Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

He reached out his hand and introduced himself.

“I am Charlie Trotter. If you give a shit.”

Cleanup every night in a four-star kitchen meant scrubbing every surface intensively. The whole kitchen staff participated. The stainless steel is washed and buffed and then the entire kitchen is literally wrapped in cellophane before a power washer is used to clean the floor.

The worst job of the day—after a sixteen-hour shift no less—was reserved for the FNG. The Fucking New Guy. The veterans called it “going up,” which meant climbing on the Bonnet stove, the flattops still radiating heat, and cleaning the inside of the hoods right up to the point where they meet the black iron. With the heat climbing up your legs, getting trapped inside your pants right at your crotch, you sprayed the degreaser and were enveloped in a cloud of toxic gas. Even if you managed to hold your breath, it would make your eyes sting and water. It was exactly what you didn’t need after a long day.

If there was one upside to the task, it was that it afforded a degree of privacy. Despite the shit-cloud of chemicals, the shelter of the hoods provided the only place of refuge in the kitchen where you could speak freely with another cook. Mike, the not-quite-so-fucking-new-guy, and I were bobbing in and out, alternating spraying the degreaser and dipping outside the stainless box to take gulps of fresh air.

“Mike, this is nuts, man. I have to go,” I found myself saying.

“You leaving so soon, G? You just got here! Total pansy. I told Bill you couldn’t hang. Too bad. I was pulling for you, fellow Michigander and all.” Peer pressure, comfort in numbers, and typical kitchen machismo—but still, this is how you help a young cook through.

Mike had just crossed over the year mark at Trotter’s and was singled out for the next sous chef opening. Although he acted like it was a burden, he secretly liked the fact that he was assigned to watch over and train me from day one. It gave him the opportunity to show the arrogance that top chefs are known for. Despite his exaggerated attempts to act overly tough, he managed to pull it off. In my eyes at least, he was a badass. He never flinched when Trotter was twisting him up, messing with his mind. He worked clean and tight and he had made it a year. The pressure of the service, the shit job of scrubbing the Dumpsters, and the sheer marathon of five days in a row of 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M. never seemed to bother him. In fact, he somehow seemed energized by it all.

One hundred and eighty-nine covers was the record number served at Trotter’s until a day shortly after I arrived. On this particular night, somehow, even more were booked. At the peak of the push, with the kitchen becoming completely overwhelmed, Trotter began yelling for food. Bill and Reggie reacted in a way that I had never seen. As Trotter directed his fury at a particular cook, Bill stepped between Trotter and the poor chef and absorbed the verbal lashings in a primal, almost parental fashion. He knew that if Trotter succeeded in mentally unhinging a cook in the midst of this service the kitchen would fall into a terminal avalanche. Bill and Reggie made sure that didn’t happen.

At the craziest moment of the night, with the optimum opportunity for disaster, Mike and I ran out of space on the pass to plate our food. The queued plates had grown to a point where the pass was covered with partially finished platings. The cooks were spinning in circles, growing more frustrated and unable to think clearly enough to take a task to completion.

“What do we do, Mike?” I whisper-barked in his direction, knowing that even a pause would be a crushing break in rhythm.

“Make the shit happen, G!” he said with a grin. He was loving this.

Mike stretched upward and grabbed a stack of plates on the shelf above our station and with a single deft motion spun left while tucking them under his arm like a football. With his free hand he snagged a spoon out of the bain and removed eight nuggets of lobster that had been poaching in an orange-infused broth and placed them on a drain rack. Without breaking stride he slid over to the dish machine, and again using his free hand, squeegeed the water off the rack and started laying plates down.

I thought to myself, “Holy shit, this guy is going to plate food on the dish-machine drain board! No fucking way.”

As Trotter began to call for lobster—gleefully anticipating another problem—Mike was saucing the seventh plate. He had a shit-eating grin on his face.

Trotter bellowed, “How long? How long? Will I get some food from you tonight? These poor people are hungry!”

“Now, Chef!” Mike called back. He turned immediately and placed the first two of the eight on the pass in front of chef Trotter.

Perfect.

Mike was the shit.

“Just don’t break and run, man,” Mike said to me. “You have to give notice. It has nothing to do with Charlie. It’s about us cooks. Don’t leave us dry, G. It will make our lives that much harder. Bill is going to be pissed . . . so tell him first, then Charlie. Poor Bill.” Mike shook his head with genuine worry.

After we finished the hoods I approached Bill and told him I wanted to talk to him after we were finished with the scrub-up.

Bill knew. He put his head down and sighed, “You too?” It was barely audible.

“Bill, I just gotta go,” I said with a shaky voice. “I am a better cook than I am performing now. Something about this place . . . it is making me worse, not better.”

Clearly, this was not the first time Bill had heard this. He didn’t say anything other than, “You have to talk to the