Customers

If my blog had an overall literary personality I would sum it up as a...

"Generally misanthropic, bitter, and ofttimes hateful treatise on restaurant work that is over saturated with adverbs, unnecessarily long vocabulary, fragments, misogyny and run-on sentences. It bears a curiously paradoxical nature in that restaurant work entails interacting with people often and daily, yet the writer seems unable to normally socialize with and/or like other people."

::deep breath::

The paradox, in short, is that a restaurant's lifeblood is a constant stream of paying customers, and yet I seem to hate customers. Especially vapid, entitled, gold-digging trophy wives who add zero value to society and whine at me over their aptly-named Platinum Blonde Martinis. I suppose they are a rather chesty carrot at the end of the stick to incentivize men to acquire material riches in life, whatever societal value that adds. And American culture in turn does a good job of teaching women they are worth little more than their boobs.

But I digress. Allow me to holster my angst-ridden, lovelorn sociology major.

It's just that, every time I get upset with a customer, I internalize it. It buds in to the beginnings of an embolism, and I lose a few minutes off my life as I smile through my teeth. It is not unlike The Machine in The Princess Bride. I'm convinced it won't be long before a Prince Humperdinck-like beast of a customer will come in, and in one fell swoop torture me in to a coma. The Six-Fingered Man will appear and scream "Not fifty years!" and my shouts of agony will echo throughout the synagogues of Long Island...

Wait, nope, nope, nope, let me try this again...

What I mean to say is, I don't deal well with customers who lack empathy for or understanding of the restaurant industry. I wouldn't presume to come in to your place of work and tell you how to do your job. But just because eating at a restaurant is universal human behavior suddenly everyone's an expert.

We are here to serve and create a nice experience for you. You are entitled to a reservation. We try our best to give you one at the time you request but this is not always possible. You are entitled to at least respectful and efficient service, food that is at least seasoned and cooked properly, and an atmosphere that is at least clean and hospitable. That's your skeleton Bill of Rights right there for you.

The problem is that very few people understand how difficult even the most basic restaurant services are to provide. The main obstacle lies in doing all of that, and more for hundreds of people in three hours. They seem to think were they in our shoes, they'd never make a mistake. That a trained chimp could do this flawlessly, and that a couple dollars thrown our way entitles them to be Yertle the Turtle. I know no one who reads this blog (because pretty much only my friends read this blog) would ever act like such a cretin in a restaurant. But for your viewing pleasure, for the betterment of mankind, here's a handy guide.

How to Handle Restaurant Cock-Ups by Eric Huang;

1) Attempt to remain calm. Getting mad may serve cathartic for the rest of your first-world problems (e.g. wife not going down on you since you got married, boss made you come in on a Saturday, your rec-league dodgeball team lost in the semis, etc.), but it is actually not very helpful. When you aren't bearing down on some poor new hire with your fangs out, they have more calm and wherewithal to fix your situation. That isn't to mean that you should tolerate indifference, instead...

2) Acknowledge and specify what the restaurant did wrong (e.g. this waitress is a huge bitch, this food is salty like my balls after a tournament in August, this food is about 20 minutes late to class and is getting an F, etc.). Perhaps deliver said message in a more respectful manner.

3) Speak to a manager or preferably an owner. Continue to remain calm. Smile if possible.

4) If the restaurant is worth any of its salt they will accordingly apologize, compensate you for your grievances and treat you with super-extra-fragilistic attention and care. If you are gracious throughout your complaining, they will feel even more terrible about their errors and try that much harder to fix them. You are a long-term investment for the restaurant. Losing the 8.5% profit margin on a steak is better than losing you ever coming back to the restaurant, and/or telling all your friends how horrible it was. Rarely is anger necessary to convey your disappointments.

5) If step four is ignored by the restaurant, calmly leave and never return. If you must Yelp, please wait at least a day for the anger to subside so that your review will be more helpful.

I could go on about the injustices I feel I have suffered at the hands of curmudgeonly geriatrics who use the negative gravity of their empty lives to siphon off what's left of my soul. I relish a good story of a particularly evil customer, it makes me feel like one of many victims unjustly oppressed by the public. But that's not what today is about. I'm going to turn over a new leaf. I'm going to appreciate the people that come through our door, purchase our goods and services, and allow my family to make a living by doing what we like to do.

Believe it or not there are many customers I actually do like. Not awkwardly smile and force myself through conversation with, but people I am happy to see come through the door. They aren't many in comparison to the amount of customers I dread seeing. If we look at the ratio that way, well... it's not very uplifting. But they do exist, I promise.

There's Howie, the Big Dog. My bartender's father might not really count as your typical customer, but all the same he's a very enjoyable person to talk to. He drinks like a gentleman, he can talk about things beyond the realm of usual guy talk (read: sports, boobs, beer), and he has these enormous, hammy mitts that firmly confer confidence through handshakes. He will at times find himself surrounded by all the females of his family and retreat to the bar to find me. His eyes will roll, he will plug his ears to mime shutting out the chatter, and he will request a glass of Gentleman Jack, neat. He always tips in fresh, crisp $5 bills. Where he gets them, why he has them, who knows.

There's Michael, Chocolatier of the Walrus Mustache. He provides the complimentary chocolates we have at the restaurant and will come in for dinner here and there. He also knows all about the restaurant biz having worked in pastry as a youth. We discuss kitchen ideas and general restaurant theory over a glass of Grey Goose, two ice cubes, and a twist of lemon. Any consternation I feel about culinary school he generally puts to rest. He's been working with us since I was just a kid and he likes to assure me that growing up in the restaurant business is more than ample preparation. "You should see some of the kids they send me... "

There's Mr. Miller, boyish good looks and goofball dad in one. He sneaks in early for a beer on Friday before the wife and kids latch on to his weekend. He'll order takeout for the family and watch Sportscenter while drinking a Tsing Tao. I generally appreciate anyone that is a Knicks fan but can still discuss them without Amar'e Stoudemire's dick in their mouth. We once had a conversation about the skyscraping display of flowers my mom puts at the front of the restaurant.

"How long do those things last? They're beautiful... I think?"
"Hah, about a week. Though they start looking a little sad by Wednesday, so we change them every Thursday."
"Yeah, I hear that. I always look a little sad by Wednesday..." Cue Charlie-Brown-shuffle out the door, womp womp womp trombone.

Then there's Julianna and her mother, Adrianne. Julianna is, for lack of a more couth description, a 100%, grade-A, Power M.I.L.F. Gracious, friendly but not overly-so, and elegant with a touch of soccer-mom, Sporty Spice vibe. How she manages to remain so picture-perfect after popping out five boys is beyond me. The woman's vagina might as well be Stargate but here she is in all her splendor. Her and her mother will take turns bringing the whole of their brood to the restaurant. Grandma Adrianne likes to take her time with her grandkids; eat slowly, spoil them with ice cream and cake when their mother isn't around. Julianna will often call as the dinner begins to inch past 2 hours,

"Hi Eric! This is Julianna. Where is my mother and my litter?"
"Hi Julianna! They're still here, looks like they're finishing up though, would you like to talk to her?"
"No, it's okay .. just remind her that they have camp in the morning, see you soon!"

I often find overprotective mothers serially annoying but her hovering is done with such charm and cuteness. Even a toe in the pool, a mere suggestion of flirting from her and I'm going for it. I would marry the shit out of her. Not that beautiful, white, suburban moms have adulterous fantasies about Asian boys in the linen closet. Not that I do either. Wait...

::ahem::

I always let Adrianne know that the Mama Bear is calling and I often get the same response,

"What is she so worried about? Right, like grandma didn't have any kids... we're going, we're going..."

These kinds of customers make working the restaurant a pleasure. They make me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile, connecting with other decent and interesting human beings. I don't doubt there is some kindness and zest to every person that comes in the door. It's just that people carry their personalities so differently, and I really take time to appreciate those that wear frustration and resentment on the inside, and compassion and warmth on the outside.

The other issue is, I don't always have the time to.

Nothing makes me feel worse than having someone I really like come through the door, but I don't even have time to have a brief conversation with them. My mother always prioritizes customers, stops everything she's doing to focus on them if they call her over. I'm sure this effort is not lost on them. But that doesn't mean that when my mother stops there isn't a whole shitload of traffic piling up behind her. My job is to make that traffic move along. There are still a lot of things to do. I'm just trying to give as many people a quality experience as possible. I look at it as if I can make the whole night go smoothly, zero complaints, generally happy faces on the way out; huge success. She sees it as if she can give a few tables the best Chinese meal of their life, an experience they'll never forget, that's a huge success. I guess it's big picture vs. small picture. You need to have both in perspective and balance. She really goes the extra mile for some people and she is rewarded with their loyalty. Loyalty that has spanned, in many cases, almost 30 years. But there are new customers every day, and they must be won over as well. We can't solely focus on a handful of VIPs, we must continue to grow.

So I am well aware that I come off cold at times. I'm trying to be as efficient as possible, no funny business, no favoritism. A lot of hosts will prefer guests to linger at the bar, buy drinks, tip the bartender, bring in more cash. But I don't fuck around with this. From what I know of Long Islanders and our clientele, they don't like to hang around the bar boozing. They want to sit down and have their drinks there in comfort. I think the happiness derived from being able to sit down and be tended to will eventually reflect in the tip, and then back to the bartender when the waiters tip them out later. A trickle-down theory that actually works, I suppose.

This is probably why I belong in the back of the house. I'm a kitchen girl really. My stringent efficiency is better applied to venison shanks than living people. But you can't deny the results of my egalitarian governance. People rarely have to wait more than 10 minutes for their table to be ready, I almost always can accommodate a walk-in, waiters get more tables, make more money, people complain less. I think there are a lot of benefits to my method, even if it might feel like you're getting processed at some points. If my work seems mechanical, I rely on my mother to make it seem intimate and personal. It usually works out, makes people feel cared for in our own special way and as a result our dining room has that distinct personality; the young guy puts you through the motions, makes your experience technically sound and if you ever need more of that human element, the maternal figure steps in to make it right.

Every dining room has a personality. Now may be the era of the celebrity chef, the herds of hispter-foodie-sheep flocking to the next hot name so they can be the first to Yelp about them and say "We ate there when.." But in the past, it was the maitre'd who owned the floor. They were the ones who set the pace and tone, and they were the ones whose names were synonymous with the restaurant. They were the person you had to know to get in. Relevant: Bonus Reading.

Whereas now it would be a rare thing to see the eponymous celebrity chef working at his own restaurant, there was a time when you would show up and the same person would be the gatekeeper night after night. You'd have to know them, know someone, be a "member" to be let in. The exclusivity just heightened the sense of belonging and prestige I suppose. But you can't really say "Fuck you, go home" to people anymore. The economy won't allow it. The public has decided they prefer a democratic dining process to some members-only private club. But there was a time when that was the norm, and for better or worse it gave each restaurant a certain degree of panache, a definite and tangible personality from the moment you walked in the door, and it often emanated from one person.

But let's face it, and it is an unsavory truth to accept, but there is such a thing as favoritism and there are customers who we like more than others. Almost every restaurant behaves this way. It sounds unfair but if you have people who eat at your restaurant 3-4x a week, how can you not reward someone for such loyal and frequent patronage? You have to dote on your core of regulars. Sure, they each have their own sets of idiosyncrasies and requirements, but the fact of the matter is, they are the backbone of your restaurant. It's not even the money they put in, it's the word of mouth advertising, it's the powerful marketing they present simply by vouching for you as the best Chinese restaurant on the North Shore. And just as my mother and I give the dining room a personality, so do these regulars paint a certain color over the floor. They talk about you at their country clubs, golf outings, doctors' visits and the next thing you know have a veined network of connections worming its way through the area back to you. So whether we like to or not (we usually do), we treat them very well and they get priority on damn near everything.

That was a harsh lesson to learn this year. Favoritism seemed unfair to everyone else. I demanded we treat everyone equally regardless of their standing with us. I would be furious when I had turned down some people 15 minutes ago, only to have my mother sneak in some VIP behind my back and take up one of my last tables. She would tell me, "You have to give him a table, figure it out." Not only had she fucked up my entire seating chart but I don't give a fuck about Mr. and Mrs. Whoever, they should have to wait like everyone else.

But I was being naive. I came to realize, that Mr. and Mrs. Whoever did indeed have to be given preferential treatment. It was up to you, the host to recognize them, surreptitiously sneak them in and give them the gold standard treatment they come for, or they'll simply go someplace else. And from the suburban restaurant standpoint, that is unacceptable.

So what makes a VIP customer? Well, as previously mentioned it could be that they just come a whole bunch and are important sources of revenue and advertisement. It could be they are just good friends with my mom, she's acquired quite a few of those over 30 years of business. It could be they booked a big party for my mom, sent a friend her way. That's probably the quickest way to her heart. They could be important people; judges, doctors, certain business owners, professional athletes, there are many reasons. If the more plebeian customers notice, they get upset. Should they? No, we don't give out these small favors lightly. But will they feel offended anyhow? Yes, and there's little we can do about it except try our best to make everybody feel special, to feel cared for.

As frustrated as I am with people I am trying and beginning to understand. To not have my first reaction be stubbornness and resentment, and instead have it be compassion and understanding. It is an infinite test of patience, I am not perfect. But I am finding that there is more reward in winning someone's appreciation than winning them over to your point of view.

I get it, you've never worked in the restaurant business. How could you know how difficult reserving tables can be? You can't and I shouldn't expect you to. Is it frustrating? Yes, very much so, but I must be the ever-patient, ever-compassionate 1950s housewife. Do you mistreat me, abuse me? Yes, but smile, do your duty and keep it together. You know, for the kids. Instead of telling customers, "You're twenty minutes late, I had to give away your table" I only say, "Glad you could make it! Give me a moment to get your table ready." In truth, I did give it away but I always have a contingency plan for such situations. When they come early, offer them drinks, make it personally if you can. Comp them if things get hairy. Get them as comfortable as possible, update them often and specifically about their table, especially if it's their table. It's annoying when people request specific tables, as that's the most difficult thing to keep available throughout the night but .. what can you do? Maybe the table has special significance to them, maybe they had such a great night last time they're trying to recreate the magic? Who am I to tell them no?

Alright, you don't want to sit in the back room. To be honest, I get it. You want to be where the action is. Unless you really like privacy and quiet, it feels better to be part of the main dining room. There's energy, vibrancy, it makes you really feel like you went out on a Saturday night. No matter what we do, no matter how good the service was, being in the back room will always feel like you were pushed aside a bit . Some people relish that, being forgotten in some corner to be alone with their friends. But most people want to be part of the show, and I understand that. People-watching is a sport for some, after all.

Hmmm, you don't want the banquette table, eh? My gut reaction is that you're being selfish. You want a bigger table and drive down my space efficiency because of an insignificant degree of comfort. You're being annoying. But in truth, I see why the banquette can be uncomfortable. It's very intimate, you're forced to stare in to each others' eyes. If this isn't a date, that's not the ideal situation. The table is smaller, they're packed closer together, you're well-within earshot of your neighbors. People often strike up conversations across tables. I would hate that, socially awkward panda that I am. I prefer my conversation to be private, the chance for interruption minimal. If I feel that way, I'm sure many other people do to. I just wouldn't have the balls to complain about it, and you do. Who's the big man now?

So I'm beginning to understand you. I'm beginning to understand how you work as a group, and how you work as individuals. I'm beginning to empathize with your situation. I am not different from you because I'm wearing a suit and telling you where to go. Not everything is just business, and even when it is, that's a much more flexible and personal thing than it first appears. And it has to be if we ever plan to succeed in the restaurant industry, where we must constantly adjust our business model to fit the people we serve. So we learn, and we accept it. Accept that we are all human and that we all like a little eye contact, understanding, empathy, compassion and warmth. That a monetary transaction doesn't change those emotions so long as they are delivered with authenticity. So really being in the front is an exercise of sincerity. And it's pretty hard to fake being sincere about your work if you aren't.

In the words of Dr. Manhattan,

"I can change almost anything... but I can't change human nature."

So I should stop being so inflexible. Everybody's different. But most everybody likes to be treated kindly. And if they're going to pay for it, well I suppose they deserve it now, don't they?

G.I. JOOOOEEEE!!

EP6

PS - My last sentences sounded so goddamn Public Service Announcement, it was the first thing that came to mind. What kind of pussy am I becoming? What kind of man are you turning me in to? Damn you, JULIAANNNAAAAA!!

Culture & Chemistry

I took some time the other day to calculate how much time I was spending at the restaurant, and like most people who run restaurants, came to the disturbing conclusion that it was a lot of frickin' time. When I'm cranking out a full week during the busy summer season, my wages (read: allowance from my mom) plummet in hourly value.

It's just the nature of the beast. Restaurants require obsessive pruning and preening. It's often the restaurants that don't have a dedicated owner there everyday that seem to lack focus and discipline. We're all guilty of it. At some point in our careers the boss has gone out of town and things seemed to breathe easier, be a bit more slack. It's human nature. Unless there is serious, individual focus we need drill sergeants in our lives from time to time.



But if you love to instruct, to guide, to refine, then it isn't a chore to be at a restaurant working so many hours. You get a chance to really engage your passions and your senses everyday as a trade-off for not getting weekends or holidays. You get real-time results, there's little idle time, you get to work with your hands. You have the opportunity to be working and interacting with a lot of dynamic people in pressured situations. If you thrive on that teamwork, that togetherness through adversity, then you get real and exciting experiences everyday that many other industries don't.



But that's only if things are going well with the right people. Rough edges, breakdowns in team chemistry will rub your staff raw. Bitter rivalries and petty disagreements will soon become festering sores, and that adrenaline-fueled team effort through dinner rush will serve more as a pressure cooker than an energy source; compressing people's emotions to the point of bursting.



Having good chemistry is rarely an accident and is seldom an easy thing to create. Crafting a good restaurant team is probably only outdone in difficulty by crafting a good basketball team. You're constantly weighing people's personalities, their egos, what they bring to the table with their skills and how that compensates for any personal shortcomings they may have. In short, their "locker room presence." I think what makes it even harder is what I first mentioned; we spend so much time together. Don't get me wrong, professional athletes have to spend plenty of time together; on the tour bus, in practice, photo-ops, and it usually helps your on-court performance if you like one another. But there's always the asylum of the off-season, your millions of dollars and buxom wenches to whisk yourself away to if the team is becoming a bit ... much. There are no such luxuries in the restaurant. There's no where to run. In New York City there's often barely any space to get even a comfortable personal distance from one another. Most city kitchens consist of a tight hallway stacked with burners and appliances. As Bourdain puts it, "kitchens perform best like tight, touring rock bands and implode just as easily."



It's not all that bad for me. No one really grinds my gears and most of them view me as a "mini-boss" of sorts, so their relationship with me is quite different from their relationships with one another. Also, I'm not forced to quality control them like my mother is, so I don't have to call them out on their faults as much. In fact, I am the guy everybody loves because I am the auxiliary fireman. I put out fires, I help in whatever department needs the most help. So I spend most of my weekends saving one person or anothers' ass, and it's usually hard to resent someone after that. And I don't dislike anyone on our staff it's just that ... I would never really call any of them my friend. They are all immigrants from China, they're all well in to their 30s and 40s with families, English is not their first language. There's not a terrible amount for us to relate to with one another. I try to maintain a polite and respectful working relationship with all of them, but once we're out of the restaurant, that's it. I might not even say hello to them in the street.



For them, it's quite different. Almost all of our employees live in Flushing and they meet at Main Street to take our company bus every morning. They cram in to this 15-passenger van, they take turns buying each other coffee, and they swelter as the poor machine putt-putts its way to Manhasset without any air conditioning. Already the summer heat has caused three arguments that neared blows as short-tempered cooks argued about who should have what seat. They leave Flushing around 10:30, they get to the restaurant around 11 AM. They work in close quarters together all day, everyday, for 12-13 hours a day, and then they take the bus home together. They each take one day off a week, so during any sort of busy season for us ... you're looking at spending 60-70 hours in direct and close contact with your coworkers, and always depending on one another to perform and get through service. That's a lot to ask of any group of people, and creating a smooth team environment is a tall enough mountain to climb.



I've spent a lot of time analyzing it. The waiters think I don't care much, but I actually watch them very carefully. I don't go running to my mom when they make mistakes, I just silently fix them and amazingly enough they get the hint pretty quickly. It isn't the most efficient way to command, I don't plan on doing it in such a manner later in my career. But for now, as I awkwardly straddle the line between employer and coworker, it seems the most appropriate means of refining the performance of the team. So I watch them. A lot. In a hopefully non-creepy way, and as a consequence I have come to evaluate their personalities. I like to think I am able to read people with some adequacy. I may not be able to divine one's personal intentions, but I can sense when people are frustrated, when they're nearing their breaking point, when they're content, and when they're upset. It's actually a rather simple combination of being an emotionally sensitive person and giving a lot of attention to detail. As it turns out, very few people are truly inscrutable.



Sam, the unofficial "waiter captain," has been working with my mom for about 9 years. He advanced through the ranks from a lowly busboy to now helping my mom run the restaurant when she's not there. He usually takes the helm on the big VIP tables because he understands my mom's standards better than anyone else. He knows to time dishes so they all come out hot, to not let them sit in the window for more than a minute. He knows to keep plates wiped clean, to serve dishes to the right people without having to ask who had what. And he's good at it. But that's only when he's doing a VIP table with a fat tip awaiting him at the end. When he's forced to work Section 3, which is mainly comprised of two-top banquettes that get sat in by elderly women couples droning on about crocheting, or whatever the fuck old bitches be yappin' about, and the turnover and tips are low ... he simply stops caring. He gets a nasty look on his face, is short-tempered, seemingly forgets all of his good serving habits, and stands in the corner playing poker on his iPhone only offering occasional glances to see when he can get these women out the door. All customers are not created equal in his mind, and they're not in reality, but you must try to treat them as such. You can't pick and choose who comes through your door. It's a fault of his, but nobody's perfect. You take the good with the bad and he's simply too important to the team at this point to let him go. The other waiters don't love him, exactly because of his poor attitude, but you just hope it goes smoothly every night.

William, the unofficial "second-in-command" is probably my favorite. He started working with my mom just before I went to college and I was kind of surprised to still find him here when I came back. He is by far the most genuine of all the front staff. He is incredibly goofy and even-tempered. He has a slight stutter and when combined with his tendency to talk excitedly, often leads to words tumbling out of his mouth in a clumsy, fall-down-the-stairs kind of manner. Most of the waiters call him "Lao Tou," which kind of means "Old Man." He's not significantly older than anyone, but he is often bumbling around as if he doesn't know where he's going. No matter how busy it gets though, he never loses composure. Whereas I will get furious sometimes, throw teapots at walls and punch counter tops, he is always cool as a cucumber. But I think he can be a bit inconsistent with his serving and thus people don't request him as a waiter too often as a result. Still, most everybody likes him and having that guy in your team who holds things together a bit solely by the virtue of being likable is important. He has a goofy sense of humor and it lightens things up when shit goes bad. Once a customer left behind her baby daughter's sippy cup. My mom told William to put it in the office with a post-it note in case she came back to get it. He excitedly waved it front of Owen's face, a waiter who happens to be very short with a young appearance, exclaiming "The boss has a new cup for you!" as if it were the funniest shit anyone had ever thought of. He laughed so hard to himself I couldn't help but smile as they messed with one another.


Alan is also another long-serving waiter of my mother’s. You can get a general idea for a waiter’s competency by how little they get yelled at. That’s the most effective means of evaluation at a restaurant, how much are you not fucking up. Well, Alan seldomly gets yelled at but I can see in his work that he’s tired. He is a bit too... for lack of a better word, fertile, as his wife keeps popping out daughters. But supporting all those mouths and educations (I think he’s up to four, plus one in the oven) is taking its toll. With every step, every dish cleared and every Peking Duck pancake wrapped, his movements say “Fuck my life.” He just doesn’t really care anymore, and though he performs adequately enough, he is soul-weary; just going through the motions because duty and obligation require him to. He’s a nice guy, a lot of customers really like him, but in his slouch and his soft voice there is a distinct lack of inspiration. You don't need to believe in inspired service to be a waiter at our restaurant, but if you want to be the best you most certainly do. In the future he will perhaps be an effective measuring stick of “burn out,” that point every human can reach when their career and life goals seem exhausting and not worthwhile.

Luo Shi-fu is probably the employee I know best. Months of standing next to him every morning, rolling out dumplings and chopping scallions will teach you quite a bit about a person. He is genuinely one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met. He’s an all-star player that any kitchen would be happy to have; bright attitude, infinite patience, expansive skill-set and tireless work ethic. He started out as a dishwasher when he was 18, and a Cantonese chef saw the promise in him and trained him to be a dim sum chef. He can work the hot line, he can carve beautifully, has extremely deft hands, and just that … general kitchen mastery. When you’ve worked with food for so long and so intensely you just know things. You know when a cut of steak is medium-rare, you figure out how foie gras works even though you’ve never seen it in your life. And he is aware of his own talents and yet humble all the same. But I can sense resentment and frustration. He has left my mother a few times in the past to try to open up his own place. He tried doing cheap take-out joints out on the ass-end of Long Island. He tried opening up a restaurant with his brother-in-law in upstate New York. He’s tried being an executive chef at some huge dim sum houses in Chinatown. None of it ever worked out. My mom takes great care of him, she recognizes his importance to the restaurant and to her kitchen. He is well-compensated and well-treated. But he wants to strike out on his own. He lacks the funding and restaurant know-how to do so though. It takes more than just being able to cook to succeed in this business, and he knows that, but all the same he isn’t able to change it. His anger will flash ever so rarely, and it is terrifying to behold, to see someone so gentle even have a flicker of rage. But it’s usually only reserved for one person… the head chef.

Ah Gau is my mother’s longest standing employee. He has worked as her head chef for 15 years. The peculiarity of it is that she absolutely can’t stand him. His shoddy work ethic, complete lack of organization, inability to manage people or control the quality of the dishes that leave his kitchen frustrate her to no end. He is less of a chef and more of a cook. He rarely if ever teaches, corrects or inspects his own cooks. Whereas most chefs I have worked with stand dutifully by the window, scrutinizing every dish that is coming and going, he will sit on a bucket at any idle chance until called upon by my mother to cook something. He is yelled at more than anyone else in the restaurant. If he doesn’t already, I’m sure his inevitable retirement will be haunted by my mother’s shrill cries of “Ah Gau! Ni zai na li!? (Ah Gau! Where the fuck are you?!)” Food cost is estimated to go up by a few percentage points when he is at the helm because he is sloppy and wasteful. Cooks come and go because no one can seem to get along with him. So the question must be asked, why the fuck is he still here? Well, he is an exceptional cook. Though Luo Shi-fu controls all of the dim sum, everything else that comes out of our kitchen is influenced by him. He has a razor sharp palate and a nigh-mystical ability to prepare some wonderful food. He is always called upon to personally cook VIP tables because he just knows. He knows how to make something delicious. And there's something to be said for familiarity. Like many relationships teetering on the brink of failure, people chicken out of taking that plunge and saying goodbye because you don't know if you'll find something better. They've become comfortable right now, and though it's not perfect they fear that change might not bring improvement. Do I like him? I actually really do, he’s always very kind to me. He likes to speak kitchen Spanish with me (though his is nearly unintelligible coupled with his thick Hong Kong accent). He is by all respects, a fairly agreeable person. But like Alan, his life has not gone the way he has planned. You can tell he is defeated on the inside. My mother claims his wife is bat-shit, extra-strength crazy and has effectively stubbed out the embers of his soul on her heel. But a man’s life at home must do exactly that … stay there. We all have our personal demons. Though these demons as materialized by menacing women seems to be a reoccurring theme at our restaurant.

So that's just a few of the key players, and yet it seems no more a powder keg than any other place of employ. But something about our company culture makes the gears grate against one another. I think it has something to do with us being a Chinese restaurant and it having a general trickle-down effect from the head honcho; Mom. As to the former, I mainly highlight this in contrast to the predominantly Hispanic kitchens I've worked in. It would be an egregious and ignorant generalization to say something like "all Mexican people get along," but I feel there's more a sense of camaraderie amongst them than with Chinese people. They got here via similar routes and a lot of them work the same path from dishwasher to cook, to maybe one day a chef. That would be a huge success for a Mexican immigrant, in my opinion. My old sous-chef, Chuy was pullin' down good cash, more than enough to support his family of four. He owned a house, a car, and he was able to bring his kids up in a good school district. You gotta have respect for that, someone who came over and started washing dishes at a corrupt racetrack when he was 17, not speaking any English. The lower-tier cooks knew not to fuck with him.

But Chinese cooks and restaurant employees come from all sorts of walks of life. Our expediter, Chen Shi-fu, was a teacher in China. William and Sam used to be cubicle rats. Owen used to be some kind of stocks trader in Fuzhou, whatever that means. Annie used to work as a receptionist. This diverse compilation of careers and skills, paired with the fact that many Chinese people speak a vast array of dialects incomprehensible to one another, seems to serve as a means of dividing us. They may have had better careers in China, they may have had better lives, very few of them seem to enjoy restaurant work. That is no fault of their own, it isn't for everybody. But when you're forced to do something, with people who share more than a little animosity between them, that makes for unhappy and strained situations. People just can't get along at our restaurant, they're always arguing, and I think it has plenty to do with the fact that they either don't want to be there, or are tired of being there.

A restaurant's personality will be a reflection of the owner's personality. Not just the face we show customers, but the face we show one another, day in and day out as coworkers. I think this is another source of tension in that our company culture doesn't foster any sense of togetherness or teamwork. I draw so many parallels between restaurants and sports because I think there is a lot of teamwork required to perform well. After reading Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness, seeing the work environment as a "tribe" seems to allow people to do amazing work. When people show up everyday to not just coworkers, but friends, who are passionate about their work, they will naturally work together to innovate and inspire. You must protect the tribe, promote its growth and ensure it is a healthy entity, inside and out. A lot of restaurants don't do that because restaurant work is seen as a pursuit of necessity rather than as a pursuit of fulfillment. People do this work because they have to, not because they want to, and as a result you get careless, uninspired results. To be sure, the best restaurants are not like this, but we are not one of the "best" restaurants. We're a pretty good restaurant held together by the vision of one person, who cracks whips rather than melds people. All employees in my mother's eyes are replaceable. Do what I say, or get the fuck out is the attitude. She thinks all of her employees are out to ruin her at any chance they get. To be fair, that is what the old school restaurant attitude is; this "fuck you" kind of attitude where you rule by fear. And she's had plenty of employees screw her over in her 30-odd-year career; people splitting and stealing her menu ideas and dishes, people forging papers and getting her in trouble with immigration, people stealing customer's credit card info and smearing her name with fraud, etc. So I think it will be difficult to change her perceptions. But I plan on doing it much differently...

It might be idealistic, but if I am going to work in a kitchen, a restaurant with a ton of people I want them to be people I get along with. People I'd get a beer with, people I like to hang out with. Not to say that we would be friends first, coworkers second, but I just think liking one another is really important. I've worked in places where there was just those few guys who made my life hell and I had zero respect for. It was awful, I feared walking in the door every morning. People often write of the city kitchen crew as a pirate crew; a motley band of rogues and brigands who didn't really fit neatly in other niches of society, but paired together like port and cheese. An overly romantic interpretation perhaps, but the point remains. Have I ever wanted to go out and hang with my coworkers? Rarely if ever. Have we ever gotten together over the holidays, or discussed means of improving the restaurant together? Certainly not. I think the team atmosphere is important, and it may be my life's work to refine it but here I am saying that it is my white whale.

I think I can do it. I like to consider myself a likable person, more because I have this incessant desire to be liked than because of any inherent charm or charisma. And it can be a bit neurotic if I ever encounter someone who doesn't really vibe with me; What the fuck do you mean you don't like me?! Fucking like me, damn it! I'm fucking likable, asshole! But what it all really boils down to is empathy. Having respect and awareness for one another's feelings, and creating an environment where they can thrive and feel comfortable, rather than live in constant fear or apprehension of each other, for their job, whatever it may be.

Like I said, it could be a bit idealistic now. Such an idyllic place may not exist. But when faced with the alternative...

"Ta men you zai cao le... zou kai, zou kai... (They're arguing again. Get out of here...)"

I look to see what he means. Our restaurant is generally a sausage fest, only four women work here; my mother, a manager, a waitress and the packing girl who packs all the take-out orders. Jenny, the packing girl and Annie, the waitress fucking despise one another. I have no idea why, my mom mentions something about an argument over what Miso Black Cod was a long time ago .. but regardless when they're near each other, the hormonal tension and resentment is so palpable I fear I might menstruate when standing between them.

Jenny's station is by the kitchen window so she can grab take-outs quickly. There's a steam table full of soup and sauces in front of her. Not so carelessly she drops the ladle in the soup with a sploosh, getting egg drop soup all over Annie's apron as she reaches up to garnish a dish with peanuts. There are death stares shared. Claws flash out, plates are slammed down and passive-aggression is building at an alarming rate. We are at 12,000 psi of female-engendered bitterness and every man in the room knows to shut the fuck up.

"Ni gan shi ma?! (The fuck's wrong with you?!)" says Annie.
"Ni de lian xiang ge hou zi. (Your face looks like a fucking monkey's!)" curses Jenny.
"Ah, ni zen me piao liang ma? (Oh, and you're so fucking pretty?)"
(cue bad kung-fu movie-esque Chinese yelling that I don't understand, and we are an inch away from someone getting slapped and getting their hair yanked in to a steaming bowl of soup)

Everyone else is silent. William pulls a walks-in-to-kitchen-immediately-walks-out-of-kitchen kind of deal. Only my mother's battlefield voice is sufficient to stop them from arguing. I run outside to Dorothy, who is probably the most sane female in the house. I tell her I always run the fuck away when women start arguing. Michael, the sushi chef is chuckling about it. He, like a neanderthal-ish male, finds it oddly sexual when women fight. I don't know how this always happens but we always find ourselves a pervy bastard of a sushi chef. He changes the subject and observes that I have a few pimples running around my temple. He always takes note of when I break out, oddly enough, saying that I should have more sex as that will alleviate any acne. Thank you, Michael, you're not the only person who thinks I should be having more sex. All the boys make sure to stay out of the girls' wake, no one wants to get burned. Like a pro, Annie immediately puts on a happy face for the customers, but she has threatened to quit if Jenny remains. There are dark looks on their faces for the rest of the night. We stay out of their path of destruction.

What can you do? At the restaurant you arguably see your coworkers more than your family, and you are at least obligated to like your family. Shit gets bad from time to time. Though the bus usually runs smoothly, the wheels fall off here and there. You patch the wounds, you sail the ship you've got. I think the only way to really fix things would be a complete overhaul, but we're past the point of no return. Hence even more important that I start things off on the right foot, be extremely rigorous in your hiring and firing of people. They just gotta pass the douche bag test, simplest of all, right?

Ask yourself...

"Is he being that guy? You know... that guy. Does he have potential to be that guy. Don't be that guy."
"He is definitely that guy."
"Okay, let's not hire that guy."

Yep, I'm pretty sure all major decisions will be played out as such in my brain from now on. Northwestern did a pretty good job of honing my douche-radar, recognizing "that guy" has gotten me pretty far in life avoiding unsavory people. And so it will be...

Everyday I'm shufflin', have a nice weekend.

EP6

After the Pride

What happens when it's 4 AM and you just had a most harrowing experience in the front...?

----

I don't feel proud of myself.

The concept of pride had always seemed intangible to me. It wasn't something predefined, it wasn't a neat bundle of emotions one felt after completing or achieving something. To me, it had always been something that went along with a general sense of well-being. If I was doing well, keeping busy, doing the things I wanted to do, and treating people well, then I felt good. I felt proud of myself. I'd stand tall, look customers in the eye, shrug off their attempts to bully me and remain unflinching. I'd smile, do my job and perform admirably. I used wellness and stability as a shield. So long as that bulwark stood firm I could face anything.

But people aren't rocks. They are disappointingly human; fallible and subject to fluctuations. There have been plenty of lows and highs this year, and I've managed to pull myself out of the proverbial ditch a few times. But as culinary school looms on the horizon, it becomes necessary to look inward. The time has come to be judge, jury and potential executioner of myself. And when people give themselves an honest look-over, they aren't always happy with what they find.

I haven't cooked in almost a month. Haven't even stepped in to the kitchen. It's something I didn't want to admit as the days off began to accumulate. My friends were too polite or too busy with their own busyness to question, "Hey, you been on chat an awful lot... no lunch service today?" This is something I have a tendency to do. It happened all the time at school. I cut a few classes, fall behind and can't muster up the courage to face the professor... I'd go weeks missing class that way. And then I would reach desperation, grow some fucking balls, face the class and make a grind to pull it out in the end. It always ended up costing me more time; I'd have to pull more all-nighters and more extra credit. I'm woe to admit that I've emotionally manipulated a few professors in my time. I always took the gamble that a professor's empathy would overcome their rigidity on academic honor. I always took the gamble that they didn't want to fail a student on their attendance policy, that that was more of a scare tactic than anything else. I was always right.

So my Northwestern failures were happening all over again. One day I drove to the restaurant, parked my car and stared at the kitchen's back door. The workers bees were beginning to buzz; refreshing sauces, sweeping, stocking take-out containers. I could hear the clang of cast iron woks on carbon-scored burners, the rattle of a dishwasher hose through the screen door. Their grind had begun for the X-th day, with X being an almost unforgivably large number. Every year, every week, six days a week, twelve hours a day for practically nothing. I had both a great deal of respect and more than a little pity for our employees. They truly were salt of the earth, carved from stone kinds of people. I suppose something about the crucible of immigration really makes you a fighter. Something about having a family gives you motivation. And I wanted to call myself a fighter too. A bulldog, someone who if lacking talent at least never gave up.

But that day, I did not want to fight.

I didn't have it. Not anymore. I didn't and don't want to fight anymore. What's the point of working that hard? To raise a family that you barely know, maybe doesn't even really like you? What merit is there in that kind of life? Why show up here everyday, give it your all and have customers treat you like garbage for their $9.95? Why keep doing this when there seems to be a complete shortage of any helpful results?

Maybe that was a different kind of pride. Not the self-confidence one used to face the challenges of the world, but the eggshell one cast around their insecurities. When inevitably broken, claws lashed out to the defend one's yellow, runny insides.

I was and remain plenty yellow.

I can't do it anymore. I can't hear another customer call me on the phone with a take-out order and hum along as they decide what to eat for 15 minutes while three other lines blare with urgency. I can't have another customer get mad at me because their table isn't ready ten minutes before their reservation, talk shit about my mom's restaurant within earshot. I can't hear these terrible Long Island accents anymore. It's that pitch, that cadence, that diction, that snobbish drawl that haunted me in high school, that weakens my soul now. To me it has the effect of screwing in a light bulb; cheap metal parts connecting to one another. It makes my teeth grind and leaves this palpable chalkiness in my mouth.

Even though Superman is a broken superhero concept, the analogy of Kryptonite remains relevant. That fucking accent is my weakness. The way they say "sauce" as "suawse," that stupid Valley Girl meets Brooklyn-Italian equals Long Island pronunciation are like hollow point bullets to my soul. Is that melodramatic? I don't know. I had a buddy who worked at Home Depot and told me every piece of lumber he scanned made him want to commit seppuku with the plastic scan gun in front of every customer, spilling his bloody entrails over pressure-treated chestnut planks, which would remain untarnished by such a display I might add. I guess we just have to realize when we've given up.

It's just such an absurd lack of empathy that it doesn't make sense to me. It's trite at this point as every girly magazine-reading, Cosmo-praising, vapid hoe has read by now that the best way to figure out if your man is "ohmygosh, a keeper!" is how he treats the wait staff. It's always in the dating advice section lost among the 37 different ways to please your man (read: sucking dick), how to let him pay for dinner while remaining your own woman, and some treatise from a failed gender studies major about the changing dynamics of feminism in the modern world. Yes, just continue to lose count of how much dick you've taken, you're a sexy, independent woman, you're not bound by archaic ideas of sexuality, you're making a difference, believe in yourself.

But it is true. How you treat service industry people is very indicative of the kind of person you are. In my opinion, it should be mandatory that every teenager work retail, or stand behind the counter of a McDonald's, or host at a busy restaurant for a year. I promise you, after a year of that harrowing bullshit, having your emotional fortitude tested every night, you will never, ever be a dick to someone again. You will have fucking empathy for your fellow humans. At least the ones who suffered as you did. If you come through all of that still acting like an asshole, then perhaps you enact Darwinian justice on yourself and remove yourself from the gene pool.

It's immature and unrealistic of me to expect better from humanity than a lack of empathy and a total immersion in ignorance, with unwillingness to expand one's mind piled on top.

I won't get in to it anymore. I always rant angrily and I'm tired of it. Tired of hearing myself say it, not caring what you think has gone wrong with my wiring. Inside of me, deep within my cold, improperly cooked, runny yolk I knew this going in. A restaurant was about dealing with people, and people were at best volatile, and at worst venomous. I just didn't expect to handle it so poorly.

It just doesn't seem worth it anymore.

That pride returns; why do these people deserve my heart and soul? Why do they deserve the product of my sweat and tears? Because they're giving me ten bucks? A sum so insignificant to them, these undeservedly rich second-generation inherited wealth motherfuckers. Ten bucks hasn't meant anything to them their whole lives. But I have to care about every fucking dollar that comes in this place, and treat it as if it were our last? Is that what this all is for? Must I sacrifice my pride and beg, and compromise my integrity for ten dollars?

If the answer is yes, then I'm not sure what I'm going to do now.

My life has been a highlight reel of failures. What makes it worse, in my opinion, is that I always had the potential for success, but I squandered it. I was given a lot of gifts, given a lot of opportunity but didn't have the wherewithal or awareness to seize it.

People had a lot of faith in my ability to play cello. They told me I had a nice professional career ahead of me. I threw it away, I didn't want it, practicing was too hard and I didn't enjoy it. Now the fingers are soft and clumsy, unable to produce what they once did. It's gone and not just to rust.

People had zero faith in my ability to play sports. I have no athletic background, a sports resume more Kobayashi than Ichiro, and nearly a decade's worth of cold-smoked lungs. Though I had the motivation for a time, I never could prove them wrong. I never had the talent and now my ultimate history will be forever colored with mediocrity.

People had little faith in my academic prowess and they were right. I have a quarter-of-a-million dollar degree, but it'd be more useful as a contraceptive than a diploma, so flimsy is the substance that backs it.

People thought I was crazy to want to learn how to cook. I deemed it to be a natural human skill though, and something I couldn't possibly fuck up too bad. But after a year in a Chinese kitchen, all I've proven is that I can still only kind of cook Italian food. A pork fucking fried rice eludes me.

And here we are, finally at a crossroads of sorts. What was once, I believed, to be a harmonious juncture of what talents I had and my life's motivation wrapped in to one. What was once, I believed, to be the evolutionary niche carved out for me in modern society. What was once, I believed, to be something I really enjoyed and deemed worthy of a life's passion and work.

Well, you destroyed that. I thank you. Now I need to spend the next few month's putting it back together. If I can do so at all. But it was your thankless attitude, not just your ignorance of the restaurant industry but your lack of any desire to show empathy for it, your hollow, depressing lives that seek to drag mine down with it, and your nasty remarks that finally did me in.

I'm immature, I realize. I shouldn't let it hurt me, they're not trying to hurt you either. It's a false sense of entitlement that comes with their generation. There is still hope. It gets better. You're a rough-hewn product, Eric... misshapen rock at best. You're not sturdy yet, but you should plant your feet right now because the tide's coming in.

But I don't want to. I used to want to. I miss wanting to. But if for all my efforts this is my reward then I say "No thank you, not right now."

Lessons Learned

It's been about four years...

I was sitting in this very house, my mother's house, still as sparsely furnished as it was then. Single mother-restaurateurs don't have much time for interior decoration. At least not in their own homes. The curtains remain temporary paper hangings, there still aren't any hand towels in the bathroom. My "bedroom" is and was the storage room, a place to conveniently hoard the odds and ends of our move while I was away at college. A desk was fashioned out of a cardboard box of nameless VHS tapes, two beds were set up because there was nowhere else to put them, and the metal folding chair I planted my ass in for so much of high school, practicing the cello, was my desk chair. I don't care much for ergonomic-leather-conforming-ass-palaces, my posterior is very accustomed to a hard piece of ... recycled steel. Two not-yet unpacked suitcases served as my dresser and the lack of any other creature comforts reinforced the idea that I was transient. A bum college student who was decidedly aimless, no career goals in sight, just enjoying the ride, not aggressively hunting a valuable internship like my peers. My summer would be reserved for what I like to call "loafing and straight-chillin'," to recover from the "stressful" academic year.

When you have zero career goals and you're majoring in Distribution Requirements until you can figure your shit out, your days are quite carefree. No long game in sight, just waking up without any worries, it is a very happy existence. One can draw comparisons to a clam, nestling deep in the warm, wet sand without any idea or care of what's coming, completely isolated from the outside world.

Yep, that was me. Truly the adage embodied.

And then epiphany dawned.

Everybody misuses the word epiphany. When you finally figure out how that corkscrew contraption works on a bottle of wine, or that Star Wars was an accidental masterpiece, or when you realize you can use Google as a calculator we are quick to jump to the word "epiphany."

e·piph·a·ny–noun

3. a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

It was somewhere in between watching Ratatouille, sitting on my ass with my broken ankle and watching my grandmother butcher the hell out of a chicken that I thought ... what would it be like to cook for a living?

The thought passed with little consequence. I went back to watching videos of BMX wannabes suffering hospitalizing injuries in their driveways. I was probably fulfilling my Omega Nerd status by playing World of Warcraft (yeah, I know .. I'm awesome). What else do you do with a broken ankle and an asinine amount of free time?

Then as I was going to sleep and the night's penchant for bringing on introspection crept upon me, the lazy thought that rolled over my brain earlier, rolled back to the forefront. What would it be like to cook for a living?

I jumped up in bed. My spine had become a lightning rod for a rare useful thought, scared stiff by a sudden and compelling idea. What would it be like to cook for a living?

It all made sense somehow. All my character defects and personality quirks seemed to fit. An obsession over seemingly useless details and minutia, an absolute abhorrence of downtime and idling, a means to sate my short attention span with real-time results and improvement, manual labor, a guarantee that even if unable to move out of a studio apartment that I'd at least be eating well, a frustrating need to be creative, little to no advanced math required to perform. This ... could fucking work!

Impulsive creature that I am, I set about researching famous chefs, their educations and what schools were worthy. I was quite set and ready to say "Hey Mom, sorry but I'm not going back to Northwestern in the fall. I'm going to [insert culinary school here]" And if I could manage to survive the thrust of her kitchen knife, I was quite convinced I was off to France to become the next Ming Tsai.

This is going to be awesome, I told myself.

Well it was. For a while. But reality has a way of shattering one's dreams.

See, even though I had grown up in the restaurant business, I was so pitifully unaware of my surroundings and upbringing that I had failed to really pay any attention to what that lifestyle entailed. I was hypnotized, brainwashed, not unlike many cooks of my generation, by that temptress known as the Food Network. Yes, I will admit it. It shames me so. It'd be like a hipster admitting they only started listening to Arcade Fire after they won the Grammy for 2011 (still convinced it was a posthumous award for Funeral, I mean there's no way The Suburbs deserved that one). It is a tale I tell almost no one, but here I am dispersing my embarrassment to the winds of the Internet.

I just didn't get it. I was excited. It was first love. You've got your blinders on, you don't know there's a train coming, you're just running with it because it feels so good. Never you mind that you've never had a stiletto heel driven through your heart, or you've never known another woman or what you could possibly like in another person you plan to spend forever with. Sorry, what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah, cooking. It looked so... so... fucking pretty! It's in Technicolor and soft-filtered light! Giada's tits were bouncing in my face as her sentences came to screeching halts when she put on her Italian accent, but who fucking cares? That bitch calls herself a chef, I can fucking do that, I'm personable! I can be charming! Anybody can cook, Remy the Rat taught me that! I'd be motorboating that woman's replacement in no time!

And so I set out. Following my grandmother around in the kitchen (on crutches mind you), asking her how to do this, or how to do that. I talked excitedly to my mother about how I had finally found a career path, that I was going to follow in her footsteps. The Asian mother in her managed to restrain itself from vomiting/stabbing me in the heart long enough to politely smile and say "That's ... (varicose vein) ... nice..." I picked up a knife for maybe the second time ever and clumsily sliced mushrooms for my grandmother (It's cool, Alton Brown showed me how to do this), and most importantly/embarrassingly, I continued to watch the Food Network.

That was step one. We'll call that stage "Before the Red Pill." Reality has not set in, we have not yet lost cabin pressure. I was going to be a celebrity chef and nothing could stop me. I was going to be that smiling asshole on TV and the bitches would come running...

I came upon a more useful and realistic introduction in to the culinary world through books. Letters to a Young Chef by Daniel Boulud, The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman, The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin, I devoured any literature on how the greats became great. Only, I still had no idea what great meant, and I still had no idea what exactly it meant to be "great."

But it was helpful nonetheless. I would be lying if my impressionable self wasn't severely influenced by Kitchen Confidential. When the history books are written and the demographics come out for millennial cooks, you're going to see a disturbing amount of Bourdain and Bobby Flay influence. But it prepared me just a little bit better.

I knew I had to practice. Cooking was a craft for sure, and one that required daily and abusive honing. The merits of practice were not lost on me, I understood from years of cello that playing a c minor scale every day just made Bach's 5th Suite go better (still a bitch of a Prelude though).

I have some cringeworthy memories of cooking at 912. This was my first apartment, no more dining halls, it was time to feed myself. Never mind that I actually have no fucking idea how to cook properly. I could pretend like I was a hot shot anyway, no one would know any better. I distinctly remember baking a cherry tomato-chicken casserole like I knew what I was fucking doing. If I recall the chicken was so poorly browned, and the onions so poorly cooked that it was damn near inedible, but my roommates complimented me knowingly or unknowingly I may never confirm. I squeezed on a bit of lemon juice and showered on a bit of salt just to feel even more like a professional. I was only kidding myself.

But I was slowly changing course. I realized that there was no honor and no real respect to be had in being a food TV personality. If I planned to run a restaurant, be a real chef then I had to emulate the likes of Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre-White ... not Rachael Ray, Alton Brown or Tyler Florence.

I continued to cook at home, acting the part, but I knew that my path inevitably would have to lead to an internship. A stage, an unpaid stint in a real kitchen where I would be of little more importance than a broom-hand. But college got in the way. There was too much beer pong, and frisbee, and females running around to really concentrate on anything meaningful. Not to mention I wanted to graduate and that meant my nonexistent academic conditioning was being put to the test daily. Did I mention that I'm a wuss? Oh yeah, that was a problem too ... how the hell am I supposed to convince someone to let me in their kitchen and fuck up their heirloom tomato salads?

It took a year, but the courage was eventually found. I called Oceanique every few days asking for the chef. He never seemed to be there, he never returned my phone calls. I began to lose hope even though I hadn't yet been rejected. I was fabricating excuses to not pick up the phone. The shred of perseverance that exists within me won through though, I finally got him on the phone.

"Have you ever done a stage before?"

Wow I wish I had thought of at least one useful response, time to bullshit.

"I mean, I grew up in the restaurant business so I'm pretty comfortable in a kitchen."
"Alright... 1 PM, this Friday. Wear dark pants, I'll give you a coat, bring a hat."
"Yes, Chef."

That would be the first time I ever uttered those words. "Yes, Chef." Giddy up, let's go.

If I was hoping to be greeted by a beautiful stainless steel kitchen, if I was hoping to encounter a band of roguish cooks with hearts of gold, tight-knit like a rock band, if I was hoping to get to actually cook something ... then I was an idiot. And I was definitely never short on idiocy in those days.

The kitchen was small, the hot line snaked around the dishwasher, the garde manger and the butcher table in such a strange manner. It was dark, it was uncomfortably warm and there was Mexican polka blaring at an unsafe volume from a 1980's boombox. No one spoke English, no one so much as even cared I existed. The chef was late so I was left to stand there awkwardly as people walked around me as if I were an inconveniently placed rack cart. The hostess and the sassy gay waiter continued their gossip while giving me apprehending looks, a cook began deftly taking apart a whole cobia.

What planet am I on? I've been in my mother's kitchen my whole life but for some reason, when suddenly thrust in to the thick of the line and to be expected to perform with the staff, what was once familiar became alien.

The chef finally shows up, about a half-hour late. He's carrying a box of organic beets, seemingly straight from the ground, likely personally harvested by him. He hurriedly explains a few things and shoves me in to the basement bakery with Javel, a towering mountain of a man with unshaven jowls and a great, big belly. I still don't know to this day if Javel speaks English as he communicated in the kind of grunts and gesturing usually reserved for human-chimp interactions. He mimed peeling a stalk of rhubarb with a paring knife, and dumped a box of the stuff on the table.

And I pretty much stayed there for the rest of service. Cleaning ovens, sweeping and mopping, organizing boxes, cooling then wrapping hazelnut tarts. By the time I thought I could go home I was gross, sweaty and tired. My face would bear a red glow for the next few hours as I had spent an inordinate amount of time getting intimate with a still-400 degree oven, scrubbing her naughty bits and shining her shoes. That coppery tang you get on the roof of your mouth when you work with generic Comet/Ajax cleaner made food unpalatable, and my hands were more wrinkled than I had ever seen them. They seemed ghostly white, alien appendages that would never regain their luster. And don't even get me started on my cuticles, they were a mess, after all the work and care I put in to them...

Okay, I was being a little bitch. I did something I will forever be ashamed of. I was tired and wanted to go home. I thought I was done cleaning and as I'm about to ask if I can go, Jose says we need to clean the pantry. There are heaps of garbage, cardboard boxes needing to be broken down, cans and boxes to shelve. My heart dropped through the bottom of my stomach. Fuck that. I tell him I have to be somewhere and all he says is "Okay, bye."

Welcome to stage two. We have downed the red pill, the mirror has melted and I just woke up in a spire of incubated humans.

I barely saw any food cooked that whole night, no one talked to me, the chef wasn't hovering over my shoulder teaching me the finer details of frying an egg. What the fuck? I thought I was set. I walked in thinking this is the beginning of my illustrious career, here I come world! You can kindly start engraving my name in the Pantheon of Culinary Gods now, I'll see you in a few years once I finish this stage and go be the fucking boss (pronounced"bause") somewhere.

It was the harsh reality of professional cooking. In the large majority of restaurant kitchens in this country, people do this job because they have to. They don't have viable skills to insert themselves in comfier parts of society, they are relegated to serving the rest of the world. It is a dirty, thankless and oft-misunderstood job. You spend a shit ton of time cleaning, and you can spend years working 70-hour weeks with no weekends to learn a craft people really appreciate, but will never want to embark on themselves.

I knew all this. It was latent. My childhood was grounded in never having anyone home because they were too busy making a living. It just all suddenly gushed up, someone pulled the stopper and in my panic the only people I had to turn to were ice-cold Mexican cooks who knew, not thought, that I was a piece of shit barely worth his oxygen in the kitchen.

I almost didn't go back. The thought of a year of hope and optimism coming crashing down, going back to professional vagabundus was ... disheartening to say the least.

I went home, told everyone it went well and sat outside with a pack of cigarettes to really think this over.

Okay, you were caught slightly off-guard. The spell was broken. My mother shielded me from this harsh reality, and the Food Network lied to me about what it was like. Even all the books ... sweeping romantic prose of hard-working cooks in some Alsatian mountain range painted a very different picture. Doubtless, they worked hard but the gritty details, the nasty bits were left out. This was a little too real for me. Was I really prepared to do this?

I went back for Saturday service. Normally, I am a self-admitted quitter but something in me told me you can't give up just yet. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was ignorance, they often blend together to form their own cocktail of emotional miasma, but I went back. I tried to remember all the basic Spanish I learned in middle school, took a cold shower and chose a different hat. Navy blue Yankees hat would be the helmet I would strap in to battle. It's business time.

And since then my life has forever changed.

I went back and realized why that epiphany was so compelling to me. The thrill of service. Well, it can be a thrill, it can also be the greatest fucking nightmare conceived by man. You'll forgive me the comparisons, I'm not trying to macho up the culinary world more than it already is, but it is not unlike war (something I have zero understanding of I might add). There isn't time enough to think, you hope your training and your preparation was good enough, you rely on your squadmates and you fucking roll. Time blurs, hours pass by in seeming seconds, and you are running like a high-octane F1 engine. If you're doing well, staying on top of your tickets... there is no greater feeling in the world. If you're in the weeds, if disaster strikes, if you've got so many dupes lined up you can't even remember if you're going left-to-right or right-to-left... there is no quicker way to bleed your heart out with stress. I love it. I watched service for the first time in my life and it wrapped its arms around me with the kind of numb tingling a bad cocaine spell will give you. It said, "Welcome. Stay awhile. If you can."

I would work weekends with Chef Grosz at Oceanique for that summer of 2008 and a few weekends throughout the school year, whenever he needed help and I was available. Did I learn much there? Not terribly so, it was just a basic introduction really. I maintain that Chef Grosz is a very talented cook, his eye for plating and flavor is naturally adept. But it was difficult to tell which way was up in that kitchen sometimes. Even a very good kitchen will be calculated chaos at best, but it was really difficult to tell what was going on there. Regardless, it was necessary. And important. Without that stage and the subsequent recommendation from Chef Grosz, I don't think Chef Muldrow would have ever taken me at Va Pensiero. And without that I never would have gotten that job, that very first job as a full-time line cook. And without that ... well, I wouldn't be worth much.

Fast forward 3 years and here we are.

I haven't cooked in a little while, I've been stuck in the front. Three phone lines are ringing while this ancient woman can't remember if she left her credit card there and she's trying to describe to me which table she sat at and that I should go look for it, even though there's a slight (read: likely) possibility it's in her car. This customer is standing in front of me with three kids desperately in need of some Ritalin/a beating so they just sit the fuck down for a second. She wants to know where her take-out order is and ... oh, is the Barbecued Shrimp actually pan-fried? Why is it called barbecue then, that's misleading, I don't eat fried food, you should change that! Tell them I don't want it, and switch it out .. oh and even though I just changed my order now, I still want it in the promised 15 minute time frame. Yeah, I fucking know we should change that. It's called having English as a second language. Be thankful it's spelled correctly and not just a poorly marketed description of a nuance in culinary technique, cunt. We are pretty critically understaffed, but yet busier than we've ever been. My fear is that all this boon in business is going to recede like a post-orgasmic flaccid dick if we can't prove we can perform at this capacity. My neighbor is sitting at his usual table, A3. He's a complete jerk-off, he has more money than God but he refuses to pay $12.00 for a Cantonese Lobster soup we made with a lobster we killed specifically for him, I might add. He calls the waiter an idiot. Again, I don't want you calling anyone an idiot unless you've waited tables in your second language. There are a ton of walk-ins waiting for tables, they're huffing and puffing that they can't believe you need a reservation for "Chinese food on a Wednesday?!" in the kind of manner that I'm not supposed to hear, but I actually can hear, you fuck-face. Kiss my ass, if it's good, then it's worth waiting for. If you don't have the patience, go the fuck home and have your trophy wife whip you up some dinner. Oh wait, she has zero practical life skills because she used her looks to get anywhere in life, I forgot. Loving someone for their looks or their money, which is more shallow, you decide. Here, here's a glass of our house pinot grigio, I made all the money I spent on it with the one glass I've poured so far, so no, I don't care about giving you a glass on the house if it means you'll just shut the fuck up for just a minute. Ugh, the phone is ringing again... please stop. Just stop ringing, the sound of your ringing wakes me up in the middle of the night with the kind of cold sweat PTSD patients find themselves in when they remember seeing their buddy's arm get blown off by an IED. Just .. stop.

This is all internal dialogue by the way. I'm all fucking smiles on the outside. At least for now. I can tell my ability to maintain composure is beginning to crack like a faulty dam.

Am I bitter? Jaded? Changed?

Maybe a little, but that's only because I've been inserted in the wrong place. I was never meant to be in the front. I don't like other people, I try to avoid them at all costs. I don't like talking to strangers, I don't like small talk, I hate telephones. My ideal vacation consists of books, coffee, cigarettes and some remote piece of land preferably near a lake with a yearly temperature average hovering around 60. So, you're asking a badger to go live with a pack of prairie dogs, that's not how it works. We are all designed for certain things, and smiling and talking to customers for 50 hours a week was not what I was designed for. I am not inherently a very social creature.

But it is an important skill nonetheless. Restaurants can have bad food, but bad service will sink you faster. I've learned a lot of lessons in infinite fucking patience. And patience is going to be what it takes to take the right steps towards opening a restaurant, towards calling myself a chef.

I don't want to be Grant Achatz anymore. I don't want to be David Chang, I don't want to be the chef with crossed arms and a knife on the cover of magazines. I don't want to be a buzzword in the blogosphere. I just want to create a good restaurant with happy staff, serving food I deem to be delicious, giving service I am proud of at a price so that I can have a meager living in New York City. I could lay that out for you in great detail as time goes by, but that's just the gist of it now. I'm not a culinary genius, I'm never going to push the envelope of food and its subsequent preparation. But what I am designed for, what I am inherently good at, I think, is making other people happy.

Happy cooks cook good food. Happy waiters don't have to be taught how to give good service, they just do it. Purveyors happy with your relationship will hook you up, they won't hound you with a phone call demanding cash on delivery, they'll tell you they have beautiful line-caught striped bass and they wanted you to know first. Happy customers don't bitch and sneer and cause problems, or send food back because they feel like they're getting gouged. Happy-ness makes it all happen.

I've learned a lot since I've been home. Maybe not about Chinese food, but about myself and what to expect when it comes to running a restaurant. Staff is critical and limiting yourself by setting requirements like "speaks Chinese," "willing to commute to Long Island," "will work for X amount of money" is just setting yourself up for disaster. You're going to spend arguably more time with your staff than your wife ... choose them just as carefully. Choose the best, don't set up a check list for them to measure up to (ladies, take note), acquire good people who will grow in to good workers. Too many cooks of my generation will focus all on food. If they survive the harsh encounters with reality that I did, with a greater appetite than before, than that's just the first step. If they think being well-rounded means you are also proficient at pastry, then that's the second step. If they realize that a restaurant is almost entirely about managing people and not just pork products, then they'll be where I deem myself to be.

I've missed you. There's a lot to talk about. There's a lot I've learned. And I'm going to tell you about it in due time. But, it's just ... I'm sorry, the phone is ringing.

Excuse me,

EP6

Respect for Culture

I used to wonder why it is that restaurants had to be bound by one type of cuisine. Was it focus? Was your food simply going to be all over the place without the framework of one solid cuisine? Was it that the pantry was most economically efficient when kept within one canon of ingredients? Did it have to fit the ambiance of the restaurant, or did the ambiance have to fit the food?

Why does a restaurant have to be just French, or just Thai, or just Italian?

I was confused because I had already drawn two conclusions.

1) A successful restaurant needs a chef who is passionate about and can focus on a certain philosophy of food and its consequent preparation. That's how you create something memorable. If you have a driven and talented cook back there making the kind of food he himself/herself loves to eat, then the rest of the pieces seem to fall in to place. That's how you find those mom-and-pop ____ restaurants (insert Mexican, Korean, Spanish, Southern, BBQ, etc.) that just seem so damned good. There's heart in that. There's someone behind the stove who would like nothing more than to be surrounded by the food they grew up eating, love to eat and gain comfort from eating.

2) But the execution and all the details were indeed very important. Once you figured out what kind of food you were in love with, you did have to figure out how you were going to cook it. Are you planning on setting your customers up for a grand tour, 17-course tasting menu? Are you in to that kind of cooking? True, it garners the most respect (when executed properly), but it requires the best-staffed kitchen and the utmost discipline. Are you going to do clockwork (protein at 6 o'clock, veg at 10, starch at 2) a la carte plates spitfired out of your kitchen instead? Not that that should require any less craftsmanship or skill, but it is more flexible in timing and is better on the bottom-line. Tasting menus really allow you to exploit variety, and offer the full scope of your skills, whereas a la carte risks hit-or-missing far more. One is not better than the other, but they express one's "culinary soul" if you will, very differently.

But a conundrum emerges in that I like a lot of different kinds of cuisines, and even when eating within one kind, I like variety on the table, and then on the plate as well. Traditional restaurant theory didn't seem to match the way I liked to eat, and I felt it important that I cooked the food I loved to eat.

So I had beef with this somewhat unspoken rule that you had to stay within one cuisine. Fusion was a risk-laden venture at best, something I wanted to desperately avoid being called at least. But it just seemed unfairly confining to be required to have just a French kitchen, or a Chinese kitchen, or an Italian kitchen, etc.

As I mentioned before and I will die by the belief; I think a chef needs to cook the kind of food he himself likes to eat. Chef Jeff would always say, "I cook big, fat food because I'm a big, fat guy." And indeed, for such a high-ticket price, white-tablecloth restaurant, the portions were very generous. Our Mustard-Marinated, Roasted Amish Chicken entree was a full half chicken, two roasted plum tomato halves, a triangle of Parmigiano potato gratin, and a nice bunch of baby asparagus spears. Not to mention a healthy, 3-oz. ladle of brown shallot sauce. And although things didn't work out for him there, I like to think he made some good food in that place, and that people really appreciated his cooking, and could sense his heart in it.

So I've had to examine rather closely, how exactly do I like to eat?

Well, my number one thing is variety. Maybe my taste buds are fucked from smoking, or maybe my palate has the attention span of some upper class, soccer mom over-diagnosing ADD white kid, but I like to experience as many different flavors, textures and sights at dinner as possible. That's why I like to share entrees with my dining companions, and alternate bites of sausages at Hot Doug's, and I don't drown my rice with sauce when I eat Chinese food.

It's all about counterpoint. Thomas Keller said it best, he wants to capture the purest essence of a flavor for 2-3 bites. That way it's almost overpowering; it's so flavorful, but of a modest portion, so when you're done... all you can think is "Oooh, I just want one more bite of that," and then the next course comes and changes the whole game again. It's like bringing someone to the brink of orgasm over and over again; the anticipation, the tease makes the end result far more powerful, even if a bit painful at times.

I think the rice argument when eating Chinese sums that up pretty neatly. Our entrees at Pearl East, in true Chinese-American fashion, are dishes of chopstick-friendly proteins and vegetables sauteed in a flavorful, corn starch thickened sauce. A bowl of rice is served alongside and we humbly request that you enjoy. I would never be so pretentious as to "educate" a customer as to how to eat something, you should eat something however you damn well please. But it bothers me when I see the large majority of our customers dumping the bowl of rice in the entree, maybe even throwing in a few crunchy noodles, and then mixing the whole thing up. Every bite tastes the damn same then! Not to mention you destroy the fluffy nature of well-cooked rice. Rice lacks any significant flavor, but that's the point! You take a bite of the dish, it's very flavorful, then you take a bite of rice. Your palate is balanced and cleaned, and renewed to enjoy the next flavorful bite. It's why you sprinkle salt on watermelon, contrast heightens the experience. If you mix it all up, every bite is of the same flavor and textural note, and to me .. that is boring, and no way to eat. (Do me a favor and try it my way next time you order take-out, just dab a little sauce on the rice ... unless you're eating a curry. In that case, ladle on, Garth.)

So I take a lot of importance in variety. A menu should be designed to have many diverse aspects, and a dish should be designed to have contrasting yet complementary textures and flavors. Yet in spite of all this, I have come to realize that staying within a cuisine is rather important.

It would be strange to be munching on Southern fried chicken on one plate, and enjoying a a plate of bucatini alla amatriciana on the other. It might taste good regardless, but something just seems wrong about it. They don't belong together. They aren't Jasmine and Aladdin, finding love through adversity, and finding similarities in their differences. They actually don't belong together, and I forbid them to get married (the chicken and pasta, not Jasmine and Aladdin. I'm still hoping I meet a princess with a pet tiger, and to make exotic Mudbloods with her).

But I had to go further. Was it ignorance and narrowmindedness that prevented me from understanding this combination? Was I essentially being a culinary Republican, failing to see past my insecurities and fears to understand the bigger picture? The conclusion I came to was, no.

It came down to the word, "culture." A word even a child would throw around, but even an adult may not fully comprehend the scope of. I had to answer the question, what exactly was culture and why was it so important to food?

What was of great assistance was The Omnivore's Dilemma. Michael Pollan gets more scientific about it, talking about how a sizable chunk of our brain power is dedicated to figuring out what is safe and nutritious to eat and what is not, much like the rat, another successful omnivore. This is what has allowed both our species to dominate all corners of the planet, instead of being confined to a particular region and type of food (much like my maligned Spirit Animal, the panda, who has somehow turned "cuteness" in to a viable evolutionary strategy). But the key difference between us and rats was "culture," an ability to store and pass on information to subsequent generations. Rats still have to trial-and-error their food. They will learn fairly quickly that rat poison isn't good nom-noms, but they will still lose quite a few intrepid rodents. The information has to be earned the hard way. Humans will have figured out what is and isn't poison far quicker, and stored that information eternally. There is no better example of this than our complicated relationship with fungi, which are overwhelmingly inedible, but humans have figured out a select few, delicious species (and some hallucinogenic).

So this made me realize that a cuisine is not just a geographical phenomenon. It's a history of tried-and-true flavor combinations, a result of thousands of years of humans figuring out what can and can not be eaten, and humans figuring out how to eat what Mother Nature has offered us. There was a time when humans were forced to eat seasonally. There was a time when you couldn't have tomatoes whenever you wanted in Italy. Italians had to wait until the summer, winter offered a whole new range of ingredients and dishes. There was a time when we had to figure this all out for ourselves.

Which is why American food seems to lack so much focus and direction. There really isn't such a thing as "American" food because of such a heterogeneous ethnic make up and rapid expansion across the continent, there hasn't been a significant period of geographic and racial isolation to force people to figure out what the land offered them (unless we're talking about authentic Native American food... yeah white people, you messed that one up, you better hope you're not around for that karmic backlash).

So that's why you shouldn't mash together hamburgers and sushi, or pizza with traditional tacos. They don't belong together, and you irresponsibly making them hate fuck each other is a disrespect and a snub of the nose to thousands of years of culture and human endeavoring.

But that isn't to say that food and particular cuisines should not be explored and taken to new heights.

Curiosity is essential to human nature, after all. We would be nothing without our insatiable desire to create and discover. I'm just saying, you have to do it with some respect.

Bourdain said it best, it's not right for Guy Fieri to be making barbecue pork sushi rolls on his show. There are guys who are practicing the craft of barbecue and pit smoking as their life's work, in acknowledgment of what came before them. There are guys slaving over the proper ratio of short-grain rice to rice wine vinegar every morning, just so one day they earn the right to combine that rice with raw fish. It's goddamn disrespectful and irresponsible. He's creating a monster, an abomination, that may have a chance at being tasty, but not a chance at being tasteful.

But because I am American, I am not so easy to classify, and it's hard for me to identify with a certain kind of cuisine.

You read a chef's bio and nine times out of ten there's some mention of this chef, as a youth, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his mother or grandmother, cooking good old Italian food, or good old Korean food.

Not only did I never really pick up a kitchen knife until I was well in to my teenage years, but it's difficult for to me to stick my childhood food in to one category. We ate all sorts of different things, it was usually a combination of my grandmother's old school cooking and something from the restaurant. Yes, I guess you could throw it under the blanket of "Chinese food," but it just doesn't deserve to be pigeon holed in my opinion.

Which is why Chinese-American food actually makes the most sense.

Though I am Chinese, I am, for better or worse, thoroughly American. Loud, at times obnoxious, big and preened, I reek of an upbringing in the Land of Plenty. I was exposed to a lifetime of ethnic and economic diversity, and that has forever changed my worldview where thankfully war and suffering has not. I grew up wanting for nothing, food was always on the table and in great portions, and it was old school Taiwanese food inflected with American newness. My grandmother actually has a lot of Japanese influence in her cooking, seeing as Taiwan was essentially a Japanese colony when she was growing up, and my favorite dish of hers was panko-breaded pork chops. But she knew that I loved ketchup, and she would lovingly marinate her pork in soy, garlic, rice wine and ketchup, and then pan-fry and drizzle some more ketchup on top. With a bowl of white rice, and stir-fried cabbage .. it is .. the best.

So things can certainly be taken in new directions, to great and dizzying heights. It just needs love, attention and respect to what has come before you.

Chinese-American food is in a bit of a rut. I won't give you the full treatise from Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese-American Food by Andrew Coe, but know the basic storyline; Chinese people came over to build your railroads. They opened restaurants to feed the workers. White people also worked the railroads, and dabbled in these first Chinese restaurants. Nineteenth-century people were frighteningly close-minded. Chinese restaurateurs realized they could make business off the "round-eyes" by offering them food with flavors more familiar and comforting to them. Chinese-American food slowly evolved in to what it is today. It wouldn't be fair to compare it to authentic Chinese food, they are completely different entities, developed in completely different circumstances. But yet, all Chinese people cringe when Americans talk about how their favorite Chinese dish is "General Tso's Chicken" and that Panda Express is the best Chinese restaurant.

So do I believe it my mission to redeem Chinese-American food? Not really, but I see it as a niche for me to conveniently fill. There aren't too many Chinese boys out there, aspiring to be chefs and have deep, entrenching roots connected to Chinese-American cuisine. As much as I bash it, I do love that kind of food, and admit no shame in enjoying a severely Americanized dish of Sesame Chicken. But as is the overarching theme of this post, taking Chinese-American food to new heights must be done with respect and tact, even if, like a middle-aged stripper, the ole' girl has no respect for herself anymore.

I've only scratched the surface on this. I'm in no position to be creating my own dishes, or dreaming of designing my own menu. I am at the the most elementary levels of novicehood, and I'm sure my opinions and thoughts will change greatly as time goes on. But I know this much...

Yes, kitchens need to have a focus. For so many reasons, but if nothing else than out of respect for the culture of food, and the passion inspired by it.

And yes, we can simultaneously pay homage to thousands of years of humans feeding themselves while developing dishes for the new age.

But no, we can not rush it.

I will summarize with my number one enemy in the Chinese kitchen; corn starch. I hate corn starch. Corn starch thickened sauces don't emulsify well, they need ample oil as lubrication, which is why poorly-done Chinese food is often so greasy, they coagulate at room temperature and become completely unpalatable well before then, and it's a bullshit shortcut. I like that French cooks go the long route with carefully made stock, and patient reduction and clarification. The end result is unmistakably superior. The mouth feel of a properly made French sauce, and a quickly junked up Chinese sauce is night and day, a child could tell the difference.

I do love thickening a sauce with a beurre manie or blond roux though. Yes, dairy has no place in traditional Chinese food, we are a billion strong nation of lac-tards. But I believe there is a way to put them together.

And I also do love a pan-tossed pasta dish; freshly plated, sprinkled with Parmigiano-Reggiano, barely melted by the ambient heat of the fresh cooked noodles, accented with herbage and salty pancetta crisps.

So I will share with you the one creative endeavor I have attempted this year. A culmination of my culinary education thus far. And yes, I made it in our kitchen after we closed one night, because I was too embarrassed to let anyone see, in case it failed miserably.

Chow Fun with Andouille Sausage, Pea Pods, Bean Sprouts in a Sha-cha Sauce

The basic idea was this:

I love chow fun noodles, they're the thick-cut rice noodles. When fresh, they have a wonderfully pleasant chewiness, and a strong ability to carry sauce without being drowned or becoming too oily.

Sha-cha sauce is a traditional condiment used with huo guo, or hot pot. Most Chinese will mix the paste (made of dried shrimp, garlic, shallots and other goodies) with a raw egg, soy sauce, chili-garlic paste and some rice wine vinegar. It is a powerful and delicious sauce to complement the mild and passive flavors of hot pot ingredients.

The raw egg got me thinking; pasta carbonara, properly made, is fresh cooked pasta tossed with raw egg, bacon and cheese. The raw egg is just barely, barely cooked by the ambient heat, and the result is a creamy, heady dish of noodles punctuated by the bacon's saltiness.

So what if we combine chow fun noodles with the sha-cha sauce, but finished it in the style of a pasta carbonara? And to the lab we went...

I don't really know the inspiration behind the addition of andouille. It's such a garlicky sausage I figured it would pair nicely with the dominating garlic flavor of the sha-cha sauce, while offering the saltiness that pancetta normally would. Pea pods are pleasantly green and crunchy, as are bean sprouts. There needed to be some textural curiosities. Made sense to me...

So you bring the chow fun noodles to heat in light chicken stock, you blanch your peas and sprouts, you grill your sausage, rest and slice, and then you ready your sauce. Traditional chow fun noodles would be tossed in an oiled wok, on the heat so that the sauce was heated and absorbed thoroughly. I specifically wanted to avoid this because the intense heat of a wok ring burner would scramble my eggs.

And then we make the sauce; sha cha paste (I like a lot, like heaping tablespoons), soy, chili-garlic paste, rice wine vinegar and two raw eggs beaten together at the last moment. Quick taste test, add a pinch of scallion greens and here we go...

Season your wok with oil, drop in your hot noodles and vegetables, drop in your sliced andouille, kill the heat... moment of no return... kill the heat, drizzle in your raw egg, sha-cha mixture and start tossing immediately, you want the egg to heat evenly...

Barely runny, slightly eggy and creamy, put it on a hot plate... enjoy.

Well, there I was in an abandoned kitchen, messing around by myself. No witnesses to my mad scientist machinations but me. I was sheltered from any judging eyes. Break a pair of bamboo chopsticks, shave off the splinters and... take a cautionary bite.

I will use no adjectives, and simply say ... I allowed myself a small smile.

I found it harder to describe how my brain would work in the process of blending and developing cuisines, and instead found it easier to just show you how my brain worked. Like I said, there's a long, long way to go. There are a lot of things to consider, and a lot of pitfalls to avoid, but I will continue on the path with this quote as my torch...

"A sign of greatness is when everything that comes before you is obsolete, and everything that comes after you bears your mark." -Dave Chappelle

I make no claims that I am destined for greatness, but you can take comfort in knowing that I am always striving for it.

EP6