I met Sean Burton when I got hired at the Brickhouse in 2016. My first impression was that he was a hot-shot cook, but humble about it. He was always willing to help me out... and he hid his agitation towards my lack of culinary knowledge and my constant, “what goes in this again?” or “what’s the right temperature on a salmon, and follow up... is this salmon?”

I never once pegged him as an addict. He probably didn’t peg me as one either. It half blew my mind when he told me he used to snort blow everyday.

“Fuckin’ serious, man?”

Many don’t fully understand the lifestyle that often haunts the line-cook. Many don’t fall into this category and never will. But for a lot of us, after a service of getting cut, burned, and yelled at for five hours straight the after service beer or joint is the best part of the day.

Being overworked, underpaid and appreciated, and trying to maintain a social life can be a challenge in any job but it’s amplified in kitchens.

“Personally, working in a kitchen, the full-time work week is longer than other jobs comparatively,” says Burton, Sous Chef at the Dining Room at the Culinary Institute of Canada. “Summer on P.E.I. for example, you work 50, 60, 70 hours a week at a fully staffed place so your personal life suffers. You don’t have time to do your hobbies, your loved ones tend to...I mean, neglected sounds really bad, but, in a way you do neglect those relationships. It’s easy to neglect your personal health.”

Like many other cooks, Burton found ways of dealing with the fast-paced, high-intensity job with vices. Wonderful, sweet, sweet vices.

“For me, stimulants were my thing, so I pretty much gave up weed immediately. It wasn’t like in that moment all of a sudden I was a coke-head, it took a couple of years of being that weekend warrior so-to-speak. Once a week, once every couple of weeks. It was always on days off. I always made sure that I didn’t have anything to do. And it snuck up on me,” he says.

“After two-and-a-half years of gradually being like, ‘I can do it Friday and Saturday this week,’ to ‘oh, I don’t have to work until 2pm the next day, I can do it tonight,’ to all of a sudden I became reliant on it; I needed it to function,” he says. Working 50 hours a week, going out after service, partying til the sun comes up, sleeping for three hours and getting up to do it all again is something that’s considered normal in a lot of kitchens. It’s like the musician finishing a gig and going back to the hotel or another bar to unwind and release what they were holding in all fucking night while the audience, or patrons in this case, got to party for hours. You have to squeeze that release into a couple hours then face the day. Again.

Sadly, it is often the case that people show up for work hungover or still fucked up and then go out after work, not necessarily because of the job but because it makes them feel better about where they’re at in life. Maybe cooking isn’t a job of passion but one of necessity-- they’ve done it for so long, they just get stuck there. So, they celebrate a service gone right, and they bury a bad one.