The Truth Is Here

Over the course of my life most of my important decisions have been made rather whimsically and without consideration. I rarely took precautions to think more than a few moves ahead, I followed my heart and by some miracle, I'm not dead and I have a college education (whatever that's worth nowadays).

I chose to play the cello. Why? Because my mom put me through a few torturous violin lessons, and standing while playing required much more energy than my chubby boy-frame could handle. Admittedly, my large stature is much better-suited to the cello than the violin. And it remains true that being a cellist is far less competitive than being a violinist, there are just too many mass-produced Korean violin-robots, especially at Juilliard, and even an exceptionally talented child would have a hard time getting in. So as much as I hated that place it was the catalyst for any success I might enjoy now.

I chose Northwestern. Why? Because I liked the uniqueness of the color purple, the northwesterly direction seemed to connote a sense of adventure, and frankly it was the best school I could apply to that didn't require SAT II's (no longer the case). And most importantly it was approximately 760 miles away from home. Something felt right about applying there, I had a feeling I was going to get in, I couldn't tell you why. But I ended up in a great dorm where I met some great people who helped shape me in to a decent and somewhat responsible adult. Without Northwestern, without Willard, without ultimate, I shudder to think of the kind of person I would be today.

There have been plenty of other missteps and lucky escapes from ill-fated disaster, but the big decisions, huge life-changing moments have worked out in my favor. I should consider myself blessed. Though of course the last major decision has yet to fully play itself out...

The night I had an epiphany to cook was unlike all the other pivotal decisions I had made in my life. I was a very different person then, I had grown up, in short. I was much more cautious, more reserved, more aware of consequences and logical expectations. Whereas I would once leap before looking with both feet, I now knew to take a tentative look over the edge. It was conflicting, I felt so impassioned and convinced that this was the one true path for my life, but yet I felt it necessary to yank on the reins, knowing in the past that I had come uncomfortably close to ruin. I stayed up all night wanting to rush off to culinary school, say good-bye to Northwestern, but I knew there were many things to consider and I played it slow.

I gave myself the hard truth. I had to have realistic expectations of what such a life-changing decision would mean. I had to honestly embrace the realities of those decisions, and if a worst-case scenario still didn't frighten me, I would forge on ahead.

Life as a cook is not and would not be easy. You are going to be poor. Very poor, more poor than you've ever been in your life. If you're doing it right, you're most likely going to be paying to be a cook, working in some top European kitchen for beans and having exchange rates give it to you harder than Billy Bob gave it to Halle Berry in Monster's Ball (never watch that movie with your mom). Even if you land a good job in the States, you'll be working long, long hours with no 401k or health insurance to speak of. This could continue for 7-10 years. You sure you like it that much?

There is a very high rate of failure. Should you ever attain your dream of opening a restaurant, there are statistics (albeit inflated and largely out-of-context statistics) floating around that say 70-80% of restaurants fail within three years. You have personally experienced what can happen when a restaurant closes. There is little-to-no recouping. When it's over you file Chapter 11, and you hope your resume isn't so tarnished, and your family not so desperate that you can pull the pieces back together. Not scared yet?

It is a very difficult lifestyle in and of itself. There are no holidays, when the rest of society gets a long weekend you will be getting a longer work week. Personal relationships will be quite difficult to maintain as the rest of the world follows the beat of a different drummer. There are few women willing to stick around with someone who spends most of their life in a kitchen making $12/hour. You'll miss parties, weddings, movies and important dinners with only the pirate crew-like bond of your kitchen crew as solace. I hope you thoroughly enjoy the company of cats.

You are old for the game. The best, the famous, the rich, they all started out young. They not only grew up in the restaurant business, they embraced it from Day One. They found their passion early and were lucky enough to have a place to fulfill it. You were not so lucky, you figured it out pretty late, and compared to your competition, you are rather inexperienced. It's going to be a tough and endless game of catch-up; can you handle always being at a disadvantage?

These were the sorts of questions I asked myself. They were harsh questions, yes, but I felt that that was necessary. To strip bare any optimism or naivety and lay the raw flesh of the material before me. If every question was met with stubborn hope and bated excitement, I knew I was doing the right thing. And I was.

So here we stand. Exactly two weeks away from culinary school in the wake of a long year at home. I worked seven days a week, every week. Some weeks would see me working hellishly long hours, upwards of 80-90 with no day off, what with kitchen time and holidays. But even still I feel I could have worked harder. I could have learned more. But what's done is done and I must evaluate again. It's been about three years since you decided to embark on the path of food and service, how far have you come?

My pessimistic nature and generally hard-on-myself attitude would say ... not very far.

I really tried but learning Chinese food has eluded me. I spent 10 solid months going in to that kitchen six days a week, but cooking doesn't work like that. You can't just stop in for a lunch shift, cook a little here, cook a little there, wrap a few dumplings, slice a few onions. You don't get terribly far doing that. You have to really be thrown in the shit. It's like training for the Olympics, you do it as a job. Ten hours everyday, living it, breathing it, that's what makes you a real cook. Not just prepping thirty racks of lamb to perfection everyday, but then plating it for service in the middle of dinner rush, tickets bleeding out of the printer like an angry wound, a chef telling you to go faster when you've already hit the wall and only your wits and your reflexes there to save you. I miss that. The crush, the weeds, the very raw and physical nature of restaurants.

But it hasn't all been for naught. While I resentfully stood my post at the front I certainly can't say I didn't learn anything. I spent a solid six hours everyday just talking to people; taking their orders, making small talk, making sure they were happy, mollifying them when they were on the verge of hitting me and succoring them when they were having a good experience. I cleared tables, folded tablecloths, smiled and nodded and though I was far from perfect, I feel that my mother and I together made a good front-of-house team. Considering that by nature I am a shy and introverted person, this was a big step for me. I know my normal speaking voice is at an uncomfortably high volume and a few beers will have me clamoring for the center of attention like an oft-ignored only child, and these things may suggest that I am an extroverted individual. But that isn't actually the case and whenever I know I'm about to have a tough or awkward conversation with a customer I often have to tell myself, "Be brave."

I never picture myself at the front-of-the-house permanently. I can confidently say I want to spend most of my life in a kitchen (even though I know I look fucking awesome in a suit... yes, ladies). But it certainly can't hurt to have a deep understanding of what it's like to be out there. See, when you're crushed in the kitchen there is always something to do, tangible means to fix things, you feel at least somewhat empowered to remedy your situation. But when it's fucked out front, you can't do anything except tell people your sorry, offer them something so they don't walk out furious and cry on the inside. Some people love that kind of work; fixing the wrongs, using their charm to the utmost advantage, but I can't do it. Not for long at least. Seeing people upset destroys me inside. It makes me want to hide in the kitchen, too cowardly to go outside and face the sound & the fury. Cooks sometimes don't get that and see special requests or anything that makes their job harder as bullshit. But I will forever understand what it's like to be out there, the bulls-eye for everyone's frustration. So while I never plan to be out there again in a suit, I feel confident that I can empathize with the front staff when I'm wearing a chef's jacket.

Still, skin-toughening aside, perhaps the most important thing I learned was being at the helm and seeing the big picture. When you're a cook or a waiter, and I've been both for quite some time now, you are focused on just doing your job. Getting that plate to the window now, getting that plate to a customer now, giving that customer attention now. There's not much philosophizing and speculating you can do when you're in that role, you're a worker bee. But when you're at the top looking down, you realize it's a complex picture and pieces have to be moved carefully. As much as you want to deliver quality experiences to everyone, you have to realize you literally can not make everybody happy, and every restaurant has its limitations. Some will only do as good as 75%, and the best will be 99.9%. But no matter how "perfect" you may seem, some people will just never like your restaurant and will leave to vilify you on the Internet. Don't take it home with you, don't let it get you down, always strive for a 110% but know that it won't ever be perfect. Not for long anyway.

There are practical things to consider. Things break down, no restaurant flows perfectly, you have to go with it. It is often the busiest Tuesday of your life when your dishwasher decides to not show. Your ice machine picks the hottest day of the summer to stop working, your power goes out just as you're about to lay down a 200-cover Friday. These are all things that have happened to me, and while they were catastrophic-level disasters we are still here. Things go on, restaurants are Murphy's Law embodied, what's important, despite any artistic ideals you might hold dear, is that you continue to make money and make people happy without losing your integrity or your sanity.

Being in command of a restaurant has no set book of rules. Everything is situational and you need to have the awareness to meet the ever-changing flow of service. Shit will and does happen, you need to have the emotional fortitude to react with grace and assertiveness. I feel I've rambled for a year and more, 10-page diatribes about what it's like to be out there doing the same thing everyday and yet having it be different every night, but it still can't be broken down in to a neat list. You just have to know and if your heart is in it, you'll succeed. A life in restaurants certainly has its downsides, but if it is the life for you, you couldn't possibly see it any other way. You feel alive in the chaos and become fulfilled through taming it.

That's optimistic-Eric talking, a rarely seen creature. But truly, I feel it really becomes a matter of can you survive the downs long enough to enjoy the highs...

The rational side of me knows that I am quite prepared for school, especially in comparison to the armies of 18-year old Food Network zombies enrolling in culinary school, but in reality I feel a bit... divided. On the one hand, I am about to embark on a journey that is has been in the works for over three years. I have a pretty good idea of what's about to come, I'm excited. But on the other ... I am exhausted.

Working seven days a week didn't amount to a lot more hours than most people's workweeks, but it just drains on you. The boss/my mom said I could take a day off if I wanted to, but deep-seeded notions of filial piety and duty to one's parents left me too guilt-ridden to relax at home while my mother was out working. I haven't had a terrible amount of time to regain composure, it was one Saturday night crush immediately followed by an even worse Sunday night crush only to return to the battlefront on Monday, day after day after day.

I've come to duly respect the regenerative properties of a day off. Without any sense of guilt you have the freedom to spend 24 hours however you will. I miss that more than you can know, and a daily grind without respite leaves me in dark corners of thought that I fear to go back to.

When I get depressed, I get depressed. Misery seems to endlessly accelerate and ignore terminal velocity until I am left in a corner wondering for the fourth time why I am doing this.. this life. I usually snap out of it pretty quickly, but for the time I spend down there in my self-made dungeon of despondency, there is a sense I'm not going to climb back out. Everything comes crashing down and a real mishap in a restaurant suddenly seems beyond the scope of my control.

I admit I can be a bit ... emotional at times. Perhaps this blog is finally resembling more of a blog in that I am giving everyone an open avenue into my personal thoughts and feelings, but here I am to lay it bare. If my personality at its worst warranted a description, I might describe it as an "engine of self-hate and negativity that feeds on the souls of happy people everywhere" but that may be the School of Eric's Over-complicated and Ranting Writing's way of saying that I can be a severely angry and miserable human being sometimes. And it is, as with all matters of the heart, completely irrational in its judgment.

When I hear some girl order take-out over the phone asking me if we use MSG in that awful Long Island accent, I twinge and am overcome by bloodlust. I have to defeatedly admit "yes" even though there is absolutely no scientific evidence of "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" or negative effects from MSG consumption (source), and then get an audible scoff over the phone to have her say "I don't wuant any MSG in anything, okay?" Listen, bitch... those Apple-tinis you drink every weekend have a better chance of giving you heart failure than this steamed chicken and mixed vegetables, no sauce, no MSG dish you're ordering from me. How about you worry a little less about your waistline and a little more about giving a contribution to society that isn't your quickly-fading beauty? And here I've ranted again, but internally, and you can see the blood pressure rising, and my eyes go red and I'm physically restraining myself from slamming the phone in to the table, the urge to kill is ever rising...

Ugh and then more shit...

The worst habit our waiters have is serving soup without spoons. We run out of spoons quicker than anything because waiters use them to wrap Peking Duck, serve dishes, etc. So the busboy has to wait on them to get washed, and there may be a 10 minute window where the restaurant is simply out of clean spoons. But there's a very simple solution, you pluck a few spoons out of the soak, and you wash it by hand real quick. Then you serve it with the soup, it's that simple. But no, they drop down the soup without checking if there are spoons, and run to some other task and the customer has to helplessly watch as their soup grows tepid. And I hate soup that isn't at the proper temperature, that being hot with italics. I try to catch this as often as possible but something within stops me from berating and demanding discipline from the staff. I am no boss yet, it is not my place, I feel awkward telling grown men, fathers that they're making a cock-up of their job, so I must suffer inwardly as people do slipshod and careless work. It's preventable, it's lazy bullshit and it's a very quick way to make me hate you...

And then more things go wrong...

Cooking is a bit like athletics in the sense that there are good days when you're in the zone, and bad days when nothing is going for you. Man, all these sauces are breaking .. is it the heat? Ugh, this dough looks like shit, it's so tacky I can barely escape from it long enough to put it in a bag, what the hell? Fuck, I cut myself... fuck, these dumplings look like abused orphans, they're falling apart at the seams. It is those days I am left wondering... why am I even doing this? I'm never going to be any good, the cooks I want to be competing against have been doing this for years, they don't even think about dicing carrots, it just happens. And even if I can catch up with my mechanics apparently I'm such a headcase that I'll never make it past year five in this game... I should just give up...

And so that nagging voice continues. A voice of defeat strengthened by feelings of hopelessness in the face of hard times and trials... One voice says to give up already, and yet somewhere inside there is a beacon of hope and it waves a small flag that says "Carry on!"

It is mind-numbing and at the very least a bit psychotic to be seemingly talking to myself with two different voices. Rather than a unified whole, I am a man divided and at times it feels the balance between two entities is threatening to decide which Eric shows up today. And it is that exact quality that I seem to share with my father.

Not to creep too dangerously close to sob story territory, but I didn't know my father very well. What I do know, as my mother reminds me, is that we are quite similar. Passionate, volatile, unpredictable, loving at times, ferocious at others. I haven't seen myself in him in well over 13 years but in memory, I know it is true. My mother is the rock, my father the ocean. As I walk the floor of a dinner service in a bad mood she notices immediately, but won't confront me about it until we're closing. I get the same lecture,

"The whole dining room can tell you're in a bad mood. You can't show it, it makes us all look bad, it affects peoples' moods, most importantly, mine!" The same song and dance every time, how my sullen tendencies stress her out and affects the whole atmosphere of the restaurant, yada yada yada... Some customer was probably being a pain in the ass and I reacted most unprofessionally, my face was immediately a visage twisted by hate and a fish could sense the negative emotion, I get it, I messed up, I'm sorry...

But this time it hit me as we're getting to the part of the lecture how I'm just like my father. I am suddenly eleven again and thinking of the day I said goodbye for the last time. The school said I can take as much time as I like before coming back, it wasn't a problem, but the day after services my mom put me on the bus and sent me to school. I wouldn't have said I was in so much grief as to not be able to function, I was just ... confused, as most eleven-year old's are and would be when they are dealing with their father's death. I didn't really want to go because my head was in all sorts of different places. One moment I felt fine, the other I felt sad, then angry, then guilty, then nervous, then ahhh, get me the fuck outta here! Too bad, kiddo, your education is what's important.

The point never hit me, I just figured my mom was being unnecessarily stringent, acting tough to be tough, but now it made sense.

No matter how we feel we all have certain duties to uphold. Despite all notions of Western stoicism or Eastern filial responsibility, this is a fact. To succeed requires performing even when we want to do anything but. There are and will be many times when we are faced with difficult tasks, or tasks we feel unprepared for or just feel unwilling to commit to. But we must perform admirably all the same, because no matter what modern conceptions of child-rearing and coddling will tell you, there is very much such a thing as winning and losing in this life.

There have been a lot of rough patches through the past year. At times it felt I was running a nursing home rather than a restaurant, the vivacity and energy killed by the elderly slowly pushing their walkers and struggling in to their chairs. This may sound like an unfair and silly thing to upset me, but when reminded of my own mortality every day, seeing someone's wife die and yet have the widower return to eat alone... it is difficult. Perhaps my sense of empathy is too sensitive, but seeing, knowing that could be me every day ... it was tough.

There wasn't much in terms of a personal life. I'd run in to the city every Saturday to see my friends, but otherwise every day was more of isolation. I don't speak enough Chinese to converse in anything other than niceties, and I don't have a lot to talk about with a middle-aged mothers who grew up poor in China, didn't even graduate high school. And I hate the small talk between customers and restaurant staff, it's the same conversation every time, often literally as some old folk can't remember what they've discussed with you and what they haven't. I am left repeating conversations with parrot-like obediency, frustrated by a lack of any meaningful connections with anyone for days.

I struggled to learn a cuisine I couldn't master, left to be more useful sweeping floors and organizing dry goods than on the line. Instead I was left out front in my most uncomfortable and undesirable of positions, struggling to gain mastery over my own tempestuous emotions.

But I showed. I fucking showed up every day, no weekends, no holidays, every fucking day rain or shine. In over 400 days, I wasn't at the restaurant for maybe 15, and even when I hated it, really was wanting to quit, tired of my daily grind ... I went. I showed because I knew there was work to be done. I wasn't going to let down my mom who had worked so hard, supporting the restaurant by herself to put me through school. I wasn't going to quit because I want the dream to be alive even when it can seem so dim, and I still have love for the restaurant even during the times it felt like it was poisoning me.

I showed up.

Maybe I didn't learn all that I could have this year. Maybe I often let my emotions get the best of me, maybe I lost a few customers, maybe I could have tried harder. Kitchen work, especially good kitchen work, requires a hell of a lot more than just being there, it requires focus, dedication and aggressiveness for sure. But at the very least I was there every day, doing my job.

I showed up.

And I plan to continue to show up for the rest of my life.

EP6