Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. - Anthony Bourdain

So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something-be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here.

if you’re going to a country, particularly in Southeast Asia, [where] you’ve never been before, it’s a very good idea to go to the market first, see what they’re selling, get an idea of what they’re good at, what the people are buying.

Male, female, gay, straight, legal, illegal, country of origin — who cares? You can either cook an omelet or you can’t. You can either cook five hundred omelets in three hours — like you said you could, and like the job requires — or you can’t. There’s no lying in the kitchen. The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy — where anybody with the skills and the heart is welcomed. But if you’re old, or out of shape — or were never really certain about your chosen path in the first place — then you will surely and quickly be removed. Like a large organism’s natural antibodies fighting off an invading strain of bacteria, the life will slowly push you out or kill you off. Thus it is. Thus it shall always be. The ideal progression for a nascent culinary career would be to, first, take a jump straight into the deep end of the pool. Long before student loans and culinary school, take the trouble to find out who you are.