A deadly romance

                Kitchen life. It’s romantic. Being a cook is one of those careers that everybody gets. It requires no explanation. “Hi, what do you do?” I am often asked, followed by “Are you a student?” Life in a college town gets repetitive. “Well, I was,” is the canned response. “Now I’m a chef.”

                Then people ask where I work, I plug the place, and usually it’s good for a free beer if I spin the food well (though it frankly needs no spin- our food speaks for itself).

                What I’ve never had to do is explain what it is that I do. People know what a cook does: knives, white coats, hot stoves, the whole shebang.

                And thanks to Anthony Bourdain and all the other chef-writers out there, they know the life too- and what a life it is.

                The cook’s life is, to be blunt, unhealthy. Many of us smoke, and all of us drink. Show me a teatotalling cook and I’ll show you a liar. The problem arises from pacing: from the moment the cook walks into the kitchen, he- and increasingly, she- has to move. And he has to move fast. People are hungry and they want to be fed. The cook is working against the peoples’ expectations, and he has to exceed them. Allow me to explain:

                The guest walks in and sits down, thoroughly ready for a good meal. The cook is out back smoking a cigarette. Or maybe he’s racing against the clock to get his prep list done. Maybe he’s hitting on the waitresses. Some are drinking already, though the trend has, to our credit, been to sobriety during working hours. The guests are hungry, the cook is not yet in the mindset to feed them.

                The guest orders. The waitress sings out “Order in!” or the printer starts chirping. Then the cook swings into action. Dinner has begun!

                On a busy night, the cook is staring down six to fifteen orders at a time, depending on house size. Every order needs to be perfect, or as close to perfect as possible. And every order must hit the table between twenty and thirty five minutes after it’s placed. Guests are not patient.

                So your standard cook is firing on all cylinders, moving as efficiently as possible, focused and cranking out wonderful food for the hungry people in the dining room. A typical rush goes like this:

                Six tickets fluttering in the wind, I fire the fagioli, check the oven, light up the marinara and drop three orders of pasta. Thirty seconds down. The garlic breads in the oven are almost crisp; they need a minute. Fire the greens, stir the pasta. Add garlic to greens, simmering with pancetta, bring to aroma, deglaze with wine. Look at the garlic breads: crisp. Tabs on the lasagnas, sitting on the bottom oven rack, broiling oh-so-slowly: half done, another five minutes. Kill the fires, kill the sauce (don’t want it to burn, it’ll stay hot for ten minutes or so), agitate pasta. Plate fagioli and cheese lasagna. “Order up on six!”

                Pull garlic breads, rough cut, plate. “Apps up on three, nine and ten!” Five minutes gone by.

                Pull five lasagnas, plate, pull spaghetti and sauce with meatballs. “Order up, table four!”

                Waitresses are running, taking their food and delivering it smiling to tables.

                Fire the oil for scampi; it heats with a pinging sound. When the oil is still, it’s boiling. Drop in shrimp, allow to sear, drop cappellini to put it on. T-minus three minutes.

                “Bruschetta on five!”

                Fire the scallops, denature the protein, allow it to caramelize. Add butter to scallops and shrimp, cook until brown- beurre noisette- and deglaze both with pinot grigio. Lemons, tomatoes, tarragon, garlic, parsley, fistfuls of herbs and fruits, salt and pepper, mount with whole butter, pull pasta- not even thinking at this point, fists on autopilot- plate, “Nine is up!”

                Spike tickets, look at cleared board, smile, grab dishwasher. “Smoke break,” suck down cigarette and cup of stale coffee.

                “Order in!”

                Repeat. Repeat six, seven, eight times. Repeat for five hours, or six hours. Move, move, move.

                Move.

                Closed.

                Then, slow down.

                The unhealthy bit of cooking is the pacing. The cook moves hard and fast for hours, stressing his mind, his body, the stove. Then it’s closing time and the pace slows to the cleaning crawl, and the cook’s heart is beating quickly. His hands are twitching, his eyes darting left and right, haunted. Sometimes his hands clench of their own accord, holding a knife no longer there. He reaches for a beer.

                The moment the suds hit his lips, he slows.

                The next beer slows him more.

                Five beers later, he’s at a normal level, the adrenaline blown from his system by braking booze.

                Of course, after he strips off his fetid whites and walks into the real world, it’s dark and late. Ten thirty, eleven at night. But he still wants to be sociable. He wants to chat, hang out, get laid, tell jokes. Where do you do these things at eleven P.M.?

                At a bar, obviously.

                The cook’s life is glamorous for the same reason a soldier’s life is glamorous: it’ll kill you as surely as a bullet to the brain. It’ll just take a little longer.

                And you’ll love every moment of it.