Jerome Lorieux is in the doghouse. A few weeks earlier, some of his remarks ended up in print. Nothing bad, mind you, and nothing other chefs haven't complained about. These days, however, just about anything can be misconstrued.

So, toward the end of a lengthy interview session, Nils Jebens, owner of the Kampa Group restaurants, steps into La Provence, observes Lorieux speaking to a reporter and waylays his young chef. "I thought I told you ..." his voice trailing off, like a father — partly in jest, but always teaching. Be careful how you present yourself is his lesson this time.

Chefs must please many bosses, after all. There are the guests, several hundred every day, health inspectors and the occasional critic. Purveyors beg for attention. VIPs yearn for an introduction. At the most fundamental level, one must balance the desires of management and the grunts, the men and women who cook, haul food out to the tables or clean up afterward.

"The staff and the boss are on either side and you need to make both happy," says Lorieux, the 28-year-old Parisian in charge of La Provence's kitchen for the past seven months. So a little bit of time in the doghouse is easy enough to bear.

"Being a chef, you're always on your own."

On your own in the middle of a hornet's nest is a more apt description. The life of a chef, particularly those working for top-notch restaurants, can be anything but glamorous. They spend much of the day on their feet. "Most places you're working 12 to 16 hours a day," Lorieux says. "If it's your own place, you work every day until you drop." Indeed, during a stint in Geneva he spent so much time manning the grill that he dropped 30 pounds (13.5 kilograms) in less than six months.

And kitchens are fickle, menacing places. Problems lurk with every turn of a switch, every flick of a blade. "Every one gets cuts, everyone has burns," the chef confides. "I got stitches only once." Catastrophes are common occurrences. Lorieux prepared 80 entrees in darkness after a minor electrical short circuit knocked out lights in his kitchen. Another time a gas grill burst unexpectedly to life, singeing off all his facial hair.

"There's always something going wrong," he explains with a matter-of-fact shrug. "Guests don't know it. They should never see it or feel it."

They should never, in fact, know the isolation of a life spent in doghouses and hornet's nests. When someone from Kampa Group management asked if, after a few months in Prague, the young chef had found a girlfriend, he scoffed. "Do you want me to have a girlfriend? Do you want me here or at home?"

Fresh out of Montereau-Fault-Yonne culinary academy, not far from Paris, the 19-year-old Lorieux set up a restaurant for his parents — designing the menu, ordering equipment, training staff. His mother and father quit full-time jobs in order to open a place with their young prodigy in charge. When a better offer came along, however, he took off. Leaving his family with a successful restaurant, of course, but leaving them.

He has no illusions about the lifestyle. During his time in cooking school he approached a friend of the family, also a restaurateur. "Are you sure you want to be a chef?" the elder neighbor asked. "Being a chef is for idiots. Are you an idiot?"

"Yeah," Lorieux responded. "When do you want me to start?"

"First you learn to clean. Then you learn to cook."

By then he already knew how to handle a stove. He started cooking lunch for his father and younger siblings at the age of 10 (although, Lorieux admits, his first attempt was rather basic, involving melted cheese). The rest he learned from harsh taskmasters, such as his neighbor and his culinary instructor, and from extensive travel.

If there is a plus to professional cooking, it's the almost global demand for your services. Over the past nine years, the vagabond chef has spent time in his native France, England, Poland, Switzerland, Norway and now the Czech Republic. There are benefits to roaming, like the time he cooked for Jimmy Carter or the day Tina Turner poked into his kitchen. "She's very picky," he recalls. "She had to have tagliatelle with truffles, that's it." OK, so it was the extent of their conversation — "Can you do tagliatelle with truffles?" "Yeah." — but how many regular folks encounter the voice behind "What's Love Got To Do With It" in their workplace?

In England, Prince Charles and Jackie Stewart were regulars. Of course, bouncing from place to place also means one must eventually sample the local delicacies. Coming face to face with a plate of lutefisk, the traditional Scandinavian serving of "fermenting" fish, can be a memorable experience. "The first two years I refused to taste it," he admits. Then one day a woman dragged him over to her mother's place for dinner. It was the type of situation where turning down food amounts to a slap in the face, so he grimaced, squirmed in his chair and finally tried a piece.

"I ended up taking some home with me," he says with a laugh.

He picks up some new flavor, some new twist on a traditional recipe at each stop — all part of the learning process. "You always have to adapt to the tastes of the [local] people," he points out. That means easing off on the heat when preparing fish, for example, in Oslo, where they like a cooler center. Or leaning on the burner in England, where they prefer it cooked thoroughly. "It's difficult for a French chef," he explains, referring now to beef. "We don't have 'medium.' We have blue, rare, medium rare. I had to learn medium in England."

Prague offers up challenges of its own. Right away, Lorieux picked up on Czech tastes and the corresponding habits of line cooks. Like the British, Czechs typically "overcook" things such as steak. And, being a landlocked country, the experience with shellfish is scarce, at best — which leads to his biggest complaint: "I couldn't find any good oyster knife in Prague."

It may sound trivial, but chefs place tremendous value on equipment. They have a rather intimate feel for the way different metals conduct heat, for example, and the unpredictable hotspots on certain stovetops. And they approach the subject of knives with an almost mystical reverence.

Ask Lorieux about this and he almost bristles. "It's your knife," he says brusquely. "No one uses your knife. No one sharpens your knife." He considers a blade dropped to the floor even once to be damaged beyond repair.

So when a local supplier promises an oyster knife sturdy enough to last through 400 oysters, the chef just grunts. "I sell 400 oysters a week."

Otherwise, he's quite happy working in Prague, although (not surprisingly) work pretty much defines his existence in the city. Czech cuisine? Lorieux knows very little about it. "I haven't gotten around to eat," he says, declaring himself a "street-food addict."

At the end of a long day — and night — overseeing steeping pots of beef bourguignon and line cooks whisking sauce béarnaise, that ever-present loneliness returns. "No one wants to eat with me after 10 p.m., and I don't want to sit down and be served," he explains, again with a shrug. But he can grab a slice of pizza around the corner.

So why take up a life devoted to the kitchen? You are, as he points out, always on your own. And you can be, as he is at the moment, a young man still picking up tips from a weathered boss.

Lorieux doesn't answer right away. He's well aware of the demands and admits Jebens is hard to please — "he travels a lot and knows the best restaurants" — and expects quite a lot from his staff. But any good chef wants to work for someone who won't slack off. And all must deal with purveyors and balance sheets and the constant headaches of the service industry life.

"Why be a chef?" he says after a thoughtful pause. "The people you work with are always fun, always young." The pressure wears on a person, certainly. "You get older faster, but you still feel young."

So, at 28, Jerome Lorieux is quite young, alone and in the doghouse. But no matter — he's found a solution to his most pressing concern. "My sister is bringing me an oyster knife from France," he says, smiling at the thought.