Freddy kicks the front of one of the fryers. “It’s Friday, dude. What the fuck?”
“I know, Freddy. That’s what I told Lucy.”
“This isn’t about him,” James says.
“Dude, fish. Fish!” Freddy is shouting now. “It’s fucking Friday. Where’s all the fucking fish?”
I stand stunned. And then I fold as if punched, right up around the impact point of the sudden realization of what I’d forgotten. I close my eyes. Brace my elbows on my knees. Pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers. Try not to scream. Shit, shit, shit . . .
Behind me, James is muttering, talking to himself. Freddy’s still yelling. Hero, laughing, slapping the board with his spatula. “You suck, wheel!”
It’s Friday night. And this being Friday night in upstate New York (all full of Catholics—Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics and Polish Catholics, Catholics who’ve come here from everywhere that Catholics have fled)—that means fish fry. Fish dinners with fries and a monkey dish of milky-sweet coleslaw, fish sandwiches going the same way, both battered and dumped in a fryer sequestered just for this foul, noxious, evil duty. Not just a tradition, an edict. God’s law. Friday fish fry.
How had I forgotten to check on the fucking fish? Favorite trick of the dinner crew: not pulling the tubs of cheap, rock-hard haddock fillets out of the coffin freezer in the back for their slow thaw. In a water bath they take two hours or more. Dumped out on a prep table and allowed to collect bacteria, even longer. The fish would’ve been on special all night, written up on the board by the front door, put on a menu insert, programmed into the servers’ POS system: SPEC FRY or SPEC SANDY. They’d probably served two hundred fish dinners earlier, would’ve gambled on how few cases to pull to leave us maximally screwed.
From my wounded hunker, I ask Freddy, “How many fillets we have?”
“Six, man. And they all stink.”
I try to think. We’ll only do half as many orders tonight—it technically being Saturday for most of the shift—but I can’t have the fish pulled from the menu. Friday fucking fish fry is pure heaven on any restaurant’s books—a fast mover with low food cost, high menu price and customers commanded by God to eat it or else they’ll go to hell. I blame the Pope, the dinner shift, the management, everyone. But the last, best curses I save for myself.
Then I stand up straight. I look around at my guys, at Wendy. Briefly, I wonder if there’s still some way I can blame this on him.
“All right. Wheel sucks. I forgot to check the fish. My fault.”
Mutiny in the eyes of the crew.
“But we know what to do,” I continue. “We can do this. Freddy, whatever fish is in the coolers, bury it. James, set the pans. Hero, get the hose. Freddy, on me when you’re done. Wendy, on James.” I step up to the pass, lean across the gleaming, hot aluminum, ducking my head under the glowing heat lamps, looking for Lucy. I call her over, tell her where we’re at. “How’s the floor?”
The floor is mercifully empty, servers rolling silver, slicing lemons, preening, staring dumbly at the walls—whatever servers do when there are no customers to pester. I tell Lucy to stall any new tables that come in as long as possible, then we break.
THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO DO A FISH FRY at a short-order restaurant.
The first is to slow-thaw a bunch of haddock fillets in a forty-two-degree prep cooler or under cold tap water in a clean sink. Once thawed, the fillets then need to be individually inspected; trimmed, if necessary, of excess skin or blood-dark belly meat left attached by the fishmonger; laid out on clean paper towels and stacked three deep in a clean, dry fish tub. The tubs are then stacked Lincoln Log–style in an upright ready cooler or lowboy. As soon as an order comes in, a single fillet is delicately lifted from its bedding and the company of its friends, dusted with flour and gently, lovingly dredged through a pan of room-temp beer batter made sweet and strong with buttermilk and a good stout. The gummy fish must then be thinned by running it between the index and middle fingers—surplus batter scraped back into the pan—and only after all this can the jacketed haddock be placed carefully into a hot fryer using a swirling motion: introducing it to the heat slowly to keep the fillet from curling as the batter tightens and to keep the batter itself from just bubbling away. There’s a motion to it. A grace. Work one Friday night on fryer station in Catholic country and you will never forget it.
A couple minutes in the oil and voilà: perfect fried haddock, golden brown and puffy, religiously satisfactory and ready to be plated alongside crisp french fries and cold coleslaw. That’s the way to do it right.
Then there’s the way we do it in a hurry (the way we do it tonight):
1. Collect from the freezer the eighty pounds of frozen haddock fillets that the dinner crew neglected to pull. The fish is already separated into ten-pound consignments—each batch a solid block of chunky gray ice inside a stiff-sided but flimsy plastic box. The boxes are heavy, slippery, annoyingly hard to handle. They’ll take the skin right off your hands if your hands aren’t bone-dry. When the crew is hurrying, the odds of a broken toe from a dropped box go up dramatically. Doesn’t happen tonight, though.
2. Take those boxes out the back door, pull off the locking lids, set them up inside empty bread racks braced at an angle against the back wall, and let Hero open up with the power sprayer we use for cleaning the floors and the grease out of the hood vents. With the hose screwed into the hot water tap and the sprayer turned against ice, it might as well be a flamethrower.
3. Power-wash the shit out of the fish tubs until the steam stops and the ice starts to crumble, stopping periodically to set back up the racks that have been pushed over or to retrieve the icy fish bricks that have slipped from their boxes and gone skittering off into the gravel. During these interludes, the chances of the sprayer “getting away from” Hero and “accidentally” soaking either Freddy or me are 100 percent. Tonight, Hero gets Freddy while Freddy is lighting a cigarette, his timing perfect, catching him just as he bends to cup the flame of his lighter against the wind. Freddy jumps, sputters, charges and takes a running swing at Hero. This just gets him another shot with the hose. The two of them need to be separated briefly. I shove Hero aside, tell Freddy to go back inside, and he does, shaking water out of his long, ratty blond hair.
4. Bring the partially thawed cases into the prep kitchen, dump them out on the tables, and split the disintegrating fish-cicles lengthwise into twenty portions, preserving as many whole fillets as possible. Place each chunk of fish ice into a long, shallow metal baking pan called a hotel.
5. Walk twenty laden hotel pans onto the line where James (with Wendy’s bewildered assistance) will have set up deep bains15 on every available hot surface, each filled with a few inches of (hopefully already boiling) water.
6. Set hotel pans on top of bains, making twenty scratch double boilers, and cover hotels with plastic wrap, now making twenty jerry-rigged pressure cookers.
7. Wait. Smoke cigarettes. Bicker angrily with crew. Freddy is off in his corner by the fryers (standing post for the absent Juan), muttering under his breath and staring death rays at Hero. Hero just keeps laughing. This is going to come to a head soon, but not yet.
8. After ten minutes or so, pull the plastic wrap off the hotels, and what you have is eighty pounds (give or take) of surface-poached, center-frozen, limp gray haddock fillets and a god-awful stink. To get rid of the stink faster, pop the filters out of the ventilation hood and just let that baby roar. Hero does this, climbing up between the grills and pulling the greasy filters out of their tracks. The suction immediately snuffs the flames on the four-burner. This is going to come back to haunt us, too. But not yet.
9. Because they are now half-cooked, the fillets will flake to pieces at the least prompting. Look at one wrong and it’s likely to dissolve into fish mush and ice. Owing to this physical instability, they can no longer take the pressure of being dredged in batter so must be casseroled. In assembly-line fashion, bring in a new set of hotel
s. Layer each one with batter, ease in as many fillets as it can hold using a long spatula, then cover with more batter. Stack the pans back in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up the batter and shock the fillets, then remove to the ready cooler. As orders come in, shovel fillets gracelessly into the oil. Fry long and hard. Carefully remove to plate for service.
10. Pray to whatever god might be listening that no one catches you.
Oddly, the fish actually tastes pretty good this way.
Well, maybe not good, but less bad than you’d think. Flaky and slightly oily outside, mid-rare in the middle. In texture it’s not unlike a poached fillet of sole, and in flavor only as bad as frozen haddock ever is—which is pretty bad even under the best circumstances.
The real problem is, going into the oil cold (and often still frozen in the center), the fillets will drop the temperature of the fryer oil precipitously. This screws with the fry cook’s timing, and when cooking for drunks—especially lots of drunks—the fry cook’s timing is of paramount importance to the synchronization of the rest of the kitchen. It also makes a terrible mess, pisses off the dishwashers, breaks about a dozen different health codes.
And it’s just wrong.
You probably think that wouldn’t matter to a bunch of guys like us. But it does. It matters a lot. If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, you understand what I’m talking about. You know that little catch you get in your chest when you’re doing something you know is wrong. And if you haven’t worked in a kitchen, you’ll just have to take my word for it. All the bullshit, the punching, the posturing, the macho crap; all the bad behavior and criminal impulses; all the hard talk and pleasure-seeking and shameless conduct—that’s all true. That’s The Life, the atmosphere in which so much food is created every day. But it’s also true that we want to be good.
Not good people. Not good citizens. Not good in any general way. A lot of us (and I’m talking about all cooks here, not just the four guys standing with me on this line) prefer the opposite of good so long as we can get away with it.
But we want to be good at what we do because being good at what we do is what saves us—balancing out all the rest, at least in our minds, at least in my mind. Someday, when the heat comes down, when they finally slap on the leg irons and the Hannibal Lecter mask and lead me off to come-what-may, I want my guys to be able to say, “He was a good cook. Sure, he was a reprobate, a degenerate animal. Always broke. Always borrowing money. He was a foulmouthed, bad-tempered, cross-eyed, snaggletoothed, brain-damaged, tail-chasing fuckup and a total wreck of a human being. But man, Sheehan could really cook.”
That would be enough, I think. Mitigation—that’s all I’m after. And I’m not alone in that. I’ve known chefs who’d scream and curse and throw pans and torture cooks for any little slight. I’ve known guys who went to jail for stealing food stamps from old ladies, for sticking up convenience stores; guys who would work any angle, screw their friends over for a buck, behave in ways that are just unimaginably bad. But I’ve seen these same knuckleheads quit good jobs rather than do wrong by the food. I’ve watched them take pride in the perfect placement of scallops in a pan, in cutting a microscopic brunoise, in standing up under fire on a Friday night with a bunch of other like-minded bastards, throat-cutters and fuckups without blowing it for the team.
Cooking can be a miserable gig sometimes. Gouge-out-your-own-eyeballs awful. But when you sign on to a kitchen crew, what you’re doing at the simplest level is indenturing yourself to the service of others. You’re feeding people, providing for one of their basic needs, and that is—all else aside—a noble thing. And I have long held to the conviction that at every station, behind every burner, in all the professional kitchens in the world, is a guy who wants to walk out the door at the end of the night, into whatever personal hell or weirdness is waiting for him, knowing that, if nothing else, he did one thing real well.
But tonight, we have done wrong and are duly ashamed. Still, that’s how you set up eighty pounds of fish fast—freezer to line in just a little over twenty minutes. It’s a nice trick. Jesus is satisfied. The Pope is satisfied. Management will be satisfied. All our masters are pleased. Everyone is still pulling sheets and bains off their stations, yelling for the dishwashers, when I holler out to Lucy, “Luz! Galley up! Bring it on.”
The printer starts chattering immediately.
THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES TILL MIDNIGHT.
“James, grill. Hero on eggs. Freddy, fryer/half-grill. Yes?”
Everyone nods. Wendy is standing in the doorway, out of traffic, staring down at his shoes, his hands folded in front of him.
“Salads?” Hero asks. “Cold garni?”
James says he’ll take them. The cold table is closest to the grill station anyway. “What about cakes?”
“I’ll pop the half-flat behind me and put up cakes,” I say, inclining my head toward Wendy. “FNG on toast. He can drop cakes for me when I can’t. He’ll learn fast.”
“Really?” James asks.
I look up. “Wendy, you a fast learner?”
“Yes.”
“You ever eaten a pancake before?”
He looks confused, as if this is some kind of trick question or double entendre.
“A pancake, dumb-ass. Round thing? Syrup on top?”
“Yes.”
I nod to James. “He’ll figure it out.”
Hero says, “He better.”
James shakes his head. “I have very little faith in the youth of this country.”
“He will,” I say, ending this particularly fruitless discussion. “Okay, we covered?”
Assent from the troops.
“Good. Load heavy. We can’t be running off every five minutes for supplies. Get your shit squared away. We’re thirty minutes out, so . . . Yeah. Let’s have some fun.”
Everyone rolls out. My forces are arranged, supplies being laid in. After the fish debacle, things have smoothed out. A little.
ELEVEN-THIRTY.
“It’s a toaster, Wendy. Bread goes in here. Toast comes out the other end.”
I show him, laying two slices of white down on the little grated conveyor belt that will take it between the heating elements, spit it out browned into the chute on the other side. He nods, fascinated, like it’s some kind of magic. I show him the box by his station where all the open, bagged loaves are kept, the racks outside the door with their shelves full of fresh bread, arranged by type: white, wheat, rye, sourdough, Texas, bags of bagels, hamburger buns, boxes of English muffins. It’s a lot of bread, but then it’s heavy breakfast business in the middle of the night. Almost everything goes out with toast on the side.
I explain, “White and sour go through once, wheat and whiskey twice. Texas goes to the grill—that’s me—because it’s too thick to go through the machine. Unless it’s a French toast order. That goes to Hero next to me. Bagels go through twice, EMs once. EM, ‘English muffin,’ got it?”
Wendy bobs his head. Sweat is running down the sides of his face, soaking his collar. The sweat is making his eyebrows shine. It’s not even hot yet.
“Really?” I ask.
“No. What’s ‘whiskey’?”
“Rye bread.”
“Why?”
“Just is.”
“Okay, what’s ‘Texas’?”
“Big place. Lots of cows.”
“. . .”
“That’s a joke. Texas toast. Thick-cut white. Big like Texas.”
“Okay.”
“Look, this is easy. One order of toast is two slices. Put ’em in, take ’em out, butter, slice, and stack ’em here. On toast plates. Unless an order is dry. Then there’s no butter. Flag those somehow on the plates so you remember which is which. You’ve got three toasters and plenty of room. I’ll call everything to you, so just listen and you’ll do fine. Like if I say, ‘One white, two wheat—one dry—one whiskey down; two Texas my hand, one Texas for French, bagel dark,’ what do I need?”
Wendy stares at me blankly. “
I have no idea what you just said to me, man.”
TWENTY MINUTES.
Cook’s cockney: OE, sunny, po/no po. Waiting, dragging, on a wait, on the fly; to the board, to the grill, to the rail, on the rail, my hand—my hand, motherfucker, right fucking now!—then whiskey down, cakes down (fast math in the head: if a short stack is three pancakes, a full stack five, and side cakes are three half-sized pancakes, then how many cakes does ‘flying cakes . . . six tall, six short, four sides of three, two tall chocolate, all to the rail,’ equal?16), fries down, tables up and orders up and fire orders. All-day, bennies, French, sizzlers, call me half, call me steady, gimme two, gimme ten, out for ammo, out for smoke, out for good. A thousand ways to say “Fuck you,” running from pissed off to downright tender. A thousand ways to call for help. There’s slang for every item on the menu, every special order, every kind of plate (wheel plate, big round, monkey dish, soufflé, side); sometimes doubled-up and tripled-up slang for one thing, jargon that only makes sense if you were there on the night the term was born and are able to track its permutations across days and weeks. Like, we cook the occasional order of awful, mealy potato pancakes here. They were po cakes in the wheel vernacular; became ho cakes one night after being ordered by a particularly skankish, drunk woman in the dining room; became a ho stack just because James thought it was funnier and because potato pancakes only came in one size so there was less chance of confusing it with a standard cake order; then became a haystack because that’s kind of what potato pancakes look like when cooked: a haystack.
“Double haystack: bacon/well bacon, going apple, jizz.” Two orders of potato pancakes, both with three strips of bacon, second order well-done, the first with applesauce on the side, the second with sour cream. Anything white, any sauce, anything that comes out of a squeeze bottle, can be referred to as jizz. Really, it’s like poetry sometimes. Fucking lyrical.
After ten minutes, I’ve given up trying to teach Wendy to recognize called orders. It’s like trying to teach Spanish to a rock. We’ve settled on a faintly mathematical par system: “At all times, have waiting six orders of white, four wheat, four sour, two rye, and two toasted English muffins. Keep half this grill full of pancakes. The rest, we’ll cook to order, à la minute, until you catch on. If I ask for something and it’s not there, I will kill you. No one will ever find your body. Got it?”
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