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.
Which is to say: if you’re lucky enough to be able to do the above, do not fuck up.
Like I said, all the great chefs know each other.
Let me repeat, by the way, again, that I did none of the things above.
It’s a little sad sometimes when I look out at a bookstore audience and see young fans of Kitchen Confidential, for whom the book was a validation of their worst natures. I understand it, of course. And I’m happy they like me.
But I’m a little more comfortable when the readers are late-career hackers and journeymen, like I was when I wrote the book. I like that they relate to the highs and lows, the frustrations and absurdities, that they, too, can look back—with a mixture of nostalgia and very real regret—on sexual liaisons on cutting boards and flour sacks, late-night coke jags, the crazy camaraderie that seems to come only in the busiest hash-house restaurants—or failing ones. I wrote the book for them in the first place. And it’s too late for them anyway.
But the young culinary students, thousands and thousands of them—new generations of them every year, resplendent in their tattoos and piercings—I worry that some of them might have missed the point.
At no point in Kitchen Confidential, that I can find, does it say that cocaine or heroin were good ideas. In fact, given the book’s many episodes of pain, humiliation, and being constantly broke-ass, one would think it almost a cautionary tale. Yet, at readings and signings, I am frequently the inadvertent recipient of small packets of mysterious white powder; bindles of cocaine; fat, carefully rolled joints of local hydro, pressed into my palm or slipped into my pocket. These inevitably end up in the garbage—or handed over to a media escort. The white powders because I’m a recovered fucking addict—and the weed ’cause all I need is one joint, angel dust–laced by some psycho, to put me on TMZ, running buck-naked down some Milwaukee street with a helmet made from the stretched skin of a butchered terrier pulled down over my ears.
Smoking weed at the end of the day is nearly always a good idea—but I’d advise ambitious young cooks against sneaking a few drags mid-shift at Daniel. If you think smoking dope makes you more responsive to the urgent calls for food from your expeditor, then God bless you, you freak of nature you. If you’re anything like me, though, you’re probably only good for a bowl of Crunchberries and a Simpsons rerun.
On the other hand, if you’re stuck heating up breakfast burritos at Chili’s—or dunking deep-fried macaroni at TGI McFuckwad’s? Maybe you need that joint.
Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d just advise you to assess honestly if it’s really as bad and as intractable a situation as you think. Not to belabor the point, but if you look around you at the people you work with, many of them are—or will eventually be—alcoholics and drug abusers. All I’m saying is you might ask yourself now and again if there’s anything else you wanted to do in your life.
I haven’t done heroin in over twenty years, and it’s been a very long time as well since I found myself sweating and grinding my teeth to the sound of tweeting of birds outside my window.
There was and is nothing heroic about getting off coke and dope. There’s those who do—and those who don’t.
I had other thin
gs I still wanted to do. And I saw that I wasn’t going to be doing shit when I was spending all my time and all my money on coke or dope—except more coke and dope.
I’m extremely skeptical of the “language of addiction.” I never saw heroin or cocaine as “my illness.” I saw them as some very bad choices that I walked knowingly into. I fucked myself—and, eventually, had to work hard to get myself un-fucked.
And I’m not going to tell you here how to live your life. I’m just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky.
And luck is not a business model.
Virtue
There is no debating that it’s “better” to cook at home whenever—and as often as—possible.
It’s cheaper, for sure. It’s almost always healthier than what you might otherwise be ordering as takeout—or eating at a restaurant. And it is provably better for society.
We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m interested in whether we should cook as a moral imperative—as something that every boy and girl should be taught to do in school and woe to him or her who can’t. I’m talking about pounding home a new value, a national attitude, the way, during the JFK era, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness created the expectation that you should be healthy if you were a kid. That you should, no, you must be reasonably athletic. That at the very least you must aspire to those goals, try your best—that your teachers, your schoolmates, and society as a whole would help you and urge you on. There would be rigorous standards. Your progress would be monitored with the idea that you would, over time, improve—and become, somehow, better as a person.
With encouragement, of course, came the unstated but implied ugly flip side: negative reinforcement. If you couldn’t keep up, you were, at best, teased and, at worst, picked on.
So, I’m not suggesting we put kids who can’t cook into the center of a hooting circle of bullies and throw a fat rubber ball at them until they cry—which was the traditional punishment for perceived crimes of “spazdom” back in my time.
But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
Back in the dark ages, young women and girls were automatically segregated off to home-economics classes, where they were indoctrinated with the belief that cooking was one of the essential skill sets for responsible citizenry—or, more to the point, useful housewifery. When they began asking the obvious question—“Why me and not him?”—it signaled the beginning of the end of any institutionalized teaching of cooking skills. Women rejected the idea that they should be designated, simply by virtue of their gender, to perform what would be called, in a professional situation, service jobs, and rightly refused to submit. “Home ec” became the most glaring illustration of everything wrong with the gender politics of the time. Quickly identified as an instrument of subjugation, it became an instant anachronism. Knowing how to cook, or visibly enjoying it, became an embarrassment for an enlightened young woman, a reminder of prior servitude.
Males were hardly leaping to pick up the slack, as cooking had been so wrong-headedly portrayed as “for girls”—or, equally as bad, “for queers.”
What this meant, though, is that by the end of the ’60s, nobody was cooking. And soon, as Gordon Ramsay has pointed out rather less delicately a while back, no one even remembered how.
Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.
It’s not too late.
Just as horsemanship, archery, and a facility with language were once considered essential “manly” arts, to be learned by any aspiring gentleman, so, perhaps, should be cooking.
Maybe it’s the kid in the future who can’t roast a chicken who should be considered the “spaz” (though, perhaps, not made the recipient of a dodgeball to the head when he bungles a beurre blanc). Through a combination of early training and gentle but insistent peer pressure, every boy and girl would leave high school at least prepared to cook for themselves and a few others.
At college, where money is usually tight and good meals are rare, the ability to throw together a decent meal for your friends would probably be much admired. One might even be reasonably expected to have a small but serviceable list of specialties that you could cook for your roommates.
Cooking has already become “cool.” So, maybe, it is now time to make the idea of not cooking “un-cool”—and, in the harshest possible ways short of physical brutality, drive that message home.
Let us then codify the essentials for this new virtue:
What specific tasks should every young man and woman know how to perform in order to feel complete?
What simple preparations, done well, should be particularly admired, skills seen as setting one apart as an unusually well-rounded, deceptively deep, and interesting individual?
In a shiny, happy, perfect world of the future, what should every man, woman, and teenager know how to do?
They should know how to chop an onion. Basic knife skills should be a must. Without that, we are nothing, castaways with a can—but no can-opener. Useless. Everything begins with some baseline ability with a sharp-bladed object, enough familiarity with such a thing to get the job done without injury. So, basic knife handling, sharpening, and maintenance, along with rudimentary but effective dicing, mincing, and slicing. Nothing too serious. Just enough facility with a knife to be on a par with any Sicilian grandmother.
Everyone should be able to make an omelet. Egg cookery is as good a beginning as any, as it’s the first meal of the day, and because the process of learning to make an omelet is, I believe, not just a technique but a builder of character. One learns, necessarily, to be gentle when acquiring omelet skills: a certain measure of sensitivity is needed to discern what’s going on in your pan—and what to do about it.
I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet—passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.
Everyone should be able to roast a chicken. And they should be able to do it well.
Given the current woeful state of backyard grilling, a priority should be assigned to instructing people on the correct way to grill and rest a steak. We have, as a nation, suffered the tyranny of inept steak cookery for far too long. There’s no reason that generation after generation of families should continue to pass along a tradition of massacring perfectly good meat in their kitchens and backyards.
Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age.
A standard vinaigrette is something anyone can and should be able to do.
The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season, to tell whether or not something is ripe or rotten might be acquired at the same time as
one’s driving license.
How to recognize a fish that’s fresh and how to clean and filet it would seem a no-brainer as a basic survival skill in an ever more uncertain world.
Steaming a lobster or a crab—or a pot of mussels or clams—is something a fairly bright chimp could do without difficulty, so there’s no reason we all can’t.
Every citizen should know how to throw a piece of meat in the oven with the expectation that they might roast it to somewhere in the neighborhood of desired doneness—and without a thermometer.
One should be able to roast and mash potatoes. And make rice—both steamed and the only slightly more difficult pilaf method.
The fundamentals of braising would serve all who learn them well—as simply learning how to make a beef bourguignon opens the door to countless other preparations.
What to do with bones (namely, make stock) and how to make a few soups—as a means of making efficient use of leftovers—is a lesson in frugality many will very possibly have to learn at some point in their lives. It would seem wise to learn earlier rather than later.
Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past—or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty.
Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.
The Fear
You knew things were going to get bad when Steve Hanson, without warning or visible regret, announced that he was going to shut down his restaurant, Fiamma. A few months of unsatisfactory receipts, true—but they’d recently won a very effusive three stars from the New York Times; the chef, Fabio Trabocchi, had been getting a lot of favorable attention and a lot of goodwill from the blogs and the food press. It was just before Christmas, no less, and there was every reason in the world—in an ordinary year—for an owner to find reason to believe things would get better, to hang on. But not this year. Hanson had examined the numbers, glanced at the headlines, taken a quick but hard look at the future—and decided he didn’t like what he saw. He shut the doors on Fiamma and another of his restaurants, the Times Square Ruby Foo, in the same week.