College got super boring. So I stopped going. Around that time got a job in a restaurant as a Food Runner. A Food Runner just takes plates to tables and drops them off. Sometimes you’re supposed to describe the plate. Not a terrible gig.

And it was fine for awhile, but I was always looking over the pass, trying to see what the cooks were doing. Eventually the chef offered me some kitchen shifts. I made less money but I enjoyed it. Pretty soon I was only working kitchen shifts.

It was fun. I worked my way up the line. If you’ve ever been in that ‘flow’ state, that’s what it was every night. You get going on adrenaline and you’re just throwing sharp things around and lighting shit on fire and before you know it your shift is over and you can go grab some beers with your crew before you crash for a few hours and wake up to do it all over again. Beer never tasted better than after a solid night on the line.

I loved being a line cook. I liked it so much that I started taking it seriously. I came in on days off to learn more. I read some cookbooks as well as some books about cooking: On Food and Cooking, Culinary Artistry, Ma Gastronomie, Tenzo Kyokun. I went to the markets with the Chef and Sous Chef on Saturday mornings, got to know the farmers a bit, and learned what to keep my eyes out for. Learning to cook took a long time and a lot of work. At first I was a messy cook, but fast. Then I was a slow, methodical cook, and faster.

For almost ten years I worked in kitchens. When I got bored with one place, for whatever reason, I would eventually find a new kitchen with new recipes, or a new style. Eventually I got promoted. I was a sous chef for awhile, and so I wasn’t really learning to cook as much as I was learning to manage. That was stressful.

I was confident on the line at that point, but looking back I still didn’t quite know how to cook. After a few years of management, I got fed up, quit, took a few months off, went to Disneyland, hosted an overly ambitious popup dinner, and then I went back to the line. I worked for a chef who had a great reputation and for whom I had a great deal of respect. It was Japanese in style. A nice take on a casual concept. The food was simple, but precise and very well informed.

This ended up being my first experience working on a dysfunctional line. A few of my coworkers were assholes. I had never come across this before, but have since heard that it is not uncommon in high end restaurants. I had gotten used to working as part of a team, and here I was mostly on my own.

The first few months were extremely frustrating and I tried to quit a bunch of times. I stuck it out and ended up learning a lot along the way. It was that experience, going back to the line and relearning what I had already known in a completely different way, politics slanted against me, that finally taught me how to cook.

It was strange, but the pressure of working that line pushed me to do things I hadn’t considered myself capable of. I worked harder at that line than I worked in the first few months at my management position. Eventually it cracked. I got comfortable and managed to nail down all of the stations. Then I started raising the bar. Those cooks that were originally bringing us down started to get frustrated, and they eventually quit.

It was a weird thing that happened then. I had gotten used to the challenge and now the challenge wasn’t enough anymore. I got a second job as a night cook in a bar just to see if I could handle it. I could, so I started picking up some catering gigs on the side too. I worked pretty much all of the time for about six months. I didn’t sleep much. I worked every day, mostly doubles, squeezed in a few triples. I was going from about 8am to 3am most days.

I worked when I was sick. I worked when I was hurt. I was never late. People love to talk about how hard they work. I had always heard those stories and thought they were half false, and half ridiculous. In a way I think I just wanted to prove to myself that I could work really hard.

It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. Years of working long nights, constantly moving, terrible eating (and drinking) habits, and then I decided to crank it up. It ended up making me sick. I was never sick, but all of a sudden I was sick every other week. It hurt to wake up. I started to have a hell of a time trying to get in the zone when I was working the line. My mind and body were shot. I had basically managed to develop some kind of anxiety disorder. So I quit. I went to Disneyland again.

I didn’t cook for awhile after that. Maybe a little for fun, but I couldn’t bring myself to jump into another kitchen. That little restaurant had broken me in some way.

Little by little, I started to cook again. But it was different. I stopped taking it so seriously. I stopped trying to impress people. It was much more an emotional experience than it had ever been before. I would just find ingredients and play with them and try to invite others to join in. I quickly found that the happier I was, the better the results. I used my experience constantly, sure, but where I had always just mostly followed recipes, I would now just cook. Still to this day, sometimes the results surprise me.

A good example here. I went to the market and saw sunchokes. I was in the mood for roasted sunchoke. While I was waiting for them to cook, I thought it needed a sauce. I wanted something a little intense, but silky. I tossed some anchovies in a hollandaise. It’s kinda weird. But it worked, and I wouldn’t hesitate to dress that up and put it on a fancy menu. I’ve never seen a dish like this. The closest I can imagine is maybe some homefries with an eggs benedict that have picked up a little of the hollandaise runoff. But the anchovies came out of nowhere. I don’t even like anchovies. They just sounded good with sunchokes.

So I started as a punk kid who lost patience with formal education and fell in love with the adrenaline of working as a line cook. I pushed that for years until I just couldn’t take it anymore. Somewhere along the way I learned how to just cook without worrying about it, without being self conscious, without being in a hurry, basically just without even noticing.

Today I’m at least the best cook I’ve ever been. Still, every few years I hit a new stage, and I break down a new wall. At these points, I look at where I am and where I’ve been and I say to myself, “Now you’re cooking. Whatever that was you were doing before, that wasn’t cooking, but this… This is definitely cooking”.