Of Caviar and Carburetors

Running Red Lights

2010-09-19T20:22:00.001-07:00

There was a great article this morning in the Sunday Times sports section about figure-eight stock car racing, which one racetrack tow-truck driver described as "definitely one of the most dangerous types of motor sports there is".

It's a pretty simple concept. Drivers maneuver their 650-horsepower cars around a cramped half-mile figure eight track (which is usually unpaved), at speeds approaching 100 miles an hour. In order to make the transition from running clockwise around one loop to running counterclockwise around the other, they are obliged to steer directly into oncoming traffic trying to make the same transition in the other direction. Imagine driving full-tilt down a busy urban street and running every red light you encounter, relying on your timing, reflexes, and a whole lot of luck. Crashes are frequent and spectacular; fatalities are not uncommon. Even so, the sport endures at dozens of tracks around the country and is a multigenerational affair in many families.

The reporter sums it up pretty succinctly:

"The people who do this, who tenderly build racecars that cost up to $50,000 and then drive them repeatedly into crossing traffic, know that they are wired differently."

Hey, wait a minute. Are we sure he isn't writing about chefs here?

My average workday for the most part feels an awful lot like a succession of potential head-on collisions, most of which I manage to avoid by sheer dint of experience, snap judgment, and sometimes pure luck. In order to succeed as a chef, you can't back down when things get messy. You need to stick your neck out and make the hard decision, knowing full well that the entire operation may come grinding to a halt if you blow a call. You need to have the courage of your convictions to stick to a decision when it is the right thing to do, and the willingness to stand on the brakes and swerve when you sense the gap closing too fast. When it's Monday morning and the gas isn't working and your breakfast cook is in police custody, when the produce truck is late and the dish machine is down and the barista has locked herself in your office to cry and oh, by the way, the CEO is in town and wants to tour today… you, as the chef, can't just slow down and drift into the pit lane to think things over. The rest of the cars are still careening around that track and you need to grit your teeth and stare down the oncoming traffic and make a MOVE, motherfucker. And not only that you have to enjoy it, live for it, even look forward to it. As a good friend in the business said to me recently at the tail end of another 14-hour day: "Boredom is my Kryptonite".

If you get off on an environment where things routinely burst into flames, where blood, sweat and tears are more than a figure of speech…well, there's just something fundamentally different about you. If you take it for granted that an honest day's work starts somewhere north of the ten-hour mark and probably doesn't involve a lunch break, if you assume that your average workday will almost certainly involve raised voices, foul language, physical discomfort, stress, confrontation, and the near-sexual release of cranking out mass volumes of good food…well, fuck. You're reading this, aren't you?

For the past several months my late-night, can't-sleep bedside reading has been Sun Tzu's The Art of War, in an edition edited with commentary aimed directly at contemporary managers in the business world. The basic premise – that modern corporations are not far removed from feudal Chinese warfare – holds up as pretty sound. And who among us hasn't felt the occasional urge to behead a concubine or two, just to make our point?

One theme which recurs again and again is the issue of resource allocation. Does the wise General send reinforcements to shore up an underprotected area, or does he leverage his strong positions in order to divert pressure from his weaknesses? Defend the castle or storm the bridge? Do you slide that extra tight end over to the weak side to cover the gap, or do you double-stack him with your fullback and go up the gut?

In other words, just another day at the office. Do I break up my dream team on the sautee line in order to shore up a pantry that's chronically weeded? Do I shave my product cost to the bone to free up more cash for labor, or do I max out on the fact that my food kicks ass and drive the top line sales, in the hopes that it all flows through? Do I spend my morning doing mis for the weakest station in my empire, or do I dedicate my time to challenging and developing my A-players, knowing full well that they're the ones who are going to carry my ass in the long run? That's how I spend my early commute every day, mentally juggling scenarios as the cool morning air swirls inside my helmet and the bike laps up the miles of darkened asphalt. By the time I walk into the kitchen at 6AM I know who is going where and doing what, which subtle adjustments we are going to make to face the day, where we might fall down and what I'm going to do to stop it.

And if I have to run a few red lights to get there, what the hell. It isn't the speed that gets you, it's the sudden stop.

The Privilege of Age

2009-11-16T21:48:00.001-08:00

A week or two ago I heard Chesley Sullenberger III on the radio. You remember our man Chesley – he's the stone cold ace who seemingly without flinching dropped a 747 smooth as silk into the Hudson when he lost power over Manhattan. Saved something like 200 lives, minimal drama, all in a day's work or so it appeared.

He was receiving yet another accolade or honorarium when I heard him, and with characteristic humility he said something like the following:

"I have had the privilege of living long enough to become very good at something that is extremely difficult to do well. My profession may be one of the few in which grey hair is considered an asset rather than a liability".

Amen, Chesley. I have doubtless butchered the quotation, and I am sure that one of my more astute friends (that's you I am talking about, Quigg) will find the actual speech on a podcast and link to it just for the pleasure of calling me out. Anyway, his words brought to mind a couple more choice ones from my halcyon rock-climbing years:

"Good Judgement is the result of experience. Unfortunately, experience is all too often the result of bad judgement"

Or:

"There are old mountaineers and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers"

And lastly:

"Go big, or go home".

The gist of this all is that we live in a world where youth and vigor are all too often confused with skill and capability. The cult of youth has long since overtaken our cultural fascination– we lionize the teenaged basketball prodigy, the twentysomething software genius, the barely pubescent pop star whose woman-child persona is a form of temporal androgyny trapping her somewhere in the twilight zone between schoolgirl and sexpot. This is far from news, and as I creep up on forty I spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of time reflecting on the failed promise of my own early years. I seem destined to wrap up my fourth decade without the Great American Novel to my credit, sure as I was that I had it in me. Likewise, I never managed to pioneer a new route on a major alpine wall, nor did I develop some seminal piece of game-changing technology. Ditto the heartbreakingly insightful collection of essays which would define my generation, and along with it the archetypical hit record of my era. Instead, I find myself just another guy raking leaves in the suburbs on a Sunday afternoon waiting for the Seahawks game to start and worrying about the CV joints in my pickup.

I am ten years too late for Boy Wonder status no matter how you spin it.

And yet, as Chesley so adroitly phrased it, I have had the privilege of living long enough to become very good at something which is difficult to do well. And I increasingly have reason to take satisfaction from this.

As of this year, I have been cooking professionally in one way or another for a full twenty years. Restaurants, boats, hotels, corporate dining…at the end of the day it is all food, and I haven't done anything else for my entire working life to date. For nearly ten of those last twenty years I have been managing cooks and kitchens, first as a fine-dining restaurant chef, later as a banquet chef overseeing massive high-end functions and an executive sous chef responsible for the 24/7 chaos of a luxury hotel. I may not have seen it all, but I have seen enough to have some perspective. I have lived through enough hairball situations that I know from experience what to do and more importantly what NOT to do. My first instinct is more often than not a good one, and I find that I can increasingly foresee and troubleshoot potential problems before they evolve into full-blown crises.

When I was just starting out at the hotel, I had a sous-chef who was thirty years into the life and had spent his whole career hammering it out in the big hotels. One December in the midst of a full-on Saturday banquet meltdown I innocently said to him: "Hey, at least it can't get any worse".

Chris turned and looked at me with eyes as big as saucers, caught in mid-stride between the ovens and the dishup line, moving like a man with his hair on fire.

"Oh, no", He said. "No, it can always get worse!"

He was right, of course. It can always get worse. The skill lies in recognizing this and having the presence of mind to see it coming and the decision-making ability to keep it from getting there. The food press may buzz with the under-thirty hotshots who are making the scene in Seattle or Chicago, but look around. The true heavy hitters – the guys that guys like me look up to? They're all Old! Thomas Keller? Eric Ripert? Jean-Georges? Older than me and then some, and they all did their time in the trenches. Aging golfers and tennis players have to soak their arthritic joints and watch the superhuman ascent of Tiger and Rafael Nadal, but chefs have the satisfaction of watching their idols grow old before them and aspiring to get there themselves.

A few weeks ago my Dad and my buddy Dave and I went out to the Sunset to see Jonathan Lethem give a talk and afterwards we retired to a Mexican joint around the corner for a bowl of oxtail pozole and a few margaritas. One way or another the conversation turned to commercial fishing and the story of a young scalloper whom my father had known several years back. He was good, he was bold, and one day he went out for one last set with the weather turning foul and he never came back. Everybody's best guess was that he snagged something on the bottom and with the seas running hard his boat took on water and went down in minutes.

My father paused, an older man with two younger men, themselves both fathers of young boys, hanging on his words as he reflected.

"A guy who had been fishing like that for forty, fifty years – he might have had a chance. He might have felt that drag start to hang up a split second sooner and cut the winch loose before it stopped him. He might have just felt something funny in the way the gear was running and decided to slow it down a touch, and that would have been enough. At a time like that there just isn't any substitute for time out on the water".

Let the boy wonders have their moment in the sun. There are old fishermen, there are bold fishermen, but there sure as hell aren't a lot of old, bold fishermen.

Food on the Table

2009-09-08T21:32:00.001-07:00

Tonight I made lasagna for dinner. Easy, economical, and the kids love it. So do I although I always end up feeling like my stomach has been injected with high-density polyester resin after I am through eating.

Maybe I should just eat less.

That is beside the point, at least as far as this particular line of inquiry is concerned. What I am talking about is lasagna. One package of Barilla no-boil pasta sheets, two jars spaghetti sauce, a container of ricotta, some ground beef left over from last week's tacos, and the end of a five-pound bag of shredded mozz that I brought home from the Cash & Carry to make pizza for Miles' birthday. Ten minutes to assemble, an hour in the oven while I read the paper and have a cocktail, and it's a done deal.

As I was digging in to slice the sucker, Jennifer raised the subject of stuffed shells. This happens often in our household; we have not even begun to consume the meal in question, yet we are already discussing what to make next, or what we have eaten in the past, or where and when we have eaten something similar or better or different or wholly unrelated. The food in front of us serves as a catalyst for memory and speculation as much as it does nutrition.

Stuffed shells. Something else easy and universally popular. Bears the same effective relationship to lasagna that a calzone does to pizza. Certainly not in the same league as a madeleine when it comes to blowing out the floodgates of memory.

And yet, at the mention of them I was transfixed. "You remember the last time we talked about eating stuffed shells"? Jennifer asked.

I was already there.

This happened maybe eight months ago, shortly after I left the hotel for the greener pastures of Redmond. It was a school night, coming up on dinnertime, and neither one of us had given much thought to planning a meal. Jennifer was still unused to having me home in the evenings, after years of feeding only herself and the boys from a simple but reliable repertoire fortified by the bounty of Trader Joe's freezer case. I was still growing accustomed to regular meals after living for the better part of a decade on whatever I could hold in one hand while I kept working with the other, so the very notion of cooking for my family on a regular basis wasn't even on the radar. In other words, we were screwed.

"Why don't you just run up to Sam's and grab some stuffed shells or something"? Jenny suggested. "They're pretty good. The boys love 'em". So off I went to Sam's Club.

And that's when I had the breakdown. In front of the frozen foods case at Sam's, considering breaded chicken products.

It was less of a breakdown than a full-blown crisis of conscience. As I debated the merits of frozen pasta versus chicken cordon bleu, it hit me all at once.

Whatever I chose, I was getting ready to feed my family absolute crap.

Coming to terms with my absolute lack of integrity was suddenly staggering. There I was, having dedicated my entire working life to the preparation of great food from scratch, yet not thinking twice about giving my kids a plateful of the worst kind of unpronounceable mass-produced garbage. All because I was too damn lazy to plan a real dinner for my own family after devoting the past ten hours to feeding complete strangers. You can spare me the rhetoric about the cobbler's children – it was absolute bullshit and I knew it. Looking at the overflowing freezers I knew I couldn't go there anymore.

For starters you have to understand how I was raised. My mother stayed at home well into my adolescence, and my childhood in retrospect was a nonstop cascade of fresh-baked bread, homemade soups, and frequent forays into the Julia Childs oeuvre. Packaged food was actually a treat as far as my brother and I were concerned, reserved for nights when my parents were going out or had dinner guests. Fast food we got a few times a year, only in the context of long car trips. I grew up assuming that sitting down every night, as a family, to a home-cooked meal, was an inalienable right of childhood. And as my own incipient parenthood loomed, I assumed that the same would hold true for my offspring.

As Eliot so ably observed, however, between the motion and the act falls the shadow. My kids grew into the age where dinner started to matter just as my own career entered a phase which precluded any semblance of a normal family life. Hence the near-cultish devotion to Trader Joe and take-and-bake pizzas. Sure, I would sometimes throw down on the weekends with homemade pizza or barbecued pork shoulder or huge pots of beef stew, but those were the exceptions. Dinner as a family was a novelty.

This has long since ceased to be the case. Ever since the night of the stuffed shell breakdown, I have consecrated anew the importance of the evening meal. Most days I am home in plenty of time to cook. Jenny and I strategize about meals in advance and shop accordingly. I can't remember the last time we cooked something out of a box, or exercised the "nuclear option" in any context other than a road trip.

And yet the sting of my own inadequacy still lingers like the pain of a phantom limb. I feel that there is still damage to undo, and a greater reckoning with my own sincerity which must be brought full circle. I am, in essence, a hypocrite. I talk sustainability at work until I am blue in the face, but I am too lazy to separate the food waste from the garbage at home. I rail against gas-guzzling SUVs, yet think nothing of burning two full tanks on an all-day ride for no particular reason. I preach integrity to my staff and colleagues when I know my own is sorely lacking.

Last week I spent a day touring a state-of-the-art aquaculture operation in Southern Washington, and finished the visit with an all-organic lunch of grilled salmon, salad, sourdough bread, and artisanal cheese. We sipped locally-bottled blackberry soda and apple juice while my boss held forth on the future of farm-to-table initiatives and our corporate commitment to sustainable fish farming. The air carried the scent of freshly mown hay and Mt Rainier loomed in the distance beyond the rows of greenhouses. And all the while I thought of those goddamn stuffed shells and how easily we lose sight of what's important.

Let everybody else eat whatever the hell they want. Screw it. I'm going home to make dinner for my kids.

One from the Archives

2009-07-14T22:28:00.001-07:00

I blame this one on David.

Then again, I could say that about so many things, foremost amongst them my occasional tendency to sit down and write with a sense of purpose. Entirely his fault.

Today, towards the tail end of a leisurely summer evening run, our conversation turned towards our combined body of unpublished work and its relative merits. Suffice it to say that the totality of this work, if set alight, could go a long way towards alleviating our dependence on foreign oil. David asked "Have you taken a look at any of it lately? You should at least post it on your blog or something".

I've had friends like this before. "C'mon. How cold can the water be? Here, have another beer"

Or "Of course we can fly your tent like a kite in this freak windstorm. What could possibly go wrong"?

And so I found myself tonight with my wife and kids safely on the East Coast as I dug through the file folder labeled ominously "JSR Personal". And there, amidst the letters and baby pictures and inexplicable relics, I found a sheaf of poems that I hadn't seen in years. This is one of them.

Thanks, Quigg.

The Cook's Prayer

"The true fine arts number five: Painting, sculpture, music, dance, and architecture – the foremost branch of which is confectionary".

--Careme

God, let me be foremost a painter

That I might capture on a single plate

The languor of a summer afternoon.

Grant me as well a sculptor's eye, to see

Each object's dormant inner form, that I

Might draw potential out with practiced hands.

And like an architect, who balances

The usefulness and beauty of a thing

Grant me the knowledge of a golden mean.

Teach me to sense, as true musicians do

The time to blend in seamless harmony

But also when to soar on high, alone.

And like a dancer, grant me simple grace

To fully realize my every move

Such that my very passage through a space

Embodies the transmission of great love.

The Things I Miss

2009-05-09T21:05:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago my shrink told me that she figures that I have the brain of a recovering meth addict.

Note the use of the present tense. Turns out it's not such an easy trip out of the woods.

Methamphetamine, pharmacologically speaking, causes the brain to produce vast quantities of dopamine. I'm talking crazy huge amounts here, several orders of magnitude beyond anything that occurs in the normal course of life. Imagine a 110 appliance plugged into a 208 line by accident and you pretty much get the picture.

Dopamine makes us feel good. It is the substance that courses through us when we feel intense love for another person, or when we throw a bike into the apex just a lttle too hot and feel the rear wheel hop out ever so slightly on the exit. Dopamine floods our brain at the moment of orgasm, the instant that our hand latches onto the bomber hold just past the crux on a sketchy climb, the first time our newborn child muckles on to our finger with his impossibly tiny fist. Dopamine celebrates accomplishment, release, triumph, raw sensual pleasure. It is adrenaline's hot, slutty cousin – desirable and available, but fleeting. We can't help but come back looking for more.

The problem with meth is that once you have lit your dopamine receptors up like God's own Christmas tree, they lose their sensitivity like taste buds with a bad case of pizza burn. Hence the addict's dilemma: You want to recapture the feeling, but it takes more every time. After meth, nothing else feels remotely pleasurable. Love? Forget about it. Sex? You probably aren't even interested, unless it's going to help you score another hit. Art, music, illegal street racing… whatever it was that used to give you that rush, it's gone. And when you go into rehab and lay off the crank, your life descends into a swirling wash of greys and browns without a speck of color to pique your interest. It takes months, or years, for the brain to exercise its remarkable self-healing powers and relearn the pleasure principle.

I never did meth with any regularity, but I might as well have.

For half a decade, I had a job that kept me at a point of near-permanent emotional and mental redline. The demands of trying to manage an operation like that demanded every bit of focus I could muster, and forced me to endure psychological punishment beyond anything I had previously thought possible. On my days off I waited in a cold sweat for the phone to ring, and on my putative vacations I spent most off my time searching for a decent WiFi connection so I could check email. There was never enough time in the day, never enough resources at my disposal, never enough effort or energy or discipline to get my arms around it. When things went wrong, they went colossally wrong; mistakes were measured in vast sums of money, or the unquantifiable yet infinitely more serious measure of damage to reputation and integrity. A single oversight could send a sixty-thousand dollar wedding spiraling irrecoverably into the abyss or leave the entire kitchen suicidally understaffed for a holiday weekend breakfast rush. When it was bad, which was most of the time, it was really bad.

On the fleeting occasions when it was good, however, it was fucking phenomenal. Dopamine bonanza. When the kitchen was firing on all cylinders, when my sous-chefs all had their game on and the food looked tight and and I was driving the whole fire-breathing machine full tilt like a GP bike down the back straight at Catalunya, I had the feeling of absolute invincibility. I was coordinating the efforts of twenty different people executing simultaneous banquets while the restaurants were going off the hook and I had it all in hand, every detail accounted for, every contingency covered, an army of people who jumped at my word and carried out their tasks like a well-oiled SWAT team in the belly of the beast… at those moments it all came together in a comingled rush of exhuberance both tempered and elevated by the certain knowledge that all hell could break loose without warning.

I miss that.

I miss expediting service for the holiday brunches when we cranked three hundred covers through the dining room in the space of four hours at a hundred bucks a head, the tickets stacked so deep that I used a line of doubled-up duct tape to create another slide for incoming orders. I miss buying Iranian Osetra by the half-kilo tin and stirring it into beurre blanc with a plastic picnic spoon. I miss the sight of thirty-five perfect cylinders of foie gras hung in neat rows from the shelves of a walk-in cooler, swaying gently like tree fruit in a breeze. I miss butchering tenderloin steaks by the hundred and seeing them racked up, seared, and buttered prior to service. I miss the slow buildup to a big night, the days of prep and planning, the rehearsal, and then the final mad crescendo of dishup followed by the delirious release when it was all over. I miss the cigarettes on the loading dock with my boss when we reviewed the game tapes, celebrating the wins and dissecting the missteps.

I miss sliding a finished plate into the window and for a brief moment pausing to consider just how gorgeous it is. I miss the food that my cooks would make for each other late into service when there was a lull, and I miss the sounds. The steel-on-steel ring of sautee pans hitting a stovetop, the hiss of rendering fat, the crash and sizzle of an entire sheetpan of product upended with an expert flip onto a red-hot broiler. I miss the raised voices, the cursing, the locker-room posturing and above all the knowledge that any one of these people would go to the wall for me before they gave up.

Why do guys like Jordan and Lance keep trying to come back? Think about it. Once you have performed at that level, been the undisputed best in your chosen line of endeavour – what's left? Can you really be happy selling insurance or calling games, or even coaching? Unless you're a freak like Bill Bradley and you go on to the US senate, you spend the rest of your life remembering what the rush felt like and forgetting how frightened you were of losing it. Which goes a long way to explain why Brett Favre is currently in talks with the Vikings.

And me? I'm home for dinner every night and I take the weekends off. My phone doesn't ring between Friday night and Monday morning, and when it does it's usually my boss calling to let me know that there's a sale at the Nike outlet. I make it to every cub scout meeting and little league practice and most nights I sleep like a baby.

And when every once in a while I go for a few drinks with my old crew and we start talking shop, I can physically feel the itch like bugs underneath my skin and I start getting that old familiar churning in my guts like it's gametime. And even though I haven't smoked in almost a year, I find myself thinking about those post-mortem cigarettes on the loading dock. Damn, they tasted good.

Guts and Gears

2009-03-01T14:18:00.001-08:00

Plenty of people are already on the job at five in the morning. Cops, breakfast cooks, diner waitresses, transit drivers… it is far from an exclusive club.

On the other hand, very few people start their workday at said inhuman hour in a vast and empty commercial kitchen with a fourteen-inch knife in their hand staring down the gutted carcass of a wild Alaskan salmon the size of a full-grown schnauzer.

Don't ask me why a schnauzer as opposed to some other like-sized creature. I just like the sound of it and it conveys the point that this is a big goddamn fish, so big that it overhangs the cutting board at both ends. At five AM, with nothing but the hum of fluorescent lights and the cycling of refrigeration units to keep me company, I have to fight the twinge of an incipient bad-trip feeling like the bugger is going to reanimate on me and start flopping around the table looking for its missing entrails. Harsh thoughts before my second cup of coffee, but I suppress the image long enough to hook the fish with my thumb through the gills just forward of its left pectoral fin and find the sweet spot where the end of its severed spine protrudes slightly from the surrounding muscle. I put all the weight of my arm and shoulder behind the curved blade and separate the filet from the rest of the fish in a single unbroken motion, pin-bones giving way to the knife with a slight popping feel like the teeth of a sticking zipper or the string pulling loose from the mouth of a burlap sack. I flip the fish over so that the exposed skeleton rests on the countertop and repeat the motion in mirror image, leaning into the knife so hard that my right foot lifts slightly at the midpoint of the stroke. I am left with two glistening slabs of deep pink flesh and a gape-mouthed head connected to a distant tail by nearly two feet of perfectly denuded backbone. The frame goes into the garbage and I set about the more tedious work of deboning, skinning, and portioning what remains.

My longtime culinary mentor Patrick Dore used to hate it when he had to start a day with heavy butchering. The man was an animal at the bench, capable of knocking out more work than anybody else I have ever known, but he liked to ease into the day with tasks that were easier on the senses. Picking basil leaves was a favorite, or even peeling spuds. Cooking pasta, making sauces – anything that didn't involve blood under his fingernails and the inevitable slickness of protein on his hands. Later in the day he could French out lamb racks and clean tenderloins with the best of them, but before lunch service he would put his energies elsewhere.

For me, butchery and fabrication have always been among my favorite aspects of the profession. I am good at it, and I enjoy it. Breaking down animals into usable pieces requires a certain degree of raw technical skill that comes only with careful observation, repetition and practice. Mistakes with meat are generally expensive mistakes, which is why in so many kitchens only the chef and maybe the sous-chefs end up handling the product. In a singular inversion of the usual division of labor, the messiest and most elemental tasks fall to the most senior personnel. Interesting. If you see a line cook cutting portions without a scale or direct supervision, it means that he is damn good at it and has earned the right to do so.

In order to take something apart, you first have to understand how it is put together. This applies to a salmon or a side of beef just as readily as it does a clutch assembly or a brake caliper. Trying to prevail with brute force invariably leads to heartache; you need to find the natural seams between muscles, the layer of sliverskin that lies against the bone, the natural weakness in a joint. I can render a chicken into eight servable parts in about ninety seconds, because I know instinctively where to find the gap between leg and thigh, and how to trace the inside curve of the wishbone with the tip of a boning knife. I can pop the remaining half of hip-joint out of a ham using sharpening steel for leverage, and strip the delicate loins from a rabbit's ribcage without mangling them at the point where the spine doubles in width. I can reduce a fifty-pound halibut into seven-ounce portions, and I have converted whole strip loins into more New York Steaks than I could even begin to count. Each of these tasks entails a methodically scripted process tempered by awareness of when to back off the knife or change your angle by a few degrees.

Likewise machinery. In tearing down an engine, the mechanic follows a carefully proscribed set of steps, applying the correct tool with the correct amount of force to the proper point of contact. Impatience and overexuberance result in stripped fasteners and broken parts – don't ask me how I know. Ruined metal is just as expensive as ruined flesh and unlike meat it can't find a home in the stockpot. When I approach a mechanical component for the first time I work slowly and tentatively, feeling out the weaknesses, referring to the diagrams, taking one careful step at a time. By the third or fourth time around I can proceed with greater fluency, and the more frequent tasks devolve into second nature. I can set the valves and ignition timing on my bike by feel and intuition before my coffee gets cold, and I don't hesitate to pull the slide and needle from a recalcitrant carb in a far-flung parking lot should circumstances warrant it. I know how these systems work, have spent hours mulling over how the pieces intersect and have struggled in the past to get them right, much as I once fought unsuccessfully to butterfly a lamb leg and wound up instead with an expensive pile of stew meat. The learning curve is steep but rewarding.

The difference of course is that machinery, in the end, becomes whole again. The meat, however, continues its journey down the food chain in smaller and smaller pieces until its very molecules are scattered, and the chef or butcher moves on to the next unsullied carcass to begin anew.

The Day No Pigs Would Die (with apologies to Robert Newton Peck)

2009-01-05T22:03:00.001-08:00

It is indefensibly trite to reiterate the fact that having children forces you to look at the world through a new set of eyes. The blogosphere is cluttered with the saccharine enthusiasm of parents who would have you believe that they just noticed for the first time that the sky is blue, or that milk will come out of your nose if you laugh hard enough while drinking it. Enough already. We know how precious and transparently observant your offspring are, so spare us the soliloquy. Call me a heartless cynic, but after eight years of parenting remarkably precocious and observant little boys I have come to realize that my children are in essence no more likely to inspire epiphany than anybody else's.

This being said, even I get zinged once in a while.

Yesterday my four-year-old and I were riding home in the truck after a visit to the cake decorating shop, where we had chosen tiny plastic trees and a little plastic skier and sugar granules that looked like tiny granite pebbles. We were riding and talking and listening to music as we always do (he is a sucker these days for that "Swing of your Hips" song by Matt Nathanson) when out of nowhere he asked:

"Papa, do bacon and sausage come from pigs"?

"Yes buddy, they do", I answered, in keeping with our policy of absolute honesty except when it becomes inconvenient.

"And do they have to kill the pig to get the bacon and sausage"?

"Yup. They sure do". This was verging on dangerous territory.

"Papa, how do they kill the pig"? Oh shit. This was a new one. Time to be very, very careful and not embark on a diatribe about feedlots and waste lagoons and the death of Rural America.

"Well sweetie, the pig lives a very long and happy life and eats lots of yummy food and then when it gets old they shoot it in the head with a gun and it dies right away without feeling any pain". At this point I could feel the cartilage of my nose pressing against the skin as I mentally figured how many years I have before he reads The Jungle. Long pause from the passenger seat as we rounded the corner onto our street.

"Papa, if no pigs died, would there be no bacon and sausage?"

Here we go. Break out the ToFurkey and Field Roast and cue the theme from Charlotte's Web. I could already envision our family mealtimes spiraling into an abyss of separate meals, impassioned defense of animal rights, and all the other theatricals that come packaged with an incipient preschool vegetarian. I have seen this movie played out in other households and believe me it is not pretty.

"You're right, buddy. There wouldn't be any bacon and sausage".

Another looong pause as I parked the truck, killed the engine, and unbuckled his car seat.

"Papa, I LIKE bacon and sausage"!

Halleluiah!

I am all in favor of my children knowing where their food comes from, and owing to my line of work I think that they have a better sense of it than most of their contemporaries. They have seen me come home from work in blood-spattered whites after a long day of butchering, and they have seen me carry a brace of freshly killed mallards in from the truck when my buddies are in the thick of waterfowl season. They have heard the tattoo of lobsters beating their staccato death throes against the side of a four-gallon stockpot. My older boy has caught hatchery trout on a spinning rod and watched impassively as I scaled, gutted, and grilled his prize, which he then pronounced to be "tasty". Last spring he asked me if we could go hunting when we went back to Maine that summer, and I had to explain that deer season didn't start until November.

The tricky part is deciding when to let them in on the rest of the picture.

I can remember all too well discovering at age twelve or thereabouts exactly how it was that veal remained so lusciously tender, which led to a knockdown family dinner fiasco at a fancy Italian joint in Westchester. I railed against the lot of the factory hen, wept for the piglets that were snatched from their brood-sow mother, exploded in outrage when the conditions that so readily incubated Kreutzfeld-Jacobs were exposed to the public. I also marched in protest against the abuse of animals in cosmetics testing and outright cried when I first learned about the use of chimps in medical research. And yet I never even flirted with vegetarianism. Meat, it turned out, is just too damn tasty.

Like so many of us, I am caught between the legitimate desire to eat only free-range, hormone-free meats and dairy products and the inability (or unwillingness) to pay the price. I am a hypocrite of the highest order. When spending somebody else's money buying product for a working kitchen, I will readily kick down thirty-five bucks a pound for farmstead cheese and five dollars plus for organic "heritage" chicken, but Sunday morning at the Safeway I struggle with the extra ten cents a piece for cage-free eggs. Could my wife and I give up our drive-through espresso habit and direct the savings towards feeding our children more wholesome food? Absolutely. Do we choose to? Sadly, no. Does this make us bad people?

Maybe it does. And maybe, before too long, I will have to explain to my sons why it is that we sometimes have to make difficult and contradictory decisions that pit resource allocation against moral imperative. Xbox or grass-fed beef, kids? You make the call.

All I know is that I LIKE bacon and sausage.

Adjustments

2008-12-13T21:14:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-12-10T17:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

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.

Blood, Chaos, and Alcohol.

2008-11-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Arts or crafts?

2008-10-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

After reading my last post, a friend emailed the following:

"Your last section made me wonder about something, though. Do you suppose that the refined movements of a ballet are the product of muscle memory earned through repetition every bit as unglamorous as the line cook's prep and the stylist's thousands of haircuts?"

I don't know. Ask the ballerina who spent a thousand excruciating hours of her childhood en pointe while some embittered old Frenchwoman rapped her on the calves with a walking stick to correct her posture. Dance, like any athletic endeavour, relies on the brutal monotony of training and repetition until the gesture itself is automatic, leaving the mind free to explore, express, synthesize. Miles Davis practiced a lot of scales before "Kind of Blue" came to be. Tiger Woods goes out and hits hundreds of balls after winning a tournament. It all hinges of training the body to perform fluidly as an extension of the mind, such that the gap between intent and action narrows beyond perception. A great cook works by feel, but the feel comes from doing it wrong, then doing it right, and learning to tell the difference intuitively.

I can sense when a pan is the right temperature to sear foie gras without looking at it or touching it, simply by the distinctive smell that its sprinkling of kosher salt emits at a certain point. I know the sound of a pasta dish cooking down too far and on the verge of sticking, and have developed the instinct to hit the pan with a splash of stock and give it a quick toss before the noodles begin to dry out and scorch. I can flip an over-easy egg with either hand depending on which is more convenient, and I know without watching a clock how long it's going to take for that ribeye to hit a perfect rested medium rare. Why? Because I've screwed up ALL of these tasks more times than I can count along the way before reaching a point where I don't even have to think about it.

I am by no stretch attempting to compare myself to Miles, or Baryshnikov, or Tiger Woods for that matter. Thomas Keller perhaps belongs to that rarefied ensemble, Jean-Louis, Eric Ripert...pick one, whoever floats your boat in the arena of name-brand chefs. My fellow journeymen and I resemble more an army of bricklayers and welders, shipwrights and pipefitters, craftsmen whose hands unerringly perform simple tasks that the rest of us would bungle hopelessly. Brain surgery it isn't, but I wouldn't ask a brain surgeon to make me a lobster terrine any more than I would attempt to excise a tumor from my banquet chef's cerebellum. Granted, the stakes are different by orders of magnitude but the premise is the same.

One of my earliest mentors was a crusty old dyed-in-the-wool Frenchie who taught in my culinary program. He had come up old school -- apprenticed at thirteen, beaten and abused for five years in the finest kitchens in Paris before making his bones as a sous-chef, then arriving in New York at the age of twenty with his knife kit, twenty bucks, and a handful of addresses. He worked the high-end "Frog Ponds" (to cop one from Tony Bourdain), cooked for celebrities and heads of state, then somehow found his way into the position of running the entire food service operation for Yale University. He then went on to found a cooking school, where the beatings were less frequent but the sense of discipline, humility, and professional pride was as much a part of the curriculum as the mother sauces or the methodology of creme anglaise. He sneered at the emergent culture of rock-star chefs, the Marios and Emerils who dominated the early years of the Food Network. I can only imagine what he would have to say about Rachel Ray.

"We are cooks"! He would exclaim, brandishing the twelve-inch Sabatier he had carried with him on a third-class steamship passage four decades ago. To be a chef was to claim a title, a position, a certain presumption of station arbitrarily taken on by two-bit hacks and shoemakers just as readily as by the giants of our profession. He would then produce his official French identification papers, which after forty years of circulating amongst the elite ranks of the American culinary establishment, still listed under the heading of "metier" the humble word "cuisinier". Cook, not chef. Bricklayer, not architect. This was a man who could conjure perfection from a pile of scraps, who taught us to make honest soups and to abhor waste in any form, who bequeathed upon us his mother's blanquette de veau and the recipe for lobster Americaine as he had made it for Mitterand.

Was he a Tiger, a Coltraine, a Wyeth? He could have been, were he driven by the raw desire to succeed. But Michel -- "Uncle Mickey" to those who survived a class with him -- was driven only by the fundamental integrity of producing great food in any context, whether a formal state dining room or a college cafeteria. His mission in starting a school was to produce cooks, nascent craftsmen with the basic skills, passion, and honesty to respect the ingredients and the guest. If we wanted to become chefs, that was our own damn business. Just show him a perfectly made cheese omlette and shut the hell up.

Vice-President in Charge of Everything that Goes Wrong (A Day in the Life Part II)

2008-10-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

No juice, no bagels, bad eggs, late orders, moldy berries, lumpy oatmeal, disgruntled or absent staff... what I am attempting to convey here is that ALL of this is my problem. Somehow, some way, anything that goes sideways in any of the three restaurants, in any of the fifteen banquet rooms, on any of the countless room service trolleys that traverse the hallways night and day...anything food-related that goes awry ultimately redounds to me.

Which is interesting, because a very small percentage of my day is actually spent cooking anything. Sure, I'll jump behind the line when the breakfast cook is in the weeds and hammer out pancakes and French toast, or I'll hop on the sautee station in our seafood joint when they're two-thirds through a 200 cover night and my sous chef is hitting the meltdown point, but in truth I spend more time with a clipboard in my hand than a knife or a pair of tongs.

Damn, I miss being a line cook.

Life for a line cook is simple, an existence circumscribed by the menu, the hours of operation, and the flow of business. You have your station, which for a seasoned player is more like an extension of his own body, with key items placed so precisely that the best of us could nearly work blindfolded in a pinch. You have your mis en place, that critical list of everything that you need to be ready for service, encompassinge everything from clean dry side towels to proteins and sauces. You have a routine in the way you set up and break down each day, in the way you organize the rotation of prep such that veal stock always gets made on Tuesdays and Fridays, butchering happens Wednesday and Saturday, gnocchi every second day no matter what because it goes mushy by day three. A dedicated line cook may become so inebriated that remaining vertical is a challenge, but I'm willing to bet that so long as he clings to one last drifting splinter of consciousness that same cook could tell you with reasonable coherence the top five items on his prep list for the following day.

Cooks are creatures of habit, and we therefore loathe and resent any break in the routine which sends us in unaccustomed directions. It has been five years since I last worked the line full time, as saucier for the dining room, but I can still close my eyes and narrate in excruciating detail how I spent the first half hour of every shift, beginning with the gathering of pots and pans and cutting boards from stewarding, the carefull arrangement of saucepans on the stovetop to preheat while I cut meat scraps and neatly arranged the foundations of each sauce on five or six individual plates, the arrangement of my sauces from dark to light, left to right, such that I never needed to label them with post-it notes like some of my predecessors...(red wine sauce on the right, then lamb, then pheasant, then rabbit, then chicken...). While the wine in my sauces reduced and the stock came back up to a simmer, I did my butchering. Once the sauces were coasting along, it was either gnocchi or ravioli depending on the day but NEVER both on the same day if I could help it. Blanching vegetables came after the big stuff was done, and the pre-work like cleaning oxtail or trimming lamb shanks was left for the end of the shift when service wound down and we had a few spare minutes. I started my day at 2 PM and service began at 5:30, which meant that each quarter-hour block of time had to be accounted for in advance so that come gametime I had my sauces strained, my mis iced down, and time for a quick cigarette before the orders started rolling in.

Any break in the routine, at any point, is the cook's greatest source of angst. Room service order for Osso Bucco half an hour before the restaurant opens and nobody says "no" ? All of a sudden you're cooking rissoto when you should be peeling asparagus. Fish delivery is screwed up so your thirty-pound whole halibut shows up ten minutes before service when you should be lovingly straining your sauces through cheesecloth? Agony. Your favorrite stockpot is half-buried in the dishpit, requiring ten minutes of excavation and wheedling to get it cleaned before you can start your veal demi? There goes the afternoon. And these are all things that can happen BEFORE service.

What most restaurant patrons fail to grasp is that great cooking is, above all else, the result of repetitive motion. Every time I get my hair cut, I watch the practiced pass with which my stylist exchanges scissors for comb in the same hand, and I see the essence of a line cook. It is a gesture honed by endless repetition over the course of a thousand haircuts, so ingrained in muscle memory as to be autimatic. I think of guitarists (Jerry Garcia in particular) who have mastered the art of tucking a plectrum quickly between their knuckles in order to switch smoothly between flatpicking and fingerstyle. No different than the three-card-monte dealer in the subway.

Cooking is no differenet. There are the foundations of technique, the innovation, the continual adjustment of seasoning and texture, but the execution of a restaurant dish relies more than anything on having done it so many times before that the basic steps pass without thought. You know when the pan is hot enough without really looking at it, you turn the delicately browned filet of trout or sole in a single fluid motion of your spatula, you execute a single pirouette between the stovetop and the window during which four or five items seamlessly shift position. When the chef calls for an order of scallops, the steps to initiate the dish are automatic -- first the braised leek with a splash of cream to warm up gently, then two sautee pans on the hot spot while you lay out and season five scallops and four slices of yellowfin potato, then the carefully timed sequence of searing, turning, deglazing, tossing the pan juices with chopped truffles and bacon lardons and beurre blanc, and asembling the finished dish in the window, all in seven minutes flat while simultaneously working six or eight or ten other dishes at the same time.

People have likened it to ballet, but in all honesty it's more like a choreographed mosh pit with the addition of sharp knives, fire, and boiling liquids. Trust me.

This One's For the Foodies

2008-10-05T23:30:00.001-07:00

As I return to my occasional indulgence in shows like "Hell's Kichen" and "Worst Kitchen Nightmares" in the wake of the Beijing games, it occurs to me that cooking deserves a standardized, internationally recognized scoring system, like so many other skill-based activities which lack the fundamental metric of goals, touchdowns, and the like. It is easy to tell who wins a basketball game or a soccer match, but how about a platform-diving or balance beam competition? Scoring in those cases hinges on parameters which are agreed on ahead of time: The more difficult the attempted feat, the higher the potential score.

Cooking, in short, needs a standardized scale of difficulty. Although I could digress for pages on the technique involved in perfectly scrambled eggs, it is plainly obvious that scrambling eggs is easier than turning them into Hollandaise sauce, while Hollandaise sauce is still far easier than turning the same handful of eggs into a souffle.

So, for those of you who cook with any kind of frequency, dig deep and ask yourself the following: what are the big kahunas? What are the triple-axels of the culinary world? Which dishes present the highest degree of difficulty to attempt, and the greatest collective intake of breath when successfully landed?

The souffle, of course, is a given. Consommes, with their crystalline transparency and overwhelming purity of flavor, are akin to a black art in their execution. Any dish that involves a warm and a cold element paired on the same plate, as simple as a scoop of ice cream on a slice of apple pie or as intricate as a delicate herb salad garnishing grilled fish presents a challenge. And without question, anything wrapped in pastry -- beef Wellingtons, foie gras en brioche, squab wrapped in phyllo dough. Wrapping an item in dough deprives cooks of our ability to prod and probe the finished product; we must rely instead on pure instinct, trickery, and a flawless sense of timing to walk the balance beam between burned pastry and raw meat.

With this preface, imagine a dinner for 350 people commencing with a lobster consomme en croute, resplendent beneath a glistening golden dome of puff-pastry, followed by a salad course of delicate arugula sprouts garnished with warm mushroom and brie croquettes, and concluding (after a relatively simple entree of tenderloin and white asparagus) with raspberry souffles baked al la minute and delivered to the guests three at a time by a phalanx of nearly breathless waiters.

There goes another Saturday night in the Big Machine.

A dinner like this doesn't just happen, of course. It begins with a tasting weeks in advance, when the dishes are sampled, tweaaked, massaged, and photographed before presentation to the prospective client. Prep begins five or six days out, with the hundred pounds of lobster bodies crushed in an 80-quart Hobart mixer, to be cooked down with six or eight bottles of brandy and a host of other aromatics to form the foundation of the soup. There are thousands of tiny pearl vegetables to scoop by hand, prawns to encase in wonton wrappers for garnish, and of course the delicate wrapping of three hundred ceramic soup cups with puff pastry. There are the six casess of massive prawns to be skewered, poached, peeled, and layered with citrus aspic in a terrine mold to be frozen solid, then shaved paper thin on a meat slicer to make an ethereal carpaccio of shellfish beneath the salad. There are hors d'oeuvres by the hundred, there are steaks to sear, fennel to braise, two hundred pounds of potatoes to peel. And somewhere, in an air-traffic-controller's booth above it all, is me.

Don't get me wrong. I have not reached a position so rarified that I no longer pick up a knife, and I can still sling a saute pan with the best of them. More often than not, however, my role resembles that of the chief mate on a supertanker. My boss, the Executive Chef, sets the course: I am the poor schmuck whose job it is to get us there on time and in one piece. When my banquet chef and his lead cook come dangerously close to trading blows at the end of another 14-hour day, I'm the one who has to step in and smooth things over. After all, I need them both intact for the function. When two thousand dollars worth of tenderloin steaks come in cut to the wrong size, I'm the one on the phone with our meat purveyor explaining the meaning of the words "non-negotiable". When my veteran chef garde-manger inexplicably overcooks eight cases of asparagus and tries to pass off the end product as acceptable, I'm the one who has to simultaneously rake her over the coals, find more asparagus, and figure out what to do with the army-green crap she was trying to slide past me. And when push comes to shove and the whole operation is deep in the weeds and my cooks and sous chefs alike are starting to get that ragged look like they might at any further provocation climb to the top of Smith Tower and start shooting, I'm the guy who has to maintain his composure, roll up my sleeves, and rally the troops until the job is done.

When all six convection ovens, pegged at 500 degrees, begin billowing flames from the overflowing Yorkshire puddings cramming every rack, I'm the guy who first rescues the puddings and THEN runs for the baking soda. When my pissed-off grill man hurls a wire basket back into the deep-fryer and I watch the perfect parabolic splashback of hot oil onto the exposed flesh of his forearm, guess who makes the midnight walk to the hospital to help him fill out the L&I paperwork, after the ER nurse peels back the skin from his wrist to his elbow like she is stripping the membrane from a rack of pork ribs.

And when people at parties, or Cub Scout meetings, or on the school playground comment "Oh, you're a chef? I just LOVE to cook" I smile and nod and don't say a damn thing.

A Day in the Life part I

2008-10-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

Five AM comes way too early especially considering that the warm body curled up next to me won't even think about stirring for another two hours, but routine is a powerful driver and I am awake in time to kill the alarm before it even goes off and fumble for my glasses on the nightstand like I've done every morning since I was eight years old, excepting a few ignominious occasions in college when I woke up with my contacts still in and glued to my corneas with the opacity of three-day-old fish eyes.

The coffeemaker burbles reasurringly as I grab a quick shower, and I manage to slug down half a cup while shaving and retrieving the holy trinity of wallet-watch-cellphone from the kitchen table. Careful pause to sort out my meds (thirty-seven years old ans I'm taking eight pills before I even start my day) and then it's out to the garage to gear up.

The sight of my bike gleaming black under the shoplights never fails to cheer me even well before a cold and rainy October dawn. It looks far better than an unrestored 1976 BMW has any right to -- immaculate paint, decent chrome, and that inscrutable look of having been both ridden hard and coddled in the same lifetime. As I work through the litany of zippers-- heavy cordura pants, Aerostich jacket, boots-- I think back on the brutal November commutes in Vermont with a bad charging system and no money to fix it so that I began each day before first light by bump-starting the bike down State Street hill in Montpelier... of riding through puddles my first year in Seattle that threatened to backflood the exhaust, of pushing the beast three miles through an ice storm last winter until I at last had to abandon ship in a motel parking lot off Aurora and walk the last twelve blocks home lugging my saddlebags and helmet like a pack mule.

Reflection aside, I chug the last half-cup of coffee and leave the mug on the workbench, open the garage door, and roll the bike fifty yards down the street before starting it so as not to wake the boys. The engine fires on a touch and with two quick rights and a left I am barreling down I-5 at a steady 70 in the pre-rush traffic.

---------------------------------------------

After ten years in the same hotel I can get a sense of what the day holds before I even enter the building. Rolling to a stop outside the soaring Palladian windows of the dining room as I wait for the light to change, I make a quick scan of the interior... how full does it look? How fast are the servers moving? Is the continental buffet set right? Are there tour busses double-stacked at the Seneca Street door? I take my next set of cues from the activity on A level, deep in the bowels of the ship. What does the overnight security guy have to say about his shift? How quickly are people hustling in the locker room? Is my graveyard cook still there at 6:45 changing out of his spattered whites and able to give me a rundown of the overnight business? And finally, the elevator.

From A level to the kitchen is a four-level ascent, and as the car rises so does the ambient volume of familiar sounds; the clatter of china and silver, the metal on metal of pans on a stovetop, the occasional punctuation of broken glass and the clamor of voices.

On a quiet morning, the doors slide open to a subdued undercurrent of sound and activity. My breakfast cook is poaching eggs two flats at a time and talking football with one of the night cleaners. The garde-manger ladies are slicing fruit, layering berries in parfait glasses, and drinking espresso laced with condensed milk from highball glasses. The servers are making a pretense at their sidework, polishing silver and glassware, filling sugar boats. These are the mornings when I take a perfuntory spin through the breakfast line and dining room, check that the oatmeal isn't lumpy and the berries aren't moldy, and then line my crew up for a quick preshift briefing before turning to my own hydra-headed workload of paperwork and projects.

That is the definition of a good morning.

More often than not however the elevator doors open to a scene more remeniscent of Guernica than Dejuner sur L'herbe. At 6:30 the breakfast line is already fifteen tickets deep and going down fast, the servers are screaming because there's no Devonshire cream or seven-grain bread, and the AM steward is chunking up watermelons into a five-gallon bucket to puree with a stick blender because the PM garde-manger forgot to make watermelon-mint juice AGAIN. I am scarcely two steps onto the floor before a banquet manager is assaulting me with the information that there were no bagels delivered for the two hundred people in the ballroom who will be flooding the buffet in fifteen minutes. When I finally make it into the kitchen itself, I discover that my overnight cook has turned ten gallons of pasteurized liquid egg product into a near-solid mass of sickly green curds meant to pass for scrambled. And this, inevitably, is the point when my lunch cook calls in sick, Room Service runs out of croissants, and I am informed that somebody lost the breakfast pre-order for the ambassador from France so his omlette is half an hour late.

And all I can wonder is what will happen AFTER 7:00 when things really get going?

2008-10-03T20:53:00.000-07:00

The half-remembered Bly poem exemplifies to me one of life's inevitable recurring tragedies -- the thing, or place, or person encountered once in passing only to prove irrecoverable after the fact. We vainly wander the streets of once-familiar towns seeking out a place that is no longer; we comb the recesses of Google and Facebook in search of people long since absent from our lives.

One summer night some years back my friend Alex and I embarked on a longitudinal Manhattan pub crawl which commenced before noon at an Irish bar on the Upper West Side and concluded well after two AM in the Village. After fourteen hours of biker joints and discount sushi and calypso at SOB's, we stumbled into a shoebox of a place somewhere down off Houston street which was oddly subdued amidst the clamor of downtown on a Saturday night. The bar was scarred but polished wood with a handfull of stools and a good rail of drafts, and a crew of regulars were devouring plates of steamed mussels and fish chowder. The bartender was without question the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh.

Her name was Shoshanna, she was (of course) trying to make it as an actress, she was entranced by my descriptions of the Maine Coast and professed a lifelong desire to see the leaves turn in autumn. I had another beer. We talked about small towns which we both came from, about the lonliness of cities, about the granite cliffs of Acadia with the colors of September ascending in variegated layers up the hillside like redrock sandstone. I gave her my number, she swore she was coming to Maine in September, and Alex and I stumbled off to Fez where I drank black coffee with Myer's rum until closing time when we went for breakfast.

Needless to say I never heard from her, otherwise there wouldn't be a story in it. Moreover, on subsequent trips to the city I couldn't find the bar, or even pin down its location. It was near a corner, it was near a subway stop, it was across from the club... Brigadoon. Nor have I recovered my passage from Bly, despite my best efforts. With time I have come to doubt the existence of either one.

Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities of the crossroads bazaar city of Euphemia, where men come not only to trade silks and spices but memories as well, such that you depart the next morning with somebody else's recollections as vivid in your mind as if you had lived them, such that "your wolf will have become another wolf, your battle another battle, your sister another sister..." What he captures is the fungible nature of our own memories, our ability to believe in things that never were be they lines of verse or polished glasses on a barback.

The best bars, the most resonant poetry, the prettiest girls. They are never there when you go back to find them again.

2008-10-03T17:53:00.001-07:00

The soup, by the way, was an unqualified success. While the tomatoes smoked slowly I sweated off a generous double handfull of celery and onions and a few crushed cloves of garlic from our CSA farm box. I threw in a some odd bits of freezer-burned slab bacon, a few basil stems from the withering plant in the dooryard, and a pint of orange cherry tomatoes that were languishing in the fridge. Then I went out and ran four miles in the gentle rain while the soup cooked out.

The run was just what I needed. It's been six months now on the Wellbutrin and more than three since my last cigarette, but the running is a more recent and sporadic endeavor born from the same need for fundamental change. Nearly twenty years have elapsed between my tenure as a cross-country runner in high school and my renewed interest in the sport, and I am reminded once more why I was drawn to the sport initially.

I was never very fast, despite a 36" inseam and a distance runner's borderline anorexic physique. My attraction came more from the pleasure of moving through the lansdscape at my own pace, of traversing routes and distances more often reserved for motorized transport. I love the simple act of covering ground.

I have been reading Robert Bly again after much the same interval of years, and came across this short one called "In a Train" in his first collection:

"There has been a light snow
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust
I have awakened in Missoula, Montana, utterly happy"

For Bly, it is all about covering a huge swath of the country in the night and the unexpected awakening in a new and unknown place, the sense of distance covered, the knowledge that steady and directed movement has brought him somewhere. And so with running -- the movement is an end unto itself, the destination a secondary benefit.

In truth, I have been reading Bly in the hopes of finding once more a poem that I encountered late one night in college while swapping verses out loud with friends, a torrent of drunken recitation which ended when the campus police showed and broke it up. There was Whitman, I remember, and Rilke's "Tombs of the Hetaerae", and a single brief passage of Bly describing the image of fenceposts as seen through the window of a moving car such that perspective lent unto them a revolving motion like the the spokes of a wheel rotating slowly against yet another snowy Minnesota stubble-field backdrop.

2008-10-03T14:52:00.000-07:00

Why Blog?

The easy answer is that everybody else is doing it, so why can't I (to cop a phrase from The Cranberies, which dates me immediately).

My best buddy David, obsessed as he is with the current electoral debacle, has parlayed his early righteous indignation into a well-received regular slot on the Huffington Post, where he manages to both vent his frustration and disbelief while simultaneously offering up well researched and articulate analysis.

My wife, a knitter of epic proportions, has a blog of her own (check out Rocketboyknits) in concert with her nascent business designing cool knitted kids clothing and toys.

Even my 8-year old son has his own iGoogle page, allowing him to chat in real time with grandparents on the other coast.

Blogging it seems has evolved quickly from a narcissistic construct of the fringes to a mainstream pastime, with no need for pretense or pretext. We no longer journal, we blog -- and thus throw our thoughts out there in real time without submitting ourselves to the arduous vetting process of annointed editors and publishers. The online world is our editorial committee, and our hit count the indicator of success or failure

Blog it, and they will come.

Which is why, on a rainy Seattle afternoon, I am sitting at the kitchen table. I can just pick up the slightly acrid aroma of the five pounds of tomatoes I am smoking outside over hickory chips, destined for soup tonight. The tomatoes came primarily from a plant named "Bob", lovingly hand-raised in our tiny front yard by my elder son. The woodsmoke and the damp air comingle and remind me of autumn back in Maine, from whence I moved nearly ten years ago to pursue a chef's career in the region's finest hotel kitchen. I think upon my favorite food writers over the years -- John Thorne, A.J. Liebling, Anthony Bourdain -- and wonder what they would make of all this. Would Liebling have blogged, given the chance? We can only imagine, wistfully, that he had.

So be forewarned -- this is not a straight-up food blog. You will find precious little in the way of recipes (I don't generally use them), not much in the way of restaurant reviews (We don't have the time or spare cash to eat out), and maybe the occasional consideration of a seasonal highlight or a great meal cooked for the family. You are just as likely to encounter a treatise on rebuilding the starter on a 1976 BMW motorcycle, or a description of the organized chaos that defines a top-flight luxury hotel kitchen firing on all cylinders. This is my attempt to connect the various dots in my life, to find the correspondances as Baudelaire would have it, that somehow make it all a whole.

So you have been duly cautioned. I will knowingly make too many literary and historical references -- such is the fate of a liberal arts major too long strayed from the fold. I will rhapsodize about my children and my motorcycle, not necessarily in that order. I will bemoan the sixteen-hour days in the kitchen which seem to be status quo for me right now, contemplate carreer changes, and try very hard not to incriminate myself in any way.

On the flip side, I can promise regular infusions of the outright absurdity which characterizes the daily operations of a five-star hotel, some potentially useful technical information with regards to gastronomy, and the perspective born of ten years slugging it out in the culinary trenches. And along the way, you might just learn how to rebuild a carburetor, so read on