My first on-the-books job was at a restaurant in Rocky Mount, N.C., called Just What the Doctor Ordered. Located down the road from the local hospital, it was a theme joint of sorts, with all the waitstaff wearing scrubs or other medical apparel and taking down orders on prescription notepads.
As a 16-year-old dipping my toes into both the workforce and the food industry, it was quite an experience. I witnessed all the highs and lows of working in a restaurant: servers berating hosts for not seating a table in their section, or for seating a table in their section; coworkers who are clearly sleeping together trying not to fight during the lunch rush. Hell, I saw a cook try to strangle a waiter after the waiter suggested he speed up. Cut to two sweaty dudes in scrubs, rolling around the floor and covered in food scraps while one yelled, “You’re not a real doctor. You can’t tell me what to do!”
Still, the worst fight I ever saw at Just What the Doctor Ordered was over Garth Brooks. The restaurant had a complicated turn-based system for choosing the music in the kitchen. One day “Friends in Low Places” almost caused a mass walk-out in the middle of dinner service. As the country anthem blared out from a heavily stained boom box, one of the servers uttered a sentence that can destroy a work relationship in seconds.
“Man, I hate this fucking song.”
That was all it took for the vicious epithets to fly. People’s musical tastes were attacked. CDs were flung into the trash. And a delicate ecosystem was destroyed, simply by playing the wrong song at the wrong time.
It sounds silly, but anyone who has worked in the food industry can attest to the power of the playlist. Clearly, a bad one can be divisive and sap morale. But a good soundtrack, whether in the kitchen or the dining room, can set the tone for a great night.
In the spirit of this week’s Food Issue, I spoke with some local food service workers to hear what they’re cooking to.
David Zeidler, co-owner and culinary director of Barkeaters in Shelburne, was more than happy to speak on the subject.
“I’ve been waiting for basically my entire life for anyone to ask me questions about my approach to mixtape curation,” he said when I called.
Zeidler has a more than casual relationship with music. He helped stage the dunk!USA post-rock music festival at Higher Ground in 2017 and has written for online music magazine Arctic Drones. He also operates Young Epoch, a music PR company — which is wild when you consider that the dude’s day job is running a restaurant.
Maybe it’s his pedigree, but Zeidler also tends to be the one curating the tunes in Barkeaters’ kitchen.
“I bought a Bluetooth speaker for anyone in the kitchen to use, but barely anyone ever uses it but me,” Zeidler confessed. “The vibes can be summed up as ‘Music I Like, That’s Also Sonically and Lyrically Appropriate for a Workplace Setting.’”
That entails a lot of alternative rock from the ’90s, early 2000s indie, classic hip-hop, some ’80s hits and “a healthy dose of classic rock.”
The last selection seems to be almost uniform across restaurant kitchens. Whether it’s a five-star steakhouse or an Applebee’s off a highway exit, the chances of hearing “Stairway to Heaven” booming near a walk-in cooler are high. (Somewhere out there in the universe, Lester Bangs is nodding sagely, as if to say, Yes, that is exactly what I said would happen.)
Zeidler likes to curate multiple playlists both for prep and for dinner service. The prep mix features songs by the likes of Manic Street Preachers, Paramore, NOFX, and lots of Coheed and Cambria. His dinner service mix features more hip-hop and electronica by the likes of People Under the Stairs, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah and DJ Shadow. (He’s got the Gin Blossoms in there as well because that band is a goddamned treasure, maligned in the ’90s by dumb kids like me who thought songs about heroin were sooooo cool. No, Chris. Songs about running away from the cops with your old high school crush are cool.)
Not every kitchen has a music writer compiling its soundtracks. One of my favorite local haunts since I moved to Colchester a few years ago is New York Pizza Oven. The NYPO (as I like to call it) is a proper no-frills kind of pizza joint with a shockingly killer meatball sub. (That’s right, I’m doing food reviews now. Our food writers Melissa Pasanen and Jordan Barry better look for new jobs!)
Just kidding, I have the palate of a 5-year-old at a Denny’s. Which is one of the reasons I go to NYPO several times a week to order the same (frankly, excellent) chicken Caesar salad.
Unlike some of the trendier kitchens in Burlington, the NYPO is usually rocking modern country music, with occasional forays into classic rock. When I popped in to get my latest lunch order, I talked with NYPO manager Devin Dessormeau about what sounds keep him and his crew going as they toss dough. Phil Collins’ pro-drowning epic “In the Air Tonight” was playing in the background, and I can report that neither Dessormeau nor I air-drummed the fill when it came across the speakers.
“Honestly, I just like noise,” Dessormeau said with a laugh when I asked what kind of tunes he preferred to listen to at work. “Anything to distract you, you know?”
There’s not a lot of curation to Dessormeau’s process. He turns on the Sonos Wi-Fi speakers and either plays a classic rock or country channel, or cues up something from his own library.
“If it’s just me back there cooking, I’ll play heavier rock or metal, maybe a little rap,” he said. He rarely faces pushback from coworkers, nor is there any kind of democratic approach to who chooses the music.
“I come in first,” Dessormeau pointed out with a grin. “I turn the Sonos on and play what I want. It’s connected to my phone, so I win every time.”
Over at Majestic café and bar in Burlington’s South End, the kitchen and front-of-house music are one and the same, and usually of the vinyl persuasion. The music is curated by bartender and co-owner Hayley Burgos, who says she prefers playing actual albums because “it makes everyone listen to whole damn albums again.” Some go-to favorites are Sade’s Diamond Life, Young Americans by David Bowie, Miike Snow’s self-titled album, Burlington expat Caroline Rose’s Superstar and Jimmy Cliff’s classic, The Harder They Come.
Though she maintains an eclectic mix of rock, reggae, disco and other genres, Burgos puts a lot of thought into how she constructs the day’s soundtrack. “I try to think about things like the day, time and weather when I’m picking out the first [songs] for the night,” she said. “Tuesday at 5 p.m. is definitely a different vibe than, say, Friday at 9 p.m. Some songs just hit better on a rainy day.”
Majestic has a nice collection of vinyl records from which Burgos selects the majority of the music. But she’s ready to put a playlist on when the record player has any hiccups.
“It turns out they can be a little finicky when you play them for hours on end most days of the week,” Burgos noted.
Like Dessormeau and Zeidler, Burgos doesn’t have to fight for her tunes. Majestic’s staff seems in harmony over her choices. “We’re all around the same age, so anything [from the] ’90s is a great equalizer,” she said.
I guess Just What the Doctor Ordered really was that dysfunctional, but I totally thought there would be more playlist discord in Vermont kitchens. It’s nice to know that local cooks can keep things rocking without any fistfights over Garth Brooks. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Eye on the Cui-scene: Behind the Music in Three Local Restaurant Kitchens”
This article appears in The Food Issue • 2026.
