Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  I’d been trying to figure out the answer to that question myself for quite some time. I’m still trying to puzzle it out today.

  I MADE RICE AT JIMMY’S, ten hotel pans of steamer mix, each pan sealed in plastic, jammed into the upright steamer, then forgotten until my internal kitchen timer told me they were ready to come out again. Rice was the first test for any new galley hopeful, any comer who claimed to know a thing or two about a thing or two. Fifteen minutes in any pro kitchen, a guy learns how to make rice. After doing any amount of serious time, he would know how to make perfect rice in his sleep, standing on his head, underwater, with his ass on fire. Yet it consistently amazed me how often I would get guys who claimed direct descent from Escoffier, Paladin or Keller on their résumés but, when told to make rice, would stand and stare at the sack and the hotel pan like a cat trying to do long division.

  While the rice steamed, I made mashed potatoes out of bagged dust and water. Once the mashers had sprung to life beneath my whisk, they were portioned out into steam-table six-pans, with the remainder scooped out into five-gallon plastic buckets that had once held olives or floor cleaner, then stacked at the end of the hot line as backup.

  It was deep prep, and regardless of latitude, regardless of position or station, I loved prep. True, I’d gone from chef to fry cook in the space of a couple of weeks and a couple thousand miles, but that didn’t matter to me. I didn’t feel ashamed of the work or demeaned by it or too good for it. Work was work. I’d been making rice, coring tomatoes and stemming mushrooms at La Cité, so here at Jimmy’s I cored tomatoes. I stemmed hideous, leathery button mushrooms. I shaved racing stripes into the flanks of two cases of cucumbers with a dull peeler, then took an eight-inch chef’s knife from the magnet rack on the wall and sliced everything in sight with veteran speed and machine precision. I was fast now. Finally Angelo-fast, after all these years.

  Twice, Floyd came by to admire my chop, to fan a spread of cucumber slices with his fingers across the rough terrain of the plastic cutting board and nod in silent approval. I felt no particular pride in having done the job right because, at this point, right was the only way I knew how to do it. As with the mussels, after a certain number of years, a thousand repetitions of the same job, a thousand mornings spent doing it, right had just become second nature.

  Looking around following Floyd’s second departure, I saw elements of the same isolation and cool, surgical detachment on the faces and in the work of some of those surrounding me. On the board next to mine, a cook called Sturgis, with a giant, overhanging belly straining the snaps of his dishwasher’s jacket and muttonchop sideburns that would’ve made Elvis blush, was stripping corn off the cob. He’d clip the ends off each ear with a double bang of his knife, stand it up, and denude it with six sharp strokes. On one side of his cutting board were kernels. On the other, bare cobs. He didn’t leave behind a single kernel. Never missed. Never varied his motions. And he did it without looking, while staring dully at the label on a bottle of garlic powder on the shelf over the prep table with a loose smile hung between his sideburns.

  Roberto, on the other hand, was splitting chickens like they’d said something nasty about his mother. And Lane—tall, shaggy blond, left arm bright with infected track marks and senior to me by all of two days—appeared flummoxed by the necessary interaction between lemons and a knife. That lovely Zen distraction came slow, sometimes not at all, and the appreciation of a thing done right had to be learned. But Roberto, at least, seemed to be enjoying himself.

  On my side of the kitchen, bets were being taken on how long it would be before Lane (on the other side) took one of his fingers off; side bets on whether he’d even notice. They were measuring in minutes, not days or hours.

  I just laughed and thought of tomatoes.

  JIMMY’S DID NO LUNCH BUSINESS. There was neither the time, the space nor the need. Everything—every effort, every skilled hand (and not-so-skilled hand), everyone’s concentration (however far it stretched)—was focused on the daily preparation for dinner, and as the day rolled on, things in the cramped, outdated, overcrowded kitchen got weirder and weirder. The endless chatter about dicks and waitresses and movies and which station the battered galley radio ought to be tuned to sloped off the closer the clock crept to two forty-five, which was when the hot line would be lit up, stocked, staffed and readied for the first early-bird hit at three.

  The entire crew took lunch at one. It consisted of an ice-filled case of MGD longnecks and a pot of ropa vieja bubbling on one of the line’s twenty burners. The ropa was Roberto’s responsibility, and it was the best food served at Jimmy’s by a long stretch—all dark and sweet and thick. For convenience’s sake, it was spooned out onto slices of white bread or tortillas and eaten one-handed so work could be continued with the other. No one left his station.

  At two, the sweet tock tock tock of knives on plastic cutting boards slowed slightly as half the crew rolled out for cigarettes on the dock, last beers, last-minute negotiations with their backs, knees and hands, begging their bodies to hold out just eight or nine more hours. When they returned, the other half went. I followed Floyd out the back door, my fingertips stained red from bell pepper juice, my calluses itching.

  Floyd was wearing sunglasses now, had two utility knives in blond-wood sheaths tucked through the strings of his apron, a black skull-and-crossbones bandanna on his head that sparkled with fish scales like sequins inexpertly sewn. He looked like a Hollywood

  B-movie pirate suffering from malnutrition and terminal scurvy. He heaved a sigh and sank down onto an upended milk crate set in the thin band of shade cast by the wall.

  “Jason, right?” he asked.

  I said yeah. Jay was fine. I hadn’t been called anything but Cherry (or worse) since morning.

  “Like smoking a jay,” he said.

  “Yup. Just like.”

  And that was it for the space of half a cigarette and a final bottle of MGD apiece. At the end of the dock, a dishwasher and a pantry cook (neither of whom had been in the kitchen when I’d arrived) argued in Spanish and looked ready to come to blows. The blacktop shimmered in the heat haze, a hot, tarry ocean. A car pulled up—a battered Ford Galaxie with its plates wired on and springs that squeaked like tiny birds having something terrible done to them. Two of the cooks, Roberto and a little kid called Dump, who didn’t look a day over twelve, jogged out into the sun and leaned in through the passenger-side window.

  Floyd picked at the label of his beer. “That’s the dope guy if you’re buying.”

  I said no. Not today, at any rate. But, as always, I found the idea of door-to-door drug delivery a brilliant innovation of the restaurant industry.

  “I can stand you to a dime if you’re broke,” Floyd offered.

  “No, it’s not that,” I said, although I was, nearly. “First night, you know? I think I’ll stick with beer.”

  “Smart man.” Floyd tapped the side of his skull with one finger and lit a second Kool off the stump of his first.

  The car pulled away. Dump and Roberto were divvying up glassine nickel and dime bags between them, stocking their pockets, obviously (I hoped, for their sake) having bought for most of the kitchen. On the dock, the argument between the cook and the dishwasher escalated a notch, and without looking, Floyd side-armed his empty bottle at them. It shattered against the wall, showering the two of them with glass.

  “Basta!” he shouted, cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. “Va a trabajar!”

  And they did, both slinking back in through the door, nodding in mortified fealty as they passed Floyd on their way.

  After that, the only sounds were the full-throated thrumming of the highways in the distance, loud and constant, and the screaming of tropical monsters in the swampy greenbelts that separated one parking lot from another.

  Floyd sighed, shifted his focus so that he was staring out across the shimmering, empty parking lot at the line of decorative palms dying at its far horizon. “Why don’t you get
back inside now,” he said to me. “You’re on fryers tonight. Light ’em up and don’t disappoint me, okay?”

  FOUR FULL STEAM TABLES. Twenty burners. Three double-wide fryers. Two deck steamers stacked one on top of the other at the far end of the line, three side-by-side, gas-fired charcoal grills with two salamander top-broilers mounted above. Two flattop griddles oiled to a high gloss, surfaces punctuated with hundreds of tiny nicks and scratches—the record of countless random impacts worked into the temper of the shimmering hot metal. Four enormous radiant ovens—two on the line, beneath the massive hot-tops, two more in the prep area—and two convection ovens stuck kitty-corner to the fryer station. Eight microwaves, six working, two with the doors wrenched off and used for storing spice bottles, smokes, speed-pourers, what-have-you. Six long heat lamps suspended on greasy cables over the gleaming aluminum pass rail.

  With all the line’s equipment fired, the kitchen went from a merely intolerable 100-some degrees to a murderous 140-degree hell above the equipment. Leave your dog locked in a car in the summer and Lassie will start to cook at 110, poaching in her own vital fluids. At 120, the human body starts to panic, pouring sweat until all you have left is a greasy, slick oil that oozes from your pores. Blood vessels burst in the eyes and on the skin. Your boots will literally fill with perspiration. Hydration and cooling the blood (usually done with frozen side towels wrapped around the back of the neck beneath the stiff collar of the chef coat) become life-and-death issues.

  But 140 is like a weight, like swimming through soup. It hits you as a straight punch in the chest that never lets up. It sucks at your breath, crawls up inside you like a fever, chews at you and sits right on top of your head like a hot, wet goat. Unless you’ve been acclimated, unless you’ve made friends with the heat and accepted it, 140 degrees will just kill you.

  We lit the line at two forty-five—at the last possible moment—and started sandbagging, carrying in stock in volumes that were difficult to believe. Someone gave me my fryer pars: two hundred pounds of precut french fries in waxy brown ten-pound bags; sixteen fish tubs full of breaded fillets (ten of haddock, six of cod dusted with cornmeal already going gooey in the humid air), then four more of portion-cut mystery fish to use for fish sandwiches that would have to be battered by hand. I had two five-gallon buckets of floury beer batter at my feet, six more stacked and waiting by the door of the cooler, and several hundred pounds of peeled onions, which, after being slammed through a sort of stamping press bolted to my station between the fryers and dunked in the same batter used for the fish, would be turned into Onion Blossoms. Lots and lots of Onion Blossoms.

  My coolers were socked in with cases of Sysco breaded clam strips, already thawed, and more cases of calamari and more cases of rock shrimp and more cases of chicken cutlets and stuffed mushrooms and little appetizer things—all of it together probably coming out close to a quarter ton, most of it having been prepped in the last six hours. And as Roberto, Sturgis, Floyd, Dump, Lane, I and a tall, skinny, glaze-eyed Mexican that everyone called Chachi were all moving onto the line, a whole second crew of prep cooks and runners were coming in to take our places at the stainless. Their only job would be to keep the line supplied with whatever the line needed to keep working and, when necessary, carry off the casualties and stand stage until relieved.

  “You need anything,” Sturgis told me, “I mean anything, you just scream, Cherry, okay? Scream loud. Runner’ll get’cha. You don’t leave your station for nothing ’less Floyd says so. Not for Jimmy. Not to take a piss or nothing, cool?”

  I nodded. I was walled in with stock, surrounded, in danger of being buried in a fish avalanche should any of it shift unexpectedly. Looking around at the rest of the stations—at the guys coolly laying in piles of side towels, fussing with their mountains of low-rent mise, stacking pans on wall racks in front of their posts; working silently now, hunched over, slotting knives into the spaces between cutting boards, angled for fast draws, and twisting the bottles in their speed racks snout-down; appearing doom-struck or expectant, bouncing in place, some of them, but all fated for some kind of disaster they all seemed to know was coming.

  Jimmy walked through to inspect the troops and took up the expediter’s spot at a long table right-angled to the pass. The hostess banged through the swinging doors. “Ready in front,” she said. “They’re already lining up outside.”

  “Go,” Floyd said quietly, just loud enough to be heard over the roar of the hood ventilators. He still had his glasses on, had his hands braced on either side of the ticket machine, staring, waiting.

  The hostess disappeared into the front. A moment later, she stuck her head back in. “Seating sixty,” she barked. “Here we go.”

  A few seconds later, the machine began rattling out orders.

  A chill ran down my spine. Like the one I’d get from a noseful of cocaine, a scare in a dark room. I cracked my knuckles and felt my eyes go wide, my pulse humming in my neck.

  I couldn’t wait.

  A SOLDIER, APRÈS LA GUERRE, will tell you there is no way to describe combat after the fact in any human tongue. Anyone who tries, fails. And anyone who succeeds was probably never a soldier in the first place.

  Likewise, a sailor cannot—likely will not—describe the sea or hard weather on it to anyone who’s not another sailor because what comes of trying is a language of analogy and comparison. The wind was as strong as . . . The waves were as high as . . .

  The truest thing ever said about a tornado? “There was wind. And then, after a while, there weren’t any wind no more.” I heard that once long ago on the TV news from some fat, florid hillbilly whose trailer had been flattened by a big twister while he huddled beneath it. There was wind and then there wasn’t.

  Cooks speak of their battles mostly in numbers: body counts, heads, tops, table turns and throughs. A hundred covers (meals actually served) is a good night for a straightforward, medium-size neighborhood restaurant. When Joe’s Bar and Grill in Indianapolis does a hundred covers on a Thursday night, Joe is a happy man. He made some money. Joe’s cooks are happy. They punched their weight.

  A hundred covers means maybe 120 bodies through the door, 120 tops (chairs filled in the dining room), counting shared plates, nibblers, people who just want maybe a cup of soup, a dessert, and then those served jalapeño poppers and french fries through the bar or, better yet, not eating anything at all and just drinking watery whiskey or jug wine at double and triple markup—an owner’s favorite kind of customer.

  A hundred covers is good. Two is better. Two-fifty, better still. At 300 you’re starting to talk some serious numbers, and unless the dining room is large and both kitchen and crew built for volume, 300 will begin to stress the systems of any normal restaurant. A topflight fine-dining galley with a veteran brigade can bang out 350, maybe 400 covers a night (taking into account long hours—maybe an after-theater rush, that kind of thing) without too much trouble, and a large, shitty, assembly-line corporate restaurant staffed by kids, moon-faced losers, jerk-offs and a couple seasoned shoemakers can do 300, 400, even 500, easy. Back at the diner in Rochester, Hero, James, Freddy, Juan and I could move those numbers—did move those numbers all the time. But at 500, you’re talking a 100 meals an hour for five solid hours, on average—the length of a reasonable dinner shift. And that’s meals—apps, entrées, desserts and ephemera. Setting aside amuse-bouches, tasting menus, desserts, multiple courses and flights, dealing only with the core of a normal meal, one could conservatively figure two plates per customer and come up with a figure of roughly three and a half finished plates every minute being produced by the kitchen, a plate to the rail every twenty seconds.

  On my first dinner shift at Jimmy’s, the kitchen did 914 covers.

  There was wind and then there wasn’t.

  If you read the prologue, you already know what came next—death, destruction, head wounds, the sudden realization of how badly I’d squandered what few gifts I had in taking this hideout job in the middle of t
his sucking swamp, in spending my waking hours deep-frying fisherman’s platters for dimwits. But as with so many things in my life, this insight came just precisely too late. We were in Florida now, Sam and me, without the money or the resources to leave. I lasted only a couple weeks at Jimmy’s, which was about the average for his cooks. The heat, the killing rushes and doomed, lost-outpost vibe got to me quick. An environment where the only pride was in survival turned me grim. I stayed only long enough to collect a couple paychecks, then left with a feeling that I was dodging some terrible inevitability. But afterward, I did worse.

  I made pizzas, which might’ve been a nice kind of retreat—a full-circle return to my roots—except that these pizzas were all covered with shrimp and awful, sour olives and lamb, except that they were being bought and devoured by people whose shoes were worth more than my car.

  For a while, I became a restaurant consultant (of sorts), poking around in the kitchens and coolers of suffering seafood shanties, hideous family restaurants and neighborhood bars, using every dirty trick I knew to help the owners squeeze an extra 4 or 5 percent out of their limping, jackleg operations even as two Olive Gardens, an Outback Steakhouse and an Applebee’s were all preparing to open within sight of the front door.

  Things were booming in Florida, the chain restaurants growing and spreading across all that fresh new cement being laid down over the swamps like kudzu. And while I could claim that I was trying to do the noble thing by throwing in my lot with the losers, fighting a holding action against the forces of evil and conformity and unlimited breadsticks, that wouldn’t be entirely true. As a consultant, all I cared about was that the places stayed afloat long enough for their checks to clear.

  But levels of betrayal exist between perfection and jalapeño poppers. You have to make your own choices about how low you are willing to sink. I’m not proud of anything I did while in Florida. Most of it, I’m downright ashamed of. But it was a weird time for me, a bad time, and I try not to think about it much, except on those days when I’m feeling good and feeling cocky and need to remind myself how I got where I am today. What I did in zip codes where I hope no one remembers my face or name.