Into the Fire

Matt — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:48:02 +0000

Watching Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations last night brought back a lot of memories. It was the episode entitled “Into the Fire” where he goes back to work his old Tuesday double shift at Les Halles in New York. He tries to get back into the hustle and bustle that is a kitchen during the dinner rush and ends with the statement that “line cooking professionally, day in and day out is a young persons game”. Years ago I worked as a cook in a Herndon Virginia seafood restaurant called “The Blue Channel Inn”. I was just out of high school and it was my first real gig. I started out working the steam table which is really the table of death. As orders for lobsters, clams, oysters and mussles start popping out of the orders printer, you give them their last rites, stuff them into baskets, lower them into pots on the steam table and crank the lever to scald them alive. The bad thing was that you spent a good part of your shift banging on the pipes with a hammer trying to get it to work while cursing under your breath. From there I moved up to fry cook, lowering baskets of breaded goodness into bubbling hot peanut oil. The worst thing about being a fry cook (besides trying to wash the smell of french fries away) is cleaning the fryers. You gotta drain all the hot oil and scrub the insides of the fryers out and then refill with fresh oil. One lesson I learned the hard way is that hot oil and water don’t mix. If you drain the oil and then forget to close the valve and spray water into the fryer you get an explosive, frothy and bubbling mess overflowing everywhere. From fry cook I moved up to broiler/grill, cooking steaks, burgers, grilled seafood and prime rib. I worked with Lucio an interesting man who had a weakness for beer. One night we had margarita scallops special which was made with a sauce of tequila and triple sec. After every order of the special that came in Lucio lined up shot of tequila. Thank goodness it wasn’t a very popular special. It was always a lot of fun in the kitchen be it throwing crushed ice balls at the dishwasher, sneaking a beer out of the cooler or just the comradre of working together to make food for a party of 50. Like Anthony Bourdain, I’ve got a lot of fond memories from that period of my life and met a lot of good/interesting people. It was a good experience and a lot of fun but no way could I do it today.

House Of Koenig » line cook

Into the Fire