New Year's Eve 1997

When I got on the subway it smelled as if someone had been using it as a bathroom. I was however fortunate enough to snag a seat so I figured I needed to take the good with the bad. I put on my headphones and listened to Kurt Elling on my way into Manhattan. Mentally I was trying to prepare myself for a long night. New Year’s Eve is not a great night to work in a restaurant. Depending on where you work it can be a very busy or long shift. It usually means amateur night. In other words, people that don’t usually eat out very often and make a lot of strange requests or substitutions. I knew we were going to be busy, and I also knew there was no way I was getting home at a reasonable hour. We had a ton of reservations at 11 pm and those people would probably linger.

Walking down 23rd street it was noticeably quiet, something that rarely happened in New York. The more time I spent in New York the more I missed Chicago. Although I had adjusted by this time, my mind kept wandering to my hometown. I hadn’t been very good about keeping in touch with friends and relatives and often had guilt trips about it. I rationalized it as a phase I had to go through, a paying your dues kind of thing. You just had to work a lot, learn your craft, and one day you maybe get to a point where you have more time. Of course, this is total bullshit but I kept telling it to myself to alleviate guilt.

The minute I walked into the kitchen I felt a jolt of energy. There were cooks and servers walking briskly to and fro, along with many conversations in Spanish and English all happening at the same time. One of the cooks high-fived me and kept walking while I headed downstairs to change. The prep kitchen downstairs was even more chaotic with cooks chopping, cutting, dicing vegetables and meat for service. The butcher had a huge pile of salmon filets next to him and was placing them in a fish box between sheets of parchment paper. The ladies were making empanadas and tamales, chatting in Spanish as they worked.

I had settled into my job at this point and was glad it was so busy. When it was crazy busy the time flew by, and I would be heading home before I knew it. The rest of cooks would want to have beers after work but I wanted to just go home and relax. I was a bit older than the other cooks and my body was starting to show wear and tear of working in a kitchen for 10-12 hours a day. My knees had started to creak, my back sometimes hurt when I got up and I found myself starting to feel exhausted after work. In fact I had started falling asleep on the subway going home and had missed my stop a few times.

When I made my upstairs the line was still humming from lunch service and the cooks were just starting to break down. They were all happy to be going home to celebrate New Year’s Eve, while the rest of us had to work. But one of the rules in that kitchen was that the lunch cook couldn’t leave until the night/pm cooks were set up, which helped a lot. There were some places I worked where the lunch cook just bolted as soon as you got there. One of the sous chefs was tellling everyone how busy we were going to be, and warning us not to run out of anything or else.

Once service time came around the cooks were all standing at our stations, ready, tongs or side towels in our hands, eagerly awaiting the first orders. The saute cook kept bugging me about going to the bar down the street after work but I told him I just wanted to go home. Of course the other cooks had to chime in as well and ask me what was wrong with me. Once the first tickets started coming into the kitchen it got quiet though, plus the chef seemed to be in a bad mood. He always talked very loudly and that night was no exception, but he kept asking why the food was taking so long and telling us to move faster.

“There’s no fucking way we are going to be able to do 400 covers tonight if you guys don’t pick up the fucking pace!”

“Yes chef!”

“Let’s go !”

We all put our head down and just cooked. Now the board was filled with tickets and the sous chef was yelling out the orders he wanted to see in the window. It was that point in the night where I had to start thinking three or four moves ahead. The grilled swordfish would stay warm if I put it on a slow part of the grill while I plated my two steaks and the ducks could go in the oven and finish, getting the skin as crispy as possible. The cook next to me gave me my all day. Seven ribeyes, eight chicken, four ducks, and three swordfish all day. He told just go ahead and plate them all and throw them in the window as soon as possible. I glanced at the suate cook and saw that he wasn’t as behind as I was, so I tried to kick in high gear.

“How long on those fucking steaks, for fuck’s sake!”

The chef was standing in front of me, looking at me, looking at the grill, mumbling something to the sous chef. The ribeye plate was a pain in the ass but I know I needed to keep my cool or it would all come crashing down. The ribeye had to be sliced and arranged on the plate, and I had seven at one time plus all the other meat. Once I got a few of them in the window I knew the chef would back off so I quickly tried to get one up there as fast as I could. The saute cook came down the line and asked me in a hushed tone if I needed help, I just nodded. He grabbed the swordfish and duck and started plating them. As I was putting the plates in the window the chef wiped the rims and stared at me and then looked at the tickets, trying to figure out what table they go to.

The second I put all my food in the window I got hit again, and again. Wave after wave of tables pummeled us and I just kept moving, not looking up very much, just cooking as fast as I could. I silently prayed my mise en place would last the night, the last thing I needed was to run downstairs and grab something, the chef would lose his mind. I do remember having to use every single container of mise en place I had. The tickets just never seemed to stop. At one point I jumped off the line for a few seconds to grab a new cutting board,the one I was using was getting so messy from slicing so much meat. When the tickets finally slowed down I saw that most everything in my station was gone. I looked at the clock in the kitchen. It was 11:30. It honestly seemed like only a couple hours had passed, I was wrong. Officially the kitchen was still open but the only people eating were at the bar. We started the process of cleaning up.

The chef came into the kitchen and handed us a case of beer which recieved a big cheer. He walked around and came into my station, which freaked me out. He handed me a beer.

“Good job Mendez.”

“Huh?”
”Good job dude. You cooked a lot fo meat tonight and nothing came back, that’s hard to do.”

“Yea, thanks I guess”
He laughed and walked downstairs. After having two beers I decided to go out with the other cooks after all. I was exhausted but happy. I had made it through another service. Sometimes I felt like I was in a war zone and I just had to survive somehow. Once you made it to the other side you were so grateful and happy, of course you wanted to drink. Plus you wanted to commiserate with your fellow cooks about the sheer madness of it all. Cooking food to order is hard, no matter the place or circumstances, and doing it well takes a special kind of person. These were the times I felt like I had what it takes to become a chef, most of the time I had strong doubts. Cooking just seemed so hard sometimes. Even though I was getting much better at it, it still required a lot of effort, and there were many days I didn’t feel I was up to it. But that night I had made it and was glad to celebrate with a few beers.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading.!