What is kitchen tape? [Video]

Professional restaurant kitchens are chaos. Beautiful chaos, but chaos nonetheless. Even in the calmest of circumstances — those dinner services that drift like clouds barely hanging onto a light breeze — there is still unseen turmoil lurking beneath.

The goal is to control that chaos as deliberately and systematically as possible, proactively creating solutions to temper the inherent madness of an environment where a thousand things can go wrong at any second. We are talking about hot, wet, slippery rooms with live fire, and sharp things, where a group of dynamic personalities attempts to execute complicated feats in a compressed amount of time, dictated by someone on the other side of the wall with their own set of expectations. Sound fun? Great. Throw on an apron. 

Like seasoned culinary professionals, I have been freshly reminded of (and possibly traumatized by) this dynamic by watching the new season of Hulu’s streaming smash hit, The Bear…