HOSPITALITY

Brochette.

I am a part of the hospitality industry. Make no mistake about that. But sometimes, as a chef makes his or her way up the professional culinary ladder, the hospitality gets lost in all of the industry. Cooking food for strangers is what I do, and though it’s generally a completely different enterprise from cooking at home for friends and family, the ideal is to bring the same feeling to customers. This is why Nigella Lawson is one of my heroes. Her approach is the opposite of a chef’s. She cooks for people she knows. And although I do sometimes cook for people I know, on a normal night I’m cooking for strangers. And that’s totally cool. That’s the job. It’s all about the guest. It’s all about hospitality. Check your ego at the employee entrance.

I learned true hospitality many years before I started cooking, in an unlikely way. At the time I was a vegetarian in a BBQ joint in Birmingham, Alabama.

It was 1995. Back then I played drums in a band called Young Pioneers. We were based out of Richmond, Virginia, where I worked at a Kinko’s making copies, which was the number-one job of choice for a loser in a punk band. My life revolved around not charging friends for copies and stocking reams of goldenrod paper for my personal use. Who could afford photocopying all those show flyers, record covers, inserts, and stickers? These things are critical for a crummy punk band, and they aren’t free. Besides, Kinko’s was an easy job.

But I’ve never been a slacker. I worked hard, I was never late, and I didn’t complain about getting $6.50 an hour. I was a quiet robot and they loved me for it. My boss was a kindly lesbian named Sue. She promoted her girlfriend to assistant manager (awesome) and chain-smoked in her office. To this day the smell of copy machine toner combined with Parliament smoke is a comfort to me. But most important, Sue always held my job while I went on the road with Young Pioneers. Hey, Sue, can I have a month off work to go on tour with my band that no one cares about? The answer was always yes.

On tour that summer we found ourselves in Birmingham, at a record store run by a guy named Russell, who also organized punk rock shows in the area. He knew better than anyone that when a band arrives in a new town, they are confused and hungry. We were no exception. We asked Russell where the nearest health food store was, and he laughed. He said he had a better place for us: Brochette’s, downtown. “Tell them Russell sent you,” he said.

We parked the van on the street right outside the place. Inside we stared blankly at the menu, displayed on a felt board with plastic grappling letters. There were four of us, including our roadie, Christian. None of us ate meat, and we were bewildered as to why Russell had sent us to a full-on Alabama BBQ that trafficked in pulled pork, burnt-end baked beans, and bacon-fat corn bread. We all looked at one another, glanced again at the menu, turned around, and started to walk out.

“Hey!” a voice called from behind the counter. “Russell send you guys?”

“Uh, yeah. He sent us. . . .”

“So, you all vegetarian?” We looked at one another again. What the fuck was going on?

“Gentlemen, please, have a seat.”

We walked up to the counter and sat down on the old stools that had puckered, split seams patched with duct tape. Our maroon van parked outside had similar Band-Aids on the seats.

“So,” the chef behind the counter said, “Russell sent you guys. Fantastic. You want some lemonade?”

He poured us all glasses and set them on the bar.

“You are in my house now. Get comfortable. Relax. Y’all just vegetarian? Or are you vegan?”

Adam and Christian were vegan. Marty and I were just vegetarian.

“Okay, gentlemen. I gotcha,” he said, and turned back to his kitchen. And then Brochette (I assume his name was Brochette, because he exuded ownership) began to cook us a personal, off-the-menu procession of plates of food. Technically speaking, it was my first tasting menu. We had no idea what was coming out of the kitchen—or what it was going to cost us. Since that day I have eaten tasting menus at very fancy restaurants—Michelin-starred places—and nothing has ever topped this one.

We were served bread crumb–topped macaroni and cheese (for the nonvegans) and baconless corn bread that Brochette prepared from scratch in a cast-iron pan as we looked on. We had collards sans hocks (he assured us with a grin as he slid our plates onto the counter), and a salad of mixed greens, vinegary and spicy with black pepper. We got drunk on Brochette’s hospitality and would have gladly eaten anything he put in front of us—a shoe, maybe, or a piece of cardboard. He was totally showboating, performing. And having a great time. The last course was a banana pudding with homemade vanilla wafers. He explained to the dairy-free members of our party that the fat he used was margarine, even showed us the container.

He charged us twenty dollars. Total. Five bucks a head. Ignorant jerks that we were, we didn’t leave a tip. And I really should have, because Brochette taught me what hospitality—real hospitality—is. I took that photo of him here on our way out. I try to keep him in mind when I’m cooking today.