The Question

I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of my friends reaching out to me after reading my last post.

"Are you okay?"
"What happened?"
"You're bumming me out, bro, get your shit together."

It was both a reminder that there are people who still read this thing and that even though the distance between us has grown, our lives very different from days of college past, that we still have compassion for one another, that every now and again you think about me.

But to the matter at hand... what is the matter?

If any of you have ever witnessed me writing one of these posts you'll know that it's a prolonged emotional ejaculation with little editing or much structure.  They get spat out in one go, the less I proof read it the better because the longer I look at it the dumber I think it is and fuck me, but it's just going to sit there in the draft box never having seen the light of day.  No shit, I have probably 40-50 pages of poorly inserted sexual innuendo amongst streams of cooking-related rambling tinged with first world problems, a strong distaste for my fellow man and a lifetime of resentment towards women just sitting there... rotting, festering, decomposing until one day the Blogger servers go down, I'll curse myself for never having saved this stuff, and some IT guy is going to come across this file and go ... "What the actual fuck is this?  A university graduate complaining about how hard his chosen blue-collar life path is?"


And maybe that's being too hard on myself, or maybe it's me trying to be too honest.  But either way the point is... this isn't being written for any major publications, it's more for me and the handful of people who for whatever reason, find it interesting.  It's to give me a little framework for my thought process, to let out a little steam.  I wouldn't take it too seriously.

Until one day I did start to take it seriously...

I came across one of those stupid Facebook posts along the lines of "Less-than-20-to-keep-your-interest-but-more-than-10-to-be-somewhat-substantial things that will make your life/sex life/body image/relationships/dick better."  I'm a sucker for those things, because while they are grossly overgeneralized and lacking in contextual relevance, they give me ammunition for the questions I constantly ask myself.  Am I happy with this?  How does my life compare to my peers, and do I really give a fuck?  Do I want a family?  Does celery actually increase the volume of my seminal fluid and inevitably improve my fertility much like the Panama Canal improved American commerce?  Should I try not eating gluten? (Answer: no, that's stupid, bread is delicious)

For whatever reason I find it to be a fun exercise as I'm constantly keeping stats and progress logged in my life much like a game of Grand Theft Auto.  I am constantly reevaluating my situation and if I find I'm wasting too much money on Indian food (specifically garlic naan, I don't understand why all Indian restaurants charge at least $3.95 for something that is about $0.35 in food cost... one of the greatest injustices in the New York food scene), or too much time on tailoring my Spotify playlist so that it's full of guilty pleasures but not completely embarrassing if someone were to scroll through it (the formula is for every song by Britney Spears or Alanis Morrisette, you need one classic rock song and one small label hip hop track), I do absolutely nothing about it.  I just like to know about it.

But then one day I actually came across an interesting way of looking at my life.  A woman posited, in regards to choosing a career path, what would you want to do every day of your life?  When you wake up, what is the one thing you would look forward to doing?

Now, obviously, I've asked myself that question a million times.  I would never have ended up in this solid $11.00/hour position if I hadn't considered it thoroughly.  But somehow, the way the question was framed, suddenly brought a different answer.

What would I be happy to wake up to every day?

Well, that I'm not so sure.  As of now, every day I wake up because my stupid fat cat does not recognize Daylight Savings Time, much like the state of Arizona, and now demands breakfast at 6:30 as opposed to 7:30 AM, which gives me enough time for one REM cycle before I'm awoken by the incessant meowing of an overweight cat whose blood sugar is a shade too low.  I wake up completely exhausted, going down my five floor walk up is extremely painful and it seems my knees do not receive proper circulation until noon.  I fiend for caffeine, I fiend for nicotine, I fiend for one night of undisturbed sleep and for the 2/3 train to just be a little smoother so I get a little less unwanted elbow and genitalia thrust in to my body on my way to work.  (The N/Q/R is better than you! I fucking said it, you West side hack!)

I think at some point I resigned myself to the mindset that unless you're a freak of nature that produces ungodly amounts of dopamine for no reason at all, nobody wakes up in the morning really fucking excited to go to work.  The only time I experience that kind of excitement upon awaking prematurely is when I'm somehow convinced I'm going to play a full day of temperate, not windy ultimate, or I have a full day of zero obligations.

But other than those now extinct life options, what the hell actually gets me excited to get up?

I think there was a time cooking got me that excited.  But it was quashed by the scaling difficulty of the restaurants I chose to work at.  It kept getting harder and harder to the point that no matter what the day, it was guaranteed to be filled with PTSD-level conditions, unfair situations you constantly have to fight your way out of, and mountains of bitch-work.  Mountains of tedious, unpleasant tasks, that even an automaton tailor-made to perform such a task would quickly develop sentience, ask itself why the fuck is it wasting its wholly artificial marvel of a life doing it, and come to the ultimate conclusion to self-destruct.

So I got more specific.

Okay, so you just straight up find hard work unpleasant.  You're a lazy piece of shit who is pursuing an incredibly difficult craft, and your peers seem to fiend for chaos, stress and disorder like a contraband hamburger at fat camp.  I mean these guys are going to suck the sugar coating off an Advil they love this shit so much.  And here you are, grumbling about front of house management choices and how everything can be better suited to me, me, me.

What, specifically, would you like to do every day?

Well, if we throw out the possibility of a four day work week, then I would say cook, but at a much more manageable pace.  I'm a hideously useless perfectionist, and the ability to control a small volume of excellent dinners is incredibly appealing to me.  But every restaurant in New York depends upon absurd volume and service to pay the rent.  If I had the time to manage some really great meals, if I had the time to work with proteins, respect an animal, take it apart and get maximum and delicious utility out of it, if I got to work with fucking fire again instead of plating cold salad after cold salad, if I got to make something I truly believed was delicious... maybe... maybe then again I would wake up every day excited to break out my knives and cut.

But that may not be the case right now ... and there are a few reasons why I'm not giving up.

I'm a strong believer that putting oneself through great adversity almost always results in a net gain of positive outcome.  Hard work now will pay dividends later.  I hate the crushing volume, I'm not crazy about the food, and the environment is complete chaos, but if I can taste this pain now maybe everything in the future won't seem so bad.

I'm not a quitter.  I signed up for at least a couple of years and that's what I intend to give.  This is a highly ironic statement given that I quit nearly everything in my life prior to cooking, but as of now, my record is golden and I plan to keep it that way.

I have a strong tendency to just be a complete pussy and am unable to take the frame of my current suffering out in to the bigger picture.  Through almost every awful thing I've gone through in life, I've managed to take a somewhat positive spin and outlook on it later in life.  (Also a highly ironic statement given that every failed relationship made me an ever-increasingly miserable person to be around, especially if you happen to be female)

I remember working the line at Va Pensiero.  Looking back, it was hack show food, but I had maybe been cooking for two months and now I was slinging pasta on the hot line like a pro (read: a n00b).  But the fire, the juggling of pans, the call backs, the communication, the plating, the ferocious crush of a restaurant desperate for some business (read: they'll take anyone anytime, so when all the demand is for 7:00 PM and the restaurant gives it to them... pucker up your buttholes, it's going to be a wild night) unleashed an incredibly intoxicating cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins.  That's really what chefs are; sensory junkies, and when a service is firing on all cylinders, it's an overload that makes your dick hard (but not really because let's face it, it would be really easy to injure your penis in a kitchen).  All successful chefs are, in at least some way, junkies for that adrenaline rush you get in a good service.  I remember that feeling and smiling through crazy amounts of stress, feeling like a warrior, feeling like you could raze villages, spread your seed like Genghis Khan, hear your enemies wail, just fucking destroy.  It's addicting.  So much so that people make careers based off of this temporary rush.

But for whatever reason that rush is gone and I desperately want it back.  I need that culinary methadone, and maybe it's my purposeful removal from the moment, my stupid manner of observing everything in Vulcun, objective pretentiousness, or I don't know what, but I can't simply enjoy the moment anymore.  I'm too worried about what my partner thinks, what my sous chef thinks, how I'm perceived, all the things I have to do, what I have to do tomorrow... there are so many voices and I want shut them all out and say, "Fuck you, it's time to cook."  But it's gone and that rush is no longer.  Now it's just stress and pain and worry and Fucked up, Insecure, Nervous and Emotional...

But there are moments... moments when it comes through and they are so strong they remind me why I'm doing this.  They remind me why I love this woman, this fucking bitch of a career, this tempestuous whore, why I have this love affair to begin with.  It's fighting all the time, shouting, punching walls, hating yourself, hating her, wanting to choke, wanting to kill and then sudden passion... clearing of clouds, wanting to embrace, I love you, take me back, take me back, you're incredible, you're sexy, you're sex... and then back to more hate, more anger, more frustration...

I think you're starting to get a better picture of why chefs are the way they are.. generally maladjusted human beings who are capricious and volatile at the same time.

Those moments are strong, that adrenaline-laced succor so sweet, but they are becoming less frequent and maybe that's why I'm freaking out.  I don't want peace, I don't want to sit around all day, I do actually want work, but I just want to love it again.  I want to want it again, to desire it, to lust for it.

But I hold out.  Maybe we're in a rough phase, maybe her cousins living with us and it's causing a lot of stress.  Maybe when I get back on the hot line in front of a fire, maybe when I'm cutting up animals again it'll come back.  Maybe the yelling, the anger, the ferocity of a nasty kitchen is what I want... maybe I like the abuse, maybe fucking burn me, hate me, slap me...

I'm not sure.  It's been a very confusing couple of months.  The sudden confrontation with adulthood and an adult life.  A career, a new environment but unfortunately a stale responsibility.  I'm still figuring it out, and if this post is evidence of anything, it's that I'm really fucked up in the head right now and it needs to clear.

So I don't know.

I think back to the days of playing college ultimate.  I was robbed, being a fatass and a smoker cost me so many years of what could have been good ultimate.  But those days were great, however short they were.  Waking up on a bitterly frosty Saturday morning, shaking the cobwebs off, setting your body on fire until 40 F is positively pleasant.  The serenity of a misty, dew-streaked field is greatly underrated as a natural wonder.  Hunting the disc as it hung in the air, that shoving match against your opponent.  It's predatory, it ignites this primal instinct in you, I don't know why.  In that moment, ripping it out of the air, establishing dominance, beating-your-chest excitement, you roar, you pound, you scream.  There's no better feeling in the world, it's out-of-body and yet so totally overwhelming in how aware you are of it.  Camaraderie, that feeling of success through many, synergy, laughter, the carefree days of running and pushing yourself...

That's my love song to ultimate, a nonsensical paragraph that best encapsulates how much I miss the game and how I remember it.  How in those moments I think I was truly happy.

I was never very good at being happy, but I always look back at those moments with fondness, as a frame of reference as to what we hope to get out of life.

And I hope more of them lay in wait for me in my future.

But as of now it's unclear.

So here's to hoping.

EP6

The Race

"I'm tired."

It's something I've often complained about after playing a full day of ultimate that was capped with a night of drinking.

It's something I've uttered maybe after a two-a-day burner, hitting the gym and taking that soreness to the field.

It's something I may have said after pulling an all-nighter, frantically cramming 300 years of Japanese history in to 12 hours, no lectures, no notes to retreat to.

But it was all bullshit.

This is tired.

I've joked about how my knees hurt for years because I played so much ultimate on a frame bearing too much weight for the game.  I've exaggeratedly groaned as we took our first warm-up jogs on a tournament Sunday, getting the heart to circulate the ibuprofen in and the alcohol out.

Now they really hurt, and I rue that I ever joked about knee pain in the first place.

If I found cooking to be a drain before, it is now a veritable death sentence.

Maybe it's the restaurant, maybe it's me, maybe this is a unique case, but waking up day after day of five hours of sleep, when you just put it through 12 hours of strain hurts.  You brain is so foggy that 44 oz. of coffee (now, my daily dose) does little good, taking in nicotine is the requirement just to reach a baseline of normal functioning and your feet and your knees really do scream in the morning.

What are you doing?  Are you nuts?  You can't do this for much longer...

I've joked about how I might be too old for the game but now am thinking it might be true.

Running up and down stairs carrying heavy loads, knee dips every few seconds to get through a crush of a service, this restaurant is fucking busy and it punishes you for being unprepared.  In a month and a half I've already lost 15 pounds, constant stress and little to no time to eat whittles away at you.

It has demoralized me.

I think what got me in to cooking was the song of remorse sung by The Greatest Generation.  They worked blue-collar, thankless jobs because they had to, mouths demanded feeding and they never got the chance to chase their dreams.  "Take passion in your work," "Do what makes you happy" they said.  "Love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life" was the hymn.

That appealed very much to me as I abhorred work.  I never went to class, I liked having fun, and the idea of wasting away in an office, necktie as noose, was horrifying to me.  Maybe if I'm always having fun, just as I am on an ultimate field, it'll never really be work, it'll be me chasing a dream.

But this is most certainly work, and New York City never lets you forget it.

I've had people tell me how fun it must be to be a chef.  To taste wonderful food all day, to waft the aromas of roasting meat in your face and eat a selection of cookies from pastry.  How much of a delight and a sensory wonderland the kitchen must be!  I would love to walk a day in your shoes!

Then you better get used to the smell of stainless steel polish and the metallic-tasting film it leaves on your tongue.  You better love Orange Force and sanitizing solution, for every item cooked means three items to clean.  You better not be opposed to getting on your hands and knees and scrubbing out an air gap drain and sifting through the mess of shrimp shells, beef fat and vegetable debris left in its wake.

Even the delicious parts of the job become tiresome.  The meat roasters have access to perfectly medium-rare, grass-fed trim from their steaks every day; duck breasts glazed with coriander and honey, pink, juicy and $44 to the civilians on the other side, and yet they are the first to clamor for a very generic slice of turkey.  "I'm sick of duck," they say.  If I eat another roasted beet I'm going to chase it with a shot of distilled vinegar because I just can't stand that grassy sweetness anymore.  If I have to taste another spoonful of aioli verde I'm going to unleash an oil-streaked shit stain more disastrous than the Exxon-Valdez.  Day after day of the same food, adjusting its quality, making sure you're not serving garbage and the romance gets killed very fast.

So even the good moments, eating good food and sharing it with appreciative people, are starting to be outweighed and I've reached a point I feared I would, a dreadful question...

Why am I doing this?

There's a very compelling and well-reasoned voice that is saying, "I don't want this anymore."  It pipes up at least once a day and its lull is both demonic and sound at the same time.  Just walk out, this isn't worth it, you're going to die early if you keep this up, Just. Leave.

The voice in retort is innocent and beautiful, but its sonorous nature is no longer.  Have integrity, fight it out, this will pay off one day, people are depending on you.

And every day it has become a struggle between these conflicting emotions.

It really has become very difficult and I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's New York busy season.  Hundreds and hundreds of guests a day who, most frustratingly of all, are completely ignorant of the struggle behind the swinging doors.  They pour in as a voracious, demanding and particular crowd and the only thing that stands between them and us is the front of house staff who I've come to loathe.

I can't help but seethe at them.  They make double what I do, they work half as hard and not only that but the focus, integrity and dedication required of them is a fraction of what is expected of the brigade in whites.

One would think the stereotype dead what with all the advancements of our industry in our society, but even dedicated sommeliers and true believers in hospitality are no more than a cabal of failed actors and thespians.  They are the majority, a legion of people handsome in face and comfortable in the spotlight who need the money to chase the dream.  They are locusts.  And here they are, acting as if they know better, making more money in less time, pretenders and charlatans who would claim authority over me.

Now I am aware I have an overly negative view of humanity, as evidenced by this online collection of unadulterated and misguided misanthropy.  Some of them may truly enjoy it, may truly believe in achieving a little enlightened hospitality, just want to do a good job.  But I can't help but see how they are incentivized by the "Gratuity" line and how little empathy they have for our plight.  I make a note to myself; limit the front of house influence in your future and have every single one of them work the pre-theater crush on a grill station.  Watch them cry, watch them crumble, drink their tears.

But we chose this plight, didn't we?  We knew what we were getting in to and the moment we can't handle it there are a number of eager faces to replace us.  Thanks to Food Network, thanks to Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay and a whole manner of celebrity chefs, we now have a veritable army of people who are willing to participate in the supposed romance and freedom of a restaurant.  Now WE are legion, us young cooks, and nobody knows what the fuck to do with all of us.

So yes, I know I signed  up for $11.00 an hour.  But while I'm plating one dish after another, waiting for a server to pick up my swiftly dying dish, I can't help but fume and think beyond the stainless steel box of my station.  Why DO we get such little compensation for our craft?  Why does no one in America give a shit about food and how it's made?  Why does the person who brings it to you get double than the person who made it for you?

It's not an easily answered question, but what it comes down to is nobody is going to pay $80 for a steak so that the guy cooking it can make a little more livable of a wage.  That's a quick way to tank a restaurant.  Society does not care about cooks, but it sure does love restaurants.

And it's neither here nor there, and complaining about it is just as meaningless as that phrase.  We, mainly I, should just shut the fuck up and do what you were told to do.

I don't know when it happened but it did and what happened was that I can't accept that any more.  Just do what you're told is not a good enough answer anymore.  This is bullshit!  I get so mad, I slam  plates, I break plates and I throw bowls and my little temper tantrum gets noticed by no one.  Someone witness my unjust calamity!

But nobody cares, except your station partner who has to now clean up a bunch of shattered porcelain.

"You're acting like a child.  Either giddy up or get off."

And he's right.

Maybe I'm not sleeping enough, but this little tantrum isn't going to do anyone any good.  No matter how much you hate the front of house and how all 40 of them get to pillage the employee meal before the cooks do, and how every mistake they make at your expense makes you want to raze villages, you need to shut up and get through service or soon someone else will be doing it for you.  Then your bridge is burned and you're out of this city for good.

It's become ultra competitive.  A lot of smart cooks with people skills, high emotional IQ and connections are filtering in to the world of cooking.  Technical skills almost anyone can learn, the rest, the big bag of intangibles that make a leader... those are nearly impossible to teach.  You've either got it or you don't, and whereas before the industry was riddled with drugged-out sociopaths who commanded by their presence and their artistry, now you have to be a smart manager as well.  No one's going to follow you in to battle just because you cook like a beast, you've got to offer your team more.  A good work environment, the ability to express oneself (because all cooks like to think their real artistic geniuses), a chance to take a vacation here and there, maybe not throwing them deep in the shit every day.

And we do get that and I should learn to enjoy it.  Take pleasure in what we have.  But that has never been who I am and it's never something I've been able to do.

I think it's important as a chef to constantly reevaluate what we do; how do I make this better?  How do I make this more efficient?  And with our naturally and forced attention to detail we're going to nitpick everything.  But at some point you have to deal with the reality of the situation.

Do we have the space for that?  Do we have the personnel for that?  Can they pull it off, are they strong enough to nail this just right?  Or should we lower the difficulty level and make it a little more cook friendly?  Does this timing make sense?  How can we adjust?

And while this may not be healthy it is critical to being successful.  Here in New York, of all places, does not allow you to rest on your laurels.  Maybe a few dinosaurs can get away with an unchanging formula, but for most chefs, much like the city, you are a constantly evolving beast.

So maybe that's why I ask so many questions when I shouldn't.  I'm no chef yet, just a grunt on the front lines, at the very bottom of the totem pole trying to earn my chops,  pay my dues.  Just shut up and cook, Eric!  No one's asking you to evaluate the infrastructure and change the system.  Anyway, the system fucking works, clearly, as you're deep in the shit every day come 5 PM because there's a horde of New Yorkers storming the door.

I wish I could and it's something I'm working on.  Clearing my head, calming my temper, not getting so fucking angry and frustrated all the time.  Just accepting the good things and allowing them to bring me peace.

I tried to take a walk.  I'm not much of a nature person or even an outdoors person.  I am content to whittle away my free time from behind the glow of a computer screen and my own thoughts.  And as my Asia-travels companions know, I could go a really long time without seeing trees or grass and be just fine.  But I thought a little New York fall, a little bit of that quickly frosting air might clear my head.

My neighborhood may not be an accurate representation of New York.  The Upper West Side is as close to suburbia as we get on the island of Manhattan.  Neatly rowed brownstones, widely spaced avenues, cutesy restaurants and Starbucks after Starbucks lighting the way, corporate lampposts to remind you this place has a stupid high real estate average, this place has money.  It's safe to walk around at night.  Brown people walk white babies, little rat dogs are in abundance, the glasses people wear are prescription and the North Face people wear is cosmetic.  Skinny white moms are running, always running, staying in shape, keeping everything tight and every so often you see a crazy homeless person who roams Verdi Park.

I like New York City.  It wasn't really my home but I do have quite a bit of connection to the place.  I like the sound of traffic, I like that as soon as you walk outside you've caught yourself in this swiftly running stream of humanity, an infinite collection of lives, dreams, hopes and wants.  I've heard a lot of New Yorkers complain about how surprisingly lonely one can feel even though you're ass to ankles in a subway car.  How difficult it is to make connections with millions of strange faces.  But I like being lost in that.  Maybe it's the introverted side to me or maybe it's the nice way of saying I'm socially awkward, but I like being amongst people but at an arm's length.

And so I walk and I realize that this really is a cutthroat city when it comes to restaurants.  Over the years I've been in the Upper West Side, even the timeless delis, fixtures in the landscape of Lincoln Center are gone, replaced by more chic bistros and faux-Italian cafes.  Chefs with pristine pedigrees and killer resumes can be eaten alive here.  They want to build the hype train so that there are butts in seats but they'll soon find themselves unprepared for the onslaught.  Media attention, critics, keeping a decent staff, grabbing the flitting attention of the New York dining public, satisfying a goddamned blogger who has little to no rights to be criticizing anything, it's all terribly stressful.  It's a common question among New York City cooks; how much longer you got?  How much more of this city do you have in you, the competitiveness, the shit pay, the harsh lifestyle.  How much can you take before you move to greener pastures?

It's a tough question and not one I entirely have the answer to.  Back in culinary school it's very easy to say that you want three-Michelin stars and be the king of New York.  But when presented with the reality it's not so easy.  Especially when you're putting up a special, something you created from nothing, and you're watching the girl who starred in her college's rendition of Anything Goes critique your dish.  Oh, you think it needs more acidity do you?  Did you come to that conclusion with your questionable set of life skills or the ever growing fear that your big break is never coming?  Yeah, why don't you pair it with a Chateauneuf-du-Pape, I'm sure you think that's a great idea and not because it's the only wine you could think of at the moment.  Yeah, thanks, I'll be sure to add a squeeze of lemon.

It just makes you so angry, it's so hard, so intense.  Maybe this city is good for earning your stripes but it sure does make you an asshole right quick.

And so I continue to walk.  Letting go of my anger for ex-theater majors, trying to let go of all the frustration I experience in a dinner crush.  You're better than this, and even if you aren't you better start being so.  Nobody wants to keep around the angry douche even if he can really cook.  You've got to try better, to master yourself, to control your feelings.  Control that dark side energy.

It isn't easy.  And it's made harder by the little sleep, the lotta caffeine and high-tension nicotine.  But we try, and we push, all because we hope for more.  We hope it'll make us stronger, make it better, make it nice.

Because that's all we're trying to do.  Make it nice.

EP6

The Injustice

If 1950's-era advertisements are to be believed, women and their abilities to cook are what make a family.  They are the linchpin in the American nuclear unit, champions of wholesomeness, nurturing and hospitality.  No day was complete without a home-cooked meal from mom, and modern day nutritionists lament that we have strayed from the days past where women were full-time homemakers, and our health and waistlines are suffering for it.

First of all, your kids are fat because you have zero discipline.  How do I know that?  Because I was a fat kid.  A really fucking fat kid.  Of course your kids want a dopamine cocktail of fat and carbs from Wendy's every night, and yes they are going to bitch unless they get it.  Should you give in?  No, you tell that little chubber to buck up and eat some carrots.  Then you tell them they're running wind sprints until they're too tired to bother you anymore and until their tits don't jiggle every time they climb the stairs.  At least this is how I would have envisioned my ideal childhood.  Would I have hated my parents?  Probably, in that very temporary and insignificant way children express hatred.  But would I have thanked them for it later?  Probably, because I'm not an ungrateful twat.

Second of all, I just went on a pretty hard tangent when my real point was that if women are so strongly associated with cooking and nurturing, then why are they all but banned from professional kitchens?

The ratio of males to females at The Culinary Institute of America's Culinary Arts program is 3:1.

It is the exact inverse for the Baking and Pastry Arts program, with the asterisk of every dude at Apple Pie Bakery is gay.  I'm not being a homophobe, I'm just being real.  So, public service announcement: Future hetero male applicants to the CIA; apply to Baking and Pastry.  Yes, making a marzipan rose is literally the most god-awful task this planet has to offer, but you will be swimming in an over-saturated mating pool with next to zero competition.  It's like the ballet program at Juilliard.  Get. In. There.

But tangent no. 2 aside, what is the deal?  So are women only suited to baking?  A gentler more controlled art, something more akin to classical music as opposed to hot line jazz?  Did the 1950's teach us that Mom was best left to making apple pies and Betty Crocker cakes, leave the meat to Dad?  Did we really go through all that societal upheaval from Homo erectus to now just so that our cooking roles remain the same as when we started; man kills animal and plays with fire, woman gathers... I don't know, some of those fucking berries over there and make 'em pretty?

When you try to think of the first female chef to recently reach the lime light a lot of people think of Alice Waters.  Only problem is Alice Waters is not a chef.  She has no professional culinary training, she's an extra-crunchy hippy from Berkeley who relied on a professionally trained chef to run her kitchen.  Now that dude has gone the way of the dodo (Jeremiah who?) and Alice Waters remains.  I don't hold a grudge against her, I think her intentions are very good but she does a very limited amount of good with a whole lot of proselytizing.  She is culinary Mother Theresa.

What other female role models do we have for professional cooks?  Rachael Ray?  She is self-admittedly not a chef, and that is why Food Network loves her.  Because much like Julia Childs, she was marketed towards housewives.  Professional chefs were intimidating, they made TV food inaccessible.  Julia Childs' goofiness and eccentric manner made her inviting, much like Rachael Ray's constantly fluctuating weight and Stepford-Wife-cheery disposition.  Giada is marketed just as much towards housewives as it is towards stoned college-aged boys because BOOBS (mincing garlic causes your chest to heave and jiggle like the fat kid in a Moon Bounce Castle).  Don't get me started on Paula Deen.  And not to get overly Bourdain-like here, but Sandra Lee is the second most terrifying personality on TV since Roseanne was taken off the air (the reigning queen of "Television's Most Nightmarish Amazon" is Ann Coulter).  They almost make you want to say "Let's rip off this Paul Newman-themed denim table setting and have some really right-wing sex; Procreative ONLY."

So we really haven't come that far.  Women who cook are expected to do so at home.  "Leave the elite level cookery to the boys, poop out a bunch of kids before your shit dries up, shop at Whole Foods and get those fuckers to college" seems to be the message.

Why is that?

Well, there are actually thousands of hardcore lady cooks it's just that most of them tend to look like Neville Longbottom with long hair.  And you have to remember that this is America.  If you're an ugly woman you are completely and utterly shit out of luck.  This country has zero things to offer you.

But lady cooks are a lot like short guys in the NBA.  It's a hell of a lot harder for them to get to where they are, so if they've made it they are fucking good.  I mean take-no-prisoners, ball-crushing, iron-tits, Stonewall Jackson good (fun fact: those are all nicknames I've used for a woman I hold in very high esteem. She has yet to stab me for using them).

Now, why is that?  Women are lovely.  They smell better (I'm convinced there's some sort of evolutionary advantage that has been passed down through the ages so that a woman's hair is the ideal thurible for shampoo and other smell-good's [Also, you're damn right that I had no fucking idea what a thurible was until this imagery popped in to my head so I googled "Catholic swinging incense thingy." You're welcome]).  They have dainty hands that are way better-equipped for peeling an orange, and despite their inability to parallel park, can be exceptional technicians when it comes to cooking.

So why is there such a dearth of women in high-level kitchens?

Well, you have to remember that kitchens are pirate ships, and do they allow women on boats?  Not really.  Because confining a large male population in to a dangerous and inescapable vessel causes a simian-like attitude to envelop the whole crew that is extraordinarily dangerous to women.  Testosterone flares off one another, dicks are measured and much like prison, the borders between hetero and homosexual start to get a little fuzzy in the absence of females.  Professional kitchens and medium-security prisons are probably the only workplaces in the world where it is acceptable to put your finger in another man's butthole.  Yet despite the presence of sharp objects in both environments, only in prison will you likely be shanked for it.

Let's face it.  Men are pretty vile creatures.  They become much more so when around other men.  Their malicious, unspent libidos feed and multiply off one another like Gremlins in a rainstorm (See: most fraternities, the Navy when at port, and 912 Hamlin).  Without a good and moral captain at the ship things devolve rather rapidly.

First, there's that what-I-must-assume to be the very unwelcome feeling of having a whole room full of creeps undressing you with their eyes.  The poor front-of-house ladies who have to look so nice for their jobs.  Every time they walk in to the kitchen ten pairs of eyes of follow them out.  Maybe some of them revel in it, mastering that cat walk with oh-so-feminine grace.  But the attention must get a little old.  Especially when that mouth-breathing hot apps guy keeps asking you out.

Second, there's the physical touching.  Touching one another is rather inevitable in kitchens, and especially New York kitchens, due to a rather serious lack of real estate.  You are literally going to be cooking with your dick in someone else's pocket at some point.  Yes, literally.  You are going to sidle along a wall past one of your coworkers and for however brief a moment your dong and their ass crack are going to dock.  I put the full weight of my sack on the back of my sous chef's head once while he was temping lamb in the oven.  It's going to be awkward.  And no you cannot give them the ass like on the plane in Fight Club.

And not to mention all the "Behinds!" and "Coming down the line!" and gently guiding people out of danger's way.  For their sanity and the cohesiveness of the group, women might as well be men in these situations.  It's pretty common to give someone a light pat on the ass to get them out of the way.  I've seen it happen to women.  It's not a sexist thing, it's a solidarity thing.  That may not be comforting at all.  But it happens and I doubt it's terribly pleasant.  I also think all the arm touching and nudging can be charged with a lot of sexual inflection, which I can only imagine gets tiresome.  Guys, you know that feeling when she grabs your elbow in just the right way, or steals your hat with just the right amount of playfulness that you know right then "Shit, we's gon' fuck."?  Yeah, imagine that much sexual energy but at work.  When you're not expecting or wanting it while you're just trying to get the lentils out of dry storage.  No bueno, Chef.

And then all the other stupid tomfoolery males engage in that I'm assured most women find horrendously primitive and stupid.  I mean, I feel bad for cows because they all have two tenderloins and one out of every two beef tenderloins gets used to cockslap someone with a massive, raw beef dick (I just want it for the record that if cooking goes south I'm going to run a full-time blog called Massive Raw Beef Dick).  I mean Superbad had it right, how many foods are shaped like dicks?!  Cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash, bananas, corn, etc.  How many foods are vaguely shaped like dicks enough so that they can be used as a dick?  Eggplant, butternut squash, subs and logs of goat cheese.  That is so many dick-shaped objects!  And they are being used to play out some sort of middle-school level prank.  Why are there any women in this industry?

And despite all of the borderline and blatant sexual harassment/discomfort, there's just the straight disrespect.

Cooking is a very physical job.  If you advance up the ladders enough, you're going to come to a point where you're not cleaning peas and slicing tomatoes anymore.  You're going to do big boy stuff.  You're going to cut fish and meat.  Unfortunately that means you're going to be hauling around hundreds of pounds of ice, slinging around a slippery 40 lb. halibut, or moving a full roasting pan of beef braise in to an oven.  This is heavy, heavy lifting, something that I, as a clumsy, mostly-out-of-shape, mid-20's, once-was-kind-of-an-athlete find difficult and strenuous on the back.  Most women will find roasting 240 lbs. of veal bones challenging.  I know because my AM counterpart had to do it and she failed miserably at it.  Most women will have a hard time handling something heavy because it's almost always also going to be hot.  That means the amount of control you need to handle it is far greater, that means lifting roasting pans with your wrists and fingers.

This is not easy.

You will struggle.

And men will judge you for it.

Why? Because see Point A through J, men are assholes.  They can't possibly make the distinction between biologically-engineered sexual dimorphism and one's capability to cook a saddle of rabbit.  For some reason, those skills are mutually inclusive.  If you can't do one, you can't do the other.

So the physical nature of the job and a woman's inherent disadvantage at performing it are then going to cause men to see you as constantly needing assistance, and thus weak.  Because we all know in kitchens, if you ask for help, you weren't good enough to do it yourself.  Cook's pride, logical stuff.

And if they see you as weak they will attempt to run you over.

I've seen it a hundred times.  When I start yelling at someone, they listen, they take it to heart.  But when a 5-foot, hundred-pound, cute lil' munchkin of a girl tries to yell at the bullish grill cook, it's as if it was never said.

It's animal nature.  You fear the big shadow in the grass, not the unseen creatures scampering below you.  You fear the lion, you ridicule the mouse.  Kitchens bring out your most primitive side at times.

Is it right?  Of course not.  But you're asking for people to be better than they are.  And we know very well that that doesn't work.  People are, for better or worse, people.

So, what's a girl to do?

The route that most of them have to take is to become the Bitch with a capital B.  Someone who has earned authority with her incredible proficiency, proficiency she needed to rise above the pack.  She is usually an ice-cold mercenary.  She is usually a little aloof, a lot serious and does not welcome any advances in to her territory.  She is a lioness to the nth degree, she is vicious and performs at an exceptional level.  Almost every female sous chef in a Michelin-starred kitchen has been forced to be The Bitch at some point.

Or they can play the Chameleon card and try to become one of the boys.  This is the girl who will fearlessly crawl up the meat cook's butthole over beers when anyone questions her commitment or "coolness."  She burps, she farts, she slaps asses and dresses in the men's locker room.  She abandons all hangings of her feminine sexuality to the point that men will cease to see her as a woman, as an object of desire, and accept her in to the pack.

Or they can go the exact opposite route and play the Bombshell card, so as to try to earn command over the men because she is so hotly revered as a sex goddess.  This is the girl who has complete confidence in her body, in her looks and her ability to attract.  This is the girl who objectively is not that attractive.  You'd stare at a picture of her and say "Meh, 7 at best and I'm a little drunk" but something about her mystique, or the way she carries herself gives off this lusty aura.  The Bombshell is irresistible, her requests and commands are answered without question, even by the married men.  Only gay men seem to be impervious and yet Bombshells seem to mostly exist in the world of pastry.  Go figure.

Superficial categorizations abound and yet we have to ask; why can't a woman just be themselves?

Because people are people.

And people are imperfect.

Hence, the injustice.

EP6

The End

The restaurant industry is not known for its cheeriness.  The image of the downtrodden, jaded, veteran scars cook is a popular one.  Some seem to embrace it by accelerating their spiral around the drain with drugs, alcohol, and generally poor lifestyle choices.  They give in to their negative emotions, they yell, they slam tables, they throw plates and they fall in to a pattern of abuse, both physical and emotional, because the job is too damned hard.  Not only is it too damned hard but it's too damned hard to remain optimistic while doing it.  So they practice catharsis through rage because it's easier and it feels good, and they portray themselves on the cross; a modern day martyr who takes a $12/hour job because no one else will do it, no one else can do it.

There's some kind of sick satisfaction people take from that.

People don't understand why chefs get angry, why they seem to have comically infantile tempers.  They think it's the artist's ego.  That somehow the chef is an artist and that his incorrigible attitude can be justified by his own pride and genius.  People watch Hell's Kitchen to see Gordon lose his shit, to see the master at work. For some reason we tolerate insufferable personalities so long as it is coupled with equally juxtaposed talent. I don't necessarily disagree, I think how "good" a person is is largely irrelevant in the perspective of their ability to produce.  Michael Jordan?  Pathological asshole, but the greatest of all time.  Who cares if he was a vicious, gambling, borderline-murderous person?  He was not being paid to be a nice guy.  He was paid to win championships.  He is remembered as the greatest basketball player of all time, his legacy so untouchable that people are still unwilling to consider the most freakish genetic abomination ever to play the game as comparable.  Tiger Woods fucking wins.  He is the most recognized golfer in the world and he brings home Cups and Jackets.  I don't give a shit if he dipped his cone in to every-colored sprinkle in the shop, I don't watch Tiger because I need a role model for modern-day monogamy, I watch Tiger because he transcends golf.

And that's what a chef is expected to do.  His responsibility is not to be nice to you.  His responsibility is to make the owners money, to return their investment.  It's to keep the doors open, to keep butts in seats, to cook edible food, there is no fucking time for your feelings.  And there's little real concern for them also because time and time again people prove they don't respond to positive motivation, but they really fucking listen when people start yelling and throwing.

This, I believe.  I know it to be true, I've seen it too much.  People get hurt when chefs "attack" them but they're always concerned about themselves first.

"Why did he yell at me like that, that's not fair."
"He doesn't know how hard I am trying."
"I didn't mean to make that mistake, why can't he understand."

Because it's not his fucking job.  His job is to get you to perform, and if you let him, he's going to make you better.  You just have to stop being so butthurt and put aside your feelings for ten goddamn seconds.  It's too hard.

It's too many hours.
It takes too much passion, concentration and hustle.
It's too little pay.
It takes so much emotion, so much resilience.
It takes so much patience.

After all of that it's almost unfair of you to expect the chef to have anything left in the tank for your feelings.

So yes.  This, I believe.  Typical bitter, jaded-at-twenty-six Eric.  Falling in to the same pitfalls as everyone else, letting anger go on autopilot because it's easier and it vents the frustration better, especially when paired with alcohol.  In short, giving in to the dark side.

But of all places to change my mind, I never expected it to be culinary school.

Don't get me wrong.  People are shit heads.  The majority of young cooks, fresh culinary school graduates are complete ass hats lacking in maturity, dedication and a realistic perspective on just what they are about to embark on; a long, long journey of "fuck your life."

But there is hope.  It's not completely their fault.  Humans, by programming, tend to be faulty at age twenty.  They have too much cock'n'balls and not enough brains.  It's exhilarating to have that kind of confidence, to leap before looking, that blind and utterly unjustified reassurance that you're going to land on your feet.  But it doesn't serve you in a kitchen.  You have to be broken first.  You have to learn discipline.

I'm not sure what did it.  I guess watching the 18-year-old's actually grow up before your eyes is fairly remarkable.  As hard as I am on them, they would love to have seen me at their age and flip the tables.  I was completely incapable of working in a professional kitchen, as immature as I was unrealistic.  So I am proud of them even though I am not sure I should be.  I'm not their father nor brother nor superior.  But yet to see the work change someone is an impressive thing, something that can't help but give you hope.

And I guess it was falling in love again with the chaos.  The moment is painful.  That panicked sweat that burns like ice, that stressed adrenaline that sets your heart aflutter is a terrible, terrible feeling.  You try to think straight and plan your next move but your brain is blaring an alarm that screams "You're not going to make it! You're not going to make it!"  It takes a serious amount of courage to say "FUCK YOU!" and fight back.  I dare anyone to try it.  It'll make you shit your pants.

I love the work.  I like busting ass, I like polishing plates, I like pouring my life out on to a grill.  I like cutting meat, I like cooking meat and I like the satisfaction of making the show run.

I like it all so much that I came to another important realization.  Stars, reviews don't matter anymore, this is not a trek to be the best in the critic's eye.  They control a great deal of success, yes, I am not unaware of reality.  But at the end of the day, what do they know?  Food is so subjective and personal to all of us, success is not measured in stars, it's measured in happiness.  Something that is inherently immeasurable.

So, what about culinary school?

The aforementioned embittered, salty cooks love to shit on culinary school.  They forget when they were unripe saplings who were unfit for the industry.  They are only capable of looking at themselves now, people who have survived trial by fire and realized how much a chef can teach you in two hours, while paying you no less.  They look back on student loans and then they really question the value of school.  And then they get thrown fresh graduates and interns every day and are reminded of how watered-down the system has become, and how terrible green cooks can be.

Of course they hate culinary school.

But me, of all people, a once-and-future champion of angry cooks everywhere, someone who had little to no faith in the inherent goodness of the human spirit, must disagree.

Culinary school is worth it.  You just have to make it worth it.

Line cooks will tell you that.  Use the resources, you get what you put in to the school.  That advice doesn't really hit home until it's almost too late.  It's all here for you.  You can continue to moan about how the school is turning a massive profit on your free labor, or you can just shut the fuck up already and clean the walk-in.  Culinary school is not about teaching you techniques.  It's not about abusing your labor.  It's about teaching you all the intangibles, and if you missed that then you missed the whole point.  Then you really fucking wasted your money.

It's about communication.

Something as simple as "Hot! Coming down the line!" so you don't burn your coworkers, stop a crazy service and piss everyone the fuck off, to something as complex as getting four stations, four cooks with four different proteins with four different cooking techniques to put finished plates up in the window within 30 seconds of each other.

It's about discipline.

Chef-instructors don't make you clean the walk-in because the health department is going to shut you down and you're going to waste product (well, that's all secondary).  They do it to teach you what's right.  It is so painfully black and white in a kitchen, it's either right or it's wrong, and a fucked-up walk-in is so wrong it's goddamn blasphemy to your religion.  You're a goddamn heretic if you can't keep a walk-in clean and organized.  You should be burned at the motherfucking stake.  You don't clean because somebody tells you to or because that's what you're paid to do, you clean because it's the right thing to do.  Doing the right thing, at least in the restaurant industry, almost always means doing it the hard way.  The painful, dirty, unpleasant way.  Cleaning the walk-in when you're working for zero dollars an hour and you just want to go home is to remind you of that.

It's about integrity.

Unfortunately, chef-instructors inevitably put up some shitty food.  Then someone gets a mediocre plate and has the audacity to say "this chef sucks," or "this school sucks."  Don't knock it til you've tried it, and by tried it I mean take worthless rookie cooks, people who couldn't earn a dime in a real kitchen, and have them put out food on time and on temp.  Now switch out your roster every 3 weeks.  I respect the system and I try to make it so I never have to be abused by it.  Because while chefs have to put out your dog shit plate on occasion, because the situation demands it, they'll let you know.  They'll let you know that that is really not worth serving and if you can't do this right, then you shouldn't do it at all.  You want praise?!  You want me to tell you when you're doing a good job?  As a cook, you are paid to put out food at a certain standard, having a perfect service is completely expected of you.  Being the best, being on point is only doing what you were asked to do in the first place.  Suck it up, no ones giving out Milk Bones because you hit medium rare, little doggy.  Congratu-fucking-lations, give it to me again and faster, the tickets are coming in.

And it's about pride.

"Take pride in your work" is so cliche and overused that I'm not even really sure what it means anymore.  I'm not even totally aware of what the concept of pride means and how it fits in to the context of a restaurant.  I know it means swallowing it sometimes.  That even if you are being unjustly dressed down, to take it like a man and respect the chain of command.  I know it means knowing your limits.  You will come to a point where you will need help and you cannot drag yourself out of the weeds by yourself.  While the idea of going down in flames as captain of your ship is appealing, your martyrdom is not appreciated.  There are paying customers out there, you have to know how to ask for help.  I know it means being proud of the little things. Having a shelf so painfully meticulous that the plastic wrap on your food has no crinkles, it looks like a window.  All the labels are cut at 90 degree angles, are level with each other and face the same way.  The food is lined up like Nazis on parade, the rims clean and the containers unblemished.

And I know it's about being aware of when it's over.

Every chef-instructor in there will catch flak, maybe behind doors, by some hot-shot cook at a Michelin-star restaurant who thinks, "He's a sell out.  He bought the farm because he couldn't handle the grind and now he's doing his 9-5, Monday to Fridays because he couldn't cut it.  He's a hack."

When you turn 35, when your alimony checks get bigger and your kids start calling you by your first name, reassess your priorities and tell me who you think is a hack.

Of course they cashed out. Of course every single one of them had dreams.  Dreams to go big, to be the next big thing, to have stars, reviews, newspapers, all of it.  But very few make it.  It's so much less about talent or skill or "genius."  It's just all about dedication and everybody's got a limited tank.  Yeah, everybody can cook but nobody can cook forever.  It's just about hanging on, the people who make it are the ones who are most willing to abuse themselves and to sacrifice the healthier parts of their lives.  They're the ones who are so addicted to the adrenaline that they can't wean themselves off the drug.  The ones who make it are truly sick fucks indeed.

So, while you think you're great, and that hangovers don't affect you, and trying to bang out hoes is really fun, coke does more good than bad, and you're such a badass because you can cook chicken to a safe level of consumption, talk to me in 10 years.  When the battery's sputtering and your body hates you for what you did to it all those years ago.  When the girls don't care anymore because you're fat and your brain is like Swiss cheese, barely able to keep track of tickets on a given night.  Talk to me then about who's the hack and who can't cut it.

I grew a lot here and it's almost embarrassing because I started here at the age of twenty four, years ahead of the pack.  I worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant, I got my ass handed to me, forced down my throat, out and back in.  I cooked with some really great people, developed friendships that don't really work in the civilized world but work so well in a kitchen.  People with whom the conversation runs dry after you stop talking about food, but yet you know each other almost better than their girlfriend does because something about the kitchen reveals you.  There is no hiding, your character and your actions are the same.  Cooking shoulder-to-shoulder with someone, surviving that chef or that 25-head PDR banquet, burning each other on occasion... it's the simplest and yet most intangible relationship you could ever hope for, and I will cherish those moments forever.

So I am sad to see it go.  I have a tendency to mature very slowly, taking time to make my life realizations, but when it's set it's stone.  It's not efficient, money or time-wise, and it's not impressive but it was enlightening.  And while I am sad to say good-bye, I at least have the confidence to say I am better than when I came.

Chef S., thank you for teaching me that not all lessons are happy, that time is indeed inescapable.  I bet you were lights-out back in the day, your pleasantness will not be forgotten.

Chef C., thank you for teaching me that anything we eat and put in our bodies inherently results in a whole host of complex issues, ranging from the ethical to the nutritional.  Thank you for reminding me to think when I seemed so desperate to avoid it.

Chef E., thank you for showing me what mastery means.  That skills are hard-earned and long-fought, but so incredibly worth the effort.  Thank you for showing me how impressive it is to cut meat.  You are the last of your kind and the world will miss you.

Chef R., thank you for teaching me how to teach others.  That all things in life are in balance and that we, as chefs, must always strive to negotiate our standards of toughness and compassion.

Chef P., thank you for reminding me of the more erudite nature of cooking, of how academics and theory apply to our craft.

Chef E., thank you for reawakening me.  You recognized my stupor and how my potential did not match my motivation.  Thank you for teaching how far a little terror can go.  The locked stare of your ice-blue eyes will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Chef N., thank you for teaching me how far-reaching compassion can be, that kitchens aren't all about yelling and slamming and cursing, that you can get a lot out of someone with heart, you just have to give a shit.

Chef R., thank you for teaching me that life is about balance, that if your mind always wants to be at home, then you can't truly be at work.  I hope everything smooths out for you.

Chef P., thank you for reminding me of what it takes to run the show.  How hard it is, how rewarding it is, and how life-changing it is.

The end of one chapter and the start of another.

To the real world,

EP6

Don't Get Cocky

In my pursuit of happiness I have always marked a healthy sense of humility and the constant checking of one's ego as paramount to success.  I so zealously believed in this practice that I dug myself deep in to insecurity, went a bit overboard, and convinced myself there was no way no how I was going to cut it in New York City as a cook, as a chef, anything.  The culinary industry seemed a zero-sum game, one person's success meant another filled niche zoning me out of the play.  The task set before me just seemed too big, my training too lacking and my experience too little too late.  How could I compete with people who grew up cooking, got high-level training at a young age and seemed not only blessed with prodigious talent but the sagacious foresight to make all the right decisions?  So I hemmed and hawed about applying to culinary school and toyed with as many options as possible that would take me out of the pond-over-saturated-with-mega-fauna that is New York.  Find a quiet pond, less big fish, make your statement in less dangerous waters.

Then I actually went to culinary school.  Then I actually started kicking ass.  Then I went on externship, worked at a first-rate restaurant.  And then I kicked some more ass.

And then, for maybe the first time in my life, I got cocky.

I went in to school with the idea that everybody there was like me.  Some upstart young cook who had his eyes set on the gold, garnering as many Michelin and New York Times stars as possible, willing to sacrifice everything and give it all to become the best.

That was far from the case.  Instead, what greeted me were all sorts of people, mainly fresh high school graduates, who were just as lost and unsure as to where they were going as I was when I was a college freshman.  They had never eaten a meal that cost more than $20 a plate, never heard of Thomas Keller, never cooked a piece of fish (many completely unwilling to eat a piece of fish, much like myself when I was 7), and couldn't tell you what season morels start popping up.  They were kids, convinced by our growing obsession with food that it would be fun and glorious to cook for a living.

A disclaimer, they don't all suck.  Obviously, the school has produced some seriously high-caliber chefs and will continue to do so.  But what became apparent was that the number of rising stars was getting watered down by the expansion of the brand, and that it wasn't the school that made you great, it was your own merit and drive.

To be sure, the school gives you the opportunity to do so.  All the tools and knowledge are there for you to play with and absorb.  But if you have the wrong attitude, it's all going to be a massive waste of time.  You could cruise by on the coattails of your teammates and slink by on the exams, but then that hefty tuition tag really didn't give you much on return.

I didn't have the right attitude.  Not when I started and not when I returned.  And I kick myself for only realizing now.

At first, I thought I was better than all the students.  It was my job to show them who was boss and walk around with my dick out, i.e. to establish dominance.  I thought the chef-instructors were wash-outs; people who couldn't cut it in the restaurant game and gave up for greener pastures.  What did these guys know?  They were years out of the game and never truly played in the big leagues.

What an unforgiving and brash assumption to make.

Can you really blame someone for stepping out of the line-cooking gig, something that makes a family life nearly impossible?  Can you blame someone for not gambling everything in the bid for a restaurant?  Only to have your life chained to the stove and putting your livelihood at risk with every slow Tuesday night?  Can you blame someone for just not liking the big city, never aspiring to play at the highest stakes?  Does avoiding any of this make you a lesser cook?

The answer, I found, is no.

There is no such thing as the "best" restaurant.  Food is completely subjective, and while there may be people redefining our concept of what a restaurant is and pushing the boundary, and they may indeed be the pioneers of our industry, there is no shame in wanting to enjoy the comfier parts of life.  And there is no detriment to your ability to cook great food and be a good chef.

And despite them having been removed from the game for a few years now, it doesn't mean the totality of their experience is not useful.  What makes a good line cook, for the most part, has remained the same for many, many years.  Organization, speed, hard work and precision translates through the decades.

So I should really fucking listen.

But my head got in the way.

I have never been truly good at something.  Some people may say that I have a vast array of talents, but all that means to me is that I'm pretty good at a lot of things, but no master of any one skill.  Even with the cello and with music, something everybody told me I had a bright future in and had an innate knack for, I never fully realized my potential.  As every teacher since the 4th grade has told me, I don't apply myself.  I was nothing short of a colossal Jamarcus Russell; talented, hyped, someone from whom everybody expected great things, but inevitably fell short... a bust.

I've never been terribly good at pushing myself to do something my heart wasn't fully committed to.  So I never truly excelled.  Until I found cooking.  It was something I wanted so badly and it terrified me how inept I was at it.  But then as I slowly began to earn my chops, develop my skills, I came to the realization I have been prepared for this my whole life.

I got a bit ... exuberant.

Though I never cooked growing up (another thing I often kick myself for), I had the fortune of being in a family who appreciated food.  We love to eat, hence why we all struggle with maintaining a flat stomach, and we know what good food is, making the problem exponentially greater.  We serve good food and we have a great respect for what food can do.  This lifelong appreciation has given me one of the best tools I never realized I had; a good palate.  Even with taste buds deadened by smoking, I still know damn well when something tastes good.

It was only when I went to culinary school that I realized that not that many people actually have a great palate.  It's about exposure, it's about constantly eating well-prepared food in a great variety of cultures that allows you to develop a true scope of how to separate the good food from the bad, and to adjust a weak dish in to a solid one.  It's like reading.  Reading won't make you intelligent, and having a good palate won't necessarily make you a good cook, but it gives you the proper software to operate at a high level.  As for the hardware...

If having a good palate and knowledge of food is good software, then being a good line cook is the hardware.  I found that I had great advantages in this department as well.  I had already worked on the line for about a year.  While it wasn't life-changing food, it was solid, and for whatever reason the chefs I worked under in Chicago allowed me free reign to learn and try as many different things as possible.  Four months of working at Va Pensiero and I somehow managed to become a chef tournant; working saute on Mondays, grill on Tuesdays, pastry and garde manger through Thursday, and then pasta throughout the weekend.  And I understood the whole process of getting the food from raw ingredient to on the plate in front of the customer better than most, having grown up in the industry.

So I got arrogant.  Insufferably so, and my ego blocked my receptors to all the knowledge I could have had.   To be sure, I did very well academically, I still tested at the top of my class.  But the only real lesson I learned was that I was fucking dominating and I should be happy with myself, instead of realizing the information has to be set in hard to be of any real use.

Humility would come.  As I have documented before, Cafe destroyed me.  It reduced me to ashes.  But somehow I had been reborn and emerged a stronger, even more confident cook.  I realized that that was probably the intention all along.  That cooking well had a lot to do with confidence, and that much like basic training, the goal at high-caliber restaurants is to break you down and build you back up.

And here we encounter the problem.  I came back to school probably more obnoxious than ever.  Unwilling to learn, unwilling to participate and only giving my most half-assed effort.  I didn't want to be group leader anymore, I didn't do homework or do any personal research, I just whittled away the time to just get out and finish.

Two problems arose; the first, working without interest and passion makes the work abhorrently boring and painful.  The second?  I should cherish this time in the academic bubble while I can, because as the reality of holding a real job with no cushion approaches I grow more and more terrified of the real world.

I didn't listen.  I didn't care what the chefs had to say, I didn't care what this class on menu development had to offer.  I dragged myself through class and went through the motions.  I threw recipes to the wind, just did it my own way, got scolded for it, didn't care.  I already proved I could cut it in the industry, I don't need this school to tell me that I can't.

What a twat I had become.

Cooking doesn't work if you don't have passion and you don't buy in to the system.  If you cook with indifference, your product isn't worth shit, you are not worth shit.  You'll half-ass everything, just show up for your paycheck and eventually when you are faced with the difficult crossroads of either doing it the easy way and passing up some bullshit, or doing it the hard way and sacrificing your time, pride, energy to do it right... if you don't care, you'll take the shortcut every time.  It simply doesn't work.

If you don't buy in to the chef's system, it doesn't work either.  Sure, chefs aren't always right.  And a good chef will listen to the his cooks when they make honest inquiries in to how to do something better.  But it is not the cook's job to change the recipe.  You are a soldier, you are a worker bee, it is your job to follow orders.  If a chef can't trust you to do the simplest things his way, as he should, then you are not worth your $10.00 an hour.

I got cocky.  I thought I was better than the school and there was nothing left here for me.  Even if there is truth to that, that is no way to go through life with your head inflated so that you can't see anything around you.  A champion can win on any field, dominate at any challenge.

I always like to relate cooking to basketball, partly because I love basketball but also because I think the analogy works in a lot of ways.

The coach creates a system; maybe it's horns, maybe it's the triangle, maybe it's Princeton offense, whatever.  It doesn't work if the players don't buy in to the system.  Now, that's a term constantly thrown around ESPN, but it's true.  The players have to trust the system, trust the coach, trust each other for it to work.  But you can't rely on the system either to do the work for you, all systems do some things well and other things not so well.  It's the player who has to know when to adjust but always to work hard.  If you live and fail by the system, then fine.  At least you played with integrity.  But if you're constantly bitching, giving zero faith, and practicing little work ethic, then you either leave or die a villain.

Well, it's much the same in cooking.  The chef creates a system and you have to believe in it, die by it.  It's not your job to change the system, only to adjust to it and work with maximum effort.  When you get cocky, think you're above the system, then it's time you were 86'ed.  Sure, you may get to call the shots one day, but until then you work with integrity and humility.  Don't be Dwight Howard.

Don't be Dwight Howard.

EP6

Breaking Badly

It's the first day of the New Year.  People have set their resolutions in inevitably broken stone tablets and go forth with eager spirits and refreshed minds.  No matter how tenuous our resolutions may end up being, for now, these first few weeks of the New Year, people are at their most motivated, energetic and determined.

Not me.

I feel like dog shit wilting on summer-sun-baked asphalt.

I feel so crappy that that is the best imagery I can come up with to describe my motivational batteries.

No matter how much I may exaggerate in my lionization of the restaurant industry, this job really does break you down.  The hours, the stress, the endless waves of little problems requiring your attention, the focus demanded of you, the slow but implacable wear and tear on your body, it tires you out.  Even months after my experience at Cafe I have never felt fully recharged.

School is partially to blame.  While the hours and Defcon-5-level panic have subsided, all the stress that fuels your adrenaline that fuels your only hope of surviving is gone and replaced with boredom.  Straight boredom and frustration, death knell to one's hopes of optimism and putting your best foot forward.

But more significantly, I've gotten old.

Now, I know 26 isn't actually old, and that with even cursory maintenance this vehicle should run just fine.  But I guess what I'm saying is I've let myself get old and it's getting increasingly more difficult to overhaul this truck back in to shape.  Especially with the kind of mileage I'm putting on.

Bourdain puts it pretty well, "Never trust a skinny chef" is one of the dumbest observations a person could make of the realities of the restaurant world.  Now, the stress of elite cookery beats you in to a thin piece of sheet metal.  To be sure, the majority of the cooks I worked with were at perfectly healthy weights, if not a little under.  But if you were to ask any of us to run a mile or display any sort of athletic prowess you'd find we come up very short.

First and foremost, it's the fatigue.  Working in a kitchen is no targeted workout, but it's 14 hours a day on your feet, hauling big buckets of ice and stock up and down stairs; mopping, wiping, scrubbing, cutting, sweeping, hefting steel roasting pans with your fingertips so you don't sear your forearms, getting down on your knees and pulling quarts of soup out of your low-boy hundreds of times a day.  When you get home, you're not sore, but the last thing you want to do is move.  You are, on the whole, depleted from a day full of pressurized movement.  My knees have aged 10 years in a summer, and even a light game of basketball will have me reaching for the ice pack in the morning.  Of more than thirty cooks I only knew two who had any sort of regular workout.  More than half were smokers.  And while youth lights hot enough a fire to melt away what food you consume, cooks over 30 really start a slippery slide in to fat-assery.

Secondly, it's the food.  As you could imagine, we are around some of the freshest and finest-prepared ingredients in the city.  While we often don't have time to stop for a sit-down meal, we will heap tons of family meal on to a take-out container and eat during lulls.  Family meal is not created with the intentions of being healthful.  It is the compilation of scraps that have their innate flavor maximized, meaning the inclusion of a lot of fat and salt.  Fried duck legs, pizza with leftover trotter sausage, creamy pasta and mayonnaise-laden sandwiches coupled with french fries are commonplace.  And then the food that goes unnoticed in your constant tasting fills up the tank as well.  The pasta cook may take twenty bites of risotto in a service, the soup cook may have 30-40 sips of cream of sunchoke, the fish cook maybe a pint of creamy brandade.  It adds up.  And then when all is said and done, if the meat cook decides to hand you a few slices off his remaining lamb roast after breakdown, or your boy on coffee station hands you a whole-milk chai latte, you don't say no.  One, it's impolite, and two, that's stupid because that shit is delicious.

So the weight piles on, slowly but surely, and everything you burn off comes back doubly strong and repugnant.  Your body degrades in to a goopy mass lacking any defining musculature, and your joints turn to rusty hinges at an alarmingly accelerated rate.  It's going to take herculean effort and determination to get your ass to the gym, your chef demands all your focus and energy, the work consumes you and breaks you and consumes you again, and despite all that self-loathing, you're looking at a plate of mashed potatoes and roasted chicken with butter and you're just gonna grab one... okay, maybe two... fine, I'll get a plate, I've got a long service ahead of me.

It used to be so easy.

If you play college ultimate, the majority of the world doesn't consider you a real athlete.  But you know the hours you put in at practice and the gym are worthy of the four to five thousand calorie diet you're working on.  It's just wanton feeding but you're running and lifting enough that you're actually losing.  Worst-possible-recovery-meal at a McDonald's after a Saturday of play?  Yeah!  Sure!  No worries!  I'm going to be running for six hours tomorrow, bring on the fat!

I am just beginning to face the realities of a body on the precipice of a downturn.  All engines should be firing at maximum power, but the wrong fuel, the wrong maintenance has it going haywire.

Finally, the lifestyle.  The rockstar lives of chefs are becoming increasingly publicized.  Bourdain has popularized the notion of the work hard, play hard chef, and it has only attracted more young people who want to be reckless and want to have fun.

If you've crushed it after a Saturday night service, that latent adrenaline has to go somewhere and it usually goes right to the bar.  Abusive drinking, drugs, cigarettes, staying up late, eating pizza at four in the morning ... it's a coup de grace to a body that is just begging for a little more nurturing attention.  And whereas before a night teetering on the edge of blackout might leave me a little hazy the next morning, even a few beers and god-forbidden-whiskey will have me effectively crippled for the next 24 hours, rendering me useless for anything more than some vegetating in front of a computer screen.

So I can't move like I used to, I can't eat like I used to, and I can't drink like I used to and this post is becoming more and more the whining and bemoaning of a young-man-who-thinks-he's-old.

What do we do?

Resolutions don't work.  If you're going to do something and you set a start date, you're just procrastinating inevitable failure.  Everyday my energy level declines a little and stairs become a little more tiresome.  If you want to do something it better be now because it's not getting any easier.

Eating good food and enjoying good drink is great.  I think everybody can benefit from a little hedonism now and then.  It reconnects people with the more primal pleasures in life, regresses your brain to Cro-Magnon status so that you can stop worrying about all your first world problems, office politics and online dating profiles, even if just for the duration of a meal.  And maybe it's hypocritical to serve food but yet discourage over-consumption.  You could only imagine a chef that goes out in to the dining room to tell his whales that maybe you should cut back on a few courses in the name of America's obesity epidemic.

No, preaching is no good.  And seeking to serve a higher purpose is no good either.  If celebrity has done a bad thing for the chef it is inflating his sense of self-importance.  You just cook food, dude.  Just food.  And while I have said endlessly that what we do is so much more than food, and I still stand by that statement, you do have to realize there are other important things in life.

Like lengthening it.

I'm never going to discourage butter, vegans still make me scratch my head, and pork fat is a commodity that deserves to be put back in to the culinary spotlight.

But for myself, I think it's time to take a step back.  Having class on the fourth floor of Roth is a major disappointment.  Wearing the workhorse suit is a little tighter than it used to be.  And god knows I need all the freedom of movement I can get when dealing with the Abrahamic hordes that sweep across my family's restaurant.  (I feel less bad about the term "Abrahamic horde" when realizing that the Encyclopedia Britannica lists the top three biological swarms in the world as locusts, passenger pigeons and the Chinese)

Just as before when I went on my long ranting soliloquy about how a balance between a personal life and a successful restaurant was possible, I believe a cook's lifestyle can be paired with a healthy one.  The paragons for this way of life exist, they are just uncommon.

But uncommon is what I always hope to be.

EP6