“Who’s got the god damned super glue!??”

One of many lessons learned while working in a kitchen is that the people in charge, that is the people in control of the money, are much more important than you realize. This took me a while to learn as most owners and upper management goons seemed almost intrusive and irrelevant to what was really the only important matter in a restaurant, the food. These goblins would sneak onto the line for a sip of soup or a ration of bacon, sneakily slipping it down their gullet and responding with something along the lines of “Quality control!” in a joking manner. Never funny. These fools (and i’ve been one) will inevitably fuck with the chef in some way, usually by hinting at adding an ingredient to a dish or changing the way it’s plated because of some trend they saw on the food network the previous night. “You should do the swooshy thing with the sauce next time.” they’d say, more often than not issuing a command disguised as a simple suggestion. “I bought these [maybe five or six, not enough to get through even the slowest dinner service] over-sized black oblong plates from World Market today, I thought we should plate the pork belly on them from now on.” It’s a disgusting and thoughtless act, almost always harmful to the well being of the kitchen and the food it produces, and the harm doesn’t stop there.

George Orwell said, “Sharp knives, of course, are the secret to any successful restaurant.” Now when he said that sometime in the late 1920’s, I feel that he was literally referring to the sharpness of a knife and how important it was in disguising a tough, lower quality cut of meat. If the average layman diner slices through a lower end cut of beef with the sharp edge of a good knife, he may think he is actually getting what he is paying for; and making the diner think he’s getting what he’s paying for is one of the finer rabbits we chefs can pull from our hats.

The sharp knife mantra represents so much more for the success of a kitchen. I learned this when the “Director of Food” (who had never cooked on a line a day in his life) stopped paying for our knife sharpening guys to come by every week, slowing their services down to twice a month. This attempt to save a few pennies was received as a hostile act, which unbeknownst to him was actually dangerous to the people who had to use the dull blades. But his handy work wasn’t finished. The kitchen at Hotel Em was constructed in the late eighties or early nineties and had hardly changed since its creation nearly 30 years prior, he had no intention of upgrading it now. The slicer was rusted out and ancient. It couldn’t be used without the AstroGlide fueled foreplay matched only by the time your grandfather first discovered Cialis and decided to rekindle the fire with granny. Desperately sawing at an onion with a chef’s knife, which should slide through like butter under normal conditions, people began to maim themselves with these dull and crusty tools. These cooks would reach for a band-aid, only to discover a barren first aid kit. Turns out the Director of Food had saved a few bucks by not reordering it that month. Super glue it is.