What It's Like for Couples to Work Together in the Same Restaurant

Running a restaurant kitchen is stressful. Working with your significant other is stressful. Combine the two and you’ve got a recipe for disaster: sharp knives, open flames, high pressure, and serious emotions. All the same, across the country there are chefs working together with their partners and, somehow, not killing each other. But as they explain, back-of-the-house life (and love) can be quite romantic. Here’s how they keep the flame alive–without getting burned.

As at home, where one person walks the dog and the other pays the bills, the chefs agreed it’s best to divide tasks. One person on salad, the other on the main. “Someone needs to be in charge, to have the vision,” says Alex Raij, chef and co-owner of Txikito and La Vara in New York. “Also, if you’re going to follow a recipe read it through first. Get your mise-en-place together.” Being organized, and preparing well for the insanity of dinner rush, keeps conflict to a minimum. “Have a game plan,” says Katherine Thompson, the pastry chef at dell’anima, l’Artusi, and l’Apicio, where her husband, Gabriel Thompson, is the chef: “That way, you can just chat while you work.”

In tight quarters, you have to be attentive to where everyone is and what they’re doing. This is not necessarily a bad thing! That is, you’ll begin to appreciate how people move. Sharon Patcher, co-chef at The Grocery in Brooklyn, remembers observing Charles Kiely during their time at Savoy. “He took this sauté pan off the stove to throw in the bus bin underneath the line,” she says. “The way he let it slide down his leg and off his foot without so much as a crash was beautiful.” Today Kiely’s her co-chef at the Grocery–and her husband.

The Thompson’s’ “unspoken commitment to each other beyond a professional one,” as Katherine puts it, allows them to be brutally honest with each other. “No one wants to tell their chef something sucks,” Gabriel says, “but Katherine can be like, ‘Ooh, that’s gross.’” And when she does, he knows it’s not ego–she means it. Also, she’s not worried about getting fired.

When shopping for a lowboy fridge for their upcoming restaurant, Uncle Boon’s in New York City, Anne Redding and Matt Danzer found themselves in a knock-down-drag-out doors-versus-drawers battle. (Drawers for Matt, doors for Anne.) Neither side would budge. “Matt was literally pretending to cook in the restaurant supply store, ‘opening’ doors and drawers to demonstrate his argument,” says Redding. “I got so mad I stormed out.”

Later, though, they could see how ridiculous the fight was. “We laugh every day about how nuts we must have looked,” she says. Even better, she adds, “We ended up with a combination lowboy: two doors and a drawer.”

Screaming may be considered “good” for reality TV, but not in reality. Still, it happens. When those inevitable battles do break out, Bryan Petroff and Douglas Quint, of NYC’s Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, take a 15-minute break. “We do our own thing and come back with calmer heads,” says Quint. And Top Chef alums Mark Gaier andClark Frasier, co-chefs at Arrows Restaurant in Ogunquit, ME, have a secret for conflict resolution that’s gotten them through 25 years together: “Rather than fight over the same $2 peeler all the time,” says Clark, “just BUY another one.”