Kitchen Confidential Read Online Free Page B

admired more for their studliness on the line-meaning number of dinners served each night, amount of pain and heat endured, total number of waitresses screwed, cocktails consumed without visible effect. These were stats we understood and appreciated.
    There was Jimmy Lester, the Broiler King, whom we thought a lot of. He'd worked for years at a nearby steakhouse and was famous for the remarkable number of steaks and chops he could handle at one time on his big roll-out broiler. Jimmy had 'moves', meaning he spun and twirled and stabbed at meat with considerable style and grace for a 220-pound man. He was credited with coming up with 'the bump'-a bit of business where a broiler man with both hands full of sizzle-platters or plates knocks the grill back under the flames with his hip.
    We liked that.
    The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives. The boys across the street were considered to be a championship team, the perfect example of the culinary ideals of the time. Mario's Restaurant was a hugely successful Southern Italian joint and the Mario crew were feared and respected because they did more covers, by a few hundred each night, than almost anyone else in town. It was fairly sophisticated stuff for the time: whole legs of veal were actually butchered on the premises, stocks were made from real bones (not commercial base), sauces were made from scratch with quality ingredients-and the Mario crew were the loudest, crudest, most bad-ass bunch of cookies in town. When they'd swing by the Dreadnaught for a few pops after work, they made our ragtag bunch of part-time roofers feel small. They were richer, more confident, and moved with even more swagger and style than our motley crew of oddballs and amateurs. They moved in a pack, with their own dialect-a high-pitched, ultra-femme, affected drawl, salted with terms from eighteenth-century English literature and Marine Corps drill instructor-speak-a lush, intimidating, sardonic secret language, which was much imitated.
    'You, sir, are a loathsome swine. Too damn ignorant to pour piss from a boot! Your odor offends me and my shell-like ear gapeth to hear thy screams of pain. I insist you avert your face and serve me a libation before I smite your sorry ass with the tip of my boot-you sniveling little cocksucker!' They had women's names for each other, a jarring thing to hear as they were all huge, ugly-looking and wild-eyed, with muscles and scars and doorknocker-sized earrings. They looked down on outsiders, frequently communicated with only a glance or a smile, and moved through the streets and bars and back alleys of P-town like Titans. They had more coke, better weed, bigger gold, prettier women. They loved rubbing our noses in it.
    'How many?' they'd ask after a busy Saturday night. '0h . one-fifty, two hundred,' Bobby would reply, fluffing the number a little. 'We did . what? How many was it, Dee Dee, daahlin?' the Mario chef would ask casually, Four-fifty? Five?' 'Six, I think,' Dimitri, the Mario pasta man, would reply-a man who would later playa major part in my career. 'Yes six. Slow night, I dare say. Pathetic, don't you know. Pig-dogs must have eaten their mung elsewhere tonight. Dairy Queen, probably. And then there was Howard Mitcham. Howard was the sole 'name chef' in town.
    Fiftyish, furiously alcoholic, and stone-deaf-the result of a childhood accident with fireworks-Howard could be seen most nights after work, holding up the fishermen's bars or lurching about town, shouting