First day on the job

In recent days I've undergone something of a transformation to the extent that I may now be unrecognizable to my friends and family up North. I live in a rundown shotgun-style house for $340/month, wear an oversized black cook's uniform with the nickname "Rhino" printed on the front (borrowed from a former Cochon employee until my set of "Rachel" shirts arrives), carry a machete-like Japanese chef's knife, and ride a blue moped from the '80s.

Saturday was my first official day as a cook at Cochon and a real crash-course on the madness and excitement of working in a professional kitchen. I went in at 3:00pm to set up and do prep work and finished 9 1/2 hours later at 12:30am, the restaurant having done 250 covers in approximately five hours of dinner service. Whew.

Cochon has an open kitchen with a wood-burning oven, a big set of stoves and a deep frier up front where the customers can peer in; this is the front line, where all the appetizers and hot food get prepared and plated. In the back is the back line, invisible to the public, where the prep work and dessert plating gets done and, behind that, the dishwashing area and the walk-in cooler where a huge quantity of raw ingredients and prepared foods occupy a relatively small space.

The prep hours before dinner time have a certain frenetic quality as cooks scramble to set up their stations before the first dinner reservations start trickling in at 5:30pm. For me on that first Saturday, those hours were more of a battle to maintain five fingers on my left hand while I diced thirty pounds of onions. I might have been more optimistic about my chances for success except that the Honduran guys who make up the rank-and-file of the kitchen staff were dropping like flies around me. First Francisco, a fellow onion dicer, cut his finger, then Didier cut his, and then Marvin, a dishwasher, had a sudden allergic reaction that left his face and neck swollen like a latino Elephant Man. I also had a bit of a quality control problem on my hands because my knife skills are weak at best and I hadn't yet bought my own chef's knife so I was using an old dull one from the kitchen stash. Steven, the restaurant owner, a large and softspoken man with a baby face who nonetheless looks like he might kick some ass at any moment, came by and fingered through my pile of ragged and uneven onion chunks, which I'm convinced became more ragged and uneven under his gaze. He then demonstrated on a fresh onion how the pros do it: halve the onion, deft slices in three directions and, bam, perfect dice. If I master just that one skill during my time as a prep cook I will be satisfied.

After onions, it was potatoes, a whole fuckin' lot of them, to be peeled and diced for potato salad. I prepared an enormous pot full and, determined to prove myself as competent as any of the more masculine cooks (I am the only female in the kitchen during the dinner shift), hauled it up front towards the stove where Steven warned me not to hurt myself and then added, somberly, "There really are no heroes." I'd like to attribute this comment as much to Steven's military background as to my own shameless quest for approval but still, it stung, and I sulked unheroically back to my prep station with a slipped disk and a bruised ego.

At 5:30 the guests started trickling in and the kitchen activity began a slow crescendo that would climax around 8:30 when every table in the restaurant was full. Somewhere after 6 o'clock the first dessert orders began to roll in, one of the cooks up front yelled "postre" and handed me a ticket, and I began my routine dance back and forth between the walk-in cooler, the freezer, and the dessert table where I performed the necessary slicing, scooping, and garnishing. On an individual level, dessert plating is a rather quaint task; pop the pineapple upside down cake in the toaster, an artful drizzle of caramel sauce on the plate, a scoop of coconut sherbet on one side, warmed cake on the other, garnish of diced pineapple e voila. When the orders come in rapid succession and each one includes multiple dishes, however, it is a total shit show. Pop the pineapple cake in the toaster, grab the honey chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie and a glass of parfait from the cooler, pull three plates off the pile and get the caramel sauce down, cut slices of the cakes and plate them, get the pear sauce and a drizzle of honey onto the chocolate cake, a slice of lemon onto the pie plate, a dollop of malt cream and a maraschino cherry and a shortbread cookie onto the parfait, pull the coconut sorbet and the ice cream du jour (banana brown butter) and a frozen ice cream bowl from the freezer, get the hot pineapple cake onto the plate, scoop the sorbet and the ice cream, which is so hard it gives me a hernia, garnish of effin' diced pineapple and then I yell "I need a dessert runner please!" and members of the waitstaff come and whisk the desserts into the dining room just as I hear the word "postre" and another ticket lands on my table.

But this postre business is nothing compared to the madness that goes down up front on the line during peak dinner hours, a type of work that requires a level of coordination, focus, and physical stamina not unlike a high impact team sport. Up there, one cook acts as an "expediter", calling orders off the tickets--"fire", as in "fire brisket", means cook and plate right away whereas "on deck" means start the dish but wait to plate--which the cooks then echo back ("fire brisket, rabbit, two catfish, two roasts") in a call-and-response that seems to require a remarkable degree of short-term memory, which then begs the question, Are all cooks geniuses? The cooks fire dishes and plate them and slide them onto the wide counter at the front of the kitchen where the waitstaff runs them to their respective tables. This counter is, to me, a particularly beautiful sight to behold, the plates glistening under the heat lamps in all their porky, deep-fried glory (Cochon's trifecta is the pork product, the deep fry, and the mayonnaise or other unapologetically emulsified sauce).

The night whizzed by in a frenzy of prep work (for example, doing a flour/buttermilk/ breadcrumbs number on an enormous bowl of sliced pigs' ears) and dessert plating, punctuated by some serious eating. Throughout the evening, bits of food kept miraculously making their way back to my station: an incredible appetizer of fried alligator in a remoulade sauce--a reptilian version of the rock shrimp tempura appetizer served at some Japanese restaurants; a chunk of soft-shell crab soaked in a chili butter that tasted like a mild and more nuanced version of buffalo sauce; a plateful of duck cracklin'; an appetizer of grilled shrimp with a pickled tomato relish; a single wood oven-roasted oyster in an anchovy butter sauce; a taste of beef jerky here, a boudin ball there, and on and on, with a plate of crunchy pickled cucumbers providing the only respite from the relentlessly lipidic dishes. I thought surely this omakase special I was enjoying was part of my initial training, a way for me to acquaint myself with the menu before the real work began. But, in fact, I have since been instructed to never eat before work, always arrive starving and it seems as though I am free to order food whenever I please. I fear this nifty arrangement might eventually do the impossible and exhaust my appetite for pork but, for the moment, I am knee-deep in cochon and loving it.

At the end of every night so far a moment has come, almost abruptly, when the madness dies down and the mood in the kitchen relaxes and Steven changes out of his chef's uniform and comes around and passes out cans of PBR. On Saturday, this moment was accompanied by the other cooks discussing their (ambitious, I thought) plans to wake up early and start pounding beers in preparation for the Saints game, a conversation that highlighted my position, being neither a Saints fan nor an early morning beer pounder, as a cultural minority in the Cochon kitchen. For the next hour, we scrub tables and wrap up food and drink our beers and accost the dishwashers with bowls and trays and silverware. Once the doors of the restaurant are locked up for the night, waiters and bartenders congregate on stools at the bar up front and smoke cigarettes and joke loudly. Witnessing this scene feels a little like going backstage at a play and catching the cast out of costume, and it is during these after-hours moments when I am most aware that I have become part of a strange and wonderful restaurant kitchen subculture.