Open Kitchens
With increasing awareness of mental health issues among restaurant workers, employees are encouraged to seek help rather than hide their troubles.
For Michael Pillarella, executive chef at the Wianno Club in Osterville and president of the Cape and Islands chapter of the American Culinary Federation (ACF), losing a pastry chef to suicide four years ago “really touched close to the family.” The talented chef, related to him by marriage, had been in the business for a long time and was well liked and respected. When the ACF lost another cook a few years later in the same manner, it was, he says, “a wake-up call. We made it a board mission to be vocal about [mental health].”
Anybody who has enjoyed some form of culinary entertainment over the last 20 years — from Anthony Bourdain’s groundbreaking Kitchen Confidential to Gordon Ramsay’s often brutal televised kitchen conduct to last summer’s surprise Hulu hit series The Bear — has at least some appreciation for the physical and mental demands of working in a restaurant. Stereotypes of menacing, abusive chefs and drug- or alcohol-addicted kitchen workers are now mainstream. While these depictions are not entirely without merit, “I think it’s a very layered subject,” says Florence Lowell, chef-owner of Naked Oyster in Hyannis. “My reality is it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s a great profession and it’s been tarnished by that.”
In discussing ACF Cape and Islands’ mental health outreach, Pillarella is quick to point out that the organization does not offer any medical support. “We’re not trained for that,” he says. “We offer a network of people that you can call at any time of day. You can reach out and the person at the other end is going to know you’re in pain and they’re going to help you.” ACF also posts a list of resources on its website that members can access.
In the past two years, Pillarella has had calls from people he either knows personally or through acquaintances. “They said, ‘I just want someone to talk to, someone that understands what I’m working with, that understands that I may be drinking too much, that understands I might be doing other things that are not beneficial to me.’ They want that with no judgment.”
Joseph Ellia, ACF Cape and Islands secretary, was in that kind of trouble. A former restaurant chef and manager, Ellia now teaches culinary arts at his alma mater, Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School in Bourne. He also moonlights as a caterer and helps friends in their restaurants all over the Cape when they are short-staffed. Ellia believes mental health “is definitely a huge issue in our industry. Honestly, I never really understood it much while I was in the scene. You just get stuck in the trenches of, ‘This is normal. This is what it’s supposed to be like as a chef or a line cook or a dishwasher.’ Once I was able to separate myself from it, you step back and you realize, this is not normal.”
For the father of two, who suffers from depression, “normal” meant leaving his restaurant job at the end of his shift and going to a bar to “pound into martinis just to calm my nerves so I could go to sleep that night. That is an issue, and a lot of people don’t realize that is an issue.” It took a toll on his now ex-wife, and he believes it was a contributing factor in his divorce.
Now in his third year as a teacher, the Falmouth native left the restaurant world after 17 years to improve his quality of life. “I was burnt out,” he says. “I wanted to be around my kid. I didn’t like where I was going.”
In 2020 Ellia joined a gym, started taking better care of himself, and stopped his serious drinking, losing 90 pounds in the process. “Mike [Pillarella] has helped me out a lot,” he says. “A lot of times that’s what it takes, reaching out.” Since his transformation, Ellia says people have come to him to ask for help. “It’s great. You don’t usually see that.”
Ellia’s long-term goal had always been to return to Upper Cape Tech. Teaching has helped him view the restaurant world from a different perspective. And working with high school students, he believes, has made him a better parent to his now 12-year-old son and one-year-old daughter. He notes that, particularly in the wake of Covid, a lot of his students have high anxiety. “They’re nervous about going to a restaurant because they’re nervous about interacting with people. Coming out of Covid they don’t know how to socialize anymore.” He is honest with them about what they will find in the industry and extremely sensitive to placing students in jobs around the Cape where they will thrive. “I’m very lucky and blessed to have this job and have this opportunity to help my friends in the industry and help the kids as well,” he says.
Pillarella counts the hours, level of intensity, high volume/high pressure and physical working conditions among the pressures restaurant workers face. Living and working on the Cape brings additional challenges. “You know you’ll have work in the summer, but you don’t know what will happen in the winter,” he points out, because even the restaurants that stay open year-round do so with reduced staff. In the winter on the Cape, people can have too much time on their hands, which he feels can be just as bad as not enough time. Add to that the lack of affordable housing that has hit the Cape particularly hard especially since the pandemic, as more people who used to visit seasonally are opting to just stay. “All of our staff are trying to figure out year-round housing,” Says Erica Dunn, co-owner with her husband, Adam, of The Pheasant in Dennis.
In the 16 years Naked Oyster has been open, Lowell, who came to the U.S. four decades ago from France to attend college, has had kitchen employees dealing with drug and alcohol addiction. “It’s an evening job and alcohol is right there, on the spot,” she says. Conceding that the problems may well extend beyond the employees’ work lives, she continues, “I promote that anybody in my kitchen who has problems, I try to get them help. That has happened many times.” Some have gotten clean and returned to the kitchen. But for some, she believes, it is just a bad environment. “A lot of kitchens create the atmosphere of drinking being part of the job, but I make sure it’s not the case in my kitchen. It comes from the top.”
“You have to make sure people have proper time to recover, they have proper guidance” she continues. “Show drugs and drinking aren’t cool things to do.” In addition to forbidding drugs and alcohol in the kitchen, Lowell gives staff four-day weeks during the winter. The Pheasant in Dennis is only open five days a week even in the summer, and the restaurant closes for several days around Valentine’s Day to give the staff a rest. Dunn says she and her husband work to create a sense of camaraderie and “a space that’s as supportive as possible during hard times.”
Frederic Feufeu, chef-owner of Bleu in Mashpee, met his wife when they both worked in restaurants in New York in the 1980s and 90s. “I’m in my 50s,” he says. “I’ve seen a little bit of the abuse mentally and everything else.” He is French. His wife has roots in Wellfleet, so they used to vacation on the Cape. After 9/11, they decided to move here with their two children (now 27 and 22). Feufeu worked at the restaurant that occupied the Bleu space. When that restaurant failed, he bought it. His antidote to previous experiences: “Here we created a work family. There’s respect, everybody’s professional. We goof around a lot. We know each other’s secrets. It’s like a home away from home.”
The staff at Sal’s Place in Provincetown is, in chef-co-owner Michela Murphy’s words, “like a big, dysfunctional family,” most of whom return year after year. Murphy owns the restaurant with her mother, Siobhan Carew. Murphy is in the kitchen; Carew works the front of the house. “It’s a very interesting way to live, to be in the restaurant business,” says the chef, who grew up in the industry. Her parents owned Pomodoro restaurants in Boston and Brookline, and Matt Murphy’s Pub in Brookline, all of which closed permanently in the wake of the Covid pandemic. “You’re there for people’s best days — first dates, engagements — and you have guests who become family and you’re there for their worst days too — funerals, losing their partners or children. You take on a lot of that. It can be incredibly rewarding but also incredibly draining.”
Being on the Cape brings another level of pressure, especially during tourist season, she adds. “For the most part, the people who come here have saved up all year for their week-long vacation and they want so much. They’ve taken time off, they’ve traveled, they’re spending a lot of money. And there’s so many things you can’t control.” Like whether there’s a breakdown of the sewer system, forcing restaurants to close, or a flash storm, as has happened at Sal’s when people were enjoying outdoor dining overlooking Provincetown Harbor. “You have to deal with it and make it look like it’s not a big deal. You want to make sure the guests are happy, always. In a lot of ways, you’re sort of an ambassador for the town and the Cape itself.”
Sal’s has a great vibe, inspired in no small part by the staff, and Murphy says that the vast majority of guests are “lovely.” Then there are those who take out whatever displeasure they are feeling on staff. “Sometimes we have people literally crying while they’re waitressing,” she says.
For Murphy, in some ways work was easier during the peak of Covid. “People treated hospitality workers with a lot more grace,” she explains. “People were so happy to be out and to experience something that felt normal. It was really wonderful, even though it was a scary time and it was hard. Now that things are kind of back to normal, there’s a lot more burnout. Everything is 10 times as crazy. Especially since coming out of Covid, some people are realizing, ‘Maybe this isn’t for me.’”
Bob Signoriello, who most recently was restaurant manager at Hyannis Yacht Club, doesn’t describe his situation as burnout per se. But after 40 years in the business, he left his job on Memorial Day 2022 and took a break. “One reason I took the summer off is these last two years, with Covid and all the changes and everything you had to go through, I think that mentally it took five years off my life. I needed to take a summer to just get away and clear my head,” he says.
He cleared his head in Puerto Rico, Barcelona and France, locations he chose, “to expand my food knowledge.” And he spent a lot of time on the beach at home. “Being in a seasonal place, I haven’t had a summer in 40 years,” says the Centerville resident. “It was time to see the life other people have.”
Originally from Mansfield, Signoriello has worked in New York, Boston, London and the Caribbean at high-end resorts and private clubs. He first came to the Cape in 1987 as opening chef at Willowbend Country Club. He was chef-owner of Agrodolce, in Brewster, from 2007-2014. In the wake of his break, the chef is feeling invigorated and looking for his next opportunity. He’s not sure what that will be but he is sure he wants a better work-life balance than he has had. In this business, he says, “A lot of people don’t take care of themselves the way they should. They don’t eat right or have substance abuse problems. You see that everywhere. I think everybody needs time to step away to find out if it’s really what you want or if there’s something else out there for you.”
Another former restaurant owner, who asked that his name not be used, gave up restaurant life after several decades — most of that time on the Cape — to become a private chef. After selling his restaurant, he spent some time as a corporate chef, until a former restaurant patron asked him to work in his home on the Cape for a summer. That has led to year-round work on the Cape and in Florida. “Now I just have to worry about myself showing up,” he says.
In this business, he says, “You see a lot of big egos, which can turn into aggressiveness when they don’t get their way.” And, “You see lots of drinking.” At his former restaurant, the staff used to want to drink in the parking lot after work, until he chased them away. A father of two, the chef says he never drank with the staff, choosing instead to go home to his family after work.
“I think there is an awareness across our industry right now that a lot of our cooks and chefs need help,” says Pillarella. “I think there is an awareness that a lot of people go into the business because it’s a whole different environment — different hours, different times, different intensity. Sometimes, if you have a mental health issue, you might be able to fit in a little better than wearing a tie to the office.” “It attracts people who are not office people,” echoes Lowell, “people who like the adrenaline rush. That’s fine. Not everybody can sit at a desk from nine to five.”
“People have issues. Sometimes it’s hard not to bring them to work,” says Signoriello. People also have each other. “There’s a huge sense of community in the industry on the Cape,” says Murphy. And a willingness to help colleagues and friends.
NAMI Cape Cod & The Islands
(National Alliance on Mental Illness)
5 Mark Lane, Hyannis
508-778-4277
info@namicapecod.org
namicapecod.org
