Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  Because I was the chef’s right hand, his backup and the instrument of his considerable will, it meant I was essentially living in the kitchen—in early, out late, with only the occasional two-hour span, midshift, when I would duck out for a nearby driving range (still in my whites and checks) to knock back a few beers and hammer a bucket of balls. I was terrible at it, but the job was pretty high stress and hitting something that I knew wasn’t going to hit me back felt pretty good. I’d explained this to Laura before asking her to move in—the hours, the stress, The Life. That part she understood.

  So to get around the complications of my schedule, she broke up with me first thing in the morning just as I was getting ready to leave for work—informing me that she was moving out and heading back to Philly immediately—then dumped me again when I got home, stinking and exhausted, after a seventeen-hour shift.

  This went on for about a week. Then, on my first day off with her, I woke to the blinding pain of an abscessed tooth and spent most of the next forty-eight hours either rolling around on the floor moaning or half-whacked on OxyContin, drooling my way through an afternoon showing of Girl, Interrupted.

  Not even an opiate coma could make that movie tolerable. We left halfway through.

  Anyway, she didn’t try to dump me then, but instead took care of me as best she could. But once I was feeling better?

  Dumped my ass again.

  THE HOTEL GIG WAS A GOOD ONE. A fun one. Also the worst one—coldest and most distant of all. Hotel work is peculiar in the food service industry in that it attracts some of the best and a lot of the worst characters in the business. It’s a middle step between the dignity and nobility (and, often, penury and insanity) of the legitimate independent restaurant world and selling out to go work for the chains or one of the innumerable “Restaurant Groups” that operate multiple properties and multiple concepts spanning cities, states and continents. Hotel work pays well, sometimes ridiculously well, and employment generally comes with things like health insurance, 401(k)s, and pension plans—perks that are virtually unknown elsewhere in the industry unless you consider ready access to the neighborhood drug dealers a kind of health insurance or the ability to walk out of the kitchen with a case of frozen 30–40 shrimp under your coat on a Sunday night a savings plan.

  But the trade-off is often a complete loss of control, a surrendering of one’s creativity to the nightmare groupthink of Corporate Chefs and focus groups and one’s balls (or at least one of them) to the organizational necessity of large-scale operations. Not a single thing on the hotel kitchen’s menu was mine; everything had been passed down, hand to hand, complete with cost breakdowns and illustrated prep and plating instructions, through the corporate hierarchy (which existed as a whole separate stratum of bosses, above and beyond my exec and the hotel manager). Not a single thing would I have proudly cooked had the choice been mine. Cedar plank salmon was already a dead trend by the time it made its way onto our dinner menu. Cheeseburgers topped with a clot of the cheapest American Gorgonzola. Red snapper in a beurre noisette and flamed with well anisette that made it taste like a licorice fish stick.

  And even when we were given our own head somewhat, the exigencies of costs and tyrannical P&Ls, food and labor targets, dictated what could and couldn’t be done. We stocked a happy-hour buffet in the bar with the worst dregs of the collective house memory (Swedish meatballs, mini–beef Wellingtons, chicken wings and tacos by the thousands) and pulled down something like four hundred dollars to provide ten people at a breakfast meeting with a platter of stale pastries, coffee and bottled water. It was embarrassing sometimes, but was really just a question of scale, of having been promoted like a soldier—moved from the field where I’d been down in the trenches and concerned exclusively with small-unit tactics, to a comfy post in command, where, suddenly, complete armies were at my disposal and the disposition of entire battlefields my responsibility. In Florida, at Jimmy’s, I’d nearly been defeated by a siege of a thousand customers. Now, a mere thousand was a slow day, was one wedding in the ballroom on a Friday night being handled by my banquet division while I was also seeing to my restaurant hot line, holding down the northern front, organizing resupply for the beleaguered bar staff dying on their own hill, and fighting a holding action against two hundred blind-drunk regional sales coordinators in Meet-C, in town for the annual Widget Manufacturer’s Convention and breaking their lines to sexually harass wandering bridesmaids and snort blow off the polished brass rails in the courtyard.

  Jeff, my exec, was totally around-the-bend, double-bat-shit crazy, but also a tactical genius who could make the operation run like clockwork even under the worst conditions, in a place where all conditions were bad. The staff were hard-core veterans, some of them having come here of their own volition, others starting as prep cooks on a prison work-release program, then getting hired full-time once their sentences were up, with still others on staff for so long nobody remembered anymore where they’d originally come from.

  Some I loved, some I hated. I had dumb ones and useless ones, lazy ones, ones that stole, ones that lied. That’s the way things are with a big staff. Most of the ones I disliked, I detested simply for their necessity. I couldn’t fire them because I had no one else to fill their posts. This wasn’t Lutèce or Daniel. Guys weren’t exactly lining up for the chance to do coulibiac, beef Welly and cheeseburgers under Jeff’s command. Or mine. I couldn’t fire them because for some of them it was this or G-pop; because I didn’t have three days or even three hours to spare to teach someone new where we kept the chicken breasts or how to mount the snapper. I couldn’t fire them because, technically, firing was Jeff’s job, and Jeff kept his own byzantine counsel when it came to giving someone the ax. He had his own rulebook, the principles of which were never explained, and sometimes you could show up late for a shift (which meant less than ten minutes or an hour early, depending) and be just fine, but break an egg in his freshly scrubbed walk-in and he’d chase you down the long hallway between banquet prep and the dock waving a hot saucier over his head and screaming threats of murder. I knew this because I’d seen it happen. And Jeff didn’t even fire Carlos. Carlos just hit the back door running and never came back.

  “Less paperwork that way,” Jeff said, laughing about it later that night on the dock. He was a big man, neckless, heavy around the middle but deceptively quick. “Man, did you see him run?” When he smiled, the corners of his mouth disappeared up into the rough of his mustache.

  WE DID MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR WEDDINGS where everyone wore walkie-talkies and earpieces like Secret Service agents and the floor staff all worked in tuxedos. We did nights when the restaurant served three people and, still, the insane FOH manager (who looked like a Rat Pack throwback and talked like Telly Savalas in Kojak, relentlessly upbeat and calling everybody “baby”) would come into the back smiling and saying, “Just you wait, boys. Next week, the week after, things’ll pick up. And then, when we get one of those critics in here, baby? Wow!”

  I did good work there, took care of my crew as best I could, pulled my weight. I was feeling better, too. During staged events (held out in the courtyard, with me and the best of my guys wearing long-sleeve chef coats to cover their track marks or tattoos, standing ramrod-straight and carving steamship rounds to order), I could put on my white Bragard jacket with the black button covers and my name embroidered over the breast pocket, the white paper toque (only time I’d ever worn one), and solid black exec pants (mark, in the color-coded galley hierarchy, of an above-the-line, command position) and act like a human being—passing jokes, filling orders, not falling down at all. I could walk the room during a fancy event and, with my hair tied back and my battered work boots traded in for a pair of shiny black clogs (only time I ever wore those either), almost look the part of a chef: hard and competent and polished like stainless steel.

  It was an act, sure. But what job isn’t? Just on the other side of the swinging doors there would be bedlam, fire, blood and harsh language; twent
y guys who, in another life, were maybe the guys who’d stolen your car or your credit-card numbers, who worked two jobs or three jobs under two or three different names to keep their own families fed, who you wouldn’t let into your house without locking away your daughters and liquor; twenty guys arranged in a double line, facing each other across three prep tables lined up end to end, working assembly-line fashion to arrange those lovely plates of plank-roasted salmon, whipped mash, mixed veg and garni, of tenderloin in red-wine demi with grilled asparagus and sautéed mushrooms; passing them hand to hand, sliding them, spinning them down the table so that one guy could pipe the potatoes, another sauce the beef, another spoon out the veg so delicately, another carefully arrange the three stalks of asparagus just so (tied with a leek ribbon when Jeff was feeling frisky), another wipe down, another plant the chervil top or sprig of parsley, another wipe again. Twenty guys, all talking, all busting each other’s balls across and up and down the table, all singing along with the galley radio, tuned to a classic rock station, blasting out Billy Idol doing “Rebel Yell” (the Mexican guys singing in Spanish, Con una rebel yell, ella lloró, ¡Mds! ¡Mds! ¡Mds!), all feeding thosfoot of the table, yelling, too—encouragement, threats, curses, calling everybody cocksucker, calling everybody motherfucker, saying he was gonna call INS, that he was gonna call everyone’s parole officer (he knew them all by name), that he was gonna break his big fucking foot off in someone’s motherfucking ass if they didn’t move faster—even as he’s slapping cloches on plates four at a time with his big, mauled hands, shuttling plates to sheet trays, shuttling sheet trays onto the Queen Marys standing beside and behind him, screaming for runners, for service, for captains to take the loaded Queen Marys and wheel them out into the hall between the banquet kitchen and the service side of the ballroom, where fifty waiters are all loafing, smoking cigarettes, passing beers back and forth, waiting for all the Queen Marys to be filled with all the trays of all the plates so they can be arranged, reset onto service trays and brought onto the floor of the ballroom to be French-served to three hundred at a time.

  I walk back into the kitchen from my tour of the floor, out of one world, across a hallway (stealing a drag off someone’s smoke and swallowing a half a glass of wine in one gulp), and into another in ten steps. I pull off the fancy white jacket and hang it on the end of an ANSUL nozzle over a cold rack of flattops. I’m wearing three walkies (one for service, one for bar, one for the kitchen) and am still talking into one of them as I pull on a dishwasher’s jacket over my T-shirt, tie on an apron, look in on the hot line (firmly in the hands of Indy, my best lieutenant, my friend, with Louis, the Puerto Rican gangbanger, pulling his first shift on the dinner side under Indy’s care), then step to the banquet line, beside Jeff, and start stacking plates.

  “What are you smiling about?” he asks me, though I hadn’t realized I was. Jeff is deeply suspicious of smiles in the kitchen, of happiness in general. It always means something is about to go wrong. “What, you going queer on me? What’s wrong? Why are you smiling like that?”

  Just because I’m alive, baby. Just because I’m alive.

  • • •

  LAURA AND I, we’d cut a groove in those first hard days of living together that was tough to jump. So it continued, on and off, for a couple months, the fights and breakups interposed only by long days and nights at work (fourteen hours a day, sometimes sixteen, sometimes more, for six days a week, then a short day on Sunday—twelve hours—with every other one off), the exhausted collapse into bed, forays out to the grocery store—considered neutral ground, both of us totally in love with the idea of food shopping together because it was just so normal and domestic—and restaurant meals taken at odd hours, in strange neighborhoods. Essentially, we were at peace only when food was involved: bánh mi sandwiches, Vietnamese egg rolls over noodles and duck sausage from Dac Hoa, mai tais at the Chinese restaurant down the street, saag paneer and chili dogs and Chester Cab pizzas, salt bagels with cream cheese on Sunday mornings when I didn’t have to be in until eleven, wax-paper bags of cannoli from the Italian restaurant around the corner.

  We slept on the floor because I’d never owned a bed, under a pile of blankets and a sleeping bag made out of an American flag. At six o’clock in the morning, sunlight as thick as white butter streamed in through the big windows, which is only a nice thing in a real estate listing, not so much in the real world where neither of us ever got enough sleep. Since we had no curtains, we taped newspapers up over the windows. And once we were informed by the building manager that the apartments on the ground floor were all infested with cockroaches that were probably headed up our way, we looked around and realized we were living in a crack house.

  Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. There was an actual crack house across the street, and our building was more like the place that the crack house’s former customers moved into after completing a treatment program, finding Jesus and a job selling aluminum cook-ware door-to-door.

  But we decided to move again anyway, only couldn’t figure where. Laura had taken a job delivering pizzas—the perfect gig for her, combining her love of fast driving, precision route mapping and the fact that she couldn’t stand most people for more than thirty seconds at a stretch—so her money, together with my salary, left us plenty of budgetary leeway. Especially since we weren’t out there spending all of our disposable income on window treatments. Or furniture. We had some cash put away. Not much, but some. Enough, we calculated, to get us somewhere and settled provided we did it on the cheap and didn’t go crazy, blowing all our folding money on Chiclets and hats.

  I CAUGHT JEFF IN THE OFFICE doing paperwork. He was a magician at it, able to make numbers turn themselves inside out at his command, to jump and flop and twist into whatever he needed them to say to keep his masters pleased, the money flowing, his pension intact. To the day, he knew how long he had to go until he was fully vested. To the hour, the minute. He talked about it incessantly.

  Like a crooked accounting firm, we kept two sets of books: one for us, which told us the unvarnished truth about what was in our coolers, our stock levels, labor costs, then another set for the bosses, which told a somewhat more rosy picture.

  “We still have top rounds left over from the carving stations last night?” he asked me without looking up, tapping a pencil on the clipboard in front of him. I stepped inside the tiny, cramped office and closed the door, opened his desk drawer where we kept the ashtray, lit up.

  “Two,” I said. “Maybe three.” I’d been on last night, seeing to the breakdown and demobilization for a party of eight hundred at one in the morning—tail end of a day that’d begun at 8:00 a.m., seventeen hours on the front lines—so knew right off the top of my head what’d been salvaged. “Lots of fruit left, too. Backup trays of veg.”

  He looked up at me. “Did we overcount?”

  “No. They underate. Most of them were shitfaced before the buffet was set. Bar got slaughtered.”

  “Nice . . .” Jeff smiled. “Looks like we’re going to be doing a lot of roast beef sandwiches and fruit trays.”

  He started scratching numbers onto the paper, altering our stock levels to represent the new reality—three top rounds of beef and about fifty pounds of assorted produce popping into existence like he’d conjured them, free because it’d all been paid for by last night’s party. We didn’t re-use food in the kitchen, but neither did we let anything go to waste. If the Smith wedding paid for dinner for eight hundred on Friday and only ate for six hundred, then the Jones graduation paid for buffet service for a hundred and only fifty showed up, that put us up two hundred and fifty meals’ worth of supplies—enough, if we were careful and creative, to cover both the Women in Business symposium on Sunday afternoon and the snack trays for the “Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How” seminar on Monday afternoon. It’s not like the chubbos ate much, anyway. Too guilty. Double up on the bottled water, put out a half-count of sandwiches and consider it money in the bank.

  “Chef, you
got a minute?”

  “Does it look like it?” He took a drag off my cigarette.

  “It’s important.”

  Jeff stopped, looked up at me sideways. He must’ve known what was coming even if I didn’t exactly. “Jesus, you’re not gonna cry for me are you?”

  “No, Chef. I’m not going to cry.”

  “You coming out of the closet?”

  “No, Chef. I still like pussy. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Funny. So what, then? You quitting?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jeff took another drag off my cigarette. I lit a fresh one. I’d had this whole speech worked out, argument and counterargument; had held to it with a debater’s confidence all the way in to work, through my first cup of coffee taken standing quiet and peaceful on the expo side of the line listening to the plastic-wrapped radio in the dish room playing Spanish love songs and the long walk down the hall to Jeff’s office. I’d wanted to tell him how awful it’d been—the hours, the yelling, the violence and pressure—and how great; how, a few nights ago, in the middle of a big party in the ballroom, these two guys had come into the kitchen, sharp suits and polished shoes, and pulled me aside, asking me, could I do a couple special plates for their table, lasagna, maybe, or a rigatoni? They hadn’t said, “Just like mama used to make,” but it’d been implied. Wiseguys, or guys pretending to be wise, anyhow. And one of them had pulled me close, patted me on the cheek with his paw and tucked a bill into my pocket. “We hear you’re very good.”

  I’d made rigatoni. A really good rigatoni—ricotta and mozz, red sauce worked up from pork scrap and espresso-ground coffee beans (always one of my secret weapons). And I’d had it delivered special to their table by Johnny, my best banquet captain. The bill Joey Mafia had put in my pocket? A five-spot. Laughable, but this was still Rochester, after all. Tough times for everyone. Where else but this industry was that actually going to happen?