Book Read Free

Cooking Dirty

Page 17

by Jason Sheehan


  But with each generation, with each run of apprentices, commis cooks and cutthroat line-dogs willing to do anything to move up, the dispersion continued. From Paris to New York, from New York to L.A. and San Francisco, then to Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta and Seattle. True, Manhattan has an enormous concentration of excellent restaurants run by the kind of celebrity chefs who get noticed in airports and asked for their autographs when pumping gas. Below them is a deep reservoir of above-the-line chefs with résumés that read like galley porno (a year at Le Cirque, garde-manger at Daniel, a stage with Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin . . .), and below them, a massive army of cooks just looking for their shot at the bigs, enough bodies to staff a thousand restaurants.

  And while this is precisely the sort of petri dish required for the growth of a scene like New York’s, it also drives the dispersion of talent because, in an environment like that, a chef has to work ten times as hard to get himself noticed, has to pay ten times as much for his space, has to battle like a pit fighter to get the best guys on his line and the best product in his coolers. Get knocked around enough in the big city and all of a sudden Elsewhere starts looking pretty damn attractive. In the eighties, Elsewhere was California. When things started getting crowded in California, Elsewhere became everywhere—anywhere that some people grew food and some people ate food and some people thought it an attractive notion to spend lots of money for really good food.

  Working as a chef is a tough gig no matter the area code, but things are just a little bit easier in places like Buffalo. Like Pittsburgh. Like Denver, for that matter, where I will end up when all this storytelling is done. That the best of the best will naturally gravitate toward the hot, dense centers of the culinary universe is, to a certain extent, true. But some who, having gone away and tested themselves against the best, will always come home again or go further and plant their flags on street corners that no one in the big cities has ever heard of. Who in the food world knew of Yountville before Thomas Keller opened the French Laundry there?

  These prodigal chefs will open restaurants that might, in Manhattan, have been dismissed as just another neighborhood bistro, just another gastropub, cooking delicate little slips of foie gras with onion jam in cities where they are the only restaurant serving such a thing rather than just one of two dozen. They will make their own blood sausages, hang their own bresaola in secret in the basements of their restaurants and haunt the farmers’ markets looking for the best ramps, the best heirloom tomatoes, the best of whatever their particular foodshed has to offer. They will cook for their community, for their neighbors, because that was what all chefs once did before it became de rigueur for a chef to cook for himself first, for his career, his brand. I know great chefs now who cook just blocks away from the streets where they grew up, who never saw any need to leave the neighborhood. There was a time when, if you were serious about food or cooking or cuisine, you absolutely had to make a run at one of the big scenes or else spend your life flipping burgers, maybe sweating over steamship classics (beef Wellington and steak Diane and artichokes French) in the one place in your hometown where everyone went for their wedding receptions. That’s not the case any longer. Not when one of the best sushi bars in the country is in Denver, Colorado, when you can get Vietnamese pho in Albuquerque, perfect Moroccan bastilla in Conshohocken and fish cooked by one of Jean-Louis Palladin’s ex-poissonardes in Rochester.

  In Buffalo,21 in the years I spent there, there were perhaps half a dozen French restaurants. I worked at (or for) half of them. There were Italian restaurants, both high-class and low. There were fantastic greasy-spoon Greek diners, open all night, and sushi restaurants and Thai restaurants and more Italian restaurants and Polish restaurants and so many Irish bars that I could probably have stayed drunk a year without ever setting foot in the same place twice. Because of the universities, there were Lebanese and Korean restaurants, places for falafel and buck-a-slice pizza served late to the kind of people who’d be out looking for buck-a-slice pizza at four in the morning. There were a few great chefs, many great cooks still making their bones, and masses of terrible, dumb owners (and a few good ones), which is exactly what a scene needs in its formative decades so that the money keeps flowing, the spaces keep coming open as restaurants fail and the bankruptcy auctions keep the professionals in cheap, barely used ranges, sets of copper pots, and economical dining room furnishings.

  I started running kitchens, and did it in the only style I knew—the way I’d been taught. I yelled and threw things, cursed with nearly equal facility in French, English and Spanish. I worked eighteen-hour days and hundred-hour weeks; slept on the flour sacks in restaurant basements when I slept at all; got stoned with my crews on the dock when the shift was done, drank like a fish, blew needle-thin rails of cheap (read someone else’s) coke off the stainless steel prep tables in the baker’s station, and generally behaved like some kind of twobit, small-town rock star with powerful delusions of grandeur—a roadhouse roof-shaker who could maybe fill the house on a Friday night provided the bar was pulling dollar drafts, but who nonetheless thought he was Mick fucking Jagger.

  Still, from this point on out, in any above-the-line post I made money for my owners. Sometimes lots of money. Occasionally handover-fist kind of money. And I did it only because I remembered every trick I’d ever been taught, every dodge, every gimmick. My owners or execs saw it as ruthlessness, but it wasn’t that at all. It was only rightness. I never threw anything away if I could help it. I kept minimal stock in my coolers, preferring to make everything fresh whenever it could be made that way because it was cheaper and better. Commercial stock or chemical demi? Why would I pay for that when my kitchen produced vegetable scraps and bones in such profusion? Hollandaise sauce made from powder? Man, that’s not even food.

  My specials (cribbed over the years from dozens of different chefs and filed away in my head as rainy-day knowledge, saved against eventual need) moved like there was crack in them. Focaccia pizzas with duck and fig paste,22 or with port-wine reduction and sausage;23 a lobster tail tortured into verticality and mounted atop a ring-molded chop salad24 or a salad of butter lettuce aux lardons dressed in a walnut vinaigrette à la Jeremiah Tower; poached scallops, sliced, fanned and served cold on a half shell with a citrus gastrique;25 penne and grilled shrimp in a vodka-spiked arrabiata and fired in the salamander, flatiron steaks in whiskey béchamel,26 tournedos of beef “Rossini,” which were, now that I know better, really nothing more than mini-Wellingtons sans pastry, and pork loin with an apple compote that was my secret weapon—essentially a recipe for cinnamon applesauce with the blending step removed. I was a sucker for salesmen—always falling for their pitches and attempts at unloading their trash or treasure on my dock. But I never bought anything I didn’t have a use for. Or better, two uses. Or twelve.

  Because I hated the idea of wasting a body to expedite orders between line and service, I set up my crews to expo their own plates in the way I’d been taught: grouping them by fire order on the pass, ranking apps right, entrées left, with servers trained to wipe plates and garnish exactly the way I (or my exec) wanted. This way, I could stand my shift at sauté, still call orders, still see every plate that left the kitchen, and do something more constructive than act as a traffic cop for plates of hanger steak and crème brûlée.

  I was thrown out of a food-service bar one night for climbing up on a table, dropping my chef pants and wiggling my cornstarch-dusted tackle at a room full of fellow travelers still in their bloody, grease-stained uniform whites and checks. I did it just to get the attention of a busy cocktail waitress who I thought was deliberately neglecting my table. And in a show of the kind of absolute solidarity I expected of my crews (and for which kitchen crews in general are legendary), my boys climbed up right beside me and did the same, presenting to all and sundry a dozen nuts and six bare wangs. Threats were made. The police were called. We climbed down rather than face a night in the drunk tank. Most of us were due back in the kitchen in just
a few hours anyway.

  When my guys and me showed up at the same bar again the next night, we were met with rousing applause from the assembled crowd and pelted with dozens of pairs of underwear. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

  On another night, I slipped while brutalizing a frozen hunk of U10 prawns my prep guy had forgotten to thaw and put an eight-inch Wüsthof cleanly through my left hand, between the second and third knuckles, feeling the cold blade tick against bone as it went. In full view of half my crew, I coolly drew it out, wrapped the hand in a side towel secured with a boxer’s wrap of duct tape, and worked a full Friday night on the sauté station one-handed.

  I didn’t work well, mind you, but I worked. “One hand is better than no hands,” I kept saying. “And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you motherfuckers have all this fun without me.”

  Two weeks after that, my grillman and butcher beveled the tip of a finger—taking it off at an angle about halfway down the nail and leaving it hanging there on the cutting board, connected only by a little tag of skin. He took three shots of cooking vodka, had a busboy drive him to the emergency room to get the thing sewn back on, and was back—totally bent on painkillers and chalky from loss of blood—for the second dinner seating.

  “Nine fingers is better than none,” he said when I tried to send him home, and though he was as useless on the grill that night as I’d been on sauté two weeks ago, that wasn’t the point. He was there. He was on his feet and still swinging when the last table cleared out. That was a pretty good night, too.

  When I shoved a produce supplier in the alley behind one restaurant and threatened to knock him out because the man had brought me a flat of mushy strawberries too close to the start of Friday service for them to be sent back, my price went up and my reputation skyrocketed. That such a thing would’ve gotten me arrested, fired, or at least forced to sit through some aggression-sensitivity seminar had I been working in any other field was why I loved my job, why—even when I doubted my own wisdom or the sanity of those surrounding me, when nights blew up or friends went down, when I would come home drunk, bloody and done in after a double shift where absolutely everything had gone wrong, so tired that I would miss my subway stop or find myself talking to people who weren’t there—I still knew, deep down, that there was no other place for me.

  COMING UP, I’d learned a lot of useful things. I knew how to shell five pounds of garlic cloves in two minutes, how to jerry-rig the plumbing on a dish machine, resuscitate a broken béarnaise, turn some chicken breasts and jugged Italian dressing into a buffet entrée for fifty on the fly, and stop an arterial bleed from a knife wound. I knew to swallow a shot of olive oil before a night of serious wine drinking to cushion the blow of grape juice slugged down on an empty stomach, and who to call at noon on a Saturday when the owner wasn’t around if I needed money to cover a C.O.D. meat order and was willing to part with, say, one of his convection ovens, cheap. I could make the best whiskey cream sauce you ever tasted and get you a decent six-inch Japanese usuba knife for four bucks.

  But even as early as Buffalo, I was also learning to be a perfectionist, a control freak, an obsessive. Looking back, if I was a good mimic of cuisine, I was an even better mimic of people, and since my bosses (the good ones, anyway) were all absolutely committed, uncompromising workaholic pedants, so, too, was I.

  Here’s the thing about perfectionists, though. There only gets to be one who actually succeeds at it, one guy for whom it all works out. The rest must all necessarily break at some point and shatter themselves against their own ridiculous expectations. And while it sometimes seems today that so many of the new young chefs coming out of the culinary schools take success (if not excellence) as their birthright, I and most of the cooks I knew back in the day took driven excellence and the inevitability of collapse as ours.

  We’d all seen chefs blow up, burn out, go crazy and end up in jail, in Mexico, running the line at Applebee’s, or worse. We cherished these stories, collected them like baseball cards, traded them like lore. We’d seen promising careers end, known guys who’d just flat lost their shit one night and never recovered. It was the pressure that did it. The grind: same menu, night after night after night. It was the proximity—four or six or ten men jammed into a space often not much larger than a prison cell, baking in the heat, listening to the incessant clacking of the ticket printer. It was the difficult conditions, the crazy requests from owners, from customers, from your absentee, cokehead exec phoning it into the kitchen from the golf course, changing the menu at four forty-five on a Friday night, and the hundred small frustrations a day. For us, this was just the way that chefs’ stories all ended: in the shit or selling used cars.

  Today, I can think back to those years and almost convince myself that it wasn’t true—that the pressure was less serious, the drive to succeed less severe, that it wasn’t the way I’m remembering it at all. I can tell my stories with a wink and a nod as if to say, “Didn’t we all think we were such badasses back then? Isn’t it cute the way we behaved?”

  But, secretly, I know that this is false. I know how I felt, how my guys felt, my crews. I know how seriously we took everything, how crushed we could be by one plate sent back, by one table lost in the melee. And I know that while the restaurant industry in general and kitchen life in particular is well-known for attracting people of libertine tastes, with sketchy backgrounds and slightly bent moral compasses, people who could not—or should not—mix regularly with the civilian population, I also know that a lot of these people had found kitchens as a sort of last resort and, once acclimated, found that they loved the work as much as the hedonistic freedoms it engendered: that they loved La Vida with its late nights and weird characters, powerful chemicals and crazy pressure, but loved, too, the brainless calm of slicing mushrooms, the skillful juggling of pans on the hot line, the look of a flawless quadrillage.

  To fail in the work, then, became tantamount to failing for good—failing at the only thing, in some cases, they’d ever been really good at. That was why a good cook shows up for work when he’s sick, when he’s hungover, when he’s still drunk, if he has to. That’s why cooks work through pain and humiliation and loss, why insult only makes them work harder, why they would die before letting down the team.

  In that environment, success becomes the end of the night, perfection the thousand small moves it took to get there, each done as well as it can be done. I can’t hear the Pogues song “South Australia” anymore without thinking of a small bistro in Buffalo where that was the first song on the tape we’d slide into the galley radio when it came time to break down and clean the kitchen. We only played it on good nights, ones where we could look back proudly on what we’d accomplished. It means nothing to me, even today, but a job well done. And I can’t eat mozzarella sticks without remembering a place in Florida where the owners made me put them on the bar menu because I’d screwed up the food costs so badly that we needed something that cost a nickel and brought in $6.95 just to get back within hollering distance of the black. Ten years gone and I’m still ashamed of that.

  While I did not always epitomize this striving toward success and pride and precision, I did so much of the time and lived surrounded by better men than me. While I might not always have been the best cook I could be, I did really try. And now, when I get asked occasionally why I act so proud to have worked in places like Buffalo, Tampa, Albuquerque and elsewhere, why I never took my shot at the Big Leagues, why I never made the chef’s pilgrimage to France, I laugh. I waffle, hem and haw. I have a rote response, the perfect sound bite. When asked, I say that when I was a cook, I never had the time, and once I became a writer, I didn’t have the money. That always gets a giggle.

  What I should say, though, is the truth. That when I was cooking, I was happy just to have work. New York? Paris? Come on . . . I was a blue-collar kid from upstate, lucky enough that I wasn’t riding the back of a garbage truck or punching a clock at Kodak. For me, the City might just a
s well have been a foreign country, and Paris, the moon. I had bills, rent to pay. Most days, if I looked forward to the future at all, it was only as far as the next turn, the next table, the next plate.

  And as to why I never reached for anything greater or tried for anything better? Motherfucker, there was nothing better. I was a cook. And for me, that was enough.

  AND THANK CHRIST that kitchens don’t just respect this driven, dedicated, perfectionist mind-set, but encourage it, foster and cultivate this sense of absolute right and wrong, best and all-fucking-else. In my twenties, I liked the absolutism. I liked the thought that I was truly sacrificing for something greater than myself. Like that night at the diner, I liked the thought that something might go down that would hurt me, that would challenge me, that might—might—finally put me down for good. In a dark and little-examined corner of my mind, I probably liked the abuses when they came my way, too. Truss the ducks, stem the greens, watch the demi all night long. A lobster sauce will be made this way, not that way. A roulade will be folded, not fucking rolled. What are you, lazy? Stupid? Are your hands broke, you motherfucking little shit? How many times do I have to show you? Now do it again. And again. And again.

  I never worked in a great restaurant, under a chef whose name anyone outside his own family would recognize, in a place that was loved by anyone outside the neighborhood, the town, or the city where it was located. I don’t know a single chef who wouldn’t have liked, at some point in his coming-up, to have run off to France and cooked with Bocuse, to have spent a year (or two, maybe three . . .) learning to make pasta in Porretta, real Neapolitan pizza in Campania or at the foot of Vesuvius, to have built a time machine and seen Vatel fall on his sword. Some cooks do that.27 Most don’t. Most chefs don’t end up sautéing foie gras for superstars, arranging Ducasse’s pantry, lugging vats of calcium chloride for Ferrán Adrià. They wake up in the morning, brush their teeth, have a cup of coffee and go off every day to feed their friends and neighbors. They do the best they can wherever they are, and, like me, if they look forward to anything, it is only the next hit, the next day off.

 

‹ Prev