Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [46]
I was making filling for crespelle toscana in the huge, tilting brazier one morning, stirring mushrooms, diced tongue, ham, turkey, spinach and bechamél with a big, heavyweight, curved Dexter meat fork, a nice patina of rust on its blunt and twisted tines. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luis coming, his right hand swinging back for a deep wallop between my cheeks. I decided right then I'd had enough; I was gonna straighten this drunken pig out. I quickly, but subtly, turned the big meat fork around and down, so the business end was pointing backwards. I timed my move for maximum impact. When Luis came in with his hand, I came down with the fork as hard as I could, sinking both tines deep into his knuckles with a satisfying crunch. Luis screamed like a burning wolverine and fell to his knees, two wide holes - one on each side of his middle knuckle - already welling up with blood. He managed to get up, the whole kitchen crew screaming and hooting with laughter, his hand blowing up to the size of a catcher's mitt and taking on an interesting black-and blue and red color. After a visit to one of the fine, union-sponsored medical clinics, the hand was even larger, looking like a gauze-wrapped football and leaking yellow antiseptic.
My life improved immediately. The other cooks began addressing me as an equal. Nobody grabbed my ass anymore. People smiled and patted me on the back when I came to work in the morning. I had made my bones.
My job at the Room, initially, was to prepare and serve a lunch buffet for about a hundred or so regular members of the Rockefeller Center Luncheon Club - mostly geriatric business types from the building who assembled in the Rainbow Grill every day. I had to prepare a cold buffet and two hot entrees, which I'd then serve and maintain from noon to three. This was no easy feat, as the buffet was comprised solely of leftovers from the previous night's service. I'd begin each morning at seven-thirty pushing a little cart with wobbly casters down the line, where the cooks would hurl hunks of roast pork, end cuts, crocks of cooked beans, overcooked pasta, blanched vegetables and remnants of sauces at me. My job was to find a way to make all this look edible.
I have to say, I did pretty well, using every dirty trick I'd learned at CIA. I turned leftover steaks into say, Salade de Boeuf en Vinaigrette, transformed dead pasta and veggies into festive pasta salads, made elaborately aspic'd and decorated trays out of sliced leftover roast. I made mousses, pates, galantines, and every other thing I could think of to turn the scrapings into something our aged but wealthy clientele would gum down without complaint. And then, of course, I'd don a clean jacket and apron, cram one of those silly coffee filter-like chef's hats on my head, and stand by a voiture, slicing and serving the hot entrees.
'Would you care for some Tongue en Madère?' I'd ask through clenched teeth, my face a rictus of faux cheer as I'd have to repeat and repeat for the hard-of-hearing captains of industry who ate the same spread of sauce-disguised leftovers every lunch and for whom the hot entree was clearly the high light of their day. 'Boiled beef with horseradish sauce, sir?' I'd chirp. 'And would you care for a steamed potato with that?'
The Irish waitresses who worked the Luncheon Club with me were more like nurses after years of this. They had nicknames for our regulars: 'Dribbling Dick' for one ninety-year-old who had a hard time keeping his food in his mouth, 'Stinky' for an apparently incontinent banker, 'Shakey Pete' for the guy who needed