The Level of Discourse

THERE WAS A LULL in service the other night, one of those all-too-brief periods of about ten minutes when the floor staff is busy trying to turn tables, and even though the bar is packed three deep with waiting customers and there's a line out the door, the kitchen is quiet. While busboys stripped and reset tables outside the kitchen door, the cooks, runners and sous-chef swilled bottled water, wiped down their stations and bullshitted. I stood in the doorway to the cellar prep kitchen and smoked a cigarette nervously. We were in that eerie, eye-of-the-hurricane calm. In ten minutes, when the next wave of hungry public had been seated and breaded and watered, there'd be a punishing rush-the slide filling up with orders all at once, the action swinging from station to station, boiling up the line like a Drano enema. First, the salad guy would get hit, then the sauté station and finally the grill, until everything came down at once-the whole bunch of us in the cramped kitchen struggling and sweating and cursing to move orders out without falling in the weeds. We had only a few moments of peace to go, and I smoked and fidgeted and half-listened to what my crew was talking about. The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so-and I realized that, my God . . . I've been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years! Who's the bigger homo? Who takes it in the ass? Who, exactly, at this particular moment, is a pédé, a maricón, a fanocchio, a puta a pato? It's all about dick, you see. It's chupa mis huevos time, time for mama la ping, take it in your culo time, motherfucker, you pinche baboso, crying little woman. And your vierga? It looks like a fucking half-order of merguez-muy, muy, muy chica . . . like an insecto. This is the real international language of cuisine, I realized, watching my French sous-chef, American pâtissier, Mexican grill, salad and fry guy exchange playful insults with the Bengali runner and the Dominican dishwasher. It's been, for twenty-five years, one long, never-ending game of the dozens, played out in four or five languages. As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate. All comments must, out of historical necessity, concern involuntary rectal penetration, penis size, physical flaws or annoying mannerisms or defects. The rules can be confusing. Cabrone, for instance, which translates roughly to 'Your wife/girlfriend is getting fucked by another guy right now-and you're too much of a pussy to do anything about it' can also mean 'my brother', depending on inflection and tone. The word 'fuck' is used principally as a comma. 'Suck my dick' means 'Hang on a second' or 'Could you please wait a moment?' And 'Get your shit together with your fucking meez, or I come back there and fuck you in the culo' means 'Pardon me, comrade, but I am concerned with your state of readiness for the coming rush. Is your mise-en-place properly restocked, my brother?' Pinche wey means 'fucking guy', but can also mean 'you adorable scamp' or 'pal'. But if you use the word 'pal'-or worse, 'my friend' in my kitchen, it'll make people paranoid. 'My friend' famously means 'asshole' in the worst and most sincere sense of that word. And start being too nice to a cook on the line and he might think he's getting canned tomorrow. My vato locos are, like most line cooks, practitioners of that centuries-old oral tradition in which we-all of us-try to find new and amusing ways to talk about dick. Homophobic, you say? Sub-mental? Insensitive to gender preference, and the gorgeous mosaic of an ethnically diverse work force? Gee . . . you might be right. Does a locker-room environment like this make it tougher for women, for instance? Yep. Most women, sadly. But what the system seeks, what it requires, is someone, anyone, who can hold up their station, play the game without getting bent out of shape and taking things personally. If you are easily offended by direct aspersions on your lineage, the circumstances of your birth, your sexuality, your appearance, the mention of your parents possibly commingling with livestock, then the world of professional cooking is not for you. But let's say you do suck dick, you do 'take it in the twins', it's no impediment to survival. No one really cares about that. We're too busy, and too close, and we spend too much time together as an extended, dysfunctional family to care about sex, gender preference, race or national origin. After level of skills, it's how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult-and how well you can give it right back-that determines your place in the food chain. You can cover your ears all you want, pretend they're not calling you chino or morena or indio or gordo or cachundo . . . but they are. Like it or not, that's your name, your street tag, whether you chose it or not. I've been flaco and cadavro, probably borracho. That's just the way it is. I call down to my prep kitchen on the intercom-calling for butter or more sauce-and that little gangster who keeps my stock rotated and makes that lovely chiffonaded parsley for me is going to reply (after I'm out of hearing), 'Fuuck YOUU!!' before giving me exactly what I asked for. Better I say it first: 'Gimme my fucking mantequilla and sauce, motherfucker. Horita . . . and . . . fuuuck YOU!' And I love that little thug, too-the headband-sporting, baggy-pantsed, top button-buttoned, bottom button open, moon boot- shod, half Puerto Rican, half cholo vato loco, with his crude prison-style tats and his butterfly knife tucked in his wristband. I have, on many occasions, pondered adopting him. He's everything I'd want in a son. Why do I, a fairly educated sort of a swine, take such unseemly pleasure in the guttural utterances of my largely uneducated, foul-mouthed crews? Why, over the years, have my own language skills become so crude and offensive that at family Christmas I have to struggle to not say, 'Pass the fuckin' turkey, cocksucker'? I dunno. But I do love it. I wallow in it. Just like all the other sounds in my life: the hiss and clatter and spray of the dishwasher, the sizzle as a fillet of fish hits a hot pan, the loud, yelping noise-almost a shriek-as a glowing sizzle-platter is dropped into a full pot sink, the pounding of the meat mallet on a côte du boeuf, the smack as finished plates hit the 'window'. The goads, curses, insults and taunts of my wildly profane crew are like poetry to me, beautiful at times, each tiny variation on a classic theme like some Beat era jazz riff: Coltrane doing 'My Favorite Things' over and over again, but making it new and different each time. There are, it turns out, a million ways to say 'suck my dick'. Most of the people in my kitchen can do it in Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali and English. Like all great performances, it's about timing, tone and delivery-kind of like cooking. There are also the terms of the trade, the jargon. Every trade has one. You already know some of our terms. '86' is the best known. A dish is 86'ed when there's no more. But you can use the term for someone who's just been fired, or about to be fired, or for a bar customer who's no longer welcome. One doesn't refer to a table of six or a table of eight; it's a six-top or an eight-top. Two customers at a table are simply a deuce. 'Weeded' means 'in the weeds', 'behind', 'in the shit' or 'dans la merde'-a close cousin and possible outcome of being 'slammed', 'buried' or 'hit'. A waitron or waitron unit is an old-school '70s, term-gender non-specific-for floor personnel, who are also, at staff mealtime, referred to as the floor or the family or simply scum. And the meal itself becomes-particularly if it's the usual trinity of chicken, pasta and salad-the shaft meal or the gruel. Then there's the equipment. Since the introduction of the Cuisinart, any food processor can be referred to as the Queez; the square and oblong metal sauce containers are six-pans or eight- pans depending on size, and the long, shallow ones hotels. The cook's spoons with holes or slots are, unsurprisingly, female, and the unslotted ones, male. Meez is mise-en-place: your set up, your station prep, your assembled ingredients and, to some extent, your state of mind. A la minute is made-to-order from start to finish. Order!, when yelled at a cook means 'Make initial preparations' such as searing, half-cooking, setting up for finishing. Fire! means 'Finish cooking' and get ready for 'pick up'. Food ready to be picked up is put in the window or en la ventana-also called the pass, the slide or the shelf. The 'slide' refers to the slotted rack where dupes or tickets containing orders hang. So one could say, 'What orders do I have hanging?' and the reply could be, 'You got two steak' on order for the deuce on five, three soles are fired.' A cook might ask for an all-day, a total number of a particular item both ordered and fired, with temperatures, meaning degrees of doneness. And on the fly means Rush! A wipe means just what it sounds like: a last-minute plate-cleaning. Marijuana or mota or chronic is chopped parsley. Jiz is any reduced liquid, like demi-glace. When one adds whole butter to jiz, one is mounting, as in monter-au-beurre. Cook well-done translates to 'Burn it!' or 'Murder it!' or 'Kill it!' When one finds oneself waiting too long for a well-done steak to finish cooking, and it's holding up the rest of the order, one can suggest throwing it in the jukebox, or giving it a little radar love in the micro or microwave. The latex surgical gloves we rarely wear are anal research gloves, and one usually puts them on with some theatrical flourish, snapping and grinning menacingly, accompanied by suggestions to 'Turn left and cough' or 'Grab your ankles, 'cause here comes papi chulo'. Those paper toques are coffee filters or clown hats, the checked pants we all wear, simply checks, our jackets and aprons, whites. When the boss arrives, it's 'Elvis is in the building' or 'Pssst, desastre es aqui! And the usual nicknames apply to any and all: cooks, waiters, busboys and runners alike. Crude irony abounds. Cachundo, meaning 'piece of ass', might be applied to a particularly homely runner. Caliman, meaning 'strong man', is reserved for a weak cook, Rayo, or 'flash' to a slowpoke; Baboso, or 'drooling idiot' to, well, any drooling idiot. Any blond, well-scrubbed waiter can become 'Opie', 'Richie Cunningham' or 'Doogie Howser Motherfucker'. Stocky bus-boy? Sounds like Burro to me. When referring to themselves collectively, my Mexican carnales like La Raza or La M (pronounced la emaayy), or La Mafia. Externs from culinary school, working for free as a 'learning experience'-which by itself translates to 'lots of work and no money'-are quickly tagged as FNG (Fucking New Guy), or Mel for mal carne (bad meat). Army, short for 'army cook', or the classic but elegant shoe, short for 'shoemaker', are the perennial insults for a lousy or 'slophouse' cook. There are the usual terms of endearment, all perfectly acceptable in casual conversation between cooks: motherfucker (a compliment), cocksucker, sunofbeech, dipshit, scumbag, scum- sucker, dumb-fuck, rat-bastard, slackjaw, idiota, bruto, animale, asesino, mentiroso, whining little bed-wetter, turd, tortuga, strunze, salaud, salaupard, chocha podrida, pendejo, silly cunt, seso de pollo, spazz, goofball, bucket-head, chucha, papi-chulo, sweet-cheeks, cupcakes, love- chunks, culero, shit-stain, cum-gargler, and so on. Asshole, strangely, is serious, to be used only when genuinely angry, and any expression involving a person's wife/mother/girlfriend/boyfriend or family member directly (with the notable exception of motherfucker) is strictly off-limits. You may well have seen your grill man's wife jacking off motorists for spare change on West Street-but you don't talk about it. Ever. A lot of cook talk is transplanted from the fringes of military jargon. One doesn't carry, one humps. To be set up is to be squared away. He sucks it up and endures, digs in for the rush, takes a bad hit if one station is disproportionately busy-is simply fucked or fucked in the ass when things go badly . . . at which point, one's buddy hopefully steps in and bails you out, covers your ass, saves your bacon. Aspirins are called crunchies because we eat them like candy. Finger cots are condoms, pronounced with Spanish inflection. The nail on which completed orders are spindled is the spike. Any round metal container placed in a water bath is a bain (pronounced bayn) from bain- marie pronounced baahn maree), or simply a crock. The life we live is la puta vida, 'this bitch of a life', and one might well bemoan a sorry state of affairs with a cry of Porca miseria! (Pig of misery!) or Que dolore!, 'What pain!' The slide, when full of dupes, is called the board, as in, 'The board is full'. Food currently being loaded by a runner or waiter is My hand, as in 'Where's that fucking steak?' Reply: 'My hand, Chef!' A hot nut is used when an expeditor wants something now: 'I gotta hot nut for that sole on table six'. This is often for a VIP, or 'Very Important Pendejo' or PPX, or soigneee muthafucka- meaning friend of the owner, or the man himself. So make sure to move that food out rush or STAT. Applying what we've learned to a battlefield situation, one might find oneself saying: 'I gotta hot nut for that six-top on seven, Cabrone! It's been fired for ten fucking minutos, pinche tortuga. What? You don't got yer meez together, asesino? Get that shit in the window, you seso de pollo pinche grill man-throw it in the fucking jukebox if you have to. The rest of the order my hand! And don't forget to give it a wipe and some mota and a squirt of that red jiz on the way out, I got shit hanging here and you're falling in the fucking weeds!' 'Working,' might come the reply. 'I getting buried here. How come the sauté no getting slammed like me? I take it in the ass all night! How' bout table ocho? Fire? I can go on eight?' Which might inspire this: 'Eight my hand, baboso! Eight fucking gone! Eight fucking dying en la ventana waiting for Doogie Howser Motherfucker to pick up! You got dead dupes back there, idiota-what the fuck are you doing? You are in the shit! Hey, Rayo! Step in and bail the culero out!'

RIP Chef

Submitted June 08, 2018 at 04:35PM by DarboJenkins https://ift.tt/2M6YNnQ