WHERE I COME FROM: PART ONE

BEER MONEY AND BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE

I always find myself doing what most chefs do very often, talking about my experiences in kitchens I have worked in, mostly comedic, sometimes anecdotal, almost always reverently and never, “how we used to do it at my last place”.  So, why not take those myriad and cherry picked experiences and quotes together and give the world at large the cliff notes of my journey through the culinary world.  I doubt anyone will read it, and I doubt anyone will care at all but I can promise two things from this serialized autobiography.  One, it will not be as entertaining as Kitchen Confidential. Two, it will be a story of growth and discovering happiness in the oddest of places.  

It was 2007, I tried to get my old job back at a dry cleaners summer after freshman year of college, the owner wouldn’t take my calls, it was ok, I was keeping the money I found in the pockets of unwashed clothes anyways.  But, I was 19 and needed beer money, weekend money, drug money, and any other kind of money.  My mom said I should go work at a seafood shack or a restaurant, it would be easy and I probably wouldn’t even have to work five days a week.  I had shunned her off because the thought of working in a restaurant sounded awful to me.  I was a lazy kid and I thought the only job they’d want me to do was wait tables; a notion that to this day still makes my stomach churn.  I may yell at waiters on occasion for taking food to the wrong table or for looking at me the wrong way, but I wouldn’t do their job if you paid me double what I know they’re already racking in.  

Anyways I answered an ad in the paper (I am dating myself so bad) for seasonal help at a restaurant down by the beach.  The owner seemed nice enough and asked what I wanted to do.  I said wash dishes, he replied asking if I knew how to prep food, and I said sure, I had lied before so why not this time, how hard could “doing food” be, I remember thinking. I started the next day and made 8 bucks an hour washing dishes and expediting after they found out I didn’t know my ass from a tomato.  I really didn’t care what I was doing, I was committed to doing it as close to half assed as would not be noticed and cashing my 300 dollar-before-tax check every wednesday.  

Two things went wrong right off the bat.  The first, was that it wasn’t at all easy and the second was that everything I did was critiqued and any mistake I made was instantly noticed.  If I didn't run the silverware through twice, the chef caught it, if I didn't dry the saute pans, the Mexican saute cook would hurl them at me when the oil he put in it started to pop.  So, there went my intentions of doing the least amount of work possible.  This was further compounded by my dishwashing and expediting duties being expanded as the summer rush increased to emptying line garbage, hosing down mats, all things related to grease and grease traps, and eventually peeling all manner of things that needed to be peeled. 

The chef was a fuck, and I say “a fuck” and not “a fucker” or “a fucking hardass” because he genuinely sucked.  The Mexican line cooks and his sous chef, whom next summer would be dutifully promoted, did all the work.  I remember all the servers laughing at him because he couldn’t make a cold soup and instead basically made 5 gallons of shitty vinaigrette; he would spend the rest of the night doing inventory or something.  By about July, I actually started to enjoy it all.  The scrapes, the cuts, the foul language, the cooks sneaking me beers and vodka sodas, the comradery.  I had joined a fraternity in college and the similarities were, well, honestly comforting.  And I remind you, I was, with overtime, taking home more money then I had ever seen, so there was that.  But most importantly, I was learning.  I might not have known it, but I was watching how the cooks turned potatoes, how they let a stock come up to a boil then immediately turn it down to a simmer.  I had found out I was very good at shucking oysters and clams, that I could prep haddock en papillote reasonably fast, and by the end of that summer I even learned some Spanish, enough to get me a hooker in Mexico City and make it back to the airport without offending anyone at least.   

I returned the next summer despite trying not to for some reason, call it that nagging nonsense in the back of my head that tried telling me I was some college boy better than these foul mouthed submariners, and I went dutifully back to the dish pit and the expo station.  And someone convinced someone to give me a raise, 10 bucks an hour, don’t worry, I did the math, and that was a lot of Keystone Light.  The former sous chef, now head chef, had scheduled me two days out of the week to do prep work too, which was a nice change of pace.  I came to realize that this was both a blessing and a curse. 

The blessing was, that when given a list or task, usually no one bothered you until it was done, save for the occasional call from the fry station for more fish, or a call to run outside to the walk-in for more demi-glace.  The curse was, the limp-legged prep cook had little respect, as he should, for a lazy white kid like me.  He had been working as the prep cook at this joint for 12 yrs when I got there and the chip on his shoulder was the size of a windmill.  But, in-between him yelling at me and threatening to kill my family and fuck my corpse, I learned a lot.  A basic meatball recipe I still use to this day for instance, or how you dip a flounder tail in boiling water to release the skin, then pull in one motion to skin it.  He and I, in later years, became good friends, and he even told me once “You never made me use my beautiful language, so that makes you a good one”, referring to how he hating speaking Spanish to Americans because it was too beautiful for their ears, and how he only spoke Spanish when angry.

Fast forward to the next summer and I didn’t even have to call the chef to ask for my old job back.  I got back into town from school and went in that weekend and started working.  The chef wouldn’t let me be a dishwasher anymore, he handed me a piece of paper with  “twelve dollars” written on it and worked the shift with me on the garde manger station.  Within a week I was working two doubles and 3 nights, which turned into 3 doubles and 2 nights when the night time Salad Girl started calling off too much.  I was shucking oysters, I was making dressings from scratch, pounding carpaccios; my station had 20 items on it and although I was, back then, trying to convince myself this job was beneath me, I loved it.  

The pressure, the pace, the drugs and the booze of course, but mainly the craft and discipline.  I am to this day enamored with the fact that all those cooks, and later myself, could party every night like it was the end of the world, and come in the next day and strap on some whites and look like decent members of society.  That they could be total fuck ups in every aspect of their lives, but their stations were spotless, their knife cuts flawless, and their plates, oh man, the wrath they could bring down upon a waiter for fucking with their finished plates.  I would go back to that joint by the sea for one more season after I graduated college.  Little did I know that the last three years were the beginning of the end of my plans of getting a “real” job after college.  Looking back, I wish I could have told my past self that sooner.  

Coming soon…

WHERE I COME FROM, PART II: FOOD IS ART AND LYING TO YOUR DAD