The Show
I’ve always wanted my own cooking show, but if I set foot in a kitchen everyone would know I’m a fraud, just like many of the cooks who have shows on that cable channel.
What, John? How can you say that? Frauds?! They’re chefs!
No, they’re not. Chefs work in kitchens twelve hours per day, are usually sweaty and angry about something, have food on them someplace, and certainly do not have manicures. The restaurant lives or dies on the menus chefs create, and all that stress boils within them. Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant will tell you that. Chefs do not have spotless open kitchens, perfectly prepared and always ready mis en place, affable temperaments, and warm smiling faces. Ninety-five percent of the time they are tyrannical, yelling, waiter-hating, drunken assholes.
Not to say that television chefs have no value; of course they do. They entertain and teach. I have been a fan of cooking shows for years, all the way back to Graham Kerr when he was still a drunk and Julia Child when she was still intelligible. It was different back then. The chefs then still had the flashy sets and clean hands, but they genuinely loved food and didn’t have that plasticky attitude that seems so prevalent now. They didn’t have catch phrases and product lines. The shows I’ve watched recently are produced on an assembly line by people who are way too pretty to be real. They don’t even have any burn scars visible on their arms, the badge of the working kitchen professional.
I do like Anthony Bourdain though, but what’s not to like? He doesn’t have a cooking show, he has a show where he eats, gets drunk, and does exactly what he loves: eating and getting drunk. It’s honest, and he’s a lucky guy. We know he’s a chef, but he never tells anyone what to do, never uses that patronizing, lecturing voice that says, “You’re totally ignorant of my Art.” He comes across as being a real human being, though somewhat confused and weathered.
Then there’s Nigella Lawson, whom I admit quite honestly makes my heart go pitter-pat. I assure you, however, that her looks are only part of it. Mostly it’s the food, the warmth of the kitchen, her domestic goddess attitude. She’s warm and charming in a cold English kind of way, sexy and distant. She gives the idea that she’s reading the recipes out of a book, just like the rest of us, and sharing her tips and tricks to makes things go smoothly. I want to sit in her kitchen and sip white wine all day, watching her cook.
The celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis has worked in two upscale professional kitchens in L.A. and is currently a private chef and caterer. Yet, she’s so tanned and toned and well made-up, so completely clean that she gives the impression of someone who has never had to work a day in her life. Watching her puts my teeth on edge; she’s so uptight! She makes great food, but she looks fake and disdainful. I want to take her out and get her ripped on Martinis, then start an argument with her, screaming at each other in the middle of the street with taxis whipping by, horns blaring. I want to like her, I really do. She needs to get back into a busy cramped kitchen and work saute for a few years, get back in the trenches and rid herself of the Princess Delicate Flower personality. She’s supposed to be an Italian. Where’s the heat?
The chefs I know in the real world aren’t nearly so pretty. The ones I’ve worked for vary from the corporate jerk so concerned about profit margin he would throw away plates prepared by accident, a measure designed to discourage the staff from ordering dishes “by accident” to get a free meal; to the affable Said, former personal chef to Morocco’s King Faissal. Said would prepare a huge meal for us every day before the restaurant opened and we would sit down together like a family. I would’ve followed that guy to the ends of the Earth, but he sold out and moved on.
My favorite chef may have been Armida, though. She ruled her kitchen despotically, instilling respect through total competence in the kitchen and complete terror in the waitstaff. She always looked like she was suppressing a smile as she tore up another retarded house cat (polite euphemism for “waiter”) for screwing up yet another order or not knowing the slightest thing about the menu. Yet she was always making jokes in her completely deadpan way, and was one of the warmest people I have ever worked for. She just wanted things to be done “a certain way,” the right way, her way. That I understand.
There are several types of bartenders, but as this is my show let’s concentrate on me. I am a tyrannical drunken asshole. I like things a certain way. I want my mis en place to be perfectly prepared. I don’t want to be interrupted while I’m with the guests by a retarded house cat asking me, “What’s in a gin and tonic?” I hate waiters. God help the one who steps behind my bar, especially if I’m busy. God help the one who orders seven margaritas and then tells me, “Oh, I didn’t want those blended.” It’s really easy to see why the kitchen staff is always on the verge of locking one of these little plate-chasing bastards in the freezer for the night.
My cocktail staff is different, however. These are professional beverage servers. They are used to dealing with drunks day in and day out, and making top dollar off it as well. They do tend to be a bit screwier as human beings, but that’s easily ignored when watching a twenty-two year-old girl who barely tops five feet berating a drunken football player to the point of tears because he just grabbed her ass. I respect these girls. They’re exceptionally tough, and the ones who aren’t don’t make it through the first week. Alcohol always puts the drinker right on the line between sex and violence. These girls realize that and always defuse a situation before it happens. There is no way I could be them and do their jobs. The first idiot who asked for a body shot would get punched.
Of course, the minute we’re off work we’re all human beings again, even the waiters. We sit at our own bar and get drunk together; kitchen, floor, and bar. We’re work friends, and sometimes a lot more. Restaurant industry workers are sexually notorious: usually someone is sleeping with or dating someone else on the staff or in another restaurant. We have to; no one else works our hours. It’s almost impossible to date someone with a day job when we work weekends and don’t get off until three a.m.
The cable channel with all the food shows should do one about us; burn scars, glass cuts, dirty clothes, impossible personalities, drunken coke binges, promiscuity and all. It wouldn’t be pretty, but I guarantee you it would be no fraud. Or better than that: give us Giada for a week. Put her in our kitchen and lives and film it. That would be total entertainment. Seeing her wasted at five o’clock in the morning in the back booth of a speakeasy while a nineteen year-old busboy does a line off her neck would completely humanize her. I can only imagine she would be the most famous television chef of all after that. Imagine her memoirs then.
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