I saw this and got to thinking... Part 1 The year was 1992 and I had graduated culinary school and taken a job as a prep cook at a casual Italian restaurant in Evanston. My main jobs were to make gallons of tomato sauce and bread everything under the sun, or at least it seemed like it at the time. Chicken parm, eggplant parm, veal parm, stuffed and breaded artichokes, almost every day I pounded out mounds of chicken breasts and veal and set up a breading station. My hand would get coated in breading too, and it would look like I had a swollen cartoon hand, one time another cook dared me to stick my hand in the deep fryer, which of course I didn’t but did ponder it a few times. I figured this was just how it was, this is the type of thing you do in order to get experience, it’s all part of the process no matter how brain-numbing. I learned how to do other things, I made stocks, learned how to organize a cooler, receive deliveries, roll pizza dough, but to be honest, it was a very busy restaurant, I was buried in prep day in and day out, but I felt I wasn’t learning as much as I could. I was hungry to work on the hotline even though it did scare the shit out of me. I worked nights sometimes and saw how the cooks would just get destroyed on the weekends, they usually would scream at me to help replenish mise en place. There were times I didn’t have that much time to actually prep anything, I just ran up and down the stairs restocking the line. Sometimes the restaurant would pass 600 covers and that’s when the wheels would usually fly off the bus and the cooks would get pummeled so badly they would come to the prep kitchen downstairs and just hide in the cooler for a few minutes, sometimes screaming “Fuck!” inside the cooler, just to vent a little. I saw this and it really filled me with apprehension and dread, stepping on that line seemed terrifying.
Nice writing, dude. Looks like that Twitter link at the top is deleted BTW. What was the gist of it?