Blood, Chaos, and Alcohol.

Thanks to the marvels of Facebook I recently reestablished contact with a friend whom I lost track of nearly 18 years ago. The individual in question shall remain nameless; suffice it to say that he was the chef at my first-ever restaurant job, when I unknowingly crossed the irreversible line between dishwasher and prep cook. This guy was a thirtysomething stone-cold line cook carpenter from Colorado with years of recreational drug use on his resume and a fondness for our teenage waitresses that verged on the inappropriate. He pretty quickly pegged me as somebody who could make his life easier, and thus began a short-term mentorship program which changed the course of my life.

It didn't help that he was also a longtime rock-climber, and by summer's end he had me clambering up the sheer granite walls of Acadia National Park in mismatched shoes, hooked on the sensation of exposure and accomplishment. Driving home we would swap tokes off the pinch-hitter he kept in the glovebox of his truck while he waxed nostaldic about the glory days of Eldorado Canyon in the early 80's and the Dead shows at Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

After two seasons of this, he moved his family back to Colorado, leaving me in charge of the restaurant and with just enough climbing knowledge to be dangerous. For the next two years, as I finished college, I would return to Maine each summer and repeat the pattern with a protege of my own: Climb, smoke, cook, sleep, repeat. Not a bad way to spend a summer. Or the next five years.

Truth be told, I gave up the smoking part pretty quickly in favor of bourbon, but the climbing and cooking were my twin North Stars throughout my twenties. The climbing fell by the wayside with the advent of children, a more demanding job, and chronic tendonitis, but there are a lifetime's worth of memories from the high desert nights in wintertime when coyotes circled the campground unceasingly, or the rich striations of Nevada sandstone exploding into rainbow colors at first light as we hiked up the canyon on the predawn approach to a long route. The cooking remains a constant -- at 37, it is the only work I have ever done.


I was understandably thrilled to find my fried on Facebook -- I had always wanted the chance to point a finger and say "J'accuse! This is all your fault! If it weren't for you I could be another failed investment banker with an Ivy League degree hocking his BMW to try and cover another month's mortgage on the house in Darien! I could be respectably divorced a couple of times with a secret Oxycontin jones and children who hate me"

But no... instead I'm a happily married and battle-hardened professional chef with adorable kids and the kind of stories that stop conversations at non-industry parties. All because swinging a knife looked like more fun than busting suds when I was eighteen.


My buddy, it turns out, has drifted away from cooking and climbing both, and is now an accomplished senior paramedic and critical care specialist for his local hospital. When I contacted him the day before Thanksgiving, I was reeling from the knowledge that I would have the holiday off for the first tine in a decade. No such luck for him -- not surprisingly, T-day is a big one for medical emergencies. Between deep-fried turkies gone awry and the annual spate of DUI's, the ambulance boys keep pretty busy. Heck, my own Grandad had a heart attack on Thanksgiving several years ago, which he credits to that third piece of pie he just had to have.

So in short, the Holiday Season for an EMT is about the same as it is for a hotel sous-chef : A non-stop circus of blood, chaos, and alcohol. Scalding liquids, sharp objects, crowded spaces. People behaving badly. Overindulgence of every imaginable variety. Gluttony, fatigue, fistfights. In other words, another day at the office.

Look at it this way. By Thanksgiving morning, your kitchen team has spent the past three days getting prepped out for brunch while still knocking out some of the heaviest a la carte nights of the year. Everyone wants to eat out on Tuesday and Wednesday nights; they are too busy getting ready for the big one to bother cooking a simple meal. Wednesday night after service, the whole crew lingers until the last patrons have left the dining room, only to spend an hour humping tables, planters, and heavy sheets of plate glass to dry-set the buffet. By midnight or twelve-thirty if you're lucky, the lights go down and everybody staggers home, most likely by way of the bar next door in order to take the edge off.

Thursday morning 8 AM you're all back at it, firing the 150 pounds of mashed potatoes, a dozen prime ribs, and the first salvo out of the thirty-plus turkies that took you half a day to break down, season, and line up for roasting. Gravy bubbles in a forty-gallon steam kettle, stuffing is packed in steamer pans, cranberry sauce warmed by the twenty-quart bucket. All of the cooks are setting their stations for battle, with bottles of Evian stashed in the line coolers by the case and clean side towels folded on the shelves above in obsessively tidy stacks. Mis en place is iced down in oversized containers with backups underneath and backups to the backups ready in the walk-ins.

Meantime the breakfast cook is getting slaughtered, twenty tickets deep and sinking fast. You realize in passing that your graveyard guy is still on the line with him, slinging hashbrowns and pancakes, poaching more eggs. You can't bring yourself to send him home even though he started at 9:00 last night, its taking him, the lunch cook, and the executive chef just to keep the food moving. You have a room full of servers who aren't used to working breakfast so every third order is a clusterfuck, and the managers are too concerned about counting silverware rollups and champagne flutes to worry about the ticket times. On the back table, roasted turkies are now lined up two by two in a golden-brown phalanx which the AM sous is attcking with his boning knife, neatly removing the breast meat and flinging the carcasses across the kitchen and into the stockpot. The chef comes back in from the dining room and tells you to tear down the whole seafood display and start again, so you do -- dozen upon dozen of crab legs, oysters, and prawns lined up like toy soldiers on a pair of garish ice carvings.

And then, silence. Silence like you hear on a granite pier at the edge of an exposed deepwater bay as you watch a squall line gather on the horizon, as you wait and watch the dark razor's edge of rainshadow slicing across smooth water before any sound reaches you. Silence like the slight quake of aspen leaves, the spooling of a weathervane, the sudden rush of air as the barometric pressure drops and the front is upon you and THEN you can hear it, the thunder reaching you concurrent with the lash of the rain and rucked-up seas. The first few orders trickle in as the dining room fills, a ticket at a time. "Ordering two turkey! Two turkey and a rib! Salmon, rib, two turkey, kid's turkey!". And so on, until the rail clogs up with tickets and you have to resort to a folded-over strip of duct tape stretched above the window because there's no more room on the slide. The saucier has his head down, carving, carving, carving, slicing breasts and rolled leg meat as fast as he can and when he nicks his hand with the slicer he doesn't miss a beat, just wraps a towel around it and keeps on going. People run from the back to refill the gravy, the stuffing, the mashers but the three guys on don't move from the ten or twelve feet that circumscribe their world. They just keep putting food on plates.

At this point it ceases to be about cooking and becomes a matter of survival. A server takes food to the wrong table and comes running back in a panic, the other table is making a fuss about it, you need to replate the entire ten-top on the fly because the food got cold on its round trip to the dining room and the entire machine comes grinding to a halt as the sequence of orders is broken and the inevitable domino effect of confusion sends your cooks into a frenzy. Buy the table a round of drinks, buy them dessert, buy them anything but most of all buy yourself a couple of minutes to get the train back on the tracks.

Cooks as I have observed previously are creatures of habit and routine who rely on an orderly sequence of tasks. For holiday service, the whole process is streamlined -- each guy has one dish to execute, and for eight solid hours his world is defined by the components of that dish. If their item isn't selling, they help the saucier set turkey plates because you KNOW that's selling. Anything that forces them out of the zone is tantamount to a car bomb, whether its a request for well-done rib or dropped sautee pan at a critical moment. Or a refired ten-top.

And so it goes, from 10 AM until the last stragglers stagger in at 6. The ice carvings are starting to look a bit vague around the edges, and the aspic on the terrines is starting to lose its lustre. Food runners are nowhere to be found so you find yourself restocking the buffet, trying to coak the cheese display into presentable condition one more time, fluffing the salads, eyeing the seafood and wondering if it's going to hold out. Last Christmas Day you and the executive chef spent half the morning driving around Chinatown looking for oysters, and the memory still makes you twitch. Meanwhile, the turkey situation is looking dire; you rolled the dice and didn't fire a last round of birds, and now you are counting the orders on the slide and the meat in the hotbox and hoping that the two add up. For the sake of saving twenty bucks worth of poultry you're going to end up comping somebody's hundred-dollar meal when you run out, and how's THAT gonna play upstairs. Your cooks are punch-drunk and getting sloppy, their stations halfway broken down already, the mis en place floating in half-melted ice. All you can think about is sitting down, taking your shows off, and a drink.

But not so fast. Tomorrow is Black Friday, and that's a whole different ball of wax.