The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

  Chapter 20

  Waking up that morning felt like emerging from a sarcophagus after two millennia in a coma. I hadn’t gotten up that early since the beginning of the semester. Or really since the previous summer I’d spent driving around the South Shore in my boss’s truck, fixing up old apartments that smelled like cat piss.

  I’d drunk the last of Vincent’s coffee a few days earlier, and hadn’t replaced it. So I was half awake at best for the trip from the bus stop to the restaurant. I remembered the prep lists and wondered whether I’d manage to get through it all. I was so afraid of being late I had skipped breakfast.

  It was strange leaving the apartment at the same time as the army of workers who usually finished their day as mine was beginning, not unlike revisiting a place that your memory has deformed over time. I got to work sleepy and starving. Bob was already there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He was setting up the kitchen, singing a Meat Loaf tune with hilarious lyrics he made up as he went along.

  “Rough morning? You look like you need coffee.”

  Bob showed me how to use the espresso machine. I watched the thin trickle of coffee filling the white cup, hypnotized, as he explained how to steam the milk.

  In the dining room, the chairs were up on the tables. Daylight filtered in, casting yellow lines onto the brick walls. CHOM FM played quietly over the speakers.

  “I heard you put that little shit in his place? Wish I’d been there to see it. I must’ve told Renaud to lose that guy a thousand times.”

  Bob was turning on hood vents and pre-heating the pizza oven. He rummaged through the line fridges to take inventory, then went downstairs to change. Séverine was already in the office. She said hi without looking up from her paperwork.

  Bob unlocked his locker.

  “Renaud said you’re a fast learner. So I’m gonna leave you alone to do your prep most of the day.”

  Séverine pushed the door open a little wider.

  “Bob, did Christian tell you Jason wasn’t coming in at noon?”

  Bob just laughed. He threw his t-shirt into his locker, and put on his chef’s coat.

  “No worries,” he said, giving me a knowing look. “The dishwasher will give me a hand.”

  He put on a pair of old sauce-stained Vans. I put on my shirt and pants, still damp from two days earlier, which I’d left in Dave’s old locker.

  Bob asked me to follow him. We went into the walk-in together. He checked the backups on the shelves, threw out whatever had gone bad, and rotated everything, explaining how critical this last step was. As he shifted buckets around he made little cracks about Renaud or Christian. We went out and pushed the thick door shut. I stayed at his side while he made a list of everything we had to do on the prep board. He showed me where to start, and took the time to explain in detail how everything had to be done.

  Then we went to the prep kitchen. He showed me how to activate the yeast in warm water to make pizza dough for the calzones and focaccias. You combined flour, eggs, salt, and oil in the big commercial mixer. It looked like a giant egg beater. Bob set the dial timer to fifteen minutes.

  “When it’s ready make sure the machine stops completely before you take the dough out,” he warned me. “This bad boy can rip your arm off.”

  We had to make two big balls of dough, and leave them to rise on top of the fridges.

  “Around three you have to make a double batch, for the night shift.”

  My exhaustion was lifting, but now I was starving. My hunger was so fierce it almost made me nauseous. I realized it was time to stop waiting around for Vincent to buy groceries. I was turning into the kind of guy who annoyed me, one of those dudes who comes back from visiting his parents every weekend with a week’s worth of pre-cooked meals. I started in on my tasks, taking care to do a good job and looking over at Bob for approval now and then. He was relaxed as could be, as if he was hanging out in his own kitchen. Not rushing at all. Everything appeared to be perfectly organized in his head, and he never had to move more than a step or two to get it all done. Bob was portioning meat and swordfish, deboning salmon, making pestos and stirring the cream sauce. Though he barely glanced up at his work, he was always doing three things at once. It just never showed. He kept right on telling stories about other shifts or parties. He talked enough for the two of us, but it never got annoying. Bob just liked spinning yarns. He was a born storyteller, a stand-up comic with a sense of how to let his setup breathe a while before nailing his punch line. It broke up the monotony of the most repetitive tasks.

  I’d been right: there was lots to do. By the time eleven rolled around I must have peeled four sacks of onions that weighed half as much as me, and then the shallots, and then chopped them all up in the robot-coupe. You had to peel every bulb with a paring knife, one at a time. My eyes were burning. I was crying acid tears, conjunctiva burning as if I’d swum thirty lengths with no goggles on.

  After the shallots I had to slice zucchini lengthwise, cut eggplant into discs, and wash and chop bell peppers. Whenever he saw me getting bogged down Bob would come show me how to hold the knife, or the correct way to chop veg without losing a fingertip. He demonstrated the trick to economizing every movement, and how to always stand up straight at the prep tables so I wouldn’t hurt my back.

  “Don’t hunch over like that,” he said, giving me a little slap on the back to straighten me up. If you don’t keep your back straight you won’t be able to get up in the morning.”

  My next job was to marinate some of the veg and grill the rest. The smell of burnt peppers would cling to my nose for hours. I barely had time to mix up the eggplant marinade when the balls of dough were ready. I didn’t have to prep as many focaccias and calzones as I did for the night shift, but it still ate up a precious half hour. Time was flying by. The idea of helping Bob with the lunch rush was making me nervous. There weren’t enough seconds in a minute, or enough minutes in an hour.

  I was squeezing the juice from an entire box of lemons when Bob showed up with three plates of scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, and bacon. He set mine down on the stainless prep counter and took one to Séverine in her office. I dropped everything to grab the plate, my hands dripping with lemon juice, and started shovelling it all in with my hands, almost without chewing.

  “Man, that’s good bacon!” I said.

  “Not bacon, dude. Pancetta.”

  He was pecking at his late breakfast, with one eye on the cream sauce bubbling in the steam pot.

  “Finish that box of lemons, then thaw out the shrimp. That way you can get them done after lunch.”

  It was getting close to eleven. Upstairs you could hear the sounds of the first customers trickling in: chairs and table legs being shuffled around, along with the clinking of glasses and cutlery. I gobbled up my breakfast in three minutes.

  Bob took his time finishing his breakfast, then turned off the heat on the steam pot before disappearing upstairs with our dirty plates. I squeezed the rest of my lemons and went to meet him. I brought some kitchen dishes up in the hope of getting ahead, or at least a little less behind. I was throwing a few racks through the machine when Bob called me up.

  He was placing order tickets on the hotside and coldside as he explained how things were going to work.

  “The day menu’s smaller.”

  He passed me a lunch menu. I was in charge of the station Jonathan worked at night.

  “So go ahead and make five of each focaccia, ready to throw in the oven. That way you never get behind, and you can focus on your salads. Watch out for this one and this one”—he pointed at two salads on the menu—“you can’t make them ahead, the dressing burns the lettuce. See how all the ingredients are marked underneath, in small type?”

  He used the same system on his side. The shelves above the oven filled up with pans pre-loaded with the ingredients of the four lunch pastas. No matter what happened, Bob pr
omised, we’d be ready for anything. He’d also put a bunch of osso buccos in to cook, even though only two had been ordered.

  “The trick is to double up on all the tricky dishes,” he said as he deglazed a pan. “You never get caught with your pants down. Worst case, you have an extra staff meal or two. Anyway you’ll see how it goes. They always order whatever’s trickiest.”

  I thought about the Bébert’s emergency osso bucco the other night.

  Day was nothing like night. Instead of multiple rushes interspersed with lulls, lunch was just one big rush. Everything came in at once. Once it started I felt like I’d been dropped from a plane with a broken parachute. But Bob was everywhere. He showed me how to read the tickets as efficiently as possible, and how to sequence my tasks in a way that never slowed me down.

  “It’s a hundred times more chill with me than with Renaud. You’ll get used to it.”

  I was tearing lettuce leaves and throwing them in the mixing bowl. My hands were shaking a bit.

  “It’s not that bad, with him.”

  “You’ve never seen him when the shit hits the fan. Pray you never do.”

  All through the service, Bob guided me with clear instructions. It was almost telepathic. One of my jobs was to prepare the portions of pasta. It wasn’t that hard, there weren’t fifteen different noodles to keep straight like at night. For lunch you got either linguini or tortiglioni. Though the row of tickets on my rack was growing wider, I kept my head above water. When I started lagging Bob would give me a tip on how to work faster. Meanwhile he was juggling multiple tables at the same time, frying slices of prosciutto or calabrese, sautéing more onions and garlic, the first step in every dish, sometimes using veg he’d toss onto the heat like a magician sprinkling magic powder. He’d simultaneously deglaze several pans with white wine. He’d add the sauces, then reduce them by eye. Each movement smoothly and precisely succeeded and completed the one before. He made it all look so easy, putting up six or seven plates at a time. Instead of ringing the bell he called out orders, joking around like they were specials in a fast food joint. Number 4 with fries; Number 13, hold the onions. The plates on the pass-through got picked up right away. Though Bob was going full steam ahead, everything was smooth as butter, and he always stayed one step ahead of the rush. It was a sight to behold. And he stayed in a great mood as he worked, there was none of the aggressive tension of the night shift.

  When the first lull came he sent me back to wash some dirty pans and bring up some clean ones. The thought of all the dishes surely waiting for me in the pit sent me into a momentary panic.

  But the buspans were mysteriously empty. I imagined the servers were as busy as we were and hadn’t had time to clear any tables.

  When I got to the dishpit Eaton was drying dishes, calm and cool as can be. The pit was even cleaner than when I came in. He flashed me a bright smile full of false teeth. I was even happier to see him than he was to see me. I’d thought I’d be stuck taking care of all the dishes on top of everything else.

  We made it through the entire lunch without once slackening the pace. I was starting to catch on. Bob made jokes with the wait staff and sent the plates out in a seamless series of movements. Not one second was wasted, but the man was having fun. Then everything slowed down, the orders dried up, and the clanking of cutlery on dishes and the chattering of customers tapered off.

  By two p.m. the worst was behind us. Lunch more or less done. I left Bob in the service kitchen. I still had to deal with the prawns for the night shift. That meant shelling and marinating them. You took a single prawn, slid off the thin shell, then sliced its back to pull out the little black string of digestive tube. This job drove me fucking crazy. No matter how many times I wiped my hands they remained gummed up with the viscera I was spilling all over the place. Just when I was about to throw all the shells in the garbage, Bob came downstairs and stared at me like a madman poised to toss uncut diamonds in the trash.

  “Don’t throw that out dude! What do you think we use for the seafood caramel?”

  Good question. I was slowly learning to keep nearly everything. The vegetable trimmings got boiled to make veg stock, the insides of peppers went into pesto or coulis.

  After the second batch of focaccia and calzone dough, with the prawns finally soaking in their marinade, we took a break to eat. Eaton had made Indian pastries with the leftover calzone dough. Bob called them Samosas. They were really spicy, almost too much for me, but I was so hungry it felt like I’d never eaten anything so good.

  We all sat down on milk crates in the dishpit. Bob had a smoke. His Red Sox cap was resting on his knee, and his apron was all bunched up on one of the shelves. He made us sit down and take fifteen minutes to eat, a luxury I’d never been privy to on the night shift.

  I thanked him for being so patient during the service, and helping me through the rush. I asked him why he wasn’t a chef.

  “This here is like a vacation for me.”

  I chewed in silence, embarrassed to say that the job was exhausting for me. He told me he’d taken so much shit over the years that now he looked for jobs with no responsibility.

  “Before I landed here I worked in a private club. Chef was a real dictator. If he wasn’t satisfied with how something came out, he’d throw it in the dishpit in the middle of a rush. And dude was never fucking satisfied.”

  Before that he’d been in charge of garnishes and entremets at a restaurant whose prep list was so massive it kept him up at night.

  “Insomnia?”

  “Sort of, but worse. I had eczema breaking out all over my body, even my face! Me and the other guys were so stressed we were literally throwing up before every shift. I couldn’t even eat anymore. All I could keep down were fucking apples. Everything else made me sick. I was going through five bags of Granny Smiths a week. Not that I had time to eat anyway, working sixteen hours straight without a break, no more than two minutes for half a smoke. There was always shit to do, make the stock, prep for the week. Then we’d get slammed, the place was packed every night. And no room for mistakes. The customers were paying fifty-five bucks for a steak, ordering four-hundred-dollar seafood platters. Fucking ridiculous.”

  He burst out laughing, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “What restaurant was that?”

  “One of those big deal places. Red carpet and shit. Bono ate at the bar once.”

  “Seriously?” I said, laughing. “Bono?”

  “Yeah, lots of others too. Céline Dion, Robert DeNiro.”

  “What made you stay, if it was so crazy?”

  Eaton was washing dishes wordlessly. From time to time he’d look over and smile, though he couldn’t understand a word we were saying.

  “I was young. And back then it seemed like the best job I could ever find.”

  “You must have made good money, working that hard.”

  “Hell no,” he said, breathing out smoke. “They didn’t pay shit.”

  “So why didn’t you get another job, when you saw how much they were paying?”

  “When it’s the same low pay wherever you apply, you choose the place with the most status. You get off on working at the hottest place in town. They don’t take just anyone, you know. They’ve got people lined up around the block to work there. Man, even talking about it gives me the shivers. I’d show up at ten in the morning every day and barely have time to get through the prep list by six. Then it was one long rush, from the first table till the kitchen closed. And then, to blow off steam, we’d run to the bar and drink like fiends. Out till four, up at nine, sprinting to work. Crazy schedule, crazy life. But you know, man: Bono ate at the bar once. So you convince yourself you’re somehow part of that glory. That’s what they get you with, instead of a paycheque. It’s the status.”

  As he told his story he gestured with his skinny arms.

  “How’d it a
ll end?”

  He flicked his butt into the alley, pushing the door with his feet. I was washing down my samosa with big sips of Sprite.

  “I got into blow. You’re always hungover, so you just need a couple of lines to get ready for the rush. And then just a bump for energy, to keep drinking after the shift. I lost my girlfriend, thirty-two pounds, and a whole lot of friends. I hit a point where I just snapped. I gave it all up for two years. Now I set my own terms. I work with people I respect, and people who respect me. I’ve known Séverine for ten years. She’s a friend. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What about Christian. Does he treat you okay?” I asked, before taking another bite of samosa.

  I dried my curry-yellowed fingers on my aprons.

  “Christian . . . Man, that’s a sad story. I met Christian years ago, when he was a sous-chef. Guy was a machine. Seriously, he could cook. But since his daughter died of leukemia he’s been on downward spiral. Every time I see him I’ve got a little frog in my throat. ’Cause he lost his wife, too, last winter. Now he’s kind of a ghost of himself. Lucky that Séverine is on top of shit, otherwise this whole mess would blow up. I’ve told her what I think plenty of times. But it’s not my place. She wouldn’t have to work so hard if her chef wasn’t lost at sea. And Christian would be better off if he took a good long break. But sometimes your job is all you got.”