“Bébert,” Renaud yelled over the music, which was louder now.
More gangsta rap was playing.
“You’re training the new guy.”
Bébert shoved the pan in the oven and closed the door with a violent swing. It wasn’t the same kind of oven as the ones upstairs. I’d learn about this one soon enough, it was a convection oven.
“I don’t have time for that shit. Dave’s supposed to train him.”
He was still trying to put some order in the piles of dirty dishes on the floor.
“Dave’s not coming in. Chef forgot to schedule him.”
“Fucking chef.” Bébert spat the words out. “Can’t even make a proper schedule.”
Renaud was adjusting the temperature of a stainless-steel stockpot as tall as he was, a roiling cauldron full of chicken carcasses that produced a huge cloud of pungent steam. He pushed it with his foot as he placed a bucket under the stock pot’s spigot.
“You’re the sous-chef. New guy’s your job.”
“Give me the China cap,” Renaud snapped.
Bébert, looking up at Renaud, held out a sort of giant conical strainer that Renaud set on the edges of the stockpot. He poured out a little stock, to check its thickness. He was grimacing in the steam. He told Bébert to relax.
“I’ll keep Jason late to give you a while to show him the prep again.”
They talked about me as if I wasn’t there.
“Hustle up though. Jay’s on his third double this week, and we’re gonna be slammed tonight.”
Without any attempt at gentleness Bébert started slamming the baking sheets at the foot of one of the counters into piles.
“Did you call Canada Laundry? I hope so, we don’t have enough rags to make it through the weekend. Think I’m gonna do my shift with a paper fucking towel?”
Renaud didn’t answer. He set a digital timer and clipped it to his sleeve, next to the pocket where he had arrayed various differently coloured felt pens like bullets in a belt. He left me there with Bébert and took off, jumping up the stairs four at a time.
“So you’re Dave’s buddy. I hope you’re a little faster than he was.”
In a move to show some initiative I picked up some of the dishes lying on the floor and walked toward the staircase.
“Where the hell you going with that?”
“Uh, I’m bringing it. To start washing the dishes. Looks like there’s a lot.”
“Leave it, we don’t have time for that yet.”
I pictured the giant mess in the dishpit, and wondered what could possibly be more urgent than tackling the mountains of dirty dishes and pans sitting there waiting for me.
“Come with me, you’ve got something else to do first. I’ll show you how to do the dishes later.”
Bébert had a round face and fleshy cheeks like a little boy, but you’d have to be a brave man to pinch them. He was missing a tooth and his thick, solid mass filled out his chef’s coat. A beer belly was beginning to grow. Rolled-up sleeves revealed three or four unfinished tattoos on his forearms. Instead of a chef’s hat like the other cooks, he wore a Cleveland Indians cap over a shaved head. His pants were too big, sagging like the rappers of the day. He must have been twenty-four or twenty-five back then, but he gave the impression of an older man.
He flipped the tape in the ghetto blaster. A bad recording of Huey Louis and the News’s “Hip to be Square” blared over the loudspeaker.
“Have you seen American Psycho?”
I was about to say yes but he didn’t leave me time.
“I think this was my favourite scene.”
I replayed the image of Patrick Bateman in a transparent raincoat, brandishing a fire ax in his loft, every surface protected by newspapers.
He opened the door to the kitchen and checked the shelves, reporting that the goddamn walk-in was a fucking mess.
From that moment on I tried desperately to keep up as Bébert listed off the thousand-and-one things I had to do. He tossed ten bags of spinach onto the stainless prep counter. My job was to pull off the stems and throw out any rotten bits. He came back out of the walk-in with two waxed cardboard boxes which he threw at the foot of the sink. I was to pick out twenty heads of romaine, and forty heads of leaf lettuce, pull off the leaves, wash them in ice-cold water, then dry them in an unwieldy salad spinner that I had to hold against my body as I turned.
“Make a dozen buspans, at least. Nothing fucking worse than running out in the middle of the rush.”
Then I had to change the water and wash the arugula, which came in wooden crates, each bunch covered in a layer of sandy dirt. It was the same thing my mum used, but she called it roquette. At the same time—I was getting a crash course on multi-tasking—I had to put the parsley and coriander in the walk-in and make the calzones, bruschettas and focaccias, on the double. It took me a while to figure out the difference, but I just listened to Bébert without asking questions. I soon understood, though, that I’d have to convert each of three big balls of sour-smelling pizza dough into a dozen portions every night.
“On a night like tonight, you want to make around thirty per ball. I checked the reservation book and we’re full up. Go fast, the dough needs time to rise one more time before the night starts.”
I was trying to remember it all. Then Bébert explained how to use the giant electric pasta roller. He told me an edifying story about a pastry chef who crushed her hand by getting it caught between the machines rollers, laughing as if it was a funny joke. She had to have surgery, but they were able to reconstruct her hand. “Good thing she was young, or they would have had to amputate.”
That night Bébert pretty much handled all the dough for me. He explained, patiently, that it wasn’t really a technique you could learn on the fly, but it was important to get it down as quickly as possible, or I’d never make it through the batch in time. While I was finishing off the focaccias he looked up at the clock, which elicited a long string of curses at the dimwit chef who should have scheduled another fucking dishwasher.
“After the prep, you have to do a good cleanup of the prep room. Wash the counters, sweep and mop the floors, walk-in too, and soak your cutting boards in bleach.”
Everything around me, at least everything in any way related to my work, was in the process of becoming mine: my dishes, my lettuce, my dough.
“And you’re gonna have to get this shit done in under twenty minutes if you don’t want your dishes to pile up too much.”
Even rushing, it looked to me like a good hour’s worth of work. I thought of all the dirty dishes probably multiplying as we spoke, growing into ever-taller stacks, adding to all the other dirty dishes already piled high in the dishpit when I got there. I tried not to panic.
“A little later, when you have time for a break,” Bébert said, with a chin-nod toward the giant pot of stock and chicken carcasses, “you pour out the chicken stock in buckets like this—he indicated with his foot—then empty the steam pot and scrub her till she shines.”
In the stairwell you could already hear the first customers being served. In time I would learn to read this distant rumbling sound and its constituent parts. Oven and kitchen doors closing with a muffled thud. Utensils and galvanized porcelain rattling around in the buspans of dirty dishes. Frying pan bottoms scraping on stove elements. Cooks yelling out cooking times, coordinating the hot dishes coming out with the coldside. And behind it all, farther away, the swell of the already full dining room. We could hear Renaud coming down the first staircases and yelling at Bébert to get his ass in gear.
“Just doing your job, dickwad.”
Bébert yelled this so loudly I imagined the customers could have heard him clear across the dining room. Soon enough I’d learn that that was the way of the kitchen: people yelled and screamed, the customers never heard a thing. Bébert changed his tone to come talk to me a
s he set off with a pile of dirty dishes.
“We’re behind, so you better leave the cleanup till you get a chance between two services.”
I copied Bébert and picked up a pile of dirty baking sheets, topped with a roasting pan full of gelatinous meat juice. It was almost too much, and in this attempt to show my readiness to work hard I narrowly avoided pouring it all out. Bébert didn’t notice. His foot was already on the first step.
“If you want,” he said over his shoulder, “bring the radio over and play your music.”
Once we were upstairs Bébert tried to put some order in the dishpit. He was cursing out the day staff so violently I didn’t dare talk to him. He told me what to do in a few quick half-sentences, and quickly showed me where everything went, calling every dish and kitchen item by its proper name, or at least the name the cooks used. I had to learn them all, he said, they weren’t going to spend all night repeating themselves.
“You ever wash dishes before? It’s easy like that.”
He filled a new rack with dirty dishes, then took the sprayer and gave it a cursory rinse before pushing it into the dishwasher.
Pulling down the door set the machine running with a loud whooshing sound I’d soon get used to. Bébert explained that in the time it took the wash cycle to run, about a minute and a half, I should fill as many racks as I could.
“If you lose the rhythm you’re fucked. If you can hear the machine struggling and the dishes aren’t coming out clean, check your soaps and the filter. Give everything a good rinse before you run it through the machine. And try to clean up all the crud in your dishpit as you go, so you don’t plug the sink.”
He played with the switches on the little control box on top of the dishwasher, to show me how to change the water.
“And this is super important. Any leftover oil or marinade you find in the mixing bowls or frying pans, or salad plates, scrape it in this bucket. Otherwise you’ll fuck up the plumbing. And if it overflows, guess who gets to clean up the mess?”
From the front kitchen you could hear a voice yelling to come pick up the dirty pans and bring back the clean ones. It was Renaud.
“C’mon,” Bébert said.
He tossed me a pair of tattered old gardening gloves from the trolley, steeped in years of grease. Then he grabbed a pile of clean pans in each fist and left the pit to take them to Renaud. I followed.
The kitchen was barely big enough for two people to comfortably circulate. Counting Bébert, there were now six of us, all moving around in a spectacular chaos. Twin rivulets of sweat were suddenly streaming down either side of my body. The cooks, in the heat of the action, worked around me and rubbed against me without looking at me. It was like trying to parse an argument in a foreign language. As he weaved in and out Bébert placed the pans under a stainless counter where the salads sat ready for pickup.
“Always put the pans here, in the right corner, under the pass.”
The noise was confusing. The hood vents’ breathing, the cooks yelling to be heard, the plates clanking together, the din of customers’ voices, the door of the pizza oven that never stopped opening and closing.
And the stifling heat, enveloping everything.
Renaud was standing over the stovetop in front of ten pans full of sizzling veg or bubbling sauces. He picked one up and threw in a splash of white wine, and the flame shot up in front of him. He handled his pans with a clenched brow, sweaty forehead, and tense look on his face. Jason was standing in front of a shelf at the pass-through. With pinched lips he picked up the orders as they came out of the printer, and placed them on the correct strip on the two parallel stations, reaching out over the cooks in motion. He garnished the plates and slid them over to Renaud’s station, right next to him, and he heaped them full of steaming pasta. The cook I’d seen downstairs worked with her back to Jason, at a station between the pizza oven and the ten open elements of the gas range. If she backed up even a single step, she’d bash into Jason. She was loudly tossing salads in big metal mixing bowls, plating them up a few at a time, and then holding them out for Jason, who’d place them on the pass-through. When he handed her order tickets she rearranged them on the ticket holder. Her face was shiny with sweat, her purple hair plastered to her forehead. As soon as an order was ready, Jason rang a little bell that pierced the ambient cacophony. The cook I’d seen using the slicer downstairs was checking the focaccias in the pizza oven and calling out how long each one had left to cook.
“Fuck, Renaud, what’s up with thirty-two?” shouted a server between two stacks of clean plates.
Effortlessly weaving between his two coworkers, Bébert yelled at me to come pick up the dirty pans as often as I could. Three large piles had already stacked up under the shelf next to the range. He picked up a bunch of them, with a rag over his hands, yelling “Hot! Hot!”
The cook in front of the pizza oven pushed up against the salad girl to make way for Bébert, who weaved through the kitchen, and we went back to the dishpit.
I followed in Bébert’s footsteps and slipped between Jason and Renaud. A pillar of flame shot up and I jumped back as I approached the dirty pans. I held out to pick up the smallest one, trying not to burn myself again.
“Don’t touch!” Renaud yelled. “Leave it there. These are the ones you take” he said, tapping them sharply with his tongs. “That one’s mine. Touch and die.”
Instead of picking up the dirty pans I’d been about to make off with the ones he’d prepped ahead, full of ingredients and ready to hit the stove any minute.
“Move, dude. You’re in the way.”
Without bothering to answer I took off, with clumsy movements and a tingling in my scalp. The pans were still burning hot, I could feel them through the gloves. I got back to the dishpit, holding them at the end of my arms.
“Figure out a way to run through a rack of pans every time you’re at the machine,” said Bébert as he sprayed off the pans to cool them down. “And give them a real good scrub. Send them out dirty and they’ll come right back. When you take them out of the machine, dry them and oil them right away, keeps them from rusting. All right, you’re on your own now, I’ve gotta get back to my station.”
Bébert went back to the front kitchen with a yell that they were going to rock this rush for real now. I focused on my work. I filled a rack of plates and coffee cups, which I sent through the machine, and started scouring the pans the best I could. After ten minutes of scrubbing away at burnt and congealed pan bottoms I was as soaked as a man trapped in a running car wash. My hands were starting to wrinkle from marinating in the dishpit stew, my fingertips were lacerated by the steel wool, and I was up to my elbows in oily brown water. The spray gun sent little chunks of food and burnt crud from the pans flying, and the steam plastered them to my face. I was beginning to understand why Dave wanted to ditch this job. But it was also working for me. I liked not having time to think about my own shit. The filthy plates, pots, and pans just kept piling up no matter how fast I scrubbed. It was enough to keep my thoughts fully occupied. It felt like I was wresting control of my life.
I still hadn’t finished washing the pans from my first incursion into the kitchen when Renaud called me to pick up more. I was about to head off when I heard another voice.
“Yo Dave.”
Someone was on their way up the hallway next to the line. You could hear the stress in his voice. We came face-to-face. He was the only member of the floor staff who’d acknowledged me earlier. A guy not much older than me, a little thinner, with the face of a male model. His black shirt was tighter than the other waiters’, and his clean shoes looked like the ones we used to have to wear at private school, only shinier. He gave me a surprised look when he realized I wasn’t Dave.
“Sorry, man. I’m Nick.”
He didn’t leave me time to introduce myself, just demanded that I wash the cutlery, which he made sound as urgent as a
blood transfusion. He took off jogging toward the dining room.
“Yo dishwasher. Pans!” It was Bébert, bellowing.
I eased into the kitchen, with scarcely more confidence than the first time. The salad girl elbowed me out of the way, her hands balancing plates with colourful salads.
“Move!”
I just managed to avoid her on my way to the pans. I held my hands over the flame to pick them up. Renaud was checking a salmon filet to see if it was done, and had just dispatched portions of linguini and fusilli into four different pans, which he was sautéing with veg. He flipped his pastas without a thought for me, dodging around me as if I were part of the furniture. I set off with a burning stack of pans, dodging Bébert, who had taken over Jason’s station. He was pushing off plates and throwing in little digs at servers who were slow to pick up their orders off the long stainless counter in front of him. I’d quickly understood that I was under no circumstances to touch these plates, not even to move them an inch.
Back at my machine, I soaked the thirty pans I’d picked up and emptied the bucket of greasy water that held a mountain of cutlery in the mire of the dishpit. I started sorting the cutlery, it was hard to imagine I’d ever get to the end of it. There must have been a thousand forks, knives, and spoons. I heard the sounds of pots clanging together and empty backups being thrown down under the pizza oven, which I didn’t have time to pick up, and the yells of the cooks: every sound ratcheted up the stress taking hold of me. In the service kitchen they were picking up speed. I could tell that in an hour I’d be in over my head.
Finally I managed to sort all the cutlery, and while I ran it through the machine, for at least two cycles, I filled up a couple of racks with pans and dirty plates.
The Dishwasher Page 5