Cooking Dirty

Life, Love and Death in the Kitchen

Jason Sheehan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857893093
• Print ISBN:
  9781848871908
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at the age of fifteen, Jason Sheehan has worked at all kinds of restaurants across America, from Buffalo to Tampa to Albuquerque: at a French colonial and an all-night diner, at a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. In Cooking Dirty he tells the story of one man's addiction to the urgency, stress, and adrenalin of minimum-wage kitchen work. His universe becomes 'a small, steel box filled with knives and meat and fire', where the kitchen is a fraternity with its own rites and initiations: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, drugs everywhere. Restaurant cooking sets a series of seemingly endless personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. The kitchen itself is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried - a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling. Cooking Dirty is a passionate, funny, electrifying memoir of addiction: an addiction to kitchen work. It reveals the hell and glory of restaurant life, as told by a survivor. Jason Sheehan is his own unforgettable central character - edgy, driven, irresistible. Eating out will never be the same again.

When the alarm goes off, it drags me out of a dream of potatoes. Nothing weird, just potatoes. Peeling potatoes, shredding potatoes, ricing them, running them across the naked blade of the mandolin.

Mandolins¹¹ have always scared me. They’re dangerous contraptions, terribly unstable, bloodthirsty. Slip on the mandolin and you won’t just nick yourself. There’ll be a nice waffle-cut piece of your palm lying on the cutting board, an inch-long piece of skin dangling from the blade.

In my dream, I’d been running a sack of potatoes through the mandolin, cutting them finer and finer. Had I kept at it, I knew I would’ve ended up hurting myself. In my dream, I hadn’t been able to stop. Only the bleating of the alarm had saved my dream-me’s knuckles.

I’ve got a cigarette lit before my eyes are even open. Sam reaches over and sets our heavy clay ashtray on my chest.

“You awake?” she asks.

“No.”

“Ten more minutes?”

I think about it while holding my breath, first drag held deep in my lungs.

“No,” I decide, huffing out an angry storm front of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. “Better not. How long was I asleep?”

“About an hour. You going to take a shower?”

“No.” I set the ashtray aside and sit up, groaning, my back and legs still sore, my feet burning. I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. My boots were outside. They smell like death, my boots—like I’d taken them off a corpse, and not a fresh one. My boots are no longer allowed inside.

“Hungry?”

“No.”

“You should eat.”

“No.”

“Really, you should.”

As a compromise, I take four ibuprofen and swallow them with a mouthful of warm Mountain Dew. I light another cigarette. Sam has retreated to the corner of the futon bed—our only piece of furniture—and is watching a BBC comedy, Are You Being Served?, on PBS, on our twelve-inch black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears and the missing volume knob. The TV sits on top of a milk crate. She’s going through the laundry stacked on the floor. I’m staring at my feet, wondering why in the hell they hurt so bad. It’s ten minutes after nine at night.

“What?” I ask.

“What?” Sam repeats.

“Did you ask me something?”

“No.”

Shrugging. “I gotta go, baby.”

“I know. See you in the morning?”

“I’ll try not to wake you.”

She turns. “No, Jay. Wake me, okay? Just wake me up. I won’t mind.”

I smile, know she’s lying. “Okay. I’ll wake you.”

I stand up, strip off my T-shirt, change into my black one with the faded white Misfits skull. To get my blood moving, I jump in place, swing my arms, crack my neck. My feet are killing me. I roll my shoulders and the joints make popping sounds like squeezing a roll of Bubble Wrap. I kiss the girl and head for the door.

It’s the most we’ve talked in a couple weeks. I’m feeling good.

AFTER I LEFT CHINA TOWN, Sam and I had hit on the idea of a road trip, a big, no-holds-barred, high-speed cross-country romp, conceived in the Kerouacian mode (which is to say, drunk), and executed with little planning, less money, and absolutely zero understanding of what was waiting for us out there in the great, wide whatsis. We’d bummed our way through many states, slept in the car, picked fights, begged for change, gone all the way to California, to Mexico, to California again.

Now, we were back. Sam was working days, I can’t remember where. I was working nights in a roadhouse diner just down the hill and around the corner from her folks’ house, where we were staying in a barely converted one-room apartment/solarium. It was not an ideal situation, but it was lovely. We were living, more or less, in a glass house, looking out over nothing but wooded slopes and a small stream that burbled with a placidity completely lost on me. Neither of us had anything like a plan for moving on.

I SHOW UP AT THE RESTAURANT a half hour early for the start of my 10:00 p.m. shift, and the dinner crew is already anxious to clock out for the night.

I am precise to a fault about clocking in, always showing up twenty or thirty minutes early and performing all the necessary preshift investigations: making sure the bread racks have been pulled around close to the kitchen door, that the stock in the coolers has been moved into night positions, that all the inserts in the cold tables have been topped and backed up and that at least a dozen cold beers are hidden under the trash bags out in the little stockade enclosure behind the restaurant where the Dumpsters live.

I check the stock levels in the walk-ins and freezer, look at pars and paperwork that I’m barely able to read—spreadsheeted portion breakdowns and prep lists prepared for and by managers but containing, I believe, some arcane wisdom just slightly beyond my ken. Frustrated, I turn away from the clipboards and weigh back stock and breakouts by eye and experience, by a simple comparison: knowing what a full cooler looks like at the beginning of a night, knowing what a wreck of one looks like at the end of one. After just a few months on this job, I can judge an entire walk-in at a glance; know almost without looking where we are going to be short, where we are long. It’s all about supply lines and dispersion of supplies. Who will need what, when, and in what quantities. I do the grunt math in my head and, inevitably, find our stock lacking. Not wanting to be caught light, I razor open cardboard boxes full of brown, waxy bags of frozen fries, pull fifty extra pounds of burger patties, forty dozen more eggs, a flat of frozen steaks out to thaw. It’s a Friday night and it’s going to be bad. They all are.

Only after all this business is done (plus various odds and ends) do I clock myself in and punch the cards for all my guys. Most of them will roll in sometime in the next half hour; straggling in one at a time, coming from wherever they go when they’re not at work, from whatever they do when they’re not here—which is not stuff any of us much care to talk about. Stumbling drunk, sometimes bloodied, stinking of beer and skank and the kind of troubled debauchery that only the very desperate or very creative can find before Letterman’s opening monologue is over, they come because they are mercenaries: well paid for doing a job no one else wants.

But it’s my responsibility to have them all here on time, and under my watch they’re never late. At least not on paper.

I’VE LEARNED NOT TO STEP across the border separating the line proper from the rest of the kitchen until I have to. When I do, the switch flips—turning the house over from dinner shift to night shift. And I am careful in timing my move onto the line because—at least until my boys start rolling in—I’m alone here.

As soon as I step in, the dinner crew will walk off. Immediately. No matter what they’re doing. They could be in the middle of a hit, halfway through flipping an egg, whatever. They walk, and the line becomes mine. So I must be cautious: make sure a party of ten didn’t just get seated, make sure there’s not more than a couple of easy checks on the slide, make sure nothing is on fire.

The dinner crew has good reason for their peevishness. I mean besides their all being a bunch of pussy little bitches who wouldn’t know a hard night’s work if it snuck up and fucked ’em, they’re mostly company men—loyal guys who’ve been in this galley a long time, who’ve clawed their way into this sweet two-to-ten slot through years of responsible, dedicated labor. They believe that this ought to make them characters deserving of some respect, and they often take spiteful offense at the night crew’s complete and total dismissal of them.

When working, they look like bored extras cast in some kind of industrial training film about the joys of teamwork and proper food handling. They all have to wear these totally gay polo shirts, hats, hairnets and latex rectal-exam gloves. We wear whatever we want, whatever we wake up in, and look, for the most part, like the infield crowd at Talladega or the crew of a hip pirate ship—all tattoos and earrings and boots and long knives and gold teeth.

They have to actually show up on time. Because I have faith that, unless dead or in handcuffs, my guys will all arrive eventually, they get here when they get here. As I was once trusted when I first started this gig, I now trust them. We don’t let each other down.

The dinner crew is expected to be clean, sober and presentable while working; to restrain their more base impulses and behave, at all times, in a polite and respectable fashion. As for us, we have a twelve-inch-long, heavily veined, and anatomically improbable foam dick that we keep in a box and slap down onto the omelets of customers who, for one reason or another, piss us off. We have our own sched ules, ashtrays in the kitchen, beers out by the Dumpster, and beyond even the usual restaurant-industry friction between front of the house and back of the house, crew and bosses—the sometimes genial, sometimes abrasive back-and-forth about who has the harder job, who’s smart and who’s dumb—we have an unmitigated disdain for anyone who’s not One of Us. It’s a tribal thing: Us versus Them. And Them are anyone who ain’t Us: customers, waitstaff, management, dinner crew.

FOUR COOKS ARE NOW permanently in the night brigade; four guys who rotate a single night off a week, then me, who gets none. In the beginning, I was part of someone else’s night brigade, but turnover in this galley is high, so now it is my kitchen, my crew. There’s Juan, who runs my fryers. James is my roundsman, my jack-of-all-trades. Freddy usually works the grill. Hero does eggs on the flat.

Juan is Mexican, heavily muscled, big, and aggressively pansexual by way of unwelcome assault. He will dry-hump anything—waiters, waitresses, busboys, produce boxes, doorframes. When he wants his fryers to work faster, he mounts them—grabbing their hot, oily flanks bare-handed and gently bumping his dick against the front panel, sweet-talking the equipment in gentle Spanish. Whenever not on the line, he can be located by listening for the squeals of outrage from the staff—Juan pinning a waiter up against the ice machine and molesting him for some presumed slight. This does not do good things for front-of-the-house morale. It does wonders for Juan.

James is an old man. Thirty-two and divorced, father of two. He has a master’s degree in something brainy that he’d never managed to translate into a straight job, and a drinking problem. The problem is, he doesn’t know when to stop, or can’t, or won’t. He started working nights on the theory that nights are when the bars are open and, if he was working, he wouldn’t be at them. Worked great until he started finding bars that opened at 7:00 a.m. Now he works shift and a half whenever he can (doing a full night, then a cooking stretch from eight in the morning to eleven to help out the breakfast crew) and drinks only on the job. This is his idea of self-improvement. Maybe it works. He seems happy all the time even though I believe he’s currently living in his car.

Freddy is a junkie. Hero is a hero. Freddy shoots smack and knocks off every day at 5:00 a.m. to rocket crosstown in his beat-ass, fifth-hand Civic to get to his second job, making bagels at a bakery in the city. Hero is tall, blond, young, good-looking, with blue eyes and a Vanilla Ice flattop like a landing pad for really bad ideas.

Freddy looks like he belongs here—he is most assuredly One of Us. Hero looks like he ought to be wearing deck shoes and crewing a regatta schooner. No one has ever figured out how he ended up here, but he did. The dick-in-the-omelet thing? That was Hero’s idea. The beers out in the Dumpster corral? He started that, too. And he’s fucked every waitress on the floor—will often discuss the relative merits, skills and pet peeves of each, pointing them out as they walk by the pass.

“Fat but kinky. Ready to go anytime, anywhere.”

“That one? Likes it in the ass.”

“That one made me wear two rubbers.”

“What, is she new?”

Hero is my buddy, my backup—as tall and fair-haired as I am short and squirrelly. He comes to work sometimes straight from the strip clubs, wearing sweatpants and slip-on Vans; stripping down to boxers in the middle of the kitchen and changing into his gear. He’d been in the Iraq war—the first one—but doesn’t talk about it except that his language is peppered somewhat more heavily with military jargon than is the rest of ours.

And he has moves—serious moves. Eggs is the toughest station. Straight hit, start to finish, no breaks. It takes the most delicate hand, the most patience, concentration like a Zen master’s. Eggs on bar rush is like trying to build a house of cards in the middle of a street fight. It’s all elbows, yelling, blood and ruckus, but you break one yolk and it blows your whole rhythm. Timing is what matters. And Hero doesn’t have a brain, just a cock and thirty kitchen timers in his head. Once, he’d popped off the line in the middle of a fierce rush—no explanation, his eggs all lined up, swimming in a slick of fifty-fifty oil on the shimmering flattop, cooking away. Less than five minutes later, he came back—swaggering, dipshit grin on his face—and picked up exactly where he’d left off, flipping eggs, plating eggs. He didn’t lose a single order. He’d read the slide, checked the upcoming fires, estimated the time it would take the other stations to assemble, picked his moment, and ducked out into the parking lot for a blow job from a girlfriend he’d spotted in the mob waiting at the door.

And then there’s me, in charge of this motley army, top dog for as long as I can hold on—until I burn out, flake out, lose my shit or die. Starting at ten o’clock every night, I am God of the box, the braindamaged Lord Commander of a kingdom fifty feet by five and made entirely of stainless steel, industrial tile, knives, sweat and fire. I am the wheelman, King of the Galley, and Christ save the peasants.

NO ONE IS HIRED AS WHEELMAN. You have to earn it. It’s a hereditary title here, passed down from man to man within the galley family. I inherited it from Jimmy, who’d freaked out one night, hit a waitress, and was subsequently beaten stupid by all of us in the kitchen,¹² his former praetorian guard. Jimmy had inherited the post from Kyle, who just didn’t show up one night and was never heard from again.

When I got the wheel,¹³ I was literally knighted on the spot—a whip-quick consensus decision made by the crew. I’d been doing eggs (though I was a real good egg man, Hero is still better), ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents page
• Prologue: Florida, 1998
• First Impressions
• Almost Famous
• Learning Curve
• Sex, Drugs and Kung Pao Chicken
• Will Work Nights
• La Methode
• Prep and Pantry
• The White Coat
• FNG
• Past is Prologue
• Cook's Holiday
• Mal Carne
• Chicken Hitler
• Cooking for Danny
• Ballroom Blitz
• Baked
• Atomic Cheeseburger
• Cooking Live
• War Stories
• On the Outside
• What Matters is What you don't know
• Epilogue: Ten Thousand Nights
• Acknowledgments