Power Through

Most normal people…that is to say, most people who work a 9-to-5, or whoopty-do 8-to-6 or something; stay home when they’re not feeling well. Now, when I say not feeling well, I don’t mean, “oh my throat is sore and I have the sniffles,” I mean wake up puking, food in your stomach turning to liquid (don’t think I need to expound), taking anti-nausea medication kind of not feeling well. People who work in kitchens are wired a little differently. For the most part, we don’t get sick days or vacation pay or understanding bosses. We get the crystal clear understanding that if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid; its just that simple. At least on the flip side, you are working in a restaurant and at least get a free meal every day.
Last Saturday I woke up after getting about six hours of sleep and felt a little sick. I’d started feeling shitty on Thursday; and because cooks don’t have the part of their brain that tells us not to have a drink after leaving the kitchen; I wasn’t exactly getting a lot of sleep. So I rolled out of bed, my head pounding, and padded downstairs to the shower, started coughing and ended up standing in a puddle of my own puke. I cleaned my shower, re-cleaned my feet, got dressed and went into work. An old roommate of mine has a great expression to describe how I was feeling…like a bag of smashed apples. So I puked when I got to work, then set up my station (did I mention all of this was taking place before 11, a.m. because I work a double on Saturday’s and have to in for Brunch by 10 in the morning?) and tried not to pass out on my feet. Brunch started slowly and around noon I walked over to Duane Reed to buy myself some anti-nausea medication, mints and Sea-Bands (which don’t work, by the way). So I powered through most of Brunch until our Chef showed up, took a look at me and suggested I try to take five, off my feet. I got a little down time, came back upstairs and worked dinner service with 186 covers, turning out plates like a man (with a horribly upset stomach) possessed.
I’m not telling you this because I want to toot my own horn; I’m telling you this so you can understand the mentality of people who work in restaurant kitchens. We are wired differently. I can tell you with absolute certainty that when I was working on Wall Street, well fed, getting fat and getting paid to sit on my ass for nine or ten hours a day I probably would’ve called in sick if I stubbed my toe getting out of the shower. Ever since I’ve been living my life trying to be one second faster than I was the day before, calling in sick is no longer an option. In Ruhlman’s “The Soul of a Chef” (his follow up to “The Making of a Chef”), he talks about says, “Not getting enough sleep? Too bad, sleep later!...(its) you against the clock, every day, every year. Whoever does the most the best wins. Period.” And that’s how I live my life now. I bust my ass every day. Every day I walk into the kitchen, my goal is to be a little bit better than I was the day before, to be a little faster than I was the day before, to take on a little more responsibility than I had the day before. It’s a tremendous amount of self-imposed pressure, but honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, my Chef and I were having this talk the other night about two kinds of people who work in kitchens: guys who spend their entire lives never advancing beyond line cook and those who become Chefs (capital ‘c,’ not cooks) and run kitchens, own restaurants and make people stand up and take notice. Well, I decided long ago that I wasn’t very good at flying under the radar…