The untrained: a memoir

Cooks share a certain playbook with soldiers: You’ll tolerate quite a bit from your colleagues if they can do their jobs under pressure, and almost nothing if they can’t.

By the time I got to San Francisco, I’d been cooking for six years and I thought I knew what I was doing. I’d just worked at the venerable old Black Angus downtown, running the fifteen-foot charcoal broiler in the dining room, and the ladies of the floor seemed to think that I was all right.

This was more of an endorsement than you might think. Betty, Esther, Faith, Alice and Shirley had about a century and a half of experience between them, and they shared an understandable skepticism about the professional potential of any long-haired hooligan who was born around the time they entered their second decade of waiting tables. If Shirley bought you a Tom Collins after work, it was like getting the Distinguished Service Cross.

So while I wasn’t precisely full of myself (in Minneapolis, cooking had not reached the iconic status it has now. It was considered to be something you did if you drank too much to be an auto mechanic) I knew that I met the most important criterion — I didn’t freak out. Cooks share a certain playbook with soldiers: You’ll tolerate quite a bit from your colleagues if they can do their jobs under pressure, and almost nothing if they can’t. I knew I’d get hired, if only for that.

But cooking in San Francisco was a different kettle of cioppino. It actually paid enough to live on, for one thing — I went from $5.57 at the top tier for union line cooks in Minneapolis to $65 per shift at the bottom. I also got paid vacation and full medical and dental — all words whose meaning had to be explained to me; I hadn’t heard them before.

And with these fancy wages came expectations. There was a pool of people circulating around North Beach who all knew how to cut and pound scaloppini, filet salmon, make thirty-gallon batches of Napolitana, and squeeze the beaks out of squid. They knew which butchers sold prosciutto bones, where not to buy bulk Italian sausage, and argued endlessly about which dried fetuccini was best. They all knew how to cut up a chuck and make it into hamburger, because that was how it was done.

I spent the first couple of weeks feeling like a turnip in a hamster cage. During morning prep, everyone else was moving at frantic speed, and I stood in the way until they chewed on me. The kitchen was small and packed with people who all seemed to leap from one job to the next without breathing between, and when I stopped one of them to ask for help or instructions, they’d look at me in panic: If I take the time to tell you, I’ll never get done before lunch.

It was left to the “chef-by-default” to explain things to me, and it was tough. This guy had been a pool shark for 15-odd years, and I gathered that in that time he acquired a girlfriend with a civilizing agenda. A real job in a kitchen came next, and then the chef died. The owners asked another cook to boss the kitchen — an older man who had come out of retirement — and he said no, thanks. Make this guy the chef and I’ll tell him what to do.

So the putative chef would hand me 50 pounds of squid and say, “Clean ‘em.” I’d ask him to show me how, and he’d mumble a little, clean one, and leave. The first day it took me almost three hours and my cats thought I was Jesus when I got home. I hadn’t felt so consistently dumb since Miss Meyerly couldn’t reach me in algebra-trig.

Eventually, the older guy realized I was floundering and would slip over to me and point my knife right, and with a couple quick words tell me how the food should come out. Then he’d watch what I was off to next, and assign someone to keep an eye on me if he couldn’t. You could see how relieved the chef was that I’d been taken off his hands; he wasn’t much further along himself, and had to concentrate like a crazy man to get to 11 o’clock alive.

I think I learned more in that kitchen than in any other, but I still have issues with the way the curriculum was set up. At the Angus, I was taken in hand by a biker and a neo-Nazi and shown every detail of my job before I started serving food. Corky, the chef — ex-president of the Grim Reapers — would weave and slur his way through a precise sequence of setup and service, and then totter back to the bar across the alley. His disciple would then fill in the details and watch the food and the timing between quotes from Mein Kampf.

It was odd to realize, as a rube just in from the steppes, that in one set of skills my fancy new digs couldn’t compare to my old dive: in the old place, even the sickos and the psychos made sure that everyone got up to speed. They assumed you were cut from the same raggedy cloth, and might need a hand.