#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'.