Cooking Dirty

by Jason Sheehan

  There are exceptions, of course. All those celebrity chefs? They all had to come from somewhere. Some of them even came from actual kitchens in actual restaurants—were guys just like me, except smarter, more talented, more ambitious, better-looking, generally taller. They somehow saw their way clear to leave the rest of us behind, making the soup.

  The rest of us imagine what it might be like to work in a great restaurant, with a name chef. I imagined it a lot—the humidity-controlled coolers, gleaming Jade ranges, clean and clinical stations scrubbed down every night by an invisible army of night porters, and cases of stiff, cotton-wrapped French pears that my food-cost numbers would never allow me to purchase. Usually, I imagined it while trying to juggle ten pans on six burners while some gin-blossomed, geriatric motherfucker with a ladle in his hand screamed at my back and threatened me in damp, spitty German, or while squatting on an overturned plastic milk crate in some stinking alley, squinting against the cigarette smoke trailing into my eyes while I tried to gimmick a recalcitrant gas ring into working one more night by fiddling around in its guts with the point of a utility knife. Sometimes it was in the sweet quiet of sudden and unexpected unemployment, sometimes while waking, hungover, on the floor.

  And there were days I could almost wake up next to Sam early in the morning, look out the window of whatever crumbling bolt-hole apartment we were buried in, across the backs of churches and row houses, through the forests of rusted TV antennae, and see the chromium Gernsback spire of the Chrysler Building on the horizon, looming there like an unanswered challenge. My dad once told me that no one ever really regrets the chances they take, only the ones they don’t. For a minute, I would kinda wish I’d listened to him.

  Then I’d get up, brush my teeth, have a cup of coffee and go to work.

  AT A PLACE I’LL CALL LA CITÉ, I found a strange kind of release as a fulltime commissary prep cook. Here was a gig where I was still cooking, but no longer cooking specifically for people. I was cooking only for a prep sheet, for par lists sent in by the three or four different quick-serve French sandwich shops and bakeries the owners held: fifty gallons of winter-squash soup, thickened with warm whipping cream, brightened with a touch of turmeric; six cases of stemmed portobello mushroom caps to be salted, seared—softened in butter over high heat—and eventually eaten like steak. There was cheese to be cut down and portioned from whole wheels, plastic tubs of Provençal shaved-carrot salad to be made, taken from a recipe that was identical to the kind of shaved-carrot salad (with a little wine, a little vinegar, some shallot, a touch of crushed lavender and mint) I’d done elsewhere, identical to the shaved-carrot salads I imagined Provençal farm wives making from the last of the season’s take from the garden.

  Here was a professional kitchen that was all kitchen. There was no rush, no hit, no line, no ticket printer, no chef standing over my shoulder, sweating port all over me and cursing me for the way I rotated my pans. Here, there was quiet. Here, there was calm. Here, there was a great chef called Bird, who worked cleanly, gently and with a restraint that I found remarkable.

  I was bored out of my mind after about fifteen minutes.

  Luckily, I came into the job right about the time the owners were looking at opening their first real restaurant—a place with its own kitchen, a proper dining room, a real menu. They were poaching kitchen talent from all over the city, grabbing guys from places where I’d worked previously, from places where I someday wanted to work, moving in with all the subtlety of Michael Corleone going after the heads of the five families.

  They already had a crazy Russian baker to do all the batch work, supplying wonderful, beautiful, impossibly flavorful bread; a guy they allowed to work by himself through the night on the production line just to keep him out of contact with the rest of the employees for as many hours as possible. When alone, he was able to focus, to create, to translate the simple instructions left for him through the mess of sour neurons and hamburger that passed for his brain and come up with the proper weights in dough to be run through the conveyor ovens: four hundred boules, two hundred baguettes, two hundred bâtards, fifty loaves of black rye. Being alone didn’t stop him from talking. He spent his nights arguing with himself, the machinery, the mop bucket in the corner, and legions of imaginary enemies; telling the walls stories of his dissident’s existence in Odessa before glasnost came and fucked up all his fun.

  After the baker came a mob of mercenary dishwashers and cleaners, busboys, servers, managers for both floor and bar, service captains. They had Bird as an executive chef, but he’d made it plain from the start that he wanted nothing at all to do with day-to-day ops at any restaurant. He was happy doing what he was doing, he said. A reasonable schedule (ten or eleven hours a day, six days a week), a dependable paycheck—these things meant a lot to him. Also, he knew better than anyone about the intimacy of prep. He knew that he would still be handling a lot of the stock for the new restaurant first, before anyone else got their grubby hands on it, and could therefore have a significant influence over the final product of the new kitchen without having to be anywhere near it.

  What the owners needed was a chef de cuisine. I volunteered for the job. When it appeared to me that they weren’t taking me seriously (I was, after all, just a prep cook on their books), I volunteered louder. About two weeks before the new kitchen was scheduled for its test run—a series of friends-and-family dinners—they brought in Matty, a line cook and station chef poached from one of the city’s better French restaurants; a white jacket they’d probably had their collective eye on for a long time.

  Matty was their guy. That much was obvious. And though they were saying that he’d only been brought on to help with the ramp-up to opening, everyone knew that Matty was it: just twenty-five years old and about to get his stripes.

  I wanted to hate him. Instead, we became fast friends in that way that feels inevitable, like succumbing to unseen gravities.

  We could’ve been brothers if not for the fact that I already had a brother, if not for the fact that he was tall and dirty-blond, wild-haired, and goateed like some kind of rockabilly front man, loud, boisterous, cheerful under almost any circumstance no matter how foul, an inveterate optimist. He was my complete and total opposite, but we were exactly the same in those ways that mattered. We were both cooks. And that was enough.

  Matty lived just a few blocks away from the new restaurant in a big, old run-down house with a rotating gang of other industry brats—anywhere from three to a dozen depending on the season and how close it was to rent day. For him, home was just where he kept his other shoes, a couple T-shirts, some beer. I was living in a crosstown apartment with Sam. For me, home was where I kept my girlfriend. For both of us, our real home was our house—the restaurant, the kitchen—because that was where we always were. If we’d had hats, the kitchen is where we would’ve hung them.

  He’d started cooking young; so had I. He hadn’t ever learned to do much else other than play guitar and sing a little. I hadn’t learned to do anything else at all. Now, we were both coming to the end of our apprentice years. We’d worked for some of the same bosses, suffered the same abuses. I was faster with a knife than he was. He worked finer and cleaner. He had a thing for meats, for grill and oven work, for soups. I loved sauces, sides, garniture and sauté. We both wore our galley tans, pale skin, scars, bruise-dark circles under our eyes and near constant hangovers like badges of rank and honor. Neither of us had seen the sun much in, oh, say, the last six or seven years.

  We both had the same strange love/hate relationship with the French: the hard-earned knowledge that the damned Frogs, for all their myriad failings of temper, perspicacity, abstention and taste in everything from movies to cigarettes to music, were just better than everyone else, ever, when it came to food. They’d spent centuries studying and stealing from every cuisine in the world, finding the best ways to cook everything that walked, hopped, crawled, slithered or grew anywhere, and (this is the important part) writing it all down. Th
ey had The Canon, and it was irrefutable.

  For Matty, this was problematic. He saw it as limiting—strangling, really—and tended to fight philosophically against it even while holding his knife the way he’d been taught by the French and cutting a brunoise the way he’d been taught by the French and dipping his pinkie in a sauce, judging it against the perfect French version in his head. His tastes ranged more broadly, his acceptance of cuisines was more ecumenical, and he chafed at the tyranny of supposed French rightness. For him, if a plate needed color, there was always the option of a mojo, a salsa, a chutney, and he was certainly more qualified to carry the title of chef than I was because he had his own ideas, his own prep strategies, ideas for specials that weren’t all lifted from Larousse.

  Again, I was the opposite. For me, The Canon was liberating. I’d hardly been to church since my First Communion. I didn’t have a religion to call my own or a God with whom I was on speaking terms. But I did have la Cuisine. I had demi-glace and cassoulet, the holy trinity of a well-cut mirepoix, and the magical transubstantiation of sauces done montées au sang; the unconditional lucidity of right and wrong. And most of the time—most of the time—that was enough for me.

  So when we saw the first draft of the menu for the new restaurant and saw how thoroughly Froggish it was, we were thrilled—him secretly, me openly. It was a beautiful board, like poetry, like history told in verse because it wasn’t just French but French colonial, which we thought was a stroke of genius, even if only because we’d never seen it done anywhere before. French colonial was truth told in food; was the record of food’s travels on the back of politics, war and national expansion. Thus, ours would be a French menu that allowed for excursions into Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cuisines—not as fusions but as whole plates given their own places of honor on our list. There would be hints of North Africa, touches of the Caribbean. If one could imagine a French chef packing up his kit one day back in, say, the early 1950s and traveling for years to every corner of the world where a French flag flew, ours would be the menu he came back with. There was pho on the menu; there was tagine, couscous and jasmine rice alongside steak-frites, simple roasted half-chickens with sauce moutarde, and salade composée—classics, every one.

  As an ass-covering measure, the owners had given over some menu space to the influence of barely recognizable Northern Italian modernism—to inventive pastas, focaccia pizzas, a full spread of crostini with bitter black-olive tapenade; to lemony skordalia and paper-thin veils of San Daniele prosciutto that we cut ourselves in the basement on an ancient rotary slicer. And yet, the stamp of Frenchness was all over that single-page, handwritten sheet that Matty and I were given about a week before the opening. Penne in a white wine and Gorgonzola béchamel with potatoes? An Italian would sooner cut his own throat than mix starches like that. The pizzas were called pizzas only because no one could think of anything French to call them. They were to be mounted on an Italian bread (the round focaccia loaves split into a top and a bottom, brushed with oil, and given a pass across the charcoal grill before being covered, topped and slipped into the oven), but then dressed with port-wine reductions, with smashed figs, duck, rabbit, compound cream sauces jacked with so much butter I’d have to force and roux them just to incorporate it all.

  Matty and I had helped test the recipes and arrange the load-out for the new galley. We’d made coolers full of tapenade and skordalia and clarified stock and demi. But neither Matty nor I had been offered the kitchen. With three days to go before the first friends-and-family, no big dog had been chosen, no boss. And for that matter, no crew.

  We’d heard troubling rumors that the owners themselves had decided to cook for the first few shifts—a sure recipe for disaster, though something I would’ve paid good money to see. It’s not that the owners weren’t food people. A couple of them were. One of them had been a career cook, a chef-owner of well-respected country-French restaurants. Another was a food designer and default wine expert by dint of having the money to travel all over the world buying up cases of grape juice. Another was a high-line restaurant brat, a young hipster who’d never cooked but thought he knew everything about kitchens because he’d watched that movie Big Night a couple times.28 The three of them trying to cook through a busy service would’ve been like a Three Stooges movie, only with real blood.

  One afternoon, Matty and I stepped out back for a cigarette to hash things out for ourselves. Matty knew that the owners had probably brought him on with every intention of having him run the new kitchen, but—once having gotten him extracted from his former gig—had simply forgotten about their plans for him. The work was getting done, the coolers were getting full, and as so often happens in this business, he’d likely only been interesting to them so long as he was something they wanted. Once they had him, he was set aside in favor of other, more pressing concerns.

  He was fine with that. He was a soldier. If they expected him to run the kitchen, he’d run the kitchen. As for me, I just wanted to be involved. I’d fallen in love with the menu. My hands had already become accustomed to the unique prep required for it. The two of us had already taken a couple tours through the new kitchen, had drunk a few beers at the new bar, so in my head (and then on paper) I’d diagrammed where everything would need to go in the coolers, what everyone would need for their mise en place, how many cooks would be required, how the menu would break down across the stations. This was one of my strong suits: strategy, the disposition of forces and supplies, the tactics of fighting off a dinner rush with the fewest friendly casualties. I told Matty that I knew I could be useful. More, that I could be good. Most important, I just didn’t want to lose my shot.

  Matty knew what I could do. And he knew we got along well together—a necessary consideration when you’re talking about a situation where two guys are essentially going to be spending every waking moment (and a good number of sleeping moments) together for the next six months, minimum.

  The way I remember it, we decided that we would be partners. The kitchen would have no chef, perse, but two c-de-c’s, each handling the jobs they did best. During service, he would work the grill half of the line, I would stand sauté/saucier. We would share calling tickets. Prep and setup would be my thing, cleanup and shutdown his. Further, no one in our kitchen would be addressed as “Chef,” and we would even go so far as to not wear the solid black pants that, in the French brigade system, denote an executive position. We wouldn’t even wear the heavy white chef coats. We’d double-order cheap white dishwasher’s jackets and checkered line-cook pants and just wear those.

  Why would this matter? Because it matters. Because tradition matters, because rank and uniforms and image matter. Because we’d both spent much of our careers looking up to the guys in the buttoned-up white Bragard jackets, the black pants, and because kitchen work tends to give rise to certain idiosyncratically abstemious personality traits. A lot of us put on the hair shirt, become ascetic, believe with total conviction that only unqualified dedication can save us, purify us, grant us the power to do all the things we want. In many ways, setting out to become a career cook and eventual chef is not unlike going to seminary or becoming a monk. Both demand a total commitment beyond the realm of normal human capacity. Both have, at their core, a blind worship of long-dead saints and faith in powers beyond common comprehension. Both are full of magic and superstition, peasant hoodoo, damnation, ritual and sacrifice. And in most cases, neither offers any tangible reward. We decided to wear dish jackets because, in our minds, only chefs should wear chef jackets; because, in our minds, the uniform really meant something. You don’t dress a cat up like Patton and give him command of an infantry division. If you put on a policeman’s uniform and start handing out appearance tickets to assholes on the highway, eventually a real cop is going to come along and throw your ass in jail. In our minds, a dish jacket (short-sleeved, snap-front, made of the cheapest polyester) would place us, in terms of uniform, at the lowest rank in the kitchen and keep us humble in the
face of cuisine.

  We stopped short of refusing to wear pants, but just barely.

  SO THAT WAS OUR PLAN. Now, there were only two things left for Matty and me to do. First, we had to run it by Bird because Bird was the real deal—an actual chef and, more to the point, our actual chef. After that, we’d go to the owners.

  When we asked Bird to step outside for a quick word, he cut us off before we could make our pitch.

  “How many times am I going to have to say this to everyone?” he said, hands massaging the kinks in his back, eyes flashing with real anger. “I don’t want the new kitchen. I want to stay here. And you know what? After you guys get up and running, I’m taking a long vacation somewhere where there’s no phones. If you two want to go, go. I think you should go. I think you both need this. It’s time.”

  “Well, we’re going to go talk to the owners now then.”

  “No,” Bird said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Don’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what will you do if they say no?”

  Silence.

  “So what are we supposed to do then?” Matty finally asked.

  “I already told you. Just go. You want someone’s permission? Fine. The kitchen’s yours. You’re chefs now. Good luck.”

  Bird shook his head, went back inside to his prep, his soup cauldron, his cases of mushrooms that needed chopping. Matty and I grinned sheepishly, shook hands, and congratulated each other.

  We’d just been made.