KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the ...

good-guy bad-guy the job requires. He's the reason I am never off sick, go to sleep every night running to ...

first thing I heard about him. That he had killed a guy with his bare hands. And Bigfoot, as you mig ...

My first night working for Bigfoot—a man I knew nothing of other than the rumor, and the fact that everyon ...

his Presidential Guard was at that moment downstairs tackling the difficult problem of repairing a city-own ...

We met, and I must have looked like a rhesus monkey—the one in the perils-of-freebase commercial, cornered ...

mistake. He lived for that. In the man's three or so decades in the life, he'd seen and heard every sc ...

cubic feet of ice production from a machine he was contracting for. Two minutes after signing, he had his ...

for a while before the metal jaws clamped shut. "I don't pay quickly enough to get the good stuff? Is ther ...

system. A lot of his time was spent figuring out ways to make the restaurant run more efficiently, more ...

As one might imagine, living under the thumb of such a micro-managing control freak could be tough. Most ...

weighing vegetables alphabetically—or by type, like most sheets—I have my sheets laid out the way the foo ...

somebody in the pipeline. My penetration agent in the competition's kitchen is getting hinkey about ratting out hi ...

by a single, central à la carte kitchen—and you had some major league volume, as well as some major leagu ...

—presumably—orders and pick-ups. I can still hear him: "Pickinguppa, one-ah vealuh Orloffah . . . and th ...

The atmosphere was not unlike a Pinero play, very jailhouse, with a lot of grab-ass, heated argument, hype ...

his knuckles with a satisfying crunch. Luis screamed like a burning wolverine and fell to his knees, ...

"Would you care for some Tongue en Madère?" I'd ask through clenched teeth, my face a rictus of faux che ...

side of the beef tenderloin. I peeled 75 pounds of shrimp at a clip, seared Wellingtons, made chicken l ...

moustache Petes from the local, two sinister-looking guys in long coats who'd show up to settle disput ...