Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [112]
Another cook has to cover for you? Wrong.
Chef spending too much time kissing your boo-boos, stroking your ego, solving your conflicts with co-workers? Wrong.
Talking back to your leader? Wrong.
You will soon become dead to me.
My friend the novice 'killer', feeling truly awful about what happened, said, 'Tony. I'm different than you - 'I have a heart!' I laughed and took that for a compliment - which it kind of was if a backhanded one.
I do have heart, you see. I've got plenty of heart. I'm a fucking sentimental guy - once you get to know me. Show me a hurt puppy, or a long-distance telephone service commercial, or a film retrospective of Ali fights or Lou Gehrig's last speech and I'll weep real tears. I am a bastard when crossed, though, no question. I bully my waiters but at least I comfort myself after ward, when I wonder if maybe I went a little too far - at least I don't bite them on the nose, as one chef I know did. I don't throw plates . . . much. I don't blame others for my mistakes. I am attentive to the weak but willing, if merciless to the strong who are not so eager to please. Though slothful to a fault in my off-hours, I am not lazy at work, and I am fiercely protective of my crew, of my chain of command, of my turf. I have perjured myself on a cook's behalf. I will cut my nose off to spite my face if a favored cook's well-being is at stake - meaning I will quit a job rather than let management, ownership or anybody else toy with any member of my crew. I will walk out of a perfectly good situation if someone insists on squeezing my cooks for unreasonable amounts of extra work at no additional recompense. I'm not bluffing when I threaten to quit over principle. My loyalty, such as it is, is to my restaurant - if that loyalty is not to the detriment of dedicated underlings. The ones who've hung with me, endured what I think should be reasonably endured, have done the right thing.
Everything else is just noise.
Isn't it?
COFFEE AND A CIGARETTE
THE LIFE OF BRYAN
THERE ARE BETTER CHEFS in the world. One comes reluctantly, yet undeniably, to that conclusion early in one's career. There's always some old master or new hotshot who's doing things with food you never would have thought of - if they hadn't done it first. And of course, in the thin air at the peak of the culinary Mount Olympus, where the three- and four-star demi-gods dwell - guys like Eric Ripert, Grey Kunz, Bouley, Palladin, Keller, you know the names, I don't have to tell you - they have the added advantage of not only being geniuses or near-geniuses, but they tend to command crews that are larger, better trained, and more single-minded in their zeal. This didn't just happen, mind you. These guys don't get hundreds of hungry young culinarians banging on their kitchen doors, begging for the privilege of mopping their brows and peeling their shallots just because they have their names stitched on their jackets. Nobody is building million-dollar kitchen facilities around their chef, shelling out for combi-steamers, induction burners, fine china, Jade ranges, crystal snifters and fistfuls of white truffles because the guy can sling steaks faster than the other guy, or because he has a cute accent. Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards. For every schlock meister with a catch-phrase and his own line of prepared seasonings who manages to hold American television audiences enthralled, there are scores more who manage to show up at work every day in a real kitchen and produce brilliantly executed, innovatively presented, top-quality food. I am, naturally, pissed off by the former, and hugely impressed by the latter.
But for my money, the guy I know who embodies the culinary ideal? A no-bullshit, no muss, no fuss, old-school ass-kicking cook of the first order?
That would have to be Scott Bryan,