Guts and Gears

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.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

Full stop.

 

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

 

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

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

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

What, then, of the second bike?

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

 

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

 

As a much wiser man than I once said:

 

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

 

Agreed.

Commuting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love my commute.

Leaving the Big House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end, of course, I left.

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

I haven't looked back.

Blood, Chaos, and Alcohol.

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arts or crafts?

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.