head, remembering which steak goes with what. He's got to be able to
tune out the howls of outrage from the chef, the tiny, gibbering
annoyances from the floor, the curses and questions and prompts from
his co-workers: "Ready on seven? Via! Let's go! Vamos! Coming up on
seven!"
The ability to "work well with others" is a must. If you're a sauté man,
your grill man is your dance partner, and chances are, you're spending
the majority of your time working in a hot, uncomfortably confined,
submarine-like space with him. You're both working around open flame,
boiling liquids with plenty of blunt objects at close hand—and you both
carry knives, lots of knives. So you had better get along. It will not do to
have two heavily armed cooks duking it out behind the line over some
perceived insult when there are vats of boiling grease and razor-sharp
cutlery all around.
So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the
trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less
than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates,
dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves,
sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as
respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts "fringe
elements", people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly
wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're
running away from something—be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history,
trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no
opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here.
They're comfortable with the rather relaxed and informal code of
conduct in the kitchen, the elevated level of tolerance for eccentricity,
unseemly personal habits, lack of documentation, prison experience. In
most kitchens, one's freakish personal proclivities matter little if at all.
Can you keep up? Are you ready for service? Can I count on you to show
up at work tomorrow, to not let the side down?