Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [133]
'Why is he/she treated better than me?'
'How come the chef gets to loiter in the dining room, playing kissy-face with [insert minor celebrity here] while I'm working my ass off?'
'Why is my hard work and dedication not sufficiently appreciated?'
These are all questions best left unasked. The answers will drive you insane eventually. If you keep asking yourself questionslike these, you will find yourself slipping into martyr mode, unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction and death.
9. Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining. This business grows assholes: it's our principal export. I'm an asshole. You should probably be an asshole too.
10. Try not to lie. Remember, this is the restaurant business. No matter how bad it is, everybody probably has heard worse. Forgot to place the produce order? Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever.
11. Avoid restaurants where the owner's name is over the door. Avoid restaurants that smell bad. Avoid restaurants with names that will look funny or pathetic on your resume.
12. Think about that resume! How will it look to the chef weeding through a stack of faxes if you've never worked in one place longer than six months? If the years '95 to '97 are unaccounted for? If you worked as sandwich chef at happy Malone's Cheerful Chicken, maybe you shouldn't mention that. And please, if you appeared as 'Bud' in a daytime soap opera, played the Narrator in a summer stock production of 'Our Town', leave it off the resume. Nobody cares - except the chef, who won't be hiring anyone with delusions of thespian greatness. Under 'Reasons for Leaving Last Job', never give the real reason, unless it's money or ambition.
13. Read! Read cookbooks, trade magazines - I recommend Food Arts, Saveur, Restaurant Business magazines. They are useful for staying abreast of industry trends, and for pinching recipes and concepts. Some awareness of the history of your business is useful, too. It allows you to put your own miserable circumstances in perspective when you've examined and appreciated the full sweep of culinary history. Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Read the old masters: Escoffier, Bocuse et al as well as the Young Turks: Keller, Marco-Pierre White, and more recent generations of innovators and craftsmen.
14. Have a sense of humor about things. You'll need it.
KITCHEN'S CLOSED
MY HANDS HURT.
My feet hurt too, sticking out from under the covers, radiating pain up to the knees.
Sunday morning at eight o'clock and I'm lying in bed after a king-hell, bone-crushing Saturday night at Les Halles, making noises no human should ever make. Just getting my Zippo to light takes three tries with unresponsive fingers, a few muttered curses. I'm psyching myself up for the long walk to the bathroom, an exercise I will no doubt execute with all the grace and ease of a Red Foxx, and the further challenge of the child-proof cap on the aspirin bottle.
I tend to get philosophical on Sunday mornings; it's an activity well suited to my current physical condition, when even lighting cigarettes is difficult, and the chamber-pots my brother