Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney Read Free Book Online

since his arrival here about six months ago, he’s shownan incredible amount of development. He truly wants to be here, almost
needs
to be here, and he tries very hard to be as good a cook as he can be. His manner is decorous, his station is spotless, he strives to impress, he is diametrically opposed to sloth, and he
hates
failure. The cooks call him Juan. Chef Juan, Don Juan, Juanita, Juan Gabriel, etcetera. It started with a general unfamiliarity with the name Warren—Kiko just thought the guy’s name was Juan. But now, though the misunderstanding has long been ironed out, everyone continues to call him that, even the white guys. They’re just razzing him, of course, but Warren’s really bugged by it.
    Unlike Warren, Vinny or VinDog, our meat entremet, could not care less what people think of him. A brick shit-house with beefy arms and a bad attitude, VinDog is animated always by some urgent, unquenched irreverence. His neck is tattooed, his face is pierced, and something resembling a Mohawk has been sawn into his head. At first glance, he’s not what you’d expect to find lurking in the wings of a star-rated restaurant.
    Nor does he appear to be here because he needs to be. He doesn’t need a restaurant to line his pockets or fill his spirit—he’s happy to get his share by hook or crook. But apparently he prefers cooking to, say, working construction or collecting trash. So about a year ago, when Chef offered to extricate him from a bar-backing gig in Alphabet City, VinDog saw fit to seize the opportunity. Had things gone differently, you’d probably find him slapping up Sheetrock in Chinatown or circling the drain somewhere in Bushwick. It’s questionable, actually, if his real name is even Vinny.
    But VinDog exemplifies a fairly common contradiction. Beneath the ragamuffin façade is an intelligent, curious, resourceful person, almost custom-made for the kitchen. He takes hard work like water off a duck’s back and he never stops asking questions until he gets the answers he needs. While his street clothes may be dirty, his work is always clean; while his appearance may be suspect, his cook’s chops are nonpareil. That he owes his skill-set entirely to Chef’s mentoring is undoubted, but that he is able to survive in this environment speaks to his own adaptability and to that of the kitchen as well.
    Below Warren and VinDog is Catalina, our garde manger. Garde mangers are the salad cooks, the appetizer specialists. They are usually entry-level line cooks, working out of a satellite station alongside pastry on the cold side. They prepare mostly small cold items such as hors d’oeuvres,
amuse-bouches
, and salads, with occasional responsibility for desserts. They have less seniority than the cooks on the hot side, but they almost always outrank the guys back in prep. They
do
work the line, as it were, which is always a source of pride and some variety of authority in the kitchen hierarchy.
    Five-two, buck-eighty, gold-toothed, and bangle-wristed, Catalina assumes all the authority she can muster. She epitomizes the hard-nosed constitution for which Mexican women are famous. She has come to be a sort of matriarch in our operation and, as is to be expected, she tackles her motherly duties vigorously. After her day off, she’ll return to work with a stack of tortillas, a wheel of
queso fresco
, and a bushel of tomatillos and prepare
flautas con salsa verde
for the entire kitchen team. When someoneburns or cuts himself, she is the first to arrive on the scene with ground pepper and tomato, to stop the bleeding, disinfect, and numb the pain. And on the unlikely occasion that a rodent should venture into the kitchen, she’ll make quick work of taking it down—often grabbing it with her bare hands, muffling it up in a to-go bag, dispatching it with a whack or two on the ground, and pitching it into the dumpster out back of the loading dock.
    Catalina is
esposa
to the A.M. prep cook, Rogelio;
tía
to the P.M.