Feeding the Soul

Long before he was the host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, long before he was an award-winning food writer and critic, even before he earned national fame for his cooking in a celebrated Minneapolis restaurant, Andrew Zimmern was, in his own words, “a mess.”

He was 13 when his divorced mother was incapacitated by brain damage. He had no idea how to cope—no support system and no idea how to find one. All he knew was that he did not want to feel the way he was feeling, and he knew what would make him not feel that way. By the time he graduated from a fancy private high school in his native New York City, he was snorting heroin. In college, he was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.

He’d always been interested in restaurants, and he helped to open and run a dozen of them. But even while his star was rising, nothing or no one was more important to him than his next high. Evicted from his apartment, he squatted in empty buildings for a year, stealing cans of Comet he dusted around his pile of clothes to keep the rats away.

“The kitchen was a great place to hide,” says Zimmern, because all his bosses cared about was that he was “the guy who could put out 200 egg dishes at brunch in an hour and fifteen minutes.” And do it with flair.

Such was kitchen culture until relatively recently. “Workers were expected to suck it up and leave their problems at home,” explains Einav Gefen, executive corporate chef at Unilever.

That culture has its upside: It’s a pure meritocracy, Zimmern maintains. Eighty percent of restaurant owners and 90 percent of restaurant managers started out in entry-level positions, the National Restaurant Association reports. Restaurants employ more women and minorities in managerial positions than any other industry.

Because what counts is performance, restaurants are a vital pathway to success for immigrants, felons—restaurants are the single biggest employer of former prisoners—and anyone who needs a second chance. Of course, that very same feature can make working in restaurants stressful on a day-to-day basis.

The heat is always on. Close to 80 percent of employees leave the food services industry within two years. Almost three quarters of chefs report they are sleep-deprived to the point of exhaustion. More than half say they feel “pushed to the breaking point,” the advocacy initiative Fair Kitchens reports.

The U.S. food services industry has the highest rate of substance abuse, the second highest rate of suicide ideation, and the 10th highest rate of completed suicide, according to the 2019 Restaurant Industry Factshoot. Suicide has shadowed the industry at least as far back as the 1600s, when François Vatel, a chef in the court of Louis XIV, put a sword through his chest after the fish delivery for a banquet was delayed.

“Chefs die all the time, and no one talks about it,” says food writer Kat Kinsman, who knew three chefs who took their lives in February 2016 alone. That was the year she founded Chefs With Issues, a website devoted to “the care and feeding of the people who feed us.”

The restaurant business, she insists, takes a toll on life, personhood, and soul because it “calls for the exclusion of everything else in the world. The exact things that make a good beast in the kitchen—drive, focus, obsession, demanding exactness, directness, utter intolerance for imperfection—make a mess of a human being outside of it.”

Then, in June 2018, came the death by suicide of chef/author/culinary explorer and food-person-writ-large Anthony Bourdain. It followed by just 18 months the gunshot suicide of “world’s best chef” Benoît Violier in Switzerland. The two deaths caught the attention of many, within the industry and without.

Unilever, one of the world’s largest food companies, in collaboration with other businesses, introduced the Fair Kitchens initiative to address “the serious well-being issue” in professional kitchens. “A positive kitchen culture will make for a healthier business,” according to its website, because staff will be stable and the team happy and productive. So far, more than 2,000 chefs have signed on to a code that values time for recharging, freedom to speak up about mental health problems, and the courage to ask for help.

After more than 13 years as an active addict—13 years after he was first told he needed professional help—Zimmern found himself at Minnesota’s Hazelden Foundation for treatment of addiction. When he emerged, in 1992, he essentially started life over, signing on as a dishwasher at Café Un Deux Trois in Minneapolis.

Not long after, the day came when a line cook failed to show up. Zimmern stepped in and got the chance to take over the station. Seven weeks later, he was executive chef.

He maintains sobriety and preserves an optimistic outlook with a deliberately crafted “design for living” that involves such practices, habits, and values as regularly attending 12-step meetings, asking for help when he feels he needs it—which he now regards “not as a sign of weakness but of strength”— daily meditation, mentoring others in the recovery community, and prioritizing kindness. “I can list 100 things,” he says, “but if you told me that I could carry only two of my tools onto the island, I would take service and gratitude.”

After years of living “completely based on an inflated sense of self,” he finds service work—doing things for others—the only antidote to the feelings that give rise to the cravings of addiction. “Once you take away the chemicals, you can find gratitude even in the worst and saddest events in your life.”

Gratitude is the operative word for Jen Hidinger-Kendrick. She and her chef husband, Ryan Hidinger, started a supper club, Prelude to Staplehouse, in their home in Atlanta. It was a first step toward the restaurant they dreamed of opening. In 2012, four years in, Hidinger was diagnosed with stage-four gallbladder cancer. A month later, a fundraiser spearheaded by area restaurants and other businesses raised more money than the couple needed to cover the expenses insurance didn’t.

Moved by the outpouring of aid, the two set up Giving Kitchen, a nonprofit that provides emergency financial assistance to food-service workers in Georgia whose lives are affected by illness, injury, or disaster. Its Stability Network offers suicide prevention training and referrals to mental health resources to employees nationwide. Private donors and Atlanta restaurateurs support the organization. So far, it has helped over 3,000 food service workers in crisis.

Although Hidinger got to launch Giving Kitchen before he died, his culinary dream became reality only after his death, through a partnership involving his wife, sister, and brother-in-law. Staplehouse is now a thriving Atlanta restaurant whose profits support Giving Kitchen.

Restaurants, says Zimmern, now a four-time James Beard Award–winning TV personality, are among the country’s most important first responders. “Whenever there’s a problem, the first call goes out to restaurants. Every charity event, every fundraiser, every natural disaster, people turn to restaurants first.”

Restaurant people, he explains, are givers. “They instinctively take care of people. But it takes a toll. Until recently, they were forgetting to take care of themselves. Now the restaurant business is developing a culture of care and reminding all of us to put on our own oxygen masks first.”

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