Life Lessons I Learned from Being a Line Cook

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Ari shares:

Forty-six years ago, right about this time of year, my friend Frank Carollo began training me to cook the line at a local Ann Arbor restaurant. It was the next step forward for me after starting in the spring as a dishwasher and then moving up a few months later to prepping. I knew next to nothing about cooking, and I’d certainly not read a single book about business.

That was then, this is now. What I started learning all those years ago about cooking the line has evolved into what the world now knows at the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses. Over the course of all these years, what I’ve learned from line cooking has had an outsized impact on what we do. Quite simply, without line-cooking, there would be no ZCoB.

Compared to the large volumes (like, say, the 600-page The Power of Beliefs in Business) I’ve also written, the chapbook is a concentrated, in an espresso shot sort of way, effort to share my many decades of experience and learning in a way that will, I hope, be of help to others. Its 5-by-4-inch format and 52 pages share 18 life lessons gleaned from the work that began in the fall of 1978 as a short-term solution to pay my rent and help me not have to return home to Chicago. What began with learning how to flip burgers turned, slowly but surely, into a life philosophy.

“Life Lessons I Learned from Being a Line Cook” highlights many subtle yet powerful insights that I hadn’t considered before. For example, the idea of making history come alive through preparing traditional dishes with traditional ingredients, and the emotional experience of dealing with a menu change or the ebb and flow of seasonal ingredients is something I hadn’t fully reflected on until now. This chapbook could completely transform a line cook’s mindset, encouraging a shift in perspective and greater self-awareness. I want to give it to everyone I know who has worked on the line.

—Chef Ana Sortun, Co-owner of Oleana, Sofra bakery & Sarma