More Stuff Coming

Still alive, but working on a new project that is taking all my time. Oh, I'm still pissed. I think both knees are getting ready to go and other physical problems are starting to worry me as well as the realization that I physically can't keep working double shifts on a line for a whole lot longer. In short, my own mortality is haunting me. Working on finishing up a book and plans for a cookware/wine/food store. I also don't want to keep repeating the same rants over and over.
There are more coming though.

Here's a quick note of a future blog: Notice how freedom of speech is being stamped out? Yep..corporate America has enlisted system draining vermin lawyers to try to shut down blogs.
These fucking scum are destroying the entire world.

Hippity Hop For Jesus

Here's a question. If this "god" is so benevolent, why does Easter Sunday brunch exist? The absolute distillation of the worst Sunday brunch crowd + 40 years. Cute little old ladies with one foot in the grave wearing revoltingly stupid hats. God fearing good Christian/ Catholic men in their best Sunday navy blue suits and ties, doing as they're told so god will keep their little secrets secret so they won't lose their inheritance or their country club golf buddies. My favorite are the bored teenagers who would all rather be getting high away from their families, and then munching out on chocolate later. People over the age of seven saying " Happy Easter". Ever walk into a dining room packed with old ladies in hats? If you close your eyes, you'll think you fell into a barrel of mothballs.
I have to admit, I care less about the food on Easter brunch than even Thanksgiving, but not less than Valentine's day. . The whole point of these traditional torture sessions is to mollify the traditional masses and slop it out we will. Half the portion, twice the price, ahhhh there's IS something redeeming in these swill fests.
Here's a link that expresses what I wish all Valentiners and Easter brunchers would make tradition. You might have to scroll down a bit.....you'll know the one.

http://suicidegirls.com/girls/Felony/

Good Cop/Bad Cop

My Sous Chef of many years has moved to New York. I can't blame him as New York is the greatest dining city in the world. Paris you argue? Try getting 2 with chili, cheese and kraut and a Yoo-Hoo by the Thames . It ain't gonna happen Gus. He did his job above and beyond and always will. His talents will be missed and I wish him all the best. He was one of the "1 in50." Anyway this blog is about the unsung heroes of the restaurant kitchen. The Sous-Chef. For those of you lucky enough not to be raised by this business, the Sous Chef is the Chef's deputy. His right hand man. His lieutenant and nine times out of ten, his confidant. He executes the Chef's words and gets them into action at whatever the cost to himself or others. He will work circles around anybody on any station, better, faster and only thinking about what's next. The good ones anyway.
Just starting in my kitchen? I'm not gonna talk to you. Who's this piss ant? Not until you prove yourself. Nope, my Sous Chef will handle that. If you don't like how he talks to you, fuck off and die. He hurt your feelings? Good. I want him to. Who do you think you are? An individual? Oh please...you're either a asset or a liability to the pursuit of cuisine and if you have thin skin, you're a liability. I love hearing cooks whine about the Sous Chef. Awww....can you do as much as fast without question? Stop bitching about people with commitment, principles and pride.
The best one also possess the all important quality of clairvoyance. They know what you want before you ask for it. They finish your sentences and don't say.." You didn't say to..." I know. I thought it. I spoke to a colleague of mine who said he has to let the Sous Chef go because he's been there for 7 months and he can't finish his sentences yet. My question is, what took so long?
Bear this in mind when you want to cry about the Sous Chef. He's the barrier between you and me. You think he's an asshole? You haven't even seen shit. He's actually the good cop. Doesn't seem like it does it? My Sous Chefs operate at a consistent level of aggression. I operate at two levels; Controlled chaos and absolute psychotic rage . When I'm that pissed, I feel like killing you. I'm not joking.
Good Sous Chefs don't drop the ball. They don't question what you want, they just do it. They get it done. I am grateful to all my Sous Chefs over the years. They're all mean, rude, hyper and don't give a fuck about anything but the job to be done. I'd love to see them all get together and kick the shit out of Norman Rockwell.
You guys fucking rock. Keep up the good work and remember, if everyone hates you, you must be doing something right.

May The Force Not Be With You

Hey here's a question that's been driving me nuts for about 10 years. Where the fuck is the work force? I'm serious. Have you seen the uncaring lot of cooks being pumped out? I mean what the fuck man? I'm sure this apathetic approach to what lazy, non ambitious people call "pointless careerism" ( like there's some stigma attached to pursuing a passion or career) has infested every business, but since I don't know every business, I'll stick to kitchens. Don't you like when you're working, and you can hear the crunch of an improperly sharpened knife across the kitchen? And this is square one! If you can't sharpen a knife, you can't cook! Why? Because cooking is principle. A minced shallot is not a hacked up shallot. If you don't do it perfectly (or at least try) every time on principle, you're pretty much worthless to any Chef worth a fuck. When you hear that fucking crunch, don't you just want to grab the offending "knife" and throw it in the trash with the great words of wisdom, "you're worthless". Of course what we normally do is snatch the knife away, feel the edge, shake our heads in disbelief and say.." so...what are you doing to my product, I mean...besides destroying it because you don't care or are too stupid to notice raggedy edges that aren't perfect?" Sniveling bunch of time wasters. Remember this future " Chefs", if you don't care about perfection, you suck. Why? Because you're satisfied with mediocrity and mediocrity is easy. There's no challenge. Another personal favorite is teaching station setup and specific dishes. Umm...where's your notepad? Oh, you're going to remember it all. Ok, cool.....don't ask how and don't fuck it up. We're all watching and waiting to say.."Why didn't you write it down dumb-ass?" My personal favorite is the blase look on their faces when you explain something. You know the look. The look of "Uh. This is soo boring...I'm sooo above this, but I can't work under pressure, or with precision or skill. Nor have I ever really cooked anything before......Look, I just want to be a Chef ok? I don't want to waste all my time on this "technique" bullshit." Ok Escoffier, do you think you could at least set your station up just CLOSE to sensibly?And keep it clean and tidy because you're a pig. You know what goes through your head when you get a fire call? All the shit all over your station.
My absolute favorite is..
" Why isn't this finished?"
" I didn't have enough time Chef."
" But you did this last week. You mean, you're not twice as fast this week?.So you don't push yourself?"..Wow. You really suck.
This new non-work force is really enthusiastic too. Really into the art/craft of cooking.
Welcome to Hell you non-ambitious lazy asses. Tony Bourdain summed it up in Kitchen Confidential when he said " A good line cook never shows up late, never calls in sick and works through pain and injury." 27 years in this business and I've been late 3 times. I've never missed a day of work. Ok one. A girl really pissed me off, so I got in my truck with my dog and a bottle of Wild Turkey , drove to North Carolina and had a fucking blast!
I had a crybaby tell me once, " I just don't know if I'm doing good." What are you? A fucking puppy?..Good boy, here's a bone. My Sous Chef responded with..."Well, you're still working here aren't you?" Fuckin' pussies.
Here's a bit from Slammed magazine, written by Michael Gagne and some of it attributed to again, Anthony Bourdain. I'm not sure if he wrote the whole piece or not but it sums up more perfectly than I ever could, about how you're viewed in a kitchen.

"the kitchen is the last true meritocracy. Here, you are what you do. Simple ability determines whether you are an asset or a liability; a culinarian or a ham and egger. Respect is a direct reflection of sharpnes of knives, of the efficiency of movement, of tidiness, punctuality and, especially, of the ability to perform under pressure. In the heat of the kitchen, cars, girls, lifestyles and personal idiosyncracies become irrelevant. Those are nothing but fodder for politically incorrect banter that fills the verbal void left behind the instructions, orders, demands and requests of the resident tyrant. Your's Truly."

In any field, ANYTHING in life, you simply KICK IT'S FUCKING ASS! Lead or stay behind. If you prefer to stay behind, you're a fucking loser. Cooking is a passion. If you don't pursue it as such, with every fiber in your being...you're passionless, and you're going to be shitty at everything you do.

MMMMMM......DOUGHNUTS....

"is there anything they can't do"

Wise words by the great Homer Simpson.
Well, I guess they can't keep Krispy Kreme floatin'. I fucking love doughnuts. Coffee with too much sugar, a couple of glazed old fashioned and I'm totally jacked and hyper. This might change. You see, Krispy Kreme is doing some corporate re-structuring. It seems that one of the CEOs has decided to start taking an hourly wage. Man. What a noble guy. It takes real balls to give a up a grossly inflated salary to get down and dirty with the common working man! Here...here's the story!..
I quote from Restaurant Business , Feb..15 2005

"Winston-Salem, NC - The troubled Krispy Kreme chain has replaced it's CEO with an hourly employee, though he'll be paid roughly 100 times the wage of an in-store crew member, according to government filings. The documents indicate that interim CEO Stephen Cooper is billing the company at a rate of $760 per hour, while limited-term COO Steven Panagos is on the clock at a rate of $695 per 60 minutes."
-Both Cooper and Panagos work for the restructuring specialist, Kroll Zolfo Cooper-
"The lofty consulting fees do not, however, guarantee the the undivided attention of the two executives. Cooper is also currently serving as CEO for.......( who would have fucking guessed!) Enron; Panagos is chief restructuring officer at Penn Traffic Co."
"Krispy Kreme also plans to pay KZC a "success fee" to be negotiated in the next few weeks"

Think about it. One "employee" making seven hundred and sixty dollars an hour for motherfucking doughnuts.
And he doesn't even have to be there! I'm doin' this shit all wrong!
I understand he has other obligations like tending to his baby Enron. Hey, it's a full time job bilking hundreds of people out of their investments and savings, but come on...you should do a little time on the line per week!
These people I truly despise. Never mind the trespassing on the sanctity of the doughnut itself, but how the fuck can you justify that much money without having to actually work?
Those assholes should break down, scrub and repaint a Krispy Kreme every goddamned day. Outside too! Scrub the hoods, move the ranges, clean the greasetrap, count the fins on the eveaporators coils on the boxes....then I'll give you some slack on your rope! But you gotta earn it...I want my money's worth! And stop riding the fucking clock!
Could you imagine what a pain in the ass a $760 hr. employee would be? I don't think I could count on them.
" Dude...I'm fucked....can you come in?"
"Nope. I'm in Amsterdam. I'll be in in two weeks, but only for 18 minutes."
"Cool, thanks. That really helps."
To think.. all this shit....this gross waste of money, growing from something as innocent and understanding as a doughnut. I wonder if these "restaurant consultants" even eat their own food. Or for that matter if they eat their own young.
Lemme guess, you're gonna close a bunch of stores, put a bunch of people who make $6.50 hr out of work and collect a "success fee." I fuckin' hate 'em!
I also don't want to think of these assholes when I see Krispy Kreme. You know what I want? I want the image of an army of grandmothers making my doughnuts in the morning. I don't want to know what really goes on behind the scenes of my morning routine...I don't want to think of Mr Burns even in the same field, even by association. I want illusion until AFTER coffee, doughnuts and cigarettes!
I have seen the enemy. And boy is he rich.

Fuck George Bush

Sorry. I never let politics infuriate me and this has nothing to do with food. I couldn't care less about blowing the shit out of other countries in the interests of defense contracts transparently cloaked as "liberation"( I will for the record say the genocidal madman Hussein DID have to be .. shall we say...dealt with.Whatever happened to good ol' fashioned assasination? Oh I forgot, we don't do that! right). Nor do I give a shit about the gay marriage thing. To me whoever anybody wants to fuck is cool, but I don't make the rules. If I can't control it, I don't give a rat's ass about it. I will say that if I see another Jesus lovin' robot with that motherfucking bumpersticker that has the- marriage=male/female stick figures - I'm gonna fuck up their vehicle. I wish I had a giant retractable dick that shot out of the front of my car and shot mayonnaise all over the place just for people who love cutesy bumperstickers. Everyone knows he's a x drunk, cokehead (his ONLY admirable qualities), an election thief, a schizophrenic( this is someone who think Jesus speaks through him. If your rich, it's great faith if you poor..it's called insane) No. It's his brilliantly misappropriated budget cuts.
The majority of the cuts are from what? Education. Guess he's trying to get that population's intelligence even lower . Well I guess, if all you asprired to was "c" averages in college, you wouldn't like trying to govern a intelligent populous now would you?

I have absolutely zero paternal instict. But I also realize that children are our future and need every available resource for education possible. First we eliminate learning how to read from school curriculums. Then ..FUCKING THEN, we eliminate -phys.ed class. Good start for creating a fat, dump bunch of people. I say start burning books next.

Or how about health care? Yep, need to cut all that shit out too. Don't him and his buddies have all the coverage they need? Fuck the rest of the country. I get great solace in the fact that in building a business that takes every single dime you can get and abuses your body and brain to extremes on a daily basis, you have to worry about losing it all if you get seriously ill or injured.
I'm tired of watching this country being turned into mindless sheep actually believing that the powers that be will "fix" everything.
It's 1984. It actually IS happening. Cameras watching your every movement, intelligence and free thinking being stamped out. Paranoid? No. just prove that these things AREN'T being instituted and I tell you I'll get psychiatric help, but I won't.

He makes me sick. I didn't actually care until his budget cuts. Now I hate him.
"THE IDIOT SON OF AN ASSHOLE"

No, I'm not anti-America, I still have a little fastly fading hope. I support our troops 100%. I love technology, watching shit get blown to smithereens. I paid for the damn arsenal, I wanna see what it can do although I might not BROADCAST EVERY MOVE BEFORE WE DO IT!!! Personally I would've turned Afghanistan into a giant glass parking lot. I think this is the greatest country to live in( for how long I don't know). I hated John Kerry too.Christ. That guy has the personality of a mop. He really didn't flip flop on the issues a whole lot either. Saddam Hussein needs much worse than he'll get. I'll defend this country to the end if I have to, but I'll wait until I feel threatened by someone other than some illiterate, Texas redneck oil fuck.

Dude, Where's My Fish?

Suppliers. Don't you just love some of them? Let me first start out by saying the suppliers I deal with from Honolulu Seafood to Jet Fresh have yet to let me down (that much) and when they do, they bend over backwards to take care of the problem. No, this bitch is about the shitheels that can't seem to get their heads out of their asses.
Here's a few better examples;
Tuesday, start of the week...v.i.p. birthday res. for that night.
The fish order just didn't show up. It was all local stuff. 20 pointless phone calls later, I was truly fucked. It just didn't fucking show. After the weekend there is rarely any seafood left in house and in this case, there was none. 75% of the customers walked that night, including the birthday party. It was one of the worst nights of my career. I couldn't believe I let so many people down.
Needless to say, the dropping of the account the next day was one of those situations you really need to take advantage of. Really tell 'em what's on your mind. Loudly. Scathingly. Scarring.

Another time I already addressed on another post. Four hours on the phone to Hawaii and Fed Ex looking for my specialty fish for the weekend. Finally shows up at 8 pm, right in the middle of service. No...sorry brother....put that shit back on the fucking truck and take it back. Too late to check it in , process and sell it.

New Year's Eve...honestly I forgot what year....85-6? 3 o'clock...no meat. Wasn't too worried at that point, I figured we'd just do everything else and spend the last bit of time doing the butchering. I like all the butchering done first but you gotta adapt sometimes. Most times shit ain't right. Order finally shows up at 5:30. Tight but doable. Except for the frozen, chine-on lamb racks. Yep. Sure would've been nice to get the split chine off racks I ordered. Thanks fuckheads! The customers ended up helping us butcher them. It was realllly fucked up, but no one seemed to get upset. It was a small place, we were mostly all friends and we were also passing around bottles of Veuve Cliquot.

I wonder if suppliers coordinate their fuck ups with your most crucial times? I mean, it happens with such accuracy as to causing the most headaches and financial loss, it seems almost brilliantly calculated. Goddamn it get us our shit on time!!! Invest in more trucks if you have to; Fucking Hummers would be good..I don't care if you have to crush a soccer mom to get me my product....just do it!
Don't you just get sick of putting out fires other people start? Constantly adapting your schedule to their bullshit. I've got a deadline for every single second of the day, motherfuckers. Throw me a friggin' bone!
Here's one I'm quite proud of. Again Friday night, Kobe ribs show up not split. I could just cut them into ribs but they're too huge. I also hate serving them off the bone. I remembered I had a circular saw in the utility closet. Across the street they were doing some masonry work and I ran over to see if they had a carbide blade. I explained the situation and they just gave me one. They couldn't believe what I needed it for. It actually fit the saw so I just fired it up and split the ribs with a circular saw. It smelled like a thousand teeth getting drilled. I thought the meat and bone would immediately clog the blade rendering it smooth and worthless, but it worked. I love shit like that.
The M.I.T grads that load the trucks are awesome too. I never would have guessed that raspberries, avocados, baby lettuces should all go on the BOTTOM of the load. It's cool though because I like my most expensive things crushed. I am also in favor of hiring the handicapped so it all works out.
Are we the only ones that spend every waking second thing about how we can do things better? I don't care what the fuck you do. If you do it, do it well. On principle. Especially if what you do has a bearing on me or what I do. Use that little pea inside your head...yeah...that rattling noise. That's your brain!
And no, I don't care about the others, just don't fuck my job up!

Integrity Where Art Thou?

I'm back fuckers and I've got more than a chip on my shoulder. I'm pissed about the lack of integrity in our business. I'm pissed about chefs who slap their name on pieces of shit to sell to the public and rip them off. It's the same thing as cooking a dish with no care and garnishing the hell out of it because you don't care. You expose and sell the public the wrong understanding of what we do. You are a bigger detriment to our struggle than a thousand Applebee's. Maybe I'm the minority, but if my name or reputation( my cooking reputation) is associated with a particular item, this item has got to be the best I can muster. It had better be right. It's principle only. You all certainly can figure out a few of who I'm talking about.
Let's look at a couple... two bad and two good.

BAM! is a bad one. Of course this wacky character even sells toothpaste now. He'll sell anything. ANYTHING! Let's take the Emeril knives as an example. First off, they're the bottom of the line stamped Wusthof. They suck. Touted as being the knives Emeril uses. No they aren't. No chef worth a shit would use these. Period. Rip off a gullible public though..that's important. His cookbooks are even worse, few recipes even work in them. I have mixed feelings about this guy a lot because he has actually raised the publics awareness of cooking. Unfortunately, he instructs them to think even less about cooking than they already do. Besides that, anyone who puts cheese and salami in a panzanella should be executed immediately! Fucking integrityless lilly guilders!.

Jamie Oliver is another one. Don't you just wanna rip this guys face off? He's a chef! He's a rocker! He's young and hip! No. He's a pud. I picked up a piece of his cookware and the rubber handle liner fell off. A rubber insert for comfort. What's the first thing we do in a kitchen when we get a few new pans? Throw that fucking rubber handle cover away. To be fair, this was a year or so ago and the new stuff is just a plain handle. But whatever, this site is all about hair splitting. I'd like to kick the shit out of this Cockney cocksucker!

( besides everything else, do we really need another celebrity spice mix?)

Now the good..

Wolfgang Puck. The $400 million dollar chef. You'ld think he would be first on my list. Nope. Why? Because like him or hate him, he has integrity. His food in his restaurants is always good. His frozen pizzas are actually good(for frozen pizza) and the cookware is solid and well made. His mixer is built like a tank. He's never lost sight of the fact that quality is what it's all about. He is, and always will be a cook first.

Daniel Boulud- No great line of spices...sauces or whatever. Two. A smoked salmon that is like eating smoky silk and knives that are extremely well made, forged beauties. I seem to recall him having some caviars also but I might be wrong. It doesn't matter. If he did, it was perfection to be sure.

Emeril selling toothpaste. Rick Bayless promoting Burger King. Although I can't blame them for their pursuit of a buck, I have to wonder if the people even know what the true responsibility of our profession is.