I had been cutting my teeth at the coffee shop for about a year when my old chef finally came knocking. I had learned a lot of the intangibles, but I still had an almost nonexistent grasp of any tangible skills outside of scrubbing pans and mopping floors. I learned how to think, but more importantly how to always be thinking. To chase efficiency with everything I did. I understood why it was cool, romantic even, to work with intelligence. But I still didn’t know how to dice an onion. Still didn’t understand what a shallot was. Just where they were kept and how many to bring chef when he called for them. I was learning how to restaurant but not quite learning how to cook. The perfect person to be a dishwasher in a new, highly anticipated restaurant. The dishwasher is the circulatory system of the entire operation. You have to have someone in the pit that understands that and gives the job the respect it demands. Nine times out of ten a fresh culinary school graduate, with their head in the clouds and delusions of grandeur, will make a terrible dishwasher.
I could always hear him yelling my name from all the way down at the end of the long narrow hallway that led to my little kitchen from the dining room. The building was as old as buildings in North Portland got with high ceilings that made sounds bounce around like a cave in there even if you weren’t as loud as my Chef. He was always loud anyways though, shouting his way down the hall, something along the lines of BELLA BOY!, RICKY B!, or BABY BELLA!!! I hadn’t heard his voice in months and the dish job was the first thing that popped into my mind, but I didn’t want to be the first to bring it up. After hugging it out and catching up for a bit, he brought up the new restaurant and asked if I was ready to start soon. I couldn’t have said yes any sooner without cutting him off mid sentence. He gave me a time and a place and made sure not to leave without reminding me that I would have to step up my game if I wanted to hang in this new environment.
The idea of leaving the warmth and safety of my little coffee cave was finally real. For the first of many times throughout my career I felt the conflicting waves of excitement and guilt that came along with moving on to a new restaurant. I was excited to see first hand all the crazy things I heard from my mentors about the type of big restaurants they had come from. Our cafe ran with five people at most. Register, espresso, cook, dish, boss. I was going to get to see a restaurant that had that many people just in the kitchen alone to execute the food. Chef, a prep cook, two line cooks, and me in the dish pit. Not to mention a full floor of servers, a food runner, two bartenders and a bar back. Walking into an operation like that was like finally turning around to see what was causing the shadows my bosses would cast in telling me old war stories in my little coffee shop cave.
I remember being so paranoid that I was gonna be late that I got there almost two hours early and just sat on a curb nervously chain smoking rollies. When it was finally close enough to my start time that I was only early and not weirdly early, I put out my last cig and walked in. I was greeted with a giant 20 seat bar, more bottles of booze than I had ever seen at one time, and a couple square looking middle aged white guys pacing back and forth on the back bar putting the finishing touches on their new wells. One of them was the owner. Not just my new boss, but my boss’s boss. For someone in such a commanding position, he was surprisingly just… a dude. He wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I was maybe 19 and had never even had a bank account. I had never been paid in any other way than in cash and I kept every dollar to my name in a pill bottle in the freezer (a trick my step dad taught me in case the house ever burned down). I assumed the type of person who had the money to open a restaurant was a millionaire in a suit and tie. This guy wore jeans and flannels and definitely didn’t have a million dollars. He greeted me with a boomy but soft spoken “You must be Bella?”
He walked me to the kitchen where Chef was neck deep in just about every single aspect of getting a kitchen ready for its first service that you could imagine. To my surprise I didn’t get the normal thundering greeting, random bird whistles and painful high five I had grown accustomed to. He was all business. He was my chef and my friend but then and there he was my boss. He gave me a quick tour which ended at a long dish pit, more dirty dishes than I had ever seen, and a case of romaine hearts that needed to get cleaned once I cleared the prep sink of all the dirty pots and pans. I didn’t even take the time to introduce myself to the dozen or so people buzzing around the restaurant doing things I didn’t understand. I would meet them as I went. I had dishes to clean and a whole new kitchen worth of homes for everything to memorize. I knew how to do dishes, but I didn’t know how to do dishes there. I was nervous about cleaning a deep fryer for the first time. I had never seen a standing mixer. Chef had this giant wood cutting board you couldn’t put through the machine and had to be dried and oiled right away. A long list of new things I didn’t understand and I was pretty sure that they would all explode if I didn’t handle them properly.
It was a scary experience, but it was a scary that I had learned to feel safe in. Being nervous about fucking something up or breaking a piece of equipment was scary because you didn’t want to let chef or the rest of the team down. Not because you were gonna be screamed at or have a sauté pan thrown at you. That never happened there, because it didn’t have to. And that type of scary was nothing compared to the real scary. The big scary. The world outside the kitchen was the real boogie man. The little pressure cooker we operated in was more like a warm bath. A place where something as silly as pantry station almost being out of share plates is a huge deal functions as a sanctuary for people with real problems. A new cave to hide in. Rent was due outside. They just raided grandmas house and got my uncle outside. Mom was still locked up outside. My drinking was getting heavier and more frequent outside. By best friend just shared a needle with some rando under the St. Johns bridge and he’s passed out on my living room floor right now outside. Worrying about keeping the dish machine running at all times and trying to get to those damn romaine hearts? That was safe no matter how many cigs I chain smoked to calm my nerves before and after.
The learning curve was steep but I had my eye on the prize. I was smart enough then to realize that I needed to be paying attention to everything, always. Before I even started trying to learn how to cook, I understood that I was dropped into the middle of this thing and if I was gonna stick with it I needed to understand all of it. I would just focus on being the best dishwasher possible and watch and listen. One time I got a cash tip from someone in the dining room who said they ate an entire three course meal while watching the kitchen and I didn’t stop moving once the entire time. Chef gave me the twenty they left with a note on the table and told me not to let it go to my head. It immediately did.
I listened to everything. Every interaction within earshot. It didn’t matter who was talking or what it was about, it was all so new to me that I felt like if I didn’t catch every word, I would never get to understanding it all. Chef explaining things to the cooks, servers informing chef about their tables, bartenders coming back to re-up silverware and shit talk with the food runner about someone sitting at their bar, cooks talking amongst themselves when chef wasn’t around, chef talking to the owner about cook’s performances when the cooks weren’t around… I was in every sense of the word, a sponge.
The cooks were all very much line cooks. Everyone treated me with respect and most took the time of day to explain things to me when I would ask, but none of them ever got cute about anything. It was all business and everyone who walked through those curtains was expected to carry their weight and you had to be smart, even in ignorance. Say behind. Call sharp or hot. Know when to be around and when to disappear. Always be contributing or get the fuck out of the way. Sometimes things got tense. There was a lane behind the hot line low boys that I would walk down a hundred times a night dropping off different dishes to all their designated homes. Whenever I was totally caught up and there was no prep to get a head on for the cooks, I would just stand there behind their stations and watch them cook. When it was slow I would ask questions. One night I asked a question when it was just a little too busy for question time. This guy was young, a very, very good cook, intense, but friendly enough when he wasn’t in the zone. I had misread the room and asked him “Hey, what’s that?” as he dolloped aioli on some grilled pork cheeks sitting high atop a pile of piperade and pickled octopus, all resting on a fat slice of grilled peasant levain. He paused for just a second, averted his gaze from the plate to look me dead in the eyes, and let out a very quick and stern “Are you fucking retarded?”
Let’s call this guy Red. He was one of my favorite cooks to work with. Him and the young Mexican cat who I clicked with right away over the fact the he, like me, didn’t speak Spanish. They were probably the two best cooks in the kitchen outside of the Chef and Sous Chef, and we all got along super well. He was intense for sure. Very passionate and invested in his craft. He once told me about a time he got jumped on his way home from some Michelin star restaurant he was cooking at in San Francisco. He was followed into an alley, jumped by these four dudes, managed to get into his knife bag, and stabbed one of the guys in self defense. Tears welled up in his eyes when he told me the story. Like I said, an intense dude. He didn’t apologize with his words, but he closed down his station faster than normal at the end of the night and spent the rest of it helping me do dishes and close the pit after everyone else left. He didn’t have to say sorry. Hell I don’t think he had the emotional maturity to do so at the time, but I got the message. He went on to have a successful career and become a girl dad with his super cool, super hot girlfriend. I still look up to the guy to this day, despite being a dick to me in that moment. Not to mention using shitty ableist language like that. 2009 was a wild time man, what can I say. We still called things gay, even amongst a group of kids who half of which would come out as queer in one way or another eventually. I don’t think he’d say shitty things like that today, but you never know.
After a couple months of learning the ropes, Chef asked me if I was ready to start learning how to cook. He told me I had the opportunity to learn any and everything I’d ever need to know to be a chef, but he wasn’t going to invest the time unless I took it seriously. I could come in an hour early and work off the clock, right next to him every day. One full hour of side by side, in depth lessons with the chef himself, and I didn’t have to do a single dish. We’d start with the basics. Knife work only. No stoves or ovens, no sauces or desserts, but if he was prepping those things, I was at his elbows, getting the full rundown of what he was doing and why. I had to learn how to dice that onion properly, but if he was baking pretzels or butchering salmon, making gnudi or blanching vegetables, I was watching and learning and taking notes. For one glorious hour every day. Once three o’clock hit, it was time to clock in and tackle the mountain of dishes. But this time I had the added motivation of clearing it as fast as possible so I could get a knife back in my hand and get back to practicing the stuff I was working on earlier. Every day that I showed up to work was the most exciting shift I had ever worked. I wish someone would have told me to stop and take it in for a second, because it’s a time and place in a chef’s career that you can never revisit again once it’s passed.
The thrill of being bad at something is a thrill I still chase to this day. Shit, to be honest it’s a part of why I started writing these blogs. Learning is addictive, and cracking the code to getting good at something is a drug. But a part of that is being laughably bad at something to start (see my first blog). The very first cut I made on my very first project was meant to be planking an eggplant for grilling. Very simple. Cut the top off, cut off the little butthole on the bottom, and make parallel two inch cuts across the eggplant. I got the top off just fine, even cut the butthole off the bottom properly, then went for my first vertical cut, veered off the the right, cut the eggplant clean in half with a big perpendicular cut, and was left with two big weird eggplant wedges. A little further down the road, I was tasked with cleaning baby octopus. My Mexican homie lent me his bird’s beak knife for the project, showed me how to do one, then walked away. When he came back to check on me I had somehow got the knife turned around and was using it backwards. He immediately went and told everyone on the line and got a roar of laughter. “It’s all good little homie, I’m just impressed you managed to clean all those octopus with the back of a knife!”
I was in a new part of town, surrounded by new people, and learning something new every single time I put on an apron. Your second kitchen shows you that you’re not just good in one kitchen, you’re just good. You’re smarter than the problems presented to you and because of that you feel comfortable in the shit. This job was the warmth and safety of my new cave, and all these bruisers and their food I helped them prep were the new shadows on the walls. Except this time I was learning how they did it. It was more of a home than I had anywhere on the outside.
These are such a joy to read. Thanks, Ricky!