Let me be straight with you. I've said "this generation is softer" more times than I can count. Under my breath while watching a cook scroll their phone between orders. Out loud at 2am with another chef who's been doing this as long as I have. Even — and I'm not proud of this — to a commis who cried after getting yelled at during a rough Saturday service.
I said it like it was a fact.
Like it was their problem.
Like I had nothing to do with it.
So let's actually talk about this. Because I think most of us are arguing about the symptom and ignoring the infection.
Photo by: 罗 平
The kitchen didn't change. The world did.
The food service industry has always been brutal. That's not a secret and it's not a complaint — it's just the job. But the people walking through our back doors right now? They're coming from a world that looks nothing like the one we trained in.
These kids grew up through COVID, a housing crisis, a climate disaster that gets worse every year, and an information overload that would give anyone a panic attack. They watched white-collar jobs disappear to algorithms. They chose the kitchen — a lot of them deliberately, eyes wide open — because they wanted something real. Something physical. Something that matters when the shift ends.
And then they walked into our kitchens.
And we wondered why they flinched when we screamed.
The hospitality industry already has the highest quit rate of any sector — nearly 5% of workers walk out every single month. Two in three kitchens are understaffed right now. And we're standing there calling the new generation weak while they're the only ones still showing up.
Think about that for a second.
The "watch and learn, don't ask questions" model is broken.
Here's what actually happens in most professional kitchens when a new cook arrives:
They get handed a knife and a station.
They get yelled at for doing it wrong.
They're expected to absorb the right way through osmosis, observation, and fear.
That was our training. It worked — for whoever survived it. But surviving something isn't the same as it being good. We just never had the space to say that out loud. Because the person who trained us did it the same way. And the person before them. And so on, all the way back to some miserable brigade in a French kitchen where the chef threw plates and everyone called it passion.
Gen Z walks in and says "I need clear milestones and structured feedback to develop properly" and we laugh at them. But you know what? They're not wrong. They just said the quiet part out loud — the part that every junior cook before them also needed and never got.
We called resilience what was actually just silence.
Photo by: Jason Jarrach
But here's where it gets uncomfortable.
Because yes — some of them are soft. I'll stand on that.
Some of them genuinely cannot handle a double on a Friday without an existential crisis. Some of them will ghost you after one rough service. Some of them think working four days a week entitles them to a head chef conversation after six months.
That's real. I'm not pretending it isn't.
But here's the question we never ask: where did that come from?
Because these kids didn't raise themselves. They came from a world where every participation got a trophy, where discomfort was treated as damage, where the algorithm rewarded them for performing confidence rather than building it. And then they arrive in our kitchens — one of the last places left where reality is non-negotiable — and we're surprised it's a shock to their system.
We didn't build the world they grew up in.
But we are responsible for the kitchen they walk into.
And a lot of us are running kitchens that are hard for no reason. Not hard because the standards are high — hard because we never learned another way. Hard because the chef who trained us was a bastard and we figured if we made it, they will too.
That logic ended careers before it started them.
What actually works — and what doesn't.
The chefs I respect most right now aren't the ones running the softest kitchens. They're not handing out gold stars for showing up on time or having weekly feelings check-ins before service.
They're running tight, demanding, high-standard kitchens — and their retention is good. Their cooks stay. Their cooks grow. Their cooks don't quit after three months and leave a review online about toxic culture.
The difference isn't that they lowered the bar.
The difference is that they made the bar visible.
They told their team: this is what I expect, this is how I'm going to tell you when you're not meeting it, and this is what it looks like when you're actually getting somewhere. That's it. That's the whole thing.
You don't need to become a therapist. You don't need to soften the industry. You need to stop assuming that people can read your mind, absorb your standards through proximity, and toughen up simply because you did.
You toughened up because you had no choice.
Give them a choice — and watch who stays anyway.
Those are your people.
Photo by: Vitaly Gariev
So is this generation weaker?
Honestly? In some ways, yes.
But we built the kitchen culture that made weakness the only option — where asking a question was embarrassing, where struggling meant you were a liability, where emotions were something you left at the back door or you weren't cut out for this.
We selected for people who could survive us.
Not people who could actually cook.
There's a difference. And it cost us — in talent, in turnover, in the kind of kitchens a lot of us still don't want to admit we were running.
This generation is weaker in some ways.
We made it harder for them to be strong.
Both things are true.
And the sooner we sit with that, the better our kitchens get.
