TWENTY-FIVE
After Hours
I walked into work one morning and found the bar littered with dirty wineglasses, empty bottles, and cigarette ashes. Had it not been for the broken glass on the floor, the wine stain on the wall, and the two upended tables, it might have been like any other day. I took off my jacket, hung it in the coat check, and grabbed some coffee before going to check out the dining room. An entire section of the normally neatly arranged room was completely disheveled—tablecloths bundled on the floor, place settings out of order, and tables at cockeyed angles. One of the upended tables was actually broken, its top partially separated from its pedestal.
“I know,” said my new assistant, Peter, suddenly emerging from the kitchen, coffee cup in hand. Cooks drink enormous amounts of coffee.
Peter showed up at the restaurant one morning not too long after I started at Veritas. He’d staged (worked for free) for the previous pastry chef one day a week and asked to continue to stage with me, and he’d arrived just in time. I’d just about had it with The Albanian who, in addition to being generally inadequate, took too many cigarette breaks, talked on his cell phone in the kitchen (Cell phone in the kitchen? Was he kidding?), and had a nasty tendency to make blatantly racist and sexist remarks. Just when he had pushed me over the edge, Peter appeared and accepted my offer to be my full-time assistant. Not only was Peter more than adequate as an assistant, but he was familiar with the kitchen and the cooks, too. Maybe too familiar. The cooks called him Stinky Peter because of what they perceived to be a body odor problem.
“This is fucked up, right?” Peter said.
“Yeah.” I nodded, taking it all in. “It was like this when you got here?”
“Uh-huh,” he answered.
“Nobody else is here?” It was not unusual to arrive in the morning and find someone passed out on table seventeen’s banquette.
“Nope,” he replied. “Just me and David.” David was the new prep guy.
“Huh.”
“And get a load of this!” he said proudly.
Peter directed me back to the floor at the end of the bar and pointed down to a clump of hair. A clump of actual human hair!
“Check it out.” He crouched down closer, pointing purposefully to the dark brown thatch. “It’s got highlights,” he said triumphantly. “It’s gotta be from Chatos. He’s the only one with highlights.”
He was right. Chatos was the only one with highlights. It was weird enough that he had highlights, let alone that they’d been pulled out and left on the floor. We walked back to the broken table in search of more clues.
“Holy crap!” Peter said, getting a closer look. “Is that blood? Or wine?”
I peered at the reddish brown drops on a neighboring tablecloth and shrugged.
“Who knows?” I answered nonchalantly.
Leaving the scene undisturbed, we walked back to the kitchen. Peter got back to work setting up the dessert station for the night’s service, and I went downstairs to change into my chef ’s jacket and clogs.
I’d like to say that finding the restaurant in such a state was a shock, but it wasn’t. The extent of the damage was unusual but not completely outside the realm of possibility. All kinds of stuff happens in restaurants at night after the customers are gone, the work is done, and the unwinding (i.e., drinking) begins, and Veritas was no exception. I could assess the previous night’s debauchery by how much urine (or vomit or excrement) was left on the women’s toilet seat.
Most independently run restaurants have alter egos, suppressed (usually alcoholic) personalities whose liberation each night coincides with closing time. As the last customers take their seats in the dining room and their orders print out in the kitchen, someone is already putting the beer on ice. Sometimes a particular brand of beer is ordered for the sole purpose of satisfying the thirst of the cooks. Sometimes it’s a cheap variety, but just as often it’s a quality import because, well, cooks work hard, earn little money, and deserve a decent beer at the end of the night. When it becomes clear that all the orders are in, the cooks begin to close down their stations. Once the crunch is over and there are no more unknowns, it’s time to relax. Time for a beer. It’s beer o’clock.
One of the first things I learned as a young cook was how to open a bottle of beer without a bottle opener. The hinge end of a pair of tongs works very nicely, ditto wedging the cap between the metal slats of a metro shelf. I was less proficient with the edge of a counter or the butt end of a chef ’s knife but still never had any problems consuming my nightly reward for a job well done. Cold beer does go down easy after four or five sweltering hours of hellish service.
And so every night, cooks, with their abundant reward of free alcohol, relax after a day’s work, just like lots of regular people relax with a drink after work. The difference is that happy hour for cooks begins at midnight, lasts longer than an hour, and is largely funded and encouraged by their employers. And even when these employers have the good sense to limit the drinks, it does little to hamper the overall intake because when you work six nights a week until at least eleven p.m., if you want to have any semblance of a social life, you must have it at night. And what is available to a young cook or waiter at this late hour? Bars. Every restaurant crew has a local bar they frequent. Every one. And who else is awake and interested in socializing at this late hour? Other cooks and waiters, who are in exactly the same boat. The very same waiters the cooks bitch about all night become cohorts once service is over and the drinks begin to work their lubricious magic. The combination of (mostly) young men and women, large amounts of alcohol, the hours of midnight through dawn, and stressful work results in antics that are more reminiscent of a frat house than of a fine dining establishment and usually end in one of three ways: the hookup, the solitary pass out, the fight.
As with the stereotypical frat boy, a cook’s need for conquest is ever-present, and thus the amount of interrestaurant relations is astounding. And because cooks make little effort to keep their exploits to themselves, I know much, much more than I really care to. Her tits hang down to, like, here, Doll, a cook told me, slicing his hand across his belly. And Alex? She’s a maniac! An animal in the sack! another said one day, eyebrows raised in exaggeration. Maybe they were trying to impress me, but more likely, I think, I was just another cook, even if I was a woman, a pastry chef, and their senior. I worked side by side with them in the kitchen and was therefore privy to their sexploits and certainly not protected from them. Have you seen how hairy her arms are? a cook rhetorically asked me. You can imagine the rest of her. . . . What I couldn’t imagine is why these young girls so easily fell victim to these loose-lipped cooks. How did so many of the cute waiters find themselves in bed with these pasty-faced, spongy-looking dogs with the stink of oil and food still under their fingernails and in their hair? It’s amazing how a couple of hours and a few drinks can bring people together.
All of this is not to say that I have not indulged in the occasional late-night sexploit. I’ve had my share of waiter one-night stands, drunken coworker sleepovers, and chef affairs. I briefly made out with my debonair sixty-year-old French chef and once took part in an after work game of all-female-coworker spin the bottle—and that was before kissing girls became fashionable. I am in no position to judge.
For every late night that results in a coupling, there is an equal number that end with the solitude of the severe hangover. I came in one morning and found Carter, a cook, asleep on a banquette in the darkest corner of the dining room. NO! No lights, he moaned painfully as I slid the dimmer switches up. Please . . . no lights. He’d startled me but not half as much as he’d startled the new young prep guy, David, who came to work at seven a.m. that morning and found him locked into the restaurant, left behind when the last of the nighttime dishwashers had locked up for the evening.
David found Carter passed out in the customer bathroom, head resting on the toilet seat and pants pulled down around his ankles, toilet still not flushed from the night before. Not a pretty picture. Luckily for Carter and me both, David pulled up Carter’s pants, flushed the toilet, dragged him over to a banquette, and tucked him under a chef ’s jacket. When it came time for Carter to set up his station and work, everyone sympathized with his green, puffy, silent face, allowing him ample space to sweat it out as well as time to retreat to the staff bathroom to puke. It wasn’t the first time someone had spent a drunken night on the banquette, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
And then there are the darker outcomes. Every once in a while, the late-night fun takes a turn for the worse and results in destruction. I’ve come to work and found entire parts of a kitchen wall in pieces on the floor, the object of after hours aggression. And I can’t count the number of times cooks have come to work the next day with black eyes and swollen hands. I was in a bar . . . I woke up on a park bench . . . I don’t know what happened. And on occasion, when a cook pulls a no-show/no-call, nine times out of ten he is in jail.
I was older now, farther along in my career as a pastry chef, and I never worked nights anymore, which meant I was no longer witness to the after hour antics. Instead, I was told about them. Truffle Boy had his balls out again last night. He chased the new sommelier around the restaurant. I heard about the sweet-faced bartender who apparently, according to one of the cooks, “likes it rough”: She really made me grab her, hard! I got the dish about the two coworkers who competed to take advantage of an alcoholically impaired female coworker: You should have seen them, Doll—like two little dogs fighting for the same prize. I found out the day after that two waiters had gotten topless on the bar—You know how they both like to show their tits—and what started out as flirtatious dirty dancing somehow turned sour until finally one ended up with a broken glass in her hand and the other got stitches in the emergency room. Another time, I found out that my scale had been used to parcel out a large delivery of marijuana. Whatever the story, no matter how outlandish, how unbelievable, how sick, I knew from my own earlier years that the bulk of it was probably true. There was no need to exaggerate.
When stories started trickling in about what had happened the night before that had resulted in torn-out hair and broken tables, everyone was interested in how far the limits had been pushed and who was involved this time. Some said they saw Chatos in the bar next door, missing a shoe, one eye already swelling, claiming that Will (a waiter) was trying to kill him. Will didn’t say much and instead let his swollen hand and cut face speak for themselves. Chatos did, indeed, have a clump of hair missing as well as bite marks on his arm. Yes, bite marks. But that’s all we ever found out. Nothing definitive. Even Paco, the dishwasher—the one other person who saw it all—kept mum. And when we asked Chatos directly What really happened? his answer was always the same: The first rule about Fight Club is we don’t talk about Fight Club.
Fight Club became the stuff of legend, the subject of jokes, a day remembered fondly if not in detail. It raised the bar of what could possibly go wrong after hours and what would be acceptable. When we heard that another restaurant’s late-night sex capades, caught on videotape, had made the papers, the waiters and cooks scoffed competitively, They got nothing on us! And what about the two female waiters writhing topless on the bar with the broken glass? Cat-Fight Club, of course.