True Life: I'm a Restaruant Chef: New Chapter

Once again ladies and gentleman, I give you the entertaining writing styles of Reid Wright and his college essay, "The Machine"

Many cooks came and went from the Metate room; sparking and fading in my memory. But there were four who stayed – standing like pillars - through the worst of times.

Lorenzo Whitehorse - The souse chef - was the big dog in the kitchen. He was 400lbs of barking Indian. He always seemed to be grumpy, and his booming voice could be heard shouting orders and curses through the solid brick wall in the customer’s bathroom.

“What the hell? Godamnit! Get your shit out of my face!” he would shout at the servers. Every once in awhile, he would flash a Cheshire grin to let us know it was all an act. Most of the time, it was.

Toby - Lorenzo’s little brother - was shorter and walked with a limp. Toby was a Satanist who collected action figures from horror films. The other cooks called them his “dolls”. Sunday morning, when most of us were hung-over, Toby hobbled around with a cone shaped colander on his head, whacking a sauté pan with a wooden spoon shouting: “Bring out your dead!” At 25, Toby was the closest to me in age.

Ben was a short, stocky, Navajo who was a little older and always had a kind grandfather smile. Ben was quiet in the way Lorenzo was not. I worked with him a year before he said a single word to me. When he did speak, it was in quiet mumbles that I usually couldn’t make out.

Brandon was the executive chef in charge. He was the glue that held us all together and kept us from getting sloppy. He was a big pale guy with glasses. A former Opera singer, Brandon would occasionally sing along operatically to ACDC on the radio.

Before we opened for dinner every night, Brandon would hold a staff meeting, which he would always end with the line: “Have fun, make money.” I have learned a little something from every single cook I have worked with, but most of it, I learned from Brandon.

People often ask me what the difference is between a cook and a chef. Chefs have been to culinary school. This doesn’t necessarily mean that chefs are better. I have known experienced cooks who could make food better and faster than most chefs. Graduating culinary school usually (but not always) gets you more money and better jobs. You can usually pick out a chef in a crowd of white coats because they use a lot of French vocabulary and they have a $1000 knife set rolled in a fancy case.

At first I was given odd and end jobs that a trained monkey could do. Mostly it was knife work. I was given several cases of vegetables to slice, chop, dice and julienne. I had a plastic bin the size of a bathtub and a four gallon bucket to fill up in three hours.

These days, most new cooks are given tightly woven fiber gloves to prevent them from cutting themselves. I had no such protection. Many times my blade would slip and I would feel the bitter kiss of laceration. I would often be seen wearing a latex glove stuffed with paper towel to soak up the blood. I still have the scars.

My hands learned a little from each cut. Now when the blade gets close to cutting me, I feel a tingling sensation, and pull away.

I worked my way up in rank quickly. I worked with Toby making deserts and appetizers. In retrospect, it was one of the most fun cooking jobs I ever had. Deserts are very artistic, and Brandon gave us free reign to do whatever we wanted with them. “People eat food with their eyes.” He used to say.

Once I had this mastered, Brandon started training me on “The Line”.

To us, there’s really just two kinds of cooks: Line cooks, and the rest. I read somewhere that fighter pilots, L.A. cops, and line cooks had the highest heart rates of any occupation.

For example, pretend you’re a broiler cook. A commercial broiler is much more potent than any backyard grill, and food cooks much faster.

Standing in front of this broiler it is about 110-120 degrees. You have 16 pieces of meat on the broiler. Each one is a different cut and a different temperature. You have to keep track of each one and which table it goes to. There an buzzer going off on the other side of the kitchen. Tickets are printing incessantly, needing to be read and called out to the other cooks. Your microwave beeper is going off. A pot is boiling over on the stove, servers are yelling at you, you’re out of sauce, you’re being elbowed by another cook trying to get something, there is a fire in your catch tray, and you have to piss like a pregnant woman. What do you do?

The answer: everything.