The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…
Bushmills or Jameson, Celtics or Rangers, don’t mean a thing here. This is a nondenominational Irish bar. No difference, no raised eyebrows. Few Irish, now that I think about it. And the Guinness, of course, blows.
The owner’s got ten or twelve of these bars and they all look the same and they all have names like Paddy McGee’s or Seamus O’Doul’s or Molly whatever—none of whom exist or ever existed.
But I am happy here just the same.
Among the pool table, the jukebox, the inevitable dartboard, the moosehead, toy trains, Yankee banners, the photos of Irish authors who never came here and whom nobody here ever read. You want to talk Joyce or Behan? A Yeats’s bust may sit dust-covered on a shelf, but start spouting lines from The Second Coming and you can just fuck off down the street, ya prat.
Who drinks here?
Office workers, jackets off, tie still on—or the reverse: jacket on, tie off. Restaurant help, nipping out for a drink, coming off a shift, fortifying themselves for the shift to come. Beaten down by life. Not broken, mind you, not beaten down like a coal miner or an out-of-work steel worker—just…dissatisfied with the way things have turned out. Not quite ready to go home just yet. Picture just a little too clear to get on the train at this precise moment. Better, it has been decided, to fuzz things a little around the edges before moving back into their other lives.
I feel right at home here—until Gnarls Barclay’s “Crazy” comes on the sound system, which brings me right back to Beirut—as it always does—and I’m pretty sure nobody else at this bar is feeling the same way I am right now. Not like I’m talking post-traumatic stress or anything, I mean it wasn’t that bad (for me), I mean a sudden sadness, a sense, an awareness of dislocation…that image of a Mediterranean, European, Arab city on the sea…rockets coming in from the horizon, floating lazily above the airport, then dropping with a delayed bang. The smell of burning jet fuel. More than anything else, the song makes me feel separated from what might, in another life, ten years ago, have otherwise been my drinking buddies at the bar.
I’ll never be a regular at this bar. Or any bar. Not even a “writers’ bar.” If you’ve ever even spent ten minutes in one of those—a bunch of bitter, snowy-haired, bilious fucks with gin-blossomed noses and ballooning guts talking too loud and laughing too hard and secretly hating each other—you’ll reconsider ever putting another word to paper. As much as I admire the work of good writers, I’ve found that hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown into a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.
“You’re not a chef,” says the kid at the bar—another bar, a “chefs’ bar,” this time, late at night. I’m probably on a book tour and out for drinks with the kitchen crew from my hotel. Is it Portland? Seattle? Vancouver? Who remembers?
“You’re not a chef!” he repeats, giving me the stink-eye, unsteady on his feet. “You don’t even cook!”
The others with me, fresh off a long shift in the kitchen, shrink back a little, uncomfortable with the situation. They like me fine. I did write Kitchen Confidential, after all, but let’s face it, the kid is right.
He’s drunk and he’s angry and, like a lot of people who own well-thumbed, food-splattered, water-damaged copies of that book—or who’ve borrowed a copy from the guy who works next to them—he feels betrayed. I’m a heretic now, having abandoned him and everyone like him, repudiated the One True Church of the Working Cook.
Look at me and my nice fucking jacket, standing there all famous and shit.
“Fuck you,” he says. “You don’t even cook. You’re not one of us anymore.” Far from being offended (though I am hurt), I want to give him a big hug. Another drink or two and I just might.
I don’t cook. I’m not a chef. The chefs and cooks who are better than I used to be—better than I ever was—they know this and don’t need to say it. They certainly don’t need to say it to my face, like this kid, pressing me up against the bar now with the force of his rage and hurt. He will channel these feelings, appropriately, into a demand that I do a shot of tequila with him. Or two.
Which is a relatively friendly and diplomatic solution to an awkward situation.
It’s the guys who are most like me who feel most disappointed in me. The hackers, the wake-up-every-fucking-day-and-drag-your-ass-into-pretty-much-one-place-same-as-the-other-to-make-food-youdon’t-particularly-like-for-people-you-like-even-less. The ones who smell of fryer grease and burned salmon fat.
When I decline the offer of a third shot, he will at least have had the satisfaction of proving me a pussy. Which will be a victory of sorts.
And when, eventually, he sags to the side in his booth, his comrades in arms looking on tolerantly, and slips into unconsciousness, I will still be thinking about what he said, that he was right.
So You Wanna Be a Chef
I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school. I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.
But the short answer is “no.”
Let me save you some money. I was in the restaurant business for twenty-eight years—much of that time as an employer. I am myself a graduate of the finest and most expensive culinary school in the country, the CIA, and am as well a frequent visitor and speaker at other culinary schools. Over the last nine years, I have met and heard from many culinary students on my travels, have watched them encounter triumphs and disappointments. I have seen the dream realized, and—more frequently—I have seen the dream die.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you that culinary school is a bad thing. It surely is not. I’m saying that you, reading this, right now, would probably be ill-advised to attend—and are, in all likelihood, unsuited for The Life in any case. Particularly if you’re any kind of normal.
But let’s say you’re determined. You’re planning on taking out a student loan and taking on a huge amount of debt. In many cases, from lenders associated with—or recommended by—your local culinary school. Ask yourself first: is this culinary school even any good? If you’re not going to the Culinary Institute of America, Johnson and Wales, or the French Culinary Institute, you should investigate this matter even more intently, because the fact is, when you graduate from the Gomer County Technical College of Culinary Arts, nobody hiring in the big leagues is going to give a shit. A degree from the best culinary schools is no guarantee of a good job. A degree from anywhere less than the best schools will probably be less helpful than the work experience you could have had, had you been out there in the industry all that time.