Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  To that end, I’d spent the afternoon prior to my ambush of the editor in chief sitting at Milton’s (my favorite diner in the city, serving my favorite breakfast burritos in the world) eating a #13 with red chile and inventing some writing samples. I wrote an essay about what it was like during those cooking classes I gave to look up and see fifty stick-thin, health-conscious suburban housewives squirming uncomfortably in their chairs and watching with mounting horror as I added pound after pound of high-fat European butter to my sauce, about all of them staring at me with equal parts lust and revulsion—as though I were up at the front of the room chopping up kittens for stew, but then dipping the kittens in yummy, yummy chocolate.

  I wrote another about Mother’s Day at La Cité and how fast things can spin out of control even in a good kitchen when someone cuts his finger off, another about glace de viande, another about the power of food memories: that first time Laura’d cooked for me in Philadelphia, at her parents’ house, and the smell of crushed thyme on her fingertips that night.

  The next day, there I was—sitting in the office with my writing samples clutched in sweaty hands, wondering what the hell I was going to say when (and if) the boss agreed to talk to me. There’s no handbook out there for trying to bluff your way into a job you’re totally unqualified for. No set of best practices. It’s the kind of thing you just have to improvise, and my plan was, if necessary, to simply beg. A lot.

  The chief, Sergio, had been in an editorial meeting when I’d shown up. Luckily for me, that meeting was going on behind a closed door very close to where I’d been told to sit and wait, and the chief had a big mouth. I could hear everything. And when I heard him smack a hand down on the table and loudly state that what the magazine really needed was “one of those Anthony Bourdain motherfuckers,”51 I could feel all the jittery nerves, tension and anxiousness suddenly spin out of me like water down a drain. Right then, I knew I was golden. Quickly, I shuffled up my most bizarre, gonzo, loudmouth sample,52 and laid it on top of the stack. When the door opened, I walked right up to the chief, stuck out my hand and said, “I’m Jason Sheehan, and I am your Anthony Bourdain motherfucker.”

  IN A LAST-MINUTE BRAINSTORM, I’d made up some dates and the names of a bunch of fictional publications and slapped them on the top of each of the pieces I’d written just before printing them out on my home computer printer and heading out the door. At the time, I thought this was genius. With just a few keystrokes, it suddenly appeared as though I’d been writing about food for years.

  It wasn’t genius, though. It was stupid to such a degree that, even today, I can hardly believe I got away with it. My bogus clippings were already chock-full of bad language, vile insults, bizarre digressions and, in one case, a long aside about how all moral vegetarians ought to be rounded up into camps and studied until a way could be found to turn them into delicious pork chops. I was already hanging myself pretty far out there on a ragged and bloody edge. But no matter how good I was (or how desperate the magazine might’ve been), a lie like that would’ve killed me at La Cocinita had anyone ever thought to check on even one of these totally specious references.

  But luckily for me, no one ever did. Sergio actually read my first two samples standing right there in the hallway. A half hour later, I had the job. I was assigned an editor (Peri Pakroo, the first person who actually sat me down and explained to me—over lunchtime beers, of course—what I was supposed to be doing for a living), who gave me one column a month on whatever the hell I felt like writing about (my debut being that butter story that’d gotten me the job, if I remember correctly), then another that was more specific and traditional: recipes for Thanksgiving leftovers, Valentine’s Day menus for two, how to eat on the street in Juárez without dying.

  UP UNTIL SEPTEMBER 11, I’d been kind of looking at this writing thing like a dodge, as something to do to fill the days until I could find another kitchen, another brigade—easier than digging ditches, safer than stealing, but a career side trip that I would absolutely not cop to once it was over. On my best days, making a living as a writer (even if it wasn’t much of a living) felt dirty. Like I was getting away with something, like I was just using the computer to print modest stacks of cash in very small denominations and, sooner or later, would have to be caught. The rest of the time it felt like a betrayal of something, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.

  I could live with it, though, because I saw it as temporary. I was a cook. Writing was just something I was doing to keep the collection agents off my back.

  All that summer, I’d just been a guy who couldn’t find a job. After 9/11, though, there were no jobs to be had. By anyone. At least not in Albuquerque, in the restaurant industry. Everyone remembers what September 11 was like. The planes, the towers, the shock of it—like waking in the middle of the night on the couch with the television still on, unsure in those first few blurry moments whether what you’re watching is news or a movie or maybe a little of both. But afterward, in the days and weeks and months that followed, the shock only deepened. Fun stopped and travel stopped and entertainment stopped. And food? No. People ate a lot of mashed potatoes, a lot of cold sandwiches. They ordered in lo mein and pizza and uncorked that bottle of ’76 Lafite they’d been saving for a special occasion because now the special occasion was being alive. Meals were taken in penitence, gilded with private extravagance, and mostly at home. No one was going out anywhere.

  Albuquerque’s was a tourist-driven restaurant economy. And with no tourists, there was no economy. The cull was brutal. I heard from friends and friends-of-friends that most staffs had been cut in half, that all new openings had been canceled, that some restaurants were just shutting down entirely for a month, maybe two. No one knew when the panic was going to end.

  So all of a sudden, writing was my career—a default vocation because it was the only one I had. I never meant for it to happen this way, certainly didn’t plan it. It was just circumstance. People ask me sometimes how I got into food writing (almost always meaning—but not asking outright—how they might get into food writing, too), and that’s what I tell them: circumstance. I became a food writer because, for a few weeks in 2001, everyone in the United States was too sad to eat dinner out.

  A WEEK AFTER THE TOWERS CAME DOWN, I asked Gwyneh Doland, the food editor at La Cocinita, for the critic’s position at its sister paper, the Alibi. I was informed that there really wasn’t a critic’s position per se, and I said make one so I can have it. She said that the paper hadn’t done regular or formal restaurant reviews in a while and that no one had seemed to notice much. I told her I could change that—promising, if nothing else, that I’d make the readers notice me. She said she’d think about it and get back to me.

  In the meantime, Laura and I drove off to Vegas in a rented car to make the whole mess of debt, poisoned history, psychological disorder and recrimination that composed our relationship legal. The Strip was probably as close to empty as it’d ever been since being just a few acres of high desert scrubland and a Mafia wet dream. All the good restaurants were shuttered. At the chapel, we were told that our booking had been canceled because everyone else who’d been scheduled to wed had already called up to cancel themselves and the wedding coordinator had just assumed we’d forgotten. We said no, we’d very much like to get hitched, please. And in the end, the Treasure Island did right by us. There were no pirates, but Laura’s immediate family and mine flew in to stand as witnesses and play the nickel slots. Flowers, candles and a cake from Freed’s (Robert Goulet’s favorite bakery) were procured. A reverend was located—a white-haired, rheumy-eyed old man with the whiskey shakes and breath that could’ve stripped paint, who was either a retired or defrocked Baptist, I can never remember which—and we told him to keep his part short, sweet, and to leave God out of it.

  We’d written our own vows. They were far from traditional. Ten minutes after the processional had played Laura in, Etta James singing “At Last” played us back down the aisle as man
and wife. In the eyes of the Nevada Gaming Commission, we were in it together now, for better or worse, till death do us renegotiate.

  We used the same six-dollar rings Laura had bought back in Rochester and ate at In-N-Out Burger to celebrate.

  She’s still waiting on that honeymoon on Monkey Forest Road.

  When we got back to Albuquerque three days later and I called the office, Gwyneth told me I had the job. I was a restaurant critic now.

  Grim fact: writing about life as a writer is not nearly so interesting as writing about life as a cook. As a cook, there are knives and fire, battles, drama, fistfights, death, revelry and shit blowing up, all of it spaced out by odd moments of quiet and pure, unfettered joy. Being a writer, on the other hand, is mostly just about sitting still and typing. The minute I set aside my Henckels and picked up a pen, I became a tourist in the cooks’ world.

  I made a deal with myself when I took that first critic’s gig at the Alibi that, to the best of my ability and within the bounds of the possible, I would fully inhabit every word I wrote about the industry I’d loved and loathed, lived in and, ultimately, left. I would always be there—lurking, present. There would be no act, no persona, no evasion beyond that which I quickly learned was required by the spy-versus-spy realities of the job itself. Above all, I would always tell the truth.

  Not journalistic truth, necessarily. That part was a given, even if never exactly easy. My promise (mostly kept) was to a smaller, more intimate, more controllable truth—one of the self and the experience, of preserving the scene, which has become such a large part of dining out these days, and also all that which went on behind the scenes, in the kitchen and on the line, in the crush of service and at the bar once all was said and done. No matter how bad, no matter how embarrassing to myself or those around me, I would tell my stories and, through them, try to illuminate the intricacies of the job going on out of sight of the public. I would try to explain how it was different in every conceivable way from what the civilians were being shown on the Food Network, in celebrity interviews in the glossy food mags where chefs were being treated like Hollywood idols, like the rock stars we’d all once secretly dreamed of becoming. We—meaning my as-yet-nonexistent readers and I—would not be eating at the French Laundry or El Bulli or La Tour, after all. It wasn’t Batali or Ripert or Bocuse or Boulud in these kitchens.53 It was guys and girls just like me, who’d lived and worked like me and understood the same kind of high joys and ugliness I did.

  Who better, then, to tell their stories than me? To write of their triumphs and defeats, the draw of The Life: La Vida Cocina, this thing of ours. I imagined being lauded as a hero, as a clear and true voice of the proletarian white jacket. And it was easy, of course, because I hadn’t yet had to actually do anything. In my imagination, everything that followed from my first day as a critic would be free pie, lobster tails and blow jobs.

  Needless to say, that’s not quite how things worked out.

  IN ALBUQUERQUE, I found myself for the first time confined to the other side of the swinging doors. That idea of telling cooks’ stories? Not so easy as I’d thought now that I was supping with the enemy, sitting in pretty dining rooms, eating the food rather than cooking it.

  Since I already knew all the tricks and shortcuts, no one could cheapjack me or get away with anything. I could taste the dulling hint of freezer burn, smell a fish that’d already been a grandmother when it came off the delivery truck. I knew what a confit was supposed to taste like when it was done right, the difference between right and rushed, ultimately the difference between rushed and just wrong. Every plate set before me, the critic, was like a signed confession by the chef. I knew every motion the guys in the kitchen were making, every pass of the knife, every flip of the pan. If I closed my eyes and concentrated, I could reproduce them in an imaginary kitchen in my head—moving deliberately through the steps of prep and final plating, a little bit of meditative cook’s tai chi.

  But what I hadn’t figured on was then having to kneecap my former friends, contemporaries and fellow travelers for fucking up the duck. I hadn’t expected the perfidy, the requisite insolence of talking shit about some poor line dog’s chow mein or desebrado. I learned quickly that there are no small betrayals in life. That no one gets to sell out just a little.

  I also learned that no one really cares what the fish tasted like. No one (except maybe another chef, and only then with an eye toward stealing) wants to read a rote recitation of ingredients: The breast of hobgoblin was pounded thin, salted, peppered, topped with a sauce of hobo wine and crankcase oil, then, finally, cilantro.

  The food in food writing is set dressing for a story. In criticism, it is causality: I have come to this place because there is food here. In the best cases, it is scenery that rises almost to the level of character, like light in a Bergman film, the optometrist’s billboard looming over every downfall of Jay Gatsby and his pals, a menacing couch in a Stanley Kubrick costume drama. But the food itself cannot ever really be a character in full because that honor must, in decency, be reserved for those who grew it, prepared it, served it, ate it or fought about it later that night. The essential, maddening and ironic disconnect in writing about food is that the writer is sent to the places where the food is and then, if he knows what he’s doing, writes about everything but. Food has no story. It just is. It is the light, the billboard, the menacing couch. The story is in what was done to the food, with the food, near the food. The story is almost always about food’s history (at least a little) and always always about how the food made everyone feel.

  So, fine. Once I’d learned these three lessons (that being on the floor necessarily cuts you off from the kitchen; that this, in turn, makes the food your single connection to the cooks on the line and the chef in his office; and that the food, though the ostensible reason for your being on the floor, is almost always the least interesting thing to talk about), I was left with only one option: to talk about myself. This was a relief because at least when I was talking about myself, I controlled the story. I could still be a critic, could still say that the veal was good, the baked Alaska frozen, and describe how the waiter put his thumb in the soup, but I could also place it all in a context. Did I know a few things about veal? You bet. And I knew even more about thumb consommé because there was this one place, back in New York, where I had this captain named Johnny . . .

  Quickly, this was what my weekly missives became: me talking about myself and talking about food and talking, mostly, about food in relation to me. I became a highly subjective, biased and personal lens through which food in general and certain restaurants in particular were seen. Everything became autobiography because, in my mind, anything else would either be trite (The omelet was toothsome and had an excellent mouth-feel . . .) or a shallow lie.54 And, of course, autobiography also served my original purpose of offering honesty and genuineness to people who maybe had no idea where their dinner was actually coming from. Maybe I couldn’t write about the bad nights, terrible tragedies, blood, dope and ecstasy in other chef’s kitchens, but I sure as hell could write about all that’d been done in my own.

  There was a price, though, because there is always a price. Like a savings account, one’s past is a finite commodity. Even Proust, after eating that fucking madeleine, ran dry eventually.

  I figured I had enough material—enough past—to cover me for about a thousand years. After that, though, I was gonna be in trouble.

  “WHAT MATTERS IS WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW. That’s where they’ll get you.”

  My current boss, Patty Calhoun, at my current job as critic and food columnist for Westword newspaper in Denver, told me that shortly after I came into her employ. It’s probably the single best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten about writing, and up there, I think, in the top ten for life in general. What Patty didn’t know when she hired me? Pretty much everything that’s in this book. But I’m okay with that. I think the odds are good that she’ll never read it. She’s already had to put up
with me and read nearly every word I’ve written since 2002, and that’s a lot to ask of anyone. As she would be the first to tell you.

  What matters is what you don’t know. Patty was talking about food and writing about food; saying that, yeah, yeah, it was great, all this cooking experience I had, all this stuff I knew. But what was important was the hundred universes full of stuff I didn’t. When the bastards are after you, that’s where they’ll trip you up. And the bastards will always be after you.

  THE CRITIC’S JOB at the Alibi was wonderful. It was educational and liberating, more fun than a sackful of monkeys and whiskey, certainly easier than standing a fourteen-hour sauté shift at some lost-outpost fusion restaurant making coconut mussels with galangal root or fillet of yak with a side of Styrofoam packing peanuts, and so delightfully, deliciously weird that it hardly ever got dull.

  The one thing it wasn’t? Well paying. I was getting seven and a half cents a word for eight hundred and fifty words a week, then an additional ten cents a word for twelve hundred words once a month.

  Yeah. Do the math.

  This put Laura and me in the interesting position of going out on a Friday night in our party duds to eat caviar and filet mignon (or tacos, churros with chocolate, dollar sushi, pupusas, moussaka or bastilla and thimbles of cinnamon-spiked Turkish coffee, all depending on the week), then spending the next six days eating ramen noodles and oatmeal. My budget for review meals was about forty bucks—not even enough to do a half-assed job, let alone a whole-assed one—so I ended up spending what little I was making off the writing to tack on additional working dinners so I could write better reviews, so I could make more pesos, so I could eat more dinners . . .

  We were living right on the edge of the combat zone in ’Burque, in a two-and-a-half-room walk-up, paying rent with Laura’s paychecks and eating off mine, but the balance sheet quickly went into the red. Even minor emergencies like running out of beer were enough to send us into a financial tailspin.