Is Culinary School Worth It? I Volunteered to Wash Dishes to Find Out.

The harsh realities of kitchen life.

Is Culinary School Worth It? I Volunteered to Wash Dishes to Find Out.

It was 2001. I was 21 years old, freshly graduated from Le Cordon Bleu New Hampshire (technically a separate college under McIntosh College in Dover, if we're being precise — and in this story, we're going to be precise, because precision is the whole point).

I needed an internship. Everyone needed an internship. But here's the thing nobody tells you about culinary school: most internships don't pay. You just work for free and call it "experience," while your student loan balance quietly does jumping jacks in the background.

I wasn't about to do that. I had a plan.

The Saturday Nobody Wanted

While working in the school kitchen, I noticed a cooking class happening every Saturday — and noticed something else: nobody wanted to work it. Not because the class itself was bad, but because New Hampshire has a beach (yes, really, look it up), and 21-year-olds would rather be at the beach than washing someone else's mixing bowls on a Saturday morning.

So I found out who was teaching it: a woman who owned an Italian restaurant just across the bridge in Maine. Kind, but no-nonsense — the type who could correct your knife grip and your life choices in the same sentence. I volunteered to wash her dishes. I got the job. Eventually, I was prepping food too, so the dishes wouldn't pile up on her while she taught.

Here's the part I didn't know yet: the math I was doing in my head — give up my Saturdays now, get a paid internship later, save enough to skip the dorm-to-first-apartment starter-apartment phase entirely — was about to collide with a much bigger lesson about how the restaurant industry actually works.

"Don't You Want To Do It Somewhere Classier?"

Through conversation, I learned something interesting: my culinary school's Chef Instructor used to work for this same woman, before he became a teacher.

So, being efficient, I asked him first — could I do my internship at her restaurant?

He shrugged. "Yeah. But don't you want to do it somewhere more classy?"

I want you to sit with that for a second, the way I did. This man used to work for her. He never said one negative word about her. And yet — the shrug. The shade. I couldn't let it go. I needed to know what he wasn't saying.

So I skipped him entirely and went straight to the source.

The Bushes Vacation in Maine (Yes, Those Bushes)

I asked the restaurant owner directly for a job. She said yes — happily. It was headed into summer, and that stretch of Maine gets extremely vacation-heavy. Actual people take actual vacations in Maine. I later found out one of the families that summered there was the Bush family. As in, the presidents.

Getting the internship wasn't automatic, though. It came with a condition: complete a working interview with her Executive Chef — what's properly called a stage (pronounced "stahj," for anyone who, like me at the time, was one Google search away from saying it like the place you perform on).

At school, we had a practice restaurant attached to the program — lunch service for basic courses, dinner service for advanced ones, roughly 50-60 covers at lunch and a bit more at dinner, spread across about 20 student-employees. It was controlled. It was manageable. It was, in hindsight, a simulation with the difficulty slider set to "tutorial."

I did not know that yet.

The Stage: Where the Training Wheels Come Off

I got in my grey Pontiac Grand Am, in my fresh-starched culinary jacket and tall white chef hat, and drove across the bridge to conquer my working interview.

The restaurant itself was nice (not what you would consider “classy”)— half Italian restaurant with a bar and patio, half small pizza parlor. I walked in the back door, where the actual Executive Chef was putting away produce. He looked at me exactly once and said, "Take that crap off." (That is not the word he used. It is the word I am using for this article, for reasons that should be obvious.)

It was May. It was humid. It was tough love, delivered at a volume and directness that no syllabus prepares you for. Ego thoroughly deflated, I changed coats and headed to the line — no other staff, just me and him. The mock kitchen had left the building. The real one had arrived, and it did not care about my GPA.

Book Chefs vs. Line Chefs

At some point during the stage, I asked him what happened to my old Chef Instructor — the one who'd shrugged and suggested I aim "classier."

His answer, more or less: those who can't cut it, teach.

In hindsight, it tracks — and it taught me something bigger than any one guy's career path. There are, broadly, two kinds of chefs:

Book chefs — the ones who went to prestigious culinary schools, came out with a connection that fast-tracked them past the line entirely, straight into the office. They barely cook (unless the owner's watching). They write menus, invent specials, look important in front of customers, and hand down demands that they themselves couldn't execute if you handed them an apron.

Line chefs — the ones who can run circles around anyone on the line, but don't know the first thing about running the business side.

The chef who told me to take my hat off was firmly in the second camp: brilliant on the line, not particularly strong in the office. I've since met plenty of the opposite.

So — Was It Worth It?

Here's my honest answer, two decades later: yes, but not for the reason you'd assume.

I don't think culinary school is required to make it in this industry — I've watched people pull it off with zero formal training. But for me, the combination mattered: the structured training in school, and getting humbled on a real line by a man who didn't sugarcoat anything, taught me two different halves of the same business. School gave me the foundation. That stage gave me the floor — the actual, unglamorous, humid-in-May floor — that no syllabus can simulate.

If you're building a career in food service, get some kind of training, whatever form that takes for you. But don't mistake the classroom for the whole story. The real kitchen is still waiting for you on the other side of that bridge.

This is the first entry in a series where I unpack real lessons from 20+ years in professional kitchens — the stuff nobody puts in the syllabus.