Adam Bateman says the chefs who trained him called him 'a black b*****d,' 'a coon' and 'the n word'

Training to be a chef twenty years ago was testing. There was no room for mistakes; disagreeing with chef wasn't an option. 

If the working conditions were tough for everyone, Adam Bateman said his experience was marred with racial abuse as well. 

Speaking on The Nightcap podcast, the group operations and development chef for InterContinental Hotels explained that having grown up in Birmingham at a time when racism was the norm, he became "desensitised" to it. 

“By the time I got to a culinary environment, cooking in kitchens – it was tough and it was hard but I was a little bit more resilient to it because it’s just the norm.” 

Working in kitchens as a teenager, Adam said chefs called him "a black bastard", "a coon" and "the n word" - and explained that one chef used to hit him with a broom with a nail protruding out of the end, which he called 'a coon stick.'

Though difficult to conceive, the chef said the racism was by no means one-sided. 

"There was another black chef who joined later on, who worked in another part of the hotel I ended up working for and he was just as bad. He was just as racist,” he said.  

“He would say: 'the white man’s out to oppress you, the white man’s out to drive you down, don’t let them get on top of you, you’ve got to be better than them, you’ve got to show that they’re inferior to you.'” 

“As a sixteen year-old, you’re kind of like, ‘where the hell do I stand in this world.’” 

But rather than let it get to him, the experience hardened the chef and made him more able to deal with the other pressures inherent to working in high-end kitchens. 

"Tough environments are a natural environment to me,” he said.

Thankfully, he said, “these days that sort of stuff rarely happens."

"I’ve no doubt that it still happens in kitchens but it’s more contained in much smaller environments, maybe in high end kitchens is the only place it exists, but in my hotels, in big chain hotels no way does that kind of stuff happen.” 

What do you think chefs? How prevalent is racial abuse in kitchens? Share your thoughts in the comments!