old woman, my Oncle Gustav, a geezer in coveralls and beret who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes until they disappeared onto the tip of his tongue. Little had changed about La Teste in the years since my father had vacationed there. The neighbors were still all oyster fishermen. Their families still raised rabbits and grew
- Location 154
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pétards, firecrackers which one could buy legally
- Location 162
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today . . . please, not the souffle station.' If you screwed up, you'd get what was called
- Location 535
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Generally speaking, American cooks — meaning, born in the USA, possibly school-trained, culinarily sophisticated types who know before you show them what monter au beurre means and how to make a bearnaise sauce — are a lazy, undisciplined and, worst of all, high-maintenance lot, annoyingly opinionated, possessed of egos requiring constant stroking and tune-ups, and, as members of a privileged and wealthy population, unused to the kind of 'disrespect' a busy chef is inclined to dish out. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.
- Location 705
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A guy who's come up through the ranks, who knows every station, every recipe, every corner of the restaurant and who has learned, first and foremost, your system above all others is likely to be more valuable and long-term than some bed-wetting white boy whose mom brought him up thinking the world owed him a living, and who thinks he actually knows a few things.
- Location 714
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Do not fuck with a line cook's 'meez' — meaning their set-up, their carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, back-ups and so on.
- Location 738
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Working clean, constantly wiping and cleaning, is a desirable state of affairs for the conscientious line cook. That chef was right: messy station equals messy mind.
- Location 748
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Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I'm not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I've eaten them.
- Location 815
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I never order fish on Monday, unless I'm eating at Le Bernardin — a four-star restaurant where I know they are buying their fish directly from the source. I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!
- Location 823
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- [note::WHEN you go to a restaurant sometimes determines the quality of food you eat - fish at restaurants typically comes on Wednesdays or Thursdays.]

But in my experience, most cooks are less than scrupulous in their handling of them. More often than not, mussels are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss in the bottom of a reach-in.
- Location 846
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Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business.
- Location 857
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Remember, brunch is only served once a week — on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'. One other point about brunch. Cooks hate brunch. A wise chef will deploy his best line cooks on Friday and Saturday nights; he'll be reluctant to schedule those same cooks early Sunday morning, especially since they probably went out after work Saturday and got hammered until the wee hours.
- Location 866
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Brunch is punishment block for the 'B'-Team cooks, or where the farm team of recent dishwashers learn their chops. Most chefs are off on Sundays, too, so supervision is at a minimum.
- Location 871
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I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.
- Location 881
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'Beef Parmentier'? 'Shepherd's pie'? 'Chili special'? Sounds like leftovers to me.
- Location 887
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'Saving for well-done' is a time-honored tradition dating back to cuisine's earliest days: meat and fish cost money. Every piece of cut, fabricated food must, ideally, be sold for three or even four times its cost in order for the chef to make his 'food cost percent'. So what happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut of sirloin, that's been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that's a total loss, representing a three-fold loss of what it cost him per pound. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can 'save for well-done' — serve it to some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won't be able to tell if what he's eating is food or flotsam.
- Location 895
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to the back of
- Location 897
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Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these water heads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.
- Location 904
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Shrimp? All right, if it looks fresh, smells fresh, and the restaurant is busy, guaranteeing turnover of product on a regular basis. But shrimp toast?
- Location 924
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If a restaurant is known for steak, and doesn't seem to be doing much business, how long do you think those few orders of clams and mussels and lobster and fish have been sitting in the refrigerator, waiting for someone like you to order it? The key is rotation. If the restaurant is busy, and you see bouillabaisse flying out the kitchen doors every few minutes, then it's probably a good bet. But a big and varied menu in a slow, half-empty place? Those less popular items like broiled mackerel and calves' liver are kept festering in a dark corner of the reach-in because they look good on the menu. You might not actually want to eat them. Look at your waiter's face. He knows. It's another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh. If he likes you, maybe he'll stop you from ordering a piece of fish he knows is going to hurt you. On the other hand, maybe the chef has ordered him, under pain of death, to move that codfish before it begins to really reek. Observe the body language, and take note.
- Location 928
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Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York. The food that comes in Tuesday is fresh, the station prep is new, and the chef is well rested after a Sunday or a Monday off. It's the real start of the new week, when you've got the goodwill of the kitchen on your side. Fridays and Saturdays, the food is fresh, but it's busy, so the chef and cooks can't pay as much attention to your food as they - and you — might like.
- Location 935
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Tuesday; he's got his best-quality product coming in and he's had a day or two to think of creative things to do with it. He wants you to be happy on Tuesday night. On Saturday, he's thinking more about turning over tables and getting through the rush.
- Location 942
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You need, for God's sake, a decent chefs knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes.
- Location 987
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Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded.
- Location 991
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Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has — in addition to its many other fine qualities — the added attraction of looking really cool.
- Location 997
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If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.
- Location 1004
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A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tourneeing vegetables, fluting mushrooms and doing the kind of microsurgery that my old pal Dimitri used to excel at.
- Location 1007
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offset serrated knife. It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a 'Z' that's been pulled out and elongated. This is a truly cool item which, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs — like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on — but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish.
- Location 1010
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the indispensable object in most chefs' shtick — is the simple plastic squeeze bottle. Maybe you've seen Bobby Flay on TV artfully drizzling sauce around a plate with one of these — the man's been making Mexican food look like haute cuisine for years with these things. Sure, it's just ancho pepper mayonnaise he's squirting all over that fish, but it looks like . . . well . . . abstract, man!!! No big deal acquiring these things, they're essentially the same objects you see at roadside hot-dog stands, loaded with mustard and ketchup. Mask a bottom of a plate with, say, an emulsified butter sauce, then run a couple of concentric rings of darker sauce — like demi-glace, or roast pepper puree — around the plate, and pay attention here, folks, now drag a toothpick through the rings or lines, and you'll see that all the fuss is about nothing. It should take you about half an hour of dicking around with a couple of squeeze bottles and your toothpick to grab the concept fully. This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do.
- Location 1016
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How can I make my breast of chicken and mashed potatoes tower like a fully engorged priapus over my awed and cowering guests? The answer is yet another low-tech item: the metal ring. A thin metal ring, or cut-down section of PVC pipe, about an inch and a half to two inches tall and varying inches across, is the backbone of pretentious food presentation. Just spoon your mashed potatoes in here — or better, pipe the spuds in with a pastry bag - and you are in business. Just pile it high, slip off the collar, stack your vegetable, deposit your chicken on top of that, and you're halfway to making that fuzzy little Emeril your bitch.
- Location 1025
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Gaufrette wha'? That's French for waffle-cut, and what we're talking about here is a potato chip. You can do that. All you need is what's called a mandolin, a vertically held slicer with various blade settings. They make some very cheap, very effective ones in Japan these days, so it's not a major investment. One of these bad boys can help you make those slick-looking, perfectly uniform julienned and bâtonnet-cut veggies you thought they cut by hand last time you ate out — and it cranks out lovely waffle cuts with a twist of the wrist. Dauphinois potatoes cut to identical thickness? No sweat. You didn't think they actually cut those with a knife, did you?
- Location 1031
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As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well. You can buy all sorts of professional quality stuff. I'd recommend pots and pans as a premium consideration if scavenging this way. Most of the ones sold for home use are dangerously flimsy, and the heavyweight equipment sold for serious home cooks is almost always overpriced. Stockpots, saucepans, thick-bottomed saute pans are nice things, even necessary things to have, and there's no reason to buy new and no reason to pay a lot just wait for that new tapas place on the corner to go out of business, then make your move.
- Location 1040
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Let me stress that again: heavyweight. A thin-bottomed saucepan is useless for anything. I don't care if it's bonded with copper, hand-rubbed by virgins, or fashioned from the same material they built the stealth bomber out of. If you like scorched sauces, carbonized chicken, pasta that sticks to the bottom of the pot, burnt breadcrumbs, then be my guest. A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent — the victim's head or your pan — then throw that pan right in the trash.
- Location 1046
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A non-stick saute pan is a thing of beauty. Crepes, omelettes, a delicately browned fillet of fish or tender skate wing? You need a nice thick non-stick pan, and not one with a thin veneer of material that peels off after a few weeks. And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don't use metal in it, use a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss whatever you're cooking in it. You don't want to scratch the surface.
- Location 1050
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Shallots. You almost never see this item in a home kitchen, but out in the world they're an essential ingredient. Shallots are one of the things — a basic prep item in every mise-en-place — which make restaurant food taste different from your food. In my kitchen we use nearly 20 pounds a day. You should always have some around for sauces, dressings and saute items.
- Location 1059
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Butter. I don't care what they tell you they're putting or not putting in your food at your favorite restaurant, chances are, you're eating a ton of butter. In a professional kitchen, it's almost always the first and last thing in the pan.
- Location 1062
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We saute in a mixture of butter and oil for that nice brown, caramelized color, and we finish nearly every sauce with it (we call this monter au beurre); that's why my sauce tastes richer and creamier and mellower than yours, why it's got that nice, thick, opaque consistency.
- Location 1063
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Roasted garlic. Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago, garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please, treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas, don't burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellow and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown.
- Location 1070
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Chiffonaded parsley. Big deal, right? Restaurants garnish their food. Why shouldn't you? And parsley tastes good, too. Just don't chop it in a machine, please. Dip the picked sprigs in cold water, shake off excess, allow to dry for a few minutes, and slice the stuff, as thinly as you can, with that sexy new chef's knife
- Location 1078
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Stock. Stock is the backbone of good cooking. You need it and you don't have it. I have the luxury of 30-quart stockpots, a willing prep crew, readily available bones and plenty of refrigeration space. Does this mean you should subject your guests to a sauce made from nasty commercial bases or salty canned broth? Make stock already! It's easy! Just roast some bones, roast some vegetables, put them in a big pot with water and reduce and reduce and reduce. Make a few months' worth, and when it's reduced enough strain it and freeze it in small containers so you can pull it from the freezer as needed. Life without stock is barely worth living, and you will never attain demi-glace without it.
- Location 1082
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Demi-glace. There are a lot of ways to make demi-glace, but I recommend you simply take your already reduced meat stock, add some red wine, toss in some shallots and fresh thyme and a bay leaf and peppercorns, and slowly, slowly simmer it and reduce it again until it coats a spoon. Strain. Freeze this stuff in an ice-cube tray, pop out a cube or two as needed, and you are in business — you can rule the world.
- Location 1087
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Chervil, basil tops, chive sticks, mint tops, etc. What does it take, for chrissakes?! A nice sprig of chervil on top of your chicken breast? A healthy-looking basil top decorating your pasta? A few artfully scattered chive sticks over your fish? A mint top nestled in a dollop of whipped cream, maybe rubbing up against a single raspberry? Come on! Get in the game here! It takes so little to elevate an otherwise ordinary-looking plate. You need zero talent to garnish food. So why not do it? And how about a sprig of fresh herb — thyme or rosemary? You can use the part not needed for garnish to maybe actually flavor your food.
- Location 1090
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Good food is very often, even most often, simple food. Some of the best cuisine in the world — whole roasted fish, Tuscan-style, for instance — is a matter of three or four ingredients.
- Location 1096
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Take one fish — a red snapper, striped bass, or dorade — have your fish guy remove gills, guts and scales and wash in cold water. Rub inside and out with kosher salt and crushed black pepper. Jam a clove of garlic, a slice of lemon and a few sprigs of fresh herb — say, rosemary and thyme — into the cavity where the guts used to be. Place on a lightly oiled pan or foil and throw the fish into a very hot oven. Roast till crispy and cooked through. Drizzle a little basil oil over the plate — you know, the stuff you made with your blender and then put in your new squeeze bottle?
- Location 1100
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Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (rent, electricity, gas, water, linen, maintenance, insurance, license fees, trash removal, etc.), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongiform bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run them over? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.
- Location 1107
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Bigfoot understood — as I came to understand — that character is far more important than skills or employment history. And he recognized character — good and bad — brilliantly. He understood, and taught me, that a guy who shows up every day on time, never calls in sick, and does what he said he was going to do, is less likely to fuck you in the end than a guy who has an incredible resume but is less than reliable about arrival time. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have.
- Location 1277
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Bigfoot understood that there are two types of people in the world: those who do what they say they're going to do — and everyone else. He'd lift ex-junkie sleazeballs out of the gutter and turn them into trusted managers, guys who'd kill themselves rather than misuse one thin dime of Bigfoot receipts. He'd get Mexicans right off the boat, turn them into solid citizens with immigration lawyers, nice incomes and steady employment. But if Bigfoot calls them at four in the morning, wanting them to put in a rooftop patio, they'd better be prepared to roll out of bed and get busy quarrying limestone.
- Location 1281
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The most important and lasting lessons I learned from Bigfoot were about personnel and personnel management — that I have to know everything, that I should never be surprised. He taught me the value of a good, solid and independently reporting intelligence network, providing regular and confirmable reports that can be verified and cross-checked with other sources. I need to know, you see. Not just what's happening in my kitchen, but across the street as well. Is my saucier unhappy? Is the chef across the street ready to make a pass, maybe take him away from me at an inopportune moment? I need to know! Is the saucier across the street unhappy? Maybe he's available. I need to know that, too. Is the cute waitress who works Saturday nights screwing my broiler man? Maybe they've got a scam running: food going out without dupes! I have to know everything, you see. What might happen, what could happen, what will happen. And I have to be prepared for it, whatever it is.
- Location 1356
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Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army — and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot.
- Location 1365
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Any magic I'd imagined about a big-time fancy New York kitchen was replaced by a grim pride in creative expediency and the technical satisfaction of being fast enough to keep up, getting away with trickery, deception and disguise. 'An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins,' as we used to say.
- Location 1543
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My problem was the money. I was making too much of it. Instead of doing the smart thing, taking a massive pay cut to go work for one of the now numerous emerging stars of American cooking, I continued my trajectory of working for a series of knuckleheaded, wacko, one-lung operations, usually already hemorrhaging when I arrived. Instead of running off to France, or California, or even uptown to work in one of the three-star Frog ponds as commis — the kind of Euro-style stage that helps build resumes and character, I chased the money.
- Location 1779
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The body was dying; only the brain had yet to receive the message.
- Location 1852
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Somehow, things got done, though I have no idea how; the place had its own momentum, like some rudderless ocean liner, captain and crew long gone — it just kept going, plowing through ice fields.
- Location 1881
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I never really knew how to cook pasta before. Here, dried pasta was blanched in small, undercooked batches and laid out unrinsed and still warm on lightly oiled sheet pans before being finished in sauce a few minutes later. Fresh pasta and thin-cut pasta was cooked to order. Pasta was cooked the right way. Meaning, the penne, for instance, after saucing, stood up on the plate in a mound, rather than sliding around on the plate or being left to drown in a bowl.
- Location 2235
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for the first time, I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product. Homey, peasant dishes like Tuscan bread soup, white bean salad, grilled calamari, baby octopus, tender baby artichokes in olive oil and garlic, a simple sauteed calves' liver with caramelized onions, immediately became inspiring and new. The clean, simple, unassuming integrity of it all was a whole new approach, very different from the sauces and squeeze bottles and exotic ingredients of my recent past.
- Location 2241
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'You know, Anthony,' he said, 'I have many, many enemies. It's good, sometimes, to have enemies — even if you don't know who they are. It means you are . . . important. You must be important. . . important enough to have an enemy.' He clapped me on the back on the way out the door. I was thoroughly charmed — if damn near shattered by the experience.
- Location 2351
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Miguel, who looks like a direct descendant of some Aztec king, spends his entire day doing nothing but peeling potatoes, cutting potatoes, blanching potatoes, and then, during service, dropping them into 375-degree peanut oil, tossing them with salt, and stacking the sizzling hot spuds onto plates with his bare hands.
- Location 2548
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I like to hear different accounts of the same incident from different sources. It adds perspective and reveals, sometimes, what a particular source is leaving out, or skewing to leave a particular impression, making me wonder: Why?
- Location 2572
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'Line one for the chef,' says the hostess. I push the blinking green light. It's a salesman, wanting to sell me smoked fish. I answer all sweetness and light, lulling him into the bear trap in the Bigfoot style: 'So let me get this straight,' I say, after he's jabbered away about his full line of delicacies, me trying to sound a little slow and confused, 'you want to sell me food, right?' 'Yes!' comes the reply, the salesman sounding encouraged by my interest and apparent stupidity. 'And in general, you'd say,' I continue, 'you have like, a lot of restaurant accounts — in fact, you'd probably say that, like, you are in the business of servicing restaurants . . . and chefs in particular?' 'Oh, yes! says the witless salesman, beginning a litany of the usual prestigious accounts, the names of other chefs who buy his fine smoked sturgeon, salmon, trout and fish eggs. I have had enough and cut him off cold. 'So . . . WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING CALLING ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING LUNCH RUSH?!' I scream into the phone, smashing it abruptly into the cradle.
- Location 2600
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Buying 10,000 dollars-worth of meat a day gave me a strange and terrible thrill, like riding a roller-coaster, and the simple act of moving ceiling-high piles of perishable fish and produce through my kitchen every day was a puzzle, a challenge I enjoyed. I liked being a general again: deploying forces where needed, sending out flying squads of cooks to put out brush fires on the buffet stations, arranging reconnaissance, forward observers, communicating by walkie-talkie with the various corners of the club:
- Location 2897
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He's a remarkably thoughtful guy — mention you like gummy bears and Steven will show up the next day with a bag. If he stops off at a burger stand for a mayo and mustard and ketchup-slathered grease-burger for breakfast, he'll bring a couple extra so everyone can have some.
- Location 2969
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I stood in the doorway to the cellar prep kitchen and smoked a cigarette nervously. We were in that eerie, eye-of-the-hurricane calm. In ten minutes, when the next wave of hungry public had been seated and breaded and watered, there'd be a punishing rush — the slide filling up with orders all at once, the action swinging from station to station, boiling up the line like a Drano enema. First, the salad guy would get hit, then the saute station and finally the grill, until everything came down at once — the whole bunch of us in the cramped kitchen struggling and sweating and cursing to move orders out without falling in the weeds. We had only a few moments of peace to go, and I smoked and fidgeted and half-listened to what my crew was talking about.
- Location 3005
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As an art form, cook-talk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate. All comments must, out of historical necessity, concern involuntary rectal penetration, penis size, physical flaws or annoying mannerisms or defects. The rules can be confusing. Cabrone, for instance, which translates roughly to 'Your wife/girlfriend is getting fucked by another guy right now — and you're too much of a pussy to do anything about it' can also mean 'my brother', depending on inflection and tone. The word 'fuck' is used principally as a comma. 'Suck my dick' means 'Hang on a second' or 'Could you please wait a moment?' And 'Get your shit together with your fucking meez, or I come back there and fuck you in the culo' means 'Pardon me, comrade, but I am concerned with your state of readiness for the coming rush. Is your mise-en-place properly restocked, my brother?' Pinche wey means 'fucking guy', but can also mean 'you adorable scamp' or 'pal'. But if you use the word 'pal' — or worse, 'my friend' in my kitchen, it'll make people paranoid. 'My friend' famously means 'asshole' in the worst and most sincere sense of that word. And start being too nice to a cook on the line and he might think he's getting canned tomorrow. My vato locos are, like most line cooks, practitioners of that centuries-old oral tradition in which we — all of us — try to find new and amusing ways to talk about dick. Homophobic, you say? Sub-mental? Insensitive to gender preference, and the gorgeous mosaic of an ethnically diverse work force? Gee . . . you might be right. Does a locker-room environment like this make it tougher for women, for instance? Yep. Most women, sadly. But what the system seeks, what it requires, is someone, anyone, who can hold up their station, play the game without getting bent out of shape and taking things personally. If you are easily offended by direct aspersions on your lineage, the circumstances of your birth, your sexuality, your appearance, the mention of your parents possibly commingling with livestock, then the world of professional cooking is not for you. But let's say you do suck dick, you do 'take it in the twins', it's no impediment to survival. No one really cares about that. We're too busy, and too close, and we spend too much time together as an extended, dysfunctional family to care about sex, gender preference, race or national origin. 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. You can cover your ears all you want, pretend they're not calling you chino or morena or indio or gordo or cachundo . .
- Location 3019
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I wallow in it. Just like all the other sounds in my life: the hiss and clatter and spray of the dishwasher, the sizzle as a fillet of fish hits a hot pan, the loud, yelping noise — almost a shriek — as a glowing sizzle-platter is dropped into a full pot sink, the pounding of the meat mallet on a cote du boeuf, the smack as finished plates hit the 'window'. The goads, curses, insults and taunts of my wildly profane crew are like poetry to me, beautiful at times, each tiny variation on a classic theme like some Beat era jazz riff: Coltrane doing 'My Favorite Things' over and over again, but making it new and different each time. There are, it turns out, a million ways to say 'suck my dick'. Most of the people in my kitchen can do it in Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali and English. Like all great performances, it's about timing, tone and delivery — kind of like cooking.
- Location 3050
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Jiz is any reduced liquid, like demi-glace. When one adds whole butter to jiz, one is mounting, as in monter-au-beurre.
- Location 3075
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Externs from culinary school, working for free as a 'learning experience' — which by itself translates to 'lots of work and no money' — are quickly tagged as FNG (Fucking New Guy), or Mel for mal carne (bad meat).
- Location 3086
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There are the usual terms of endearment, all perfectly acceptable in casual conversation between cooks: motherfucker (a compliment), cocksucker, sunofbeech, dipshit, scumbag, scum-sucker, dumb-fuck, rat-bastard, slackjaw, idiota, bruto, animale, asesino, mentiroso, whining little bed-wetter, turd, tortuga, strunze, salaud, salaupard, chocha podrida, pendejo, silly cunt, seso de polio, spazz, goofball, bucket-head, chucha, papi-chulo, sweet-cheeks, cupcakes, love-chunks, culero, shit-stain, cum-gargler, and so on. Asshole, strangely, is serious, to be used only when genuinely angry, and any expression involving a person's wife/mother/girlfriend/boyfriend or family member directly (with the notable exception of motherfucker) is strictly off-limits. You may well have seen your grill man's wife jacking off motorists for spare change on West Street — but you don't talk about it. Ever.
- Location 3089
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Applying what we've learned to a battlefield situation, one might find oneself saying: 'I gotta hot nut for that six-top on seven, Cabrone! It's been fired for ten fucking minutos, pinche tortuga. What? You don't got yer meez together, asesino? Get that shit in the window, you seso de polio pinche grill man throw it in the fucking jukebox if you have to. The rest of the order my hand! And don't forget to give it a wipe and some mota and a squirt of that red jiz on the way out, I got shit hanging here and you're falling in the fucking weeds!' 'Working,' might come the reply. 'I getting buried here. How come the saute no getting slammed like me? I take it in the ass all night! How' bout table ocho? Fire? I can go on eight?' Which might inspire this: 'Eight my hand, baboso! Eight fucking gone! Eight fucking dying en la ventana waiting for Doogie Howser Motherfucker to pick up! You got dead dupes back there, idiota — what the fuck are you doing? You are in the shit! Hey, Rayo! Step in and bail the culero out!'
- Location 3107
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Why did God, in all his wisdom, choose Adam to be the recipient of greatness? Why, of all his creatures, did He choose this loud, dirty, unkempt, obnoxious, uncontrollable, megalomaniacal madman to be His personal bread baker? How was it that this disgrace as an employee, as a citizen, as a human being — this undocumented, untrained, uneducated and unwashed mental case who's been employed (for about ten minutes) by every kitchen in New York — could throw together a little flour and water and make magic happen? And I'm talking real magic here, people. I may have wanted Adam dead a thousand times over. I may have imagined, even planned his demise — torn apart by rabid dogs, his entrails snapped at by ravenous dachshunds, chained to a pillory post and flogged with chains and barbed wire before being drawn and quartered — but his bread and his pizza crust are simply divine. To see his bread coming out of the oven, to smell it, that deeply satisfying, spiritually comforting waft of yeasty goodness, to tear into it, breaking apart that floury, dusty crust and into the ethereally textured interior . . . to taste it is to experience real genius. His peasant-style boules are the perfect objects, an arrangement of atoms unimprovable by God or man, pleasing to all the senses at once. Cezanne would have wanted to paint them — but might not have considered himself up to the job. Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown may be the enemy of polite society, a menace to any happy kitchen, a security risk and a potential serial killer, but the man can bake. He's an idiot-savant with whom God has serious, frequent and intimate conversations. I just can't imagine what He's telling him — or whether the message is getting garbled during transmission.
- Location 3232
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'You know, there is something to love about this guy . . . beyond the bread.' He's an extraordinary survivor, a man who has attained some nice highs and endured some truly low lows and always managed to bounce back. Maybe he's calling himself something else this time around. Maybe his paychecks are made out to some fictional company, a third party, his latest alias, but he's still on his feet at the end of the day . . . and still making that incredible bread. Adam is not a stupid guy, though I sometimes think he aspires to be. His anecdotes are wildly exaggerated, unspeakably crude and graphic adventures — usually involving his penis — but without the earnest and self-deprecating charm of his friend Steven's accounts.
- Location 3307
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God knows, a man who can make those perfect rough-slashed boules of sourdough and Tuscan country bread deserves his place in the sun. Somewhere. He's the best at what he does, after all. The finest bread I've ever had. And the most expensive: in human cost, aggravation and worry. Hiring Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown was always a trade-off — with God or Satan, I don't know — but it was usually worth it. Bread is the staff of life. And Adam, the unlikely source.
- Location 3342
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'The guy had to go,' is what I said, the kind of cold-blooded statement not unusual for me when in chef-mode. 'What? Are you gonna keep the guy on? Let him talk shit to you in front of your crew? Let him show up late, fuck up service . . . because you're afraid he's gonna off himself? Fuck him. We're on a lifeboat, baby. The weak? The dangerous? The infirm? They go over the side.'
- Location 3365
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I care about my crew and their problems. I go home Saturday night with a sulking cook getting crispy around the edges on my mind? Someone in my kitchen talking about going AWOL, exhibiting symptoms of the dreaded martyr mode? My weekend is ruined. All I'm going to be thinking about for every waking moment is that cook and what I can do to fix the situation. I'll lie there on the bed, staring into space, paying scant attention to the TV, or what my wife is talking about, or the everyday tasks of bill paying, maintaining a home, behaving like a normal person. I don't know, you see, how a normal person acts. I don't know how to behave outside my kitchen. I don't know the rules. I'm aware of them, sure, but I don't care to observe them anymore because I haven't had to for so many years.
- Location 3376
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The absolutes first attracted me to this business (along with that food thing). The black and white of it. The knowledge that there are some things you must do — and some things you absolutely must not. What little order there has been in my life is directly related to this belief in clear right and clear wrong: maybe not moral distinctions, but practical ones. Another cook has to cover for you? Wrong. Chef spending too much time kissing your boo-boos, stroking your ego, solving your conflicts with co-workers? Wrong. Talking back to your leader? Wrong.
- Location 3412
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He was a cult figure, it seemed, among cooks of my acquaintance. Over time, I developed an idea of him as some sort of hair-shirt ascetic, a mad monk, a publicity-shy perfectionist who'd rather do no business at all — die in obscurity — than ever serve a bad meal.
- Location 3451
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Scott learned early that he might have to actually work for a living, whereas I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living — all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.
- Location 3482
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