I was sitting in this very house, my mother's house, still as sparsely furnished as it was then. Single mother-restaurateurs don't have much time for interior decoration. At least not in their own homes. The curtains remain temporary paper hangings, there still aren't any hand towels in the bathroom. My "bedroom" is and was the storage room, a place to conveniently hoard the odds and ends of our move while I was away at college. A desk was fashioned out of a cardboard box of nameless VHS tapes, two beds were set up because there was nowhere else to put them, and the metal folding chair I planted my ass in for so much of high school, practicing the cello, was my desk chair. I don't care much for ergonomic-leather-conforming-ass-palaces, my posterior is very accustomed to a hard piece of ... recycled steel. Two not-yet unpacked suitcases served as my dresser and the lack of any other creature comforts reinforced the idea that I was transient. A bum college student who was decidedly aimless, no career goals in sight, just enjoying the ride, not aggressively hunting a valuable internship like my peers. My summer would be reserved for what I like to call "loafing and straight-chillin'," to recover from the "stressful" academic year.
When you have zero career goals and you're majoring in Distribution Requirements until you can figure your shit out, your days are quite carefree. No long game in sight, just waking up without any worries, it is a very happy existence. One can draw comparisons to a clam, nestling deep in the warm, wet sand without any idea or care of what's coming, completely isolated from the outside world.
Yep, that was me. Truly the adage embodied.
And then epiphany dawned.
Everybody misuses the word epiphany. When you finally figure out how that corkscrew contraption works on a bottle of wine, or that Star Wars was an accidental masterpiece, or when you realize you can use Google as a calculator we are quick to jump to the word "epiphany."
e·piph·a·ny–noun
3. a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.It was somewhere in between watching Ratatouille, sitting on my ass with my broken ankle and watching my grandmother butcher the hell out of a chicken that I thought ... what would it be like to cook for a living?
The thought passed with little consequence. I went back to watching videos of BMX wannabes suffering hospitalizing injuries in their driveways. I was probably fulfilling my Omega Nerd status by playing World of Warcraft (yeah, I know .. I'm awesome). What else do you do with a broken ankle and an asinine amount of free time?
Then as I was going to sleep and the night's penchant for bringing on introspection crept upon me, the lazy thought that rolled over my brain earlier, rolled back to the forefront. What would it be like to cook for a living?
I jumped up in bed. My spine had become a lightning rod for a rare useful thought, scared stiff by a sudden and compelling idea. What would it be like to cook for a living?
It all made sense somehow. All my character defects and personality quirks seemed to fit. An obsession over seemingly useless details and minutia, an absolute abhorrence of downtime and idling, a means to sate my short attention span with real-time results and improvement, manual labor, a guarantee that even if unable to move out of a studio apartment that I'd at least be eating well, a frustrating need to be creative, little to no advanced math required to perform. This ... could fucking work!
Impulsive creature that I am, I set about researching famous chefs, their educations and what schools were worthy. I was quite set and ready to say "Hey Mom, sorry but I'm not going back to Northwestern in the fall. I'm going to [insert culinary school here]" And if I could manage to survive the thrust of her kitchen knife, I was quite convinced I was off to France to become the next Ming Tsai.
This is going to be awesome, I told myself.
Well it was. For a while. But reality has a way of shattering one's dreams.
See, even though I had grown up in the restaurant business, I was so pitifully unaware of my surroundings and upbringing that I had failed to really pay any attention to what that lifestyle entailed. I was hypnotized, brainwashed, not unlike many cooks of my generation, by that temptress known as the Food Network. Yes, I will admit it. It shames me so. It'd be like a hipster admitting they only started listening to Arcade Fire after they won the Grammy for 2011 (still convinced it was a posthumous award for Funeral, I mean there's no way The Suburbs deserved that one). It is a tale I tell almost no one, but here I am dispersing my embarrassment to the winds of the Internet.
I just didn't get it. I was excited. It was first love. You've got your blinders on, you don't know there's a train coming, you're just running with it because it feels so good. Never you mind that you've never had a stiletto heel driven through your heart, or you've never known another woman or what you could possibly like in another person you plan to spend forever with. Sorry, what were we talking about again?
Oh yeah, cooking. It looked so... so... fucking pretty! It's in Technicolor and soft-filtered light! Giada's tits were bouncing in my face as her sentences came to screeching halts when she put on her Italian accent, but who fucking cares? That bitch calls herself a chef, I can fucking do that, I'm personable! I can be charming! Anybody can cook, Remy the Rat taught me that! I'd be motorboating that woman's replacement in no time!
And so I set out. Following my grandmother around in the kitchen (on crutches mind you), asking her how to do this, or how to do that. I talked excitedly to my mother about how I had finally found a career path, that I was going to follow in her footsteps. The Asian mother in her managed to restrain itself from vomiting/stabbing me in the heart long enough to politely smile and say "That's ... (varicose vein) ... nice..." I picked up a knife for maybe the second time ever and clumsily sliced mushrooms for my grandmother (It's cool, Alton Brown showed me how to do this), and most importantly/embarrassingly, I continued to watch the Food Network.
That was step one. We'll call that stage "Before the Red Pill." Reality has not set in, we have not yet lost cabin pressure. I was going to be a celebrity chef and nothing could stop me. I was going to be that smiling asshole on TV and the bitches would come running...
I came upon a more useful and realistic introduction in to the culinary world through books. Letters to a Young Chef by Daniel Boulud, The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman, The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin, I devoured any literature on how the greats became great. Only, I still had no idea what great meant, and I still had no idea what exactly it meant to be "great."
But it was helpful nonetheless. I would be lying if my impressionable self wasn't severely influenced by Kitchen Confidential. When the history books are written and the demographics come out for millennial cooks, you're going to see a disturbing amount of Bourdain and Bobby Flay influence. But it prepared me just a little bit better.
I knew I had to practice. Cooking was a craft for sure, and one that required daily and abusive honing. The merits of practice were not lost on me, I understood from years of cello that playing a c minor scale every day just made Bach's 5th Suite go better (still a bitch of a Prelude though).
I have some cringeworthy memories of cooking at 912. This was my first apartment, no more dining halls, it was time to feed myself. Never mind that I actually have no fucking idea how to cook properly. I could pretend like I was a hot shot anyway, no one would know any better. I distinctly remember baking a cherry tomato-chicken casserole like I knew what I was fucking doing. If I recall the chicken was so poorly browned, and the onions so poorly cooked that it was damn near inedible, but my roommates complimented me knowingly or unknowingly I may never confirm. I squeezed on a bit of lemon juice and showered on a bit of salt just to feel even more like a professional. I was only kidding myself.
But I was slowly changing course. I realized that there was no honor and no real respect to be had in being a food TV personality. If I planned to run a restaurant, be a real chef then I had to emulate the likes of Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre-White ... not Rachael Ray, Alton Brown or Tyler Florence.
I continued to cook at home, acting the part, but I knew that my path inevitably would have to lead to an internship. A stage, an unpaid stint in a real kitchen where I would be of little more importance than a broom-hand. But college got in the way. There was too much beer pong, and frisbee, and females running around to really concentrate on anything meaningful. Not to mention I wanted to graduate and that meant my nonexistent academic conditioning was being put to the test daily. Did I mention that I'm a wuss? Oh yeah, that was a problem too ... how the hell am I supposed to convince someone to let me in their kitchen and fuck up their heirloom tomato salads?
It took a year, but the courage was eventually found. I called Oceanique every few days asking for the chef. He never seemed to be there, he never returned my phone calls. I began to lose hope even though I hadn't yet been rejected. I was fabricating excuses to not pick up the phone. The shred of perseverance that exists within me won through though, I finally got him on the phone.
"Have you ever done a stage before?"
Wow I wish I had thought of at least one useful response, time to bullshit.
"I mean, I grew up in the restaurant business so I'm pretty comfortable in a kitchen."
"Alright... 1 PM, this Friday. Wear dark pants, I'll give you a coat, bring a hat."
"Yes, Chef."
That would be the first time I ever uttered those words. "Yes, Chef." Giddy up, let's go.
If I was hoping to be greeted by a beautiful stainless steel kitchen, if I was hoping to encounter a band of roguish cooks with hearts of gold, tight-knit like a rock band, if I was hoping to get to actually cook something ... then I was an idiot. And I was definitely never short on idiocy in those days.
The kitchen was small, the hot line snaked around the dishwasher, the garde manger and the butcher table in such a strange manner. It was dark, it was uncomfortably warm and there was Mexican polka blaring at an unsafe volume from a 1980's boombox. No one spoke English, no one so much as even cared I existed. The chef was late so I was left to stand there awkwardly as people walked around me as if I were an inconveniently placed rack cart. The hostess and the sassy gay waiter continued their gossip while giving me apprehending looks, a cook began deftly taking apart a whole cobia.
What planet am I on? I've been in my mother's kitchen my whole life but for some reason, when suddenly thrust in to the thick of the line and to be expected to perform with the staff, what was once familiar became alien.
The chef finally shows up, about a half-hour late. He's carrying a box of organic beets, seemingly straight from the ground, likely personally harvested by him. He hurriedly explains a few things and shoves me in to the basement bakery with Javel, a towering mountain of a man with unshaven jowls and a great, big belly. I still don't know to this day if Javel speaks English as he communicated in the kind of grunts and gesturing usually reserved for human-chimp interactions. He mimed peeling a stalk of rhubarb with a paring knife, and dumped a box of the stuff on the table.
And I pretty much stayed there for the rest of service. Cleaning ovens, sweeping and mopping, organizing boxes, cooling then wrapping hazelnut tarts. By the time I thought I could go home I was gross, sweaty and tired. My face would bear a red glow for the next few hours as I had spent an inordinate amount of time getting intimate with a still-400 degree oven, scrubbing her naughty bits and shining her shoes. That coppery tang you get on the roof of your mouth when you work with generic Comet/Ajax cleaner made food unpalatable, and my hands were more wrinkled than I had ever seen them. They seemed ghostly white, alien appendages that would never regain their luster. And don't even get me started on my cuticles, they were a mess, after all the work and care I put in to them...
Okay, I was being a little bitch. I did something I will forever be ashamed of. I was tired and wanted to go home. I thought I was done cleaning and as I'm about to ask if I can go, Jose says we need to clean the pantry. There are heaps of garbage, cardboard boxes needing to be broken down, cans and boxes to shelve. My heart dropped through the bottom of my stomach. Fuck that. I tell him I have to be somewhere and all he says is "Okay, bye."
Welcome to stage two. We have downed the red pill, the mirror has melted and I just woke up in a spire of incubated humans.
I barely saw any food cooked that whole night, no one talked to me, the chef wasn't hovering over my shoulder teaching me the finer details of frying an egg. What the fuck? I thought I was set. I walked in thinking this is the beginning of my illustrious career, here I come world! You can kindly start engraving my name in the Pantheon of Culinary Gods now, I'll see you in a few years once I finish this stage and go be the fucking boss (pronounced"bause") somewhere.
It was the harsh reality of professional cooking. In the large majority of restaurant kitchens in this country, people do this job because they have to. They don't have viable skills to insert themselves in comfier parts of society, they are relegated to serving the rest of the world. It is a dirty, thankless and oft-misunderstood job. You spend a shit ton of time cleaning, and you can spend years working 70-hour weeks with no weekends to learn a craft people really appreciate, but will never want to embark on themselves.
I knew all this. It was latent. My childhood was grounded in never having anyone home because they were too busy making a living. It just all suddenly gushed up, someone pulled the stopper and in my panic the only people I had to turn to were ice-cold Mexican cooks who knew, not thought, that I was a piece of shit barely worth his oxygen in the kitchen.
I almost didn't go back. The thought of a year of hope and optimism coming crashing down, going back to professional vagabundus was ... disheartening to say the least.
I went home, told everyone it went well and sat outside with a pack of cigarettes to really think this over.
Okay, you were caught slightly off-guard. The spell was broken. My mother shielded me from this harsh reality, and the Food Network lied to me about what it was like. Even all the books ... sweeping romantic prose of hard-working cooks in some Alsatian mountain range painted a very different picture. Doubtless, they worked hard but the gritty details, the nasty bits were left out. This was a little too real for me. Was I really prepared to do this?
I went back for Saturday service. Normally, I am a self-admitted quitter but something in me told me you can't give up just yet. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was ignorance, they often blend together to form their own cocktail of emotional miasma, but I went back. I tried to remember all the basic Spanish I learned in middle school, took a cold shower and chose a different hat. Navy blue Yankees hat would be the helmet I would strap in to battle. It's business time.
And since then my life has forever changed.
I went back and realized why that epiphany was so compelling to me. The thrill of service. Well, it can be a thrill, it can also be the greatest fucking nightmare conceived by man. You'll forgive me the comparisons, I'm not trying to macho up the culinary world more than it already is, but it is not unlike war (something I have zero understanding of I might add). There isn't time enough to think, you hope your training and your preparation was good enough, you rely on your squadmates and you fucking roll. Time blurs, hours pass by in seeming seconds, and you are running like a high-octane F1 engine. If you're doing well, staying on top of your tickets... there is no greater feeling in the world. If you're in the weeds, if disaster strikes, if you've got so many dupes lined up you can't even remember if you're going left-to-right or right-to-left... there is no quicker way to bleed your heart out with stress. I love it. I watched service for the first time in my life and it wrapped its arms around me with the kind of numb tingling a bad cocaine spell will give you. It said, "Welcome. Stay awhile. If you can."
I would work weekends with Chef Grosz at Oceanique for that summer of 2008 and a few weekends throughout the school year, whenever he needed help and I was available. Did I learn much there? Not terribly so, it was just a basic introduction really. I maintain that Chef Grosz is a very talented cook, his eye for plating and flavor is naturally adept. But it was difficult to tell which way was up in that kitchen sometimes. Even a very good kitchen will be calculated chaos at best, but it was really difficult to tell what was going on there. Regardless, it was necessary. And important. Without that stage and the subsequent recommendation from Chef Grosz, I don't think Chef Muldrow would have ever taken me at Va Pensiero. And without that I never would have gotten that job, that very first job as a full-time line cook. And without that ... well, I wouldn't be worth much.
Fast forward 3 years and here we are.
I haven't cooked in a little while, I've been stuck in the front. Three phone lines are ringing while this ancient woman can't remember if she left her credit card there and she's trying to describe to me which table she sat at and that I should go look for it, even though there's a slight (read: likely) possibility it's in her car. This customer is standing in front of me with three kids desperately in need of some Ritalin/a beating so they just sit the fuck down for a second. She wants to know where her take-out order is and ... oh, is the Barbecued Shrimp actually pan-fried? Why is it called barbecue then, that's misleading, I don't eat fried food, you should change that! Tell them I don't want it, and switch it out .. oh and even though I just changed my order now, I still want it in the promised 15 minute time frame. Yeah, I fucking know we should change that. It's called having English as a second language. Be thankful it's spelled correctly and not just a poorly marketed description of a nuance in culinary technique, cunt. We are pretty critically understaffed, but yet busier than we've ever been. My fear is that all this boon in business is going to recede like a post-orgasmic flaccid dick if we can't prove we can perform at this capacity. My neighbor is sitting at his usual table, A3. He's a complete jerk-off, he has more money than God but he refuses to pay $12.00 for a Cantonese Lobster soup we made with a lobster we killed specifically for him, I might add. He calls the waiter an idiot. Again, I don't want you calling anyone an idiot unless you've waited tables in your second language. There are a ton of walk-ins waiting for tables, they're huffing and puffing that they can't believe you need a reservation for "Chinese food on a Wednesday?!" in the kind of manner that I'm not supposed to hear, but I actually can hear, you fuck-face. Kiss my ass, if it's good, then it's worth waiting for. If you don't have the patience, go the fuck home and have your trophy wife whip you up some dinner. Oh wait, she has zero practical life skills because she used her looks to get anywhere in life, I forgot. Loving someone for their looks or their money, which is more shallow, you decide. Here, here's a glass of our house pinot grigio, I made all the money I spent on it with the one glass I've poured so far, so no, I don't care about giving you a glass on the house if it means you'll just shut the fuck up for just a minute. Ugh, the phone is ringing again... please stop. Just stop ringing, the sound of your ringing wakes me up in the middle of the night with the kind of cold sweat PTSD patients find themselves in when they remember seeing their buddy's arm get blown off by an IED. Just .. stop.
This is all internal dialogue by the way. I'm all fucking smiles on the outside. At least for now. I can tell my ability to maintain composure is beginning to crack like a faulty dam.
Am I bitter? Jaded? Changed?
Maybe a little, but that's only because I've been inserted in the wrong place. I was never meant to be in the front. I don't like other people, I try to avoid them at all costs. I don't like talking to strangers, I don't like small talk, I hate telephones. My ideal vacation consists of books, coffee, cigarettes and some remote piece of land preferably near a lake with a yearly temperature average hovering around 60. So, you're asking a badger to go live with a pack of prairie dogs, that's not how it works. We are all designed for certain things, and smiling and talking to customers for 50 hours a week was not what I was designed for. I am not inherently a very social creature.
But it is an important skill nonetheless. Restaurants can have bad food, but bad service will sink you faster. I've learned a lot of lessons in infinite fucking patience. And patience is going to be what it takes to take the right steps towards opening a restaurant, towards calling myself a chef.
I don't want to be Grant Achatz anymore. I don't want to be David Chang, I don't want to be the chef with crossed arms and a knife on the cover of magazines. I don't want to be a buzzword in the blogosphere. I just want to create a good restaurant with happy staff, serving food I deem to be delicious, giving service I am proud of at a price so that I can have a meager living in New York City. I could lay that out for you in great detail as time goes by, but that's just the gist of it now. I'm not a culinary genius, I'm never going to push the envelope of food and its subsequent preparation. But what I am designed for, what I am inherently good at, I think, is making other people happy.
Happy cooks cook good food. Happy waiters don't have to be taught how to give good service, they just do it. Purveyors happy with your relationship will hook you up, they won't hound you with a phone call demanding cash on delivery, they'll tell you they have beautiful line-caught striped bass and they wanted you to know first. Happy customers don't bitch and sneer and cause problems, or send food back because they feel like they're getting gouged. Happy-ness makes it all happen.
I've learned a lot since I've been home. Maybe not about Chinese food, but about myself and what to expect when it comes to running a restaurant. Staff is critical and limiting yourself by setting requirements like "speaks Chinese," "willing to commute to Long Island," "will work for X amount of money" is just setting yourself up for disaster. You're going to spend arguably more time with your staff than your wife ... choose them just as carefully. Choose the best, don't set up a check list for them to measure up to (ladies, take note), acquire good people who will grow in to good workers. Too many cooks of my generation will focus all on food. If they survive the harsh encounters with reality that I did, with a greater appetite than before, than that's just the first step. If they think being well-rounded means you are also proficient at pastry, then that's the second step. If they realize that a restaurant is almost entirely about managing people and not just pork products, then they'll be where I deem myself to be.
I've missed you. There's a lot to talk about. There's a lot I've learned. And I'm going to tell you about it in due time. But, it's just ... I'm sorry, the phone is ringing.
Excuse me,
EP6
