It was 8am so we could barely hear the music. The sharp sound of the bench scraper was louder than the song playing from the small cherry-colored Bluetooth speaker in the speed rack next to me. Jack, the prep cook and grizzly bear, was the only other human in the basement prep kitchen besides Jon Jon, and he consumed whole milk. Less than three weeks into my job, I felt out of place and green. The wet dough stuck to my sweaty palms, and the more flour I used, the more my hands burned with eczema. I was still in my head and trying hard to keep a low profile.
“I can’t hear a single note they’re playing,” Jack muttered. I don’t think he’s ever heard of Soccer Mommy and I was sure he wouldn’t be keen on starting today.
“Do you like the Replacements?” he groaned. I said I’d never heard of those, so he took over the speaker. He turned the volume up to maximum. My mind was blown.
In the early days of my first job as a pastry cook in New York, music was the key to getting me out of my head, connecting with other cooks around me, and inspiring me to gain confidence and belief in the kitchen. From that day on, I played music that could be heard from the walk-in freezer to the linen closet. It’s a mix of 90s alternative rock and the bubblegum nostalgic pop of Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani. For many chefs, music is an integral part of their morning prep routine, hours before dinner service begins and the first glass of wine is poured.
“When you walk into a restaurant, everything is very quiet,” says Terry Justice, chef and co-owner of HAGS, a queer fine-dining restaurant in Manhattan. Mornings are the only time there is no noise in the kitchen, except for the whirring of the oven and the sound of knives being sharpened. Immediately a cacophony of sounds begins. Of course, music is king.
“I love starting my day with jazz. It’s a very peaceful but energetic way to set the mood in a room,” says Justice, whose morning playlist is stacked with the likes of Alice Coltrane and Charles Mingus. But as the heat in the kitchen increases, so does the tempo, and esoteric jazz harps and upright basses succumb to rock bands like Turnstile and Deftones.
“It’s a hot, dangerous, fast-paced environment,” says Justice, a former punk rock drummer. “When you really need to get your blood pumping, no amount of aggressive music will ever feel inappropriate. The higher the BPM, the more efficient your body is and the faster and sharper your movements will be.”
Kayla Wong, a baker at Radio Bakery in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood, says the tempo in her kitchen is determined entirely by the backing track. When the team arrives at 4 a.m., the sous chef takes control of the speakers while the baker toasts the morning bread and shapes the sesame stilato loaves, starting the day with either SZA or Sabrina Carpenter, depending on whether you want an easier start to the morning or something more powerful to wake you up.
“When someone plays a too-cold radio station for too long, the energy in the kitchen slows down and the pace slows down. Usually someone is crying out for a change,” she says.
In a multilingual kitchen, music is a powerful way to bridge language barriers, and chef Ayesha Nurjaja took the initiative early in her career.
“When I first started cooking, I spoke Italian but not Spanish, and I didn’t really know how to communicate,” explains Nurdjaja, executive chef and partner at Manhattan restaurants Shuka and Shukette. Without a common language to share, simple preparation and navigating the kitchen proved difficult, and Nurjaja fell behind. It wasn’t until she listened closely to the music played by Spanish-speaking cooks, bass-forward reggaeton and upbeat Latin pop that she found a way to get back on her feet.
“Lyrics are easy to remember. When the kids were listening to music, I’d Shazam the song and have them translate it. I’d study the lyrics on the way home.” The choruses became familiar, and as time went on, the verses started to stick with me. In no time, I was able to converse in Spanish with ease. For the benefit of native Spanish-speaking cooks, she encourages everyone in the kitchen to speak Spanish conversationally.
“[Music]teaches you that your culture is not the only culture that exists,” says Ignacia Valdez, executive chef of Tokyo Record Bar, an izakaya-style restaurant and listening room in Manhattan. “We all come from different backgrounds, but when we see someone enjoying the music they play, it resonates with us.”
Reggaeton was the soundtrack of Valdez’s teenage years in Chile, where he would sweat it out on the dance floor late into the night to bass-thumping old-school acts like Daddy Yankee and Joel & Randy. At Tokyo Record Bar, the dining room’s hi-fi sound system is ignored during morning prep service. Instead, 2000s reggaeton plays from a portable Bluetooth speaker surrounded by tape dispensers and Cambro containers of rice. These songs are nostalgic for Valdez and her team: Her line cook, who is from Puerto Rico, and Porter, who is from Guatemala, know all the lyrics to “Sargo pa la calle” and “Ah oh ah oh,” which Valdez danced to as a teenager.
“I always say I’m embarrassed, because when I lived in Chile, I only listened to it at parties,” Valdes says. “I’m not going to say I love reggaeton because it’s so basic…” But after 12 years working in kitchens abroad, it’s the music of her club days that brings her back home and fosters community within her team.
“I can’t hear a single note they’re playing,” Jack muttered. I don’t think he’s ever heard of Soccer Mommy and I was sure he wouldn’t be keen on starting today.
In the world of Michelin-starred fine dining, the most musical sounds a chef is likely to hear in the hours before dinner service are the constant alarm of a kitchen timer or the rhythmic tap of a sharp knife on a cutting board.
“Music was like a curse word,” says Nurjadja, who worked in several Michelin-starred kitchens. There, chefs were hardly even encouraged to converse with each other. She remembers hearing a co-worker playing music quietly through her phone’s speaker during a bathroom break. This was a chance to break the ice of the high-stakes silence.
“I understand there’s a perspective that says, ‘We’re here to focus and use all of our senses. We want to hear sounds, we want to smell things,'” says Justice, who previously worked at high-end restaurants such as Wild Air and Contra. “But my mind is so loud and busy that when I get quiet, I can’t escape the prison in my brain.”
Justice speaks of an emotion closely related to the gleaming precision of pressed tablecloths and haute cuisine: an unbridled anxiety stimulated by the sheer force of the kitchen. For her, music relieves tension, cancels out the ambient noise that distracts from the task at hand, and brings her closer to a place of lightness and imagination. It’s a sentiment echoed by Canadian chef Keith Siu, who listens to indie R&B artists like Dijon and Col 3 Trane while cooking.
“I’ve been thinking about how music can encompass emotions like courage,” says Siu, a chef at Toronto’s Belle Isle. Creating menus that reflect his Cantonese-Canadian upbringing, Siu believes that courage is an essential ingredient in sharing your individuality as a chef and revealing parts of yourself through your food. “Music that allows me to feel all my emotions helps me come up with ideas and iterate on dishes,” he says.
After all, both music and food connect us without the need for words, evoking memories and empathy. Both are truly universal languages. Together, these could help create a more ethical working environment for cooks in a culinary world defined by restaurants that advertise having a single head chef rather than an entire kitchen team.
“At the end of the day, the kitchen belongs to the people who work in it, and that’s what makes the space special,” Justice says. “Music is one of the greatest forms of democratization, especially in the kitchen where staff can enjoy the music they want to listen to and create their own time and space.”
