The Cast

I came upon the realization that I have been a fully-participating member in the food industry for only three years.  It seems a hell of a lot longer than that.  Probably because I grew up in the industry, riding the pine for my mom's restaurant, pinch-hitting here and there.  And then I was further sidelined by a questionable stint at The Culinary Institute of America.  So I suppose that doesn't count.  But as a front-line grunt, a full-time, paid and frayed by the hour cook, it's only been three years.

Only.

Still, in all that time of varying investment, I have been deep in the ever-changing mosaic of employees that come and go through the restaurant industry.

Why do people even bother with this industry in the first place?  It's pay-to-hour ratio is abysmal, there are no real breaks, an unending reel of high-stress, fast-paced situations that barely give you a moment to think, while someone with the empathetic ability of an especially sensitive hamster bears down on you for mistakes that are without any accountability or proper context.  How do people convince themselves it's a good idea?

Well, the harsh truth that not too many people want to admit is that they have to.  Those working conditions are indeed pretty soul-sucking and unsustainable for long.  People who have any decent head on their shoulders will steer far and clear away from such murky waters.  So what are we left with?  The people who have no other options, and the sociopaths who actually like this shit.

Therefore, you can imagine that the competition for talented, smart and emotionally balanced employees is pretty damn high.  There aren't too many of them.  Even the smart people the industry has are tinged with a shade of madness.  A truly smart person would've pursued a stable desk job with a respectable retirement option, found a partner with predictably solid parenting skills, dumped out a couple of kids and sent them to a decent college.  It isn't like medicine, or law, or business.  We don't attract people with the whole package.  We get the misfits and the renegades, true blue-collar heroes who are rich in conventional wisdom and working fortitude, but maybe lacking in highfalutin book smarts and genteel educations.  In short, graduates of the school of hard-knocks.

I'm no manager but I try to place myself in those shoes occasionally, knowing that that will eventually be my destiny.  The questions always sort of revolve around the same issues; Why don't you move faster?  Why don't you work cleaner?  Why can't you do this better?  Why can't you focus?  Why can't you work well with others?

The easy response is to rage.  Damn you for your shortcomings, I am able to do this, why can't you?  Look how much shit I've gone through to get to where I am.  I'm going to ignore your entire personal experiences and perspectives and just get fucking furious because they don't line up with mine.  Fucking get with the program.  Respond to fear!  Respond to base and unsophisticated emotion!

But the more nuanced question to ask is "Well, really what can I expect from someone who I'm paying $11.00 an hour?"  "What skilled, focused, driven individual who is also adept at working with others in a stressful environment, am I hoping for at that price point?"

When you ask yourself that you can toss around the debates of why don't chefs get paid more and why don't people care about their food, but at the end of the day you have to take what you can get.  Being a good cook and eventually being a good chef requires one to have a full mastery of skills across many disciplines.  You have to be athletic, focused and graceful movements in your core, with a sense of beauty and aestheticism reserved for artists, but the rigid work ethic of a master craftsman.  You need the emotional capacity to relate to and command a kitchen crew while having the business acumen to push the bottom line and market oneself.  And if you really want to be the best, you need the capricious muse of creativity on your side while having the wherewithal to seize the right opportunities when presented.  All of that on top of being able to hit medium-rare on a steak with your eyes closed, resting it and slicing it with a perfectly maintained knife.

That's part of why I love it.  I have never been especially good at one thing, but I am pretty good at a lot of different things.  And I have always had the fortune of surrounding myself with good people.  But to be really honest?  Where else was I going to go?  A hilariously worthless GPA from a great school doesn't get you anywhere, and an at-best intermittent attention span wasn't going to do me any good either.  In to the fire I went.

But that doesn't mean I am exceptional.  There are many who came before me and there are many still who outshine me in many ways.  The complex fabric of restaurant employees may be horribly stained in some areas, but truly beautiful in others.  The cooks I have encountered in my short time have been at their best, brothers in arms, trustworthy people with which to share a foxhole, but at their worst, people you'd shove in front of the N train if the opportunity presented itself.

I present The Cast.  The various archetypes of cooks I've seen in my life and conveniently categorize people in to because it makes for interesting blog material, and a sensible way to make sense of an at-times senseless industry.

The Mercenary

It's no real secret that the restaurant industry attracts a lot of immigrants, especially from our southern borders.  It's a controversial subject with which I step lightly, frankly it's above my pay grade.  But cooks who have worked with a whole host of people from Mexico, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic (and almost all cooks have), know that they can range from truly horrendous troublemakers to some of the most ice-cold, efficient cooks in the known universe.

I risk generalizing and being branded a racist here, but the truth of the matter to me is that a lot of these immigrants approach their work with an entirely different attitude than us Americans.  We have been spun the story that work is about personal growth and spiritual fulfillment.  We should go to work with the hopes of achieving greater happiness, not just for paying the bills.  Holding a sinecure earns little honor in this country.  But the immigrants who struggle so hard to make it here?  Who escaped a difficult life in hopes for a better one, risked everything?  They work for the sake of the work.  They work for money, to pay bills, to feed mouths, that's it.  Any enjoyment they take out of it is a great existential bonus.  They work harder, longer and with more discipline because they don't have much else of a choice.  How well they perform is directly correlated to their ability to provide for their families, often the only thing they took with them when they came to this country.  When someone gives them an awful task to do they don't whine like we would about if this sort of task is really an efficient use of manpower or if this is utilizing my time properly.  They just, fucking, do it.

That sort of dogged focus and pragmatic approach to work can really shine in a kitchen.  And it can be greatly rewarded.  Meat-cutters who spent years slogging it out in some dark, bloody factory cutting up questionably-raised animals and hauling the waste to some questionably-managed dump can become incredibly prized butchers at some restaurants, people with a truly rare skill in the modern age who are given whatever hours and vacation time like.  Or people who, smelling like fish for years and having the rot of piscine viscera permanently embedded under their fingernails, become legends to the cooks around them, able to break down a school of fish in a workday.  There is high honor in this work, even if they don't believe it themselves.  I greatly appreciate the skill even if to them it's just a means of bringing home the bacon.

I don't mean to positively stereotype the multitude of Latinos working in American kitchens.  Certainly, they are just like the rest of us; some have the ambition to shine, while others resent their lot in life and can't be fucked to give a damn about washing a pot with a good attitude  But it is in my experience that the ones who have the ambition to do better for their family, take pride in their work, and approach their craft with that head-down, nose to the grindstone attitude?  They are some of the most remarkable cooks I have ever worked with.

The Perfectionist

The best cooks are those that exist at the beautiful intersection of speed and precision.  All cooks battle one precious resource they cannot control; time.  There are lots of people who can cut perfect dice, wrangling precise cubes out of geometrically stubborn shallots, but can you do it on top of all your other duties?  Under pressure, the clock ticking, ready for service with all of your other mise en place before the curtain opens at five o' clock?  That's a much harder task to manage.

Even amateur cooks can manage beautiful product, but they have the luxury of time and a lack of impatient customers.  When the clock is ticking you have to figure out the way to turn out good dice in a reasonable amount of time, and that's what separates the home cook from a seasoned professional one.  That doesn't mean we put up shit because we don't know how to manage our time properly.  The threshold for which someone can push the relationship of precision and speed goes exceptionally high.  But there are certain people who become too bogged down by their desire for perfection that they quickly lose sight of the bigger picture; getting set up for service.

Perfectionists range in overall usefulness.  On the one hand, their extremely high standards and attention to detail are admirable, they don't want to serve anything that doesn't fit their very restrictive standards.  But they tend to falter under the weight of a heavy prep load.  This either results in screwing over your partner, or if you have the luxury of being solely responsible for the station, yourself.  At some point, the clock is going to pressure you and if you are accustomed to making everything painstakingly perfect you're not going to be in your natural environment when the kitchen needs you to produce now.

To be sure, Perfectionists thrive in certain environments.  There are restaurants that are set up in such a way that they have the time and resources to exact out their dogmatic cooking.  Ultra high-end dining is really where these sorts of cooks can flourish.  But if you want to make money, you need to sell a lot of food, and if you want to sell a lot of food?  You need to know what is worth sinking a lot of time in to and what isn't.  Shallot brunoise is something all cooks should be able to do exceptionally, perfect chives are something all cooks should be able to cut given enough time.  A truly useful cook is someone who can give you a pint in five minutes, a quart in ten.  And you have to pick your battles.  It's getting folded in to an aioli where the customer will never see it?  Then it just has to be uniform so the customer doesn't get a massive bite of raw onion, it doesn't have to be cosmetically perfect.  Oblique carrot cuts for a garnish, are they standing in broad daylight on a stark white plate with only a chicken breast to hide behind?  Or is it getting lost in a pasta with a variety of other vegetables?  Then maybe your window of attention changes slightly.

Perfectionists, if they last long enough, eventually come to make very frustrating but important managers.  When they are put in a position where they have to evaluate product rather than produce it, their steadfastness in bearing the standard of perfection is extremely valuable.  They will always show your cooks the North Star of Excellence they must follow, even if they've forgotten the practical difficulties we face in cooking.  But boy, are they a pain in the ass to work with.

The Beast

This cook exists purely on the X-axis of speed.  He (and they usually are "he's," just as Perfectionists are usually "she's") will stroll in minutes before call time, lazily set up a board, steel his knife a few times, and within an hour will be surrounded by a tower of plastic containers filled with completed knife cuts and mise en place.  In cook's parlance, this guy can crush.  It's hard to tell when the Beast is in the shit (that is, in danger of not getting all of their tasks done in time), and they rarely seem to be moving particularly fast or in a panicked manner, but through whatever voodoo magic and determination they will face an insurmountable prep list and then ask you what you need for service.

I suppose through the language I use it's hard not to imagine that I admire Beasts in a way.  I admire that ability to keep your head down and just start working furiously yet quietly.  But just as with any other type of cook, they can vary.  Some Beasts and their work do not hold up well under the microscope.  You look around their shelves, you really put the fine-tooth comb on their work and you start to see how they were able to get so much done.  Slight imperfections, a few noticeable corners cut.  The end product rarely suffers, if it did they wouldn't be a very useful Beast at all, but I suppose it just matters what sort of restaurant you're in.  Are you in the sort of place that demands absolute integrity at all levels of work, perfection despite any sort of practical limitations the world may put on you?  Then, the Beast is in the wrong place.  But in a turn-and-burn sort of joint, a place that is jammin' at all hours, you couldn't ask for a better friend.  A refined Beast, someone who can magically create a mountain of product in a few hours that really does hold up under intense scrutiny?  Those are people who anchor your line, and when they become managers, chefs, executives later?  They step on to your cutting board, show you how it's done, and make you wither in the face of their total dominance.  It's a simple and brutish way to earn respect, but an important one in the Pirate Code of professional cookery.

The Bro

Cooking has OD'ed on an injection of testosterone to the ass.  Full sleeve tattoos, Iron Chef "combatants," faux-hawks, smoking, drinking, fucking waitresses, poor Bourdain acolytes.  There's just way too much puffed-up masculinity in cooking today and it certainly attracts a large contingent of Bros; frat-boys and DIII college athletes who are still looking for that adrenaline rush and that hazy border between male bonding and butthole pleasures. The Bro is exactly what you'd imagine, a tatted up goon who will shamelessly hit on every server in the restaurant and rush off to be under the influence of any substance he can get his hands on after service.  There's really not a whole lot to say about Bros.  They are not entirely useless, they often make excellent grill cooks, a station that presents the most primitive challenges of starting a fire, putting meat on it and cooking it.  But I've yet to see one properly capable of cooking a piece of fish or delicately turning a Thumbelina carrot.

The Rookie

I have a soft spot for interns.  Their brave and foolish optimism about what they're going to encounter in the real industry is refreshing.  It reminds you of when you first started, when you were bright-eyed and hopeful that this was the right choice for you.  And if they remain that way, always keep a positive attitude, and keep chugging along despite all the shit thrown their way, then I can't help but love them.

Interns really get some shit jobs.  Rearranging dry goods, wiping off cans of tomatoes and scrubbing down wire racks, cutting six quarts of leek brunoise, shelling peas and slicing onions for the whole restaurant, some asinine amount in the neighborhood of 26 quarts.

See, I never really got to be an intern.  I got a battlefield promotion to the line early on and I was a little too old to be bitched around.  I had perceptible value from the onset, and I appreciate that because I would never have been able to swallow my pride and do an intern's work.  I'm too impatient, too proud, I would have walked out.  So I feel for them and admire their innocence, and in that innocence, their determination.  They will carry the badges of that tedious work for the rest of their lives.

Thomas Keller once said of the ideal cook, "Someone who has the attitude that they can do anything, but is too humble to say it."  The majority of interns I've encountered in my life embody that ideal.  They aren't so bitter and crusty like the hot line cooks, they are fully accepting of any education you offer them, like a child sponging up a language.  And when they pony up to their first service and they're freaking out, the adrenaline is coursing through them and they don't know how to handle it and cook at the same time, and they're spilling salt everywhere and creating a godawful mess... I mean it's obnoxious but it's also cute, and it's a good reminder that we all started somewhere, and we all had humble beginnings.

The Piece of Shit Rookie That Everyone Hopes Dies Violently As Soon As Possible

On the flip side, every so often I will encounter an intern who I wish will encounter a fiery, painful death.  Here is someone who is green as grass and yet has the gall to utter defiance and suggest he knows better.  They talk back, they make excuses, complain, all while not knowing their ass from their elbow and remaining ever confident.

I've never been one to tolerate unjustified arrogance.  I like a little trash-talking now and again, a little swagger is important to establishing oneself in a kitchen, but you have to earn it.  You have to know, not think, in your heart there's not a single person in this kitchen who would dare salt on your skills, even if they found you extremely unpleasant.  So for someone who has zero experience (or some bullshit hack experience at so-and-so-nobody-gives-a-fuck-restaurant-you-probably-spent-all-day-cutting-bread-for-the-servers-you-shoemaker-piece-of-shit) to get uppity and challenge the senior ranking cooks is nothing short of a heinous crime.  If I could court-martial you, I would.  Better yet, if I could Code Red you like Santiago in a A Few Good Men, I would.  No question about it.

If you come in with an attitude and assume you know everything, you don't fucking belong.  Even if you're a smart-ass who studies all the time, reads his Eater blog, and has eaten more three Michelin star dinners than John Mariani, and you actually may be correct?  Shut your fucking face.  There's a pecking order, you can call it primitive, unnecessary, draconian, whatever you want, but it exists.  You fall in line, you shut up and you do what your told.  You ask why?  You get one chance for a response.  "Because I said so, chef" is exactly what you're going to get.  Ask why again, say why one more god damned time, they speak English in why?!  Then you're out.

Thankfully, most kitchens will weed out these pestilent tumors rather quickly.  Martial law and Pirate Code sees to it, the auto-immune response of the line will destroy this creature or assimilate it.  But the few that manage to permeate and slink along just slyly enough to stick around?  Someone who is universally reviled but is not quite so bad as to deserve firing?  They are poison in the wound, and should be avoided at all costs.

The Time Bomb

I will be the first to tell you that the high-stress environment of a restaurant brings out the worst in people.  People who, in normal, civilian conversation are pleasant, polished and perfunctory, will become tempests of wild emotion when the tickets come streaming in.  Some people are just not graceful under fire, there's not a whole lot you can do.  Everybody has a moment at some point in their career where they consider walking out, the pressure has become too immense, I'm going to crack.  The difference maker is if you become accustomed to that stress, or if it constantly compromises your ability to cook good food with the people next to you.

When it's slow season in New York, the summer, all the rich folk off in the Hamptons just having a lovely ole' time, it's easy to be at your best.  The produce is beautiful and consistent, everyone's in a good mood, there's sunshine and the restaurant is doing a very manageable amount of covers.  You are never quite pushed in to the red.  Cooking during this time is, for the most part, very pleasant, you can put your best face forward every day and remain genuinely cheerful.

But when the winter comes and the beautiful Hudson Valley produce starts to shut down; bad frost here, bad weather here, sorry these leprous potatoes are really all I can offer you, and I couldn't get a nice product out of this if I tried, all of a sudden the holidays are coming up and you're questioning your life decisions because your loved ones are all on vacation, enjoying each other's company and getting gifts, and to make things worse, everyone else is coming to your restaurant to celebrate their good times, and be in the mirth of the season, and it's just crushcrushCRUSH everyday, a never ending line of customers...

That's when it gets hard to put your best face forward.  And that's where most Time Bombs will be very dangerous to the morale of your kitchen.

"Hey, how long out on apps?"

"IT'LL BE READY WHEN IT'S FUCKING READY, AND IF YOU ASK ME AGAIN, I'LL SHOVE DOUGH DOWN YOUR THROAT AND PULL PASTA OUT OF YOUR ASSHOLE! GO FUCK YOURSELF!"

"Alrighty, three out."

You see, it's hard to criticize someone, or push someone to move faster without it sounding intensely personal.  The message has to be delivered delicately, but the receiver also has to have the resilience to understand that everyone's just trying to cook better food.  No one's saying you're a bad person because your salad could use a little more acidity, they're just saying the salad could use a little more acidity.  Time Bombs usually have a touchy emotional constitution to begin with, a fucked up personal life they can't help but bring in with them, most likely due to their volatile emotional state, and they become very difficult to work with.  You can't say anything to them, even if they're doing it wrong, they drag down the spirits of the whole crew, and they create this very nervous environment where you're forced to walk on eggshells.  When Time Bombs are happy and things are going well?  They're great, emotionally attuned, forceful and dedicated.  But when the shit hits the fan they greatly exacerbate an already shit situation with their furious nature.

It's hard to identify Time Bombs, and they don't always present themselves right away.  Oftentimes, they appear later in the careers of cooks as the long-term effects of being a chef starts to whittle away at their sanity.  They've usually proven they can do great work, you can't throw that all in the garbage and shit-can someone because they had a meltdown.  But they certainly create a lot of unnecessary headaches for management.

The Pastured Bull

Most cooks work with the intent of becoming a sous chef at some point.  The daily pressures of setting up a station and working the line is a young man's game.  There's a finite amount of endurance one has for that sort of labor.  Eventually, once someone has earned their chops and proven they are an ice-cold line cook, they get promoted to being a sous chef or a tournant; a management position that trades in the physical exhaustion of working the line, for the mentally exhausting task of managing a team of cooks.

The Pastured Bull is a person who, lacking the immense physical difficulty of cooking that set the fire to their intensity, becomes checked out.  They're managing others, coming up with ideas, and sure it's a difficult job to have, but your performance is no longer measured by seconds, it's measured by hours.  You lose the fire, you lose the push.  You stroll around the restaurant, grazing on your cooks' mise en place as quality check, you do paperwork, you order produce, you expedite service, but you are rarely put under the pressure again where you are racing to the finish line.  You start to get a little lazy.

To be sure, there are many an excellent sous chef who will continue to grind and motivate, even if they aren't cooking every day, but there are just as many whose greatness stemmed from the adrenaline, and without its familiar ignition, start to glaze over.

The Bull will come on to the line every so often.  Someone will call in sick, someone is on vacation, they're forced to get back in the saddle.  And usually what you will see is a revival.  The poison of Saruman is drawn from their veins, they awaken and they remind you of what it took for them to get to where they were.  Flashes of brilliance, slick moves on the line.  But the rest of the time, when they return to their position of management, one can't help but be reminded of an old bull, who after years of successful work and glory days , was given the honor to live out his days in peace.

(I suppose the analogy breaks down when you realize prize bulls are really valued for the gallons of bovine semen they've provided over the years.  Yes, I see this now.)

The Temptress

Women in the kitchen have always had it hard.  If they're not deemed traditionally attractive, the kitchen crew will kill all signs of femininity and designate her as a full-time bro.  If they are traditionally attractive they have it even harder.  They will either suffer from not being taken seriously, or they will constantly get hit on, or they will be forced to become a little nasty to ward off the unending tsunami of penis that is flooding their Fukushima.  If they even nastily reject a man's advance once, she will then become a "bitch."  What a world it would be if a woman could just be her usual self and not have pressurized jizz cannons trained on her from the get go.  (How many times have I talked about seminal fluid in this post?)

The most effective means I've seen this problem dealt with is what I call Business Mode.  Even a rather plain woman will be deemed incredibly sexy if she can hold her own on the line, not smell like sweaty balls after service, and her chef coat offers the mere suggestion of breasts.  So no woman is truly safe from unwanted eyes.  But the best way to shut that all down without sending a nasty and confusing message?  Business Mode.  All business, all professional, all the time.  This may give off the suggestion you're a bit stiff and maybe not the most fun, but I think it's a better alternative to being called a bitch or worse, a Temptress.

There are certain women who are very aware of the exaggerated power they have in a male-dominated kitchen.  They wear tight, black, pants to work, they talk very closely to you about the most mundane of subjects ("Oh yes, I cleaned a quart of spring onions for you." she said, in a breathy tone), and they sashay away from you to fishhook your line of sight.  They are powerful and dangerous creatures who can suddenly have you doing things that have stressed your prep load beyond the breaking point.  One comment in a normal male conversation about anal like "Yeah, it can be pretty good" and all of a sudden all attention is diverted and distracted.

I don't endorse it, no one on either side is doing anything right or professional, but they exist, they almost always have boyfriends, and they are out to disrupt your world if you let them.

The Fat Boy

"Never trust a skinny chef."

It's the most useless and untrue idiom I've ever encountered, and if I ever hear someone utter it in seriousness, I will stab them in their fucking goiter.

Being a high-end line cook requires a great deal of athleticism.  Does that mean we are ripped, sleek and wiping off the corners of our abdominal frame in the locker room? Fuck no, we polish that gourd in our gut because we just ate two quarts of white rice topped with Sloppy Joe mix for family meal.  But that doesn't mean we aren't graceful, that we use most of the calories, and that a wide-load ass is going to cause everybody a lot of problems.

I can't describe this better than Bourdain, but the basic premise is this: almost every NYC kitchen is going to have you cooking shoulder to shoulder with someone in a space the size of a cubicle with fire on each side.  If you weigh 320 pounds and are looking to be another statistic in America's Type II diabetes epidemic, then you are going to be a severe inconvenience in the kitchen.  You will bump in to people coming down the narrow ass line, you will move slowly and people will impatiently huff behind you on the stairs, and it will be very difficult for you to prove you have any useful fifth gear.

I get it.  I was fat and am slowly returning to that state.  It sucks, it's hard to control, it's a never-ending battle from which you constantly retreat in to your Krispy Kreme Kastle with cheese sauce.  But if you want to be taken seriously, if you want to have a career longer than three years, if you want to cook with the best, you gotta hit that treadmill, son.

The Machine

If chefs could build automatons with the ability to do knife-work, season food, cook it to proper temp and artistically present in on a plate, they would install seven in to their line and say "Fuck you" to all the cooks that worked for them.  Not to mention that robots don't talk back or call in sick because they're not sure if it was blow or gonorrhea they got from this chick in Harlem.

What every line cook should seek to be is a machine.  Chefs are often seen as some sort of whimsical artist, a flourish there, an edible flower here.  But where they all (should) have come from is being an absolute machine on the line that is relentlessly, impossibly consistent.  The ability to produce perfect food, on command, every time with precision, speed, grace and little to no emotional instability.

Cooking a duck breast is a great way to see how someone works with heat, and how close they are to being The Machine.  The challenge of duck breast isn't getting it to a nice medium.  It's more forgiving than beef and far quicker to cook in that manner.  The challenge is knowing each individual breast, its size, its fat content, its water content, by feel... putting it in a pan and knowing by the intensity of the sizzle, how long it will take to render out all the fat so that the skin is crisp like a potato chip... all the fat is rendered off so it isn't chewy, the breast hasn't shrunk by 40% because you rocked it in max heat, and the breast meat is still a beautiful, juicy pink throughout, an even gradient with little to no gray to suggest it was cooked in a one-directional pan.  That's the challenge.

I've known cooks who can get a duck skin to shatter in the mouth, the meat to immediately release juice, salt and residual fat, while looking like duck meat comes from nature colored a rosy hue, every, single, time.  That's what makes a Machine, and this is the sort of cook every aspiring chef should aspire to be.  You walk over to their station, it quite literally looks like new.  Even the equipment seems to shine brighter when they're there.  Their knives gleam, the water their spoons sit in looks like a Reflecting Pool, even their garbage cans look barely used.  They are obsessive and ruthless in the execution of their culinary efficiency.

There aren't many Machines out there.  They tend to become very famous chefs and in charge of their own kitchens, but when you encounter one, you'll know it.  You'll know they have everything it takes to be the best, and by some god given grace or the tenacity of their own ambition, remind you why we love to cook and eat.



I suppose the natural question we come to is where do I belong?  I'm not totally sure, I'm still in what I consider the infancy of my career and I haven't had a whole lot of time to spread my wings, but I've seen some shit.  I've seen a whole lot of shit and I take this time to reflect and wonder about where I'm going.  But my own reflections can only go so far, our own self-awareness so limited, so like most cooks I am constantly in the search for feedback.

I have been described as very detail-oriented and able to consistently produce beautiful plates, but I have never been described as a Beast or as someone who could crush mise en place.  I am better suited to precision than I am to volume, and I admit knowingly that I can become bogged down by details.  I am obsessively, obsessively clean and will be the first person to scrub out a hand sink, compact a burgeoning trash can, and bust out the stainless steel polish.  I am generally cheerful but have been known to have a nasty temper, and my station partners have dubbed my "Look of Death" as something akin to having ones dog killed and utter, reckless hate for the world.  Some strange combination of Perfectionist/Time Bomb/The Machine/Fat Boy Jr. I suppose.

But there's still some time to see where that grows.  Not a lot of time, I am not so young a man anymore, hopefully the glue isn't set and that I still have room to change and improve, but it's hard to tell.  Cooking is difficult, it exposes us, and shows everyone who we really are.  At the end of a fourteen-hour shift, not everyone has the energy to better themselves.  But what is a chef if he isn't in the constant pursuit of improvement, the constant pursuit of knowledge, and the betterment of everything he believes in?

Well, then, they really aren't a chef at all.


EP6

The Misfit

I have a fondness for animated movies.  Pixar, Disney Magic, the occasional Dreamworks triumph, they all strum some sentimental heartstring I've hung on to since childhood.  Perhaps in the face of adulthood reality and the dark nature of my career I need this simple, lighthearted entertainment to prevent me from going in to the brink.  I need something to remind me of fearless and innocent imagination, of what it was like to jump without looking, consequences and the boundaries of reality be damned.

So that being said I had no shame in plunking down $14.00, sliding in to a leather chair and watching Frozen; classic Disney storytelling about the plights of a magical snow queen (you know, normal stuff).

There comes a moment in the film where Elsa, the aforementioned snow queen, escapes the confines of her throne to go in to self-imposed exile in the mountains.  After years of restraining herself from using her powers she unleashes flurries, crystals and animated snowmen.  She builds a towering castle of ice that rises up out of nothing, a wintry fortress of solitude serving as her bastion against the fearful world, "Let it go!" she sings as she finally claims her seat as the Queen of Winter.

Either this is a cleverly disguised metaphor for coming out of the closet, unleashing your pent up homosexuality upon the world in ice fortress format, or it is a more general message to the children (of which there were few in the audience, I might add) to accept yourself for who you are.  Bottling up your true feelings, your true identity only leads to pain.  Love yourself, accept what you have become, embrace inner tranquility and happiness.

This is a common theme in media directed towards young adults; be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.  Teenagers are hormonal, anti-authority, and not getting the sex they want, how do you expect them to figure out who they are amidst all that adversity?  Not that I have the mental maturity of a teenager (though, I suppose it's possible), or am struggling with a lack of a congruent self-identity (oh wait, this is sounding familiar), or am frustrated by the world around me instead of accepting that which we cannot change (oh shit, train's pulling in to the station of realization).

So I suppose it got to me.  This lovely, animated snow queen with her giant, fucking round-eyes and inhuman-standard-of-Caucasian-beauty resting on a stick frame (let alone that singing a power ballad while running up a mountain is fucking impossible;  that skinny bitch ain't got no pipes) spoke to me.  Why?  Why was I having trouble letting it go?  Why do I even feel this frustration?

And it all comes back to work.

I hate for work to define me as an individual, but it's difficult for chefs to have an alternative.  So much of our waking hours are devoted to cooking, our social relationships so starved and our emotional ranges so stunted, we really have nothing else.  We cling on to the hope that our meager dose of adrenaline is enough to make the time go by, that our of love of food will be pleasant company in years of solitude, and that somehow, someway this will pay off.  So in all that focus and desperation, we find that this is all we ever think about and all that ever affects our moods.  Good services make us ecstatic, bad services ruin our weeks.  Work consumes us and finds us, rules us and in the darkness, binds us.

So when my work is not going well, I feel a powerful and debilitating sense of overall dissatisfaction.  If this isn't going well for me, then nothing is.

This is in great unfairness to the people around me, especially my girlfriend.  They have nothing to do with the pain I experience, and yet they are all victim to my bad moods and querulous tempers.

But why isn't it going well?  I think I'm held in fairly high esteem, the resume power is palpable, I execute professionally and exceptionally.  By all standards, things are going well.  Why complain?  Stop bitching!

And it all comes back to the Snow Queen.

I can't be myself.

Don't get me wrong, the restaurant is impressive.  From my viewpoint, what goes on behind the scenes is far more impressive than anything you'd get out in the dining room.  Without question, I am a part of one of the most well-run and well-organized restaurants in the world.  The staggering network of farmers, purveyors, employers, employees, guests, guest relations, businesses is managed so efficiently and so pleasantly that any other restaurant is pure amateur hour, my own family's restaurant straight bush league.  What restaurant will match a 401k for you?  Who will allow you vacation days, paid time off, medical insurance that isn't a complete joke, and provide a constantly refreshing expense account for you to dine out?  Tax-exempt commuter cards and no-questions-asked disability compensation?  Company-sponsored English lessons for any and all?  You cubicle monkeys take this stuff for granted.  In 99% of the world's restaurants, you don't work, you don't get paid.  You are hourly, everything else is nonessential.  You are a rat.

And yet, despite of all that, despite of all that generous and nurturing extra mileage, I find a reason to bitch.  To express discontent, to hate, to behave poorly.  Like a brat.

Why?

I'm not a sociopath.  I have never bitten the hand that feeds me.  Why now?  Why, when I have been given so much, do I become so resentful?

In the end, it comes down to a cultural problem.

An environment that cultivates such a generous and gentle atmosphere is going to be hard-pressed to perform like a "normal" kitchen.  My fear is that you would interpret that as a criticism, when by all objective standards, this is high praise.  No bullying, no yelling, no unnecessary abuse, expressing hospitality to one another before expressing it to the guests.  No more Old World slamming pots and pans, belittling you and cursing you out.  This is an evolved restaurant, we will behave like an evolved business.  Professional and emotionally considerate at all times.

The company calls it the "51 Percenter."  The ideal hire is someone who is almost perfectly balanced in having the requisite technical and emotional skills for the job, the ratio being 49% technical to 51% personal.  The idea is simple and one that anyone would find difficult to disagree with; technical skills can be taught, while emotional skills are nearly impossible to teach.  We value people who can communicate and display empathy towards one another over people who can execute flawlessly.  We care more about how we make you feel than how we get the job done.  That isn't to say that we skew heavily towards people who may lack the technical skills, but that both should be in a nearly synchronous high level of performance.

That's a lovely notion.

But in reality, it falls short.  In my opinion, what we are left with is a whole lot of passive-aggressiveness, unclear directives and people who suck major balls at what they do.

We want to maintain high standards, but we don't want to hurt anyones feelings.
We want to crack the whip and get the team to focus, but we fear being too firm.
We really value this employee as a person, but they can't get the job done, we'll move him somewhere less impactful.

Maybe those sorts of sentences can go through a person's mind and be comprehended without raising an eyebrow, but when I read that my mind goes red.  It is in direct contention to everything I stand for and who I am.

People fucking suck and in moments of desperation will show you the meaning of depravity.
In this life there is only winning and losing.
There can be no excuses only results.

Now to be fair, this is a mindset held by many Old World chefs.  And this is how you get someone throwing a knife at you because you burned a sauce.  This is how you get criminals, these are the people who will fill jail cells if you disappoint them too many times in life. This is how you engender a violent, abusive, hyper-competitive environment where cooks seek to win individually, instead of succeed together.  This is how you get sociopaths.

I used to think I was a nice guy, but this restaurant has proven otherwise.  I like to consider myself highly empathetic, but now I find I just don't care.  Oh, you're having difficulty learning how to do this?  Yeah, I get it, it's because you have zero self-confidence.  I've already shown this to you in a gentle manner as many times as I've had patience to.  You're not getting it because you're not scared enough.  Get the fuck out of my face, I hope you die.

It has become severely alarming how many times a day I will say to myself, "I hope you die."

Do I miss the abuse?  Am I that much of a sick, masochistic fuck?  I would argue no, I just came to the kitchen because it was the last meritocracy and I miss it.  It was a retreat for all those who didn't have a chance elsewhere, Asian, black, gay, ugly, pretty, dumb, it didn't matter if you could do the job.  Those misfits who struggled so much in normal society could find refuge here, they could find a home where all that mattered was what they brought to the table with their skills.

I wouldn't say I miss the abuse all that much.  I still have stress nightmares about a French woman, with the face and build of a bulldog, questioning everything I do, throwing all my product out and slamming my burnt soup pots in the dish pit, "Merde! Merde! Merde!".  That kind of thing sticks with you for a long time.

But I will say I miss two things dearly.  The clarity and the adrenaline.

What I have come to realize is that if you don't punish mediocrity, you don't reward excellence.  Some will say excellence is its own reward.  I say in kitchens, that's only partially true.  What I see now, the purpose of all that yelling and screaming I endured is that once the yelling and screaming stops, you know you've succeeded.  It's clear as day, black and white.  Every day you know if you've won or if you've lost, you know if you're the hero or the villain.  It sounds sick, but avoiding the hate, managing to get through a day without getting abused is an incredible reward.  Would I choose it over loving praise?  Yes.  Any day of the week.

When you choose to forgive mistakes, forgive lackluster performance, you muddle up the standards.  Things are unclear, people get by with shit they shouldn't get by with, you're suddenly forced to accept less-than-excellent product.  And in a kitchen, where your success depends upon one another a great deal, this can start to grind a lot of gears.  But of course, we'd never express it.  You could never tell someone to their face, their feelings would be hurt.

Then comes the adrenaline.  In dodging bullets, working in a kingdom of fear, your heart races at a lot of moments.  I imagine normal civilians would never get nervous about putting away chives correctly, or even more scary, getting fucking hard over it, but when you've been punished for doing it wrong, fear being punished for doing it wrong, and then finally get it right?  That's when it flows.  Endorphins, adrenaline, stress relief, jizz, fucking satisfaction.  You're going down like the Hindenburg in the middle of a Saturday crush?  Your'e getting publicly humiliated and shamed for not being able to put out a butternut squash soup in a respectable timeframe?  You learn quick, you never do it again, or at the very least, you figure out how not to get caught.  You succeed, you win, you learn how to put it out on time and all you ever get is silence.  And somehow that silence is more rewarding than any loving praise you could ever throw my way.  I would take the silent, barely acknowledged nod of your respect and acceptance, over the half-hearted flowery praise you throw everybody's way, any time.

So I'm a sociopath.

I'm a sick fuck.  I run on negativity and the distrust of my fellow man, misanthropy and jaded world views rewarded by the occasional confirmation bias.  I do not believe in inherent good, I believe in inherent evil.  The world is three missed meals away from total anarchy.

But is that really who I am?

I like to think I am not quite this visage of hatred and frustration.  I have friends, I get along with people and people tend to enjoy my company, however salty it may be.  I care for those who try, I would never punish a good attitude and a genuine effort.

My method seems to want to rest in the middle, the place where it is least likely to stay.  You have to be gentle with people, yes, that hyper-competitive, abusive environment is not healthy in the long run.  People burn out, you lose a lot of good people who just needed a little more time to figure it out, it's stressful just to walk in to that much hate and pressure every day.  That's how you die early.

But you have to know when to be firm.  The food matters, it improves under rigorous expectations from the chef, you can't just let bullshit slide.  I don't think you need to yell a lot if you know when to use it.  A little bit of anger, a little bit of unleashed fury goes a long, long way.  Is it Machiavellian?  Do we need a little fear to earn respect?  I think yes.

But this balanced environment is impossible to keep stable.  There are only so many cooks who are looking for work, there are even fewer quality cooks.  Yes, you want the "51 Percenter" but do they exist in any appreciable quantity?  No.  You get 45/55'ers, you get a lot of 30/70's.  But what if they stick around?  What if you never axe these people because they really did try hard, and you had to reward their loyalty because frankly, there was no one else?  Well, they stay, they get comfortable, and they get promoted, and they become toxic.  They poison your whole establishment with mediocrity and unfocused skills.  Or they poison your whole establishment with toxic attitudes and rampant hatred.  You go really hard in one direction, you're too nice, all of a sudden you're surrounded by morons, who while pleasant, are ineffective.  You go really hard the other way and all of a sudden you're surrounded by bullies, borderline criminals and pirates who inspire no faith and have even less for themselves.

I don't know what the answer is.  Maintaining the balance is too difficult, especially with any restaurant of realistic size.  Ten?  Twenty employees?  Yeah, I think you can maintain the right profile of emotional vs. technical skills.  One hundred?  Two hundred?  Now it's getting harder.

I don't know what the answer is and I don't want to strive for an unattainable ideal.

But I don't want to feel out of place anymore, I don't want to feel like a jerk because I care about the food, and I want to do things right.  I want people to care about doing it right, fear of God required or not, I just want people to have integrity and to let it be rewarded.

I want to find home and I'm terrified that it doesn't exist.

But what can I do but continue the search?  My thought is that I will never find it.  I will be ronin and dissatisfied no matter where I go, and eventually?  The only possible outcome of all this frustration and all of this writing, and all of this thinking?

I build it myself.

EP6