Pt. 3... Maybe it was just piss.

Restaurant operators telling the staff “We’re like family here” has been frowned upon since roughly 2020 and the “86’d list” earthquake that shook loose from the same tectonic shifts that propelled the BLM and Me Too movements. They all kind of bubbled up to the surface and fueled each other’s fires while the world was locked in their living rooms and glued to their screens, reflecting on what the fuck we were all doing with our lives and why. The general consensus now is that saying things like that are often manipulative, not to mention patently false. Someone paying you for your service and profiting (or not) off your labor is inherently a different cultural and societal relationship than someone being a part of your family. “We’re like family” is a slippery slope towards “We really need you to come in on your day off. We really need you to stay late. We’re doing all we can so I hope you understand.”

Like with most things, both extremes annoy the shit out of me and I believe the answer is somewhere in the middle. It took a very long time but I only just now earnestly trust myself to do the right thing in any given situation, as a person and a Chef (about thirty and fifteen years, respectively). I do things for my team on a daily basis that go above and beyond being someone’s boss. It’s a struggle, and to be perfectly honest it’s playing with fire. By trying to care about every single cook’s progress, their experience in your kitchen, and their life in general, you open yourself up to a lot of risks. You invite criticisms, disappointments, frustrations and expectations that you simply wouldn’t have if you ran a kitchen where the cooks were just expendable employees who only mattered as much as they could or couldn’t do the job. In really great, truly exceptional kitchen environments, the relationships you build with the people you’re cooking next to can feel like family. Especially for a younger cook. Especially one without a great home life. If I didn’t luck into a few jobs working for a short list of mentors that treated me like family, I wouldn’t be alive right now. Full stop. I wouldn’t have made it to see my twenty first birthday. That’s probably a hairy statement that some people don’t want to acknowledge, but it’s true. It muddies the waters of a conversation that most want to pretend is black and white. Slopes, alas… are slippery.

But that glittering kitchen in the sky with it’s perfect culture and room for everyone is a promise land that rarely if ever actually exists. Most of the industry is filled with people who want a culture like that, but don’t have the mental or emotional tools to make it so. Or it’s kitchens that are rotted to the core. That are functioning precisely as designed when taking advantage of people’s time and energy or preying on their passion for food or need for money. More often than not, those are the kitchens who really want you to know that “We’re like family here”. The restaurant operators that are the most exploitive with your time and money are always the ones that feel the need to stress to you how much work they’re putting in behind the scenes when the smarter employees start to realize they’re never around to actually run the restaurant. And when you scale things back to tiny mom and pop operations with only a couple employees and overworked restaurant owners, the people that are affected by the failures of the “We’re like family” mentality can be the owners themselves, doing it to each other.

I’ve waxed poetic about my coffee shop days in the past but I’m not here to paint a rose garden without thorns. Things can be breathtakingly beautiful while still being ugly. My first experience with that was at that god damn little coffee shop nestled in the city of roses that I loved so much. I was always treated really well by my bosses. If I’m being honest with myself, once I started getting good at stuff around there I was treated like a bit of a golden boy. But ownership wasn’t nice to themselves and I definitely found myself caught in the middle. Coffee guy boss and kitchen lady boss were a couple running a small business together and living together. Waking up together 6 days a week, spending their entire work day together, coming home to each other every night and spending their one day off a week stressing about money together. In what now seems like way too on the nose of a metaphor in real life, they chose to save money on a linen service by washing all the restaurant laundry at their house and bringing it back for me to fold when there wasn’t anything else to do. Very literally bringing work home with them every day.

This eventually turned into a breeding ground for the toxic, stressful, and all too personal environment that most sane and rational people would assume it would. I learned how to sense a screaming match coming and find an excuse to scuttle to the other side of the front/back of the house before it got to restaurant equipment being thrown. Most times it was kept under wraps but there were definitely occasions when guests in the dining room could hear the screaming from the kitchen and more often than not I would be up front trying to find something to clean because I couldn’t go back there to my dishes. Some people would just get up and leave, some would give me a knowing look like “yeah I can hear that too, sorry kid.” Most of the guests were neighborhood regulars who cared about both of my bosses just as much as I did, regardless of who was right or wrong. That’s just what happens when two people decide to chase their dreams together. Living every second of your lives together trying to run a business on tiny profit margins while still maintaining a relationship is an objectively bad plan. No shit it didn’t work guys, what the fuck did you expect.

A lot of times I would end up with him in the office after she had left and the shop was closed. Hot boxing that tiny little room with weed 10x stronger than the stuff I was getting from my guy off Fessenden street. I’m actually laughing as I write this, remembering back to stoned teenage me sitting in that dog hair covered couch trying to play relationship therapist while he bitched and moaned about how crazy she was. Even then I was smart enough to realize that I was only getting one side of the story, and I had already grown to love and respect them both, regardless of what they said about each other. Still pretty fucking hilarious though. It all came to a very abrupt end one day when one of the screaming matches led to him storming out the front door of his coffee shop and very literally never coming back. Walked away from his partner, his business and (most hurtful for me) his dumb ass little teenage drop out friends who sat around looking up to him all day. I’ve often imagined how absolutely subterranean of a place he must have been in mentally to finally do it. He was one of my best friends even though he had to be at least 15 yrs older than me, but I also cared deeply about her. My sweet, scary, sexy boss lady. And at the end of the day I still had a whopping $250 in rent to pay every month, so I stuck around with baker mamí and learned that life always moves on, even without your older stoner best buddy.

Right about then is when I met my second chef. Some cooks work their entire career without ever getting two seminal chefs to work for. I was lucky enough to have a few, and the first two back to back no less. We’ll call him Chef Billy. Chef Billy was moving to Portland from back east. I was fully ready to cold shoulder this guy. I already had a Chef and I loved him like a big brother. Little did I know that this man’s shoulders were colder than the ice baths I had to reach down and drain when the stocks were ready to fridge. He was very quiet. Scary quiet. He was absolutely covered in tattoos from the ear lobes down and skinny as a rail. I could be forgiven for being terrified of him the first time we met. He politely introduced himself to me, shook my hand then proceeded to not speak for the rest of our shift.

My first chef had finally got the call that it was time to start putting in work at his halfway built new restaurant. He had a couple more dinners on the books while Chef Billy was getting acclimated to things, ending with an absolute rager of a final dinner. The torch was being passed and the shots were flowing in honor of both the outgoing and incoming Chef’s newly acquired roles. The party started as soon as dessert walked but it continued all through close and then back to chef’s house for the after party that me and a select few of my hood rat friends were lucky enough get invited to. Getting to party with the adults (not to mention having access to an adult’s liquor cabinet and weed stash) was maybe the coolest thing we had ever done up to that point. I remember the kids getting split up into two cars that our two Chef’s drag raced down Columbia in on our way back to the house… and I vaguely remember the girl I was in love with pushing me into the bushes I had just puked in once we got there? Maybe it was just piss.

That was the last I saw of my first chef for over a year. His parting words were that he was going to come back soon and offer me a dish washing job once his restaurant was ready to open. Until then I was stuck with the scary ass, school shooter vibes having ass new Chef who wouldn’t talk to me. He was going to take over the kitchen and expand the program while boss mamí took over the coffee and front of the house side of things. We were gonna expand lunch to a full restaurant size menu and open for brunch on the weekends while still continuing our supper clubs under his direction. I had got to see a different side of him at that party. I think I recall him and my Chef’s roommate drunkenly wrestling and breaking some furniture in the living room. But as far as day to day stuff went, he was still pretty closed off.

The first thing we got to know each other over was metal. Not like, Metallica and Pantera metal, but the real heavy shit. One afternoon he came in wearing a Cattle Decapitation shirt, and when I asked him if he knew they were all vegan, he explained that he was very aware and he wore that shirt specifically on days when he got to grind raw meat. That got us talking and realizing we both shared a deep love of all things death metal. I would get to work and he’d ask me what I wanted to listen to today. I’d ask for something like Cannibal Corpse, he’d counter with Cephalic Carnage, and we would settle somewhere in the Necrophagist realm. Then he put me on to weirder bands like Neurosis, Isis and Sunn O))). He would crank the sound system so loud the fucking walls would shake. We’d work in blaring silence for hours, him cooking, me doing his dishes, and neither of us saying a word.

Without realizing it I went from not liking this guy, to being scared of him, to our hours long death metal silent kitchen shifts being the highlight of my week. But I still thought he kinda hated me. He had still only initiated any real conversation with me maybe a dozen times and often answered my questions with one word answers. When I finally got the nerve to ask my boss lady about it she surprised the hell out of me when she told me in her southern drawl “Ricky, he tells me how much he likes you all the damn time… he just won’t do it when you’re around.” I was genuinely shocked. My last Chef would come in the kitchen hot, yelling my name and hi fiving me so hard my hand would sting for an hour. My new chef would walk in, quietly say “what’s up Bella” without making eye contact, tie on his apron and get to work.

They couldn’t have been more different. My first Chef was loud and boisterous. He could whistle louder than I could yell and he did it all the time. He was braggadocious and he brought this crazy, almost animalistic energy with him everywhere he went. His cooking was passionate and instinctive. He was shockingly good at what he did and he knew it. My new Chef was the antithesis of all of that. It was an early lesson for me to see that they were both equally as good at would they did while the way they did it couldn’t be further apart. My first Chef hyped me up and made me believe I could learn to cook. My second Chef taught me that you have to do it for yourself and nobody else. Because once you can pull the cart without the carrot, you don’t need someone with some string and a stick.

Chef Billy cooked in a way I had never seen before. His movements were thoughtful and deliberate. He took his time to process things before he moved. He picked up and set down his knives gently, almost as if they were made of glass. I specifically noticed how he washed his hands. Regardless of how busy the kitchen was, he washed those wrinkly tattoo covered mitts from nail to elbow, scrubbing each finger and taking even more time to get them bone dry. Like a surgeon prepping for an operation. I swear sometimes I could see a cloud of his thoughts in the air like the weed smoke that hovered over his head when we’d toke up in the basement after work. He made me want to look at things closer. To see deeper into what we did than the basic form and function.

None of this could have happened without this thing of ours functioning like a family at times. The good, the bad and the ugly. I would never have learned as much as I did, but I also wouldn’t have needed to take smoke breaks out front because coffee mugs were being thrown at each other in the back. My addictions would have surely found a way to flower into maturity, but maybe not as fast and viciously as they grew being surrounded by daily drinking and pot smoking. I battle with depression every day of my life and anxiety on most of them, and I would be a fool to think this formative time didn’t contribute to that in at least some small way. But those times also instilled in me the things that I love most in myself and taught me how to be the person I am when I am at my best and when I’m most proud of myself. Slopes are still slippery. Water is usually muddy. For some people the juice ain’t worth the squeeze and that’s o.k. Other people find themselves while kicking and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.