Adjustments

When I arrived at 6:05 one of my Sous-chefs met me at the door with a look of utter panic on her face. Uh-oh.

 

"Chef, Chef, we have a major problem", she spat out, barely able to contain herself.

Ten years of conditioning already had my mind in overdrive damage-control mode. What was it? Overnight fire that tripped the ansul system and trashed the kitchen? Seen that. Flood from a broken pipe in the ceiling that left the entire place three inches deep in dirty water? Seen that. Two of the AM cooks in a fistfight, such that neither one of them would be present for his shift today? Seen that. Walk-in cooler went down sometime last night, propelling every scrap of product straight into the danger zone for an indeterminate length of time? Seen that one too. And here I was at a brand-new place, with a whole new realm of potential crises to face before my second cup of coffee.

"Calm down. What's going on?" I couldn't smell smoke or hear the slosh of standing water, so I proceeded to unlock my office, stow my backpack, and change into my work shoes as Kim followed me like an anxious shadow.

 

"They ran out of soap for the dish machine last night, so they couldn't finish washing the dishes, and all the stuff for the salad bar and the espresso counter is still dirty, and we need it to open".

 

Full stop.

 

That was the extent of the problem. Somehow, through some superhuman effort, we had to find a way to hand-wash half-a-dozen thermal carafes and blender tops and a few silver buffet pans before we opened in an hour. I paused long enough to send out a group email to the twenty-five other chefs within a two-mile radius who use the same detergent, then rolled up my sleeves for a quick twenty minutes of old-fashioned sudbusting. By the time we had the necessary stuff clean and run through the soapless machine for a sanitizing rinse, I had three separate emails from colleagues who could lend me a case of detergent until my Sysco order showed up later in the morning. I knocked back a quick doppio from the now-open espresso counter, shuffled back into my riding gear, and cruised on down to Café 112 to pick up some soap. Crisis averted.

 

Crisis, after all, is a matter of perspective. At my old job, the potential for disaster was unceasing and awesome in its magnitude. The wheels never stopped turning -- I could walk in at 6 to face a plated breakfast for 300, or the entire Washington Redskins offensive unit waking up hungry before a morning game. If a single person called out sick, the entire operation could go sideways, prompting a frantic round of phone calls to hungover cooks in an attempt to find coverage. Product went missing or showed up late or incorrect or not at all, meeting planners threw fits because of spots on their bananas or runny scrambled eggs, John Travolta's personal assistant is looking for a steak quesadilla made from hand-cut tenderloin and he needs it now. And this is just the everyday stuff. This doesn't even factor in the presence of the Saudi Royal Family, or the Rolling Stones, or any of the other one-off situations that stretch your resources even further. Those are stories for a different time.

Imagine two motorcycles. One of them is a full-race MotoGP machine, built with the sole purpose of going faster and handling better than anything else on the track for exactly as long as it takes to win a race. Pneumatic valvetrain, massively oversquare cylinders, compression ratio through the roof and every scrap of metal from the crankshaft to the fasteners lovingly machined and massaged to the end of minimum weight and maximum performance. When everything is working right – when the ignition map is dialed in spot on and the rings have seated properly on the break-in, when the engineers have settled on the ideal valve-timing and injector size, when the tires are warm and the track is dry and the suspension settings tweaked just right – when all of these stars are in alignment, you have a machine that will take you from zero to a buck eighty-five in about two heartbeats and keep you there for the better part of two hours.

The flip side of course is that one slight mishap or misadjustment and the whole thing blows up on you, sometimes literally. Valvestems snap, pistons seize, bearings spin, hoses burst and spew coolant all over the tires and the track. Or maybe the thing just runs like crap, surging and shuddering and hesitating, fighting you through the corners and trying its damndest to throw you into the haybales. And even if it does run properly, the engine has about three hours of life in it before it needs a rebuild or better yet a replacement. This is why factory teams travel with entire replacement engines ready to swap out at an hour's notice if need be.

What, then, of the second bike?

The second bike is more like my R60. Carbureted. Points ignition. Compression in the range of 10:1 and a combustion chamber shape that in no way resembles a Frank Gehry building. Everything is overbuilt and heavier than it needs to be, and pretty much anything that goes wrong can be addressed with a set of wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers. Keep the oil changed and the valves adjusted, the thing will go forever. It won't go real fast, but it gets you where you're going fast enough and you still have fun getting there, without the sense of straddling a time bomb at one-eighty plus. There are plenty of thrills to be had but at the end of the day you can put the bike to bed knowing that when you hit the starter tomorrow it will fire up compliantly and do it all again, even if the timing is half a degree off and the plugs are partway fouled. Anything that goes wrong you can probably fix with a set of wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers, but most likely nothing will go wrong in the first place.

 

The hotel kitchen was a MotoGP caliber machine, but it had to run unceasingly without the luxury of a shutdown for repair and rebuilding. Parts were changed on the fly and if a crucial piece let go at crunch time then the wreckage was spectacular. My new gig at Redwest is more akin to the second, more workaday machine. Not as flashy, not as glamorous, and without the adrenaline-soaked thrill incurred by simply keeping both wheels on the ground. Overbuilt, with inherent redundancy such that two or three people can call out sick and the place keeps on running. More forgiving, with lower expectations, but with plenty of room to push the envelope if you're so inclined. When something does break down, it is generally a pretty easy fix. I can change a menu item at the last minute, substitute one dish for another, pull a barista to help serve food when a cook doesn't show. Dissatisfied guests are bought off easily with a comped lunch, neighboring cafes are close at hand to swap product with, and the clientele and management alike are easily impressed with even a modest effort to raise the bar. Yesterday I made prosciutto-wrapped salmon as one of the entree choices and my new team looked at me like I had just invented fire. It felt good.

 

As a much wiser man than I once said:

 

"It's more fun to ride a slow bike fast than it is to ride a fast bike slow".

 

Agreed.

Commuting.

There is something about an air-cooled, carbureted motorcycle engine and a cold, clear winter day that just goes together. Peanut butter and jelly. Gin and tonic. Cigarettes and coffee. Stockings and high heels -- take your pick. It just works.

Objectively, I know the reason. Colder air is denser and contains more oxygen, which means a more volatile fuel-air mixture and a bigger bang for the given jetting and displacement. Bigger bang equals more power, which is why land-speed records have always been set at low elevations and preferably in cool temperatures when the air is densest, viz the Bonneville salt flats at dawn.

I am not about to set any speed records, but I love to ride on a clear winter morning.

I have owned modern bikes, and can appreciate everything that they have to offer in terms of real brakes and predictable suspension. What they do NOT offer is the innate pleasure of owning, riding, and mainting something that has more personality than most people of my accquaintance.

My ride is a 1976 BMW R60/6, which I bought the same year that I got married. It is only slightly younger than I am, though arguably better maintained. The R60 was the redheaded stepchild of the /6 line, the last bike that BMW made with a drum brake up front, its undersized cylinders fed by a pair of quaint little roundslide carbs. Whereas the 750 and 900cc versions of the same bike are recognized as landmark touring machines before the era of fully-faired roadburners, the R60 occupies a peculiar niche, slightly underpowered and tremendously underappreciated. They are the best-kept secret in the pantheon of vintage Beamers.

What the uninitiated fail to understand is that an R60, properly tuned and with a few minor tweaks, is one hell of an enjoyable ride. To compensate for the smaller displacement, they fitted the bike with a different camshaft than its larger-lunged brethren, allowing for more valve overlap and thus a higher effective compression ratio. With less torque and horsepower to apply, the engineers in their wisdom fitted a shorter-ratio gearset, making for less speed at the top end but a snappy ride up to about 70, which is realistically as fast as you want to go with those drum brakes. Whack the revs up to five and a half then short-shift it up through fourth gear and you'll see what I mean. Get the front suspension dialled in (either progressives or the heavy-duty stock springs, which I use), put a decent set of shocks on the back and swap out the standard Metzlers or Dunlops for a set of Bridgestone S11's, and all of a sudden you have a sweet-handling, silky-smooth machine with enough oomph to get out of its own way and the legs to take you anywhere.

The great secret about the R60 is that the top end is grafted onto a crank and drivetrain that were designed to accomodate half again as much displacement, which means that the machine is massively overbuilt for the moderate stresses imposed on it. They are, as a result, the longest lived of the '70s bikes; I know of several with well over 300k on the clock that are still running strong, their bottom ends untouched through the course of half a dozen ring and valve jobs. An email accquaintance of mine recently rode his successfully in the Iron Butt rally, covering 10,000 miles in ten days while touching all 4 corners of the continental US. Riding in a sea of Goldwings, K12RT's, and ST1300's, he finished the rally with minimal drama then returned to his daily commute.

My own commute has changed of late, in some ways for the better. After years of a straight shot downtown on I-5, I have begun a daily trek across the 520 to Redmond, 18 miles door-to-door. Without traffic, 20 minutes; during rush hour, bring a snack and something to read, you may need it. Thank God for the HOV lanes.

In the mornings, though, there isn't an isssue. At 5:30 I roll the bike out of the garage without starting the engine, so as not to wake the boys; I coast silently downhill along 133d street for a few dozen yards before I hit the starter and fire it up. By the time I hit my on-ramp, I have backed the choke to halfway; as soon as I am up to speed I open it the rest of the way as the bike warms up. Even this early the traffic on 5 south is surprisingly steady, and I bob and weave through the clumps of semis and contractor's vans down through Northgate and the University district. Coming over the ship canal bridge, the city rears up between Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, with the lakeshore curving away below me on both sides. In daylight, Mount Rainier overlooms the entire prospect like an outsized scrim painted on the morning sky itself.

Just past the bridge I duck into a tunnel that drops down and hooks hard left at the bottom, enough so that it's easy to come in too hot and and find myself braking hard at the apex. The curve is tight and fast enough that more than once I have touched metal to the asphalt just before it straightens out. On rainy days I scrub the speed off hard coming down from the freeway and clench my teeth just a little as I lean it over.

Out of the tunnel, 520 picks up arrow-straight for the shot across Lake Washington. Over the Montlake cut, with the houseboats glowing like a string of Chinese lanterns, past the avian silhouette of Husky Stadium against the hazy sky, then onto the floating bridge, skimming so close to the lake that I feel like I am riding directly on the water's surface. Even in the inkblack predawn I can make out the lake on either side, the upwind portion rucked up in a courduroy chop, the downwind reach as smooth as as swath of fresh snow. Later in the spring when I crest the Eastern highrise and approach the outskirts of Bellevue, I will see the first vermilion edge of sunrise framing the peaks of Snoqualmie, reflecting off of upslope snowfields in an explosion of color. Right now, however, a week before the solstice, the ascent towards the Sammamish plateau is a headlong rush up a darkened staircase framed only by the retroflective guardrails on either side.

All of this transpires to a soundtrack. Last year I blew the entirety of my Christmas gift card swag on a ridiculously good pair of Etyomotic earbuds, which jack into a matchbook-sized ipod in the breast pocket of my jacket. They sound better than any pair of full-sized speakers I have ever owned. The ipod shuffles 200 songs that comprise a snapshot of my musical history, running the gamut from Springsteen wailing out "Candy's Room" to Ice Cube and Snoop's assault-rifle delivery on "Go to Church". In between there's a whole lot of Death Cab, Dire Straits, Miles, Moby, James McMurtry, and everything in between. Imagine bursting out of a darkened tunnel pulling hard at the top of third gear and power-shifting into fourth as you snap the bike upright and tuck down over the tankbag, Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene" winding up to a frenzy and the fully warmed-up engine breathing deep of the crisp clean saturated air and howling with satisfaction... at that moment I feel as close as I can to the way my four-year-old son must feel every morning at first light when he flings back the curtain at his bedside and proclaims, regardless of the weather and to noone in particular : "It's a beautiful day"!

I love my commute.

Leaving the Big House

History has taught us that hostages and captives over time often come to identify with their captors, to the extent that upon their release they find it difficult to leave. After years of separation from their families and society, their most basic rights taken forcibly from them, these damaged survivors find themselves powerfully bonded with those who provided their only human contact, however dire the reality of their confinement. I think that it is called the Stockholm Syndrome.

With this, you can understand how hard it was to leave the hotel after ten years and walk blinking into the daylight of a Monday through Friday gig. When the time came to walk across the loading dock and climb on my scooter one more time, I had physical difficulty leaving the building. I felt like somebody had buried one of those invisible fences around the perimeter and it was hitting me with just enough juice to keep me from trying to cross the line again. So instead, I wandered the bowels of the place for a full hour after I had left the kitchen, walking the service corridors and saying more goodbyes, postponing the inevitable.

Let me try to put it in perspective. I started in that house as a breakfast cook when I was 26, childless, and fresh out of culinary school. I have really never known another job for any significant length of time. I worked every position in the operation, from graveyard cook to saucier to restaurant chef for the five-star dining room. And for the last three years, as executive sous chef, I lived and breathed that operation twenty-four seven, period. Thirteen hours was an average day,fifteen not unusual, and I would still come home with my laptop and a pile of schedules or reviews to knock out on the couch with the TV on as background noise. I worked every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every New Years Eve since 1998. Without exaggeration I spent more time these last few years with my Exec Chef than with my own wife, and likewise him with me.

The job, in short, was eating me alive, and something had to give. I was a minor league player called up to the majors and fighting every day to hold his own, unwilling to admit that some of us are meant to be happy playing AAA. I clung to it at first because I thought it was what I wanted and later, as my depression pulled me further into the abyss, I clung to it because the routine, however brutal, was at least safe and familiar and in its own way comforting.

It took six months of therapy and industrial-grade meds to bring me around, but somehow things all fell into place. They always have, that's the rub. Just as the economy was teetering on the brink and the luxury hotel sector along with it, I got an offer to go out to Redmond and run a facility for Microsoft. Forty-five hour weeks. Holidays off. Home for dinner every night. Great money.

So, you're asking, what was the catch?

Here's the scary part. There wasn't one. These people were serious.

So why, then, was it so hard to leave?

Truth be told, even if you have been getting hit between the eyes with a two-by-four every day for ten years, there is a certain solace in knowing which two-by-four it's going to be and who will be swinging it. Better the devil you know. After a decade in the Big House, I understood its inner workings like the custodian of a medieval clock understands the vagaries of its mechanism. I knew the secret repositories of power and influence, and where everything was kept within the labyrinthine back-of-the house passageways that spanned twelve floors and an entire city block. The engineers trusted me enough to lend me tools, the security guys kept an eye on my bike for me, the admins would happily take on massive photocopying and collating projects for me. In so many ways, I had it wired.

In so many other ways, though, I didn't -- at least not sufficiently to earn the approbation of my boss, who was both a genius at his job and a borderline psychopath. Every decision, every action, every project invariably led me down the road of ridcule and abuse until I simply expected it. My day to day life had become a self-fulfillying prophecy of Sisyphian proportions, and yet I kept going. If I focused on the restaurants, I lost control of banquets. If I focused on banquets, I lost track of what was happening in the restaurants. Each week I went through the exercise of scheduling forty-two people in five different areas across three shifts in a terminally short-staffed kitchen, and every week I unfailingly fucked it up, either blatantly or in some barely perceptible way which would then be elucidated to me in painstaking detail. At the end of every month, I frantically slashed labor in order to make our forecast, often covering double and triple shifts myself to save the hours, only to start the next month by fighting tooth and nail for a budget that would keep us from landing in the same situation yet again. I was expected to be on the floor more or less nonstop, accountable for every scrap of food that left the kitchen, yet the avalanche of paperwork never slowed down; hence the evening laptop sessions. And through it all, I never gained an inch.

So now you're thinking I must have been nuts to even consider passing up the chance to escape. But look at the flip side.

By the time I left, I had personally hired almost half of the cooks in the hotel, and had come up alongside the rest of them until I took the precipitous leap into management. For the rookies, I embodied the totality of that kitchen's day to day operation, and they couldn't conceive of the place carrying on without me. For the veterans, I was a dependable presence, the guy who was always there to troubleshoot or lend a hand, the guy who generally had the answers, and most important of all the buffer between then and the outright volatility of the Chef. I was the balance wheel, and these people counted on me. They needed me. And we all like to be needed. Would anybody need me quite so much anywhere else? Doubtful.

In the end, of course, I left.

I had cleaned out my office gradually over the course of my final two weeks, so on my last day I left empty-handed. Ireturned my laptop to the IT guy, and my backpack felt oddly light without the familiar weight. One more time to the locker room, where I changed into my riding gear as I had every night for what felt like a lifetime. Once more to the laundry to turn in my dirty uniform, but without the continuity of picking up a clean one. Once more through the tunnel that runs to the loading dock, where I had parked my bike in its accustomed well-protected corner. And once more the reverberation of exhaust noise against the garage walls as I rode out, the sound throatier and louder than it was when the pipes were ten years younger. One left turn and two quick rights put me onto I-5 northbound, headed for home.

I haven't looked back.