Thoughts About My Potential Food Job

As most people who read this already know, there's a very good chance I'll be going to culinary arts school sometime within the next nine to twelve months. I've been looking at a few facilities--I saw Johnson & Whales in Charlotte, I'm heading up to CIA next week--and yesterday I visited the French Culinary Institute here in New York.

I have been unwavering in my conviction that the kitchen is where I want to be. I had worked in the kitchen of an Upper East Side restaurant while I was in college, and over the past five years in book publishing, my fondness for that restaurant job has developed exponentially. And moreover, I'm ready to try out something a little bit more unconventional (read: not taking the subway when everyone else does) that won't have me installed in front of a computer all day long. When someone a few months ago--tired, surely, of still listening to me complain about work--asked me what I would do if I could be getting paid to do anything, I said I'd probably spend my day exactly as I did every day while in Paris for a month: the morning shopping for food and the evening cooking it. With that I decided to pursue a food career, and I've allowed myself to completely embrace the nostalgia. I want to be on my feet again, peeling potatoes, skimming vats of stock, whizzing up tomato sauces with one of those enormous hand blender things, pressing chicken livers through a chinois, chopping up sidewalk-square sized blocks of chocolate, and the whole while losing all perspective when it comes to butter, salt, and sugar. I'd been carrying on like this for a few months now, and have even had many dreams about food.

I spent summers in high school and college working at a bread bakery, and bread bakeries always smell phenomenally delicious. But it's a funny thing about the smell of an industrial kitchen: they don't ever smell very good. On the line (basically where all the food is plated and cooked before taken out to the table) the only thing you smell is meat and oil--the floors and counters are danger zones because it's so slick. But in the prep station (where the vegetables are chopped and dressings and sauces made and the meats and seafood trimmed and cleaned; the above photo is extremely atypical) which is where I worked, it smells like ass. The trash can overpowers everything, and no amount of bleach can conceal the odor. So you have the wonderful, aromatic combination of ass and bleach and, because of the near Universal Rule of Bad Ventilation that the prep areas of kitchens adhere to and the constant 120-degree heat due to the boiler just ten feet away, a lot of heat (which I associate with the smell; it's weird), and there is on top of it all the sweaty, chemical, fumey vapor that comes from the dishwasher. I won't belabor the point here, but that toxic brew is like nothing I have ever smelled before, and with all my recent Proust-meet-madeleine romancing of the kitchen, I have until now managed to block it from my memory.

Until yesterday. Part of my tour of the FCI campus included a walk through the restuarant kitchen, which is part of the school's restaurant, L'Ecole. I had seen all of the four classroom-kitchens, which are sleek and beautiful and fully equipped and which look like the kind of place where I'd have my dream birthday party. But then my guide and I came through the swinging rubber doors of the L'Ecole kitchen and came face to face with That Smell. It was paralyzing. I was introduced to the chef, but I couldn't manage any coherent responses to his jokes about me being from Idaho because That Smell was gripping at my throat and telling me that I'd best run for my life. That Smell was screaming into my ear: Long hours and weekends! Cleaning 150 pounds of squid at a time (serious: I would have to do this at least once a week)! Organizing the walk-in refrigerator! Belittling waiters! Scary chef tirades! The sickness that is what your shoes become! Merengue!

I managed to calm myself down, and we didn't stay long in that kitchen, but I couldn't leave without a detectable tinge of unease about the whole thing. As in: Do I . . .? Really . . .? Want . . .? To do this?

Right now I'm going to say yes. Because I'm beginning to finally understand that all jobs suck a little bit, and if they don't suck, I will find something sucky about them. AND: I love food. I really do. And I want to be great with food. And I know getting older that being great at something requires more than just fervent admiration. So kids, Lukas is going to get his hands dirty. Boner appetit!