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