Monica Geller - Career

Career

Monica is a chef, and, as with most areas of her life, she is obsessive and competitive. Monica uses Chantal cookware in blue. Originally, she was a poorly paid chef at a restaurant called Iridium. After accepting a promotion at Café des Artistes, she was fired for accepting a gift from a food distributor. Monica remained unemployed for a while before getting offered a job as a waitress at a 1950s-themed restaurant called the Moondance Diner, where she wears a blond wig, roller skates, and massive fake breasts. While working at the diner, she met millionaire Pete Becker (played by Jon Favreau), who used his money to open a restaurant and appoint Monica as head chef. After the relationship failed due to the consequences of Pete's desire to become the "UFC Champion", Monica began a short-lived catering business with Phoebe.

Also during her unemployed days, Monica worked for an unnamed food company, thinking up recipes and then making them, using substitute food products, such as 'Mocolate' (featured only in the season two episode "The One with the List"), a chocolate substitute which never took off due to its repulsive taste (Phoebe described the taste of Mocolate as being "what evil must taste like") and the side effect of causing urination to become painful if a large amount was eaten. Also during this time, to avoid taking a job in the aforementioned Moondance Diner, she temporarily bought shares in the stock market using the few savings left in her bank account ($127), despite not knowing anything about how it works, buying shares from companies only because of their names, not knowing what the companies did or how successful they were.

Monica began working as a restaurant critic for a local newspaper whilst setting up the catering business with Phoebe, assuring Phoebe that the two would not conflict. This quickly proved incorrect, as due to writing a fairly vicious review, and the subsequent sauce she cooked for the enraged owner, Monica was eventually hired as head chef at a local restaurant, Alessandro's. This put an end to the catering business. At first, Monica's employees disliked her because three of them were the children of the previous head chef who had been fired as a consequence of Monica's arrival. However, Monica hired Joey as a waiter, solely to fire him, thereby appearing to be a tough boss. It apparently worked, as her problems with her employees were reduced. She left Alessandro's when Chandler's firm required him to relocate to Tulsa, Oklahoma. However, when she contacted a job-hunter about Tulsa restaurant openings, she got a job as head chef at Javu, an upscale restaurant in Manhattan, forcing her to stay in New York.