Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  SO EVEN IF SOMETIMES (oftentimes . . .) I would find the industry maddening, owners foolish, customers intolerable, and The Life a crippling bad influence on any attempt I made at becoming a decent, good and reasonable man, there was always the food—at the center of my every day at work.

  For years, food would be my first concern in the morning, walking into quiet kitchens, the chilling cold of walk-ins, to sniff garlic, tug the skins of chickens, run my fingers across mushrooms in their cases to feel for dampness and earth. It would be the last thing I thought of at night. In my twenties, I was still learning, still gathering knowledge and skills and lore. But today, I could write you a book about barbecue, a novel of fish (because so much fish knowledge is specious at best). The dubious stories of French chefs dispatched to the far corners of the globe in cuisine’s dark ages, like missionaries of cassoulet and sauce gribiche, tickle my inner geek the way uncertain histories always have. The legend of baklava?18 I love that, have thought long and hard and have determined that were the choice given to me—apple of knowledge or peace and honeyed walnuts—I would’ve been perfectly content wandering the Garden with my ding-dong hanging out and eating baklava forever.

  In the galley, on the line, even in the worst backroom and basement prep kitchens, I was being paid to play with knives and fire, to spend pretty much every waking hour surrounded by the one thing I found most interesting in all the world. I’ve gotten to know a lot of cooks and chefs since then. And among them, the story is almost always the same: they got into the industry for the money, for the ready access to cheap and powerful chemicals and the opportunity to sleep with athletic and morally challenged waitresses, but they stayed for the food. I was no different. Even when I was broke and exhausted, hungover, beat-up or hurt, even when I was slopping buffet breakfasts for hotel guests or standing up in my white jacket, toque and black button-caps carving steamship rounds for wedding receptions, I knew I was lucky. As I’d once done at Ferrara’s, every time I went back to the industry, at the beginning of every new job, I made the same promise: This time, I would tell myself, this time I’m not going to fuck it up.

  I FUCKED IT UP. Every time. I fucked it up until there wasn’t any up left to fuck. My first time handling black truffles (not the big, beautiful, fist-size monsters only ever seen in gastroporn cookbooks or TV money shots, but small, serviceable ones about the size of a withered knuckle), I was told by the chef to be careful. This was in Buffalo, working under a sous-chef in a kitchen laid out like a factory floor. “Slice,” he said, holding my wrist, bringing his big hand down like a karate chop onto my palm. “Then chop. Not rough, not fine. Just between, yes? Then here”—pointing to the giant mixing bowl in which I was making wild-mushroom stuffing—“then there,” pointing to the big, recalcitrant baker’s oven.

  “Yeah, chef.”

  “You must watch,” he said, jabbing a fat, mauled fingertip at his own eye, then the oven.

  “Yeah, chef.”

  “Watch.”

  And that’s the part I screwed up. I ducked out for a smoke and to wash what I then thought was the horrible, earthy, sour-sweat stink of truffles off my fingers. Meanwhile, the truffled stuffing burned. Just a little, but enough to ruin it completely. And the chef didn’t yell. He didn’t throw the pan against the wall in a rage. He called me over, made me scrape it all into the trash myself with a spoon while he (and everyone else in the kitchen) watched.

  Then he had me make it again.

  “Watch,” he said, and this time I was afraid to blink.

  I broke sauces. I broke equipment. In a tiny, cramped galley where I worked as a saucier and sauté cook, I broke my hand (again) in a knockdown scuffle on the garde-manger station trying to punch a station cook who’d stolen my chive sticks—little lengths of chive, brilliant green and used for garnish. The smart move would’ve been to simply cut more chive sticks, but this was a matter of principle. The guy had stolen from my mise en place. Unforgivable—like fucking my wife or taking my knife. But when I went to hit him, I missed, punched the door handle on his cooler, worked the rest of the night with my pinkie taped to my ring finger and in a fog of ibuprofen and cooking vodka.

  I’d come from the low end of the culinary world, both personally and professionally. I’d never eaten coq au vin, pâté or crème brûlée growing up, and I’d certainly never cooked these things. But I picked up cuisines the way some people do languages: by immersion and repetition, beginning with a few basic phrases and building a workable lexicon around them. After the diner, after my final attempt at walking away from the restaurant industry and then coming back to it like a recalcitrant lover who’d gone hound-dogging but come back home again when the guilt became unmanageable, I’d accepted that kitchens were where I was happiest and that cooking was just something I had a knack for. Not the art of it necessarily. That came, but it was never my strong suit. I learned early that I was a soldier—not just the kind of guy who could survive the pressure, the heat, the killing stress, but one who thrived on it. I came to love the long hits, the machine-gun chatter of the ticket machine spitting out orders, the throbbing surge of panic adrenaline when the rush came in—first seating, Saturday night—and the screaming, the curses, the flames.

  True, I also adored the odd lull, ducking out into some stinking alley or dark loading dock for half a cigarette sucked down while my station was cool and the garde-manger man was getting murdered. I loved the beginning of the day and the calm of a house not yet awake and the end of the night when all was said and done. Slammed, buried, dans la merde on a Friday night, nothing more was expected of me than to find my way out again, to perform with perfect machine precision and faultless replication—to sing out loud in the only language that truly mattered.

  The worse things got in the kitchen, the quieter things got in my head, until the act of slicing a single bulb of garlic, the quartering of a tomato, the precise placement of a halibut fillet in a smoking-hot pan, could expand and balloon outward to fill my entire universe.

  AT HOME, Sam and I would eat cold omelets, cold steaks, lukewarm pastas barely reheated in our one pan over an electric element in the weird light of 2:00 a.m.—everything brought in from my kitchens, eaten in bed, on the fragile cusp of exhaustion. Sex on rumpled sheets, sleepy and disjointed, our bones knocking together when we were skinny and poor; her kisses tasting of Canadian beer and dope tar, mine of cigarettes, low-grade dread and, only later, Moët, truffles, foie gras. I took after the guys I worked beside. I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. I was either explosively keyed up or asleep. I would fight over anything. I couldn’t get through a sentence without using the word fuck seven or eight times, as a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a reflexive noun, a personal pronoun—sometimes all of them at once: “That fucking fucked-up motherfucking little fucker.”

  Early on, when my world was back-to-back weekend doubles, riding the fryers, cooking for drunks and calling orders to galleys full of junkies, dropouts and mercenaries, I thought things might be different in the fine-dining world.

  I found that they weren’t. Not even a little. And that suited me just fine.

  I’d had six or seven or maybe eight different restaurant jobs by the time I was twenty-three. By twenty-five or twenty-six, it was maybe double that—some of which I would admit to, some of which I wouldn’t. The time I’d spent in hash houses and diners, checkered-tablecloth neighborhood Italian joints and terrible, awful, troughlike buffets made me a precious commodity to a certain type of boss. In busy houses and established kitchens, speed was always more important than smarts, stamina infinitely more priceless than a canonical knowledge of Escoffier. The prevailing wisdom at the time (a view that has fallen ridiculously out of favor these days, and you can taste the effect) was that skills could be polished and recipes taught, but chops you gotta earn. I was surprised to find that no one cared what I knew or didn’t know about scalding, braising or emulsification. All anyone wanted to hear about were my hours (which is to say how much m
oney my former places of employment rang up during their prime seatings), my covers (how many individual people my kitchens and crews could feed in a night), and my cost (how much I expected to be paid for lending my muscle to the team).

  Hours, counts and covers—those numbers were easy. I knew them inside out and backward because they were akin to bragging rights: three turns of an eighty-seat dining room inside a five-hour dinner service, plus bar and patio, was a cinch. At twelve to fifteen bucks a head? Call it a grand, even—though I could easily lie and bump that up to a grand and a half with no one getting suspicious. And as for how much I was worth? That varied wildly from year to year, place to place, whether I was being put on the books legally or paid out of the register at the end of the week. But the paychecks always came down to the same hard juxtaposition: being both more than enough and not even close to enough. You put in a hundred hours a week, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for spending money. You pay your bills when you remember, you buy a little weed and a lot of beers. After a couple months, you start feeling rich because there’s a fat wad of cash or stack of IOUs scrawled out on waitress dupes. But then you do something stupid. You get pissed at the chef, grow bored with the menu, get to hate the mix tape that the grillardin plays all night, every night, on the skeevy galley radio, and you walk out. All of a sudden, the money just goes, because now it’s Saturday night and you don’t have a kitchen, a double shift, sixteen hours on the firing line, to keep you out of trouble. You have to pay for food rather than eating free in the kitchen. All of the little scams dry up, the network of favors owed. At the bar, you’re in civvies, not whites, so no one’s buying you drinks. You have to pay full price for your drugs. You don’t have the structure, the rigor of the work, so you’re sleeping till noon, staying out all night, buying things. And before you know it, you’re a month back on the electric bill, bouncing rent checks and wondering whether that little bistro down the street might be in need of a warm body on the line.

  I would work anywhere, and did. I would leave Rochester and go to Buffalo following the promise of work, leave Buffalo for Florida, leave Florida for Rochester (again), then New Mexico, Colorado, elsewhere. I worked for dumb, rich knuckleheads who would open French restaurants, then frantically front-load the menus with cheeseburgers and pastas when three days went by without anyone ordering the warm leek soup or duck or salade composée; who would pay five hundred bucks a pop for custom-made sconces in the dining room, then think they were getting a bargain by paying their illegal-immigrant dishwashers a buck under minimum. And I worked for dedicated craftsmen, for owners who staffed their above-the-line posts with real talent, for chefs who ran their brigades like the small, private armies that they were and understood just by looking at me, my journeyman knife kit, my overcrowded résumé, that I was there as an apprentice—there to learn all I could, work as hard as I could, then move on.

  Those French and German and Alsatian expats that I worked with and for, the Russian émigrés, Swiss hotel-school graduates, strange, pale, broad-faced men who could’ve just as easily been cast as the sweating gunrunners or expert forgers in a Graham Greene novel—they understood what apprentice really meant because, for the most part, they’d come up as apprentices, too.

  Apprentice meant “slave,” or worse. It meant the guy who had to do everything he was told, without question, for little pay and with maximum abuse. Thus did I scrub out grease traps, polish hood vents and stay in the kitchen after closing to scour the backsplashes. I babysat stocks and demis like they were sick children, staying up with them all night, worrying over them. I boned out chickens and ducks, pulled the pin bones from black bass and red snapper, brushed (never washed) the dirt from cases of mushrooms and reduced thousands of damp, verdant bunches of flat-leaf parsley to small piles of chopped parsley that were then used to top innumerable bowls of mussels in garlic-shot beurre blanc and innumerable plates of sole meunière, to make buckets of persillade. I pulled a million stems from a million leaves of spinach and bitter field greens by hand. Why? Because stems taste terrible, have a nasty, woody texture, and look inelegant in a composed salad. I go out to eat now and get a salad full of stems pulled straight from the bag of spring mix mesclun by some nose-picking dipshit of a garde-manger man and it drives me crazy, because I can remember, back in the day, sitting bowed over the prep sink for hours like a brain-dead hump, picking stems until my fingers turned green, knowing that if I missed just one and the chef saw it, he’d probably send me out into the alley to stem the leaves off a fucking tree.

  I learned a million tricks over the years. A million and one. I learned to never give up, to never fail, to never, ever admit that I was beat. I learned that there is always another way to do a thing: if you’ve tried everything you know and nothing is working, try something else. I learned that, above all else, what matters is putting dinner on the table. It makes no difference how you do it. It makes no difference what you, personally, had to go through. No one cares about your struggles, your sweat, your long hours or what final, last-minute miracle you pulled. Just put dinner on the table. And once dinner is on the table? Walk away. If you’ve done your best, if you’ve truly done all you can, then there is nothing more you can do. There’s always tomorrow for doing better.

  At the Left Bank in Buffalo, Matt—one of the cooks, a station chef—explained to me everything there is to say about the business of professional cooking. He summed it up in two sentences: “We cook the food,” he told me. “And then we go home.”

  AS I BOUNCED FROM NICER RESTAURANT to nicer restaurant, I rose quickly: prep crew, then pantry (which I loved), and garde-manger (which I didn’t), and finally back onto the hot line. Born Italian in this business, I would find myself being raised French, earning my stripes and my scars as part of a proper brigade. I flourished within the brutal strictures of the old Frog brigade system, with its militaristic hierarchy and promise of rewards for distinguished service. It was a universe that made sense to me—small and rigidly defined, with the chef as God, his sous or chef de cuisine as prophet and translator of God’s sometimes incomprehensible orders, and the rest of us as his quaking, dope-smoking acolytes with our dirty élan and miserable esprit de corps, as closed and weird and zealous and insular as any secret society.

  At the time, being a chef or a cook was a straight blue-collar gig. We worked like plumbers or carpenters or masons would, doing the job because the job itself was noble enough. It was a craft, not an art, not a path to anything else. In the days before the Food Network, before cooks got to sit down in their cheap suits and borrowed shoes to rap with Matt and Katie on the Today show, parents didn’t brag about their kids going to work in kitchens. They lied and said Junior was waiting to hear back from Harvard or angling for a job with the city collecting trash—just doing a little cooking until his father could get him a union card.

  These days, too many kids go off to cooking school and then take on their first professional gigs expecting to be called Chef right out of the gate. They act sometimes as though actual cooking is beneath them, as if this kitchen work were just something they have to do until their first cookbook deal comes through. But at least among the guys I came up with, chef was Chef—was the end that justified everything that came before and the ultimate goal of all the struggling it took to get there. And there was something decent in that, an order and tradition that was comforting even in a cook’s worst moments. Chef got to be Chef because he’d once been a dishwasher—a plongeur—like you; a pasty-faced, quivering prep monkey stuck for fourteen hours in some squalid hell, scaling and gutting a quarter ton of sturgeon like you; a stoned pantry cook saddled with the unlovely responsibility of turning Saturday night’s leftovers and whatever over-the-hill produce could be salvaged from the trashed walk-in into frittatas or puttanesca or some nightmare “fisherman’s stew” for the Sunday special just like you; a sharp, vicious station chef like you; a hard-eyed veteran sous like you. Chef had earned his post, so if he screamed at you for trussing th
e duck crookedly or slapped a fistful of cold liver in your face because the pâté didn’t quite meet with his impossible (and never quite articulated) standards, that was okay because the universe was an orderly place. The same thing had been done to him once, and the promise was that someday you’d do the same thing to some other junior rôtisseur or poissonarde in turn.

  Abuse and terror and awe and strong drink were what made the world go round in the cramped, hot, despotic and nepotistic microcosm that I called home, and I loved it because, seriously, without that, how else was anybody going to learn to truss the fucking ducks?