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