On Food Service

♠

When I was thirteen, I lied about my age and got my first job in food service. I was working at a food stand, making the sort of wage you’d expect from a man who would hire a thirteen-year-old girl to work twelve-hour days. It was a shitty job, I gave up all my weekends to do it, it was hardly glamorous, but I loved it. It was my own little world, away from my family and friends, where I could be someone entirely different.

One day I came to work to find the usual morning chaos compounded by the disappearance of the manager, Greg. The owner, who I had only met once, was completely uninvolved in the operation of our petty stand, and so the manager, the only person involved in this sad affair who could even loosely be termed an adult, was our de facto authority. And now he was gone, and my sixteen year old co-worker came up to me and said, “Figure out how to run this place, I have to go upstairs and hide Greg’s drugs so he doesn’t get arrested when the shit hits the fan.” So he hid the myriad illegal substances in our manager’s upstairs apartment while I opened the safe (Greg, that idiot, had told me the combination), dealt out change and organized the grumbling staff and called hospitals to see if Greg was dead yet, or if we would see him later on the nightly news. We found out much later that he had gone on an ill-fated acid trip, somehow made it to New York, and decided to stay there. We learned this from the owner when he showed up three months later, finally cognizant that three kids, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, had been placing orders, hiring and firing, depositing cash, writing checks, and generally running the show at his little side venture. We were all fired, but it didn’t matter. I was in love with food service.

I went on to have a lot of jobs in the service industry, as it is called. I was a manager at a café in high school, taking the bus to work after class and working insane hours, sometimes closing the place at one AM only to re-open it five hours later. My co-workers, who became my closest friends, threw me a kegger for my sweet sixteen, and one night, when I fell asleep reading a textbook during a break, my co-worker stayed hours after his shift to finish my work, waking me only when it was time to go home. Around this time, I was pressured into applying for college. “After all,” friends and family told me, “you don’t want to work at a restaurant your whole life.” But it didn’t sound that bad to me. Why shouldn’t I work at a restaurant my whole life? Those were communities that accepted me and took care of me, that understood my anger and misanthropy and disenchantment with the established social order. My restaurant friends were artists and writers and philosophers, and they had adventures and moved a lot and worked hard and drank hard and loved and lost and left. That was what I wanted.

But I went to college. During this time, I worked as a waitress, a caterer, a pizza delivery girl, and a bartender. Delivering pizzas remains, to this day, my all-time favorite job. I would sit in the pizza joint, a dive, and talk to my strange co-workers, nearly all locals from that small, rural New York town. Then I would drive around the countryside for hours, smoking cigarettes and listening to NPR, peering into the houses and lives of hundreds of people. I learned some important lessons from that job, lessons that I still hold dear, including: poor people tip well, and rich people don’t; dogs are scary and not to be trusted; black olives make cheese slide off a crust; never accept a slice of pizza from a drunk man; and, most importantly, do not judge a person by their house. My favorite customers lived in a rundown shack in the middle of a junkyard. They always invited me in for a slice (always declined), always told me how their boy was doing at school (great) and always tipped well. My least favorite customers lived in what could be called an estate, were always rude, and once asked me to take off my shoes so that I would be clean enough to deposit their food in the room of their choosing while they talked to guests. I also declined that offer, hard as it was to turn down.

In any case, I left that job, and many others. I eventually graduated and somehow ended up on the West Coast, waitressing and bartending once again. At this point in my life, my love affair with the service industry had begun to wane, as I was tired of waiting tables with its attendant misogyny, hypocrisy, and general disrespect. Fortunately, being part of another close-knit restaurant community, I was saved by a group of chefs who made me a cook, despite lack of experience and a hesitancy to turn in my cocktail dress for a sweaty chef’s uniform. They taught me to cook professionally through a mixture of compliments and threats, encouragement and rage. They would set me to horrible, backbreaking tasks, like cleaning artichokes for hours on end. They would laugh as they walked by me and saw my hands turning black and starting to bleed (artichokes are a treacherous, evil vegetable). But then the sous-chef would say, “These are chef’s hands!” and slip me a shot of whiskey in an eggshell. I was in love all over again.

When that restaurant closed, my heart was broken, and I moved. In my new city, I couldn’t find work as a cook. I was a stranger coming from the West Coast, with limited experience and even less self-confidence. Eventually, an old chef-boss of mine called me and told me he had found me a job as a baker. I should say here that while working for this chef, I once dropped a wedding cake. At the wedding. I’m still not entirely sure what happened but I picked it up and the next thing I knew it was on the floor, a crumpled pile of icing and cake. The chef heard my scream and came in and immediately dropped to his knees, holding his face in his hands and moaning, “How? How?” “I don’t know, I don’t know!” I shrieked. If you have ever seen a six-foot-five man covered in tattoos and dripping with an intrinsic sense of his own bad-assedness drop to the floor like a broken child, you would understand what I mean when I say that I thought this was the end. The end of what, I’m not sure, but that’s how it felt. I didn’t even realize that I was crying until he said, “Go pull yourself together. There’s no crying in cooking!” So I washed the tears off my face while he pieced the cake back together, and gave him the icing I pulled off my hands while he smoothed it back over the cake. We covered it in berries and fresh flowers and hid the hole in the middle under the other layers. The happy couple thanked us for making their wedding beautiful. That night, instead of firing me, he took me out for a drink. “Never lose control,” he told me. “It has nothing to do with the food, it’s about you staying in control, finding another way to make it work.” The last words he said to me were, “I won’t tell them about your history with cakes.”

So I became a baker. I don’t know why these women took a chance on me, but they did when no one else would. They made me part of yet another community of musicians and artists and writers, baking their way through the day and struggling through the night. I would like to say that I am content with my decisions and sure of what I am doing, but that’s not the case. There is always the nagging worry that I am wasting my time doing something unimportant, or more honestly, unimpressive. I hear the subtle condescension that creeps into even my closest friends’ voices when they talk about the day I get “a real job.” And I worry about not having health insurance and moan about working through weekends. But I can’t yet bring myself to leave the world of food service behind, not for the cold comfort of a cubicle and an official nod from the bourgeois sanctioning board. It has been ten years since my days at the shitty food stand, an entire decade that took me from childhood to maturity. The service industry has been the stage on which I have made most of my important decisions, informing my development at every turn, and I am happy with what it made me. It has taught me to take pride in my work, whatever it is. Waitressing forced me to shed my shyness and cooking taught me resilience. Delivering pizzas made me more open-minded about the people I meet and baking has brought me the patience I have always struggled for. And my co-workers, throughout, have taught me to be professional, conscientious, hardworking and committed to something larger than myself. I still need all of these lessons.

Brillat-Savarin, the original food writer, once said, “The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and every day; they go hand in hand with our other pleasures, outlast them, and remain to console us from their loss.” I have made a lot of bad decisions during these ten long years, lost a lot of opportunities and gained others. Throughout, the service industry has provided me with income and friends when I probably deserved neither. It has allowed me to work hard and drink hard and love and lose and leave, just like I wanted. It has been my consolation. But I still keep one eye out for publishing job openings. Sadly, I don’t want to work in restaurants my whole life.

—CEP

ESSAIS