For a Chef, 41 Years in the Kitchen Takes Its Toll

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

For Mark Peel, 58, the crazy hours and physical strain of life as a professional chef have meant wrist, shoulder and back pain, a bone spur and hernia operations. But he is aiming to age gracefully, with a less strenuous schedule.

STARTING as a dishwasher at the age of 17, the chef Mark Peel worked his way up at some of the great California restaurants: Ma Maison, Michael's, Chez Panisse, Spago, Chinois and, finally, for more than two decades, Campanile, his own place in Los Angeles.

Those 41 years in the kitchen have brought him considerable fame: Campanile won the James Beard award as outstanding restaurant in the United States in 2001. They have also brought him carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and thoracic outlet syndrome in his shoulders, resulting from repetitive stirring, fine knife movements and heavy lifting. He has a bone spur on one foot and a cyst between toes of the other from constantly standing. He has had three hernia operations and lives with a chronically sore back.

Being a professional chef, like being an elite athlete, tends to be a young person's game. When he started out, Mr. Peel thought nothing of shifting a 125-pound stockpot full of hot, sloshing liquid from one burner to the next without calling for help, his arms stretched away from his body, muscles tight to control the motion. It was a recipe for trouble down the line.

The 16-hour days he once put in at Spago — seven days a week for seven weeks in a row — are no longer an option for Mr. Peel, who is now 58. He straightens a sore shoulder at the memory of those days. He can still work like that, he says — "just not as often, and not as long." Today, he says, he can survive perhaps three days of crazy hours, as long as Day 4 includes sleeping in, to recover.

In September, Mr. Peel will open a new Campanile at Los Angeles International Airport. He closed the 190-seat original last fall after 23 years, 16 of them alongside the chef Nancy Silverton, then his wife, and seven more years on his own. His career track record going into the new project is excellent; his body, the worse for wear.

The new, smaller Campanile will open at the American Airlines terminal, in a licensing agreement with Host International. Mr. Peel will "train, taste, advise, direct and organize," while younger chefs execute the dishes he creates. "At some point, the mind is willing but the body rebels," Mr. Peel says. "Most chefs over 50 are no longer cooking daily."

Mr. Peel came of age during an explosion of interest in dining out, and his workload expanded to keep pace. Many in the next generation of young chefs have seen the physical toll on their elders, and they are planning accordingly.

"There's an arc," says the chef Jonah Miller, 26, whose awareness of his "shelf life as an active cook" informed his decision to open his own restaurant sooner rather than later. That establishment, Huertas, a Northern Spanish restaurant, will open this winter in Brooklyn. It is a nod in equal parts to Mr. Miller's youthful ambition — he first volunteered in a kitchen when he was 13 — and the "need to plan for the time when I'm not physically able to work the line, which for most cooks comes in their late 30s."

"It's a pretty hard-and-fast rule," he says, that chefs eventually step away from the action; he aspires to the natural progression from cook to chef to "purely a coach and a mentor."

Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, agrees that cooks can age quickly. "Every time I find myself eating in an exciting restaurant, the chef is 28 years old," he says.

A chef's early years are arduous, devoted to working the line — cooking some portion of what lands on the plate, shift after shift. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, where high rents and demanding diners require a chef to "maximize every minute of the day," according to Mr. Davis, it is even harder.

"Cooking on the line is a sport," says Mr. Miller, who played basketball and baseball in high school. "It's regimented and it's continuous. You're always pushing, just like an athlete: the highest quality you can manage in a specific time frame, doing it again and again."

Chefs are more likely to sustain injuries than the average American worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sprains, strains and tears are the most common complaints, followed by cuts, lacerations and punctures; burns; and fractures, says Martin Kohli, chief regional economist for the bureau. Musculoskeletal injuries like Mr. Peel's carpal tunnel syndrome are also common.

When asked to name chefs who have persevered in the kitchen past their youth despite the physical toll, Mr. Peel, Mr. Miller and Mr. Davis all hesitate for a long moment. Mr. Davis comes up with the New York-based Daniel Boulud and David Bouley, who have reputations for being active in the kitchen longer than their peers. But each example is served with a side order of disclaimer; they are the exceptions who prove the rule.

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