Kitchen Confidential

Cooks Rule.

I'll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualtiesover over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost.

But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

A few months back, in a moment of admittedly misguided solidarity with my heavily decorated kitchen crew, I got a tattoo, a reasonably tasteful headhunter's band around my upper arm. Nancy, however, was on record as finding skin art about as attractive as ringworm; she took it, not unreasonably, as a personal affront. She was mightily pissed off, and still is, for that matter . . . but she still wakes up next to me every morning, laughs at my jokes on occasion, and helpfully points out when I'm being an asshole.

The brilliant Dimitri has been out of the life for years - and doesn't return my phone calls. I don't recall doing anything too bad to Dimitri, other than dragging him to New York. But I suspect he doesn't want to get tempted should I call with an unusual offer. 'Hey, Dimitri! This gig would be perfect for you! It'll be just like old times.' They make movies about that, the old bank robbers getting together for one final score. Dimitri knows better than that. He must.

Though I've spent half my life watching people, guiding them, trying to anticipate their moods, motivations and actions, running from them, manipulating and being manipulated by them, they remain a mystery to me. People confuse me.

Food doesn't. I know what I'm looking at when I see a perfect loin of number one tuna. I can understand why millions of Japanese are driven to near blood lust by the firm, almost iridescent flesh. I get why my boss grows teary-eyed when he sees a flawlessly executed choucroute garnie. Color, flavor, texture, composition . . . and personal history. Who knows what circumstances, what events in his long ago past so inspire this rare display of emotion? And who needs to know? I just know what I see. And I understand it. It makes perfect sense.

I don't know who said that every man, at fifty, gets the face they deserve, but I certainly got the hands I deserve. And I've got a few years to go yet.

There's a raised semi-circular scar on the left palm where I had a close encounter with the jagged edge of a can of Dijon mustard. Almost passed out from that one - that terrible few seconds before the blood came, me looking at my injured paw and it not looking like my hand at all, just some terribly violated slab of very pale meat. When the blood came it was almost a relief.

There are some centimeter-long ridges in the webbing of my left hand, between thumb and forefinger, from the Dreadnaught, when I would regularly lose control of the oyster knife, the dull blade hopping out of or breaking through the shell to bury itself in my hand. The knuckle wounds are so numerous, and have been opened and reopened so frequently, that I can no longer recall, in the layer upon layer of white scar tissue, where or when I got any of them. I know that one of them is the result of boiling duck fat at the Supper Club, but other insults to the flesh have come and gone; it's like the layers of an ancient city now, evidence of one kitchen after another piled up on top of each other. The middle finger of my left hand, at the first joint, where the finger guides the knife blade, has been nicked so many times it's a raised hump of dead flesh, which tends to get in the way of the blade if I'm whacking vegetables in a hurry. I have to be careful. My fingerprints are stained with beet juice (hot borscht as soupe du jour yesterday), and if I hold my fingers to my nose, I can still smell smoked salmon, chopped shallots and a hint of Morbier rind.

There are some recent scrapes and tiny punctures, a few little dings here and there on the backs of my hands - the result of rummaging at high speed through crowded reach-in boxes, hauling milk crates filled with meat upstairs, busting open boxes and counting cans on Saturday inventory - and a few shiny spots where I must have spattered myself with hot oil or simply grabbed a pot handle or pair of kitchen tongs that was too hot. My nails, such as they are - I gnaw them in the taxi home from work - are filthy; there's dried animal blood under the cuticles, and crushed black pepper, beef fat and sea salt. A large black bruise under the left thumbnail is working its way slowly out over time; it looks as though I've dipped the thumb in India ink. There's a beveled-off fingertip on the left; I lopped off that fingertip while trying to cut poblano peppers many years back. Jesus, I remember that one: the face on the emergency room intern as he crunched the curved sewing needle right through the nail, trying vainly to re-attach a flap of skin that was clearly destined to become necrotic and fall off. I remember looking up at him as I twisted and writhed on the table, hoping to see the cool, calm, somehow reassuring expression of a Marcus Welby looking back at me. Instead, I saw the face of an overextended fry cook - a kid, really - and he looked pained, even grossed-out as he pulled through another loop of filament.

I got, finally, the hands I always wanted. Hands just like the ones Tyrone taunted me with all those years ago. Okay, there are no huge water-filled blisters - not this weekend anyway. But the scars are there, and as I lie in bed, I take stock of my extremities, idly examining the burns, old and new, checking the condition of my calluses, noting with some unhappiness the effects of age and hot metal.

At the base of my right forefinger is an inch-and-a-half diagonal callus, yellowish-brown in color, where the heels of all the knives I've ever owned have rested, the skin softened by constant immersions in water. I'm proud of this one. It distinguishes me immediately as a cook, as someone who's been on the job for a long time. You can feel it when you shake my hand, just as I feel it on others of my profession. It's a secret sign, sort of a Masonic handshake without the silliness, a way that we in the life recognize one another, the thickness and roughness of that piece of flesh, a resume of sorts, telling others how long and how hard it's been. My pinky finger on the same hand is permanently deformed, twisted and bent at the tip - a result of poor whisk handling. Making hollandaise and bearnaise every day for Bigfoot,I'd keep the whisk handle between pinky and third finger, and apparently the little finger slipped out of joint unnoticed and was allowed to build up calcium deposits, until it became what it is today, freakish-looking and arthritic.

12. Think about that resume! How will it look to the chef weeding through a stack of faxes if you've never worked in one place longer than six months? If the years '95 to '97 are unaccounted for? If you worked as sandwich chef at happy Malone's Cheerful Chicken, maybe you shouldn't mention that. And please, if you appeared as 'Bud' in a daytime soap opera, played the Narrator in a summer stock production of 'Our Town', leave it off the resume. Nobody cares - except the chef, who won't be hiring anyone with delusions of thespian greatness. Under 'Reasons for Leaving Last Job', never give the real reason, unless it's money or ambition.

13. Read! Read cookbooks, trade magazines - I recommend Food Arts, Saveur, Restaurant Business magazines. They are useful for staying abreast of industry trends, and for pinching recipes and concepts. Some awareness of the history of your business is useful, too. It allows you to put your own miserable circumstances in perspective when you've examined and appreciated the full sweep of culinary history. Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Read the old masters: Escoffier, Bocuse et al as well as the Young Turks: Keller, Marco-Pierre White, and more recent generations of innovators and craftsmen.

14. Have a sense of humor about things. You'll need it.