Work – Madness in the Melting Pot

Although I adore breakfast food, I rarely eat an actual breakfast. In the morning I crave only the most inelegant, unappealing pairing a culinarian could ever conjure: coffee and cigarettes. Until my smoker’s rights have been finally annihilated, I will continue savoring them both in respectable quantities.

As a cook, whose duty it is to appease the appetites of others, I have found only two things that whet my own appetite for solid substance in the morning. The primary culprit is the sweet sizzling smell of smoked pork, expelling its porcine perfume from any and all equipment used to cook bacon. It is the almightiest of meats in my opinion, worthy of its own spot in the foundation of a properly balanced food pyramid. The only other odor I have known to arouse hunger in the morning hours is a bit peculiar. There is a sludge-like substance found at the bottom of most deep-fat fryers once the oil is removed for cleaning. No matter what has been cooked in the fryer–fish, fries, rangoons, rice noodles, churros, or chips–it always smells the same. Every time I catch a whiff, I’m smacked stupid with a desire to devour something real. This is one of my cooking-acquired quirks.

Everyone is idiosyncratic.  It’s part of what makes us human, what makes us intrinsically unique, and our idiosyncrasies continue to develop over the course of our lives. I have become increasingly aware of certain quirks, born in the kitchen, on display in this cook and in other cooks as well. By definition, a quirk is a way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is peculiar to an individual or a group, especially an odd or unusual one. By my observation, there are restaurant quirks that are commonly shared, and others that are especially peculiar to odd and unusual cooks. These cooks are the ones for whom I have the greatest affinity.

After bumping all around the Lower 48 for a few years, I currently work in the greater Charlotte area, I’m back in the South where quirky kitchen folk aren’t hard to come by. For instance, I knew a broiler cook in Michigan; I called him Sims. All day long the radio played on his station, and for most of the day he would improvise his own lyrics particular to whatever was happening at the time.

A hip hop chorus of, “Ghetto prisoners, rise, rise, rise,” would become, “I need a burger with fries, fries, fries.” Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” was overwhelmed by Sims singing, “Sear us a steak, you’re the broiler man, sear us a steak tonight. We’re all in the mood for it medium; it’s coming back if it ain’t cooked right.” There are countless songs marred by this man, none of which I’ll ever hear the same way again. For that I am grateful.

A chef named Scotty who, well (there’s no P.C. way to put it) “swung both ways,” would always remind people when he slid by them in the narrow spaces up and down the line that, “Everything is cool.” It was his way of telling people that he just needed to ladle a cup of soup, or grab a side of Caesar dressing, and that he wasn’t trying to cop a feel. Scotty must have worked in a hellacious, way-too-busy weekend joint before we worked together, because no matter what the restaurant looked like at 6:30 on Friday night, he’d start getting jittery. At the first sight of tables showing up, he always–and I mean always–remarked, “Here they come boys,” as if the Roman legions had just finished conquering Europe and we were the unfortunate cooks sentenced to feed them all. Scotty, if you ever read this, I know it’s cool and I love you, you kooky old bastard.

Then there was Rick, “Tricky-Rick,” as I called him, or even “Silent P” (as in “P”rick), as he sometimes introduced himself. During the summers Rick came in to work the dinner rush in a pub out West that I once referred to as my home away from home. In the winter, he worked in the kitchen at the ski lodge so he could snowboard for free. Rick rolled in at 3:00 p.m. to set up and work the cold side, which took the first hit from customers at around 5:30. In his two-and-a-half hours of relative downtime amidst the trickle of tickets for happy hour customers wanting nachos, Rick cleaned and restocked his line cooler and steam table in an immaculate fashion. I’m O.C.D. when it comes to prepping my mise en place prior to service, but this kid took it to a level for which psychoanalysts haven’t yet developed a term. Right before the dinner rush hit, when his line was less than a smudge away from perfection, he covered every visible inch of stainless-steel with a double layer of plastic wrap, making sure to keep it cling and wrinkle free. Then we’d get hit–sling this, sling that, do our thing, feed the masses, have a laugh, wind down, and, finally close. After the ceremonial post-rush/pre-clean smoke, Rick would come in, switch out his cooler containers, stock a little more if necessary, put the lids on, rip off the plastic wrap, and within ten minutes be in his street clothes clocking out.

Idiosyncrasies might not quite account for the nature of a pastry chef I knew named Claire. Perhaps it was an infrequent quirk at some point in her career but by the time I worked with her, she had a full-fledged propensity toward sexual aggression. Never before and not since have I felt so vulnerable around a female. My only guess is that at some point she realized that the only way to fight a certain type of fire is by burning the hell out of it. In an industry full of foul-mouthed man-boys trapped in a mostly steel box for hours on end, the kitchen can be a precarious place for an attractive girl. Not for Claire. She was the first girl who groped, spanked, and snickered at me so viciously that I felt violated. She was so aggressive that I never once thought about initiating any type of flirtatious behavior. I had a healthy fear of being humiliated by her reaction. A friend and fellow line cook once justified my fear when he made the mistake of walking up behind her, grabbing her hips and uttering a few choice phrases too raunchy for print. If you’ve ever seen a small dog mount a larger dog then you’ll have an easy time picturing what happened. After a vicious bump backwards, while he was holding himself and moaning, she took him by a fistful of hair, bent him over the closest countertop, and proceeded to hump him–the way dogs do–shouting, “Is that how you like it!” That poor guy was too embarrassed to blush. He just turned white, ghost white, and never messed with her again. Claire, however untactfully or even unlawfully, gave me a new appreciation for women in the commercial kitchen, and, point of fact, the girl could outright bake. Years later, I still crave her spiced applesauce cake.

Cooks: my brand, my people, my preference. The twisted societal microcosm of the commercial kitchen claims the full gamut of personalities and personality disorders: from crackpots, crazies, and junkies to saints, sages, and even a few ordinary citizens. The fast-paced, stressful swelter of the line and the antithetical saunter required to rock it (i.e., to prepare food efficiently and effectively) produce a breed of body and soul like no other. We generally operate like a large dysfunctional family, bound not by love but by a common duty, purpose, and passion: to cook a damn fine product, present it in the most pleasing way possible, and hurry the hell up because the customer’s waiting. Idiosyncrasies are welcome and even encouraged. You can be as strange as they come, so long as you can hold your own when–“Here they come boys”–it’s time to cook.

~ John Zoet