I've heard it said that working in a
kitchen is nothing more than a 24/7 dick-measuring competition. I
cannot think of anything that could be both more accurate and more
wrong, all at the same time. Kitchen work is a survival of the
fittest sort of thing. And I mean that in a very literal sense. You
very rarely see people who have a similar body type as the customers
standing next to the grill all night. And if that does wind up
occurring, they either quit or sweat it off pretty quickly. Spending
forty plus hours a week in that sort of environment is a challenge
that many people are not up to. Forgive me if this gives those of us
who can do it, sometimes well, a bit of an ego to match the callouses
on our knife and saute hands. There is a continual showing off aspect
to the whole thing, a bit of stage show provided, not for the
customers, who will never be allowed near the whole lurid spectacle
of professional food preparation if management has any idea what is
good for them, but for one's co-workers. The basic premise of the
enterprise is that, as kitchen work is not an office job, the goal
should be to commit some sort of act that would get one fired from
any self-respecting office at minimum once per hour. Working through
hangovers, or while in the bag or on most any ingestible substance,
is the mark of the line cook. If you manage to somehow (Probably
through some sort of misunderstanding or trickery) find yourself in a
stable relationship, you have committed a minor sin. Not vomiting
over the railing of the deck to close the night because you wish to
spend time in the company of said other may up the deal to felony
level. Why would you want to go home for sex when the waitstaff is in
such close proximity? In short, it is all about the Three B's: Booze,
bluster and bullshit. And it is wonderful.
Now, make no mistake, there is no
actual dick-measuring competition going on back where your food is
prepared. For one thing, there is little use for a ruler in a
kitchen, and kitchens tend to get trimmed down to the essentials.
This would leave any sort of serious contest woefully imprecise. But
more importantly, unless you're running El Bulli, there is likely a
limited amount of space in the back of house (If you are running El
Bulli, the extra space is probably filled with unpaid interns.
Perhaps stacked). To have a dick-measuring competition would likely
mean having to wash your cutting board, and given the usual state of
affairs in the dish pit, it's almost always best to simply keep it
zipped up unless/until the new host walks by. Instead of taking a
physical form, this leaves the favored game as verbal abuse.
There are rules to this sort of thing,
but they vary from kitchen to kitchen depending on the backgrounds of
the crew contained therein. The general policy is that if you think
you can say it without getting stabbed, it will be coming out of your
mouth. Sometimes even these remarks get uttered if it seems likely
that their emittance will remain unpunished. If you ask anyone in a
kitchen about this atmosphere, they will tell you they're just
busting someone's balls. Nothing more to it than that. But this is
incorrect. You see, there is an eventual goal to this eternal show of
machismo. What everyone is trying to do back there is to be the one
who pushes a fellow employee over the edge, dropping the final insult
on some poor bastard who didn't have the intelligence or opportunity
to choose a career path better-suited for his particular temperament.
This goal remains unacknowledged, as talking with your co-workers
about your continual attempts to get them to kill themselves would
probably put a damper on the sort of camaraderie needed to get
through a busy Saturday night. Yet it still exists. And the
undiscussed reward is just as widely known as the contest itself: The
winner gets eternal free drinks from the remainder of the staff. To
help him forget.
