Violence is an old refrain in kitchens. Physical blows, thrown objects and utensils, burns, insults. The close quarters that exacerbate all contact, so that you push one another, knock one another over, so that you cannot stand your neighbor’s elbow—Fuck off!—so that you defend your territory with your body, your square foot of space, so that you fight over machines and utensils. Stories emerge from kitchens: a commis chef who got punched for doing nothing when he was simply waiting for his saucepan to fill with water; another who got a plate in the face because the entrecôte was overdone; a third burned on the forearm by a spoon of boiling water or a red-hot blade because his beurre blanc wasn’t up to standard; and other tales of newbies bullied, humiliated, hazed—I remember that apprentice who started before everyone else, to get ahead of the game, who woke up two hours earlier to arrange his plates, and the chef, furious at this attempt to evade his authority, who swept his forearm across the table, sending everything crashing to the ground. But most violent of all is that this violence is considered by the cooks themselves to be part of the job, an immutable law to which they must submit, an initiation they must simply survive. They talk about it as if it were a venerable tradition, even a form of education. To become a chef, you have to be prepared to get hurt. People who commit to this life are forewarned: they implicitly accept that they will suffer, resist, become hardened, support the idea of a natural selection that will eliminate the frail, the weak, the hesitant, the rebellious.

Obviously, this culture of violence goes hand in hand with a notion of solidarity that exists in kitchens. It’s kind of like a family, Mauro says, without taking his eyes off the Top Chef contestants, who move about in a frenzy on the screen, and who, for now, do not share any brotherly feelings for one another. I smile: Come on, Mauro, not that old family line! I wanted to remind him that not one of his colleagues had batted an eyelid when he quit Le Merveil after getting whacked in the face with that metal utensil, but he insists: I mean it—the chefs often feel responsible for “their youngsters” as they call them; they look after them, they worry about them, and most of the time they’re there for you if anything goes wrong.