For a Chef, 41 Years in the Kitchen Takes Its Toll By KAREN STABINER Published: August 24, 2013 STARTING as a dishwasher at the age of 17, the chef Mark Peel worked his way up at some of the great California restaurants: Ma Maison, Michael’s, Chez Panisse, Spago, Chinois and, finally, for more than two decades, Campanile, his own place in Los Angeles. Those 41 years in the kitchen have brought him considerable fame: Campanile won the James Beard award as outstanding restaurant in the United States in 2001. They have also brought him carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and thoracic outlet syndrome in his shoulders, resulting from repetitive stirring, fine knife movements and heavy lifting. He has a bone spur on one foot and a cyst between toes of the other from constantly standing. He has had three hernia operations and lives with a chronically sore back. Being a professional chef, like being an elite athlete, tends to be a young person’s game. When he started out, Mr. Peel thought nothing of shifting a 125-pound stockpot full of hot, sloshing liquid from one burner to the next without calling for help, his arms stretched away from his body, muscles tight to control the motion. It was a recipe for trouble down the line. The 16-hour days he once put in at Spago — seven days a week for seven weeks in a row — are no longer an option for Mr. Peel, who is now 58. He straightens a sore shoulder at the memory of those days. He can still work like that, he says — “just not as often, and not as long.” Today, he says, he can survive perhaps three days of crazy hours, as long as Day 4 includes sleeping in, to recover. In September, Mr. Peel will open a new Campanile at Los Angeles International Airport. He closed the 190-seat original last fall after 23 years, 16 of them alongside the chef Nancy Silverton, then his wife, and seven more years on his own. His career track record going into the new project is excellent; his body, the worse for wear. The new, smaller Campanile will open at the American Airlines terminal, in a licensing agreement with Host International. Mr. Peel will “train, taste, advise, direct and organize,” while younger chefs execute the dishes he creates. “At some point, the mind is willing but the body rebels,” Mr. Peel says. “Most chefs over 50 are no longer cooking daily.” Mr. Peel came of age during an explosion of interest in dining out, and his workload expanded to keep pace. Many in the next generation of young chefs have seen the physical toll on their elders, and they are planning accordingly. “There’s an arc,” says the chef Jonah Miller, 26, whose awareness of his “shelf life as an active cook” informed his decision to open his own restaurant sooner rather than later. That establishment, Huertas, a Northern Spanish restaurant, will open this winter in Brooklyn. It is a nod in equal parts to Mr. Miller’s youthful ambition — he first volunteered in a kitchen when he was 13 — and the “need to plan for the time when I’m not physically able to work the line, which for most cooks comes in their late 30s.” “It’s a pretty hard-and-fast rule,” he says, that chefs eventually step away from the action; he aspires to the natural progression from cook to chef to “purely a coach and a mentor.” Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, agrees that cooks can age quickly. “Every time I find myself eating in an exciting restaurant, the chef is 28 years old,” he says. A chef’s early years are arduous, devoted to working the line — cooking some portion of what lands on the plate, shift after shift. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, where high rents and demanding diners require a chef to “maximize every minute of the day,” according to Mr. Davis, it is even harder. “Cooking on the line is a sport,” says Mr. Miller, who played basketball and baseball in high school. “It’s regimented and it’s continuous. You’re always pushing, just like an athlete: the highest quality you can manage in a specific time frame, doing it again and again.” Chefs are more likely to sustain injuries than the average American worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sprains, strains and tears are the most common complaints, followed by cuts, lacerations and punctures; burns; and fractures, says Martin Kohli, chief regional economist for the bureau. Musculoskeletal injuries like Mr. Peel’s carpal tunnel syndrome are also common. When asked to name chefs who have persevered in the kitchen past their youth despite the physical toll, Mr. Peel, Mr. Miller and Mr. Davis all hesitate for a long moment. Mr. Davis comes up with the New York-based Daniel Boulud and David Bouley, who have reputations for being active in the kitchen longer than their peers. But each example is served with a side order of disclaimer; they are the exceptions who prove the rule. THESE days, Mr. Peel works in a lower gear — he prefers advance work to the frantic pace of dinner service. “I love butchering, meat, fish, poultry, everything; I like the precision,” he says. “And I really enjoy sauce making, which requires a specific texture and flavor and density.” Whatever he does, he factors in time for setup and recovery. He made it to his early 40s with only minor discomfort, but 15 years ago a back spasm laid him flat on Campanile’s kitchen floor between courses at a charity event. Since then, he has consulted a chiropractor and a physical therapist. He says he also stretches, thoroughly and religiously, the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. The end-of-day stretch is a burden when he’d rather collapse, but he knows the consequences of skipping it. “There are days, if you don’t do it, where you have to ask the next morning, ‘Do I really need to wear socks today?’ Because it’s going to be hard to put them on.” Mr. Peel depends on his stretches and the occasional recovery day to keep his aches and pains at bay. He doesn’t take the time to visit doctors for his chronic conditions — though rather than tempt fate, he does pay for his own health insurance, having lost his group coverage when Campanile closed. Mr. Peel’s personal life has been affected by his long hours, and he has made a concerted effort to change, though the demands of the job continue to intrude. He feels that his marriage to his first wife suffered, along with his relationship with their three children. In the years since, in conversations with those now-grown children, he says, “I have alluded to being sorry I wasn’t always around.” He is now married to the comedian and blogger Daphne Brogdon, whom he met when she came to Campanile for a drink after a stand-up routine. Ms. Brogdon doesn’t have a 9-to-5 work schedule, so “we have some days together,” Mr. Peel says, as well as more time with their 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. “I try to be home two nights a week, try not to miss special school things, family.” It works some of the time. “I really tried to be different this time,” he says, “but it’s hard to hold to a ‘this is sacrosanct’ schedule when somebody doesn’t show up for work.” Chef Jonathan Waxman of Barbuto in New York, who was once Mr. Peel’s colleague at Michael’s, was recently nicknamed “Chef Obi-Wan” for his preternatural calm on Season 2 of the Bravo television series “Top Chef Masters.” At 63, he, too, has figured out a way to slow down without dropping out. “I let the kids do the hard work,” he says. “Working the line from 6 to 12 no longer interests me, but being in the kitchen during prime time does. The best analogy is the symphony. I’m the conductor. I don’t have to carry the trombone anymore.” “I raise a lot of money for charity,” he says. “I mentor people and talk about the philosophy of food. I’m a bit of a cheerleader and a professor.” RONALD HAYES, associate director of career services at the Culinary Institute of America and the author of “Creating Your Culinary Career,” says demographic trends have opened new career opportunities for midlife chefs who want a slower pace, as aging food lovers seek out new living arrangements where they can eat well but don’t have to cook. “As baby boomers age, people are expecting and paying for resortlike accommodations,” says Mr. Hayes, referring to luxury senior communities where residents expect something better than bland institutional meals. “People with a high level of restaurant experience are golden for that kind of position, with better money and better hours.” Large markets like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s offer another option for cooks further down the kitchen hierarchy, according to Mr. Hayes: the chance to prepare restaurant-quality take-home meals without facing a tsunami of 8:30 reservations. But chefs like Mr. Peel and Mr. Waxman stay put, redefined, because the restaurant kitchen is where they’re happy. Mr. Peel has downsized into a more manageable environment to satisfy both his desire to keep cooking and the exacting standards that propelled him to the top. Working at the original 190-seat Campanile could be exhausting; the new one at the airport is 75 seats, and Mr. Peel will leave the daily mealtime hustle to others. In March, when the owner of the 3Twenty Wine Lounge, a 12-table establishment in Los Angeles offered Mr. Peel a month of Thursdays to reprise the famous grilled-cheese night from the old Campanile, it was a nice way to keep his skills sharp. The volume was lower, but not the quality. Ten seconds after one of his sandwiches hit the plate, he would bark “Pick up,” to make sure that the server got it to the customer while it was hot. “It’s an adrenaline high,” he said. “There’s nothing more exciting.” Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here. You may also follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes/booming. Our e-mail is booming@nytimes.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 05:55:44 +0000