When the craft becomes the commodity, and the love starts to slip away.

I know that when I started ten years ago, I looked forward to going to work. I was happy to be there six or seven days a week. But somewhere along the way, passion turned into routine, and routine turned into survival.This isn’t a story about hating kitchens — it’s about trying to find balance again between the love for the craft and the reality of making a living from it.

The View From the Other Side of the Pass

My first proper holiday since before COVID came after a relentless summer with no let-up. I’d already decided a few months earlier that I’d had enough; it was time to leave the industry. This was my first real taste of stepping out of the kitchen and experiencing it from the other side — taking time to enjoy the food I love.

Still, I felt conflicted. Being a chef had been my focus for ten years, and it was sad to think I might have lost the passion I started with.

One afternoon, I went to a food hall for lunch, the kind with open kitchens where you can see the chefs at work. As I placed my order, I saw the burnout I’d been feeling reflected straight back at me — the tired faces, the autopilot movements, the lack of joy. I knew I was just another face among dozens they’d served that day.

But as I waited, I kept watching. Between the exhaustion, there were flashes of laughter and moments of care. When they were plating my dish, I saw it — that look of quiet focus and total immersion. It reminded me of myself.

When I went back to work after my holiday, that moment stayed with me. Even though I was burnt out and ready to leave, I still wanted every plate to be perfect. The plate was still my blank canvas. Over the ten years I’ve been a chef, a lot has changed — my patience, my stamina, my health — but not the instinct to create. What had disappeared wasn’t passion, but the joy that gets lost when creativity becomes commerce.

The Art That Outlasts the Job

I’ve worked in so many kinds of kitchens — cafés, brunch houses, pizza joints, chains, and a few where I created the menu myself. The food couldn’t have been more different between them, but for me, every dish was always an opportunity to create something beautiful and memorable for the diner.

Cooking has always been an art to me, a form of communication between me and the customer. But over the years, that conversation became harder to hear. The plate started getting drowned out by numbers, targets, and the growing demand for fast, cheap food.

The industry demands too much: the heat, the hours, the repetition, the chaos. But what really breaks you is how the business side crushes the art. Faster service, lower costs, more covers — every plate becomes a number, every ingredient a figure on a spreadsheet. There’s no time left for care or creativity, only survival.

When Passion Becomes Product

That’s when you start to feel like you’re mass-producing emotion — trying to make something heartfelt inside a system that treats it like a product. You still care, but there’s no room left for the care it takes.

What makes it worse is when both the customers and the bosses start to see you as a machine that can just keep going. Gratitude fades, replaced by expectation or disappointment. You bend over backwards to meet every request, and still, someone complains.

And half the time, it isn’t even your fault. You’re short-staffed, low on ingredients that weren’t ordered, or working with broken equipment. Yet you’re still expected to perform. You end up letting down customers who have no idea what’s happening behind the pass. It all feels like everything is working against you creating the kind of food you actually care about.

Finding Small Escapes

Even so, it’s the little things that can save you, the same way the little things can break you. A nice comment from a customer. A laugh with a colleague. A dish that turns out exactly how you imagined it.

They don’t fix the wider problem, but they remind you why you started. They’re the flashes where you feel the art again — the small proof that what you do still connects and still matters.

And always, no matter how tired you are or how few resources you have, there’s that final plate: your one chance to make something beautiful. That’s when it hits you — it was never the job you loved, it was the craft. Maybe to truly enjoy it again, you have to separate it from survival, to let cooking exist as something that brings joy instead of pressure.

Protecting the Chef, Not the Career

What finally gave me peace was realising that by leaving, I wasn’t losing the chef in me. I was saving it. The decision to walk away was what allowed me to keep that part of myself alive.

When I listed the reasons I became a chef, I realised everything I loved was still possible if I cooked for myself, friends, and family. The passion for creativity had been lost because everything had to fit into what the customer wanted and within a set budget. At home, I was both chef and customer. When you take away the financial transaction, people become more grateful. There’s no unrealistic expectation — just appreciation.

I’d reached a point where being a chef felt like all I was, the only thing that gave me value. But work is work; it isn’t life. I used to look down on people who worked just for money, thinking they lacked passion. Now I see they might have it figured out. When there’s no pressure or price tag, you can really enjoy your passion again.

Redefining What it Means to be a Chef

I can’t fully conclude this because it’s still an open story. I know I’ll miss the work, and I can’t say I’ll never want to come back. But if I ever do, it won’t be to what the industry is now. It would have to be something different, something smaller — a side project, maybe, something that doesn’t have to carry the weight of survival.

Out of every ten chefs I talk to over thirty, maybe one is happy with their work, or at least content with the hours and pay. Even fewer hold onto that deep passion they started with. I think it’s a young person’s game, and I’m not sure it’s possible for most chefs to avoid burnout forever. I see so many under-20s desperate to break into fine dining, saying they want to be the best, and it makes me a little sad, because they’re already stepping into a mindset that will later break them.

I started cooking because I wanted to make people happy with food. I don’t feel the industry can offer me that anymore, but I know I can still do it in other ways.

That’s why the plate still matters.Because it’s more than a product; it’s the last honest thing left in an industry that often forgets what honesty looks like.

Even when the heat and the hours broke me, the love didn’t.And maybe stepping away isn’t about giving up the title of chef. Maybe it’s about giving the chef a chance to survive, to create, to care, and to love food again.