Trouble in River City

One thing about Jason, he never bullshits you.

JasonWx wrote

I'm so fried from the daily job of managing people..My fantasy   job is , to sit in cubical and do data entry and not have any human interaction..

I can relate to that. Unless you have the right personality, managing people is a drag. I hated it and as soon as I saw an opportunity I got out of it. I sure hope you can find a way out while you still have youth, energy and health.

PeeTex wrote

JasonWx wrote

I'm so fried from the daily job of managing people..My fantasy   job is , to sit in cubical and do data entry and not have any human interaction..

I can relate to that. Unless you have the right personality, managing people is a drag. I hated it and as soon as I saw an opportunity I got out of it. I sure hope you can find a way out while you still have youth, energy and health.

Thanks ..i'm work on getting out
youth i guess is relative..i'm 57

Mines sit on a lawn mower.

Fuck it. You aren't worth the trouble.

JasonWx wrote

Culinary kids don't want to be cooks they want to be chefs thus they make lousy cooks...

Sounds like my experience with CIA grads remains the same!  Back in the day I did the dishwasher-cook-chef thing.  Worked at a local pizza joint through HS, starting at the bottom and working my way up, and as I graduated college I helped the owner convert his big old house in Carmel/Kent into a higher end Italian restaurant.  In addition to my full time accounting job I worked four nights a week as a chef.  Of course in a small business a chef isn’t just a chef.  He or she does prep, washes pots and pans, cleans the walk-ins when it isn’t busy, works every station in the kitchen, etc., etc., etc.  Unfortunately, CIA grads, who probably want to have their own place some day, don’t seem to learn that.  Most CIA grads didn’t last long where I was, and the one that hung in was really kind of useless, from a practical perspective.  Creative yes, but not willing to do the dirty work it takes.

JTG4eva! wrote

JasonWx wrote

Culinary kids don't want to be cooks they want to be chefs thus they make lousy cooks...

Sounds like my experience with CIA grads remains the same!  Back in the day I did the dishwasher-cook-chef thing.  Worked at a local pizza joint through HS, starting at the bottom and working my way up, and as I graduated college I helped the owner convert his big old house in Carmel/Kent into a higher end Italian restaurant.  In addition to my full time accounting job I worked four nights a week as a chef.  Of course in a small business a chef isn’t just a chef.  He or she does prep, washes pots and pans, cleans the walk-ins when it isn’t busy, works every station in the kitchen, etc., etc., etc.  Unfortunately, CIA grads, who probably want to have their own place some day, don’t seem to learn that.  Most CIA grads didn’t last long where I was, and the one that hung in was really kind of useless, from a practical perspective.  Creative yes, but not willing to do the dirty work it takes.

Pretty insane that some parents pay for that degree or the kids take loans, or both. It's probably 50 grand a year, because it was about 40 the last I checked. Like a friend's wife said to me, actually there, at the CIA at lunch, in the Italian place, "I'm not going to spend 40 thousand dollars a year so she can learn to cook!", referring to when her daughter wanted to go there. I really doubt you'll find many great chefs who paid nearly that. Most never went to college. The French have a brutal apprentice training program that weeds out the weak and uninspired. They cook very well.

Btw, the daughter went to BU, learned finance, moved to Manhattan, got a great job, and married a budding hedge fund dude. She's not doing prep or washing dishes, for sure.

You either love to cook or you do it out of necessity. I would never want to cook in a restaurant, I love cooking as a hobby but not as a profession.

It would be interesting to look at the CIA employment stats, and the track record for successes.  There have been some James Beard award winning chefs, no doubt.  What they learn there is incredible.  However, they don’t learn the whole business, and too many get an elite “chef” air about themselves.  Rather spend the dough on Cornell or Johnson and Whales or someplace and learn the management, how to really run the biz, and not just the cheffing.

Jason,
Where is your shop located?
$20/hr is good for a location like upstate but would suck in NJ or the city.

JasonWx wrote

Thanks ..i'm work on getting out
youth i guess is relative..i'm 57

At 57 you still have some runway but not a lot. You gotta get your wings up pretty soon so you have a good 20 years to sore. I wish you well.

JTG4eva! wrote

It would be interesting to look at the CIA employment stats, and the track record for successes.  There have been some James Beard award winning chefs, no doubt.  What they learn there is incredible.  However, they don’t learn the whole business, and too many get an elite “chef” air about themselves.  Rather spend the dough on Cornell or Johnson and Whales or someplace and learn the management, how to really run the biz, and not just the cheffing.

Oh, hell, no need for a degree to learn that. Never put your own money into a restaraunt, they fail at an alarming rate, and focus on no kitchen work after fifty, if you want to live past 60.

Benny Profane wrote

JTG4eva! wrote

It would be interesting to look at the CIA employment stats, and the track record for successes.  There have been some James Beard award winning chefs, no doubt.  What they learn there is incredible.  However, they don’t learn the whole business, and too many get an elite “chef” air about themselves.  Rather spend the dough on Cornell or Johnson and Whales or someplace and learn the management, how to really run the biz, and not just the cheffing.

Oh, hell, no need for a degree to learn that. Never put your own money into a restaraunt, they fail at an alarming rate, and focus on no kitchen work after fifty, if you want to live past 60.

benny
you said it all

JTG4eva! wrote

It would be interesting to look at the CIA employment stats, and the track record for successes.  There have been some James Beard award winning chefs, no doubt.  What they learn there is incredible.  However, they don’t learn the whole business, and too many get an elite “chef” air about themselves.  Rather spend the dough on Cornell or Johnson and Whales or someplace and learn the management, how to really run the biz, and not just the cheffing.

You are misinformed about the CIA.
https://www.ciachef.edu/cia-academics/
The first 2 years are "cooking" which lead to an associates degree. The CIA offers all kind of options (including Food Business Management, Hospitality, Food Science) for the next 2 years leading to a Bachelor's degree.
https://www.ciachef.edu/cia-bachelors-degree-programs/
This is similar to Johnson and Wales.
The CIA also offer Master's programs

I know a lot of CIA people..They will all tell you it's a bunch of horse hockey...They learn a bunch of cooking techniques that aren't used in the real world. They don't teach what it's like to be on the "line" in 125 deg heat with printer sounding like a german machine gun, and the panic of not have enough mise  en place..(prep) or literately translated things in there place

The restaurant business is unique, it's very hard to teach in the class room..You have to be hands on and be a total masochist

by the way I went to the French Culinary in NYC..

x10003q wrote

You are misinformed about the CIA.

If you say so.  I never had the pleasure of working in a kitchen with someone who had a CIA baccalaureate.  It would be interesting to see the stats on what percentage of CIA students obtain their bachelor’s degree.  Of course, once they transition into the management programs they are probably less likely to want to get their hands dirty than when they were cheffing.  Misinformed as I may be, I still maintain that the CIA has a hard time pushing out chefs who can deal with the rigors and responsibilities that the majority of kitchens are going to throw at you.

JasonWx wrote

I'm so fried from the daily job of managing people..My fantasy   job is , to sit in cubical and do data entry and not have any human interaction..

Same! Comforting to hear this isn't just me. I just can't stomach the pay cut just yet. Getting close, though. 1-2 more years and we'll have all debt cleared except the mortgage and a sizable amount in savings and retirement accounts. At that point, I could take a 50% pay cut and still not have a change of living standard.

PeeTex wrote

Without getting political, I view today’s economy as being in a rebuilding stage after decades of decline. The current conditions are somewhat similar to post WW2, however then there was a shortage of skilled labor and a shortage of highly educated labor. Today the shortage is in unskilled and skilled trades labor and a strong market for educated STEM graduates. This is beginning to drive a shift in power from the employer to the employee. If it continues you will see a return of benefits, retirement plans, and a tightening of the gap between blue collar and white collar jobs as well as a strengthening of unions.

The current economic data doesn't back this up. One issue that is really confounding economists currently is that wages have been and are continuing to be generally stagnate despite the economy and a job market extremely favorable to job seekers and very unfavorable to employers. Lower skilled jobs have seen a small overall increase due to localized minimum wage increases and some large national employers like Walmart increasing their starting minimum wage into the double digits. But that upward pressure on wages has not been felt by the middle class at all and it continues to not happen despite a strong economy. It sure isn't going to happen with the impending recession. I think you have the economy backwards, it is about to decline after being hot for the quite a few years. I see no power shift from employer to employee at all.

riverc0il wrote

 Lower skilled jobs have seen a small overall increase due to localized minimum wage increases and some large national employers like Walmart increasing their starting minimum wage into the double digits. But that upward pressure on wages has not been felt by the middle class at all.

I think you repeated what I stated.

People have been predicting economic disaster since Nov 2016 and just the opposite has happened. I don’t see it, I see lots of volatility as the economy adjusts to the changes but the US economy is very strong.

It's strong until it becomes unhinged, which can sometimes happen dramatically based around singular events that exposed significant underlaying weaknesses.

If we were simply able to "see it", we could play the market without much issue. When you implement a significant tax cut in the latter stages of a bull market youre going to drag on growth but I would suspect we will pay for it in a larger correction than we might have seen (and perhaps in a more dramatic and destructive fashion).

Wage stagnation combined with debt accumulation both personally, publicly, and in the private sector will come back to cripple us again.