A cook’s tale chapter-2 “The Mushroom Incident”
The next day I’m feeling good, I’m normally a pretty up-beat kinda guy, knock me down, I get right back up to ask for seconds. I get there (early, of course) and the sous tells me to collect a case of each type of mushroom from the walk-in for mushroom ragu. I come back with twelve pounds of various shrooms, which I’m told to slice and keep separate from one another so that they can be caramelized individually. This is the way it’s happening too, like slo-mo. Get this. Okay. Now slice them. Okay. Now get an onion. Okay. Fine dice that. Okay. Like being fed spoonful by painful spoonful. Meanwhile the sous and the chef have taken a couple of cases of mushrooms off my hands to help speed the process along. Fxxkfxckfxckfxckfxckfcxk! I know what this means, they’re carrying me and I realize I’m fxxked from the get-go. My prior upbeat mood starts to slip away as I try to juggle four pans of caramelizing mushrooms, a prep list print-out that I don’t understand and a kitchen full of hidden utensils. She tells me to cook the mushrooms in a particular order as they all have different water contents, first the trumpets then the oysters, shitakes and criminis, all separately. The chef leaves on some errand and that’s when she comes over to me, I had begun to notice a pattern in this habit of hers. If the chef was around, she spoke somewhat nicer to me, if not, well…a friend of mine liked to say in a mock southern accent “I may be dumb, but I ain’t stoo-pid!”
“What are you doing! I said shitake after the trumpets!” as if I had just smacked her mom, or decided to use foie gras instead of oil. Whoa, a little caught off guard at such a harsh admonition I try to respond with something articulate like “No, actually, you said…”, but all that I can manage is a befuddled “Naa…”
“Shitakes, now.” She commands, then stalks back to her cutting board. Wow, this bxxch has issues, I may not be a card-carrying member of MENSA, but I think I can remember a simple instruction. I switch off and start getting the shrooms down while doing some light prep in between, at least what I can figure out.
“It’s almost four o’clock.” She comes over to inform me, in the same tone my dealer used to tell me to fxxk off when I had over-extended my credit. I look at her with eyebrows raised as if to say “aand?” I have a pretty good internal clock and glance over her shoulder and see that it’s 3:35. Fifteen minutes before I would consider it almost four o’clock, I’ve been there maybe forty-five minutes and I still don’t have the mushrooms done. “That means it’s time to move. Faster.” She declares and walks out of the kitchen.
From what I’ve seen I know she’s planting seeds in the chef’s ear, I know that after people have worked together for a while, especially in the trenches of busy kitchens, they’re bound to trust their word over any others. I could have told him his apron was on fire and if she said I was lying, then he would simply burn with a smile on his face. I know I’m screwed.
Service starts and I can do nothing to please my ever-judgmental “trainer”. Everything is in the wrong place, nothing is plated right, my technique is deplorable. Everything is wrong, wrong, wrong. Why can’t I do anything right! I want to ask her if my shoes are OK. Can I wear this Sox hat here? Will you come home with me and pick out my clothes for tomorrow, because obviously, I haven’t been able to do anything before you came along. At one point in the middle of the rush, she asks me, “Where are your spoons?” Busy, I give her a good old-fashioned shrug of the shoulders, wanting to plate my dishes and get on with my life. Besides, I’m busy. “Where…are…your…spoons?!!” she really wants to know.
“I don’t know.” I tell her, thinking she really needs a spoon while sweating out another plating.
“Then how did you taste that?! How can you serve something you haven’t tasted!??” With my tongs I lift a couple of tasting spoons out of the nine pan they’ve been sitting in, so she can get a good look. Miffed, she turns aside and I can finally finish plating. Of course I had tasted it. I taste fxxking everything in every stage, so I can know what it tastes like in what ever stage it is in. And at a new place, I taste at least three times! Throughout the night she barks at me, reprimands me, criticizes me, breaks me down and I’m miserable, miserable, miserable. If I wasn’t so OCD about failure I would’ve tore her one she’d never forget, thrown in my apron and stalked off to greener pastures. But, I’m a persistent bastard and failure is not an option; I won’t let her beat me.
At the end of the night, I go back to the dry storage room to change and find her and the chef, suddenly silent upon my arrival. Knowing that no one should be made to feel the way I do now, I ask the chef to step into the walk-in with me, where all great conversations are held. Now this guy isn’t what one would call a “smooth talker”, but he was a “smart talker”. He had that way of making you feel like everything he said was right, that he had a bead on life that no one but the initiated could grasp, and that by even gracing you with a couple of words of wisdom, you were therefore obliged to comply, nod your head, smile and go on your way, obviously better for the enlightenment. Yeah, I couldn’t get through to him either. I bring up the shrimp, the way I feel I’ve been treated and a couple of other things, probably shooting myself in the foot, but I can’t help it; besides will I really come back tomorrow? I go home abjectly depressed, feeling like a specter among the living, unsure if I’ll show up the next day.
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