The End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what about culinary school?

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

Of course they hate culinary school.

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

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

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

It's about communication.

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

It's about discipline.

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

It's about integrity.

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

And it's about pride.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of one chapter and the start of another.

To the real world,

EP6

Don't Get Cocky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What an unforgiving and brash assumption to make.

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

The answer, I found, is no.

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

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

So I should really fucking listen.

But my head got in the way.

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

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

I got a bit ... exuberant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a twat I had become.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't be Dwight Howard.

EP6

Breaking Badly

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

Not me.

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

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

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

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

But more significantly, I've gotten old.

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

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

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

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

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

It used to be so easy.

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

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

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

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

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

What do we do?

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

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

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

Like lengthening it.

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

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

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

But uncommon is what I always hope to be.

EP6

The Madness

Michelin Stars: The Madness of Perfection

As Chef Marcus Wareing looks through the Michelin guide he sees two stars nailed next to his eponymous restaurant, and he can't help but wonder,

"Is that it?"

"All that? For this?"

Of course "all that" is an unworthy two-word summation of decades of training, years of slaving and screaming, commanding, toiling, pushing, grinding and never giving up in the heat of a kitchen.  It symbolizes a man's life's work, all the tears, sweat and blood he has poured in to refining a meal.  Just a meal, one of tens of thousands we will have in a lifetime, all in pursuit of an intangible idea, a simple yet devilishly deep craft, all out of some misguided passion tinted with nurturing and giving, generosity and integrity.

All that.  For this.  Two stars.  Ordained by some occult and anonymous critics who seem to hold our life's work in the balance, who hold disproportionately great power over us.

Rewind the clock.

It's 2009.  I have painfully simple ideas of what success means in the restaurant industry, and I have my eyes are set on one prize: three Michelin stars.  The ultimate Holy Grail, the supposed apex of achievement in the restaurant world.

I study the lives of Michelin-star chefs.  What it takes, who you have to work for, question how much depends on the kitchen and how much on the individual.  And I am nothing short of zealous, firm in my belief that this is my true cause in life, that Michelin stars are the only stars worth reaching for.

Fast forward.

It's 2012.  I'm working in a one-Michelin star restaurant and I am near dead on my feet.  I'd do anything for a day off, but my partner's called in sick and it's time to slog it out to an 18-hour day in the face of a packed Saturday.  I'm fucked.  Down a double espresso and hope a cocktail of adrenaline and caffeine can drag my ass through this service without going down in flames.  The familiar crank of a ticket printing signals my coming doom, "Order-fire!"

My perceptions of Michelin-starred cooking before and after working at Cafe are as different as Dante before and after the dark forest.

Whereas it seemed such a simple process in theory, now I realize it is not only a path fraught with danger and enough stress to guarantee a diminished lifespan, but perhaps one that isn't worth it.

I have nothing against fine-dining.  And the Michelin guide is moving away from only giving credit to restaurants with priceless porcelain, leather-backed seats and endless changes of silverware.  You can have a sushi joint in a subway station, or a homey pub with cafeteria forks and drinks in mason jars and still claim a star.  But at the end of the day, is it worth it?  If you have a packed house every night and people leave with smiles on their faces, does it really fucking matter if a bunch of European pricks want to stroke your dick with some stars?  Bukkake your restaurant with macarons?

(The Michelin "stars" are actually called macarons, as in the light, egg-white based French cookie ... just in case you were getting the improper imagery of a Frenchman actually drizzling down the oft-mistaken coconut pastries in an orgasmic fashion, "Oui! OUI! OUI! Noix de coco!")

I'm not so sure.  Now, I'm a pretentious and lucky jerk.  I've eaten at six of New York's seven three-Michelin star restaurants.  I can be a fancy girl.  I like to enjoy a meal from a high-octane kitchen operating on a different plane of existence.  And to be sure, all those meals have been incredibly enjoyable, some of them life-changing.

But does it matter? Is it worth it?

Sometimes I find myself getting near-equal enjoyment from a really fucking good hamburger.  Or fresh-made pasta.  Or a really bear-skin-rug-by-a-Canadian-fireplace-while-it's-snowing-out-kind-of-hearty stew.  Or fried-fucking-chicken with Crystal hot sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy-from-a-packet.

My point is, I think I'm confident enough in myself and have experienced enough of the glory of Michelin stars to make a realization;  I'm a simple guy.  I'm a fat kid at heart, I like fat kid food.  I like going out to dinner with friends, sharing a ton of different dishes, eating family style, eating with your hands, laughing, drinking and not having to worry you're making too much noise, or acting like too much of an ass.  I'm boisterous, I'm loud, I'm casual, I'm sick of wearing suits and I like to have fun.  I don't want to see first dates sit in a plush-ass banquette that I know is damn comfortable, but they look like they're halfway deep on a set of anal beads because it's so goddamn frigid in here, and they're afraid the food's smarter than they are, way over their heads.

Michelin-starred dining just isn't that fun anymore.  Did Chef Ramirez serve me a fucking incredible meal at Brooklyn Fare?  Shit yes, he did!  But he stared at me in his silent dining room as I struggled with a fresh-from-the-fryer soft-shell crab that was causing holocaustal pain in my mouth, and all I could think of was "Jesus Christ, Chef Ramirez fucking hates me and if I don't swallow this bite of crab he is going to chop off my dick, deep-fry it in front of me and season it with a $40 case of Roland sea salt."  I can only imagine how he would react if he had heard me say to Wilson that this was the most expensive man-date I've ever been on and I better be getting laid later by someone, some way.  Or that the wine I brought to this somehow-B.Y.O.B., Michelin 3-star cost me $12 and I roulette-d it off a rack 20 minutes ago. It's from New Zealand, Chef! I'm sorry! I didn't know your sea bass is from Spain, please stop hitting me, oh god, my nuts, whyyyyy?!

To be sure, Michelin-starred restaurants are getting it.  Our generation, this lost Generation Y, doesn't like sitting around in dinner jackets, sniffing wine with supposed know-how over a 4-hour dinner.  Sure, it's fun once in a while, but no one's going to hit that up more than once or twice a year.  Maybe for an anniversary to show the Mrs. you still give a shit, or for the Mistress to show that you still give a shit, and your youth and virility aren't circling the drain of Sunday football and High Life's.  But it's just too much expectation, it gives an evening that's supposed to be rarely celebrated freedom; freedom from kids, from work, from a shitty home cooked meal, whatever, it gives that evening so much gravity.

Yes, you in the back, I hear you.  Yeah, hit me, brotha...

"Um, how much of this realization is a result of you being a pussy and realizing that Michelin-star cooking is hard and soul-draining?"

Damn, I knew I shouldn't have called on you.  You was supposed to be my brotha, man.  Fine, I'll answer your stupid-ass question.

Yeah.  I won't lie to you.  It's hard.  Maybe more than I bargained for.  But I'm not quitting on that yet.

For all my criticisms, there is one thing that will always remain true about Michelin-starred cooking.

It is the best training you could ever ask for.

Yeah, they beat you in to the ground.  They make you realize you are less than a peon sometimes, that a trained Rhesus monkey could pick herbs better and faster than you.  And that, yes, this refrigerator is clean but does it shine?  Yeah, they will teach you to ask those kinds of questions and do all the little things that everybody thinks doesn't matter, but holy shit does it matter a lot.

I have absolute respect and dedication to the religion of elite cookery.  It is akin to being a Marine, a Navy SEAL, spec-motherfucking-ops, minus all the, you know, real world consequences, life and death situations and general importance to the world.  Yeah, minus all that shit, the analogy stands.

But let me worry about how my kitchen runs.  Let me make sure that I'm not only performing to high standards, carrying out our humble craft with integrity and that we're training people to be the best they can be not because it really actually matters if you're an excellent cook, but because you're the kind of person that when you do something, you do it the best you fucking can.  Let me worry about that shit, I got that shit under control.  You guys?  Out there in the dining room?  You guys have fun.  Just because I take this shit too seriously doesn't mean you have to also.

And maybe we, in the back, your faithful culinary peons working for $10/hour in a city that charges about $2500/month for a studio, will have some fun too.  There's no point in cooking if everyday you go home and you think "Man, I suck, I should quit" or "Holy shit, I'm going to have a heart attack if I hear another ticket printing."  You have to take pride in what you do, and the work environment provided to you should give you the capacity to earn this pride.  But maybe we don't give a shit what a bunch of Frenchmen say about us.  Maybe we're New Yorkers, we'll let them decide if they think we're worth a damn.  And if every weekend, you see lines, you hear phones ringing, you see reservation books stacked with notes and names, maybe that's all you need.  Maybe fuck yourself.  Fuck your guide.  I've been doing this long enough to know that this tastes good, and I've been selling enough of them to know that this tastes good, and I've been cooking it long enough to know it's damned good.  So let me push it, let me make it nice, and let me go have a beer afterwards that isn't the first step over the cliff of self-destruction, a night of partying multiplied by the factor of stress I endured this week already, that is probably going to have me palpating my liver in the morning.  Let me have a beer that is a toast to the hard work of the crew, that is a nod to our craft and the camaraderie it inspires.

So the direction is still unclear, but the clouds are parting.  Whereas once I blindly prayed to a book, believed in its holy message with unerring, unwavering piety, I now have seen the light.  There are no miracles, only hard work, passion and integrity.

I haven't given up on you, you spare-tire-loading fat-fuck Book.  I will pray to you for quite a bit longer, because my spirit is in need of you. I need you to discipline my life and my skills, make me the best I can be. But once I am free of that nest, I will cast you aside and set my own rules.

I used to wonder.  It's so simple in theory.  Go to a three-Michelin star restaurant, beg them to let you work, stay there and at that level for 10 years, and then boom.  Three Michelin-stars! Right?  And maybe that's the gist of it.  And maybe that caused me a great deal of anxiety because I realized, I can't be the only asshole that's figured that out.

But it takes so much more than that.  It takes so much, so much, SO MUCH sweat and tears.  It takes destroying the balance of a normal life, it takes being a little fucked up in the head.  If you're the kind of person who is obsessed with the work, needs only the friends he makes back-to-back at a stove, no time to think a little and gain some perspective on what really matters in life, then godspeed.  You belong here, shit.  You're hell of a lot tougher than me.

But there are other things in life.  And call me lazy, call me a dog, but I think happiness and fun are a part of it.  And I don't think they're mutually exclusive.  To be sure, there still is a great deal of hard work before me.    I'm not exactly talking about a regression to 40-hour weeks with smoke breaks.  There's still a lot of brick to lay, and a lot of blood to bleed.  But in the end, even after all this shit, after all the hate, stress and bullying I experienced, and the sights I saw first-hand about how hard it really is to have a successful restaurant, I still believe that it can be balanced.  That there is such a thing as cooking excellent food while having fun and having a life.

It's not about three stars, it's about happiness.  That's the goal now.  That should have always been the goal. Food is happiness, it's making people happy, it's sharing a part of you with someone else because you hope they can understand what you see.  So we shouldn't just serve happiness but also practice it.

Call me crazy.  Maybe it can't be done.  Maybe this time I really will go down in flames.

But I'll try to keep a smile while I smolder.

EP6

The Jungle

When you embark on the path to becoming a chef one generally accepts the fact that their personal life is over.  You don't know for sure how this will affect you at first, you only hope that your passion and love for food is greater than the need for any relationships, regular sex, time to get haircuts or holidays.  As a line cook you're probably doing 6 days on at 70-80 hours, and if you're lucky enough to have a 5-day week you get two uselessly broken up days off to sleep, sharpen your knives, buy groceries and rigorously masturbate.

Yes, yes I hear you over there complaining from behind your ergonomic desk chair with your lunch breaks.  You only get 10 paid vacation days a year and all the federal holidays, I've heard it all before.  Oh, and the bankers of course, who indeed work the same kinds of crazy hours but are effectively making quintuple and some of what your average New York City line cook makes.  Anyway, you're only in it until you make manager or head to business school, right?  It's a high-risk, short-term strategy.  No line cook knows how long they might have to remain a line cook.  They just hope they can move up before their mind and their body gives in, and the need for a long-term life strategy becomes urgent.  Like say, retirement or your kids' college tuition.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that this was a conscious choice.  Nobody put a gun to our head and said "Thou must cook! Or may thy flattops be uneven, your pans smote, and your spoons stolen!"  I mean there was a time when the lawless and the uneducated were relegated to this life, no other career choices made available to them.  But that has largely been eradicated as a bunch of college-educated, white-collar douches watched Food Network one day and thought "Oh hey! This should be fun! And I can be famous!"  Career changers and misguided high school graduates now inundate the industry.  And while they are the preferred employee in the sense that you don't have to worry about bailing them out of jail before Sunday brunch, or having them bump a line of coke in the staff bathroom, they are a bunch of soft, whiny bitches.

"Oh, I don't wanna stay and clean the walk-ins.  I just DVR'ed The Voice and my girlfriend will be asleep."
"Stop yelling at me, I'm trying my best, you're hurting my feelings."
"Why do they have to be so mean? Don't they know I'm working so hard."

While no self-respecting cook would ever say any of that out loud (lest they seriously face the wrath of God/Chef), I can tell a lot of them are thinking it.  And thus the basis for my grand Line Cook Half-life Degradation Theory. (Those were the only terms I could remember from high-school physics.)

Professional cooking is hard.  Professional elite cooking is very hard.  Professional elite cooking in New York City is just about as hard as it fucking gets.  But anybody with the a fantastic work ethic, a decent head on their shoulders and fierce determination can do it.  A well-mannered orangutan with that skill-set could do it.  But what sets the boys apart from the men, the dabblers from the lifers, the kidding-yourselves from the true-born is endurance and the possession of that dangerously close duality of passion v. insanity.

While I believe there is little in terms of talent to being a good line cook (note that I didn't say chef), there is a whole lot to do with endurance.  Sacrificing your personal life and giving your self wholly to a kitchen for the sake of learning, perfecting the machine that is your skills should ideally take at least 8-10 years.

But being a line cook for 8-10 years is a rough gig.  Giving up so much to get $10 an hour back is harsh.  That's just one of the reasons why this is a young man's game.  If you've got a family or a biological time bomb AKA a serious girlfriend, prepare for them to leave your broke ass or earn some serious bread-winner points plus pants-wearing rights.  Even if you're exceptionally frugal, have a loving partner willing to suffer through your indentured servitude, you then have to ask them to suffer your horrendous lifestyle.  Minimum 12-hour days, all weekends and major holidays devoted to the kitchen, plus obligatory kitchen-crew bonding (read: misery drowning in copious alcohol) ... honey, you sure that nine-to-fiver at Happy Hour with the 401k isn't better for you?  Debbie is totally willing to talk to his ugly friend for the team, and Joanna's boobs are out to play.  He probably runs a lower risk of heart disease and of "getting-fat-disease" than that asshole in the kitchen.

So while theoretically anybody can cook, as we learned from the timeless tale of Ratatouille, it takes an exceptionally crazy and tough asshole to do so for any respectable amount of time.  Though I suppose the suburbs should be thankful for harboring so many half-finished chef refugees who found an investor, a low-competition environment and a yard-with-a-dog.  Otherwise I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any decent restaurants outside of major metropolitan areas.

That's LCHLD Theory Part I; cooking is hard and non-conducive to a healthy lifestyle, most people will eventually bail before getting the proper training to either start building their own brand (impatience, but some exceptional talents will soar), or bail because the toll on their personal life is no longer sustainable (giving in to reality, the desire to reproduce, not be alone with your knives and alcohol), or they jump ship for corporate to get reasonable holidays and a greatly inflated salary (what Nas would call Jay-Z, i.e. being a punk-ass nigga that sold out).

Part II to this formula is the counterpoint.  While we have witnessed that this lifestyle is highly draining and taxing, it can be less so or even the exact opposite if you're...

a) insane,
b) just that passionate,
c) have no personal life to concern yourself with,
d) all of the above.

It is my firm belief that chefs in the (D) category are the most successful.

I think there's really no other way to cut it.  Being a line cook sucks.  The only thing that makes it suck less is if for some god forsaken reason it energizes you, makes you feel alive, turns you on, makes you hard, gives you the fucking rush during your successes and crushes you in your failures, only you keep going back for more, more, more, and baby burn me, slap me, choke me...

Ahem.  Excuse me.

Yes, cooking is not unlike a really abusive girlfriend.  That girl with whom you know you have no sustainable future with, but god DAMN is it fucking great right now.  You treat me like shit, you flirt with other guys in front of me, and then at home you want me back and you tell me you love me, and then it gets weird...

And frankly, you either break up with this girl because you grow up and realize "WOW, this doesn't make sense," or one day, eight years later you think "Wow... I want to marry this woman."

It all depends on what kind of crazy you are.  If you're the normal kind of crazy, then god bless you and all your future, healthily socialized children.  If you're the fucked-up kind of crazy... then god save your wretched soul.

What a lot of it comes down to is this; are you an adrenaline junkie?  Do you love pressure, dire situations and the need to fucking PUSH every day of your working life?  Do you love seeing the clock blur by, have people breathing down your neck telling you you're not worth a thing, cook hard, move fast, test the fire, burn your hands all just to SERVE. SOME. FUCKING. FOOD?!

We try to make it better by telling ourselves that.  "It's just food, guys."  But yet we know, deep down, it's so much more than just food, than just a meal, than the $300 shit you're about to drop down that toilet later (we probably don't provide much fiber, and we use a lot of butter, so let the mudslide roll).  It's about yourself, it's about integrity, it's hating yourself but loving the process of making yourself better.

You either got it or you don't.  You're not a bad person for not being the stuff line cooks are made of, as you can see those aren't exactly qualities we look for in a friend or lover.  But you will be yelled at nonetheless.  It won't make sense, sometimes it will be so clear that someone's lashing at you just cause, it will hurt sometimes and make you feel like an asshole, but whether you come back for more is what determines if you've got what it takes.  The environment is harsh to test you.  There is no room for tears, appealing to other's humanity and being soft is not tolerated.  While some chefs are wholly capable of sympathy, and human understanding, there simply isn't time.  Cooks live a life of efficiency.  The most efficient way to whip someone in to shape and see what they're made of is to break them open and look inside.  If they come back together, looking for more with a smile, then damn you've found a tough nut.

I'm still not sure where I lie.  The jungle that is a high-level kitchen is exhausting.  If you work the AM shift, like I did, you wake up every morning in the dark, under-rested and miserable.  Every hour of your free time is devoted to "Shit, I should be sleeping" and eventually you hit that point in the season where you never see the sun.  You get one day off, you use most of it just to sleep.  You're not sore, you don't got a case of the D.O.M.S., but the work is fatiguing.  You run up and down stairs carrying big containers of chicken stock, you do hundreds upon hundreds of knee dips to get shit out of your lowboys, you focus and accelerate your hand speed to cracked-out-zergling-status for hours at a time.  Let's just say there's no energy left to go to the gym.  If you work the PM shift, you may get enough sleep to battle back a hangover, but suddenly there isn't time for anything else in your life.  You're never going to see your civilian friends again, everything as mundane from a haircut to doing your laundry becomes a huge ordeal.  You have cleaning and polishing your lowboys to look forward to on a Saturday night.

But yet, here I am.  On vacation.  And while I am thankful for the sleep and the time to organize my life, it has become ... boring.  It's too peaceful, you start worrying about the stupid little shit in life.  Maybe it's been exacerbated by the storm shutting us in, but there's no push, there's no drive, there's none of that crazy-tinted fever you hit every day.

I'm not saying this is some Hurt Locker scenario, where I leave a child, a domestic life and Evangeline Lilly for the life-or-death tension that is bomb defusal.  Because who the hell would ever leave her for bomb defusal?  But life has somehow lost a great deal of its challenge, of its edge.  I don't think I'm in that certain category of crazy, the kind that becomes energized by the fury.  But maybe I have left this job fundamentally different.  Maybe I am not the same, maybe they've not just made me better.  Maybe it's made me crazy.  Maybe I've fallen in love, and yet found more hate and exhaustion.  Maybe none of it makes sense and it never will, food is so visceral, so emotional, so primitive.  All I know is we're together.  Maybe one day, I'll sell out.  Go to the suburbs, call it quits, cook under control and in peace, make sandwiches for grandmas.  Or maybe I'll continue the grind.  Working for an elusive and oft-failed dream, cook with legends-to-be and flirt with greatness.

I don't know if I'm that tough.  But I know the job makes you tougher.  We'll just have to see what I'm made of.

EP6

The Pain

"Ordering a soup no dairy, salad S.O.S. followed by a beef medium and a hali!"

The brigade responds in unison.

"Oui!"

At culinary school we used to jest about all the "Yes, Chef" and "Oui, Chef" business.  We gleefully resounded with faux French accents and let the seriousness play off of us in our smiles.  We were no true brigade, just an amalgam of misguided students.

Now... I can't stop saying it.  When cashiers ask me if I'd like to pay credit I respond "Oui." When my girlfriend asks me if I'd like a glass of water, I respond "Oui, Chef." When waitresses ask me how I am doing today I respond "Oui."  It is so painfully ingrained in my response protocol, drilled in to my being.  All the whimsy and enjoyment has been siphoned from the phrase.  Instead it has become representative of the cold and brutal training of a real brigade system.  It is the only response expected from your mouth and you are to deliver it with eye contact, with gravity and with respect.

"You fucking suck, you know that? It's 11:30 and you're not set up for service.  What happens when I get a salad fired at noon and you have no fucking garnish and your dressing is broken, huh?  Do they fucking teach you anything at culinary school?"


"Oui, Chef."


...


"Don't fucking touch my mise en place! This is my fucking station now because you fucked it all up.  All of this? Merde. Fucking shit, man.  Now I gotta clean up your shit so guess what this is MY station now.  If you want me to do your mise en place everyday, I'll come in at 10:30 and be ready at noon, because I'm not so fucking slow as you.  Do you understand?"''


"Oui, Chef."


...


"I told you I don't want to serve shit, alright?  You do realize you work in a one-Michelin star restaurant, right?  You CAN'T. SERVE. SHIT. This lettuce is shit.  What do you mean you didn't think to look through the greens?  This is your station, do you fucking care at all?  If I was like you, didn't care about anything, you and this kitchen goes down.


"Oui, Chef."


...


"How long have you been working on this station, man?  Two weeks?  Everybody else figures it out in three days.  You don't fucking care that's why you don't get better.  You're fucking slow and your food sucks.  You sure you want to be in this industry?  You can't fucking make a soup."


"Oui, Chef."


...

You respond.  You respond confidently even though there is no conviction in your voice.  Your eyes get that tremulous quiver that hints your composure is about a hairline fracture away from complete crumble; waterworks fucking everywhere.  You try not to look dismayed, you try to accept your lashing with defiance, images of Denzel Washington in Glory come to mind.  But it doesn't work.  The only thing you know with complete sureness is that you never, ever, ever say you're sorry.

"Sorry, Chef."


"Oh, don't be sorry! Never, ever fucking say you're sorry!  What, you want me to know that you feel bad about fucking this all up?  That you threw away a whole tray of micro(greens)?  What does your "sorry" bullshit do for me when I'm staring at $90 in the trash?  Huh?  It doesn't fucking do anything for me, you want me to appeal to your humanity I don't have the fucking time nor patience.  Never, EVER, say you're sorry."


And that lesson stuck.  Firmer than anything else.

Chef Jeff used to always say "Don't be sorry."  I never really understood what that meant.  I thought it was some idiosyncrasy of his, a way to say "It's alright, I'm just pissed."  Now I get it.  And so much more.

As this blog is evidence of, I had a fascination with the old French brigade.  A take-no-prisoners style of cooking where the food was of the utmost importance, and there was just too much emotion and money on the line to allow for mistakes.  It was militaristic, it was precise, it was disciplined.  It necessitated integrity and revealed character.  I felt it was the only way to become a good cook.  Everyday you were put on the line under fire, and any straying from the order got you a furious response.  It sounded bad-ass, it's what teenage boys think when they see action movies or play Call of Duty.  The glorification of the soldier mindset, a sort of heroism inspired only under the influence of danger and ferocity.

But then like so many boys who grow up to become soldiers, they learn the reality is far more harrowing than what their frenzied daydreams had promised.

Every morning I stare at the clock.  I wish it would stop.  I'm running out of time.  I got here an hour and a half early and there's still just not enough time to get it all done.

The first year of culinary school has come and gone without having been introduced to my writing.  But all that you need to know is this.  They can not and have not prepared you in the least for what it takes to cook at the highest level.

It's a sad realization.  In some ways it makes you wonder why you're doing it.  What good is it for?  Culinary school builds your confidence up so high, and then the real world promptly rampages through it like Godzilla through Tokyo.

What it really does is make you ask questions?

Can you handle this?
Does it have to be this way?
Is this what you want?
Is it worth it?

Fuck... it's ten o'clock already.  I'm never going to make it.

I see what they are trying to do.  And as the success of the restaurant makes you see, the system works.  I just don't know if it works for me.

Is it worth it to dread coming in to work every day?  Not just dread like "Oh man, this is going to suck how boring it's gonna be" but dread as in complete and utter fear, heart palpitations, cold sweat and panic.

If you can survive it, I think yes.  Stress is good, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  But this is unlike any sort of gauntlet I have run before, and my energy has been exhausted already in the beginning.

I have quit on too many things in life to give up on this.  I am under contract, I will see this through.  But it has opened my eyes to the world of cooking.  Elite restaurant level chef-dom.  It is as much about having the skills and the smarts as being maladjusted and pathological enough to endure the daily shit storm.

Everything I ever presumed to know about the industry has been forced back down my throat.  I am beyond humbled, I am broken.  My confidence is at rock-bottom.

But there is hope.  A faint glimmer, a wavering prayer that perhaps if I survive this that I will be a stronger man, a better cook.  That it will all be worth it.  That a true victory lies at the end of this road.

...

"Ordering 2 salad, a Lyonnaise, soup..."

That's all I have time to hear.  I have no board, there are no tickets for me to go back to in case I lose my place.  It is extremely important that I remain mentally organized and remember the orders as they are called and to give them out in the proper sequence.

My only hope to remember everything is to put down plates on the pass.  If I become terribly lost I can at least look at the plates and have a rough idea of what I need to put out.

Quickly now, three salad plates and a soup.  Lunch time sees our prix-fixe menu so when chef says soup or salad, it can only mean that.  Along with the two prix-fixe dishes there are three additional soups, two additional salads, a charcuterie and a cheese plate totalling four possible soups, three possible salads and a couple of X-factors.

In the industry it's called "hand speed."  You either got it or you don't.  It's how fast you can move your hands in decisive actions to plate, cook, move food.  It's less about actual hand speed and more about confidence and efficiency.  You are always going for the ideal of "no wasted movement."  You are tight, like a machine, doing nothing but the absolutely necessary.

Open the lowboy drawer, throw two handfuls of gem lettuce in one bowl and a big handful of frisee in another.  Throw in the garnish, season and dressing and hold until you have to plate.  You don't have time to put on gloves, but you also don't have time to wash your hands.  After you mix a salad by hand, you can't be running to the sink every time.  It is the last thing you do.

Put a pot on the induction burner, pour our 6 oz. of soup and add a 2 oz. ladle of chicken stock to thin it out and...

"Ordering Lyonnaise, two all day and a pea soup..."


Okay, tuck that away for later, except I'm going to make two Lyonnaise salads at once.  Making two separate salads, one at a time would be utter failure on efficiency.  Pot for soup is on, it's heating, induction burners can flash to 900 F on a ferromagnetic pot, you have to watch it.  Open a drawer, pull out eight chicken livers, dry them on a C-Fold towel and season with fine sea salt.  Not kosher, the large flakes in the salt draw out too much blood and discolor the liver.  Put a small saute pan on, crank the heat, you want to sear the fuck out of these livers.  Grapeseed oil, high smoke point allows for high heat, in the pan.  Livers go in and ...

"Ordering bar cheese and a mini-comp soup 9-1-1!"


Okay, shit.  9-1-1 means there was some kind of mistake in the dining room and the dish tagged with the emergency call has highest priority.  A mini-comp soup is what it sounds like; a miniature complimentary soup.  What soup that is is up to me, but it needs to be out fast.  I don't know what's gone down but basically the soup is sent out to customers who are going to be expecting a big time gap before their food comes out or the mistake is rectified.  I choose a cold soup.  There is absolutely no time to heat up a soup for a 9-1-1 fire.

Open a lowboy, pull out a quart of spring onion veloute, delicious.  Shit, it's too thick.  It happens sometimes when soups are put under chill, their texture changes dramatically.  Pour out 2 oz. in a pint container and ladle in 2 oz. chicken stock, run on over to the immersion blender and buzz it quickly to re-emulsify...

"Eric! WHAT THE FUCK!?"


I sense a cataclysm of light behind me.  Fire.  The liquid in the livers has jumped out in to the hot grapeseed oil and the fire of the burner has ignited the grease.  It happens all the time but that's why it's important to really dry out anything you're going to saute.  Usually you can just blow it out and go on with your day.  Not at a Michelin-star restaurant.

"It tastes like gas now, pay the fuck attention.  Throw them out, start again!"


Okay, first; finish the soup.  Cold onion soup, in to a chilled bowl, three dots of chive oil (you never plate components in even numbers... you can't plate perfectly and even numbers encourage forced symmetry that will look wrong when coupled with human error), a sprinkle of freshly minced chives and a smear of garlic cream.  Out it goes.  Now for the livers.

Back in a pan, nice color on each side, flip and remove from the pan.  Pour out the excess grease, throw in a knob of butter, sweat a tablespoon of minced shallots.  Put two poached eggs in the water, get them heating up.  Deglaze the pan with sherry vinegar, reduce by half, ladle in 4 oz. of chicken jus, reduce slightly, fold in a tablespoon of minced chives and hold warm.  Once the eggs are ready (one minute, thirty seconds, no more or you tread too closely to the danger zone of overcooked eggs) you are ready to go with everything.  Salads ready to plate, soup is hot, go-go-go!

Everything's plated, next order.  What was it?  A Lyonnaise and a pea soup?  Get the garnish on, emulsify the pea soup, plate the second Lyonnaise and go...

"Eric, what the fuck?  The second Lyonnaise and the pea soup go with the octo from GM, you're too fucking early.  Start over, everything's at the wrong temp.  Hey Ben, hold on that octo, Eric's been eating shit all morning..."


Shit.  You have to listen to the rest of the ticket to know what you're going with.  Dishes have to be presented to the pass within 30 seconds of each other, or the temperature and the vibrancy is lost.  Go again...

"Eric, how do you look on a Lyonnaise and a pea soup?"
"Uhhh... anytime, go!"
"Go-minute!"


Go-minute is the final call for a synchronized course.  The highest ranking cook (it goes Roti - Poissoinier - Entremetier - Pasta - Garde Manger - Soup/Potager from highest to lowest) initiates the call for all the dishes to come to the pass.  If one station needs time to complete they call for 30 seconds or 1 minute, tops.  If you call for 2 minutes, you are seriously fucked up and need to catch up with the team.  When the sous chef hears "Go-minute!" he knows to expect all of a table's course to come up to the pass, and consequently calls for runners to pick up the food.

The blitz continues for two more hours.  The rush of two hours blinking by in seemingly 15 seconds can be exhilarating.  If you win.  But if you're losing, or as they say, "eating shit," then there are few worse feelings in the world.  No one likes to go down in flames and it usually requires some serious assistance to pull you out of the weeds.

The initial rush has been survived, but barely. ("Congratulations, Eric.  It took you twelve minutes to put out a fucking salad.  Hope you feel good about yourself.")  The orders start slowing down and then the magic words...

"Fire the board! Beef medium rare, duck medium, MC tort and a scallop! BREAK DOWN!"


"Oui!"


The last order has been put in.  We are done.  For now.  Since almost all of my dishes are for first course, I can safely start cleaning my station and licking my wounds.  My apron is a bloody mess.  The floor is littered with bits of salad greens.  Chef evaluates me and sees only complete chaos.  It is a disdainful yet understanding look.  He knows I got fucked.  I was Bobby in Deliverance.  I was tied to a tree with my own belt and taken out back.  Beyond the stern look is a bit of understanding though.  I can sense there is a fraction of understanding;  he's just a student, he's learning, he's trying.  But it is shut away quickly.  There is no mercy for you as there was no mercy for me.  This is how the world of elite restaurant cookery operates. It may be wrong, it may not be for you, but while you choose to participate then you will obey.  There is too much to deliver upon, too high of standards to uphold.  There is no time for compassion and it is you who must learn to accept it, not we who must change.

Maybe I'm brainwashed.

Maybe I'm crazy.

But crazy is exactly what this industry attracts.

EP6

Less Talk More Rock

"Here."

It's a simple command made simpler as Chef hands me a spoon.

Fuck. Chef doesn't give you a spoon because he wants you to share your earth-shattering-consomme-of-orgasms with him. He gives you a spoon because it's a nicer way of saying "Taste this. Because either you didn't taste it before or your palate went full retard today."

"Yes, Chef."

I dip a clean spoon in to a consomme that is a curious mahogany brown. I was a bit confused as to how that happened. Despite a deep understanding of the chemistry behind consomme, I've never fucking made one. It did seem a bit dark but it tasted all right. At least it did before...

"And?"

"It's a little bitter, Chef."

"Why would that be?"

"Because it's burned, Chef."

"Yes. It is most certainly burned. Please bring me your pot."

My heart drops. This is kind of like your girlfriend dumping you. Not because she's cheating on you, but because the girth you've gained in middle-age isn't as boisterous in the sack as it once was. Because you've gone lame and unable to produce. It hurts.

I obediently retrieve the pot I made my consomme in. A cute little gallon soup pot with the sad remains of a consomme raft jiggles around in the bottom.

A consomme, by the literal definition, is a refined French broth. Completely clear and devoid of fat, so clear that you should be able to read the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon. It should, by all impossibilities, be clearer than water.

This is achieved with a "raft." A mixture of ground meat, egg whites, tomato and aromatic vegetables that is simmered in a flavorful broth. The albumen proteins in egg whites coagulate at 155 degrees Fahrenheit and form a raft at the top of the liquid. This protein mesh, with the assistance of a convection simmer, captures all the impurities in a broth rising to the top, thus making it clear. This also draws out some flavor though, hence why we add ground meat and vegetables to the mixture, to reintroduce some flavor in to the soup. Tomatoes are an acidic component that denature proteins, facilitating the coagulation process.

When your consomme is finished, you ever so carefully ladle it out of the pot through a coffee filter to really capture any invisible crud left in the broth. Finally, a dry paper towel is dragged over the surface to capture any stubborn fat that has remained. Then you serve it hot, piping fucking hot because the soup has very little garnish and fat and thus loses heat rapidly.

I knew all of this, even before we went over it in lecture. What I didn't know is that when you make consomme in such a small pot the "raft" is very much in contact with the bottom, vigorously interacting with the hottest part of the burner. It doesn't really do much floating. You counteract this by stirring constantly until the raft begins to form. Failure to do this will result in, you guessed it, a burnt raft. This was practical experience I didn't think to prepare for.

Chef takes a spoon and reveals the bottom of my raft to me. Black. Charred, burnt beyond repair.

Son of a bitch. In two years of professional cooking, I've never burnt something. I've had three dishes sent back to me ever. One was an underseasoned mushroom tagliatelle (guilty). Another was an undercooked ravioli (guilty, they were much more frozen than I had accounted for). And finally, the last was an undercooked salt-crusted sea bass (guilty, first time cooking with a salt crust). Other than that, in the hundreds of dishes I sent out, I was proud to say I only had three sent back and never because something was burnt.

But here was proof of my fallibility. A blackened consomme raft that produced a broth deep mahogany brown. I mistook this for a proper development of flavor. I was wrong.

Chef grimaces. He's not upset, he's disappointed. I was voted in as the group leader, the sous chef of our class, I am one of the oldest and most experienced cooks in the kitchen and here I've gone and made the most elementary of mistakes. He knows that I know better, knows that I can do better ... far better. The disappointment hurts more than any other sort of reproach. I'd prefer it if he hit me.

He scribbles down a 60. The worst grade I've gotten so far. By all respects, it should have been a zero. This would never go out to a customer. This would even be unworthy for a dishwasher to sip on as a snack during a Saturday crush. It was fucking garbage.

He sees how my face goes from somewhat hopeful to a mask of complete defeat. I was never very good at hiding my emotions, hence why I don't feel I belong in the front of the house.

"Now, Eric. It's not the end of the world. You guys still have a lot of work to do. Tomorrow's another day, and I can guarantee that you'll never make that mistake again."

"Yes, Chef."

It's the most commonly uttered phrase in the kitchen. Yes, Chef. Carry on, orders understood. Continue to perform adequately. Move on.

And he's right, there is a whole lot left to do.

When I signed up for the group leader position, I figured it was kind of a joke. Like being the class president of your high school. It's a resume padder, you don't really do much, it's a false title. I was very, very wrong.

A pin in the shape of a golden toque is adorned on my jacket collar. One in every 20-30 students wears this pin. Students are selected to group leader by popular vote. Such a whimsical process for a fairly serious position. I figured it was more a popularity contest. Wrong again.

I very much am at the helm. Chef, other than evaluations, demos and the occasional roaming instruction, will sit at his desk and watch me run the kitchen. He wants to see my feet put to the flame. He wants to see if the student who so boldly declared himself the most qualified candidate for leadership can actually fucking lead.

Have I ever run a kitchen? God no. I've never even "told" someone else to do something. I've been a minion, a slave for the past two years. What right do I have to command? Yeah sure, I ran the floor at my own restaurant but that's front-of-house. The back is a whole 'nother beast to tame.

But earn and believe in this right I must. Because it's 10:15, and if we want to eat lunch we've got to start cleaning now.

Two quick lessons in leadership I learned.

1) Leading by example is important, but you can't do everything yourself. What really makes a strong leader is making your team believe in your standards and carrying them out in unerring and passionate fashion.

2) If you want something done, you need to find someone and directly make the order, make them responsible. When you ask "Can somebody...?" or "Is anybody...?" that's effectively the same thing as asking "Can nobody...?"

So with those two lessons tucked away after Day One it's time to clean.

If there's one facet of leadership I've been blessed with, it's a battlefield voice. All those years of my housemates telling me they can hear my voice at all times, and that my normal speaking voice is uncomfortably loud ... now they pay off. So you'll have to imagine me yelling across the spanse of a 5-range kitchen.

I've divided our class of 20 in to five teams of four and assigned them to various tasks ranging from stock production, vegetable production to sanitation.

"Team One! Degrease and skim stocks, mirepoix goes on in 5!"
"Team Two! All burners off! Flat tops and burners in the soak!"
"Team Three! Compost bins and countertops wiped! Garbage in 10!"
"Team Four! You're on dish! Team Five! Bring all the boards and pots to dish!"
"The mark is 11:30! We have about an hour to make this place spotless, let's rock!"

A chorus of "Heard!" echoes back at me. It's the most succinct way to communicate that you've heard it, you've understood it and you are now in the process of executing it.

Same shit, different day. But yet the thrill of command is a pleasure, day in and day out.

I'm not addicted to the power. I don't get hard over telling other people what to do. I get adrenaline and energy from the reciprocation of command; pushing my team to go harder, seeing results and having them force me to be on top of my game and work harder. It's a feedback loop and it's more exhilarating than any of the various narcotics I've ingested in my sordid past. It's the kind of shit that drags you out of bed at 4:30 on a freezing, upstate New York day. It's better than sex and coffee ... combined.

Time flies in a kitchen. We've been here since 5:30 and other than my brief moment of self-reflection-leaning-on-suicide after I burnt my consomme, I haven't really had a thought that wasn't about cleaning something, cooking something or wiping something. I don't often settle down to one task because I have to roam around and supervise. I like to lead by example and thus my horrid obsessive cleanliness is something I force upon my team at all times. After they wipe a countertop, I follow them with another rag and get all the bits they missed. They see what I do, they know what's up, hopefully they won't do it again.

This system works decently so far, and for the amount of power I actually have it's fairly effective. But occasionally, the bad cop emerges.

We're 45 minutes in to cleaning and now on sweep. We call sweeps every 25 minutes, three cooks in one direction to maximize efficiency and minimize the amount of times we need to sweep and mop. All the crap that has accumulated on the floor is now in a neat pile by the trash .. only there are no trash bins.

"Who the fuck took out the trash without checking with me?!"

Chef raises an eyebrow and grimaces at me again. I'm not supposed to curse. I sheepishly grin. I don't usually slip, I know it's a classroom, but my natural vocabulary is saturated with profanities and crude analogies. When I get angry, it slips.

"I think Larry, Moe and Curly took it out."

Motherfuckers. Now I have trash piling up and being dispersed by everyone's movements. We've wasted time and all the efficiency we gained from a coordinated sweep. I'm pissed.

"All right, leave it here, I'll take care of it when it when they get back. Leave the sweep, start rubbing down the flat tops with oil!" (We use a lot of cast-iron... it rusts, hence it requires lube)

We are in what I like to call "full-tilt boogie-woogie." We had a whole lot of dishes to prepare today and consomme is a motherfucker of a preparation. Not only is it time and attention consuming, but it requires a motherfuck-load of pots and bowls. And any assholes that burned their rafts, like me, will have a pot crusted in sticky, burnt proteins. A nightmare to wash out, especially since we don't get any steel wool pads. Dish is behind and if we don't finish everything else and help them out, nobody's getting a lunch break.

Larry, Moe and Curly return with the trash. I am really pissed.

"Who told you to take out the trash!? Look at all this trash we still have to throw out, and what the hell took you so long?! Now you have to do it again, so do a complete sweep and mop and take out the trash again, it takes 5 minutes. Go!"

That's a fact, actually. I timed it. Even with precipitous weather and a line at the dump, it takes on average 5 min. and 27 seconds to dump out trash, compost and recycling, rinse out all the bins and bring them back. I know those assholes like to take out the trash because it gives them an excuse not to clean, one of them definitely sneaks a cigarette and they generally goof off for 12 minutes thinking I won't notice. Too bad for them, I noticed.

But the better question arises; when did I become such a dick?

At some point here I decided I no longer cared what people thought of me. What was of supreme importance was staying on schedule, having a spotless kitchen, and making sure everybody improved day to day. A great majority of the students in my class have very little hands-on cooking experience. They burn and cut themselves regularly, just as I did when I first started out. They don't finish their knife cuts that get graded every day, they simply can't do it all in 45 minutes. And their production items, whether it be consomme or cream of broccoli soup don't usually turn out very well either. This is all good and fine, that's why you're in school after all; to learn. The important thing is to get better everyday, to never regress. If we can do that and keep a good attitude, I'm all sunshine.

But when people act like shitbags looking to skirt out on work and generally find every excuse to sit down and talk, then I bubble over with Krakatoan rage.

Well, Krakatoan might be a bit hyperbolic. It's not nearly that bad. I'm still restrained by the confines of the classroom and the big German Certified Master Chef that sits at the desk. This is a good thing, it's forced practice for controlling my temper. But regardless I've developed a borderline chaotic/ruthless attitude. If you're going to work against me, then I'm going to throw you under the bus and make you feel like an asshole.

So a few of them probably hate me. That's fine. I welcome it. I don't want their adoration, I just need their respect. If they won't give me that, they can take a walk, I'd rather not have them in the kitchen.

A rather stark change from the neurotic creature who obsessed over his general likability for 24 years. Now I'm on the warpath and ready to claim heads.

But I'm not alone. The people who really want to learn, really want to work, they're with me and I know it. I have the solid loyalty of the people who matter and that's all I need to get through the day. With those 7-8 people, we could do the work of 20. Easily. And such will be the case in the classroom where you can't choose your coworkers.

But what we've got is pretty good, and I must say better than anything I've ever had.

What I kind of expected but didn't fully understand about culinary school was being immersed in an environment of passionate, passionate food obsession. Not everyone's on that page, there are a great deal of people here who aren't really sure why they're here. But the people who are on the bullet train to progress, working harder every day, thinking about the best marinade and brine for a pork chop as they go to sleep... those are the kids that are fun to work with.

It's just so much positive energy. After working with industry-lifers who were forced in to the restaurant world, it's nice just to be with people who actually want to be here. They love it. They love the food, they love talking about food, they jerk off to the new Eleven Madison Park cookbook, they like washing dishes because it's cathartic and they like getting slammed with prep because when they win you feel like an unstoppable machine.

In short, they're like me. And maybe it's weird to say I've been looking for someone like "me," but I'm glad to say that I've found a whole lot of "me's."

I do another cursory sweep of the kitchen to make sure things are getting done, no one's standing around like an asshole and then I see the predicament dish has gotten themselves into. There are simply too many pots and pans and cutting boards lining up and poor Ant over there is soaked in sanitizer and sweat. I pull up beside him and take off my horrendously awkward toque, a 15-inch monstrosity of a hat that towers above my head.

"Scooch. You good?"
"I'm good, baby. Let's go Man-Bear-Pig on these dishes, dawg."

Man-Bear-Pig, for those who don't know, is the mythical beast that Al Gore tried to prove the existence of in the South Park universe. Its appearance is legendary and utter destruction follows in its wake. It's our fun little way of saying, let's fucking rage on these dishes.

"Alright, I'll set up with you. Team 3! Make sure the kitchen is spotless, do last round checks and scrub the stock kettles! It is 11:05, the mark is 11:30, let's push!"

The water is steaming healthily and is painful to hold your hands in for longer than few seconds. I channel my best "fight-through-the-pain" mantra and convince myself that deadening my nerve endings is a good thing for cooking. It most certainly is.

Ant does his best Gordon Ramsay impression as our hands turn to angry red raisins. I definitely am sporting a wound from an errant sharp chicken bone when I dumped 120 lbs. of the stuff in the kettle. It stings like a motherfucker as the hot, soapy water makes a mess of my chef's coat.

But yet, I'm laughing. This is the most fun I'll have all day. I love it. Washing dishes with a crazy motherfucker who loves masochistic labor as much as you do, fighting the clock every day, trying to win... my heart races in the pursuit of victory, and if there's a meritocracy left in this world, if there's a place where everyday you are made aware of winning and losing, and the amount of blood and sweat you've poured in to the sand means something ... it's here. In the kitchen.

And today... it looks like we might just win.

EP6