I've been cooking almost all my life, including a stint in a continental kitchen as a sous chef so I know what's what in a commercial kitchen - which, to be honest, is a dangerous dirty thankless profession. I began watching "Chefs" when my spouse and I first started subscribing to MHZ but after viewing a few episodes, I found it too dreary to continue - very dark storyline in a dark kitchen and alleyways with the occasional pack of German shepherds in attack mode and brutal beating scenes. Once in awhile after a shift, the personnel go up on the roof to view the Seine, but they are all smokers so how can they with their impaired taste buds be judges of fine food prep? And anyway, there are just too many cooks in the kitchen and hardly any customers in the front of the house to justify all the employees who are there "because they need paychecks," according to the elderly dish washing guy. When a rookie cook squirts yuzu on a tiny array of paper thin zucchini coiled up in the middle of a big plate, the head chef (very surly and drunk most of the time) proclaims it a masterpiece, like no one on earth ever before thought of using citrus juice as a flavoring. I had to laugh when a female manager, dolled up in a royal blue sheath, demands tweezers to rearrange one leaf of parsley (or is it sorrel?) before letting the plate be taken away to a diner. The French is hard to decipher in this series and I'm tired of seeing dead people popping up everywhere like muses (a plot device I've seen in numerous other French TV shows). I'm disappointed because a series about the tribulations of commercial cooks should be more, shall I say, appetizing.
