In a collapsing star, the forces of gravity crash together with unimaginable heat and pressure to create a black hole. These dark ferocious conditions are so hot and pressured that light cannot escape, and time itself is warped. Nothing can enter and leave out the other side without being changed by these forces.

You will find the same principle in a professional kitchen.

The heat and pressure created in the process of cooking restaurant food is enough to alter the passage of time. Speeding it up in some places whilst slowing it down in others.

Time affects things faster in kitchens: pans, ovens, chefs. Ageing and knackering them before they’re due. There is not a single round saucepan where I work. Like iron snow flakes, each one is battered into an infinite variation of facets with no two alike. They are fused with a black tar that could only have been formed at the creation of the universe yet somehow is a by-product of cooking.

In months they acquire the kind of non-stick layer that most home cooks would never achieve in a lifetime. A thick lacquer of burnished carbon that food slips straight off of. Forged in the crucible of endless, endless heating, oiling, washing, heating, oiling, washing.

Chefs age almost as quickly. Two years in a kitchen seems like five. The onslaught of heat and stress thickens skin to a hide. Their hands, arms and face harden like a bulls flank. Many will have entered the kitchen in their late teens as a source of quick cash only to find themselves a few months later in their mid-forties.

At home people do maybe one shop a week. A large bag of salad for example, would be eaten gradually throughout the week and stay fresh. As edible on Monday as it would be on Sunday.
Not in a restaurant. Food is bought almost everyday, in vast quantities that vanish immediately. Cases of vegetables, litres of milk, boxes of butter, trays of tins. Schlepped in, shovelled out and shat, so fast that if you come back after a day off, like the shifting dunes of a desert, the store room is unrecognisable.

Food moves fast with good reason as bacterial life ages faster as well. Things start to rot almost before the end of a shift. In your bread bin at home a loaf will hopefully keep a week before the end piece speckles with mould. In restaurants food yellows before your eyes like old photographs. With your back turned an endless wave of bacteria will swarm and fur over anything left out.

Amidst this furious pace however, waking life slows to a limp. The time between the start of a shift and the end can be counted in years. Working a shift on a bad day feels as if you’re sitting in a locked sauna. They say a watched pot never boils and in a kitchen a watched clock never tocks. Even if all the pans are boiling, with your toes dipped in the bubbles.

The only constant beat, the metronome to which all else is measured is the rhythm of the beginning and the end of the days. Open up, set up, clean up, lock up. Open up, set up, clean up, lock up. Between these markers time rushes and drags like a car racing traffic lights. Working each day towards no greater goal than for everything to be ready for the next day. And the next.