MORE THAN
SKIN DEEP
Chefs with tattoos—is it personal expression, body art or part of a great tradition?
By Ethel Hammer
Images from the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show’s Kitchen Ink project.
IN kitchens across America, effervescent
tattoos decorate hardworking arms, backs,
torsos, necks and legs. From one tattoo
that tells it all to entire body canvases,
tattoos dance at stoves, sinks, prep
stations and kettles.
tongs, muffins, pigs, corn, taffy apples,
Picholine olives, herbs, skulls, snakes,
demons, dragons, caulfat—and so much
more. Restaurants may change. Tattoos
stay put. Tattooing is so pervasive even
the great Charles Darwin wrote about it
in The Descent of Man: “Not one great
country can be named, from the polar
regions in the north to New Zealand in
the south, in which the aborigines do not
tattoo themselves.”
You name it, we’ve got it covering us:
cupcakes, whisks, hot dogs, knives,
As Maarten Hesselt van Dinter, author of
The World of Tattoo: An Illustrated History
(KIT Publishers, First Edition, 2005) notes,
“There is no tribe or population group whose
members did not decorate their bodies in
some way, be it with paint, tattoos or scars.”
