I don't cook professionally anymore,
but when I did I learned some very useful things. The most useful
among them was this; chef pants are the greatest pajamas in the
world. I am sitting here comfortably in my chefjamas with my second
favorite pair of flannel pajamas next to me, and I can't help but
think that there is really no comparison.
Fit – advantage chef pants. To put it
plainly, my flannel pajamas look more like a flannel potato sack.
After years of wear they are stretched and baggy. My chef pants, on
the other hand, look just about the same as the day I bought them,
despite the long hours in the kitchen, getting food and hot grease
splattered on them. The fit is as baggy as the jeans you wore in the
90's, or before your gastric bypass, and the rugged canvas doesn't
stretch and washes easily, but that does – unfortunately – bring
me to their one disadvantage.
Fabric comfort – advantage flannel.
I'm not saying that the canvas chef pants are uncomfortable, far from
it. After 2 or 3 trips through the laundry they're softer than khakis
or jeans, but you can't beat flannel for softness. But that softness
comes with a price.
Pockets – advantage chefjamas. If I
order a pizza at eleven o'clock in the evening – don't judge me –
and I put my cell phone in one pocket of my flannel pajamas and my
wallet in the other, when I get up to answer the door when the
delivery man arrives my pants are not coming with me. My trou will be
fully dropped. The pockets in flannel pants are not designed to hold
anything heavier than their own lint. Not only do my chef pants have
proper pockets that can actually hold things like keys, cell phone,
spice grinder, raw meat, discrete plastic bag of what I can only
assume is oregano... etc. they also have rear pockets for your
wallet, and whatever other unsavory things chefs keep... probably
drugs. And if I continue to use the example of ordering a pizza at
eleven PM, you wont even want to. Once you put on your chefjamas you
will be filled with a magical chefs-light. Ordering food someone else
made will be unthinkable. You've got chef pants on. You can make your
own damn pizza! Who needs that nasty cardboard grease pile? You're
going to make the greatest pizza the world has ever tasted!
Practicality – advantage chefjamas.
Despite their comfort and their supreme lounge-ability, these are
work pants and as such you may wear them in public, the same as you
would a pair of Dickies. And speaking of; unlike traditional pajama
pants chef pants don't have a fly. You can wear them to class and
rest one leg on the seat in front of you without... trying to say
this diplomatically – looking like a hot dog salesman.
Style – tie. You can get pajamas with
just about anything you want on them. My favorite pair have blue
polar bears on them, but you can get them in tartan, covered in
bottles of Tabasco sauce, polka-dotted, solid pink with “juicy”
written on the bottom or solid blue with “pink” written the same.
Chef pants are available in nearly as wide a range of styles
(including the Tabasco bottles, but minus the “pink” and
“juicy”), but if chef pants have one tiny stylistic advantage it
is this – Houndstooth.
So there you have it. Chef pants are
the ultimate in lounge-wear. Appropriate inside and out, from the
kitchen to the bedroom. However, my brother works in a hospital and
claims that I am wrong. He says that scrubs are the best pajamas.
They're appropriate inside and out, they are rugged, easy to wash,
have pockets, and are made of soft cotton, but he says that they have
one major advantage; scrubs don't have a front or a back, some of
them don't have an inside or an outside because doctors can be called
into emergency surgery at any time and they need to get dressed for
it as quickly as possible without getting tangled up putting their
pants on the wrong way around, so scrubs are as easy to put on as
humanly possible, and I will admit that there is something to be said
for that. But think about this; chefs are in near-constant danger of
being set on fire or splashed with hot oil, and when that happens the
best way to avoid serious injury is to remove the flaming article of
clothing. So while your fancy symmetrical scrubs may be designed to
go on faster, my chef pants are designed to come off.
Better.
Photo credit; your imagination.
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