A preface, pt. 5

Demons, fungi, and Carlo Rossi

The thing about fine dining restaurants in 2009 is, every one of them was almost exclusively staffed, owned and operated by functioning(?) alcoholics. When I look back at my first decade in the industry, I can honestly say the percentage of people I worked with who I would now consider to have a drinking problem was around… 90%? We fuckin boozed, man. We boozed in every possible fashion. We boozed lightly, we boozed heavily, we boozed in celebration of good services, we boozed to forget bad services, we boozed with coffee at the start of our shifts and we boozed with more booze at the end of our shifts.

I stepped into that scene from an environment equally as pickled in liquor, that of the high school drop out couch surfer, so I really jumped right onto the carousel without missing a beat. I wonder sometimes though about the culture shock some kids must have experienced getting into cooking at a very young age, but coming from a straight laced, responsible and healthy background. I guess the ugly truth is that most kids with a good upbringing, caring and present parents, or reliable support systems don’t end up working in restaurants as teenagers. Some do. Out of all of the very best cooks I’ve ever worked with, I know of at least two of them that grew up rich. But we’re still looking at another 9-1 split.

It’s no coincidence that addiction and mental health issues are more prevalent in people who grew up under the poverty line, and that people who grew up under the poverty line are more prevalent in restaurants. We are a subculture, a people if you will, that is born out of and defined by resource scarcity. By an inherent lack of privilege. If we had more built-in privilege, we would have better jobs. Or better yet, we’d still be in school working towards even better jobs. It leads us to that entry level dishwashing gig with the same cold hand that it leads us to the bottle. Generation after generation, chef after chef. Our name is legion, for we are many. And holy shit, do we have some demons.

Unfortunately, it’s just baked into the cake. Addiction and the restaurant industry always have been and always will be inseparable. The industry both creates and attracts addicts. It gives you a reason to drink, and then it gives you the ability to do so. Like the ophiocordycep unilateralis fungus, which takes over an ant’s brain and compels it to climb the tallest surface before the infection fruits as to ensure the widest spore dispersal, dependency isn’t an accident in this industry. And the prey is almost always the worker ants.

One of the most beautiful things about my profession is that we don’t charge at the door. Anyone can get in and degrees aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. As a working chef in this very moment, I can tell you that a culinary school degree on a resume does absolutely dick. It might even be a deterrent, depending on the rest of the vibes. I can also tell you that as a mildly successful chef AND a writer who has literally hundred of subscribers on Substack, I have no functional education. I don’t have a high school diploma, shit I never even got my G.E.D.

Because this thing of ours is an open door to everyone, you get a lot of successful people like myself out of it, who otherwise wouldn’t have had an opportunity for upward mobility elsewhere. And a lot of us are able to carve out a living, god forbid some sense of meaning or purpose in life, from something that started with mop buckets and compost bins. But let’s not all start sucking each other off for the rags to riches Chef tale just yet, because that same low entry level means you get a lot of successful people like myself out of it, who are statistically more prone to mental illness, substance abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, and all the fun stuff that follows. You get rooms full of them. Floors and buildings full of them, all together at the same time, all operating in an echo chamber of trauma and coping mechanisms and talent and ego and competition and sharp knives and secret bottles. Ant farms of at-risk alcoholics.

This was the restaurant I was lucky enough to find myself working at in 2009. The owner was an alcoholic. Half the front of house drank at work. Chef drank too much. Sous chef was more of a weed guy. But every one else in the kitchen, including my dumb nineteen year old deer in the headlights ass, definitely drank too much. Or at least more than most nineteen year olds, but by then I had already gotten addicted to and kicked heroin so I guess I’ll give myself some grace. Shift beers were a thing, and unfortunately still are in a lot of places. Hey, sorry we pay you in dog shit, here’s a free tall boy at the end of your shift, aren’t we cool bosses? We never openly drank in front of chef, and I honestly can’t remember exactly how secretive we were about it towards the end of the night, but I do know that as soon as we could start discreetly drinking, we were discreetly drinking. And as soon as we could openly drink, maybe once chef and the last guests had left, we were openly drinking.

Chef was in his late twenties? Early thirties? He was definitely in party mode. Young, successful guy, career on the rise, finally getting some recognition for all the years of hard work he had put in behind the scenes for his mentor at his last restaurant. We won restaurant of the year from one of the local slop shop publications in town. We were kinda poppin. I always thought he drank happy. He was a fucking blast to get sauced with. But there must have been some darkness in there I never saw the roots of because every once in a while his alter ego “Bob” would come out, and Bob liked to head butt people. He never drank in the kitchen though, and cooking was always sacred over everything else. Looking back, I think that’s the distinction between someone who drinks too much and someone who should never touch a drop of hooch for the rest of their lives. He didn’t drink in the kitchen as a chef, I later went on to drink in the kitchen as a chef. He drank too much, I should never touch another drop.

Our lead line cook came into the kitchen a functioning alcoholic, took over after chef left as a functioning alcoholic, and closed the restaurant down after I left as a functioning alcoholic. One of the most talented guys I’ve ever gotten to work next to. A very thoughtful man and an absolutely beautiful cook. First guy I ever saw with a recipe in grams. I remember seeing cookbooks in this guys locker, cookbooks in his car, and cookbooks in his apartment. Very passionate and very dedicated. We still talk to this day and the last time I saw him I was caught off guard by the overwhelming sense of gratitude I felt in just seeing his face for the first time in years. That being said, the man had some demons. For we are many.

The squirrelly pantry cook was a heavy booze hound too. God damn he was a lot of fun though. We had this little home mini-fridge that we kept on pantry for dessert mise en place because the station didn’t have a low boy, and this fucking guy would smuggle in all the ingredients to make all these different classic cocktails for all the cooks once chef was out of the kitchen. I’m typing this out with a huge grin on my face, laughing at the absurdity of this fool busting out little deli containers of stuff he brought from home to make everyone a corpse reviver no. 2 or some shit. We’d all stand around and pretend to listen while he ranted about the tasting notes and history of the drink, but he was drunk, we were drunk, and it was all just more booze at the end of the day.

Not long after we opened, a new kid got hired on who was destined to be my best friend, my station partner, my roomate, my biggest rival and my best drinking buddy. He was roughly my age, also Chicano, also into equal parts heavy metal and Elliot Smith, also a wealth of childhood trauma, and also a drinker. We’ll call him Chuck. Chuck was like a year older than me and about a year further along in his career. Chuck was a really, really good cook. Way better than I was. At least when we met anyways (I know you’re reading this, love you). Cooking next to him made me better almost immediately. Better because I was stealing all his tricks, but also better because the thought of fucking something up in front of Chuck and giving him the ammo to roast me in front of the crew kept me up at night.

I can’t say I’d be the chef I am today if it wasn’t for my sparring time with Chuck. We worked together 5 days a week, often walking to and from work together whenever we had the same start times, and spent our two days off together nursing hangovers and watching No Reservations. We talked about food and cooking 24/7. We compared notes and cookbooks. We went to the bar across the street and ran through play by plays of service that night like an NBA team watching footage after a playoff game. We fought like cats and dogs, and we drank like fish. We had to alter our route home to avoid walking past the bar across the street because we got too chummy with the bartender there and he’d keep us going past beer thirty and all the way till the sun came up.

We were two of the exact type of person that the kitchen beckons to. Grew up poor? Definite yes for both. Mommy AND daddy issues? By the bucket. Lack of leadership or positive roll models? Shit. Trouble functioning in normal society? See questions one through three. What I’m describing is a perfect recipe for two things: a really hardworking dishwasher and a substance abuser. Now you put that person in a high octane, high stress work environment where you’re surrounded by alcohol, you’re serving alcohol, you’re working next to alcoholics, and your employer is giving you alcohol for a job well done. This is why we are legion.

You typically get two kinds of drinkers. Those chasing something and those running from something. Chuck and I were both running. That’s a bad combination. Like Hannibal Lector talked about roller pigeons. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can’t mate two deep rollers otherwise their young will roll all the way down. Chuck and I were both running from our past. We both had fucked up parents. Fucked up childhoods. We both had trouble processing those things so we both drank, and the drinking made a lot of those problems worse. Round and round we went. Then we met and got stuck inside each other’s feedback loop like two bull elk getting stuck in each other’s horns. Most the time that happens, both animals die. Luckily, Chuck and I are both still deep rolling.

The closest I got to deep rolling all the way down at that point in my life was from drinking alone at work after everyone else had left. I ended up in the back of an ambulance, then in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, then in my Abuela’s bed with hospital socks on and no idea how I got there. I was the last one closing the kitchen and the closing bartender was neither a moral man nor a smart one. He was feeding me shots and beers all through close, then when he was done before me, he just left. I wasn’t even old enough to go to a bar yet, and here I was, drunk and alone and at work in a restaurant filled with booze at two in the morning. I don’t know who the fuck gave me a key, but hey man, 2009 was different.

After I finished shutting down the kitchen, I locked the doors, grabbed a bottle of fernet and an arm full of tecates, and sat on one of the booth tables with my headphones on, listening to From a Basement on the Hill, staring out into the beautiful south east Portland cityscape, chain smoking cigarettes and drinking voraciously. That’s the last thing I remember anyways. I was fully blacked out by the time I left but, like a true professional alcoholic already, I managed to hide the evidence and lock up properly like it never happened. I’ll never understand how I managed to drink cooking wine during service, shots and beers with the bartender during close, then pull straight from the bottle after that for who knows how long and still somehow toss all my empties, wipe down all my cigarette ash, and find the right key to lock the door on my way out. Wish I could tell you.

I don’t know what I did after I left. Don’t know where I went or who I was with, if anyone. But apparently at some point I called a cab home and was coherent enough for the cabbie to let me in his car, but that didn’t last long. By the time we got to my apartment I was passed out, had vomited on myself , and was unresponsive. Cabbie called 911, I was thrown in an ambulance, and I ended up at Legacy Emanuel getting my stomach pumped. I guess my mom was my emergency contact? And luckily was out of prison by then so she had to show up at like five in the morning, dragging my step dad and my little sister with her of course, to see her son acting a damn fool. I was asking all the nurses for cigarettes and at one point had ripped my IV out and was wandering down the hallway smearing blood on the wall from the puncture wound in my arm. Wild boy shit.

I don’t remember any of that though. My family had to fill me in on everything after I came to. I guess I tried to jump out of the moving car while we were flying up Greeley as soon as you get off the freeway. My little sister had to pull me back in, get the door closed and strap on my seatbelt while I still struggled to jump out. Only thing I remember is opening my eyes to find I was in my Abuela’s bed, seeing those god damn grippy socks on my feet, and knowing I fucked up again. I walked out into the living room to an immediate roar of responses from my whole ass multigenerational family living at Grandma’s house. My tia kept calling me my dads name (which was a real low blow to be honest, seeing as he was a drinker too and didn’t come around anymore), my sister kept saying over and over “Mom said she’s gonna fuck you up, Brother,” my tio just kept calling me a retard, and my Abuela was yelling at everyone to leave me alone.

Luckily my Mom wasn’t there to fuck me up. Not only that but I was conveniently in the number one place I would want to be to nurse a giant hang over: Grandma’s house. I poured myself a big ass bowl of fruity pebbles and sat down to watch Maury Povich for a couple days. You see, thanks to dumb luck, all this had happened on my Friday, so no one at work ever caught wind of any of this. There’s some people who were there who will find out about this incident for the first time with all of you. I was able to sleep it off for two days and show back up to work like nothing ever happened. Dumb luck is dumb though, and it always runs out eventually. What finally brought about some change was much, much more mundane.

That time in my life came to an end in two stages. The first was chef catching me drinking more than just a shiftie, and the second was chef leaving. I came into work one day, appropriately hung over but ready to bust ass, only to open the doors and be greeted with a quart container waiting for me on the bar top. Lid still on, condensation still clinging to the inner walls, last couple swigs of white wine still at the bottom, and a piece of tape that read “Bella’s Booze”. Quart delis of Carlo Rossi was how all the older guys drank at work, and I had taken a liking to it, too. You fill it with cheap cooking wine from a box so nobody will notice how much is missing. You stash it under a prep table next to the flour or sugar. Then you get a little too buzzed and leave it there for your chef to find in the morning. Easy money.

Then came the dad talk to end all dad talks. Do you even take this seriously? Do you think I’m an idiot? If you want to party and get drunk, do it with your fuck up friends, not here. Why am I wasting my time with you if you’re just here for the cooking wine? Everything he said was just as valid as the last. I didn’t offer any excuses or explanations. What the hell could I have said? Sometimes you just gotta take it all on the chin. I waited until he was done saying what needed to be said, then I told him it would never happen again. And it didn’t. Not for many years at least. I never drank in that kitchen again. Not long after that he left to reunite with his mentor to open some big hotel restaurant downtown. I never once drank in the kitchen while I worked for him there either.

It took all the way until my first head chef position a couple years later for me to start drinking at work again. But that’s skipping ahead a few chapters and a story for another time. Until then I’ll leave you with this. People from low income households and people without higher education are being shuttled into an industry that takes advantage of their labor as a means of production. People who are then pacified by alcohol and access to alcohol as a substitute for living wages and benefits. This isn’t the only way it happens. There are good chefs and good small business owners out there who are fighting the good fight and effecting change in our culture. But once again, we’re looking at about a 9-1 split. The more it’s talked about, the more the reality of the industry will come to light. So I don’t know, man. Talk about it. Talk about it at the bar after work tonight if you have to. Then maybe don’t take that shiftie after work tomorrow.