Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (21 page)

Only you and Warren remain. Two seats have opened up at the bar and you commandeer them with a pair of geriatric groans. You sip your drinks and have a look around.

The place has gotten noticeably fuller in the last half hour. Dozens of new customers have arrived, almost simultaneously. You could have predicted this. All the restaurants in the area close about this time, and their crews, like-minded as they are, had the same thought you did: the Inveterate. It comes as no surprise. It’s the place to go on Fridays. Everyone in the industry knows this.

And now here they all sit, waving twenties and fifties, waiting for beers and whiskeys, while the bartenders scamper around shaking drinks and popping bottles, doing their best to accommodate the push.

Pete, the veteran among them, shows no fear. Like a stud line cook in the throes of service, he’s hit his rhythm, selling drink after drink with stone-faced sprezzatura. He’s flaming orange zests on a batch of old-fashioneds when he notices you and Warren down the bar. You give him a nod; he nods back. No matter how many people need a beer, he’ll always take care of you first—you’ve been coming here for years. He hands off the drinks he’s just made and makes his way past the gauntlet of bill-brandishing guests to where you sit.

“Gentlemen,” he says, flipping down a covey of coasters. “What’ll it be?”

“I’ll have another pair when you get a chance,” Warren says, jiggling an empty bottle.

“Sure thing, friend,” he says. “And you?”

“I’m good for now,” you say. “Early morning tomorrow.”

“Right,” he says, producing a bottle of the booze you drink. He tops off the glass in your hand, slips the bottle back into its special slot in the well.

“Thanks,” you say.

He gives you a wink and, with a point of the finger, moves on to the next guest.

Warren is a good person to chew the fat with. He’s a philosophical type—always ready for scintillating discourse. Having spent time in another line of work, he knows what the world looks like outside the restaurant industry. Unlike the majority of your colleagues, with Warren you can actually talk about something other than cooking. At least, you
could
, if you wanted to. Not that you ever do on nights like tonight. No, after a busy service, the discussion at the bar almost always orbits work.

“So,” you say. “How do you feel?”

“How do I
feel
?”

“Yeah, about service tonight.”

“I feel like I just got donkey-punched is how I feel,” he says. “I got fucking rolled tonight.”

“Yeah, I think we all got rolled tonight,” you say.

“Not like me,” he says. “I got my ass handed to me at the end there.”

You have to exonerate him. He shouldn’t be blaming himself. In fact, if you’re honest, it’s only because you left
him alone on the line that he got into trouble with that last little push. Otherwise he did a great job handling tonight’s unprecedented numbers.

“Quit beating yourself up,” you say. “You did a great job tonight.”

“Right,” he says. “I’m just glad Chef wasn’t still around to see me go down in flames.”

“Ah, don’t worry about him,” you say.

“I just want to do right by him, you know? I want him to believe in me.”

“He does believe in you,” you say. “You just need a little more time in the pot is all.”

“Yeah,” he says. He swigs his whiskey, shakes the rocks around inside, stares through the golden liquid to the bottom of the glass. “It’s like, ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall,’ right?”

“Exactly,” you say. “You’ll get there. Don’t worry.”

“Yeah,” he says, and swigs his drink.

At this moment you recognize in Warren a certain quality that exists in you. It’s a desire to impress, a hunger for validation, a need to succeed. You want to preserve this in him, protect it from hurt. You must shepherd him the way your mentors have shepherded you.

“So what made you switch into cooking?” you say. “Why did you leave entomology?”

“Why do I cook?” he says. “That’s an easy one. There’s no politics in the kitchen. No bullshit.”

“I think you’ll find that there’s plenty of politics in the kitchen,” you say. “Plenty of hoops to jump through.”

“Yeah, but there’s a big difference between jumping through hoops and being given something you don’t deserve.
Which is the sort of bullshit you don’t see in kitchens. I mean, you don’t become sous chef at a great restaurant without earning the position, right? You’ve been here, what, two years?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were cooking for how many years before that?”

“Ten.”

“So you should know this better than anybody: you have to
earn
it. And you earn it with the skills you develop through years of hard work. And those skills are what define you. Cooking is the last true meritocracy. All that matters is how well you can do the job. And with what level of finesse.”

“Sure,” you say. “I just think it’s dangerous to believe that hard work is everything, that all that matters is ‘earning’ it. That kind of thinking makes it easy to forget what we came here to do in the first place.”

“I know hard work isn’t everything,” he says. “But it does count for a lot. I mean, it validates everything we do. It makes it sincere, keeps us honest.”

“Right,” you say. “But I think you’re missing my point. Let me put it to you this way: What are we here for? As cooks, I mean, what are we here to do?”

“We’re here to feed people,” he says. “To take care of them.”

“Exactly,” you say. “But don’t you feel like sometimes we lose sight of that? Like, when we get all caught up trying to ‘earn’ it, we forget that we are simply here to feed people? And if we forget that, then what is all this hard work for? To impress Chef? To satisfy ourselves? And if
that’s the case, isn’t professional cooking just another form of enlightened self-interest?”

“No, see, this is where you’ve got it wrong, friend,” he says. “The self isn’t even part of the equation. Cooking is altruism. It’s not about you. It never will be. It’s only about what you do for others. And
that’s
what hits me where I live. There is honor in it.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” you say. “Which is precisely why it doesn’t matter what Chef—”

“What the fuck are you chumps talking about?” Stefan interjects, boisterously lunging into the bar for another round of drinks.

“Cooking,” you say with a touch of irritation. “What’s it to you, boy?”

“You’re not pollutin’ our cooks with this philosophy mumbo jumbo again, are you?” he says, with an elbow to the ribs.

“No, Chef,” you say. “Just talking about cooking. Why we do the things we do.”

“He pollutin’ you, Don Juan?”

“Nah, nah,” Warren says. “We’re just talking shop. It’s all good.”

“Good,” Stefan says, signaling Pete with a nod. “I hate when you get all brainy and shit. It just confuses everybody.”

“Right,” you say.

Meanwhile, VinDog has escorted his new friend to the jukebox. She seems to have taken a real shine to him. She stands close by his side, running her long press-on fingernails
through his knotty Mohawk while he picks songs. His selections, mostly seventies and eighties tunes, strut that tenuous line between proto-punk and synth-ballad, a juxtaposition that has summoned more than one curious glance in the direction of the jukebox, Warren’s included.

“Get a load of this chick VinDog’s putting the moves on,” he observes. “What is he thinking?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” you say, sipping your whiskey. “Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Anyways, back to what we were just talking about. I think that’s exactly the point. That’s what counts for most.”

“Wait, that’s
what
point?” he says. “I’m confused. What were we talking about again?”

“Right,” you say. “What I was trying to say is this: quit worrying about what Chef thinks. I mean, sure, you want to do things the way he wants them. It’s his restaurant, after all, his name on the menu. And sure, you want to be able to believe you’re not totally fucking shit up all the time, so a high five from the boss every now and again is nice. But at the end of the day, none of that really matters. At the end of the day, what matters is the guest. That person on the other side of the kitchen door. The one you’ll never meet, the one who has no idea what you look like or what your name is. The one who trusts you to keep her safe, the one who is about to ingest what you have made. The one you are nourishing, taking care of, looking after—she is what matters. Chefs come and go, and restaurants and coworkers, too. Your time at any given place, with any given crew, is fleeting. But that guest? She will always be there. She is the constant. The one you are cooking for. And all the hard work—the focus, the discipline, the effort, the care, the
techniques you practice, the recipes you perfect—it’s all for her. And the second you forget that, the second you start cooking for Chef’s praise or critics’ accolades, for pride in yourself or for high fives from somebody else, that’s when all the virtue attached to the work we do—all this honesty and sincerity and honor you’re talking about—that’s when all that shit goes right out the window.”

The idea seems to fly by without leaving an impression on Warren. His gaze has meandered from you to Vinny and his new friend, and now to Candice the true professional’s voluptuous rear end, which he’s taken to scoping out without a shred of civility. His inattention is aggravating. You were just beginning to feel you were onto something, and now his head is elsewhere. It makes you feel like you’re talking to yourself, which makes you wonder whether you’re saying what you’re saying for his edification or for your own.

“Who knew how good Candice looked in a skirt?” he says.

And, like that, the conversation is gone.

“Anyways, whatever,” you say. “Food for thought.”

You sip your whiskey. You look at your watch.

Suddenly you feel like just going home.

“It’s getting pretty late,” you say. “Almost three bells. Should probably think about calling it a night.”

“Yeah,” Warren says, eyes fixed, mouth agape. “I think I’m gonna soldier on here awhile, though. Burn a bit of that midnight oil.”

“So much for dry-heaving in garbage cans, huh?”

“Yeah, well, maybe there’s some truth in what Vinny
said about living life to the fullest. And right now, Candice’s ass is looking pretty full.”

“Right,” you say. “I’m gonna go burn one.”

Out front of the bar you find Stefan smoking a cigarette with great focus, a slight sway in his stance. It appears the drinks have begun to catch up with him.
Great
, you think. You were hoping to make a clean getaway.

“What up,” you say.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” he says.

“No, no,” you assure him. “Just having a cigarette.”

“Good,” he says, lighting your smoke. “Good night tonight, right?
Crazy
night!”

“Yeah, maybe a little too crazy.”

“You can never complain about being busy, right?” he says. “It’s the best problem in the world.”

“Yeah,” you say. “But I just hate getting pounded on the line like that.”

“This is what we signed up for,” he says.

“I suppose so,” you say.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Tomorrow will be better. That retard Raffy will sleep it off and come back strong.”

“I don’t know,” you say. “I’m starting to lose faith in that kid.”

“Really?” he says. “I think he’s pretty good.”

He has no idea that Raffy was just here getting twisted, that tomorrow he’ll probably be the same as today. You resist the temptation to mention it—you don’t want to kill Stef’s buzz.

“Yeah, well, I’m not so sure,” you say. “And the way things are shaping up tonight …” You pause to gesture at the rest of the team carousing inside. “I think tomorrow’s gonna be kind of a shit show.”

“Aww,” he says, pinching your cheek. “You scared, Chef?”

“I’m never scared, Chef, it’s just—”

“It’s just cooking, baby,” he says. “This is what we do: we work hard, we play hard. We break to
build
. And we always bring some soigné shit the next day, no matter what. Am I right?”

He raises his hand enthusiastically for a five.

“Right,” you say, halfheartedly slapping him up. “I suppose so.”

“Fuck, yeah,” he says.

For the next few moments, all that’s exchanged between you is the occasional cloud of cigarette smoke.

“So, listen,” he finally says. “Lemme borrow sixty bucks.”

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“I’ll pay you back tomorrow when I cash my check. You know I’m good for it. Dev’s still a little pissed at me for not sticking up for her when Chef flew off the handle tonight. I’m trying to take her mind off it with some Korean barbecue.”

“Right now? Where, K-town?”

“Yeah, that place Danja is twenty-four.”

“Can’t you just give her a massage or something?”

“Nah, dude, I’m not getting out of the doghouse unless I put some bibimbap in her face.”

You let go an exaggerated sigh.

“Come on, man. Please?”

He looks at you like a dog with a biscuit on his nose.

“Ugh … All right,” you say, pulling your last three twenties from your pocket. “But—”

“Ha-ha! Good looks,” he says, snatching the bills. “I owe you big … Now let’s go get some more drinks. This one’s on me.”

He winks at you and fake-punches you in the gut.

“Right,” you say, slapping his hand away. “Lemme just finish this smoke. I’ll meet you inside.”

“All right,” he says. “I’ll go fire up another round.”

He rifles his butt far off into the street and heads back into the bar.

It appears the drinks have begun to catch up with you as well. You find you need to spread your legs out shoulder-width across the sidewalk in order to keep a steady posture. Your vision blurs. You blink it out and study the scene back inside the bar.

Through the steamed-up glass you see Vinny and his new friend. You see them hand in hand, making their way toward the jakes. They stop at the restroom’s threshold to kiss a minute, then enter together, presumably to either blow coke or have sex. Perhaps both. You see Warren putting the moves on Candice, whispering game into her ear. She fixes her eyes on him with great attention. He is obviously telling her something she finds fascinating. Perhaps he’s teaching her about bugs. At any rate, you see she’s gone sweet on him. You see Stefan, too, corralling a fresh set of drinks. Presently Devon rejoins him at the bar. He takes her
in and kisses her with profound affection. You see the spark of love between them, whatever that means for them.