This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.
We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine – and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same market plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very, good.
I like cooking pasta. Maybe it’s that I always wanted to be Italian American in some dark part of my soul; maybe I get off on that final squirt of emulsifying extra virgin, just after the basil goes in, I don’t know.
But I’m simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I’ve seen it. It’s all here: the good, the bad and the ugly.
The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour – and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status – they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians – and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio.
But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue, and in some way, preparing me for future events.
John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying – guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.
He was a crusty old bastard, dressed like my uncle in ancient denim coveralls, espadrilles and beret. He had a leathery, tanned and windblown face, hollow cheeks, and the tiny broken blood vessels on nose and cheeks that everyone seemed to have from drinking so much of the local Bordeaux.
It was a protein rush to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient high, eaten with the hands. Could anything be better than that? As.
Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate – but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound.
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.
As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system – and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter – disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system.
The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts ‘fringe elements’, people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.
Bigfoot understood – as I came to understand – that character is far more important than skills or employment history.
The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so – and I realised that, my God... I’ve been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years!
I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence. Unless you’re talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.
I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them – and in a very personal, fundamental way.
After level of skills, it’s how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult – and how well you can give it right back – that determines your place in the food chain.
As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc., an overwhelmingly large percentage of “new,” “healthy,” and “organic” alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. “They got you comin’ and goin’” has never been truer. Like breaking a guy’s leg – so you can be there to sell him a crutch.
Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park.
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade.