they work. But that doesn’t give you the right to act that way in another environment. It doesn’t give you the right to shout because that’s how you were treated.
There is a point, however, when you look at what we do now as chefs and think, are we ever going to achieve greatness without it?
It was almost a badge of honour to have survived one of these kitchens, or even to have it on your CV. And they were revered in our industry 10 years ago for being a ‘tough place to work in’ or ‘that chef must be good, hire them because they worked there.’
The truth is, you were probably hiring someone with huge emotional scars.
The statement about the tough kitchens is untrue, however, because there are great leaders who have achieved great things without this type of kitchen.
So my theory as a head chef is, what do we have to do to get recognised by the award system that is Michelin?
The group that apparently empowers kitchens of this old school mentality and almost wants everyone on this list to be worked to the bone, up at six in the morning, home at one at night, working to the point of absolute destruction mentally and physically. But it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge that this happens in the industry. And it isn’t only our industry where this happens. I know for a fact through family and friends that the NHS is, without a doubt, one of the hardest places to work. It was a common question amongst peers whether you would rather work in the NHS or kitchens. Almost all of my friends would say lol… kitchens for sure…
I had a friend who went to work in the US. He told me that being appointed sous chef got him a car, a house, a job with a good salary, chefs treated like rock stars, with reasonable hours and AM, PM teams that would hand over to each other during the day. All I can say is wow, I wish that was the case in the whole industry.
As a chef of the rough and tough era, all I want for my staff now is to be able to treat them fairly, not have my face threatened to be smashed against a salamander or have a boiling pot of wild garlic risotto thrown at me. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?
I want to, however, highlight the fact that everyone knew about Noma hiring chefs for ‘free’ for three months at a time. 10 years ago, all I heard from peers was ‘oh my god, imagine going to work at Noma for three months, that would be sick’. That’s nothing new. Obviously, the punching and stabbing with forks is insane, but working for free? People were on a waiting list, if I’m not wrong, to do it. At the time, it almost seemed like a holiday many of us couldn’t afford.
Along with the pandemic, a change came that changed everything for us as an industry.
For a while, we were looking at being closed forever, bakeries and eating at home, meals delivered from restaurants that you finished yourself at home, and then only serving people outside and the possibility of screens dividing the atmosphere in the dining rooms. But along with the reopening of restaurants and Brexit, a challenge came with a whole new wave of attitudes and staff front and back, including my own change of attitude towards life. I was happy to be back doing what I had been doing since I was 15. I would not change that for the world.
So whatever comes of this or the Noma stories, I hope there can be a change not only in our industry but all industries. It’s not just ours that suffers this kind of pressure, blood, sweat and tears.
My experiences are not as bad as the punches, burns or intentional stabbings, but they still count and stick in my mind, so I can’t imagine for one minute how the others have been affected or, more importantly, are still affected now by theirs.
Sam Coleman, Head Chef
The Water House Project, London