Out of the pan...
"Keep your face always toward the sunshine...and shadows will fall behind you"- Walt Whitman
I was thirty years old when I arrived in New York City and I felt having lived in Chicago, I was no stranger to big city living. It’s not like I was some bumpkin. But from the first five minutes of my time there that’s exactly what I felt like. Nothing can prepare you for the cacophonous onslaught of noise, activity, and all-around mayhem that is New York City. On my very first subway ride, I got off the train on 23rd and 6th, it was the closest stop to the restaurant where I was working. the train was packed at 8 am, which I expected, it was rush hour. How packed, was not something I was ready for, there were so many people jammed into the train car my chin was resting on the guy’s shoulder in front of me. I could feel a briefcase buried into my back, but I ignored it because it was actually helping keep me keep my balance when the train stopped and started. When I squeezed my way off the train along with seeming hordes of other people, I followed everyone to the exit, I had no idea where I was going. And then I saw something that forced me to stop and stare, forced me to look around to see if I was the only one seeing what I was seeing. I couldn’t be the only one right? There were what seemed like hundreds of people on the train platform getting off trains or trying to get on, they had to see what I saw. There, on the end of the platform, a homeless man had dropped his pants and was taking a dump right there in plain sight of everyone. But it seemed like no one was seeing this because they just rushed right by him and dashed for the turnstile. In fact, people started bumping into me because I had stopped walking for a minute to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. I quickly realized I had to keep moving or the hordes were going to get angry and trample me so I made my way to the turnstile and up the stairs to the street. Where was I and what had I gotten myself into?
Working in New York also was nothing like Chicago. I mean yes, there were a lot of things I was familiar with, but I was not prepared for how busy it was day in and day out. Patria was busy, like crazy busy, shit your pants busy, pray to God you’ll somehow get out of the weeds busy, get religion busy, get so slammed it takes everything to not start crying busy. I remember one Saturday night looking at the digital clock in the dish pit and it was 4:59, and that once it changed to 5:00 the ticket machine started spitting out dupes like it was angry. At first, I settled into a steady pace and was able to keep up with the constant stream of food, the sous chefs just kept barking out orders and I felt like it was never going to stop. At one point I remember that I was moving as fast as I could and that everything in my peripheral vision seemed blurry, kind of like in the movies. Eventually, the tickets slowed, and I was able to actually stop cooking for a minute and reached into my cooler for an orange Gatorade that I had bought at the bodega on my way to work. As I greedily gulped the Gatorade I glanced at the digital clock again and it said 11:05. That was a very surreal moment, it felt like only an hour or two had gone by but in fact, the night was almost over. One of the other cooks must have seen my expression because he laughed at me and said “You’re not in Chicago anymore dude”. No, no I wasn’t.
When the night finally ended and I took an inventory of my mise en place, one thing occurred to me, I literally had nothing left. I had gone through almost every single thing I had prepped. The only positive thing about it was that it made cleaning up fairly easy. The total devastation of my station was still wreaking havoc on my psyche when the lead line cook Aaron looked at me” Hey new guy, cook something for the dishwashers”
“Huh"?”
“Make something to eat for the dishwashers, they busted their ass”
“What should I make?”
“How the fuck should I know? You’re a cook, cook something. Fuck dude it’s not that hard”
I have to stop here and explain how much the idea of cooking for the dishwashers scared the shit out of me. I know that might sound ridiculous, I had cooked for literally thousands of people before this, I had just cooked for hundreds of people that night. Why would making something to eat for the dishwashers frighten me so much? So it’s one thing to cook somebody else’s food and put it in the window for a server or food runner to take away. As a line cook, you rarely meet the guests or interact with them in any way, it’s very anonymous. It’s also not your food, so if a customer has negative feedback you can sometimes throw that back at the chef right? It’s his dish, his ideas, his problem. But when you create something yourself, no matter how humble you open yourself up to criticism. Sometimes your colleagues can be the harshest critics and I was not ready to deal with it at this time. Cooking for other people and getting feedback is not easy, no matter how friendly the audience may be, it’s hard. I know people have told me countless times they are nervous if they invite me over for a meal because they think I will be supercritical because I’m a chef. I really am not judging anyone’s cooking, especially if they invite me over and cook for me, I’m delighted to not have to cook myself. So there were so many things swirling through my tired brain. I felt the cooks were going to watch me, to see if I put any effort into it, the dishwashers were family after all so I had to take care of them. When I looked over to the dish pit one of the dishwashers was smiling at me and pointing to his mouth. Great.
So many things went through my mind, I had only been there a short time and I didn’t really pay attention to what the other cooks had made them so I had nothing to go on. My prayers were answered though, mercifully, when the fry cook just happened to walk by me and mutter underneath his breath, “Just make them chicken with rice and beans, it’s what they want anyway”
“Really?”
“Trust me, they would eat chicken every day if they could.”
So I served them grilled chicken breast with chimichurri, rice and beans, and guacamole, all of which I was able to get from the other cook’s mise en place. The lead line cook sort of sneered but didn’t say anything. The dishwashers looked at the plates I made for them, I tried to really pile on the food but make it look good too, and they smiled and gave me thumbs up. The oldest even exclaimed “Pollo!” They seemed so excited, it instantly made me feel sad, these guys worked so hard, and they were more than content to sit on empty milk crates next to a dish machine and eat chicken with rice and beans. I did notice that through time, the more I cooked for them the more they were willing to help me when I was super in the weeds. They would pick herbs for me, run downstairs for backup mise en place if I asked, put things away for me, they saved my ass many times. Over time I learned what they like to eat, usually chicken, aways rice, and some kind of salad. They also like really hearty soups or stews so sometimes we would put together makeshift stews with leftover short ribs, or pozole with leftover pork shoulder. One day it was especially busy so all the line cooks got together and made lobster tacos for them, the chef said it was ok, we really wanted to hook them up. They came back and told me they’d rather have chicken if possible, so we ate the lobster and I made them grilled chicken like usual, they were quite happy.
It took me a while for me to have fun cooking, I worried about everything so much. I know when I first came to New York I was constantly in a state of agitation, living there was stressful, work was stressful, I had little to no personal life, I worked a lot and when I didn’t work I usually slept or read mostly cookbooks. It took me time to feel confident in my skills as a cook, to feel like I knew what I was doing. Once I got over my initial fears I started to feel more relaxed and I started to learn quite a bit. When you work in a very busy restaurant you are forced to adapt, you don’t have much of a choice. I do recall one of the sous chefs taking me aside after I’d been there about six months.
“You know Chicago ( yes they called me Chicago sometimes, they thought it was funny). I was really worried about you, when you started here you looked like a scared rabbit. But now, now you’re a warrior.” There are no words to describe the immense pride I felt right at that moment. I’ve always been extremely underconfident in most things I do, and not that many people had ever told me I was good at something. It felt so good but so foreign also. The same sous chef yelled at me the very next day about how I grilled the swordfish, he said my grill marks looked like shit and I should stop touching it so much. Good times.