#003/// A Smoking Hot Topic

Line Cook for Life #003

Allow me to take you back...

The year is 1996. I stroll into my recently acquired dishwashing position at a local cafe in suburban-upstate N.Y. Out of the little radio above the dish machine plays a mix tape while I toil away keeping Carlo, the chef, stocked on pans and plates. From the kitchen came hand made tortellini stuffed with braised pork belly, dandelion greens and ricotta in a sweet pea cream sauce with prosciutto and tomato concasse (Tortellini con Panna); platters of artichokes with tarragon, white sardines, caper-berries and grilled lemons (Antipasti Aroma); and stewed tripe with portabella ragout and mint (Trippa e Menti). It was a revelation - especially the part where they revealed what tripe was after I had asked for seconds. The wine was good, espresso was strong, service was memorable and the dishes were the cleanest in town. They all had to be. Carlo would not have accepted less for me or anyone involved.

Carlo was an interesting cat to say the least. He was raised in Rome to be an opera singer until his father, a wild mushroom gatherer, killed Carlo's teacher in a dispute over the bill. After that, young Carlo was apprenticed to a local chef instead. I never heard whether his father was ever punished, come to think of it. Neither answer would surprise me.

Still a dishdog, circa '96

Carlo had run with the bulls in Pamplona. He was a prize fighter in Lisbon. He was there when the Basilica's doors were opened in the Vatican. He rode camels in the Sahara. And his singing!!! It was like Bocelli himself were there. Regarding food and his kitchen sensibilities, the man knew his shit at a genetic level. To say he loved food was an understatement and his bulk was as impressive as his fundamental culinary instincts. His beady eyes saw everything. This was the man who introduced me to the magic of balsamic and strawberries, describing this almost mythic pairing  as,"This? This is what mommy gives kiddie after school... simple." My mind is still blown at watching this guy try to sell Western New Yorkers whole snapper with fennel, knowing that they were not ready. Knowing most went out for Italian for pasta and sauce. Carlo did not accept the understanding deep down that he had to cater to the guests and not the other way around. When the inevitable complaint came back to the kitchen along with the fish to debone and fillet for the guest, he would curse their families, ancestors and any future progeny in rich Italian because, "...these porca vacca are reminded the fish once was a fish and swam and fought and fucked..." While masterfully dealing with the fish, making it look like food and not life, he would avert his eyes from what his hands were doing so he, "...can tell saints that I was ignorant of what happened to God's creation." This dude was a chef of a dying breed.

Carlo was also an unrepentant smoker. At all times one of his Italian import smokes were burning in a stand up ashtray (with the button that makes the bowl spin and the ash fall into a coffer underneath - I still think about its design) that was propping the kitchen door open. Between slinging pans and throwing plates he was back and forth to the door, huffing down what he could before returning to the line and exhaling into the hood vents. When he wasn't actively cooking he was on the phone arguing with the local Italian produce company about fucking up either his order or the ponies he had money on, while smoking in the office. If he wasn't in the kitchen or the office, then he was out back mildly harassing some hostess, also while smoking. He bragged about his three pack a day habit.
One day Carlo caught me after a particularly rough turn outside in the parking lot sitting on a milk crate catching my breath and looking for a second wind somewhere. He flipped the fuck out. He was right, I had shit to do and I was just sitting down wasting time. He grabbed me by my ear and dragged me back into my pit. Guiseppi, his assistant, came to me ten minutes later while I was balls deep in Carlo's pans, handed me a smoke and said in his gravelly Italian-accented kitchen-English, "Five minutes, go. You have that lit, he no yell."
So it began.

Since that day I have been a smoker. I love the act of smoking... the feel of it between thumb and forefinger, rolling the butt between fingers, flicking ash three times after every drag, like clockwork. I once had a cook working for me who claimed he could tell my mood based on how quickly I would chief down my smokes. I am currently a work-only smoker, at the detriment of my staff's supply. I don't want to bring it around my family at the behest of my wife. The request is not hard, though, seeing as I only really crave a smoke after a particularly stressful bit of line cookery. Hell, if I cook a largish size meal at home I don't even want to eat, I just crave a cigarette. No if-ands-or-buts about it, there is a completely Pavlovian reaction at play. It has been a two-pack-a-day habit at times, namely the times I have virtually lived at my restaurants - back in the day, sleeping on office couches or corner booths wasn't abnormal. It makes sense though, it really does, that kitchen folk are smokers. Generally speaking, those employed within kitchens tend to be poorer and less educated than those wearing ties to work. Those employed within kitchen have a higher rate of being from foreign lands where smoking isn't vilified and thus more widely accepted within their culture. People in hot, fast paced, stressful environments where the ebb and flow of what is to be done changes, mutates and adjusts every four minutes benefits from the occasional five minute break. Just a second to walk away from the noise and confusion and the perma-overstimulation we maintain simply to collect our thoughts - if only to prepare to take it on again. It can be the difference between a successful evening of smooth service and fisticuffs. In a world of micromanaging, multiple bosses, different standards mixed with confusing chains of command, sharp knives, distracting wait staff, hot ovens, wickedly brutal hangovers and withdrawal, tight quarters involving cracked flooring and puddles, multiple languages and subsequent barriers, team affiliations and the occasional big city rodentia or back woods bugs (depending on locale) it is very surprising that anything gets accomplished without drugs of a slightly stronger variety than just nicotine.

Nicotine.

Whether its effects are psychosomatic or medically proven, it has a way to take the edge off. Part of me feels that the cigarette and its nicotine have nothing to do with the addiction for food service professionals. The addiction is to the smoke break itself. The cooler, fresher, outside air helps to remind oneself that there is a world outside the kitchen door. A moment without other cooks within a foot of your private space. The chance to call your mom on Mother's Day while you're working brunch and cooking for mothers other than her can keep you in The Will. Actually, the smoke break is how we keep in touch with the real world and since the advent of smartphones the amount of shit that can be accomplished in that four to six minute time period allotted is surprising. It has become the part of our day where we tackle stuff that involves regular business hours. Things like banks and post offices have been a kind of kryptonite to the section of the populace who work evenings and off-hours. If I were to describe the wrath of a wife with a baby at home without any adult contact while I'm toiling away with a group of my 'buddies,' doing what I love for 15 hours and no phone call to check in you would think I was describing was in fact a pack of hyenas and the sounds make upon encountering a particularly cute and meaty looking gazelle in the Serengeti. Not pretty man. Bad news fucking bears.

Cooks love flavor. Its an added taste-bud stimulant that studies have shown deaden taste bud sensitivity. I think that is why most cooks have such wild and flavorful cuisine. Gotta cut through the palette covered in tar somehow, right? These studies, though, show that smoking neither decreases the number of the tastebuds an individual have nor the receptiveness of said tastebuds - rather the shape of the tastebud. The studies, carried out by the Greek Miliatary and published in BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders are inconclusive as to what a different shape means other than some flavors are 'perceived differently.' What does that mean when crossed with a cook, someone who perceives them differently to begin with? Is it possible that cigarettes are what help hone a chef's palette into the crowd pleaser it has become?

I would estimate approximatly eighty percent of the kitchen folk I have encountered were smokers, counter to the CDC who says it's around thirty-one percent - but that number does include waitstaff. The national average is just under seventeen. I would love to get some feedback concerning this from visitors of this blog. I know in my current kitchen it is running a solid 85%, however once you include the front staff that number drops dramatically. Today, seeing Anthony Bourdain do his globe trotting sans cigarette makes me feel my intellectual hero and spiritual food guru has given up the last true yolk of the kitchen - his self destruction and loathing as represented by the camel regular in his hand. After the cuts and burns healed, the sleep schedule stabilized, the knee and back aches subsided all with the help of travel channel paychecks and younger wives, just seeing him curse his producers with a smoke dangling between his lips was all the evidence I needed to remember that this guy was in fact one of us. Good for him but most working cooks don't try. Like I said, how else does one get a break in an industry that doesn't do the whole break thing?

-----

Keep up with the events here at Line Cook for Life. Lately we've been throwing a lot out there. I'm trying tp get the Facebook site really going, but the 'community'-type Facebook site is very different than the 'individual' variety. Check in on it, like it if you would be so kind and that way our updates will be in your feed. We cannot message or friend request anyone we may know. We have new contributions from a baker, a corporate GM and a bartender coming up. Also, continued discussions with Ian, Kleb and Nick within the next month.  I would like to give a nod to Nick, contributor to this site as well as a recent quitter. That shit is hard. The LCFL podcast is stalled due to scheduling conflicts but it is coming. My new goal is for it to drop on July 1, but we'll see. Cooks work late, man, cooks work late.

Keep bangin'.
James Pawl Kane
Chef and Smoke Bumming Bastard

Just The Tip: A Server's Guide to the World of Food, Gratuity and Vicarious Living

I am Nick Massimilian and have been living the restaurant life for over six years. Like many in this industry, I started out with the grunts at the bottom of the corporate food-chain slinging Jim Dandy Sundaes to rude, sweaty and morbidly obese customers at a well-known, national ice-cream and coffee chain in Charlestown, Massachusetts. I knew full well that an extra scoop of marshmallow topping or the bonus peanut butter cup would result in a spike in the incidence of coronary thrombosis amongst our patrons. Still, on a base level, I felt that first glimmer of the pleasure that comes from serving and a genuine sense of reward from making people happy. I worked at Friendly’s for nine months before Ma Dukes decided it was time for me to return home to Rochester, NY, and leave behind the Townie backdrop. I should add that she was worried about me getting my ass kicked by the Irish gangs in the neighborhood who harassed me when I walked home from work every night. Justifiably.

Being broke, dry and essentially cut-off financially, I had no choice but to take the skills I had learned scooping ice cream to screaming children and their lumbering parents and matriculate them into a career. Consistency has always been a stumbling block for me so wisely I thought maybe a corporate restaurant chain would be the solution. If anything, corporate is consistent.

Corporate also reeks! It’s plastic and cold, but those checks rarely bounce. Mom was in a good mood and slightly buzzed so I got to take the car keys and off to Jefferson Road I went.

My first (and only) stop led to what I will dub the Mac Shack, where I have since been employed  through different mediums and locations for six years. In the beginning I bussed tables and swept up after hordes of ill-behaved Canadian adolescents and fifty million fucking split-checks, all by jersey number. Oh – and on a side note – while Ma and Pa Maple Leaf sucked back Blue Lites, their kids thought it was hilarious to get up and change seats to confuse the servers as well as use the crayons on the table to do as much destruction as possible in the fifteen minutes before their food came. Persevering, I moved up to host, then server and bartender until after about three years of drinking the Kool-Aid I was offered a management position.

Admittedly, deep down I still have a true affinity and respect for my first “real” restaurant. It was at the Mac Shack that I learned to break my back for others and to sacrifice for the coffers of home office. I had a place; there was structure to my life, albeit fickle. For once I felt a sense of purpose. Dare I say  Stockholm Syndrome?


I will revisit this question throughout my gastronomic odyssey.

Currently my focus and muse for motivation (outside of the pursuit of duckets) is in a privately owned, semi fine dining establishment located in the Rochester's "Neighborhood of the Arts." It is far and away the closest I have come to feeling a true sense of ownership of someone else’s establishment where passionate and skilled professionals strive to create something unique. People give a fuck. Simple as that. The focus of my contribution to this restaurant – as well as this publication – is to create an experience. For our guests and readers alike, I want to tell a story that lives up to the creativity and passion that is put into every side of root veg or hand-rolled gnocchi.

Importantly, this is an exploration into the diner’s experience and why we tip servers and staff for creating this experience. Tipping is such a cerebral concept, involving both one’s conscious as well as subconscious sensibilities. The right word well timed, or elegant body gesture, can change everything. I want to understand the “why” behind it, and this is my first step.

A Communal Engagement

My name is Ian Auger and I am a line cook, living and working in Brooklyn. I do not hale from a tradition of culinarians nor do I possess an archive of knowledge acquired through years of professional cookery. My background is primarily in history and literature, and it wasn't until my sophomore year in college that I even considered professional cooking to be an avenue to pursue. As many do, I stumbled into a restaurant through a series of nefarious events, and I am now proudly a cook nearing the completion of his second year behind the line. In relative terms cooking is still new to me, and I have a very great distance to travel before I can claim any sort of authority on the subject. However, with an educational background that encouraged critical examination and reinterpretation, I bring my curiosities to the processes of cooking. Young in my career as I am, the question of why is often posed when encountering techniques both new and old, thus eliciting experimentation and reanalysis of that which is often taken for granted. I am far from the first cook to have pursued these interests nor am I the most qualified to engage in the deeper scientific explanations of why food behaves as it does; however, I offer my curiosities and the ensuing investigations to this forum with the intention of providing a framework for others to build upon and contribute alternative perspectives and information. I seek a greater understanding of our craft, and I hope to find answers through this group and the larger community of those engaged within the business of food.

A.A. Anonymous: Musings of an Alcoholic Apprentice by Kleb Tuckett

Today was my first day of learning some real saute shit. My panko-chicken cutlet came out perfect, as well as the salad we top it with - 'cause after 6 months of plating salads I better know how to do that fucking proper. My bourbon glazed salmon, though stuck at first, came out similarly. The caramelized brussel sprouts we pair it with didn't go so smoothly.

After blanching the brussels, on the very first toss in the pan, I've instantly made a considerate mess for myself to sweep up after service. I think there were three total sprout halves left in the pan, like three little round Martian midget middle fingers displaying a solid "Fuck You!" and "Take me to your leader," 'cause obviously he knows what the fuck he's doing.

When Chef finally recoils from his keeled over position of laughter he proceeds to finish the plate flawlessly and sentences me to tossing and swirling chick peas in a pan in between the rest of my prep. At least it wasn't marbles like his mentor used.

I didn't think I'd ever end up here. I never wanted to be a cook. I've never seen a damn Gordon Ramsey T.V. show. I have seen quite a bit of Bourdain shows, but I always thought the travel aspect of them was what drew me to them.

I can't say I'm one of those people that have "moved around a lot when I was younger." I grew up in the same house, on the same horse ranch, in the same tiny redneck town outside of our modest upstate city my entire life, eating mom's cheeseburger casserole (equal parts store brand mac n cheese and same brand 80/20 ground beef) my entire life. You better believe I wasn't happy about it. Almost the same day I turned 18 I moved to a decrepit studio apartment in West Philadelphia, four blocks from Will Smith's high school actually. The other boys on the playground didn't give me any shit though and I sure as hell can't play b-ball - white men can't jump for true.

After I quickly realized anything I wanted to learn about video production could be learned on fucking Google, I dropped out of a shitty college (*cough* Art Institute *cough*) and botched a slew of flings with some serious Jersey Shore-type cunts, I drove my dumb ass back to Rochester at 5 a.m., a bottle deep in bottom-shelf whiskey.

After a year back here slinging pizzas out of a beautiful '95 Jetta that eventually got totaled in a drunken head-on collision on the thruway (and get this: I wasn't even the drunk one this time!) I used the lawsuit settlement to buy an extremely expensive camera and move to Phoenix to pursue a career in rollerblading (yes, people still do that) photography. Hell, I even got two photos printed, and one was a two page spread!

While out west, I was slingin' sandwiches for a little mom n' pop joint and enduring a relationship that I thought would be my last. When I broke my ankle blading I couldn't work anymore. My recurring depression forced the end of the relationship. That, I guess, was the straw that broke the alcoholic camel's back.

After almost a full year back in Rochester, stuck in both depression and my parents' house - and my first DUI - I used the cash from selling my car to buy a bicycle and move into the city. A summer of whiskey, burning cash, and living room tattoos with a good friend on a similar path, left me broke and desperate. Then I got the phone call.

"Hey you want to wash dishes at the restaurant I serve at? You'll start tomorrow." 
I reluctantly obliged.

Two months after that I found myself thrust into cold line cookery, scrambling to remember recipes as simple as salads and pizzas and fumbling to form perogies in the expert fashion of an elderly Ukrainian lady.

I never wanted to be a cook. Looking back at my first job at fifteen scrubbing pans under the table in a shady Italian joint, to years delivering pizzas, and absolutely bombing in retail due to less than appropriate interpersonal skills, I see now I've been destined, conditioned - and doomed - to exist in kitchens. People like us can't sit at a desk from nine-to-five. People like us go to work when everyone else leaves their cubicles and then we wander the streets all night just trying to get our kicks, sleeping just late enough into the afternoon to make it to the kitchen mostly on time with only a minor hangover.

It's easy to love the lifestyle. In Kitchen Confidential you probably remember Bourdain writes about the people who love the life as opposed to the people that love the food. After reading that I was afraid I was one of the former, but as Chef sends me home with more and more books, such as The French Laundry Cookbook (!), I find that I am becoming one of the latter. I am very proud to have accepted his offer of apprenticeship. It was like getting asked out for the first time in high school. I'm also proud to be a part of this culture and community and look forward to sharing my experiences as a rookie cookie with y'all.

My drunk name in our kitchen is Kleb Tuckett. I promise to only embellish my stories solely for literary purposes and never to hide my embarrassments. I promise to always be drunk when writing this column and to get progressively more drunk as I write it. I promise to keep my vulgarity within reason and my definition of reasonable is pretty loose. 

And I promise to always bring shame to my parents.

If you're ever in Denver please stop in to Tocabe Native American Restaurant and say hello to my friend Cody, he may just give you a cheap tattoo if you bribe him with recreational substances.

Also please check out the trailer for my upcoming fruitbooter video, The Orchard Blade Flick. https://vimeo.com/64449092

Now fuck off.
Kleb Tuckett

#002///Weekend Update

                                                                                                                            Line Cook for Life #002
Friday
It's 3 in the morning and I'm bushed.
Doesn't mean I want to sleep or would even be capable at this point.
The boys and I did a hundo-thirty or so in covers tonight that weren't paced or spaced in any attempt to make our lives easier. To help the reader understand, our kitchen is approximately thirty-five square feet and we seat about fifty in the dining room if everything lines up just right, at least according to fire code. We also have a patio with another thirty on it now that the weather has broken for the better in our rust belt urban center. I'm used to that. We were walking a tightrope for about three solid hours and only towards the end did we wobble a bit.
Purely an issue of stamina. Hot, sweaty, nicotine addicts can only keep that shit up for so long.
I was not satisfied with the last three tables, though. They took too long to get out. In our kitchen, the difference between too long and just right is between twelve and fifteen minutes without food in front of the guest. Each of these tables were twenty. The last was twenty-two.
That hurt.
To any lay folk out there who don't appreciate the difference of three minutes, think about that the next time you ask the server how much longer it'll be for your food or let him know you're in a rush to get to a show after you've had apps and salads. Three minutes is the difference of giving away a thirty dollar plate to some overly entitled dude in a hurry to use their twelve dollar movie ticket.
And they still ate every fcuking bite.
That shit keeps me up at night. Makes me go from wanting to needing a drink. I chew a hole in my cheek to keep from hollering at everyone on staff about things none of them have any control over.

I pace around the block twice.
To make matters better, we left our restaurant after breakdown and went to some local hipster mating pen and ran into a literal assload of people and it seemed it was everybody's birthday. Follow that with darts, watching friends make terrible decisions with strangers and for color add some tom-foolery with a police horse and a good time was had by all.
Now here I am, writing.
I went into the restaurant at ten this morning.
Packed my daughter's lunch at seven.
At least I get to make pancakes for my family in six hours and enjoy the people that I love...

Saturday
Pancakes were awesome. The seeming five minutes I got to enjoy with my kid - yelling at her about lack of listening regarding room cleaning - and wife - griping about daughter's inability to just fucking listen - made life worth living, charged my battery and got me amped for my day.
When I got to the shop the reservations had jumped from forty to eighty. That deflated my good morning balloon a bit. From strictly a business point of view, things couldn't be better.
Make that paper. Dolla' dolla' bill, y'all.
From a strategy and supply point of view, on the other hand, this might be a bit tricky.
Our standard lunch of about twenty-five heads mutated into a well executed, relatively low headache sixty-five in 90 minutes - but sixty-five is still sixty-five and just as mentally taxing as your desk job is during an eight hour day, especially when unexpected.
That tightrope I mentioned regarding yesterday's dinner service? We were on it at two this afternoon. Service didn't start for three more hours.
"Do we have enough salmon?" my sous says to me.
"Where are we gonna find Faroe Island salmon at three on a Saturday?" I reply.
Phone calls are made.
"At that price it fucks our food cost!" says I. It's our top seller...
"Fine."
"Burgers?"
We are low on burgers, now?!?

So, we somehow get ready to roll only slightly late, and roll we did. This service was a well paced affair and it was only after we did hundred covers we had to kick it into high gear. 

I fell asleep during a smoke on the stoop after the nine-thirty ten-top's entrees walked at half past ten, cigarette still burning. My sous-chef woke me up by stepping on me while taking out the garbage...

Sunday

Reflections, pride and exhaustion.

When I broke the yolk for an egg over easy I was throwing together for the wife I lost my cool and went back to bed.
Subtract the pride from the previous statement.

How can I bust out the hash I've slung over the last few days, few years so effectively and be brought so low by a fried egg?

It took a while for my wife to talk me off the ledge of pissing away my day off and succumbing to depression and self-loathing. Now that I'm feeling better, she's upset that she married a man-child. 

While trying to get this written she tells me that we are leaving an hour earlier than expected for our niece's birthday party and I have to boogie to build the fruit tray she signed us up to bring. Now, I volunteered to make it, so this is not a complaint so much an ironic observation about how once you start doing this it never stops never stops never stops never stops never stops...



The "Weekend Update" will be a series used from time to time to let you know what my weekends - and that of most of the over 350,000 pro-cooks within the U.S.-of-fuckin'-A - are like. Remember this: when the rest of the people are getting off from work is when we get busy. You get a lunch break? We are getting busy. Someone have a three-day weekend? We have three days of getting busy. This series will hopefully show multiple points of view about the shit show we all call the service industry.

Please continue to check in on the Line Cook for Life blog. This is quickly growing into a community of food-folk who will begin contributing soon to provide more material for the site and fodder for the podcast. We are planning and preparing for our first show - lots going on here. The LCFL facebook site will be up later this week. That will be a more organized forum of the events we will be doing, pictures of those involved, videos of us acting the fool, etc. By now we all know how versatile facebook can be. The blog will now drop every Monday morning by noon along with any materials collected in the previous week's adventures in line cookery. Expect other's essays later in the week as they will be other shades of the same color.
Until then keep bangin'...
James Pawl Kane

#001///Mission Statement, Lifers & Jumpers

Line Cook for Life #001

Mission Statement:
This will be a record of what it is to be a street level practitioner of making people happy in the fastest manner available to us - through their guts.
This will be a record of the comings and going of cooks, chefs, butchers, mongers, dish dogs, purveyors, servers, hostesses, & any fools lucky enough to find themselves within my sphere of food and beverage appreciation.
This will be a record of the failures and successes at the restaurants we decide to inhabit and befoul with our behavior and enrich with our knowledge and passion.
This will be a record of an open ended discussion about how to better ourselves as professional eaters and preparers of food and, less importantly, ourselves as human peoples.
This will be an uncensored look into what it means to be a chef with boots/clogs on the ground as opposed to the wonderfully dynamic & beautiful bastards whose faces are smeared across the landscape on books and food rags, shirts and mugs, TV screens and CIA students wet dreams.
This will be a record of  the battle of good and evil between real food and bullshit as seen through our eyes.
This will be epic.

My Name is Pawl Kane and I am the chef of a semi-fine dining restaurant in Rochester, NY. Ive been around the business of food and spirits for about 15 years now, starting in bars and diners, onto an apprenticeship under a one time great who hit the bottle an awful lot by the time he got to me. I then passed on school due to some misconception regarding 'selling out' to work for free or damn close to it in several top tier kitchen on the eastern seaboard until I gained enough skill to bullshit my way into a top 25 restaurant in Bean Town.

You'll notice I have yet to name a name.
That will be a theme.
I will use nicknames and such.
These people still are important to me and I need their support, if not their respect.

After that, I returned to midsize cities to start running my own joints. Family style Italian, southern style Smokehouses, Provincial style French, Chicago style Steakhouse, Corporate style Seafood Shack, and now the Jeet Kune Do style Bistro. (Jeet Kune Do loosely is 'The Style of Having No Style' philosophy and form taught by Bruce Lee; if you dont know that then put this tripe down and go read about that - that'll change everything. Priorities, son.) I've been around. My hotheaded and Irish sensibilities have kept me from being able to achieve any kind of stability in this business, a common theme of those who love the path we've decided to walk together. Like minded douche bags. Ive been lucky enough to meet someone with a restaurant who is willing to put up with my ups and downs in favor of the stuff Im good at.
Namely, running a kitchen in an efficient and effective manner. I hit food costs, labor costs, quarterly goals. I do the prep of two men. I build clientele through menu development and execution. I make the people happy.

I also am loud, boisterous, cocky, obnoxious and vulgar with the added possibility that I am always right.

Enough about me. That will all come soon enough.

This blog will be the companion piece to a podcast with the same name.
We will start recording in a month.
It will fill a noticeable void, that of a food podcast that is restaurant focused.
Search the googles and the iTunes, you will find only food writers and clips from Food Network, Travel, etc. that are simply platforms to show off either the new lifestyles of the rich and famous or to show you what a line cook does the moment he is given an opportunity to stop humping the line.

Not us. We are married to the stainless steel and sweat, the heat and smoke, the sizzle and clank. Cant live without it.

And we will close the first blog discussing that idea.

Those of us in this industry fall into one of two categories: The Jumpers and The Lifers.
The jumpers are the gross majority: The philosophy student taking 8 credit hours a semester, the actor/dancer/singer who is doing this just until he breaks, the mom who picked up lunch shifts while the kids are in school, the coke dealer who needs a part time porter position so he has a legitimate income to show - these are the people who are in my business that I depend on daily to get the job done who couldn't care less that they are a part of a much greater whole that envelops ALL of human history. They want their hundred and fifty a shift and so they can take it and do other things. Zero investment back into what is providing for them.
Most of the time they couldn't give a shit.
And yet I need them, even though they look down on me and those around me - the aforementioned Lifers - because we chose this path (although the decision was easier for some than others.) How can the good folk who are cut from my cloth put up with such little regard from our coworkers and comrades even though we present the opportunity for them to get the job done? Especially when it is also piled on by our families and friends who never see us?
Simply put, by creating a shell of arrogance and ignorance.
We feign the arrogance as if we had some high minded idea of feeding the hungry or some kind of pretention that our food is art.  It gives us the ability to flip burgers without thinking we just fucking flipping burgers. We encourage the ignorance that what we do is noble, regardless that we are all working extremely hard physically and mentally in hot, smoky, greasy environs to feed the rich and get near minimum wage for the effort because we are 'uneducated' (read college dropouts or never wents) and can't get a desk job due to mental instability or criminal record or both.
The Jumpers are called that because the jump ship at the drop of a hat.
The Lifers are called that because we have no choice.
A resentment grows between each side, too. This workplace hostility is what creates a million fucked up friendships throughout one's career as a Lifer.
Mostly because the Jumpers, for the most part, work on the floor - a.k.a servers, waiters, et al - and deal in straight cash, homie. Tips. We Lifers manipulate that into rounds of drinks post-shift that the Jumpers are happy to pay for. These drinks are bought in hopes of creating a union that will provide the Jumper an in to the Lifers practices and patois, if for no other reason to avoid getting yelled at about table 3 some more even when we are off the clock.
The Lifers agree to these terms so they can get shitfaced for free.
You can see this dance in any bar on Thursday nights not inhabited by the people that go to our establishment - the rich and the pretty.
And sometimes I wish I was one and not the other.
Alas, this business is my albatros and I feel an immediate kinship with anyone else carrying an oversized bird too.

If you want to hear/read more of this, let me know. I hope that others will read and this will grow. I will keep plugging away whether y'all do or y'all dont.
Reach me at pawlkane@gmail.com with suggestions, pictures, stories or fuck yous.
Thanks and keep bangin'.