Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  THE REST OF MY LIFE I lived like any other college dropout in a rust-belt town. First in Rochester, then Buffalo, Sam and I had a series of awful studio apartments and converted second-floor walk-ups with orange shag carpeting and fake wood paneling with peeling veneer. The places were nearly as empty with us living there as they had been when they were vacant, and at times—strange, castaway nights while between jobs or suffering from insomnia or the spins—I would find myself in a room I barely recognized. Knocking around, alone in the daylight while Sam worked, I would pace the length of these small apartments, counting down the minutes until I was due back at work because without the kitchen I had nothing to do and nowhere to go.

  There were notebooks and old take-out containers, piles of dirty T-shirts, newspapers that were weeks old, empty beer bottles, broken chairs, a half dozen ashtrays overflowing with cigarettes and the roach ends of joints; once, a Christmas tree stayed up until August—until it was completely naked of needles and a terrible hazard in a home with two smokers. None of our kitchen or bathroom sink faucets ran smoothly because the little filters had been pulled out to serve as screens for bowls. I suppose, at the time, I saw this as monkish austerity suffered in service to my particular dedication to kitchens and to cooking.

  But that was bullshit. Our futon, sleeping bags, milk-crate dresser, twelve-inch black-and-white TV—all of that was kept just because we had nothing else, because I was working a hundred hours a week or more, which doesn’t allow a lot of time for shopping. I kept my savings in an envelope stuck under the TV, a mix of cash and IOUs and checks, some of them dated back two months, often getting cashed just ahead of their ninety-day expirations. I owned two pairs of pants that weren’t chef pants, two button shirts that weren’t restaurant-issue, and one pair of shoes that weren’t my work boots.

  Kitchens—or anyway, the ones I’ve known—tend to come as an all-inclusive package deal to those lucky enough to have made a career of cooking dinner for strangers. Along with a paycheck, you get friends, a family, a posse to roll with—automatic, the instant you pull on the whites. You get connections, dealers, girls, booze, opportunity, heartbreak, angles, options, ulcers, scars. A life, complete and real. Kitchens give you a history (even if it’s a borrowed one—the history of the last twenty guys who held down your post), a past, a future, however moment-to-moment it might be, a present and a place to belong in it, which is probably the most important thing of all.

  It’s right there, laid out in abundance, yours to swim around in and get weird with. And for someone like me who had, outside the kitchen, almost none of this—was tabula rasa, brainless, useless, lost, unable sometimes to find my own pants or have a conversation that didn’t devolve into some jinky, gutter-mouth prattle about covers, pussy and garlic—this instant sense of community and shared experience was a life preserver. Kitchens were my map and compass, La Méthode like a constitution outlining the basic tenets of my republic of one. By the time I was twenty-five, if there was anything to me beyond that which was defined by a white canvas jacket, a perfectly roasted capon, the pure sex of a knife slipping through ripe melon, I knew the rest of it was all just a wound.

  When Sam and I first moved to Buffalo, I worked at the original Pano’s on Elmwood—a twenty-six-seat short-order all night diner that had been open close to forever. It held down a tiny piece of real estate at walking distance from the university and about three hundred different bars and was infamous across several generations of Buffalonians as a great place for souvlaki or to get your teeth kicked out. No lie, come 3:00 a.m. the lines would stretch out the door and down the block. I worked with two waitresses and one dishwasher: that’s it. It was a one-man kitchen placed right behind the counter, open to the entire dining room. I worked close enough to the people at the counter that they could reach out and grab me, and often they did. It was crazy. I loved it. It was such a killer, man-alone, Lord Jim trip that I would have done it for free.

  When Pano’s moved, giving up its old location in favor of a newer, larger, infinitely more plastic one just a few doors down, I quit. In the new digs, there was a proper kitchen and crew, gleaming prep areas, an expansive floor. It was just no fun anymore, and I don’t think I lasted even a week before walking out.

  For the money, I took on a job at the Clare, a big Irish bar and restaurant attached to a hotel in North Buffalo, just a week before St. Patrick’s Day. The owners, in an attempt to staff up in advance of the coming booze-and-blarney shitstorm, were hiring aggressively, offering big money19 for experienced guys and decent money for any ambulatory knucklehead or shoemaker who could grip a knife in his claw.

  On Saturday morning, I got plugged into the prep line, helping to clean, trim, steam and slice a literal ton of corned-beef briskets. Hustled along by the chef and his sous (two total lifers, as close as lovers, both organizational wizards and master shortcutters totally spaced out on the volume and long hours), I was stuck next to a knife-crazy girl cook and career prep specialist who—for at least our first six hours together—completely schooled me when it came to pure, raw volume of production and the particulars of the St. Paddy’s Day feast.

  It took us three days, working twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts, to get through the tractor-trailer load of corned beef that’d been delivered to the Clare’s back door. I will never forget the smell (a meaty, soupy, almost sweaty stink rising off the mountains of fat and scrap that accumulated on the prep table) or the feel, the particular weight, of the slick, pink, finished briskets as we tossed them, one by one, into storage tubs. Because of the amount of knife work involved in the trimming and slicing, I developed blisters through my calluses, broke them, rubbed the skin raw, and developed even thicker calluses along the ridge of my index finger and the fat pad at the top of my palm. I remembered being told once, at Pano’s, by Pano, the owner, that I held my knife like some kinda queer—so delicately, so tenderly, while I sliced tomatoes and butchered heads of lettuce. And I’d looked at him like he was an idiot. I held my knife correctly, like a professional, because that was the way Ange had held his all those years ago, and I’d tried to copy Ange in my first, tentative stabs at cutting.

  “And this,” Pano had said, pawing through the garbage can set at the end of my table, pulling up the tops of a few tomatoes that I’d cut off and discarded because the rippled flesh near the top of a tomato where the stem grows is sour and tough. “If I was your mother, would you be wasting my tomatoes like this? Go do something else now. I’ll find someone who knows how to use a knife.”

  Among low-rent cooks and those for whom prep consists of little more than stocking a cold table or mangling a few vegetables, the knife grip is like a fist around the handle, constantly punching downward toward the table or cutting board. For professionals, though, it is delicate—a loose hold on the handle, thumb slightly extended, index finger either extended along the forte of the blade or curled just a little. It is balanced, allows one to feel the bite of tip and edge, makes maximum use of the knife’s own weight. It is the knife fighter’s grip, the killer’s grip. And after fourteen, forty, four hundred hours, your hand will freeze in that position, your muscles will remember it and never, ever forget.

  I also got good with the diamond steel at the Clare and learned to appreciate, on a highly personal level, the art of knife sharpening; developing an almost obsessive tick about wiping my knife on my apron, both sides, then tidying the edge with the steel a dozen or a hundred times a night. Like folding my side towels in a certain way or purposefully melting the flanks of a speed-pourer with my cigarette lighter (a trick I learned from Hero) until I could dent the plastic to the contour of my hand so that I could get a better hold on it when I was rushed, distracted, sweating or under fire, this was a habit that hung with me until I left the kitchens for good.

  When the brisket was done—when the last of it was cleaned, steamed, sliced and banked away in the cavernous walk-ins, sitting in a thick brine/marinade made from bay leaves and peppercorns and a large portion of
the briskets’ own fat—I got moved. One whole day, I did nothing but peel carrots and cut them, bâtonnet. I got lucky in that I’d dodged the foul job of prepping the cabbage (by a long reach, the smelliest and most monotonous of the tasks, so therefore handed off to the lowest of the low men on the food chain), then got lucky again in riding a wave of sudden fuck-you resignations straight onto the service line. The chef and sous-chef were both busy coordinating all the prep work and massive geometry problem of storage and shipping. We were using cooler space at a variety of restaurants, and all that product had to be kept track of, figured into the rotation, picked up and delivered. Because of this, I received a battlefield brevet to saucier, claiming a turf of six burners and a flattop.

  Wednesday passed in a blur. I had about an hour to look over the menu and figure out how to cook everything on my station before the orders started coming in. Whiskey béchamel, mixed veg (which came off the burners, from out of one huge sauté pan kept over low heat and constantly refreshed with produce), stout gravy for the bangers and mash, a creamy dill sauce, really good lamb stew simmering in a massive stockpot, and some kind of awful cheese sauce to go on top of the “Killarney Chicken” (or whatever it was called), which was nothing more than the cheap cheddar base of an insipid American mac-and-cheese. It was easy enough.

  Thursday the floor manager broke his arm—or rather, got his arm broken by a brainless server going out through the in door between kitchen and floor. I stood there in my spot on the line and watched him crumple, the door hitting him just right to shatter the point of his elbow. He was a big guy, rotund but solidly built along the same body lines as a former college pulling guard—heavy but able to move fast over short distances. He went down like a cow hit with a brick, making these adorable little mewling noises, his lips pursed like he was air-kissing an invisible girlfriend.

  The chef got the floorman back on his feet, poured the first drink down his neck, told him everything was going to be okay even though he didn’t have enough range of motion left to spank the monkey. The guy barely missed a table being sat—washing a fistful of aspirin down with a couple more shots and getting right back to it, keeping his arm folded tight against his belly the rest of the night, looking like Napoléon minus the jacket and silly hat. His hand swelled up and turned purplish. A doctor (friend of the house, a regular at the bar) was rustled up during a break between seatings and took a look at the floorman.

  “You need to be at a hospital,” said the doc.

  “I’ve got a full dining room,” the floorman replied, “I need to be here.” And that was that. The doc went home, fetched a sling and some painkillers, brought them back. The floorman never stopped working.

  This being Buffalo, it didn’t matter what day St. Paddy’s actually was. The party went on for a week, nonstop, but on Friday (it being Friday in upstate New York, again), we added a fish fry to the short holiday menu. I got shifted off saucier/sauté and stationed in front of a fryer, surrounded by fish tubs and batter in five-gallon buckets that I would thin periodically throughout the night with bottles of porter poured right in, thinning my own blood the same way and at about twice the rate as I did the batter. With the weekend, the bottles of liquor and other sundry chemicals had been brought up from the locker room (where, in locker number nine, there’d been a bucket full of iced Labatt Blues kept cold for all comers and a bottle of Jameson Irish in number thirteen) and right onto the line. We kept a pour-top of gin and sour mix in the speed rack above the sauté station, and anytime anyone pulled open the freezer door, the entire kitchen filled with the sweet, thick smell of pot smoke.

  While setting up the last of the dinner prep, I pulled a sheet tray full of something out of one of the stacked convection ovens. Someone else was coming through the narrow alley between the ovens and the prep table. He went low, I raised the pan up high, accidentally laying the edges of it flat against the insides of both of my forearms. The burns didn’t hurt a bit, which was how I knew they were bad—that and the crisp little edges running around the clean, smooth, shiny white lines where the hot metal had actually made contact. Knowing I’d be spending the whole night sunk up to my elbows in bloody fish water, scooping out raw fillets for battering, I put gauze pads from the medical kit over both burns, taped them in place, then wrapped my forearms in plastic wrap. At the time, this had seemed like a wise solution. Now, whenever I get a tan, you can still see the scars real nice.

  When St. Paddy’s week was over, the chef and his sous collected a bonus based on the amount of business the kitchen had done. It was a small piece (maybe 2 or 3 percent) but that still translated to a fairly huge chunk of change considering the line was firing constantly, three meals a day, from about six in the morning till about two in the morning, and the floor never saw a minute when it wasn’t backed up by a turn or more for seven straight days. As soon as they had that money in hand, both were gone. I should have seen it coming. They were on vacation, ostensibly, but I don’t know if they ever came back.

  Suddenly, I was left in nominal control of the kitchen, responsible for the dinner shift: prep monkey to chef de cuisine in seven days. Not a bad run, except that I hated it—hated every goddamn minute because, for one, I had no real idea how to command an entire kitchen,20 and for two, everyone else had quit almost as soon as the chef and sous were out the door.

  I was left with a kid so dumb he could fuck up water and an ex-marine who was just nuts—prone to paranoid fantasies and sudden, unexplained absences from the line; who brought a .45-caliber pistol with him to work every night and kept it tucked into the back waistband of his gigantic, size XXL Chefwear pants. He was always pulling up his T-shirt to show me the bullet holes in his hairy back, saying that he’d already done his work and needed to take a break now. The only good thing about this arrangement was that the restaurant did hardly any business at all in the few days after St. Paddy’s, and I didn’t have to do any serious ordering because we were still working through the massive back stock of basic provisions brought in for the holiday.

  When I tried to quit, one of the owners offered me a 100 percent raise to stay on—bumping me from around ten an hour to something in the neighborhood of twenty. I agreed grudgingly. That night, the ex-marine pulled his pistol and threatened to shoot one of the steam tables. I stayed late to clean, finished scrubbing down, then sat in the chef’s office and wrote a letter detailing all the reasons why I couldn’t stay—beginning with the boredom of cooking week-old leftovers for geriatric Hibernians and ending with my very real fear that, sooner or later, my grillman was going to put a fucking bullet in me. By the time I was done, no one else was left in the house for me to quit to, so I spiked my resignation to the cutting board with one of the house knives, packed my kit, and left without looking back.

  I’ve rarely been so happy about leaving a job. My fervent hope was that the owners—in a fit of panic—would be forced to call either the chef or his sous back from whatever weird debauchery they’d sunk themselves into and that one of those bastards could spend the next 360 nights slopping out lamb stew and Killarney Chicken to the good people of Buffalo because I had neither the patience nor the desire.

  Finding work was fun. I took a job in a fusion restaurant that opened in a former hair salon and closed almost before the smell of rancid fryer grease had supplanted the stink of burnt hair. I got a job once based almost entirely on my ability to quote from that scene in Goodfellas where they’re all sitting around, making dinner in prison, and Paulie is slicing the garlic with a razor. Another because I claimed (lying though my teeth) to have just returned from living in France. I wrote an event menu based on my imaginary time there—roasted capon stuffed with lemons and thyme, mussels, frites with coarse mustard, pavé of salmon dripping with beurre blanc, and blanquette de veau, most of which I didn’t know how to prepare—inspired by the gas lamps, cobbled streets, burbling rivers and warm, cozy cafés of a town I’d never seen. I worked a line that operated only with portable butane burners, as a pizza
delivery driver (briefly), and as a station chef under the command of an exec I never once met or even saw in the restaurant, but who had assembled a menu that read like it’d been pinched from some psychotic CIA foreign-service lawn fete—all melon balls and prosciutto in simple syrup, oysters Rockefeller, crepes, thin slabs of foie gras on toast points with grilled apple slices and frenched lamb chops wearing those absurd little paper hats.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME I’D BEEN IN BUFFALO TWO YEARS, I would just run into guys out at the bars, walk into a place for dinner and end up talking with the chef or the owner. I would be pumped for information and gossip in the kitchens or on the loading docks of restaurants all over the city. The inner workings of standing crews would be explained to me over ice-cold bottles of Tsingtao beer and dim sum at the smoky back tables of Asian restaurants frequented by the chefs.

  There was always work, always a kitchen with a hole that needed filling, always a chef who was unknowingly on the outs and an owner who wanted a guy in place, ready to step up and take command. I know that when people talk of great American food towns, no one ever thinks of places like Buffalo—of the small, less than cosmopolitan cities scattered throughout the United States. Even today, to the serious, coastal foodie it’s all about New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. But this is a ridiculous conceit because the United States has been experiencing a massive migration of chefs since sometime in the 1980s, a diaspora of talent that had even by the mid-nineties, spread the children of Manhattan’s greatest chefs far and wide. Yes, at one time a chef working in Los Angeles would’ve had to import his pastry department, probably his sous-chef, maybe a station chef or two, simply because there weren’t enough talented, out-of-work mercenaries in the city to staff up the number of new restaurants opening there. This hypothetical L.A. chef would’ve had to do this much like the great restaurants of midcentury Manhattan had to bring in their talent from France by the boatload.