Tall chef, short career

[GreyWolf]

Tall Chef, Short Career

I love to cook. I like to think that I always have, but then I think back to those early teen years of living out of a pop top English camper van eating mac and cheese, hamburgers, cold cereal and spam sandwiches. Food out of an ice chest. Groceries in a cardboard box. Eating off of paper plates and drinking out of Styrofoam cups thrown haphazardly into a paper shopping bag to be disposed of later, but only after it was overflowing and before the rats that lived in the ravine nearby came out sniffing to see what course of food I had left for them to divulge themselves of. I can’t imagine that I ever thought I NEEDED to learn how to cook. I mean, I was so happy! Living in a van, washing infrequently- clothes even less so- sleeping where I wanted and going wherever the winds of change took me (which wasn’t far because I didn’t have much of an income as a dishwasher and the van barely ran). But I also liked to eat. So it seemed a natural fit to learn something that might actually pay me while feeding the seemingly empty bottomless stomach I seem to have at the time, although now I have to do stuff like cardio and weights a couple of times a week to try to keep the gaining poundage to a minimum as I grow older and more lethargic.

I started out actually as a partner with a friend of mine named Joe who had snagged the luxurious job of the “Kamikaze” shift at the local Mountain Charlie’s Saloon and Restaurant in downtown Los Gatos. Being both fresh out of high school and feeling invincible as the young studs we were, the job title sounded glamorous and simple enough. Go in after the cooks had finished once a week late on a Saturday night and clean the kitchen from top to bottom. Sounds easy right? Crank up the boom box, smoke some new strain of Hawaiian weed before going in and then just go like hell. Pull the rubber mats off the wooden platforms the chefs stood on while cooking (presumably to make themselves taller than everyone else and make them feel more like the Gods they were) scrape the floors of grease and vegetables, rice, chicken parts, burnt meals, flour, bread parts, broken plates and an occasional towel with a corner soaked in blood from some chef who “nicked” his finger during one of the evening rushes. Empty the steam table of water and scrub down the calcium deposits, pull out the grease soaked filters in the overhead ventilation hood and wipe it all down with chemicals and grease cutters with names like “Zep Quick” and “Easy Clean” oven cleaners that burned your eyes and caused you to gag if you breathed in while spraying at the same time. Crawl on our backs into the clambake ovens after tugging the crusty racks out and scrub with wire bladed scrub brushes all the crap that the chefs had spilled or slopped over from slamming saucepans of various dishes or ceramic boats filled with all kinds of fish and meat dishes that inevitably bubbled over and onto our once a week spotlessly clean ovens, hoping that the last sauce man of the night had turned the damn things off hours earlier so we wouldn’t scorch our backs and occasionally picking stuff out of our eyes that flew from the crap that lined the ovens as we scrubbed. Run everything through the industrial grade dishwasher twice and put back. Empty the fat fryer, scrub off all the stuff that fell out of the fryer baskets which had baked themselves into miniature volcanic turds on the sides of the wells restricting the flow of hot oil from the burners below and refill with a 40# cube of shortening. Clean all the stove top grills, poking out the flame holes with wire shish kebob skewers and then “burning” off the excess crud that accumulated naturally from a kitchen that typically pumped out 400-600 meals a day. Scrape off the wooden platforms, hose off and stack to dry while cleaning the rubber mats making a mess of the parking lot outside, having to haul these monstrosities up and down a two story staircase at three o’clock in the morning. Then reassembling the entire kitchen back together again all before the first shift and first deliveries of the next day showed up at 9 a.m. We were studs. We literally ran at full steam for those 8 hours on pure adrenaline, pushing each other while dragging, scraping, rubbing, wiping, and taking out bags of sodden towels, food and broken dishes to the dumpster down the staircase to the dumpsters below. We drank beer and traded dirty jokes, made fun of the messy saucier of that last shift, thought up outrageous carnal situations of the waitresses that wouldn’t ever occur in our lifetime and cursed the lazy busboys who couldn’t clean worth a shit if their life depended on it (They were mindless droids after all). We’d walk out of there with the first rays of light warming the brisk morning air smelling so bad that people actually walked around us in wide circles smelling the booze and grease thinking that we were some street bums looking for trouble. And as the town started to wake to another day, we’d go back to our apartment we shared and crash only to awake a day or two later and start our “normal” jobs at the restaurant.

Joe had already worked himself up to day prep (a much vaulted position one up from dishwasher) while I was still a lowly nighttime dishwasher- something akin to the Odd Couple if you will. While I was a complete slob, Joe had girlfriends, a car, drugs and lots of friends. Seemingly composed and more together than I. Me? I wore my hair long and had these funky mutton chops that covered up half my face and had a long distance girlfriend some 120 long miles away. My room was always a mess; somewhere between a tornado hit bachelor pad and a semi-single living room space replete with leftover food and basic life necessities. The smell must have been atrocious, what with the chefs pants covered in grease and the socks that practically stuck to the floor by themselves or stood in a corner silently mocking me that laundry needed to be done NOW, mon. No wonder I didn’t actually have any friends at the time. I lived in a vacuum. Waking up, sometimes taking a shower sometimes not, having “tea” as it were - an innocuous concoction of Argentinean coca leaves that you could legally buy in any store under the “Celestial Seasonings” brand called appropriately enough “Morning Thunder”. It was pretty foul stuff, but I drank that by the pot full first thing every morning, feeling the coca substance run through my veins and cause my blood vessels to expand and my eyes to dilate, absorbing my surroundings and generally feeling pretty cosmic. Or so I thought anyways. It was highly psychosomatic of course. The coca substance was far away and below the legal limit, but it was fun just pushing the boundaries that we all tried so hard to emulate from our cultural icons of the day. I’d roll into the restaurant just before the dinner hour and start cruising the bus stations looking for any and all dirty dinner service that needed to be cleaned, knowing that if I got behind then, I’d never surface until the end of the night and not only incur the wrath of the god cooks but the floor staff as well. For me though, it was never a problem. With my long legs and rail thin body (I was 6’5” and 165 lbs at the time) I could run the stations, wash dishes and even sometimes occasionally help out a chef or two as their personal go-fer going to the walk-in refrigerator to pull some meat or sauce or whatever else they needed. The cooks ruled the kitchen and most of the restaurant, although that was a contentiously heated debate among the wait staff and maitre d almost every night. The boom box roared continuously belting out loud hard rock and roll or an occasional Giants baseball game, except for when it got busy. Then we would turn it down just a smidgeon so that we all could hear and feel the pulse and pace of the restaurant. After all, WE- the dishwashers- were the backbone that kept plates, glassware, coffee cups, silverware, pots and pans clean and ready for the next table, course of food, or sauce. The cooks would reward us lowly peons with leftover scraps of Filet Mignon, New York Steak or an occasional flopped meal that was overcooked, maybe even fell on the floor, but we didn’t care. The cooks knew we existed? What could be better than to be recognized by the god-chefs themselves?

I remember well when I was first offered the chance to spring up to the day prep position. Joe had climbed the ladder and was now on the line with the big boys serving up food on the day time shift, so the position needed filling fast. Here is where I learned knife craft that to this day is probably my most important asset I have as a learned chef. Cutting 20# boxes of romaine lettuce for salads, slicing pounds of mushrooms sounding like the Bumble Bee song rat-a-tat-tatting on the wooden tables with an unbroken rhythm, 50 lb bags of russet potatoes dumped into the potato peeling machine then hand punched through the French fry cutter catching the peelings before they went down the drain and throwing into the always nearby garbage can; salad dressings made in 55 gallon plastic drums with whole wheels of Swiss Bleu Cheese, buckets of sour cream and IMO (fake sour cream), then into 5 gallon buckets and stored in the walk-in following the god-cooks designed recipes for the three different dressings we had; massive amounts of seasonal vegetables sliced and stored for the evening dinners in bus tubs and covered with moist cloths ready to be snatched at a moment’s notice and rotated into the steam table; 30 gallon soup stock base made fresh every day with roasted bones and vegetables; croutons for salads from the leftover house made whole wheat bread mini loaves cut into cubes, seasoned and roasted then stored; alfalfa sprouts grown in flats that needed to be rinsed daily and put out to grow under the flickering fluorescent lamps of the prep area before being slapped on sandwiches. Starting new seeds by soaking a day before then spreading in flats, watching them slowly grow, nurturing them along was my only gardening duty. All this plus receiving hundreds of pounds of the daily deliveries of food supplies from various vendors- veggies, fruit, meat, poultry, dairy- all within the first couple of hours in the day and having to put away, rotating stock in the various reach-ins and walk-in refrigerators. Oh what a life! I was on cloud nine. I was on my way to becoming a chef!

And then the opportunity came up that was my first break into the world of professional cooking. Joe moved from day time to night time saucier and once again, my guardian angel looked out for me; offering me the much vaunted Day time broiler position. For those that don’t know, this is arguably the most difficult position in any restaurant. On this shift you are required to pump out the majority of the lunch time food which consisted mostly of some 15-20 different sandwiches- plus various meats (London Broil, Hamburgers, steaks- all done to various degrees of doneness) and time it all to the rest of the line as other items would come out of the ovens or off the stove all within basically a two hour window- the infamous lunch time rush. After which you started not only prepping for the next day, but helped with some of the preliminaries of the night time prep. It was hot, it was fast paced, it was amazing just how well tuned a restaurant and its staff could be in such a short period of time for eating. A busy lunch in a two hour window would be about 200 or so. That’s a handmade custom made meal basically from scratch about every 30 seconds delivered hot and fresh to the customers table! At the end of that shift, and at the end of every day after that, I was drenched with sweat. Standing at the end of the line where the broiler, grill, fryer, and steam table where it was probably the hottest part in the entire kitchen. I kept off any weight gain for years by working this position and I loved it! It was a fantastic way to burn calories without any “real” exercise, as usually we just woke up and found ourselves at the restaurant before we were actually even awake yet- residuals from hard night time partying and many other unusual nocturnal activities still foggy in our groggy minds. I was now a cook in a well established well respected kitchen in Los Gatos, California in my early twenties. Something I never thought I would even remotely begin to pursue as a livelihood, yet it seemed destined to my liking and to my well being. The camaraderie was a brotherhood of sorts. A somewhat silent, unspoken, underground organization of life that you knew existed no matter where you found yourself in the world, any country, any continent. If your knife work was up to par, if your attitude and demeanor fit the group of cooks you worked with (which was a vast varied assortment of personalities), if your body could put up with the insane hours of standing on your feet in heat with people yelling at you from all sides and still maintain your cool, yet pump out consistently meal after meal exactly the same, for hours at a time, you were “in”. I thrived on it. I ate it up. I was in my element and I didn’t even know it at the time. This is what I was made for; this was my one true calling. It didn’t pay worth a crap- I was lucky if I had $100 dollars at the end of the month in my checking account, but I didn’t care. I was of the age where money was okay as long as I made rent, did laundry (oh, so infrequently!), and ate (mostly at the restaurant!), although Mac & Cheese seemed to still be the apartment staple. My forays to visit my girlfriend 120 miles south are another story for another place and time, but I had just enough money to pay for gas and sometimes after work, I would just jump into my VW bug, pop open the sunroof, and cruise on down to surprise her, making it back just in time to change into my checks and get back to work singing merrily to myself as if I had just stepped briefly away for a cup of coffee or a beer.

And then the big break. Night time broiler! Not only night time broiler, but on the three day crew! These were the big hitters. The big league. The Pro’s. The guys with Cajones that ran, nay, ruled the Kitchen. The testosterone emanating off of these monsters put away any thought of further discussion about anything but food. No arguing with these brutes. These were the guys that burned through 400 plus dinners in a five hour stretch from Thursday to Saturday nights with Saturday being the Holy Grail in the restaurant business for the all important profit/loss statement. This is where you could have 6 New York steaks, 8 Top Sirloins, 6 more Lamb Shish Kebobs, maybe 4 or 5 Cordon Bleus, 3 Veal Scaloppini’s and maybe a couple of livers on the grill at any given moment all while you are carving up Prime Rib to order. Rare, Medium Rare, Medium, Medium Well, Well Done and the occasional sinfully ordered Very Well Done (I’d put some grill marks on the steak and we’d throw the damn thing in a pan with some Au Jus in a 475 degree oven for 15 minutes- it shrank something terrible and would almost crack the plate when we dumped it out although one customer bought us a round of beers saying it was “perfect”. Go figure.). We worked like a precision team, each knowing what the other was doing at ANY given moment. Was that an Herbal Chicken Half that was just ordered? It’s a race to reach in the refer, grab a chicken and vault it the length of the line to the sauté chef who hastily has to grab a pan, wipe and angle it just so to catch the flying fowl and toss into the oven. Was he actually just firing up the garlic for that Shrimp Scampi? Better get that meat turned over and put it up higher on the grill where it was hotter to get it to the desired doneness so we can kick it out all at once. Did I just see the salad guy get buried in salads? Better stock up on clean towels, get another prime rib in the steamer and make sure I have my backups ready to rock ‘cause I’m getting the next slaughter in about 15 minutes after they pull those plates off the table. Sauce man falling behind? Slide over and start helping with plate set ups, speaking with the wait staff about what’s coming up (need 4 potatoes with and 3 without). Look at the clock. Is it halfway yet? How many more reservations? Try to get someone on the floor to ask what the reservation count is- better yet, ask for that cute hostess to come back to tell us- so we know whether to promote a dishwasher to start extra prep work or not. Maybe I need to slip around the corner and start pounding more veal for the Cordon Bleu or let the floor know we’re almost out of Prime Rib except for end cuts and well done. You never wanted to eighty-six anything (meaning you ran out), but sometimes you never knew what the main item would be that night that all of a sudden everyone seemed to want to order. No matter how much we prepped and tried to remember in that database each of our minds had about how much we went through last week, the week before, the year before, we always had to eighty-six something before the dinner rush was over. It actually was more beneficial to run out than to have too much. Too much meant you either had to come up with some sort of exotic special two nights later (there was a sort of time lag between rotations of food) or throw food away. Throwing food away was not an option unless it really was pretty rank stuff. We knew all the tricks to “freshening” food up whether it was partially grey raw steak or fish that stank, vegetables that got overcooked, or leftover cooked meat. Food costs were food costs. It was the basic line cost in the kitchen and we followed it like a mantra. Food costs went up last month? There goes any chance of a raise and now management is snooping around getting in our way telling us- the chefs!- how to prep, making our lives even more miserable than they had been. So we learned to improvise in ways that boggle the imagination. You think that this doesn’t happen elsewhere? Guess again. It happens in every kitchen I worked and every one that I know of where some of my friends worked too. Get over it. Its standard industry practices. I mean, if the food was just too ranked, of course we threw it out! We weren’t stupid. We knew our livelihoods depended on repeat customers. People who enjoyed our food and came back time after time again and again bringing family, friends and business associates we knew were our bread and butter. So we got pretty creative and kicked out some pretty decent food from all that.

It was a fun time for a guy who had just seemingly found his oats. A good start. A base to build from with feet somewhat solidly in an industry he didn’t think he would be in. And then I moved up the peninsula, following the executive chef who had moved on who was actively recruiting a few of us that he knew could be trusted to perform in a new venture within a *gasp* corporate organization. It happened to be in Burlingame on the inland side of the San Francisco Peninsula about halfway down in an old reconverted bank building called the “Palm Grill”. Here is where I finally learned that there was so much more to learn about cooking. Here was an upscale restaurant catering to millionaires who would come down out of their mansions in the surrounding hills in their chauffeur driven Rolls Royce’s, Mercedes, BMWs and the like scarfing down hundreds of dollars worth of food and libations without a blink of an eye. New items appeared that I had no idea how to cook like lobster, shark, snails, and abalone. Sauces I had never made before such as Béarnaise, Hollandaise, and a slew of others. They actually even had a written cookbook with all the recipes in it (we just handed down the recipe from cook to cook at Charlie’s). I learned a ton there and it was somewhat the same old type of crew I was used to before- students, bachelors/bachelorettes, divorced, married, young, old, practically every race and religion you could think of worked there. There was Jaime (pronounced “Hymie”), a good looking Honduran who loved to use his accent on the ladies out on the floor watching them get all glassy eyed, although we kidded him about his lisp. Gretchen, who was a pastry chef who could drink and party like there was no tomorrow along with her gal pal Kristin, a busgirl, who we all thought were secretly lovers and shared boyfriends. There was Bogus Bob, so named because he just never said anything that was based in reality. There was Stan the Man, our executive chef, who took on the job but wasn’t very serious about it which trickled down unfortunately to the rest of the crew and was our ultimate demise eventually. The prep kitchen was in the old vault downstairs having been renovated but without any adequate ventilation. This meant when you had to chop up some 50# of onions for onion rings for the bar, you cried like a baby. Tears streaming down your face, eyes puffy and your hands stunk for hours afterwards no matter how much salt you rubbed them with. We tried all the tricks- unlit match sticks in our teeth, cutting under cold water, wetted cloth napkins tied around our face like bandits- all to no avail. You cried. Plain and simple. It also meant that when something went bad, it went VERY bad down there and it was always a race to get it into the lift and elevated up to street level where it would sit in the back alley ripening further! It was also a very long way from the kitchen upstairs meaning that if you had to run out during a shift to replenish, you had to go out the swinging doors into the bar area, hang a left and descend 20 steps or so past the restrooms to the prep kitchen and walk ins. I remember one night we were just swamped. The restaurant was packed and the bar overflowing. Orders never seem to stop coming in and I don’t think I ever saw so many damn tickets on the line at once. Waitstaff streaming into the kitchen in an seemingly endless parade carrying hot platters out, but returning seconds later for more. I had to run down to the prep kitchen for something I had run out of and I literally ran out of the kitchen taking that left hand corner not thinking if anyone was there and ran smack into a thirty something good looking woman coming back up from having gone to the ladies room. I remember putting my arms around her to keep her from falling over backwards in a bear like vise hug, do a sort of two step to put her on the top step and then letting go while I sprinted off to the vault, just getting a glimpse of her eyes before I turned downstairs and silently laughing. Did I ever surprise her! Her eyes were glittering and her face glowing from that little bump with one of the chefs and I remember seeing her in the bar still glowing on my return trip back. Actually, I thought it was kind of fun! And I’m pretty sure that lady thought so also. But oh did I catch hell from management about that one though.

I spent a pretty short time there it seems like. The corporate boys put another restaurant in Foster City that Stan the Man drifted off to and after having to deal with an inept menu planning corporate person and the general downgrade of my own personal life due mostly to my own denials and lack of self worth, I left and went back to my old haunts in Los Gatos wallowing in shame for having gone turtle on my benevolent alma mater, but happy to be back in familiar surroundings.

It was also a pretty short lived time back at Mountain Charlie’s before the usual pangs of wanderlust struck again. A much badly planned expedition to the Arctic to study Grizzly bears with two other crazy idiots fell apart due to bad planning and basic ineptitude to convince North Face to donate all of our equipment needs. So I found myself back in a Mazda RX-2 coupe that my dad donated for the cause and along with my best friend for life (although I didn’t know it at the time) my wife Colleen, with all of our basic goods either on the roof or in the trunk, we took off for parts unknown. This just happening to be the summer where Mt. St. Helen’s blew her top. We traveled into and out of some 14 northern states plus parts of Canada before bee lining to Marquette, Michigan where my family has a cabin on the shores of Lake Superior. We surprised my aged great Aunt Gladys, but she took us in and calmly let us be, feeding and entertaining us, showing us off to her fellow friends, letting us meander on the beach shoreline, in the boat offshore exploring, and just basically be our own lazy selves. We got it into our heads that wouldn’t it be grand to live in the cabin, work in town at some restaurant and go through the winter here? Never mind that it was a basic shell of a cabin, not at all winterized (it was basically just a stud framed cabin), and never really fully understanding the wrath that Mother Nature shells out on that Lake, which is an incredible destructive display of what winter can whip up in the Great Northeast! Nonetheless, I went into town and befriended a restaurant owner who wanted to open up a portion of the restaurant to a newer theme that would help drive business. We seemed to get along okay and in my naiveté I said I’d do it, not even thinking out all the myriad of details that later in life I would think back to and cringe about the lack of planning for such a venture. Somehow, luckily, we escaped that bullet though. I think it was because Colleen’s brother was getting married and we made some lame excuse about having to get back to California to be a part of the wedding festivities. With a collective sigh of relief- I’m sure on all parties including my Great Aunt Gladys- we drove non-stop back to California and arrived a scant two and one half days later in Los Gatos thoroughly exhausted but probably much for the better now living in a mild coastal climate. A this, that, and another adventure or two found ourselves in Arroyo Seco at Colleen’s family cabin where I hit the all time low of working the graveyard shift at Denny’s restaurant in King City working along with a crazy black kid from Virginia name of Billy. We had a blast he and I, but the cards just weren’t for me to work at this level in the restaurant scheme of things and before too long we took off yet again.

There were many travels between then and now. Lots of miles, many states, many adventures. We met a ton of new people and found out a thing or two about our own relationship between us, I would like to think. I learned more skills, picked up some pretty cool jobs, bought and sold a couple of houses, moved around a lot, and now find myself in a decent environment situated on two acres on the Central Coast of California with a yard full of grapevines, a 35 ft fifth wheel parked in the yard with a monster of a truck to pull it with, two great dogs, a pretty nice job that keeps me moving around and thinking on my feet, along with my better half who is slowly finding her own place in life.

I still cook. I always have. It’s a skill that makes me happy and I enjoy it immensely. I haven’t really challenged myself as far as learning any of the classic dishes and so on, but I recently re-read a book by Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential) and for some reason it triggered something within me. Yeah, the book is full of a lot of bullshit and testosterone driven bravado, but the basic treatise and underlining story line are true of the cooking world. I know. I lived it. We do it for the love of cooking something fantastic out of just ordinary ingredients. The right combination can make a dish exquisite! The wrong ones disaster. The search for fresh, rare ingredients is a disease. Each new dish you prepare with something new you found just prompts you to look even further afar and try something even more outrageous than the last. I love cooking for a group of friends or my family when they visit. I love being in the kitchen preparing, chopping, slicing, sautéing, doing the barbecue thing when the weather is favorable, sipping my wine and talking with my guests while they mill around making themselves comfortable in my house chatting and sharing experiences. I love shopping for all the ingredients beforehand having a vague idea of what I’m going to try to accomplish and then when I pull it off at the end of the meal I’m on a cloud floating around happy as can be. It’s a skill I’ll always have and at any point I’m pretty sure I could fall back into it easily once again. Maybe with more maturity. Maybe a better understanding of what really is expected. Maybe just a tad bit more pride than those early party years of seeing who was faster, who could pump out more plates, who could slice mushrooms faster. The pay still sucks I’m sure, but the environment and people that work in all those restaurants out there are all basically the same. Pretty neat people. A real cross section of life.

So, come on by anytime. Mi Casa es Su Casa! Just let me know ahead of time. I’ll try to come up with something different to spring on you and I’m pretty sure you’ll like it. If you don’t, I think I have a box or two still of the Mac & Cheese I can heat up for you!

-Mark
January 2011

[LaurenOE]

Nice! Ya never know when and where I show up! Someday I might take you up on your offer!

[Joe]

Cool reads!

Helluva long invitation though

[Electrical_Tech]

Wow!! A chef and a literary all in one! You can be your own critic Nice write up!

[GreyWolf]

Thanks all for the nice words. It was a fun write up to do as I really had to pull from my memory banks of stuff that happened a helluva long time ago, but I found out that it was pretty well embedded in that gray mass inside my head. Surprised the hell out of me actually! LOL

[Electrical_Tech]

I can write on long compositions such as you have done above, but the content isn't suitable for publishing on here

[UberGoober]

Originally Posted by GreyWolf

Thanks all for the nice words. It was a fun write up to do as I really had to pull from my memory banks of stuff that happened a helluva long time ago, but I found out that it was pretty well embedded in that gray mass inside my head. Surprised the hell out of me actually! LOL

Its amazing, isn't it? You start pulling at a thread, first this thing happened, then this and then - whoa I forgot about that - and it all spills out.

Its a fun read!

[GreyWolf]

Originally Posted by UberGoober

Its amazing, isn't it? You start pulling at a thread, first this thing happened, then this and then - whoa I forgot about that - and it all spills out.

Its a fun read!

Coming from a guy who has some pretty amazing life stories himself, Thanks!