Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [78]
Upstairs, in the real world, however, things were going quickly sour.
I was, I'm telling you for the record, unqualified for the job. I was in deep waters and fast-flowing ones at that. The currents could change at any time, without warning. One day, I attended a chefs' committee meeting on the East Side and returned to find that the whole menu had been changed back into Italian! This included the listings on the computer, so that when I expedited that evening, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to read off items in Italian, translate them into English in my head, and call them out to my Ecuadorian crew in Spanish. I had to learn some fast mnemonic tricks to keep up, like: 'I want to Lambada - just for the Halibut,' so that I would remember that lambatini was Italian for halibut, or 'I fucka you in the liver' to recall that 'fegato' meant liver.
I worked seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, surrounded by a front-of-the-house crew who'd been, for the most part, with the company a long time, and were fiercely dedicated to all things Pino. They were so gung-ho in their ambitions, or so frightened of failing, that they'd cheerfully drag a knife across your throat if you so much as dropped a fork. The GM was an over groomed tall blond northern Italian, an unctuous and transparently duplicitous cheerleader who was always urging his terrorized waiters to 'smile' and 'have fun' - while he calmly planned their imminent termination. This was a guy who would daily invite me over to the Whiskey Bar, supposedly to discuss strategy, buy me a drink, and then make repeated overtures about how we were a great 'team' and how 'we' were going to 'work together' against 'the others' - while all along he was doubtless dishing me as an alcoholic rube. I suspect that I was providing a valuable service to him on these trips - by providing official cover for his own need of a strong drink.
I soon found myself paralyzed by it all. I was just too tired and too confused and too spiritually empty to move this way or that. There was always something that needed doing, and none of it pleasant. Then sudden austerity measures required that I begin laying off crew and working line shifts in addition to my other duties (which I was having a hard time with already). Poor Steven and I were firing people whom, only a few weeks earlier, we had lured away from good-paying jobs - so many of them that often Steven would be letting somebody go in one room while I demolished someone's life in another. Each firing, each incident, each accident then had to be recorded on an appropriate form for the truly vapid director of human resources, who rambled on earnestly in New Agey patter about self-actualization and job satisfaction and fairness in hiring and appropriate down time - when she knew that the whole business rested firmly on the backs of a mob of underpaid, overworked and underfed (ten minutes for chicken leg, penne and salad, every single day, lunch and dinner) Ecuadorians of dubious legal status. Listening to this witless, hypocrite ramble on as if we all worked for Ben and Jerry rather than the realpolitik Kissingeresque Pino was to dream of smacking her stupid face with a pepper-mill, give her something to write about.
At one point, near the end, Steven and Alfredo, both reaching the end of their ropes as well, summoned me for a quiet word at a nearby bar, Scruffy Duffy's.
'They're gonna screw you, man,' they said. 'You gotta do something. You're fucking up! They're gonna get you!'
By this time I was thoroughly wiped out.
'Guys, I know, believe me . . . I know. But I'm not prepared to do any better than I'm doing now. I'm going on all eight cylinders, I'm doing the