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Chapter VI.
The Fast Lane
I went to work for a huge seafood restaurant that had just opened. It was one of those places where the owner opens several restaurants, each a totally unique concept and menu type. Each one completely different than all of the others. This was a large restaurant, seating approximately 600 people in 15 dining rooms.
The kitchen! My God, I cannot adequately convey my impression as I entered it the first time. It was the biggest kitchen and most well equipped that I had ever seen. The two hotel kitchens I had been in previously did not even compare, and they were huge. It was as if the owner decided to create the most state-of-the-art kitchen and explode it into the largest, too. I still, to this day, miss that kitchen.
I was also in awe of the Executive Chef – he was a corporate chef that opened the new restaurants for the owner, and this was the latest. But he was not a cookie-cutter chef. He was a true artist, and each concept, menu and recipe was thoroughly thought out and implemented. His experience was such that there was nothing that he could not make happen, and there was nobody that did not look up to him. Yet he was not hung up on attitude like most chefs – he simply did things the way they worked best. And if that was not in-line with the French way, then so what? It was an incredibly successful combination, putting together a totally awesome chef with shrewd business acumen and the best kitchen that money could buy. Not to mention he insisted on the best ingredients, where appropriate. This was a famously popular restaurant in its day.
I was hired for prep work, and with a Saturday seating of over 1,200, that was no small amount of preparation. As I said before, the kitchen was huge – three walk-ins, two front lines employing six line cooks each, four huge steam kettles, a whole kitchen dedicated to prep, a separate kitchen dedicated to washing sinks, dish machines and storage for the hundreds of pots, pans and accoutrement. There was even an entire section dedicated to the food runners. And this did not include the employee dressing and break rooms on the second floor!
Anyway, a typical preparation I had to do involved chopping two to three cases of parsley at a time. The person that first showed me what needed to be done used a knife in each hand to simultaneously chop with both hands. It was kind of like a drummer, except the drumsticks were knives and the drums were cutting boards with parsley on them. I guess we were the rockers of restaurants. Hey, that’s a good name for a group! Anyway, that was not good enough for me. After about ten cases like this, I decided that there had to be a better way, so I scrounged six chef’s knives and with three in each hand between my fingers, I started chopping away. I became somewhat of a legend, as none of the other cooks could match my dexterity in using six knives at once. Of course, it helped that my hands are so large. The most my competition got was four, two in each hand. Mind you, this parsley was not rough chopped; this parsley got chopped to dust-mote size, and then washed and squeezed inside a towel to make a green “dust” to sprinkle plates with. Imagine, an entire case of parsley, about sixty bunches, when prepped, made up only about four cups of garnish! I still cannot stand the half-assed way that parsley is chopped by most places. Sure, it is easy to chop in a food processor, but the look is so different. You cannot know the difference unless you see it for yourself. In fact, when I owned my restaurant, I could not convince my cook that it made that much of a difference to prepare chopped parsley that way. But after I had prepared some and showed him how it did not clump when sprinkling and also how much more professional it looked on the plates, he was sold. He never did it any other way after that demonstration.
Back to the seafood restaurant. After a few weeks, the chef had heard so much about me from the other cooks, that he personally asked me to work Sunday Brunch. You need to understand that unlike some cooks, we all viewed Sunday Brunch as the holy grail of the cooks’ life here! Being asked, by the Executive Chef no less, to work it was like the Pope asking a small town priest to come work in the
And the best part of working Sunday Brunch was that the chef himself worked it, so we could go to him at any time to get advice on our latest ideas and he would be like a proud father, helping us to excel and outdo one another. It was also a chance to show him what we were capable of. I had found my calling. For that period of my life, at least.
After working several Sunday Brunches, the chef asked me to become a line cook at night. I realized much later that my stint at Sunday Brunch was the chef’s “trial period” for a cook to see if they had what it took to be promoted, and unbeknownst to me, I had passed!
My first night as a line cook, I was on plating – garnishing plates, wiping messy plates, helping to ensure that all of the dishes on the same order were called up at the same time, etc. It was HOT on that line! And I don’t mean hot as in when Paris Hilton says it. I mean hot as in standing in the caldera of a volcano in Hell wearing sweats drinking lava and jogging in place. I still cannot think of anywhere that I have worked that was more like what I thought of as a sweat shop than that.
The line was a twenty-foot long aisle with 4-foot by 6-foot square open-flame broilers at each end, 7-foot tall pressure steamers next to the broilers, and several 8-burner open-flame flat-top stoves and ovens in the center. On the opposite side of the line, across from the cooking equipment, were lots of counters for setup. Twenty feet of steam tables and chiller tables for garnish and items that needed to be chilled but readily available. Above that were triple-stacked, twenty foot wide shelves for finished plates. Imagine, if you can, sixty feet of space full of plates ready to go out into the dining room, sometimes stacked more than one plate high! And, on busy nights, every shelf was often full.
My first night on the line, two hours into the rush, I passed out. The sous-chef, rather than being annoyed as he should have been at the newbie, simply sat me in a cool place and told me that it happens, and that I needed to take salt tablets and drink plenty of water. Back then, we were allowed to keep salt tablets on hand for just this reason. Now, whiney people and lawyers have put a kibosh to that because some idiot got carried away and needed to blame anybody but themselves. That seems to happen a lot in our society, doesn’t it? The stupidity of a person driving off with a hot cup of coffee between their legs and suing the restaurant for the coffee being too hot is only exceeded by the stupidity of the jury that awarded the case! Not to mention the complete and uncontested witlessness of the judge! Of course, we know that the lawyer was only doing it for the money. Enough on that subject.
The chef and sous-chefs attitudes and demeanor quickly made me into their “stepford wife”. What I mean by this is that I would have done anything for them, as I was sure that everything they said and did was for my good and that I was the only cook they had. Of course, I was not that special, but they had a knack for making people feel this way.
One huge peeve I had there was due to smokers. Cigarettes, that is. Up to this point in life, I had not really noticed smokers one way or the other. Hell, I even smoked a cigarette or two on occasion. Of course, this was before the latest societal fad of relegating them to the farthest reaches of the outdoors. Back then, smokers were allowed smoke breaks every twenty minutes. And boy did they take advantage of it and throw it up in the non-smokers faces. It was so bad that if one did not smoke, you were only allowed a break every hour or so. I am sure some of the cooks took up smoking just to get more breaks. And my issue with this was not that they got more breaks than us non-smokers, it was simply that they always chose the worst time to take their break. It was as if they were in a
Here is how I accomplished that no-smoking task: I started taking breaks when it was most inconvenient for both the smokers and the food getting out. I had also enlisted the help of several of the non-smokers, so after a few nights of the floor manager having to come back to find out what the holdup was, he finally tried to force us to get back on the line. So, like a true democracy, we went on strike and said that if he wanted us to return, the policy would have to be made the same for both smokers and non-smokers. We even went so far as to tell him that we did not care if this meant that the breaks would be fewer and farther between, we simply wanted a measure of consistency. Shortly thereafter, the policy was changed to make sure that nobody was able to take advantage of the situation. Thus started my leadership transformation, albeit it a rather questionable one. Not only that, this was when I graduated to the top of the kitchen food chain, and had groupies of my own in the “lower” ranks.
Of course, that was when anyone could smoke anywhere, including right next to where the food was being prepared. Actually, I kind of feel sorry for smokers now, as the pendulum has swung the other way too far. I see restaurant workers smoking outside of a building where I know that they work on the 31st floor and have to come down to the first and outside to smoke. I guess that restaurant did not want to make a smoking lounge, like in one of the airports that I frequently fly through. But that in itself would scare me – these lounges are glass enclosed and every time I go past them, they are completely gray with smoke. Makes me sneeze just thinking about it.
Within a few weeks of beginning on the line, I became the lead broiler man for one of the two lines. This was the top position on the line, second only to sous-chef. Let me explain why this position was so intense and difficult, condensing tasks into bullet points to make it easier to understand how it was accomplished sequentially and totally:
- As broiler man on the line, I received all food tickets;
- I visually scanned the tickets, and then mentally calculated the cook time for each item on the ticket. For example, if there was a medium done steak and a sautéed sole, the steak would have to be put on first, and then when the steak was about three minutes from being cooked, the fish would have to be started, as it only took about three minutes to cook. Every item on the ticket had to be timed so as to be finished at the same time so that no one item would sit under the heat lamps too long;
- After mentally calculating the cooking time, I would put the steak on and let the sauté cook know that he had a sole coming up and about how long he had before he needed to start it cooking;
- I then notified the plating man about the two plates, so he could get them ready for setup and ensure that he had the garnish at hand and ready. He also kept the sauces topped up;
- If something was needed on the line from the back kitchen, the cook needing it would let me know, and I would call back to the prep kitchen that we needed an item for the line. This happened all through the night;
- When the steak was about three minutes from being done, I would call to the sauté cook to start his fish cooking;
- If everything was timed properly, as it usually was, the steak and sole would get plated at the same time and garnished;
- I would then call the food runner that they had an order ready for pickup;
- Sounds easy enough, right? Well, on a good (and typical) Saturday night, we would put out over 1,200 plates between 5 and 10! Yes, twelve hundred! That’s 240 plates an hour, or a whopping 4 plates a minute! That is, 6 people cooking, checking, garnishing, prepping, setting up plates, watching all items in process, and dishing up plates, making sure that they were all consistent and clean;
- Some tickets would be two-tops, some four and others up to twenty plates per ticket. And each plate on a ticket had to be done at precisely the same time as all the other dishes on that ticket;
- The exception was that if there were appetizers on the ticket, these had to be timed separately from the main courses, yet all appetizers had to come up together. Also, there had to be enough time between the appetizer course and the main course for the customer to enjoy their experience, and I had to estimate that;
- All of this was happening in my head! No timers or computers or calculators. Just my little old brain.
But, we hardly ever got anything sent back – we were a knock-out team. And every plate had to be exactly the same as the one before.
We were a team out of the kitchen, too. A rather troublesome one, at that. Someone would always have speed to take before a dinner rush, and we were like well-oiled machinery – never getting in each other’s way. We got to the point where we could almost read each other’s thoughts on the line.
After work, we would go to one of the cook’s apartments and drink, smoke pot and play games – mostly Risk. You see, we were a competitive lot, and Risk allowed us to defeat each other, since at work we were different parts of the same machine working towards a common goal.
We would also talk shop all night, and sometimes get in a mood to experiment. So, here you would have a half dozen cooks in a small apartment kitchen making up stuff! We always loved what we made, but most of it was not fit for public consumption. Like the psilocybin mushroom pizza or the hashish sauces. But we loved it. Of course, it may have been our physiological states and the munchies talking, but whatever works.
Sometimes, we would make a “no-shop-talk” rule, where the person to mention anything about work would have to do a shot of Jack Daniels. I was usually the only one not stinking drunk, as I did not, and do not, like Jack Daniels. I had my share of slip-ups, though, due to the mushroom and pot haze.
Occasionally one of us would get a bizarre idea for something weird, and being the people that we were, we would usually act on it. The craziest example was when the cook that, while high in acid, thought that a Christmas tree hanging upside-down from the ceiling would be cool. Since it was the Christmas season, the next day he got a tree and actually hung it from his apartment ceiling. He had no ornaments to hang on his tree, though. When I saw the tree the next night, and saw all of the empty bottles of liquor all over the place, I had the idea that hey, why not hang empty bottles from the tree as ornaments. So we did. What a cool tree! Years later I saw a certain “TV Hausfrau” with the idea to hang a tree upside down, and on a different show, the idea of using those tiny liquor bottles as ornaments. I wonder – was our late-night, drug-induced fantasy tree the ground-zero of these ideas of many years later? Who knows? The etymology of concepts is an interest of mine, too.
Occasionally, particularly during the week, we would have slow nights at work. Since we were used to busting ass all of the time, we were never ones to sit around. So, we would often cook specialties for each other. Usually whatever we had been thinking about or were in the mood for. This was well before the Food Network, so we truly worked off of our own imaginations and experiences. I remember the one and only non-American cook that I had ever worked with to that point, who made a Mongolian beef, which to this day, I have not had better. I have searched and tried this dish in many restaurants all over the country, but never has it even approached his. I just wish that I had convinced him to show me how to make it. Alas, I was not so forward thinking in those days. In the restaurant business, we tend to live in the moment.
Speaking of living in the moment, we had some spectacular food fights. Long before “Animal House” we were waging war on each other that would have made the college people in that movie cringe. Since we played war games at night and were so competitive, we would of course always try to outdo each other.
It would start calm enough – near closing, one cook would get playful and throw a cherry tomato onto another cook’s counter. Then, in the vein of fun, the second cook would toss the offending fruit back and add to it a handful of parsley. The first cook, not to be outdone, would toss all of that back and add a spoonful of sauce to that. By this time, it had transformed from a playful game into a serious competition. And so it continued, until one night, I got tired of the pissing contest (I was quite often one of those two, you see), and poured all of my remaining sauces over his counter – what a mess!
Admitting defeat in the only honorable way, he took a squeegee and squeegeed it all onto the floor. Since we did not have to clean the floor, it was a perfect solution. We laughed our asses off and left for the night to get high and drunk and play war games. Too bad real war cannot be resolved so equitably. Maybe if we elected….well, never mind.
There were other examples of me getting fed up with the mamby-pamby little food fights, and I was the best at firing the shot that was like a final blow to the war-du-jour and stopped all further aggression. For example, after a particularly long and drawn-out night of food war, I dipped a pair of chef’s pants, zipper first, into hot fryer oil and flipped the offender (on bare skin thank you very much!) with the lava-hot zippered end. He had a welt for days, but nobody fucked with me for days after that, either.
Another end-game involved an uncooked ten ounce filet mignon. The sauté cook on the line had been messing with me all night, and after having had enough, I grabbed my weapon of choice from my meat cooler, swung around and wound up for the pitch. Since we could all pretty much read each others minds, and he knew that there were no steak orders up, he got to boogying off the other end of the line. But, since he had ten of the twenty feet to traverse, he was barely passing the corner when the missile whizzed by his head. His eyes were as big as saucers as he exclaimed “Hey: I heard that whistling by my ear!” Then, we looked and saw that where it had hit the steel door of the walk-in cooler, it had made a fair-sized dent. He swore to me that he would never screw with me again so long as I never did that again.
Another time, another food fight, another offending cook, I ended a fight with a raw scallop. No biggie, you say? Tell that to my victim. He found out the hard way that a raw scallop (large sea scallop), when thrown at bare flesh from about ten to fifteen feet, hard enough, not only stings, but splats and sticks to the skin, leaving a bruise that takes days to go away! From that time on he got nervous any time I picked up a scallop.
Interestingly, we never actually had fist fights, so we never caused any permanent damage, in spite of all of the weapons at our disposal. No matter how angry we got, there was always a limit to how far we were willing to go. Always unspoken, of course, but intrinsically understood by all. I am not sure why, but it was as if we knew that our wars did not need to degenerate into real damage to prove the point. Are you listening, governments? Most certainly not. Idiots.
Sometimes, our war would expand beyond our borders. If a waitress was pestering us enough, we would get a live lobster, remove the rubber bands from the claws and chase the offending foe out of the kitchen. It was fun to watch them the rest of the night. Skulking around the corner of the kitchen door, tiptoeing into the kitchen and being generally contrite. Once, I am rather embarrassed to admit, I even announced, over the kitchen microphone, that a particularly bitchy waitress was on the rag. She hated me ever after, as it turns out she really was! I have felt bad about that ever since, but could never make it up to her satisfaction. Ah, youth and idiocy are not great companions.
Something else you need to be aware of when dealing with anyone who has professionally cooked, is that time is relative (Cook’s time, that is). There are immutable timeframes that all cooks use, and if you know the rules, you will get along just fine. First of all, if a cook tells you that something will be ready in “two minutes”, that means “Get the hell away from here – it will be done when it is done”. It can be anywhere from one minute to fifteen minutes, and the two minutes is code for “I don’t know, I don’t care, and if you don’t leave me alone, I will come after you with an unsheathed lobster”. Whereas if he tells you any other amount of time, that is an accurate timing. I have no idea how or when this started. I also cannot tell you how I learned it, as I know that it was not told to me in so many words. It is simply the way it has always been in any kitchen I have ever cooked in. It’s an immutable truth of a restaurant kitchen.
As I mentioned, competition was fierce in the kitchen. My most notable was with the sous chef on the methodology of line cooking. Like a cheesy movie, the student was to surpass his master. At one point, I told him that there was a better way to run the line, and that if certain changes were made, the line would operate more efficiently. Of course, he did not like that idea, as the line was initially set up by him. Mind you, his way was excellent; it is just that there were things that could be done to improve upon it.
Since he refused to entertain my changes, I challenged him to a competition in front of the entire line staff, so of course he had to accept or lose face. Did I mention that I was a real asshole? Anyway, we had both lines running, with six cooks on each line. My line with my changes and his line in his original configuration. The cashiers were tracking the number of plates that went out from each line, and pools were made and bets were taken.
Of course, since he had trained me, I was the long-shot for this competition. So sorry for the suckers that bet against me! My line beat his line by about fifty plates that evening. He meekly acknowledged that I could make the changes to the line as I saw fit. Of course he had no other recourse, as to do anything less would be to show his staff that he was petty. Besides, he did not regularly work the line, so whatever made his cooks more efficient was best for the business. And, of course he was fine with making his cooks more efficient.
Another strange development at this restaurant was our discovery of whippets. Whippets became a way of life for us, yet were always on the verge of ending our careers. For those of you who don’t know, a whippet is when you hold a can of compressed whipped cream right side up so that the cream does not come out, and inhale the gas. You would get a very intense high for a minute or so. Of course, the modern day compressed whipped cream does not contain this gas any longer. That was when they were compressed with Nitrous Oxide.
For a long time, the managers were perplexed by the fact that most of our cans of whipped cream had cream, but no gas in them. We’re talking five to six dozen cans. Of course the vendor got blamed at first, having to replace it all. We ran those poor managers ragged trying to catch us in the act! One night, one of the food runners squealed to a manger that the cooks were actively imbibing the gas, so the manager made it a mission to catch one of us in the act. As it transpired, I happened to be leaving to go back to the line after my high before one of the other cooks. I saw the manager heading towards the walk-in from the other side of the kitchen with an intent look on his face – presumably the snitch told him that the cooks were “partaking” of his whipped cream. So I rushed back to the cooler, where the other cook had fallen down, he was so high from the several whippets that he had inhaled back-to-back. Some people have no sense of control! I had to slap him and pour some cold water onto his face to straighten him out before the manager arrived and busted him. Since we were in the cooler, the water just happened to be smelly water from iced-down fish, but hey, it worked. You see, we cooks watched each other’s backs, and were extremely dedicated to each other. Just at the moment that the manager opened the cooler door, we “bumped” into the manager, heading out of the door with a couple cases of items that we had “just gone” in there to restock the line with. Of course, he knew what was going on, and we knew that he knew, but without any evidence, there was no crime. So, we smiled hugely and nodded to the manager and went on our way to stock our stations, leaving him fuming at the open door, looking at us, and into the cooler at the seemingly-untouched cartons of whipping cream. I am sure that he knew why all of us cooks laughed every time we saw him later that night, but without evidence, there was nothing he could do.
We found out what food runner had snitched, and paid him back in spades. Not only did he snitch on us and act like he was better, but sometimes the food runners would get it into their heads that they ran the kitchen – they would start getting bossy and tell us what to plate up, when to cook something, and even had the temerity to tell us how to cook it. One night, we decided to show them who really ran the line. So, since I could mentally track dozens of dishes and times to the second for the entire line, I calmly called the orders that came in over the next thirty minutes as if they were on the same table. Remember, we are talking a Saturday night rush, so this amounted to about thirty-five tickets and approx 120 plates!
In fact, we plated up no plates during that thirty minute period, lulling the offending food runner into a false sense of calm. Since he had about a half dozen runners that were standing around picking their noses with nothing to do, he sent them all out into the dining rooms to bus tables and fill water glasses. Mind you, the dining rooms were spread out over an enormous area. I calmly waited until enough moments had passed that I knew that the runners would be spread out over the entire restaurant and that the offending runner was the only one left in the kitchen, sat on the edge of the counter as if I had nothing to do, stared at the offender, then calmly looked down the line and asked in a really quiet voice “Ready?”. The runner, looking confused, glanced at each of the line cooks and must have seen Satan in our eyes, for his eyes got big enough to swallow Jupiter, and he screamed out “FUCK!” at the top of his lungs and bolted to the dining room to gather back all of his runners.
So sorry – too little, too late. By the time he returned with reinforcements, the entire 20-foot line of 3-tiers was stacked 3 plates high, and every one of our tickets was up and ready to be delivered. Suffice it to say that this particular runner never challenged our authority in the kitchen again. I don’t think he ever snitched again, either. At least if he did, he managed to conceal it from us.
Yeah, I guess you could say we were mean, vindictive bastards. OK, here is where many of you are going to lose it, and will never want to eat out again. But, let me tell you now and reiterate later, that the following is an exception, and you should only be worried if you are a total jerk all of the time and are stupid enough to foist your inane complaining on the same restaurant employees all of the time.
This restaurant, while named after a certain Captain, was actually not owned nor started, nor even run, by the Captain. In fact, the Captain was a fictitious creature invented specifically for this location as a mascot for the public to be able to relate. So, to make it “real” for the public, they hired an actor to be the Captain, but after a while, he started to believe the hype that he “was” the Captain. It showed in his arrogant stance, the way he “inspected his kitchen” and dining rooms whenever he came in, pointing out the least spot and haughtily telling the closest person to “take care of it” and that “he would not tolerate” a messy ship.
Needless to say, nobody liked him, and so we, the line cooks, decided to “make our mark”. He always ordered a medium cooked
We awaited the explosion from the dining room, anticipating the end of our careers nervously. We just knew that he would taste all of our “seasonings”, or that one of the runners would have seen and squealed on us. Well, lo and behold, when the “payback” time came, the Captain regally entered the kitchen, and addressed us as a group, saying that that was “the most flavorful, juiciest” steak he had ever had, and that we were to keep up the good work! You could have knocked us over with a feather. After he left, we all fell on the floor laughing so hard that it took at good ten minutes before we could manage to get back to work.
What did I learn from that situation? Never, ever make a cook believe that you are an arrogant prick. At least, if you do, don’t go back to that restaurant.
For those of you now saying that you should never send anything back to the kitchen, I will ease your mind – I have witnessed plenty of returned plates for a variety of reasons, both real and imaginary. The cooks involved don’t take these seriously (or personally) – we simply fix the problem and send it back out as close to the requested way as possible. We usually don’t have time to think about it – we just want it done and out of the way. We are not like the “Frenchy-chef” guys, thinking that they know best what a person should enjoy. We know full well that everybody has different tastes and we excel in making all customers happy; even if we do not personally agree with the results (I personally don’t care for well done, but go for it if you do). Unlike the Frenchy Chefs, we are not judgmental of other’s tastes. So do not be afraid to send a dish back that is not to your liking – just don’t get arrogant about it, or make it a habit out of doing this at the same place. If a kitchen continuously sends out food that you feel is bad, don’t go back there. You are only asking for trouble, since the fact that you keep returning shows that you are a glutton for punishment, so the cooks will be more than happy to assist your masochism.
Remember I told you that the Executive Chef was the most incredible man that I had ever worked for? Well, his wife was equally talented. There were many weddings done at the restaurant, and she always got to do the cakes. But not a mere frosted cake like mine, no! Her cakes were pulled sugar or chocolate, and she was a genius with both. Her pulled sugar cakes were pure satin perfection, and her ribbons looked like they came right off of the spool from the fabric store, except the colors were too perfect. And chocolate, well, all I can say is incredible. And I don’t mean chocolate icing or poured chocolate. I mean sculpted, formed chocolate fantasies! She turned out some cakes covered in tempered chocolate that would have made the Food Network chocolate battle contestants jealous. And, like her husband, she was down-to-earth and patient. She would calmly answer any questions while whipping up a masterpiece, and never miss a beat or break a sweat.