Spiced

“What are you guys doing?” I asked, trying to keep the suspicion out of my voice. I knew what they were doing: They were preparing a family meal. Carter was working the hot appetizer station, which meant he was responsible for cooking the staff meal that had to be ready by four o’clock every day. But they were up to something. I could tell. No one got that excited about family meal.

Culo and Carter looked at each other, clearly struggling with whether or not they should tell me what was going on. It was a common struggle. I was one of them, part of the kitchen’s inner circle (the immediate family, we called it), but they didn’t always trust me. I was the pastry chef, older than all the cooks by at least eight years, and I was a woman, the only woman in the kitchen, all of which made me suspect. I was like a disapproving stepmother. It didn’t help that I occasionally (and futilely) tried to be the voice of reason when their hijinks spun out of control. Despite all of this, they had just as much trouble not telling me, self-satisfied boys that they were. They couldn’t help themselves, really.

“You know how when you eat spaghetti, some of it always hangs off the fork and so you bite it and let some fall back onto your plate?” he asked, not waiting for my answer. “Adrienne does that over the family pot!” He started mimicking her, snorting, while shoveling imaginary food into his mouth. I instantly got an unfortunate image of creamy pasta dripping off of Culo’s goatee.

Over the years I had worked with plenty of people whom I wouldn’t exactly have called friends, but Culo was the first coworker I actually found distasteful. For the most part we got along. He was the sous-chef, and though I didn’t respect him, I tried to at least respect his position as sous-chef. We got along well at first, even joked around a bit about our polarized views of the world. But over time, after listening to more and more of the crap that came out of his mouth (about women, artists, various ethnic groups, liberals, New Yorkers, anyone not like him, really), I grew to dislike him. He was the kind of loudmouth not really interested in talking or even debating. He thought that the louder his own voice, the more correct he was.

“Here,” interrupted The Sherminator, another cook. Though not as inherently mean-natured as some of the other guys, it was like Lord of the Flies in that kitchen: prey on the weak and follow the leader, who was, unfortunately, Culo. He poured a pan full of freshly cooked diced bacon, grease and all, into the already fat-laden pasta.

“Everyone” really meant all the waiters, since cooks can usually, within reason, dip into their own mise-en-place when they want a snack. They can fry up an egg, sauté some spinach. Plus, they would spend the night sweating over a stove. What did they care if family meal was a grease-laden bowl of starch and cheese? They might as well have been preparing for a marathon.

It wasn’t all that surprising that things could get that bad, really, at least not to me. Some people fall for the romanticized version of family meal that has been the subject of cookbooks: The entire restaurant staff sits down together at a single table to enjoy a leisurely meal that has been prepared with fresh, carefully chosen ingredients, crafted with love, and served on fine china amidst celebratory nods of shared enjoyment. But I knew better. Over my twelve years of cooking professionally, I could count on one hand the number of family meals that bore any resemblance to this idealized, truly familial rendering and still have fingers left over. Most of the time, family meal is at best an afterthought with severely limited resources.

Every day, a low- to mid-level cook who has been given the unwelcome responsibility of making the family meal will have to find something to prepare. He’ll start off by spending a few minutes in the walk-in refrigerator staring at the shelves, searching for some approximation of protein. If he’s lucky, he’ll find five pounds of ground beef set aside, a jackpot ingredient that can be transformed into chili, Bolognese, meat loaf, meatballs, tacos, etc. But it’s just as likely that he won’t be so lucky, because while some restaurants do order cheap meats for the family (ground beef, pork butt, Italian sausage), there is no guarantee. Instead, maybe the cook will find something that is no longer fresh enough to be served to customers, some fish that is starting to stink but that will, once overcooked with plenty of herbs, olive oil, and lemon juice, seem perfectly acceptable to the family, especially the unwitting waiters. Or what about some charred scraps of veal breast that have already been roasted and then simmered for six hours to make sauce? Under different circumstances this meat, now completely devoid of any flavor or tenderness, would be discarded. But technically it is still meat that can masquerade as the foundation for family meal.

Next, this cook might look for vegetables—onions, red pepper scraps, celery, carrots—the cheap ones. Nine times out of ten he will open a can of tomatoes. Then, he will decide on the final and simplest part of the meal: the starch. Every family meal—every single one—includes a large dose of pasta, rice, polenta, or potatoes. If by chance salad greens make it to the family, you can bet they will be on their way out, wilted and slimy edged—still my biggest pet peeve. Once tossed with vinaigrette, though, the slime won’t be that noticeable.

This is not to say that family meal can’t be tasty; it can be, under the right circumstances. Some of the best Mexican food I’ve ever had anywhere (including Mexico) has been the product of family meal. Cooks who make trips back home often return with spices or other ingredients unavailable in New York that they share with the family, even if it’s with just the immediate family: cooks, not waiters. I’ve also had amazing Greek pastitsio, Italian chicken soup, and Texas barbecue for family meal, thanks to the varied ethnic backgrounds of those who end up working in kitchens. But for every tasty soup there are many more trays of broiled fish heads, each one staring aimlessly in a different direction. For every authentic pastitsio, ten pots of pasta primavera—minus the primavera. And even when family meal tastes good, it doesn’t mean we’re all going to sit down together and enjoy it in a relaxing, civilized manner. Restaurant families are far too dysfunctional for that.

And in no way does the caliber of family meal directly reflect the caliber of the restaurant itself. At La Côte Basque, we had rabbit kidneys at least once a week. The slight scent of urine wafting off the hot stew prompted a common response from unsuspecting newcomers: These mushrooms taste weird.

So why is it that cooks who presumably have an interest and talent in preparing tasty food often put so little effort into it? Why not attack family meal as if it were a challenge on Top Chef, the only food show on television that garners even a modicum of respect from cooks? They don’t start out apathetic. At least I didn’t. When I was a new cook and given the responsibility of family meal, I felt an unspoken pressure to prove myself to my peers. Yes, making family meal can be a real pain in the ass, a chore that eats up time that can be better spent on the real preparation necessary for service. But somewhere in the back of my head I wondered if it was all part of a test. So, I did my best to pull something together, despite my limited time and resources. I took pride in family meal. And then, when my food was ready, the waiters would line up. Half of them, upon eyeing what I had made, would immediately leave and find food from somewhere else. The other half would stick around.

Over time and through conversations with my more experienced fellow cooks, I came to realize that it wasn’t personal. They’re just frustrated artists. Miserable fucks ’cause they have to be here waiting tables rather than doing what they really want. It wasn’t long before I easily fed into this ideology: Fuck ’em. They’ll eat what I make, and they’ll like it.

Pastry people (fair or not) never have to make family meal unless they expressly choose to. The smart pastry chef never chooses to as there are only two possible outcomes. If the meal is a success, the cooks will resent it and undercut that success: I could make a good family meal, too, if I had that much time. Or, should a pastry chef ’s family meal not succeed, the cooks will tear it apart with great satisfaction and lose even more respect for the pastry chef, who, in their minds, has an easier job as it is. My family meal responsibilities came to an abrupt end once I made the switch to working pastry full-time, and so the seed of resentment planted in me during my early years never fully blossomed. Still, I try not to get involved with family meal: I don’t complain and I don’t offer to help.

It’s easy for cooks to feel like cogs in a wheel, one that is often churned by a demanding chef for long, hot hours, yielding little monetary reward. Add ungrateful, whining waiters to this grind, and you have a recipe for disaster. When cooks finally have the chance to feel superior, to wield what little power they have in the form of family meal, they take the chance. And they take it out on waiters.

Sometimes it’s passive-aggressive. A cook might go out of his way to make something delicious, only to purposefully keep it from the waiters and share it only with the other cooks. Sometimes it’s more overtly aggressive. Charlotte, the daytime sous-chef at Tonic (the sadism is by no means limited to the males), always had family meal ready and waiting for the cooks but would intentionally withhold serving utensils from the staff, just so she could gleefully watch them stare helplessly at the cooling food. She would deride any waiter who dared pop his head into the kitchen before the appointed time, sniffing for family meal: Are you stupid? What did I say? Not until four o’clock. Other times, she would go out of her way to make an outstanding meal and then lord over it, attacking anyone who didn’t partake—Stupid waiters, they don’t know what’s good—or punishing those who didn’t give her the appreciation she felt was due her—Why do I waste my time? Of course, no amount of thanks or appreciation would ever have satisfied her. It was the power that she craved, not the thanks.

But why do cooks really treat waiters this way? Why do they hate them? Mostly because cooks think waiters are lazy: Do you believe that lazy bitch? She won’t even walk downstairs to get some chocolate truffles for her VIP table. Or because waiters whine about bad tips in front of cooks, knowing full well that even on the worst nights they make far more money than the cooks do: They have no idea how easy they have it, fucking waiters. Because they are selfish: Look at him, picking out all the pieces of meat from the pasta. Selfish prick. Because they are vegetarians (gasp!), artists (no!), or, what was especially appalling to Culo, liberals (the horror!). The only waiters who have half a chance are the cute ones (most cooks are still boys, after all, and suckers for a pretty face), and the few who happen to behave exactly how cooks think a waiter should, which entails a fair amount of ass kissing. Cooks don’t need a reason to hate waiters, that they are waiters is reason enough. As one chef friend put it, Waiters only care about three things: When can I leave? How much money did I make? What’s for dinner? Every mis step, every offhand comment, fuels the fire of the cooks. They hate waiters because they can. Adrienne was entrenched in a losing battle, and there was nothing she or I could do about it.

“I made pork-skin pizza,” he explained. “I took the skin from the pork belly and roasted it until it got really crispy. Then I loaded it with melted cheese and lardons, and drizzled it with chorizo oil. I put the little herb salad on top just to throw them off.” He winked.