Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (7 page)

As I looked around the beach, I saw, in the jaundiced light of my unhappiness, the full extent of the horror of this Island of Dr. Moreau I’d willingly marooned myself on. The full spectrum of plastic surgeries gone wrong—right there in the open, curiosities of the flesh, which at a lesser income level would have been confined to the carnival sideshow: mouths that pulled to the side, lips plumped beyond credibility, cheeks filled with golf ball–like lumps, and foreheads frozen so tight you could play snare drum on them. Identical noses…eyes that refused to blink and could barely even close…

And there was my date for the night, in her thousand-dollar plain white T-shirt. Searching—once again—for her cell phone.

It makes sense that restaurant operators—and Robèrt—would prey on these people. They should. They are, after all, in the business of desire—of figuring out what fulfills their clients’ wants and needs. What they want on St. Barths—as elsewhere, I’m guessing—is to feel secure among others of their ilk. Secure that they’ve chosen the right place—the place everybody else in their set will choose. Secure that, if nothing else, everyone else in attendance will have bought into the shared illusion. Where no one will point out the obvious: that they’re too old and too ugly to be wearing what they’re wearing. That the surgery didn’t help. That they can’t—and shouldn’t, in fact—dance, ever again. That they’re eating food that the cleanup guy, who’s going to sweep up after closing, wouldn’t touch with rubber gloves and and-irons. That the rest of the people on this planet, if enough of them knew who they really were—and how they’d made their money—would have their heads quickly on pikes.

In the end, I walked away.

After she lost her cell phone for the fourth time, I saw her drunkenly survey the room, eyeballing other partygoers for suspects. I watched as her insane gaze finally settled on the entourage of a prominent gangster rapper who’d taken over the VIP section of the tented restaurant patio. Specifically on two very large women, thick-necked and unfriendly-looking to begin with, both wearing midnight sunglasses—either of whom could easily have taken me in a fair fight. In the kind of slow-motion approach that so often precedes disaster, I watched as my companion confronted the two women, accusingly demanding to know where her cell phone was.

The music was playing—very loud. So I didn’t hear their reaction.

But assuming they responded with “What the fuck do I want with your cell phone, bitch?” and “You’re accusing us ’cause we’re black!,” they would have been demonstrating impeccable logic. Utterly disgusted, I now no longer cared if, in the weeks to follow, I was found in a culvert, with my feet sawed off. I no longer cared if there’d be a price to pay later for escape. It was all just too awful to bear—much less look at—anymore. I needed to get out now. I’d had enough. Let her dig her own crazy ass out of this ever-building shit storm.

I pulled her over and said as much—then lurched out of the restaurant and down the road. I packed my bag, arranged with the front desk for her to have two more nights at the hotel, should she need to, and then walked the mile or so to the airport, where I spent the night on a bench. I took the first flight out and landed on my old, familiar—and decidedly more friendly—island ten minutes later.

I retrieved my rental car from the long-term parking and drove gratefully home, where I quickly curled up in the fetal position and slept like the dead for twenty-four hours.

I stayed home, avoiding bars, brothels, and even beaches for the rest of my time on the island. I’d had enough. Somewhere along the line, I’d stared Evil in the face and it had frightened me to my core. I don’t know whether it was something I saw on St. Barths—or in the mirror during the worst year of my life—but something had to change. I knew that now.

P
eople call me “chef.” Still.

Walking down the street, I’ll hear somebody call that out and my head still swivels to see who’s talking to me. Nine years now since I last took up a pan in anger and I still whip around automatically to that title. Of course, it’s no longer true. I am not a chef. Still, it usually makes me happy when I hear that.

There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar—even in this fake-ass Irish pub. It’s new, built to look like old. Erin Go Bragh bullshit with its four flat screens silently flashing sports crawls for games I don’t care about. The generic Irish bric-a-brac they deliver by the truck-load. Empty moving vans roaming the Irish countryside right now, I imagine, waiting for old Missus Meagher to drop dead into her black pudding so they can buy up the contents of her curio shelves. All of it shipped straight off to a central clearing house, where it’s divvied up between Instant Irish Pubs in New York, Milwaukee, Singapore, and Verona.

I’ve been at this bar before, of course. We all have. Yet I’m strangely, indefensibly happy here. Even the stink of Lysol from the too-clean floor, the fruit flies hovering over the garnish tray do not distract me from a general feeling of well-being.

The food, were I silly enough to ask…well, I know what’s on the menu without looking. Fried zucchini sticks, fried mozzarella, surely there’s calamari in red sauce. Look deeper and there will be indifferently prepared shepherd’s pie; a French dip with salty “gravy” made from canned base; a burger with a limp pickle, an unripe tomato slice, and Simplot Classic frozen French fries. “Bangers and mash” will be an Italian sweet sausage—and there might be a gummy approximation of Irish stew, containing too-lean lamb bits and lots of potatoes.

And what of the seafood options? You are on your fucking own there, boyo.

The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about.

The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of
his
immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He
looks
different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim.

The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…

Bushmills or Jameson, Celtics or Rangers, don’t mean a thing here. This is a nondenominational Irish bar. No difference, no raised eyebrows. Few Irish, now that I think about it. And the Guinness, of course, blows.

The owner’s got ten or twelve of these bars and they all look the same and they all have names like Paddy McGee’s or Seamus O’Doul’s or Molly whatever—none of whom exist or ever existed.

But I am happy here just the same.

Among the pool table, the jukebox, the inevitable dartboard, the moosehead, toy trains, Yankee banners, the photos of Irish authors who never came here and whom nobody here ever read. You want to talk Joyce or Behan? A Yeats’s bust may sit dust-covered on a shelf, but start spouting lines from
The Second Coming
and you can just fuck off down the street, ya prat.

Who drinks here?

Office workers, jackets off, tie still on—or the reverse: jacket on, tie off. Restaurant help, nipping out for a drink, coming off a shift, fortifying themselves for the shift to come. Beaten down by life. Not broken, mind you, not beaten down like a coal miner or an out-of-work steel worker—just…dissatisfied with the way things have turned out. Not quite ready to go home just yet. Picture just a little too clear to get on the train at this precise moment. Better, it has been decided, to fuzz things a little around the edges before moving back into their other lives.

I feel right at home here—until Gnarls Barclay’s “Crazy” comes on the sound system, which brings me right back to Beirut—as it always does—and I’m pretty sure nobody else at this bar is feeling the same way I am right now. Not like I’m talking post-traumatic stress or anything, I mean it wasn’t
that
bad (for me), I mean a sudden sadness, a sense, an awareness of dislocation…that image of a Mediterranean, European, Arab city on the sea…rockets coming in from the horizon, floating lazily above the airport, then dropping with a delayed bang. The smell of burning jet fuel. More than anything else, the song makes me feel separated from what might, in another life, ten years ago, have otherwise been my drinking buddies at the bar.

I’ll never be a regular at this bar. Or any bar. Not even a “writers’ bar.” If you’ve ever even spent ten minutes in one of those—a bunch of bitter, snowy-haired, bilious fucks with gin-blossomed noses and ballooning guts talking too loud and laughing too hard and secretly hating each other—you’ll reconsider ever putting another word to paper. As much as I admire the work of good writers, I’ve found that hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown into a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.

“You’re not a chef,” says the kid at the bar—another bar, a “chefs’ bar,” this time, late at night. I’m probably on a book tour and out for drinks with the kitchen crew from my hotel. Is it Portland? Seattle? Vancouver? Who remembers?

“You’re not a chef!” he repeats, giving me the stink-eye, unsteady on his feet. “You don’t even cook!”

The others with me, fresh off a long shift in the kitchen, shrink back a little, uncomfortable with the situation. They like me fine. I did write
Kitchen Confidential
, after all, but let’s face it, the kid is right.

He’s drunk and he’s angry and, like a lot of people who own well-thumbed, food-splattered, water-damaged copies of that book—or who’ve borrowed a copy from the guy who works next to them—he feels betrayed. I’m a heretic now, having abandoned him and everyone like him, repudiated the One True Church of the Working Cook.

Look at me and my nice fucking jacket, standing there all famous and shit.

“Fuck you,” he says. “You don’t even cook. You’re not
one of us
anymore.” Far from being offended (though I am hurt), I want to give him a big hug. Another drink or two and I just might.

I don’t cook. I’m not a chef. The chefs and cooks who are better than I used to be—better than I ever was—they know this and don’t need to say it. They certainly don’t need to say it to my face, like this kid, pressing me up against the bar now with the force of his rage and hurt. He will channel these feelings, appropriately, into a demand that I do a shot of tequila with him. Or two.

Which is a relatively friendly and diplomatic solution to an awkward situation.

It’s the guys who are most like me who feel most disappointed in me. The hackers, the wake-up-every-fucking-day-and-drag-your-ass-into-pretty-much-one-place-same-as-the-other-to-make-food-youdon’t-particularly-like-for-people-you-like-even-less. The ones who smell of fryer grease and burned salmon fat.

When I decline the offer of a third shot, he will at least have had the satisfaction of proving me a pussy. Which will be a victory of sorts.

And when, eventually, he sags to the side in his booth, his comrades in arms looking on tolerantly, and slips into unconsciousness, I will still be thinking about what he said, that he was right.

I
am frequently asked by aspiring chefs,
dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school. I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.

But the short answer is “no.”

Let me save you some money. I was in the restaurant business for twenty-eight years—much of that time as an employer. I am myself a graduate of the finest and most expensive culinary school in the country, the CIA, and am as well a frequent visitor and speaker at other culinary schools. Over the last nine years, I have met and heard from many culinary students on my travels, have watched them encounter triumphs and disappointments. I have seen the dream realized, and—more frequently—I have seen the dream die.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you that culinary school is a bad thing. It surely is not. I’m saying that
you
, reading this, right now, would probably be ill-advised to attend—and are, in all likelihood, unsuited for The Life in any case. Particularly if you’re any kind of normal.

But let’s say you’re determined. You’re planning on taking out a student loan and taking on a huge amount of debt. In many cases, from lenders associated with—or recommended by—your local culinary school. Ask yourself first: is this culinary school even any
good
? If you’re not going to the Culinary Institute of America, Johnson and Wales, or the French Culinary Institute, you should investigate this matter even more intently, because the fact is, when you graduate from the Gomer County Technical College of Culinary Arts, nobody hiring in the big leagues is going to give a shit. A degree from the
best
culinary schools is no guarantee of a good job. A degree from anywhere less than the best schools will probably be less helpful than the work experience you could have had, had you been out there in the industry all that time.

You’re about to take on $40,000 to $60,000 in debt training for an industry where—if you are lucky—you will, for the first few years, be making $10 to $12 dollars an hour. In fact, if you are really,
really
lucky—one of the few supremely blessed with talent, ability, and great connections deemed worthy enough to recommend you to one of the great kitchens of Europe or New York for your post-school apprenticeship—you will essentially be making
nothing
for the first couple of years. You will, once living expenses are factored in, probably be
paying
for the experience.

Should you be fortunate enough to be among the one-in-a-million young cooks taken on at a famous and respected restaurant like Arzak, in Spain (for example), this will truly be time and money well spent. If you perform well, you will return home never again needing a résumé. In this case, the investment of all your time and money and hard work will have paid off.

But the minute you graduate from school—unless you have a deep-pocketed Mommy and Daddy or substantial savings—you’re already up against the wall. Two nearly unpaid years wandering Europe or New York, learning from the masters, is rarely an option. You need to make money NOW. If that imperative prevails, requiring that you work immediately, for whomever will have you—once you embark on a career dictated by the need for immediate cash flow, it never gets any easier to get off the treadmill. The more money you get paid straight out of school, the less likely you are to ever run off and do a
stage
in the great kitchens of the world. Time cooking at Applebee’s may get you paid—but it’s a period best left blank on the résumé if you’re planning on ever moving to the bigs. It may just as well have never happened. Country clubs? Hotel kitchens? These are likely employers straight out of school—and they promise a pretty decent, relatively stable career if you do well. It’s a good living—with (unlike most of the restaurant business) reasonable hours and working conditions—and most hotels and country clubs offer the considerable advantage of health insurance and benefits. But that sector of the trade is like joining the mafia. Once you enter the warm fold of their institutional embrace, it’s unlikely you’ll ever leave. Once in—rarely out.

If it matters to you, watch groups of chefs at food and wine festivals—or wherever industry people congregate and drink together after work. Observe their behaviors—as if spying on animals in the wild. Notice the hotel and country club chefs approach the pack. Immediately, the eyes of the pack will glaze over a little bit at the point of introduction. The hotel or country club species will be marginalized, shunted to the outside of the alpha animals. With jobs and lives that are widely viewed as being cushier and more secure, they enjoy less prestige—and less respect.

You could, of course, opt for the “private chef” route upon graduating. But know that for people in the industry, the words “private” and “chef” just don’t go together. To real chefs, such a concept doesn’t even exist. A private “chef” is domestic help, period. A glorified butler. Somewhere slightly below “food stylist” and above “consultant” on the food chain. It’s where the goofs who wasted a lot of money on a culinary education only to find out they couldn’t hack it in the real world end up.

How old are you?

Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you’re thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens? If you’re wondering if, perhaps, you are too old?

Let me answer that question for you:

Yes. You are too old.

If you’re planning on spending big bucks to go to culinary school at your age, you’d better be doing it for love—a love, by the way, that will be, almost without a doubt, unreciprocated.

By the time you get out of school—at thirty-four, even if you’re fucking Escoffier—you will have precious few useful years left to you in the grind of real-world working kitchens. That’s if you’re lucky enough to even get a job.

At thirty-four, you will immediately be “Grandpa” or “Grandma” to the other—inevitably much, much younger, faster-moving, more physically fit—cooks in residence. The chef—also probably much younger—will view you with suspicion, as experience has taught him that older cooks are often dangerously set in their ways, resistant to instruction from their juniors, generally slower, more likely to complain, get injured, call in sick, and come with inconvenient baggage like “normal” family lives and responsibilities outside of the kitchen. Kitchen crews work best and happiest when they are tight—when they operate like a long-touring rock band—and chances are, you will be viewed, upon showing up with your knife roll and your résumé—as simply not being a good fit, a dangerous leap of faith, hope, or charity by whoever was dumb enough to take a chance on you. That’s harsh. But it’s what they’ll be thinking.

Am I too fat to be a chef? Another question you should probably ask yourself.

This is something they don’t tell you at admissions to culinary school, either—and they should. They’re happy to take your money if you’re five foot seven inches and two hundred fifty pounds, but what they don’t mention is that you will be at a terrible, terrible disadvantage when applying for a job in a busy kitchen. As chefs know (literally) in their bones (and joints), half the job for the first few years—if not the entirety of your career—involves running up and down stairs (quickly), carrying bus pans loaded with food, and making hundreds of deep-knee bends a night into low-boy refrigerators. In conditions of excruciatingly high heat and humidity of a kind that can cause young and superbly fit cooks to falter. There are the purely practical considerations as well: kitchen work areas—particularly behind the line—being necessarily tight and confined…Bluntly put, can the other cooks move easily around your fat ass? I’m only saying it. But any chef considering hiring you is thinking it. And you will have to live it.

If you think you might be too fat to hack it in a hot kitchen? You probably are too fat. You can
get
fat in a kitchen—over time, during a long and glorious career. But arriving fat from the get-go? That’s a hard—and narrow—row to hoe.

If you’re comforting yourself with the dictum “Never trust a thin chef,” don’t. Because no stupider thing has ever been said. Look at the crews of any really high-end restaurants and you’ll see a group of mostly whippet-thin, under-rested young pups with dark circles under their eyes: they look like escapees from a Japanese prison camp—and are expected to perform like the Green Berets.

If you’re not physically fit? Unless you’re planning on becoming a pastry chef, it is going to be very tough for you. Bad back? Flat feet? Respiratory problems? Eczema? Old knee injury from high school? It sure isn’t going to get any better in the kitchen.

Male, female, gay, straight, legal, illegal, country of origin—who cares? You can either cook an omelet or you can’t. You can either cook five hundred omelets in three hours—like you said you could, and like the job requires—or you can’t. There’s no lying in the kitchen. The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy—where anybody with the skills and the heart is welcomed. But if you’re old, or out of shape—or were never really certain about your chosen path in the first place—then you will surely and quickly be removed. Like a large organism’s natural antibodies fighting off an invading strain of bacteria, the life will slowly push you out or kill you off. Thus it is. Thus it shall always be.

The ideal progression for a nascent culinary career would be to, first, take a jump straight into the deep end of the pool. Long before student loans and culinary school, take the trouble to find out who you are.

Are you the type of person who
likes
the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life?

Or are you like everybody else? A normal person?

Find out sooner rather than later. Work—for free, if necessary—in a busy kitchen. Any kitchen that will have you will do—in this case, a busy Applebee’s or T.G.I. Friday’s or any old place will be fine. Anybody who agrees to let your completely inexperienced ass into their kitchen for a few months—and then helpfully kicks it repeatedly and without let-up—will suffice. After six months of dishwashing, prep, acting as the bottom-rung piss-boy for a busy kitchen crew—usually while treated as only slightly more interesting than a mouse turd—if you still
like
the restaurant business and think you could be happy among the ranks of the damned? Then, welcome.

At this point, having established ahead of time that you are one fucked-up individual—that you’d never be happy in the normal world anyway—culinary school becomes a very
good
idea. But choose the best one possible. If nothing else, you’ll come out of culinary school with a baseline (knowledge and familiarity with techniques). The most obvious advantage of a culinary education is that from now on, chefs won’t have to take time out of their busy day to explain to you what a fucking “brunoise” is. Presumably, you’ll know what they mean if they shout across the room at you that you should braise those lamb necks. You’ll be able to break down a chicken, open an oyster, filet a fish. Knowing those things when you walk in the door is not absolutely necessary—but it sure fucking helps.

When you do get out of culinary school, try to work for as long as you can possibly afford in the very best kitchens that will have you—as far from home as you can travel. This is the most important and potentially invaluable period of your career. And where I fucked up mine.

I got out of culinary school and the world seemed my oyster. Right away, I got, by the standards of the day, what seemed to be a pretty good paying job. More to the point, I was having fun. I was working with my friends, getting high, getting laid, and, in general, convincing myself that I was quite brilliant and talented enough.

I was neither.

Rather than put in the time or effort—then, when I had the chance, to go work in really good kitchens—I casually and unthinkingly doomed myself to second-and (mostly) third-and fourth-tier restaurant kitchens forever. Soon there was no going back. No possibility of making less money. I got older, and the Beast that needed to be fed got bigger and more demanding—never less.

Suddenly it was ten years later, and I had a résumé that was, on close inspection, unimpressive at best. At worst, it told a story of fucked-up priorities and underachievement. The list of things I never learned to do well is still shocking, in retrospect. The simple fact is that I would be—and have always been—inadequate to the task of working in the kitchens of most of my friends, and it is something I will have to live with. It is also one of my greatest regrets. There’s a gulf the size of an ocean between adequate and finesse. There is, as well, a big difference between good work habits (which I have) and the kind of discipline required of a cook at Robuchon. What limited me forever were the decisions I made immediately after leaving culinary school.

That was my moment as a chef, as a potential adult, and I let it pass. For better or worse, the decisions I made then about what I was going to do, whom I was going to do it with and where, set me on the course I stayed on for the next twenty years. If I hadn’t enjoyed a freakish and unexpected success with
Kitchen Confidential
, I’d still be standing behind the stove of a good but never great restaurant at the age of fifty-three. I would be years behind in my taxes, still uninsured, with a mouthful of looming dental problems, a mountain of debt, and an ever more rapidly declining value as a cook.

If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel—as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them—wherever you go. Use every possible resource you have to work in the very best kitchens that will have you—however little (if anything) they pay—and relentlessly harangue every possible connection, every great chef whose kitchen offers a glimmer of hope of acceptance. Keep at it. A three-star chef friend in Europe reports receiving month after month of faxes from one aspiring apprentice cook—and responding with “no” each time. But finally he broke down, impressed by the kid’s unrelenting, never wavering determination. Money borrowed at this point in your life so that you can afford to travel and gain work experience in really good kitchens will arguably be better invested than any student loan. A culinary degree—while enormously helpful—is only helpful to a point. A year working at Mugaritz or L’Arpège or Arzak can transform your life—become a direct route to other great kitchens. All the great chefs know each other. Do right by one and they tend to hook you up with the others.