line cooks are madmen

bourbonsamurai

musicians are certainly wild people.  some of the craziest bastards i've ever know are musicians.  but truly, the craziest fuckers on earth are line cooks.  as many of you know, i work in a fairly busy entertainment district, and i know plenty of both, but man, the cooks i know make Motley Crue look like children.  it's true.  any of y'all have any experience with kitchen people?

inmyhands

Those folks scare me. I'll eat a badly cooked steak rather than send it back because the second offering may contain hidden ingredients I'd rather not contemplate.  

I wouldn't put anything past those folks.

bourbonsamurai

inmyhands said:

Those folks scare me. I'll eat a badly cooked steak rather than send it back because the second offering may contain hidden ingredients I'd rather not contemplate.  

I wouldn't put anything past those folks.

to clarify:  i'm not talking about Waffle House, although i think short order is its own kind of wild and awesome.  i'm talking about the folks in the kitchen brigade, that are cranking out 200 covers of salmon benedict on a sunday, hungover.  or the lunatics throwing scallops at the expo and servers at Delmonico on a Saturday night.  fine dining is two worlds, the polite front of house, and the terrordome behind the swinging doors!

bourbonsamurai

when i tell you they are crazy, i mean CRAZY.  a few years ago, a friend of mine had a heart attack on the line, checked himself out of the hospital ama, and went back to work and finished his shift.

Stitsel

You ever hung out with loggers, or fishermen?

LerxstFan

I used to go to a really crappy dive for breakfast Sunday Mornings when I was stationed in Monterey in the 80's that had a punk rocker line cook. Purple mohawk, dog collar with chains and tons of tatoos and piercings. It was a total dive, but that guy made the best breakfast for hangovers on the planet. I would order a "hangover breakfast" and he would cook something with eggs and hashbrowns and other stuff. I lived on that guys food. If I walked in and he wasn't cooking, I would leave. 

bourbonsamurai

Stitsel said:

You ever hung out with loggers, or fishermen?

plenty of fishermen and shrimpers, no loggers.  oilfield workers are crazy too, but they have to behave for two weeks at a time.  lol

inmyhands

While those of us working for utilities are virtual saints. 

Dinosaur David B

inmyhands said:

While those of us working for utilities are virtual saints. 

Life is Sector 7G 

bourbonsamurai

LerxstFan said:

I used to go to a really crappy dive for breakfast Sunday Mornings when I was stationed in Monterey in the 80's that had a punk rocker line cook. Purple mohawk, dog collar with chains and tons of tatoos and piercings. It was a total dive, but that guy made the best breakfast for hangovers on the planet. I would order a "hangover breakfast" and he would cook something with eggs and hashbrowns and other stuff. I lived on that guys food. If I walked in and he wasn't cooking, I would leave. 

one of my places used to get ripped off every three months or so by the cooks.  they'd gotten close to the manager, knew her routine, etc.  they'd carefully clock when she was numb from adderal, or lost in video poker land, and rob the office.  mgr was so lost in space, she never figured out who was doing it, or simply didn't care.  when we removed her, and beefed up security procedures, they got so pissed off, they tried to burn the place down.  they almost succeeded, too.  it was a two alarm fire, and we had to close for six months to renovate.  wild times in New Orleans.  lol  i knew another cook that robbed a restaurant for over $20k by hiding in the air conditioning duct until the place was closed.  all these dudes cooked their asses off, too.  lol

LerxstFan

Line cooks are like meth addicts. You cannot ever tell what they will do next, only that if you try to thwart them, it will be a fight. 

bourbonsamurai

LerxstFan said:

Line cooks are like meth addicts. You cannot ever tell what they will do next, only that if you try to thwart them, it will be a fight. 

professional cooking, especially fine dining, requires a weekly time committment that is unfathomable to most humans, if one ever wishes to advance their career.  the pressure placed on even a dishwasher, is simply extraordinary.  it attracts unique personalities for this reason.  you want a job in IT, learn to code, and you can get a job.  you want a job in the oilfield, if you're built for it, and can control yourself when you're not at work for 2 weeks at a time, you can probably get it done.  the ladder to a sustainable career for line cooks is incredibly steep.  there's no quarter offered, and none given.  the kitchen is one of the last truly unforgiving, merciless professional environments left.

eduardoritos

My older brother.
Dangerous, for others and himself. 

bourbonsamurai

eduardoritos said:

My older brother.
Dangerous, for others and himself. 

i know many that fit this description. some cooks are hard to know, and even harder to be around.  me, i tend to seek those sort of individuals out for companionship.  i'm not particularly extreme, in the context of the 50-70 hr per week life of a food and beverage career professional, but i know some really wild people.  as i mentioned earlier, the sole criteria in the kitchen that matters is, can you maintain the standard, day after day?  if you can do that, nobody that matters in the industry can get in your way.  i know a lot of highly functional psychopaths.  lol

Divasaurus

I actually fucking love line cooks a TON.  It's a value system thing for me personally.  Have a lot of friends to this day in the industry, and I love them, their insane driven way of life, and of course it was all about surplus.  Meaning shit you could STEAL so way back in the day in a galaxy far far away they were some of my favorite types of people to "date."  I also personally love to cook a lot so there were a lot of perks that came along with em, no less how to shop for produce better, I learned all the knife technique I have now from three of em, and at that point in my life the schedule thing where what I was up to and what they were up to was kind of perfect, one of my side gigs didn't get out til 8am three days a week, and it meant a lot of surplus, free shit and a lot of really great times,  and of course the best thing bout line cooks is that they'll teach you how to get out of a place faster than any door person or bouncer I ever worked with in clubs.