Alex Rotherham, of The Bay Tree café, in Bury St Edmunds, looks back at his early career in restaurant kitchens

As music is so critical to my existence, I listen to music when I write. So I thought I should include a recommended song to listen to while reading my column each month.

Being as obsessive as I am, I will curate a song I feel best fits with the tone and tenor of what I am trying to convey. The song I’m recommending with this piece is Everytime the Dog Barks by John Cale.

I’ve been fired. Well, actually I’ve been fired twice. Okay, okay. Hands up here. I guess, technically, you’d have to say that I have been fired a total of three times in my life… so far.

So, for the first time, I was only eight years old and had a paper round delivering the Real Estate Weekly, which as it was just a listing of houses for sale, it was really more of a flyer than a paper.

Many of the houses I was meant to deliver to had signs demanding no flyers and some verbally told me not to deliver to them. I didn’t know what to do about my extra papers, so I just dumped them. Apparently, that was not the correct solution and I was fired for dumping the papers. Fair enough. Lesson learned. Moved on.

The third time, I’m not sure how much I can really speak about, other than to say I was wrongly fired, used as a scapegoat for corporate financial troubles. I will go so far to say that I did look into suing them for wrongful dismissal and they settled out of court. For now, I’ll leave it there. If I get a chance to look into the legal repercussions of telling the story of that one, I may share at a future date.

Now back it up a bit and let’s look at the second time. I worked for a restaurant in North Vancouver; part of what is now the largest restaurant group in Vancouver, possibly Canada – earls Tin Palace. No capital on the ‘e’ and no apostrophe before the ‘s’. That is correct.

If you’ve spent time in Vancouver, you’ve either heard of earls or one of their sister companies: Cactus Club Café or Joey Restaurants. Many of the other chain restaurants try to copy what they do. They are essentially restaurant royalty in Vancouver.

My first proper job was washing dishes for them. Which I studiously did for several months, with a promise of moving up to the cooking line eventually. After six months, I gave up waiting and quit. Got a job dishwashing at a traditional English fish and chip shop. After another six months, I learned about everything there was to do in the kitchen there. At this point, I had a friend who was now a sous chef back at earls and I returned, now as an appie (appetisers) cook.

This time, movement was a lot faster. Over the next three months I worked every cooking station, except for bakery, in the kitchen. By the end of that three months I was running the pass (this is the pivotal position for the entire service line) on days where we would serve more than a thousand customers. Admittedly, at this point, I was way out of my depth; but I was having so much fun and I was getting paid to do it, I really didn’t care.

The friend who got me the job, Kevin was his name, now got let go for reasons I never actually learned. I was pulled aside and had to assure my bosses that it was not going to affect my performance. And it didn’t as, again, I was having fun, and it really did not seem like a job to me in any way. The fact it was an insane party restaurant as well probably added to that feeling.

Often on a Friday or Saturday night, the patriarch of the business, Bus Fuller, would be hanging out in the bar with some friends drinking. In the middle of the dinner rush, he would send a tray of shooters back to the line cooks. We would grab our shots, duck down behind the counter, lights turn off. We’d take our shots. Lights back on and dutifully we return to cooking.

All of this seemed perfectly normal to me, as I had nothing else to compare to. And in reality, some of my later restaurant adventures got a little more reckless and unprofessional than this.

Well, I’m guessing at some point, the company figured out that the party atmosphere was actually not good for business in the long run. So a mass firing came down. All the front of house managers, the head chef and sous chefs all were dismissed, as well as many employees. Somehow, I was one to escape the chopping block this time around. While I did not receive a promotion, myself and one other cook of even less experience than myself were now somehow running this massive beast of a kitchen. I will reiterate here, I was massively out of my depth and with practically no training, didn’t really have a clue to what I was, or should be, doing.

But hey, I now had keys to open and lockup the building. I thought I must be doing something right. Things continued on for a while like this. Was actually a good feeling. On days sometimes, the corporate executive chef, Chuck Currie, would be in there playing with recipes and I got to assist. Some of my core beliefs as a chef developed from him. They had no microwaves in their kitchen, they only had a tiny ice cream freezer.

I can even recall a time we had a dish that was slightly burned and un-servable and I was going to let another member of staff have it as their staff meal. And he lost his temper on me: “If the dish isn’t good enough to serve to a full paying customer, it isn’t good enough to serve to anyone.”

Well, I felt all was ticking along quite nicely now. I was growing stronger and more confident in my role as lead grill cook. I would run the pass, directing the entire line so food times-up and comes to the pass together.

Seemed like things were going the right way for me and then they hired a new head chef and two sous chefs. While, as I was never technically in charge of everything, I wasn’t actually demoted, but it sure as hell felt like I was. Suddenly my hours dropped and I had to hand over the keys to one of the sous chefs. I still did most of what I was doing, but now under direction by others. Fair enough. It made sense, but still did not feel nice.

And as things continued, the head chef typically worked Monday to Friday, nine to five. At that time, I assumed that was normal for a head chef. Though I still haven’t successfully found myself on a rota of that nature, even now as the owner. Maybe I still haven’t figure out how to do the job right! Occasionally, the head chef would hang around to observe us on a Friday night dinner service.

On one such service I was running the pass, yelling orders down the line. Important to note, with all the cooking equipment, refrigeration units, extraction fans and cooks just banging pots and pans around, it gets extremely loud in this type of kitchen. Add to that, this line was over 30 feet long. I had to call orders through this loud chaos, a dozen chefs working away. I was loud – I needed to be for my team to hear me.

The head chef came up to me during service and informed me that I was being too loud, that I need to communicate more quietly.

I challenged him. The importance for the team to hear me clearly necessitated my volume, but it was left with I need to be quieter. So, with my boss right there, I then proceeded to use Chinese whispers (broken telephone) to communicate up and down the cooking line with my staff. I was quite proud of myself at the time for the perfect act of disrespect to my boss. Nothing was ever said to me regarding this episode.

Over the next several weeks, the head chef had gone quiet with me. He stopped trying to coach me and just let me get on with my job. At the time, nothing twigged and I was happy; but now that I’ve been on the other side of this equation many times, it’s as clear as day what was happening.

As I said, I worked the lead grill cook position. There was myself and another trained for the position and you really only needed two people. Also, in theory the two sous chefs and the head chef should all be fully qualified to do this position and train others to do it. I was now tasked with training a new person for this position. At one point through the training, I questioned why we were training another person for this position. I just got a shrug of the shoulders as a reply.

Then, once I had trained him, as I arrived to work the next day, I was invited to a meeting with the head chef and one of the sous chefs. Again, I was totally thick and clueless at this point. I don’t really remember the meeting at all, in trying to recall it, I get the sound of adults speaking in a Peanuts cartoon ‘wah wah wah’. And to be honest, I don’t think any of what was said really mattered.

As I reflect back, I have since fired many employees just like I was then. I don’t regret any of the times that I have been fired, including the one time that it was not justified. I grew from my firings. I became a stronger person out of every one. I think there is way too much dark connotation put on being fired. It just means someone felt we were not in the right place at that time.

I dread every time I’ve had to let someone go and I often give people more of a chance than I should because I don’t want to go through that again. It can truly feel like a sucker punch to the gut. I always try to be as positive as possible and give guidance on a recommended path for the person I have to let go. But, like when I was fired, I imagine all the words out of my mouth probably just sound like ‘wah, wah, wah’, or some variation, to them.

But, from every time I have been fired, I grew. I learned and I moved forward. A few months after I had been fired from earls, the two sous chefs that had been there were working with another restaurant, the Uptown Charlie’s I spoke of last month. They contacted me and asked me to work for them there. So, one door slams and another one opens.

However bad it may feel to be fired, it doesn’t need to be seen as the end of the world. It can lead to opportunities unexpected and while my path has most certainly not followed the one I had imagined as a teenager, it has led me to have a career better and more interesting than I could’ve imagined back then.