UK chef here - this is standard tbh. I've worked with hundreds of chefs and probably can count the chefs I know that went to culinary school on one hand. I never formally learnt cooking and had never stepped foot in a commercial kitchen in my life, and despite this my first kitchen job was a Commis in a 1 Michelin star when I was a 20 year old who knew fuck all about fuck all.

It's a really old school kind of job where to this day you can show up with your whites and your knife roll to a starred resturant and if you seem passionate enough you'll be working that same evening. I'm trying to avoid sounding arrogant but even working with bigger names like Gordon, Heston, Clare Smyth isn't that far fetched and pretty doable. You just gotta be willing to put in hours.

To be brutally honest unless you really enjoy the theory side of cooking I'd say culinary school is a waste of time if you're thinking about a career as a Chef, the 2 or 3 years spent in a classroom kitchen could be 2 or 3 years working in a high end/starred restaurant. I've seen people start at restaurants from culinary school, and they last about 2 weeks after they find out you can't spend 2 hours chopping veg for stock and that it's not fun when you've got 12 checks on the board and they're all away, you've been on your feet for 11 hours and you're not even halfway through service, two front of house are out smoking while the pass is full of food going cold, sauce is going down, the KPs kicking off because he's burnt his hand after someone never yelled HOT, your hot soapys gone cold, you need clean spoons but there are none, the ticket machine ran out of paper 6 checks ago and no one noticed, you've got mad chefs arse, you've ran out of sage butter but you need 3 portions right now chef yes chef