Lives On The Line
A pro chef’s kitchen is not for the faint of heart by Mike McJunkin
“
The art of a chef is born from techniques learned and mastered over a lifetime, utilizing a continually changing lineup of raw products, served to a capricious and demanding clientele.”
T
he morning alarm assaults his ears like the sounds of a slaughterhouse; piercing his coma-like slumber with its screeching message that sleepy-time is over. Last night was brutal. His eyes open and the memory of that night begins to play in his mind through an “Apocalypse Now”-Martin Sheen-flashback sort of haze. It’s Friday night and there were almost 120 covers...three 10-tops, herds of four-tops, VIPs kept rolling in and blindsiding front-of-house...we were totally slammed by 8:30 and had to 86 teres AND the bass. I was running expo through this huge exodus and killing on that soigné risotto—the one with the zucchini blossoms that goes a la minute... We were seriously crushing it until this green-ass virgin on sauté goes down two orders as we go to plate…TWO ORDERS! Weeds start sprouting up all over the kitchen while he fires both orders on the fly, grill is bitching about missing her cigarette break and the rail is jammed. Then it got really quiet for just a minute, like that moment after you fall just before you hit the ground.
8 • The Pulse • May 15-21, 2014 • chattanoogapulse.com
Then the sound of the printer cut right through the silence, churning out dupe after dupe...I really thought we were going to crash and burn. Jason is working a double today and it’s Saturday, the busiest day of the week. That means he’ll get to the restaurant at 8 a.m., work all day and help close. Theoretically, he should get a two-three hour break sometime in the afternoon, but in reality he knows he’ll be lucky if he gets to huddle over a plate of food in a back booth between rushes, or sit on a stack of milk crates on the back dock to smoke a rare, unhurried cigarette. Such is the plight of a chef at a busy, popular, casual-dining restaurant. Jason wants to eventually rise to become an executive chef in a fine-dining restaurant, but for now he pays his dues
and hones his skills as best he can in this turn-and-burn subculture filled with sex, drugs and home refrigerators cluttered with to-go containers of leftover cauliflower purée and Lagunitas. “Jason” is not his real name. He decided to use a pseudonym because he broke most of his restaurant’s rules and several health-code regulations to let me hang around as he went about his normal workday. In order to secure the silence of several prep cooks, I had to resort to a bribe using the alternative currency of any restaurant kitchen: beer and cigarettes. As we walked through the metal service door to the kitchen that morning, Jason took huge, deliberate sips from a tea glass full of coffee as if the liquid contained a cure for the herpes he got from a hostess two years ago. Sadly, it does not. But it does help him absorb the magnitude of the prep lists hanging at each station on the line. The “line” is where the cooking is done, usually set up in a horizontal line and divided into “stations” manned by chefs or line cooks. This is also where Gordon Ramsey would get punched