• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 760 0

cook. He leans over that plate and delicately, carefully drizzles sauce from a favorite spoon, gently applies an outer ring of sauce, then sensuously drags a toothpick through it. He tastes everything. Looks at his plates with a decorator’s eye for color and texture. Treats a filet of fish as tenderly and as lovingly as a woman’s erect nipple. Piles cute, girly-little garnishes into high, cloudlike piles of gossamer-thin crunchiness. He’s doing what everyone told him growing up that only women should do. (Ramsay’s own father told him cooking was basically for poofs and that chefs were all ponces.) We work in aprons, for fuck’s sake! You better have balls the size of jackfruits if you want to cook at a high level, where an acute sense for flavor and design, as much as brutality and vigilance, is a virtue. And be fully prepared to bulldoze any miserable cocksucker who gets in your way.

Both times I visited his restaurant, Ramsay was in the kitchen, supervising every dish that came out, riding his crew like rented mules. He wasn’t gliding through the dining room, sucking up to his public. He’s a cook in twenty-first-century England; that means he’s an obsessive, paranoid, conspiratorial control freak. A hustler, media-manipulator, artist, craftsman, bully, and glory hound – in short, a chef’s chef. That I found him polite, charming, witty, and gracious and am saying so here will probably be an embarrassment to him. For that, I apologize. His detractors should be so lucky as to taste the absolutely stunning braised beef and foie gras I ate at his restaurant – a dish so sumptuous that I am forced to use that word. A ham hock terrine of really extraordinary subtlety and flavor, a lobster ravioli with fresh green pea puree that revealed – as all food reveals its creator’s true nature – a level of perception and sensitivity that can be a liability in the mosh-pit subculture of professional kitchens. Here’s a guy who risked everything in his career, many times over. He walked away from a career in football when it was made clear he’d never play in the bigs. He endured a procession of stages in some very tough French kitchens. He bolted from his first restaurant, entangling himself in potentially enormous liabilities just when he was in sight of the mountaintop. He loudly announced he was going for three Michelin stars and then stayed on course until he got them. Rather than kiss the asses of all those people who might – under ordinary circumstances – be expected to be helpful to him, he has consistently kicked them in the teeth or even viciously sucker punched them. It’s very hard for me not to like a guy like that. And every day those stars are sitting on him like six-ton flagstones, defying any who might choose to try knocking them off.

England’s worst boss? I don’t think so. England’s worst boss is the boss who doesn’t give a fuck, someone who’s wasting his employees’ time, challenging them to do nothing more ambitious than show up. Understand that in no-name pit stops and casual dining establishments, it’s just a mistake when a cook forgets a single unpeeled fava bean or a tiny smudge of grease, but in a three-star restaurant, it’s treason. In the cruel mathematics of two- and three-star dining establishments, a customer who has a good meal will tell two or three people about it. A person who has an unsatisfactory meal will tell ten or twenty. It makes for a much more compelling anecdote. That one unpeeled fava bean is the end of the world. Or it could be.

As most really good cooks or commis working in similar circumstances will readily tell you: Mess with the chef at your peril. It’s his name on the door.

Where Cooks Come From

There’s a little town in Mexico where cooks come from.

If you’re a chef and you’ve spent any serious time working in professional kitchens, you know what to do when Hector, your saucier, gets pinched for assault and you suddenly need a replacement. Faced with a situation where you need a French-trained, ready-to-go, reliable, hardworking guy who knows what to do when you need a solid flounder