calling in the kitchen<\/a>, he told Hewitt that would-be chefs should think twice about attending culinary school:<\/p>\nSo You Want to Be a Chef?<\/h2>\n
Interested in pursuing culinary school? Chef Thomas Lents offers strong words of caution:<\/p>\n
\u201cBe careful of culinary school\u2014its\u2019 a lot of money. And to be perfectly honest, this industry, especially at the beginning, does not pay well. I\u2019ve been very fortunate and it took me a long time to get to the position I\u2019m in. I\u2019ve been doing this for over 20 years. I\u2019ve seen a lot of people who don\u2019t make it. I\u2019ve seen a lot of cooks and chefs strangled with financial debt from culinary school.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re really interested in it, go cook. Go work in a professional kitchen for a couple years and make sure it\u2019s for you. Don\u2019t go to culinary school without having seen what the life is actually like. It\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s not even the physical labor of it that\u2019s difficult, it\u2019s the fact you work when everyone else plays.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re never going to have Valentine\u2019s Day off, you\u2019re never going to have New Year\u2019s Eve off, and it\u2019s always going to be very difficult to get any time around the holidays off. You\u2019re going to slowly drift away from those 9-to-5 friends you have. You have to be ready for that and willing to do that. Your partner needs to be willing to have somebody that does this. It\u2019s not for everybody.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou go and spend $60,000, $70,000 or $80,000 on a culinary education and then you just know how to cook at dinner parties. It\u2019s a costly mistake that a lot of people make.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Philosophy-major-turned Michelin two-star rated Chef Thomas Lents \u201995 tells stories with his culinary creations. \u201cYou\u2019re never going to get me to say I\u2019m an artist, because I don\u2019t think I am,” Thomas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":1052,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes","category-features"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2015\/05\/lents-wm-online-cover-1024x682.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1056,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/1056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}