After years of 90-hour work weeks and non-stop partying, a cancer diagnosis and the death of his brother, chef Joel Brown of Gusto 54 Catering has left the rock ’n roll kitchen culture for sobriety and a slower pace — and he says he’s not the only chef making the change.

The restaurant industry used to be known for its “Kitchen Confidential” lifestyle, he says, referring to the 2000 book by Anthony Bourdain that detailed the hard-partying “underbelly” of kitchen culture.

“I think for a lot of younger cooks that lifestyle is cool, it’s badass, it’s punk,” says Brown, 32, chef de cuisine at Gusto.

But the culture is changing in kitchens as “cool,” he says, no longer seems to be about who can undertake the longest bender.

“Every chef I know seems to be running a marathon,” he says.

He says getting messed up seemed cool in the same way that Humphrey Bogart smoking was cool, but when “you look at how precious your life is, it’s not very cool at all.”

It’s a lesson that took him more than a decade to learn.

Brown says his first drink came at age 15 or 16, when someone tossed him a beer after his dishwashing shift.

“After that, I saw the underbelly of the kitchen world,” he says.

A stint at Montreal’s Shed Cafe under a “pretty hardcore party chef” hooked Brown on cooking and the atmosphere that came with it.

He soon travelled to the famed Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris. There, students focused on “revelling and celebrating that rock ’n roll lifestyle that, at the time, we thought Bourdain was celebrating — but I think he was just trying to expose the darker side,” Brown says.

Post-graduation, in 2009, Brown worked at the Healthy Butcher in Toronto before moving on two years later to work in the city’s restaurant scene, including a stint at Parkdale’s Parts and Labour under now-sober chef Matty Matheson, who has spoken out about his own hard-partying past, that included having a heart attack at age 29.

“Pretty much after every shift you had this adrenalin coursing through your veins, you’d be all amped up,” Brown says of his time working with Matheson. It was easy to justify “blowing off some steam.”

Brown soon found himself going out almost every night, blowing most of his paycheque on drugs, cigarettes and booze.

“It was expected,” he says. “It was just the thing that cooks do.”

Brown didn’t think he had a problem, but at age 28 he was exhausted. He needed a break, so he took a job in forestry out west. Shortly after, Brown says he started to feel a little sick.

In 2014, he noticed the lump near his groin area, and another in his arm pit. It would turn out to be Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“Before I knew it, six weeks later I was at Princess Margaret (cancer centre) doing my first round of chemo,” he says. “That was a pretty big wakeup-call for me.”

Though Brown went back to kitchen work during his six months of chemotherapy in Toronto, he didn’t drink.

“That was the longest stretch of sobriety I’d ever had since the age of 15,” he says.

After his cancer went into remission, Brown says he started to feel “invincible.” He was soon back to his old habits of drinking, smoking and partying — and within a year he found himself in the same spot: exhausted, hungover and angry.

The final straw came on May 4, 2016. Brown says he was on the streetcar, deathly hungover and everyone around him was making stupid “May the 4th be with you” jokes.

“I had this episode of like, extreme anger,” Brown says.

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“I got off the streetcar and I threw up in broad daylight,” he says. “I was like, this isn’t the person I was supposed to be.”

From there, he went cold turkey — “It sucked.”

Luckily, Brown had an open invitation from an aunt and uncle with a bird sanctuary in Yellowknife. He soon found himself sleeping in a Winnebago on their driveway.

“Well, sleep is a stretch,” he said, as it turned out getting some shut-eye is difficult when going through withdrawal. It’s even harder in the Land of the Midnight Sun, next to flocks of screaming birds. The entire situation was a “cruel joke,” Brown says.

What helped him was talking on the phone to his younger brother, Elliot — his “best friend” — who had gone through rehab earlier that year. Eventually sleep did come, and with it, his senses.

“I started to notice that I was feeling again — and feeling things super intensely,” he says. “It was like a connection to my emotional state on a level that I don’t think the average person ever has to experience.”

At the end of summer, Brown returned to Toronto but continued to call his brother every week, so as to be a “support network for each other.”

But one week, his aunt called instead. His brother had died from a fentanyl overdose.

Elliot’s death was a major test of his sobriety, Brown says. But he says going back to drinking would have felt like “an insult to him, his memory.”

So he stuck with it. Now, Brown says most of his kitchen is sober — and it’s hard to miss the alternative.

“The energy here is great,” he says. “People are happy to come to work.”

For someone struggling with substance abuse who’s thinking about quitting, Brown says his advice would be to find a good friend to talk to about it — ideally, someone who’s gone through it before.

No one’s going to think you’re lame for getting your life together, he says.

“There’s people that really give a s--- about you, and really care about you, and want you to live, and want you to be a part of their life.”