I am sitting in a nurses' kitchen inlet inside a hospital. The fridge is humming. There is a sign on the wall asking me to please ask a staff member for kitchen supplies. The room is cold in a way that rooms should never be cold when someone needs comfort. I keep thinking that maybe a little colour on these walls would help. Just a thought from a guy who has spent his whole life inside rooms where people gather to feel better.
I am writing this here because I have been transparent on our podcast for six years and I am not about to stop now. This is not a marketing piece. This is not about foot traffic or menus or which platform is going to save your restaurant. This is a real note from someone who builds his career around helping operators in this industry, and who is right now sitting next to someone he loves while she fights an illness most people never see.
Last week I lost my sister. She fought kidney disease for fifty years and she was tougher than anyone I have ever known. She did not flinch. She handled what life handed her with a grit that most of us will never have to find in ourselves. One week after we lost her, I am in a hospital with my partner as she works through a serious mental health crisis. That is the stretch of days I am living in. The highest highs of my career running into the hardest moments of my life, all in the same breath.
I am writing this for the cooks, the servers, the dishwashers, the managers and the owners in this industry who are dealing with mental illness in their own lives or in the lives of someone they love. I see you. I understand it now in a way I did not understand it before. I know what it feels like when someone you know better than your own family puts on a mask you do not recognize. I know what it feels like to want to fix it and to realize you cannot.
I grew up in a house where the screaming never stopped. I came along eight years after my parents had already built the family they planned, and I figured out a lot of things on my own that a kid should not have to figure out. I have watched my own children live through their own version of what I lived through. One parent screaming. A house that should have been safe and was not. If I could ban one thing from the future of this world, it would be screaming at the people you love. I mean that with everything I have.
What strikes me as I sit in this room is how hard mental illness is to understand from the outside. A broken leg makes sense. A heart attack makes sense. You can see the cast. You can read the chart. You know what to bring to the hospital and you know what to say. Mental illness hides. It wears a mask. It tells you everything is fine when nothing is fine. It puts a wall between you and the person you love and dares you to climb it.
There is a wall of pamphlets across from me right now. Old phone numbers. Curled corners. Tacked up like someone was not even sure they should be there. It looks like a graveyard of hope. And yet this is the wall people stare at when they have run out of ideas. This is what we hand them in their hardest moment. We can do better than that wall. Our industry can do better than that wall.
Our industry is built on people who carry a lot and say very little about it. Long shifts. Late nights. Pressure that never lets up. We romanticize the chaos and we celebrate the grit and we do not talk nearly enough about what it costs the human beings doing the work. The kitchens and dining rooms of this country are full of people wearing masks. Cooks who are struggling. Managers who are drowning. Owners who have not slept properly in months. People who pour everything they have into the guest experience and quietly fall apart on the drive home.
That is why Ashton Media is partnering with The Burnt Chef Project this spring. Not as a campaign or as a sponsor but as a partner. As a commitment. Because the people behind the food deserve more than a pamphlet on a hospital wall when things get hard. They deserve real support, real conversation, real space to say I am not okay without losing the shift, the job or the respect of the people they work alongside.
If you run a restaurant, you have a role to play in this. It is not complicated and it does not cost a thing. Sit down with your team one on one. Phone face down on the table. Step into the office or out back where it is quiet. Ask how they are doing. Then ask again, because the first answer is almost always a version of fine that nobody actually means. Ask a third time if you have to. Listen longer than feels comfortable. That might be the whole job.
I have learned more about strength this week than I learned in my first fifty years on this planet, and the strength was not mine. It was my daughter picking up the phone and calling 911 on her own mother because she knew it was the only way to get help. That is what real strength looks like. Not the kind we put on Instagram. The kind that makes the call when no one else can. The kind that loves someone enough to do the hardest possible thing on their behalf. I will carry what she did this week for the rest of my life.
If you are struggling right now with something you cannot figure out, something that is pulling your mind into a place that does not feel safe, I want you to hear me. It is not your fault. You did not do something wrong. You are not broken. There is something in your past that is not finished with you yet, and it needs more help than you and your family can give it on your own. That is what professional help is for. Not because you are weak. Because the load got too heavy and you are still human and you deserve to set it down.
I have a co-host. Anyone who listens to the show knows him. Today, in the middle of the hardest week I can remember, he gave me the best piece of advice I have heard in a very long time. He told me, just love. That was it. Just love.
Love your team. Love the line cook who is quieter than usual this week. Love the server who used to laugh and stopped. Love the owner across the street who looks tired in a way that goes deeper than tired. Love your family. Love the people in your kitchen carrying things you cannot see. Love yourself enough to make the call when you need to make the call.
If this piece reached you because you needed it, please reach out to The Burnt Chef Project. To a friend. To a doctor. To a hotline. To anyone. The pamphlet wall is not your only option and you are worth more than what is taped to it.
This industry saved me when I was a kid looking for somewhere to belong. As I sit in this hospital tonight, I can feel it saving me again. The people I have met. The kitchens I have stood in. The operators who have trusted me with their stories and businesses. You are why I keep showing up. And tonight, I am asking you to show up for the people in your restaurants the same way.
Just love. That is the whole note.
Jay Ashton Canada's Restaurant Guy, Founder of Ashton Media | Co-Host, The Late Night Restaurant Podcast
