When The Bear came out a couple of years ago, I heard about it immediately from friends in the food world. “I bet you and your husband would love this show,” people wrote me, with some variations in the words and always the same theme. “This show seems made for you and Dan.”
Nope. Not in the summer of 2022.
That was the worst summer of our lives together.
Dan had been depressed for four years at that point. We were in year two of him spending almost all of his day sitting on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, staring at his phone in his hands in front of him.
He hadn’t been fully present to me, to our kids — and especially to himself — since December of 2018 when his childhood friend died by suicide. This friend had nudged Dan in high school to start thinking about making a career in food.
Dan started working as a dishwasher in a pizza place at the age of 14. This was his consequence for prank ordering a bunch of pizzas for a girl without paying.
He worked off what he owed the owner and never left.
Dan has told me, many times, how working in restaurants made him feel like he’d found a home. See, my lovely husband has always been quiet, a man of few words. Dan is deeply sensitive. He notices everything — including small sounds, the disapproval on people’s faces, the taste and smell of every object around him, and the colors of anything he sees. He didn’t quite fit in with the kids and the people around him. He grew up in a small town, so he was known. But still, Dan didn’t quite understand all the social cues. He felt a little alone with what was in his head, since no one else quite seemed to understand him.
Aside from the friend who died in 2018. That friend really got him.
That’s part of the reason Dan began drinking at 14.
As an older teenager, Dan worked at a kind of saloon-diner-fried food place that the locals of his town adored. Dan remembers the manager admonishing the staff at a meeting: “Look, we’ve really got to cut down on the cocaine use.” That was an eye-opener for a shy 15-year-old boy. That made him a little hesitant about working in restaurants.
It was the camaraderie with the cooks that made him want to be there. “Even when I was bussing tables, I was always in the kitchen, talking with the cooks. I was living off their energy.” He loved the fast pace, the sound of the tickets printing, the fire, the flames, the knife sounds chopping against the boards. The commotion. This all worked for his ADHD brain.
He didn’t know he had ADHD back then. He just knew that the constant quickness and needing to be ready NOW and the energy and excitement of a restaurant kitchen turned him on.
Working in a restaurant kitchen was a lot better than going to high school.
And so, thanks to the friend who went to the New England Culinary Institute before him, Dan took off for cooking school and never looked back.
From restaurant to restaurant, he chased that thrill.
And yet, another part of his brain was always on edge, worried that he wasn’t doing it right. “I had eyes in the back of my head, looking for the Chef, trying to figure out where they were in the kitchen. I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want to get into trouble and start all over.”
Starting at 14, until I met him, Dan spent hours every day in fear, worried he wasn’t good enough. Always, always, scared he wasn’t good enough.
That’s in large part because of the culture of restaurants.
Jump to the year 1998. Dan has been named sous chef of Papillon Café, a high-end, fine dining restaurant in Denver. Some days, Dan came to work an hour early, just to make sure he was set up to make lamb shanks confit, to make sure the shanks were cooked properly. He was dedicated to his work.
Dan was also nervous. The executive chef at Papillon insisted on meticulous details, done right. He taught Dan how to make incredible sauces by requiring Dan to make them again and again. The flavor, the texture, the color — they had to be perfect. Broken butter sauces? Start again.
Like this scene.
As Dan told me recently, “If anyone had been using tweezers to put herbs on food in 1998, this would have been the Papillon kitchen.”
When Dan makes a sauce now, the knowledge is in his hands, his body. But that wisdom came at a cost. He doubted himself, drove himself, and derided himself for decades.
Plenty of people have written pretty extensively in the past 4 years about how toxic restaurant culture can be.
Here’s what my husband would like you to know.
It’s all true.
He also says, “If you eat in a restaurant, just know that someone on the line is sick as a dog and making your food, because almost no one offers health insurance or paid days off.”
And I would like to say: trying to do all of this when you are autistic is triply hard.
In September of 2019, Dan left his restaurant job. I found a job in the city. Dan wanted to stay home and be the house husband, like John Lennon. He loved it. I saw him relaxing, maybe coming out of the grief of losing his friend.
And then COVID hit. And 2 weeks into lockdowns, Dan’s dad died.
He found out that his dad was in his final days one evening. We had him on an airplane early the next morning. “There was nobody in the airport. It should have been prime time, but every part of the airport was bare, empty. When I got on the plane, there were maybe 20 people. It felt crazy. I had an entire row to myself.” A friend whose sister is a nurse gave Dan a kN95 mask for the journey. He had the chance to be there with his mom and siblings for his dad’s death.
And then he came home broken. In the summer of 2022, when The Bear came on tv, Dan still hadn’t recovered.
There was no way we were watching that show.
We both know more now. A few months ago, Dan was formally diagnosed with autism. And learning this helped Dan to put a lot of pieces of his puzzle together.
“Now that I think about working in restaurants, I recognize that a huge majority of the people on the line are autistic or have ADHD minds. They’re focus driven. They’re not normal.”
Thank goodness.
The neurodiversity of the restaurant industry is what drew Dan into it, even though he wouldn’t have been able to name that before this year.
Everyone in restaurants is a little bit different than typical. That meant that often Dan was put into a position where he could shine and be proud of what he was doing.
“My family was a little hesitant about me going to culinary school. But in a restaurant, I could work my way up and be sous chef, in charge of the kitchen. I was proud, especially at a prestigious restaurant. I was good at that. I could run the line and do 200 covers for lunch and do a great job. Have command of the line. I loved that.”
The adrenaline and coffee worked well with Dan’s ADHD brain.
At the same time, anxiety runs rampant in autistic people. All the sounds, the sights, the “do it again and do it again,” the doubts, the orders, and all the over-stimulation? It wore on him.
“I loved the work. But after a while, it took a toll on my body. And my mind. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
That’s why he and I both recognize now that he was not merely depressed after the loss of his friend, and COVID, and his dad’s death.
He was also in full-blown autistic burnout.
Realizing that he is autistic is helping Dan to see himself for who he is.
Being a para-educator at an ECAP preschool, and teaching a bunch of 3-year-olds who adore him. is much easier on his brain than working in a restaurant kitchen.
“I will never regret that I worked in restaurants. It was just time to move on.”
I have my husband back now, even better than before.
He no longer stares at his phone all day. That was a way of decompressing and healing, I recognize now. He just couldn’t do much while he was in burnout.
And now, he’s making incredible food again, better than anything I tasted before, when we were making cookbooks. This time, he’s making it slowly, thoughtfully, and with simple ingredients from the food bank, instead of fine-dining meals.
Now, he is ready to watch The Bear.
I came home one day a few weeks ago. Sheepish and excited at the same time, Dan said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I watched the first episode without you.” In the past, I might have accused him of breaking the cardinal rule. But this time, I grinned. Because he LOVED it and wanted to watch it again with me.
He’s healing.
And my god, we both LOVE that show now. I’m obsessed with every detail, especially Carmy’s hair, which looks just like Dan’s hair at the end of a shift, when he’d race his hands through his hair fast, to get it out of his eyes when he was on the line. And maybe there was oil on his hands.
The Cambro full of veal stock spilling. The constant chopping of carrots. Hands. Exhaustion.
We both gasped when we watched Carmy drinking water from a plastic quart container. I’ve seen Dan do that so many times.
They get everything right in this show.
Dan told me: “Watching that show is a way to look back at my old life — the intensity, the way I always chomped at the bit to get to the restaurant. It’s helping me understand how I used to live.”
He’s having fewer restaurant dreams now.
He’s here.
And luckily for me — and for you — he still knows how to make an incredible lemon-caper sauce.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Our Kind Kitchen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.