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
