High and low context cultures: some personal insights.

So, we were talking about the low and high context theory according to Edward T. Hall in school. I found this interesting because we got to see some theoretical insights about something we experience everyday.
The situation that sprang to my mind immediately about this subject was the period around my last year in secondary school and the year after where I worked full-time.

I was following hotel-school and during my training at school, everything was solely focussed on traditional French cuisine. In some way, this is a very low-context environment: It is focussed around some old books from a few selection of cooks who already passed away a long time ago. Every dish has it's own specific name, a very complete recipe to make it correctly as it has already been done for decades and a huge fan-base of purists who criticize you when you do it in a different way. Every classical French dish is described in the smallest details in order to make it how it should be made. And than we're only talking about the food, not to mention the chefs that seemingly all have to be white, middle-aged men with a bright, white uniform.
I thought this was very sad. At school, there was barely room for creativity and trying to do new things. I was told before that cooking was about creativity, making art with food, but at school, it felt as assembling some Ikea-furniture: It is what you expect, it does what it has to do, but it has no story or identity in it. Now, when you take a huge jigsaw, go nuts with the Ikea-furniture and make it into something extraordinary and unique, that's a different story. Not everyone will like it, but at least you have something with it's own identity.

I graduated, didn't knowing to be happy or sad, and after a short break of around a week I went out to look for a job. Somewhat regretting the choices I've made earlier and now being forced into a job which I thought had very little perspective due to the low-context nature of my training, I was open to every interesting offer, just to be able to see and learn something new. My former classmates were hunting jobs in the classical, high-profile restaurants, but I ended up in a small restaurant ran by an older Iranian woman. Despite being graduated as a cook, it was back to zero when I started there.
The first days, I didn't know what I saw. There were no cooking-books, recipes or angry chefs telling you exactly what to do. Everything here was, I finally know how to call it after this class, high-context cultured.
"How should I make this dish?", I often asked the first days. More often than not, the answer was "Just do what you want in order to make it taste good"
Not that much was documented extensively, there were no specific rules about the way to prepare every dish. Cooking had a bit more of a personal aspect in here. Sometimes, it worked out well, sometimes, it wasn't really how it should be.
But, often it was also quite difficult to work there in the beginning, because I didn't have experience with such a high-context environment in a professional situation.

I don't really know what was the best, a high-context or low-context culture. Is there something as 'the best choice'?
Sometimes, rules and regulations are necessary, however, a higher context culture appears more friendly and personal to me. It's just a matter of finding a balance between them both I guess, and the only way in achieving this is opening your eyes for other cultures and getting to know them, accept them and interact with them. The multicultural-society that everyone was hoping how it would turn out.

I know my story is a very specific situation, but for me, it gave me some insight and it was my own personal meeting between western and eastern culture. Also the theory about the iceberg metaphor appeared very clear to me due to this experience.
When I told people I was working in an Iranian restaurant, there were a few reactions that I heard several times, like:

• Oh, isn't it strange to work with muslims?
• Everything is very spicy there I guess?
• Iranians? Aren't they all terrorists?

By working there I realized that our view on something is always very narrow and influenced by media. When I look back, everything I ever heard about Iran in the media is that they are a threat because they're trying to develop nuclear weapons, they are very conservative muslims and regarding to their food, we seem to think that everything in Asia is just spicy. Honestly, some stereotypes were also in my mind before I worked there, but in reality it was completely different.
First of all, she wasn't muslim at all, she was a refugee who fled away after the Iranian revolution. As far as I know, she wasn't developing nuclear weapons in her basement and the food tasted very mild actually.
While working there, obviously I learned some new cooking techniques and dishes, but the most interesting thing I learned had absolutely nothing to do with cooking.