There is a certain unflattering imagery that accompanies the professional label of “cook”: a sad, tired individual wearing a stained apron and a dirty shirt, simultaneously grasping a spatula and a fry basket. “Chef”, however, paints a more favourable picture, and so it makes sense that a large portion of my contemporaries shy away from referring to themselves as cooks, opting instead for chef. In some parts of the world the two are synonymous, but around here they aren’t. Not by a long shot, and I like it this way. Cooks who call themselves chef are piggybacking, and in doing so, do little to rescue the word “cook” from the dark side of people’s imaginations. You see, becoming a chef isn’t as simple as holding a knife and wearing the uniform. Graduating from culinary school doesn’t even earn you the designation. So what does it take to be a chef? Well, it’s kinda complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain it from my perspective, which is that of a cook.

I once sniffed a sous chef gig, got scared and ran away. That’s as close as I’ve been to being a chef, which really isn’t all that close. Every day spent in the kitchen is another day closer to being ready for the day it happens, and chances are when it does you won’t actually be ready. Maybe you’ve been toiling as sous in the same kitchen for a half decade, maybe half a month, but at some point, the guy at the top is gonna clock out, leaving the still warm throne vacant for you. I imagine it would be like being tossed from a frying pan and into a deep fryer. Ready or not, you’re a chef now, and you get to tell people that’s what you are, and they can “oooh” and “ahhh” while you do the same for entirely different reasons: they’re impressed, and you’ve got a migraine. There’s a chance that you’ll get a fancy coat with your name and title on it, possibly some business cards to go with it too, but these things are vain, and amount to just a wee portion of what truly separates a cook from a chef.

All that time spent being a cook is either a way to keep busy while chasing bussers and hostesses, or a period of research and development for when your time comes. Or both. While there is plenty of time spent doing, the best spend as much time as they can watching. Watching the boss, watching the peers, and watching the dishwasher try to steal beer at the end of the night. This ongoing observation is the only way to pick up on the subtleties, the things that go unmentioned. The way a chef responds to adversity is something you have to see to appreciate. The way a chef handles mistakes. They way a chef handles a burnt out and poisonous line cook. The way a chef handles new hires. The way they fire people. The way they cook. They way they teach. The way they lead. All of this is picked up via peripheral vision and direct experience, there simply is no other way. You aren’t a chef until the cooks are watching you, asking you a million questions, and calling you on your days off.

What I would like is for all the good cooks out there to identify themselves as cooks until they’ve made the jump. Intended or not, referring to oneself as a “chef” gives the false impression that you’re something that you not. A cook is a cook, a sous chef is a sous, and a chef is THE chef. This little piece of nit pickery primarily revolves around the discussions we have with outsiders. Terminology and titles get mangled within the confines of the kitchen, and in that place everybody has a keen understanding of who’s who and if anybody is actually somebody. As a dishwasher I would introduce myself to new hires as the sous chef. The ruse lasted only a second because my coworkers would snicker audibly at the thought, and I would soon find myself performing the dirtiest and shittiest tasks available in the restaurant. That, my friends, is funny. Telling strangers and outsiders that you’re “a chef”, however, is misleading and an indication of insecurity. Tell people you’re a cook, and go about making yourself a great one. Then, in all likelihood, you’ll find yourself wearing the fancy jacket, answering all the questions, and sleeping less than a crackhead.

~ Jacob Galbraith

(Read “Selling Out – Part 1“)

I walked away from the orientation sessions with a comprehensive knowledge of three things: the benefits packages, breakfast pastries, and the peripheral interests of several people I would never speak to again. At the outset I understood that I was signing up for a culture shock, but the environmental contrast between restaurant and hotel had my own personal Jiminy Cricket chirping loudly. My conscience, it seemed, was completely unmoved by the possibility of earning more in four 8 hour shifts than I would have earned in five shifts pulling much longer hours in restaurants. Since I had already trimmed my respectable playoff beard into a Gillette-style business beard, I decided to put a muzzle on Mr. Cricket and venture further into the bizarre abyss of hotel cooking.

Each day provided more incentive to leave. My first schedule featured a shift in the banquet hall, some time working the breakfast buffet, and culminated with a couple of graveyard shifts. Out of the 70 some odd line cooks working in that hotel, I was chosen to be one of two guys left to rot overnight cooking room service for entitled and inebriated folks who prefer to do their eating during vampire hours. The torture of cooking 100 liters of borderline inedible tomato sauce in a tremendous vat paled in comparison to the agony of starting work at 10pm, trying to function confidently in the eye of a hurricane of cooks trying their hardest to get the fuck out of dodge. The menu featured just about everything you’d expect at a 12 year olds birthday party. Nachos, hot dogs, chicken fingers, pizzas, burgers and the like. I had recently departed a restaurant that prided itself in making almost everything in-house, and I had apparently landed in a place where that’s just silly; macaroni and cheese, of all things, was brought in frozen and microwaved when needed. There is some relief, however, to finally work in a kitchen that validated the idiotic line of questioning on the Red Seal final exam. Cooking that kind of food is akin to being punched in the nuts. And since it was all happening at 3AM, it was like being punched in the nuts in your sleep; a rude awakening, so to speak. The whole thing reeked of injustice. The food, for one, deserved better. As did the customers, who were paying hefty sums for food that was bogus all the way through. I always knew that this kind of shit went on, but having my fingerprints on it was brand new and unpalatable. I was getting paid great money to do awful things to food, which made me painfully aware of the fact that the previous arrangement of getting paid smaller sums to produce great plates was simply better for my heart. And so, with only one week in the bank, I made the decision to leave.

At this point I hadn’t been paid for a while, so rolling up my knives and saying “Fuck it” wasn’t an option. I first needed to find work, the good kind. Meanwhile, I tried really hard to get pulled off of the graveyard shift, first by expressing displeasure to as many of the higher ups as I could find. The best I could get was a loose promise that it would only be that way for “a few months” and that the situation would be reconciled then. This did little to pacify my urge to leave. Something about pulling those sorts of hours for a few days a week really messes with every fabric of your being. I, like most folks, prefer the standard arrangement of existing when the sun is up, and signing out when it goes down. Everything was upside down and inside out, and with no solution on the way, I did the right thing and started growing my beard back. The way I saw it, nobody wanted my job, and that meant that I had enough leverage to grow some hair on my face. There just wasn’t any way in hell that some Executive Sous Chef was going to spend the night in my stead. That was phase one of my petty retaliation for being leveraged into a shitty position that I simply wouldn’t have accepted had their plans for me been disclosed in the first place. You’re reading phase two right now.

It’s a weak plan, I know. Growing a beard and vaguely describing a professional atrocity won’t exactly bring ol’ Goliath to his knees, will it? And that’s not what I was trying to do, I just needed to exhibit some defiance while I hunted for a more appropriate job while doing my best to ignore the aspects of the job that hurt my soul. Unfortunately it didn’t make me feel any better when I would have to throw out incredible amounts of food on a daily basis, or when I would be asked to cook tremendous quantities of the lowest quality breakfast sausages on the planet. It was astonishing, and heartbreaking, to be in the presence of so many young cooks, and have to see so much food enter the building already prepared. A certain canape, for example, required the meat from Chinese BBQ Duck. One would assume that with all of that equipment, and all of those cooks, that someone could cook up a couple of ducks. Alas, this wasn’t the case, and the ducks came in a box, already cooked, and ready to be served. To know that these sorts of things are normal and unremarkable in that setting is why I had no choice but to leave. It was nice to make good money for once, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I, or anyone else there, was being paid so well. I was finally underworked and overpaid, and instead of being pleased with the arrangement, I felt guilty. I felt like I was selling out.

When I found a better job that wouldn’t be mine until a month later, I immediately gave two weeks notice. I couldn’t handle it for any longer than I had to. It was at this point that the powers decided to acknowledge my gripes and were kind enough to try and get me to stick around, promising me my choice of departments. When I brought to their attention that my problems extended beyond having to work the graveyard shift, that I took an exception to the amount of food that they wasted on a daily basis, I found, unsurprisingly, that they were unwilling to change, just like me.

It isn’t enough to walk away from that situation and keep my mouth shut. The experience was conflicting in terms of creativity, individuality, professional ethics, and sustainability. I have to believe both as a cook and a concerned individual, that a restaurant should strive not to dispose of enough food to feed 50 hungry bellies on daily basis. And that’s just for breakfast in of the many food outlets in the building. The issue isn’t whether the food is paid for, because those customers pay dearly for their shitty sausages and hours old pancakes, this issue is waste. It’s a waste of an animal, a waste of labour, and a waste of time. It was at the hotel that I learned just how much efficiency and thoughtfulness matter to me as a cook, and how there isn’t enough money to make me feel good about ignoring such things. I can’t be among those who are unwilling to challenge themselves, those who are unwilling to question a broken system, in order to make things better. This is the perfect example of what is wrong with affluent society. Beyond the facade of marvelous architecture and flawlessly groomed and strictly regimented staff lies a massive pile of bullshit. It’s disgusting.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

I’m a large doses kind of guy, which isn’t always good. I’m lucking that hard drugs never found their way into my bloodstream, because I’d be the dead kind of drug addict, for sure. I either do something exclusively for years, like obsess over pop punk as an angsty middle class teenager, or pour myself into something entirely for a month or two, like the last few months when I tried my hand at selling the fuck out.

The last time you heard from this voice I was surrendering to an internal dialogue that was initially voiced by someone stern and trustworthy, like Peter Mansbridge, but eventually morphed into something manic and irate, like Gilbert Gottfried. I was at the end of a 6 month decline, a line cook in distress, wounded, bitter, and suffering from third degree burnout. I couldn’t think about professional cooking without imploding, so writing about the joys and perils of it just wasn’t an option. I went from full time hardcore to part time softcore, but the change of pace and scenery didn’t solve much at all. I was really lost for a while, but I’m now somewhere new where there’s a certain familiarity that reminds me of a sweeter time when I wasn’t at my wit’s end with food and cooking. That said, I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t been where I was a little over a month ago. Somewhere, as legend has it, that cooks go to die. Restaurant cooks, anyway. I took a job at a hotel.

I suppose I should let you all in on how that happened. My girlfriend, or in line cook terms, “breadwinner”, is in the middle of climbing a corporate ladder, and it turns out that further advancement meant we’d be packing up her nice things and my DVD collection to set up shop in Vancouver. A few weeks prior to our arrival, I met a guy who worked at one of the swankiest hotels in the city, who took advantage of my intoxicated state and threw a hell of a sales pitch. The kind, I’m assuming, that a lot of restaurant cooks have bit hard on before me. He told me about the money, which is as close to a grown up wage as I’ve ever seen, and also of the other perks: health benefits, discounts at other hotels, a kind-hearted and talented chef, and an 8 hour work day complete with lunch breaks. I asked about the food, and I remember hearing something to the effect of “It’s better than everybody says it is”. In this case, “everybody” represents restaurant cooks, who are notorious for slandering hotel cooks. We exchanged numbers and names, he called himself “Hotel Guy”, shook hands and parted ways. I woke up the next day, and instead of feeling dirty and ashamed like I should have, I thought about “the future”.

What followed was a bizarre courtship that involved a really limited “stage”, or tryout, that required me to stand around and do little else but peel carrots and trim other vegetables. The tour was terrifying. There were more cooks spread across 2 floors of kitchen than I’d worked with in my entire 7 year career, which is approximately 70, or 65 more names than I can be counted on to remember. I eventually met Chef who lived up to his reputation. He’s a decorated cook and a very kind man, so I filed that away in a very empty “pros” list; the “cons” list was heaving. I left baffled by what I had seen, but not enough to tarnish the idea of a big fat paycheck. I declared my intention to work there and heard back from them the next day, at which point I was asked to fill out a wholly redundant and vaguely insulting questionnaire. This is where the whole hiring process truly deviated from what I had grown accustomed to, which was essentially a handshake/introduction/10 hours of chaos and constant observation, a handshake, maybe a beer, and an offer of a meagre wage and quality experience.

Apparently that strangeness wasn’t enough to grant me employment. I was then required to sit through a handful of interviews with a variety of professionally appropriate personalities. I did what I could to cover up any evidence of previous damage, and deftly avoided touching upon my recent hard times. Somehow I managed to say enough of the “right things” to merit an offer for the position of “PT First Cook” at a starting wage of “More than you’ve ever made before.”, on the condition that I keep my beard tidy, which was a pretty difficult concession to make given that the Canucks were balls deep in a playoff run of epic proportions. I signed, went home, and took the clippers to my face, crying on the inside while humming “Taps”.

Before I’d get to set foot in any one of the many kitchens they had, I first had to endure 16 hours of company ordered orientation, for which this little line cook was required to dress business casual. This experience was the cherry on top of the strange fucking sundae. Complete with combed hair and tidy beard, I sat amongst a wide variety of hotel employees (a couple cooks, servers, bellmen, doormen, valets, engineers, etc.), ate the free pastries, and drank the Kool Aid. I counted down the hours until I would be freed from the forced and awkward interaction, and paid the minimum required amount of attention, which was slightly higher than I expected thanks to a cunning HR personality obsessed with administering the corporate dope via extensive audience participation. We watched numerous videos starring employees from across the globe, who all spoke the company tongue. They seemed truly happy to work for the company, but I didn’t trust their wide eyes and perfect smiles for a second; they were obviously Cylons. It took an awful lot of will power to keep my independent spirit at bay, because the whole thing felt exactly like a brainwashing session, and I wanted absolutely no part of it. Hotel Guy contacted me afterwards and said, “Remember, you’ll still be in a kitchen after this.”, meaning that I should be far more comfortable in my whites instead of business casual. He was wrong.

Check back in a few days for the thrilling conclusion.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

We were a classic example of “is she really going out with him?”. I was a fresh faced 19 year old at the tail end of the “year off” of school that has always had a way of turning into either a decade or forever; I had yet to be determined. You, on the other hand, were something to my nothing. You were moving while I stood still, and for whatever reason you pulled over and offered a me lift. The side of the road, in this case, was the internet, where you were looking for a dishwasher and I was looking for a way out of my shitty job working tech-support in a call center. The fact that I openly wondered whether or not I’d get the job speaks volumes about my level of confidence at that time. The things I was good at, guitar, video games, and gym class, didn’t qualify me for much, so I was thrilled when you offered me the job.

What followed was torrid: you provided a rush of energy and learning, as well as a gateway into a world I didn’t know existed. The kitchen was full of people similar to myself, people who never exactly intended to stand behind a stove for ten hour days, but were nonetheless glad to have purpose. Initially my purpose was to get the dishes clean, and occasionally peel buckets and buckets of carrots, onions, and potatoes. Tasks that seem menial now, but were meaningful to me back then. I made friends, “kitchen friends”, who made not seeing my old friends less difficult. Before I knew it, I had graduated from dish jockey to full time prep cook; first base in relationship terms. The journey from first to home were accelerated, I went from fooling around in the prep kitchen to ruining people’s steaks (including Diana Krall) in a matter of a few months. The pace was intoxicating. I was working beyond full-time, spending my hours outside of work with my kitchen friends or reading cookbooks and thinking about food. I was consumed, and I was spending so little time with my old life that it made sense to just forget about it and embrace the new one; you and I were moving in together.

Years rolled by, not without incident, but any turbulence only seemed to make our bond stronger. Mistakes happened often enough to keep my young but rapidly expanding ego in check, but not so often that you’d tell me to fuck off forever. You were demanding, and we’d spend a lot of time together, but the rewards were better measured in experience not dollars. These were the terms of our engagement, and though I had some questions about petty things like “fairness” and “legality”, I thought better than to disrupt what was one of the best things to ever happen to me. I shoved it all to the back of my mind and carried on the best way I knew how, by burying myself in my work.

Everything in my life was food related and I thought about you all the time. I memorized Keller and Bourdain, idolized them too. And before long I realized that I wasn’t very good at video games anymore, nor the guitar, and I was terribly out of shape. I was covered in cuts and burns, as well as the scars from old ones. The old me was an athlete, and the new me liked beer, duck fat, and sleeping as long as the day would allow. I caught a glimpse of the sun one day and wondered what it would be like to be touched by it again. This led to further wondering; the sorts of questions that aren’t conducive to a lengthy career in a kitchen. I started to think more and more about another life where I wasn’t a cook, but a customer instead. I thought about the money I wasn’t making, the friends I wasn’t seeing, and the body I wasn’t taking very care of. What originally seemed infinite was starting to resemble something futile, so I did the only thing you can do in that situation: I started lashing out.

I talked shit to anyone that would hear it, complained about things that I had once accepted about you, but no longer had patience for. I was foaming at the mouth, righteous, and ready to split. I was mean to you when all you had ever been with me was honest. Regardless, I knew deep down that it was time to pay attention to the voices that weren’t Bourdain or Keller, but rather those of my friends, family, and self. I had to end things.

For my understatement of the year I offer this gem: divorce is tricky. It’s a tangled mess of financial and interpersonal arrangements, and our dissolution is no different. As it stands, you’re keeping all of the people, and I’m keeping all of the stuff. Sure, I see the people from time to time, but I know they took your side, and the exchanges are kept brief; we don’t really hang out any more, we just catch up. It stings a little bit when they talk about the “new guy”, and for the most part any conversations revolve around all that crazy shit that happened over the years. Thousands of dollars of aspiring chef paraphernalia is scattered throughout the apartment, serving as constant reminders of a past life: dozens of big fat cookbooks, Japanese knives that are totally impractical for cutting bagels and spreading peanut butter, and clogs, dirty old clogs. My formerly grizzled hands exist in a sort of limbo where they’re soft and un-swollen, but are littered with red marks: they’re the hands of a man in recovery. I miss my calluses, the sore knees not so much.

I’m a firm believer that time and place are everything when it comes to relationships, and what happened between you and me was perfect for a long time. Before we got together I was completely directionless, and flirted with following in my father’s footsteps because I had no ideas of my own. You kept me from careening in that direction, providing a place to develop skills and gain confidence; to make mashed potatoes and eventually, pommes puree. I’ll be carrying this experience with me the rest of the way, it’d be foolish not to. Your vocabulary knocked mine up, and kitchen slang is now my slang until I learn some new terms. Particular words and phrases, when used outside of the kitchen, don’t go over too well, and my loose grip on a certain C word better get in check soon.

I’m no longer angry, and am able to regard the past 8 years as a positive experience, in totality. There’s a million songs specifically for times like these, but I’d rather put it in terms of food. Considered as a hamburger, it was 6 years of stability sandwiched between a slice of infatuation and another slice of burnout. What we’ve got here is a pretty typical story of how things fall apart in the industry, and for a long time I thought that I’d only ever get to watch it happen from the outside. Instead I got to live it, and while it’s ugly, it was also entirely necessary. For the record, I wouldn’t change anything except the time that I fell down the stairs with $500 worth of chocolate chips. So don’t cry for me, my friends, cry for all of that delicious chocolate.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

So I’ve managed to change some pretty sizable pieces of my life in a short amount of time, among said changes: place of work. The details aren’t gruesome, typical even, but I’ve landed where the grass appeared to be greener only to discover that it is indeed greener… for now. By that I mean that there’s an inevitable dissolution when one takes a job, with the whens and hows and whys all representing X in the equation for food and beverage chaos. What lies after the end is always different, and that’s what makes the grass so wonderfully green. New faces, new food, new customers, new place to stand, and most importantly a new smell to carry around with you. A new job isn’t about getting everything you always wanted all at once, because, except in the most rare of cases, you will get a mixed bag of great, good, bad, and awful. In the very beginning, however, things are blissful, and anything even remotely different from your previous workplace will be regarded as terrific, and it’s this period that I want to talk about right now.

The transition into my new digs has been smooth, mostly due to a pre-established rapport with the staff, one of whom worked with me at my old job. The tone is dialed down on the serious meter, which suits me fine, and it’s an altogether more social atmosphere, a given because of the open kitchen. The change is not unlike going from being trapped in that tiny castle to swimming with the rest of the goldfish in a less oppressive yet still oppressive environment. The jibber jabber is constant, covering a vast range of topics including: the local sports team, music, anatomy, and “would you rather” based quizzing. Things are kept light while expectations remain reasonably high, all to a soundtrack determined by whomever laid their ipod down first. Certainly there’s a complex social arrangement in any workplace, but the new person is always left to be comfortably numb; never absorbing anything negative, only positive, oblivious to anything that could ever be wrong. Chances are I’m getting “the treatment”, and it’s only a matter of time before shit gets real. I’m not accusing anybody of being false, it’s just the way things work, and eventually I’m going to be confronted by the true nature of my new surroundings sometime in the not too distant future.

Everything is so novel a new workplace, and whether it’s technically wrong or not means dick, it’s new, and therefore it’s refreshing. The slam is different, so it’s fine. Same with the customers; allergies which would elicit explicit responses are just part of the job. I’m drinking it up, willingly, though I’ve come to realize that it has less to do with the thing itself than it does with the repetition. The same shit happening day in day out has a way of bringing a person to the brink, so a way of getting around that is finding different shit every now and then. There’s no escaping the cycle, so it’s a good idea to learn how to manage it to suit your own sanity and that of the people who have to be around you whether they like it or not.

When becoming oriented with a new job, it’s certain that you’ll fuck up, big time, at least once, and moderately quite regularly. A new person’s mistakes, albeit annoying, are accepted as inevitable and are treated with unbelievable grace. Unless the gaffe is entirely ridiculous, the new body escapes pisstakery based on their newness alone. This buffer is not to be abused, only appreciated, as it disappears without warning at some point in the future. The expectations are realistic, and slip ups are expected and therefore treated gently.

All of this adds up to a feeling of being wanted and appreciated. I’m aware of the cycle and hope that I can prove myself wrong by keeping things clean as long as I’m at this new place. Contamination is almost certain, though, and unfortunately oblivious and obvious are just a couple of moves apart. This stage is wonderful, rejuvenating, and relaxing all at once, and I thoroughly recommend a change for the sake of change to anyone feeling in dire need of a shake up. I’ve learned that the place isn’t as important as the act itself, and most of what is to be gained is gained by having the gall to make the jump at all. What appears as abandonment to those you’ve left behind could be anything you deem it to be: a vacation, a change of focus, or the first step on a path that takes you away from cooking and into something else.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

The holiday season for this little line cook, and several others I’m sure, was spent juggling chaos and leisure, alternating between long days of feeding the frenzied and festive masses and taking some time to sit down, drink some wine, and enjoy the presence of people I care about; the bitter is seldom far removed from the sweet in the last days of the calendar year. During my downtime I found myself bombarded with gluttony, whether my own or that of others, I found it on the table, in the fridge, on the TV, an even on the internet. I classically overstuffed myself during Christmas dinner; too much bird, too much gravy, too much of almost everything really. Afterward, I fell into some strange hybrid of slumber and coma, feast induced to be sure, waking up several hours later to do more eating as well as some giving and getting.

All of this leisure left me exhausted, so I found myself channel surfing, eventually landing on a Man vs. Food marathon. I’m sure we’re all initiated, but for those who aren’t the show revolves around some schmuck that glorifies reckless abandon at the dinner table by gobbling everything he can find, which is generally some grotesque and gigantic version of foods we know and love. I’d only really seen a few clips, and couldn’t be asked to turn away from the train-wreck, so I didn’t. I must have half-assedly sat through 4 or 5 episodes, jaw agape at the profane nature of what I was seeing, before my stomach turned and I felt ashamed for allowing myself to be entertained. It was like one of those nature programs where you watch animals eat, except they usually work pretty hard to get their fix, and are doing it as a means of survival. Snakes will sometimes dislodge their jaws to eat something bigger than nature would prefer, but then they won’t eat until they eventually need more. This buffoon, on the other hand, waddles from grub shack to snack station in search of the next big thing to fit into his belly, seemingly immune to the effects of his folly, but is actually just ignorant. Sadly, he was doing this shit before anyone was watching, and unless he can evolve into a thoroughly more gluttonous and disgusting monster, he’ll hopefully be double-fisting double downs for a non existent audience in the not too distant future.

I’m absolutely tickled to be involved in an industry that is getting all kinds of attention these days. The local/organic/healthful food movement felt to me like a political campaign chock full of hope, not unlike Obama’s in 2008. It could, however, prove to be all for naught, as people seem to have grown tired of the lecture, bored with the informational nature of the aforementioned movement, and are starting to enthusiastically suck on the tit that offers triple thick double chocolate milkshakes. If I were porno, I’d be thinking long and hard about starting a turf war, because food television took away their money shot. Fuck sex, people want to stare at the red-in-the-face-from-eating-so-much-goddamned-grease food network host Guy Fieri wipe burger juice from that godawful chin beard of his with slices of processed cheese. It’s all just a little bit too Hustler, isn’t it? I would gladly embrace some form of censorship of this stuff, perhaps by fuzzing out the chewing sequences, and bleeping out the slurps, burps and foodgasms.

I’m certainly not the first to fire shots in the general direction of these folks, South Park and Letterman have recently added their weight to the tug of war between wholesome and obscene. It is strange to be able to categorize food that way, but here we are, and maybe in a few years it’ll be something to laugh about while we talk about the type two diabetes epidemic, our livers swollen and useless from an era of overindulgence. Past generations have been able to plead a lack of knowledge to excuse their vices, but ours can’t be treated the same way; we know better. It all started so innocently: an extra patty here, some bacon stuffed there, but then it was battered, fried and knocked into orbit, growing more and more bizarre each day. The hope is that this is just a phase, but it’s a very real possibility that this behavior will piss off the parts of the world that know intimately what it is to be actually hungry; we’ll be well marbled from eating all the food, and they’ll be hungry and angry. Perhaps the threat of being eaten to death could keep us from eating ourselves to death.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

I remember peering through the clutter of scraped off plates and often burnt pans, from the dish pit to the line, marveling at not only the pace, but also the collective focus of the entire brigade, evidenced primarily by the expressions they wore on their faces; the seemingly impossible combination of a furrowed brow with widely opened eyes, and a mouth that would be frowning if there was time. They worked with the urgency of a bomb squad; both meticulous and stressed, their movements were automatic, almost mechanical, though the results were never guaranteed, and so there was tension, and pressure as well. The return of a steak slightly over cooked was akin to a hefty punch in the pride sack, whereas the return of a perfectly cooked one would send the grill cook into an unproductive spiral of profanity and manic gesturing; a text book reaction for somebody who is starving for both food and nicotine. Ten dollars an hour seemed to coax and incredible amount of care from these people. And perhaps because at that time I was a picky eater and had yet to fall in love with food, I didn’t get it. In fact it seemed downright silly to fuss over a sprig of rosemary in a pile of mashed potatoes, or to debate over the proper placement of a Yorkshire pudding. Nearly 8 years later I can say that I understand that the delivery of a poorly presented plate of food is like handing somebody a balloon that had already been burst; sure it was always going to end up that way, but it’s important to be the one who makes it so. Is it life or death? Certainly not, but it is meaningful.

My dishwashing days turned to prep cooking afternoons, and eventually I had myself a weekly streak of line cooking nights. Eventually I found myself ready to leave, and had a job offer on the table from a restaurant with a horrible reputation in a town that I wanted to move to. It was a dilemma because it was my only way out, but it was a decidedly undesirable path. I didn’t want a stain on my resume, which had mostly words and very little experience on it. My Uncle James took me aside and told me plainly that cooking was about one thing, and one thing only, doing a good job. I took the job, and it was exactly what I expected, a tremendous shit show. It was the kind of greasy hole that swallows dreams and shits them out as nightmares. I didn’t last very long, and it was hard to absorb my Uncle’s advice while surrounded by cooks who seemed to have never done a good job at anything, ever.

Dark days followed, and it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I finally got a shot in a real kitchen. What made it “real” was the all encompassing presence of passion and care. The places I had come from had brought me a few allies, but mostly folks who were in it for the little money it offered. In this scenario, everyone wanted it, from front to back and top to bottom. Everybody did a good job, and the attention to detail was something I wasn’t used to at all. It wasn’t a very intense atmosphere, but it was extremely educational and intimate. I was nurtured from a feeble state to a moderately confident one, from crappy to capable. They tolerated, and often ate, my mistakes, and taught me more in a year and a half than the previous three combined. I felt good on all levels, a little bit too good considering the small amount of good experience that I actually had to my name. So, of course, I left in search of something new, something hard, something strange. It was time to do a good job somewhere else, now that I knew how.

Those things that I was in search of? Well, I found them, though not in the dose that I was hoping for. For six weeks I struggled immensely with the work load, deciding that never again would I take a new job at the beginning of summer. Every night my station would be decimated, and I’m not sure I had ever felt that kind of fear; it was like being a puppet with stage fright. I was within an inch of giving up the whole time, hanging on for any signs of progress. Eventually I got one in the form of a night that wasn’t terrible. This is not to say that the service went extremely well, it just wasn’t awful, and that made it awesome, somehow. I found myself amongst cooks I once watched from the dish pit, behaving exactly as they had all those years ago. I scowl, I slam, I twist, I turn, I shuffle, I stir, I flip, I fling, I hurry up, and then I wait. I was officially not pretending anymore, for I had prevailed over something that I thought was going to be my undoing.

My former self would never hang onto anything that was burning him, instead he would opt out and let whatever it was spill onto the floor. I’ve since smartened up and know exactly how long I can do it before any damage worthy of an emergency room is sustained, and this I suppose is the difference. As much as I try and keep it light, I’ve become serious in my work. Compared to others it may not seem so, but versus a younger version of myself, I’m a stone these days. I don’t necessarily want to call it progress, but it’s certainly a change that every cook goes through. There’s something to be said about the everything that leads up to the next thing, and when it doesn’t go as planned, you grunt and curse and move onto the next opportunity to get it right. For as much external pressure there is, there will always be more from inside, reminding you how long you’ve been at it, and how much better you should be by now. I used to be able to calm myself by saying that “it’s just food”, but it’s apparent that it became more than that somewhere along the way. What it actually is is the thing I’ve spent more time doing than everything except for the past decade, so yeah, it’s mostly pretty serious stuff, and sometimes it’s extremely satisfying, though I currently have reservations about putting sprigs of rosemary in mashed potatoes, and believe that the perfect place for a yorkshire pudding is in my stomach with plenty of jus and horseradish.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

The culinary world is full of vices, some of which you drink, others you smoke, while edible etceteras find themselves filed in the knotted bellies of kitchen folk everywhere. While some cooks find their fingers up to the knuckle in at least one of these pies, I only ever catch a whiff of the one I’m after, and it always smells like the best fucking pie in the history of pies. I’d wager a slice of Obvious pie that you’ve already guessed that I’m talking about Information pie. I get the impression that it exists in a perpetual state of cooling on an infinite sill somewhere in the restaurant universe that is just beyond my reach, but is close enough that I won’t stop trying to get my mitts on it. If I did manage such a feat, I’m positive the filling would be exponentially hotter than that molten apple goo you find in those dirt cheap and deep fried monstrosities they sell at any number of fast food chains, and that not only would it blister the roof of your mouth eternally, it would most certainly melt your brains. Nevertheless, I want me some of that goddamned pie.

By now you’re probably asking “What the fuck?!”, which is something I get to utter daily/nightly/madly/deeply. I’m often disappointed by the carnage that comes with dinner service on the weekend, mostly because I know that there’s a bevy of information that could be used to try and prevent it. To exist in a world where any questions you’ve got can be aimed at the internet and answered with astonishing swiftness and accuracy, and then work in another world where questions are met with several different answers that are consistent only by nature of their vagueness, is extremely frustrating. You’d think that after years of wading through misinformation that I’d stop asking, but I’m hoping that by hanging on to thousands of tiny details I’ll eventually have something that resembles the restaurant equivalent of that amazing book Marty McFly was packing around with him in Back To The Future 2, at which point I’ll ride my hoverboard out of Restaurant Hell and into Restaurant Heaven.

The people who have the information, or at least the ability to acquire it, are seemingly unaware of its importance to people such as myself. Before service begins I want two things: a cup of coffee and the numbers, and I usually do get these things. Everything seems kosher, and then we open. Madness ensues and priceless knowledge gets tossed around like a hot potato until it inevitably falls to the floor and gets kicked under a table, only to be discovered by the cleaners the next day and returned to the kitchen damaged and no longer useful.

The stakes are numerous and varied, of note are the collective morale of the staff, and the constant toeing of the fine line between having prepared too little or too much food. In the eyes of the cook, knowing what’s coming means the difference between eating or being eaten, and all too often we’re gobbled up by toothy mobs of well heeled clientele, our bones left in a cluttered heap in front of the stove. Instead of dreaming of success, our sleep is terrorized by worst case scenarios, haunted by hoards of hungry mouths with fickle palates. The head down/mouth shut approach is fine and all, but I’m not cut from a cloth that is comfortable with not questioning an unending chaos. I want to know why and where and when and how, ideally every five minutes until I get to go home. There can never be enough information, though I’m not sure I need to know if someone’s dog is vegan.

As far as vices go, gambling never really appealed to me because I understand how it feels to be gambled on; it’s awful. My thirst for a beer after service is rivaled only by my hunger for knowledge beforehand. I’m hooked. It reminds me of the old days when I would search throughout the scrambled stations for a glimpse of a nipple, the needle in the hay of my adolescence. Every smidgeon of intelligence that I gather rips a stitch in my blindfold, and sometimes I’m convinced that I can make out the shapes and sizes of what are heading towards me. The collision is always head on and unavoidable, but seeing makes it easier somehow. To be able to brace oneself is an extreme luxury, and a welcome vacation from being blind and misinformed.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

The kitchen is the only place that I know that takes these two little words and does with them whatever it pleases. Gratitude is miles away towards the end of the night when the customers are pecking at the ruined corpse that once was a well prepped station, yet I still find myself giving thanks. It’s different everywhere: corporate yahoos will simply say “yo”, other establishments have chosen “oui”, but where I work we say “thank you”. However you say it, it’s kitchen speak for “gotcha”, and on a busy night you’ll hear no words spoken more often, or with as much oomph. If everyone’s calling back, especially in unison, the night is going well. If the chatter stops, that’s when things have either gone sour, or they’re about to.

Television would have people believe that we spend a ton of time swearing, which is bogus because there isn’t a ton of time to do much else but cook and thank people for telling you what you need to do. The cussing is generally reserved for colourful retellings of things gone awry thoughout the day. It’s only when things go especially fucky that the explicit lyrics come pouring out of our mouths like vomit from the face hole of some drunk girl in the back of a taxi.

I’ve found that the words are extremely useful in other non-traditional scenarios such as being confronted by your own mistakes. People hate excuses, but they love being thanked, so I’ve found it the most effective way to let them know that a) you’re sorry, b) you’ll never do it again, and c) that you’re really busy and would love to get back to your malignant prep list. That’s all the other person, likely one of your bosses, wants to hear. Stammering and stuttering around clumsy descriptions of how the clusterfuck came to be just wastes time, time that is more precious than a golden box of Wayne Gretzky rookie cards.

Most cooks find themselves stymied when presented with an actual opportunity to use the words as Mr. John Q English originally intended them to be used. Compliments are seldom, but when they come they’re usually to the point and a la minute, like “nice fuckin’ fish”. Jaws drop, and the world stops until you say thank you and then go about making some more “nice fuckin’ fish”.

So, to all the little cooky cooks: always be sure to say thanks, even when you think that what’s being done to you is extremely impolite.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

Hollywood tainted love by leading people to believe that a wealthy man can fall for a wig wearing prostitute, and porn spoiled sex by tricking men into thinking that all women secretly crave explicit exploitation. Professional cooking, in turn, has been permanently fucked with by none other than Thomas Keller and his portrait of culinary perfection, The French Fucking Laundry. For my generation, this was the book to own. I pored over the pages for months on end, and cooking quickly switched from an interim means of acquiring beer money to an actual career plan. I had never seen food so clean and wonderfully presented. Even more alien was the inclusion of philosophy, as Keller preached about the “importance” of this or that. I drank the punch (and then I ate the bowl), which had obviously been cleverly reinterpreted and playfully titled, setting me up for several future disappointments. From then on, nothing I’ve done has been able to equal or better the standards laid out in his manuscript. I could look at this one of two ways: 1) I’m a failure, or 2) I was lied to. I’m going with the latter. And for the record, I count withholding the truth as lying.

What I mean by this is that I both credit and fault this book for forming the hopes and dreams of all the little cookers out there, slinging hash while pretending that it’s “hash” or whatever Mr. Keller would call it. The esthetic presented is Godly and pure: kitchen walls that have never heard a raised voice, a floor that has never felt a spill, complete with vegetables grown by Christ himself. Flip to a picture of anyone from the kitchen staff and imagine them with a halo and feathered wings, playing a harp to a pile artichokes. They’re practically glowing. I understand that I’m reaching, but it’s late enough that I’m convinced I’m onto something, so bear with me.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the book, but I feel like they’ve done cooks everywhere a great big disservice by omitting the shit show. In recent years I’ve gone from a bad place to a good place, and eventually an even better place, only to find that quality and crazy are correlated. I thought that the better I became at this job, the more calm and collected I and the people around me would be. I’ve since discovered that if you’re cooking under ideal conditions, you’re probably at home. I understand that perhaps they wanted to make a cookbook that would sell, and telling people exactly how hard it is to cook those things is probably a terrible marketing campaign, but I could have used a little bit of real. I know that bad things happen in that place, they must. With high levels of performance comes failure of equal or greater proportions.

Which brings me to my next point: what is real? I don’t know the exact number of seats and cooks, but I’m pretty sure it’s a lot closer to equal than in any restaurant you’ve ever worked in, unless of course you’ve worked somewhere on its last legs, but that’s not the same. If they’re angels, there’s an army of them making sure those little sauce dots are in the right place every time. In a “real” kitchen, it’s less an army and more of a little gang. Only a few restaurants in the world can afford to do things the Thomas Keller way, so to treat the book as anything more than fantasy was probably my fault.

The reality of the business came down hard on my French Laundry fantasies, turning what I thought were bricks into mere dust (maybe some kind of vegetable powder). I’ve entered my rebuilding phase, chock full of awful nights and terrible mistakes, and while it may not be perfect, it’s perfectly real.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

In a word, I expected shenanigans when I signed up to attend and write about the 2010 Canadian Chef’s Congress. As a most unfortunate side effect of being a cook first and writer second (boyfriend third), is that I couldn’t wrangle the entire weekend off, and therefore found myself missing out on the Friday night festivities, which included a pig roast, followed by 4am tomfoolery. That being said, the shenanigans were pretty much over with by the time I showed up, leaving mostly the business of feeding the mouths and minds of about 500 chefs & cooks from all over our lovely country.

The Eats & The Drinks
This was the hands down best backyard bbq I’ve ever attended. The setting: Providence Farm (just outside of Duncan on Vancouver Island), provided a gigantic and varied open space, complete with camping, a wood fired pizza oven, beautiful gardens, and a giant stage for the various forms of entertainment. I’m not sure I’ll ever find myself privy to tasting so many talented chef’s work in such a short amount of time (4 meals and snackery brought about 50 courses to my face). Picking a favourite plate would be difficult, so I’ll just say that it all made one hell of a food baby. Being rained on hasn’t been this worth it since Radiohead’s last stop at Thunderbird stadium.

As promised, I never went hungry, and I definitely was never thirsty. I’m a devout beer guy, primarily because I’ve yet to give wine the time it deserves. What I can say is that there was enough BC wine (16 out of 17 wineries that were asked to contribute, did) to satisfy the palates of even the snootiest campers. Beer was well represented too, (Storm, Spinnaker’s, and R&B), and I “tasted” everything they had on offer. Wet feet were offset by rosy cheeks and warm and well fed stomachs.

The Cooks & The Chefs
I’m adjusted to being around the same 5 or 6 cooks and chefs for 60 hours a week, and as much as I like seeing those folks, it was interesting to be surrounded by people from other places. Gnarly hands, beer bellies, beards, and tired eyes were to be seen as far as the eye could see, and instead of horror, it brought comfort. It was therapy just to know that most, if not all, of the attendees had their own nightmares and tales of services gone awry. Most of my writing for Urban Diner has been an open letter to any cook who lays eyes on it, so the opportunity to have actual conversations with several experienced strangers was a treat.

It was a bit surreal at first to be surrounded by so many of the chef’s I’ve seen in the papers and local magazines. It was strange to see them in camping gear instead of whites, holding beers instead of trophies. Michael Stadtlander’s hat could have been found in Middle Earth, and Vikram Vij standing onstage recalled AC/DC’s Brian Johnson. Rob Clark could be found, microphone in hand, at damn near every lecture or workshop. Most chefs find themselves feared because of temper, but I’d be afraid to be in that guy’s kitchen just because of his ability to cut people up into a thousand little pieces, using only his sense of humor. When he wasn’t stitching up the audience, Oyster Boy was. This guy turned brief breaks in any lecture into moments of hilarity, and even found himself in a priceless exchange with Vikram during the closing ceremonies, involving circumcision and the possibility of an after dark meeting in somebody’s cabin. Congress in the hands of a bunch of cooks couldn’t stay serious for long, and the laid back nature of this gathering was one of its biggest successes.

Food for Thought
I work in a restaurant that hasn’t served salmon for at least the last two years, and even my previous employer would seldom feature the fish on their menu. Focus was instead placed upon other fish that weren’t in such a precarious position, for reasons that can be filed under “S” for sustainability. This was the real reason we were assembled in Duncan last weekend, and there was plenty of discussion covering the broad subject. The keynote was delivered by Dr. David R. Boyd, and he did a fantastic job of providing serious information without deflating hope for the future. He spoke of the good things that are being done in our waters, like the restoration of habitats, and he also spoke of the bad things like bottom trolling and how a lack of regulation finds cruise ships treating our part of the ocean like a gigantic splashy toilet.

Information was as readily available as food and drink over the course of the weekend, and I found myself sitting in on as many lectures as I could. I learned about the many benefits of purchasing fish that has been frozen at sea, and also of the roadblocks that prawn fisherman face. These seminars were held in the vacant time between meals, and were really well attended. The bottom line is that if we as cooks aren’t thoughtful about our approach, we’ll run out of fish to cook in a goddamned hurry. Being informed is only important if the information elicits change, and while progress has been made (with help from sustainable seafood programs like Ocean Wise), we need to continue to push forward. A better subject could not have been chosen, and hopefully the event will be a catalyst for further and more widespread change.

Etcetera etc.
My experience was made better by the people who propped me up socially. I met fellow cooks/bloggers Owen Lightly and Cristie Peters (butterontheendive.ca and crustinthekitchen.com, respectively) and they were good about letting me tag along while I was there. I had good talks with James from Storm brewing, Ted from Refuel, and Matt R (chef of the Oak Bay Marina in Victoria, and #1 food blog commenter). Picking favourites as far as the food is concerned would be difficult, but what I will say is that I really appreciated any tent that featured seldom seen seafood (like geoduck, sardines, herring roe on kelp, and sea urchin). What better food to serve at a conference about seafood sustainability?

I’d do it again, but I’d probably reverse my decison to sleep in my car instead of my tent. Honda Civics, though dependable and economical, weren’t meant to house someone of my stature. Congratulations to the organizers for putting on such a terrific gathering. Something that I hadn’t mentioned was the almost complete absence of garbage, thanks to the reusable plates and cups issued to everyone in attendance. I’m grateful for having been invited, and hope that I can make it out to Newfoundland. I’m already excited about the Screech booth.

~ Jacob Galbraith

eatapeachforhours.com

One of the perks of being a cook who can also read and write at a fifth grade level is that I’m occasionally called upon to attend events I would never be able to make it to. Last May brought the Vancouver Craft Beer Week, and today I’ll be frolicking amongst approximately five hundred or so superior cooks at the Canadian Chef’s Congress. Industry figureheads are gathering at Providence Farm in the Cowichan Valley to discuss sustainability in our oceans, eat eats and drink drinks. I initially expected a business forward sort of meeting, but I’ve since been told that things turn festive relatively quick after business time concludes. For the sake of people who actually have reputations, I won’t be publishing actual dirt, no matter how dirty and unbelievable it may be. What I can and will do instead, is blindly and wildly speculate.

Robert Clark is one of the primary organizers of this massive get together, hence the ocean forward theme. I’ve long suspected that he’s either a) a merman, or b) THE merman (see: Aquaman), so I figure he’ll take the opportunity to tell the world. Separately, and less sensationally, I expect him to have a pet salmon that lives in a tank which he drags around in a wagon. At some point there will likely some hurt feelings, when a copy of someone’s cookbook ends up in somebody’s campfire. Speaking of campfires, since almost every chef is some kind of failed musician, campfire sing-a-longs are going to be rampant. I’ve never been crazy about this, but I’d pay good money to seek David Suzuki perform Free Bird. I’m also expecting a line up at the first aid tent exclusively composed of people who have second degree cheese smokey burns in the roofs of their mouths, which is why I plan to eat my cheese smokies early (I hate lines). I’m not really expecting to get much sleep for two reasons: 1) raucous behavior, and 2) an unprecedented concentration of work nightmares. I’m but a lowly line cook and my workmares are horrendous, I can only imagine them to get incrementally worse in accordance with rank (much like the beer belly scale).

It’s late/early, and I’ve got a big day ahead of me. I’m just dying to know how all of these honcho’s got a weekend off. That being said, it might be a good weekend for the customers to cook for themselves.

Stay tuned for more!

~ Jacob Galbraith

For all of the things that cooking professionally contributes to my fleeting grip on sanity, there are aspects which come extremely close to redeeming the unseemly qualities that are scrambled throughout all of my writing. These “perks”, as I know them, are the things that I would dearly miss if I were to one day get a hair cut, and of course a real job.

Shouts of “Scrap attack, motherfucker!” preclude any sort of impromptu trim feast in the kitchen I work in. It’s the only occasion I’m even remotely okay with being called a motherfucker, mostly because I reserve that terminology for inanimate objects. For example: “That drawer/stove/blender is a motherfucker.” Anyways, the aforementioned scrap attack is one of the better parts of a cook’s day. Throughout preparation, trimmings of all sorts of goodies accumulate, eventually winding up in the deep frier, then onto a plate and doused with some kind of mayo/hot sauce amalgam. Tasty toxic treats, twice a day, five or six days a week. I’ll stop when my ass doubles in size, at which point I’ll readily find work in rap videos. A fiscally pleasing side effect of the snack attack, is that it detriments only your health and not your wallet. The cook’s paycheck isn’t going to lure any gold diggers, but the free eats and drinks save me at least a couple hundred bucks a month. As a result, trips to the grocery store aren’t nearly as devastating as they would be if I had a “real job”.

We recently had a tap installed in our walk-in fridge, with the beer being supplied by Driftwood Brewing, just a few miles down the road. Freshest beer I’ve ever had, which counts for a lot at the end of the nightly rape and pillage. The post slam pint is the kitchen equivalent of post race podium champagne, except instead of all over the place, the beer winds up where it was meant to: in our bellies. It’s our way of celebrating, and we just happen to celebrate often. We’re jovial, alright?

Another blessing that appears as mere laziness is the cook’s ability to wake up whenever they want. There’s an alarm clock in my bedroom, but it’s on my girlfriend’s side of the bed, and I’d need to read the manual to set it. I’m up late, not depressed teenager late, but late enough that everyone else in the world is on their first or second coffee break of the day. I like this. The world that is available to me in my mornings before work is exactly that; available to me. The city becomes one big post apocalyptic candy store, and the only people to brush elbows with are the ones with the same lifestyle. Getting shit done is a breeze when you’re doing it on Tuesday morning instead of Sunday afternoon. I almost died of panic the last time I was at a Home Depot on the weekend. Never again… Never again.

In addition to the freedom, the schedule provides a welcome oppression. By this I mean that I never have to figure out to do on Friday night. Or Saturday for that matter. I’m busy, and will be for as long as I’m doing this. I might get one or two of these big nights off, but it’s typically for plans that have been made for me, obligations if you will. Sure I miss my friends, but I don’t miss standing in line at some shitty bar because I can’t afford to bribe the doorman. I would much rather be sweating behind a stove on Saturday, being part of the reason for one of those awful line ups.

~ Jacob Galbraith

For many, cooking for money was never part of a grand scheme. Ask any cook how they ended up in clogs and you’ll hear “I just fell into it” far more often than “I always wanted to be a chef”. The designation of perchance profession leads most people to believe that the average cook wears clogs because he or she lacks the mental capacity to deal with laces. I no longer believe in laces (velcro, bitches), but if I remember correctly, tying a pair of shoes isn’t so different from trussing a chicken, no? In these strangest of days, intelligence seems to be metered if not by one’s ability to harvest money, then at least by one’s attempts to do so. Strangely, cooking at a high level is a terrible way to bring home the bacon. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there isn’t any bacon, there isn’t any brains. I have two things to say to people who subscribe to this idea: I’ve seen Frasier, and I understood it.

Sometimes telling people that I cook for a living elicits the same sort of response as telling them that the animatronic Jaws at Universal Studios ate my baby: there’s sadness, pity, and usually some version of “How did that happen!?”. They’ll poke and prod for indications that it’s only a temporary thing, and that perhaps it’s just a way of putting myself through med school. When they find out that cooking is both the journey and the destination, they offer directions. At conversation’s end, they tell you that they’ll pray for you. The concept of serendipity seems to be lost on most people, and the lack of a plan when it comes to one’s career path seems to lead people to believe that there was no other choice.

There is evidence that suggests that they’re right, and I am indeed a moron: fried chicken sandwiches built on maple dip donuts, and smiley faces drawn on second degree burns come to mind. Stuff like that happens every single day in every single kitchen worth mentioning, yet I’m not ready to admit that we’re in a remedial state. What we are is comfortable within our own haggard skin, something the rest of the world could use a loving spoonful of. The kitchen is a haven for people who consider a tie an awkwardly fitted noose, and the liberal cursing, casual drinking, and conservative eating of healthy food is only natural.

Kitchen Confidential’s exponential sales figures prove that people think we’re most interesting when we’re fucking around, and it seems that’s all people want to hear about anymore. To reference sharks twice in the same article, I’ll compare Anthony Bourdain’s version of a chef to the airborne great white. Those beasts spend most of their time in the water, but every now and then one of them breaches the water with a million teeth and a seal in its mouth. That image resides next to the image of the well tattooed, and recklessly hungover chef in that they’re both real, but neither is really real: what they are is really sensational. The truth is that our days are relatively monotonous, mostly serious, and totally focused. The only interesting thing that comes from those things ends up in your bellies, and eventually some poor toilet. It’s hard to put a spin on that stuff, and it’s considerably easier to peddle the idea previously mentioned delinquent chef, who inevitably casts a big stupid shadow over the entire industry. So while we drink, smoke, swear and all of that other stuff, it isn’t because we’re stupid, it’s because we’re allowed to, and you’re not.

~ Jacob Galbraith