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By Erin Hollingsworth
March 2007
A McDonalds commercial that aired circa the 1996 Olympics depicts
several young, bright-eyed, would-be Olympians, stockbrokers and
otherwise successful adults finding their first jobs at America’s
favorite fast food establishment. While the overt PR at work in
the commercial creates a decidedly deceptive and overly optimistic
view of minimum wage employment, it actually has some baring on
the reality of the American workforce.
According to the National Restaurant Association, 32% of American
adults got their first job in a restaurant and over half have worked
in one at some point. 80% of salaried restaurant workers began working
on an hourly wage, making the food service industry, as McDonalds
implies and Anthony Bourdain says explicitly, a “true meritocracy.”
And what’s more, the thriving American restaurant industry
is the nation’s largest employer, save the US government.
The 2006 StarChefs.com Salary Survey is our third annual contribution
to the dynamic dialogue of restaurant economics and worker wages
and benefits. Do pastry chefs generally receive health insurance?
Does going to culinary school mean making more money? Where’s
the best place to work as a line cook? These are the kinds of questions
we seek to address. With over 3,000 respondents, from every state
of the union, this is financial food fodder that should satiate
your appetite for facts and figures until next year.
If you’re among the elite – an executive chef, working
in the US, in 2006 – you can expect to make $73,260. A little
more if you live in New York, $88,947, a little less if you work
in New Mexico, $65,000. While the odds of ending up in an executive
chef position would seem to be against you if you aren’t,
say, a white man (only 15 % of those executive chefs surveyed listed
themselves as something other than “Caucasian”, and
only 9% were women), the good news is that the average salary for
Hispanics and Latinos that are in executive chef roles
actually surpasses the national average, at $73,610.
But, as anyone who’s worked in a kitchen, taken a look at
our past
Salary Survey results, or even read Kitchen Confidential will
tell you: the vast majority of American kitchens are filled not
with rich, franchised, celebrity chefs, nor do many working in the
restaurant industry go by the coveted title Executive Chef
(3 % of whom are actually paid for their near unanimous, serious
overtime) Instead, America’s kitchens are mostly comprised
of hard-working, often underpaid sous chefs, pastry chefs, managers,
bartenders and line cooks. These are their stories (read graphs
and statistics).
Executive chefs make more money than line cooks and do better in New
York than Florida. No surprise there. But, if you’re looking
to work in Las Vegas, for instance, pastry is the apparent smart financial
move, as the average pastry chef’s salary ($81,250) soars there,
nearly doubling the national average ($42,922), and even surpassing
the average earnings of executive chefs in the same city ($73,333).
With the ostentatious, theatrical sugar art, avant garde desserts
and decadent chocolate creations that can dominate the Vegas pastry
scene, these ostensibly counterintuitive figures are actually indicative
of the Sin City’s taste for skilled, and flamboyant, pastry
talent.
Pastry chefs don’t fare as well in Chicago,
where a thriving restaurant environment is realizing itself through
the notable achievements of its savory chefs. Line cooks and pastry
chefs do about the same there ($25,990 and $26,000 respectively).
Executive chefs in Chicago earn the nation’s second highest
average salary ($85,454), behind New York ($88,947), meaning the
journey from line cook to executive chef can yield a lucrative career,
where the cost of living is significantly lower than in New York.
— Salary By Region—
According to our survey, all chefs in America have a computer and
Internet access. No, not really, but you get the joke. The truth is
that restaurants employ a very diverse group in terms of gender, ethnicity,
religion, sexual orientation, geographical origin and education. The
truth, however, is also that most high ranking chefs are men, and
most of those men are white. Women have more of a presence in the
pastry kitchen, where they comprise 68% of the workforce. And respondents
of Hispanic/Latino descent work not only as line cooks and prep cooks,
where many assume they do, but also comprise 9% of Executive Chefs
surveyed and 5% of both Sous Chefs and Pastry Chefs.
The largest percentage of African American respondents are line
cooks, but many also work in pastry, constituting 7% of the pastry
kitchen and 8% of all line cooks. 6% of all line cooks surveyed
listed themselves as Asian and 5% considered themselves Native American,
Caribbean or, simply, other. While the playing field is not, evidently,
level, organizations like WCR, coupled with the media exposure of
many chefs of oft marginalized ethnic background or gender can only
help to inspire an increasingly diverse work environment for front
and back of house alike.
— Who took the 2006 Salary Survey—
Take a glance at the bar graph below and you’ll probably notice
the huge white column. That represents the average number of jobs
waitstaff respondents have held in the last 5 years, 8.37 to be
exact. The good news, if you’re a waiter, is there’s
probably another restaurant around the corner willing to hire you
on the spot when your Norma Rae-esque diatribe on the management’s
fallacious policies doesn’t go over so well. The bad news
is you might go on this hunt several times a year.
Of those polled, managers enjoy the lowest turnover rate, working
at 1.64 restaurants in 5 years; and, while turnover rate does not
job security indicate, it’s reasonable to conclude at least
many managers can feel comfortable in holding a single job for several
years. Of course, not everyone wants to stay in the same job forever,
especially ambitious upper-level chefs, many of whom want to learn
as much as possible, as many places as possible. Executive Chefs
polled work 1.64 jobs in 5 years, where Sous Chefs work 2.42. It
would seem that, reaching the top, Executive Chefs stay where they
are a little longer, while Sous Chefs play the field.
— Restaurant Turnover by Occupation
—
While we didn’t receive adequate responses from restaurant
professionals over 60 to actually answer that question (if you’re
reading, seniors, we’d really love to hear from you next year),
the thousands that did reply show conclusively that you can expect
to make more money as you get older. That's probably as it should
be – and it’s nice when things are as they should be.
The largest jump in salary occurs for Executive Chefs when they
say goodbye to their angsty, idealistic twenties and hello to their
more responsibility-laden thirties. The mean change in income is
from $58,017 in the 20-29 age group to $71,488 in the 30-39 age
group, or an increase of 23%. Concurrently, restaurant managers
experience a 30% increase in salary, impressively moving from $42,949
to $55,711.
The salary increase for Sous Chefs and Pastry Chefs is not as drastic
(from $36,999 to $40,338 for Sous Chefs, $36,409 to $45,590 for
Pastry Chefs), but as in the sometimes delicate, tedious world of
baking, slow and steady can win the race. Both groups make more
money in their thirties than their twenties, and the curves for
executive chefs and managers would suggest a slight slowing down
in percentage of salary increase in their forties, but a continued
increase nonetheless.
— Age and Salary—
Working harder and longer will get you more money over time, which
is a good thing since you’ll probably be paying for some,
most, or all of your health insurance on your own, if you have it.
Waiters are the least likely group to receive health insurance through
their employer, and the least likely to have it at all. A little
more than half (58%) of waiters surveyed have health insurance,
but 67% of those that do have it pay for it completely on their
own. With an average salary of $41,059, some can afford insurance
but many either cannot or choose not to.
There is a clear correlation between income and health insurance
status, as the average income across restaurant occupations of those
with health insurance is $52,865, while for those without insurance
it’s a significantly lower $36,828. This would seem to be
true for two reasons: first, the more prestige and money attached
to a position, the more likely a person is to have insurance; second,
if insurance isn’t provided by an employer, or is done so
to a limited degree, a greater income provides for a greater ability
to pay on one’s own.
This is evidenced by the fact that a virtually unbelievable 100%
of executive chefs surveyed have health insurance, covered at least
in part by their employers. When, according to the 2005 US Census,
46.6 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever, it’s
no small victory that restaurants are finding a way to offer insurance
to so many. But they certainly haven’t found a way to offer
it to everyone – only 56% of line cooks get their insurance
through their employers and only 69% have health insurance at all.
— Health Insurance —
It’s often asked how to make it in the restaurant business,
and answers are often anecdotally conjectured. Should one go to
culinary school, stage, work abroad, or even study philosophy only
to feign (or endure) a sudden change of heart leading to a career
in food? The anecdotal answers often given make sense, because so
much of the business is – like other industries that rely
on luck, talent, connections and circumstance – unique to
one chef’s experience. That said, our survey offers a more
left-brained response to these questions, hard facts to aggrandize
your opinions at the next industry-only cocktail party.
Reductively, the numbers say this: Executive Chefs make greater
salaries when they: A) complete a stage, B) work in a restaurant
outside of the US and C) receive a non-culinary degree. They make
less money when they go to culinary school, on average, than chefs
who did not go to culinary school. Now, these conclusions are correlative,
based on isolating two variables from a slew of others certain to
impact the final equation. What’s interesting, though, and
what this group together implies, is that kitchen experience and
diversity of experience is the greatest precursor for financial
success as a chef.
Those that worked for nothing (staged), probably under the tutelage
of someone very talented and important, earn more than those who
didn’t. Chefs that staged, but did not attend culinary school,
earned more than those who staged and attended culinary
school ($65,068 and $63,236 respectively). Working in a restaurant
outside the US helps too, and getting a degree in something other
than the culinary arts adds dollars as well. The point is not that
going to culinary school is a bad idea, but that, as many chefs
offer anecdotally: restaurant experience, reading a good book once
in awhile, traveling – these things matter, maybe even more
than classroom experience and the proverbial piece of paper that
goes with it.
— Work Experience, Education and Salary:
Executive Chefs —
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