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and julienne, in which case you are desperately underqualified for this job, and whoever hired you is going to need both a proctologist and a podiatrist to get my foot out of their ass. Or, two: you DO know and just don’t give a crap, and you figured I wouldn’t notice, which makes you both a dumbass and about half an inch from fired.” Her lower lip began to tremble. But when Patrick gets on a roll he makes Gordon Ramsay seem maternal.
    “So, let’s all gather around and have a lesson this afternoon, shall we? Because obviously we have lost our passion for precision around here. Someone get me a fucking knife and some goddamn carrots.” They magically appeared at the station in half a second, and for ten minutes he turned a pile of carrots into perfect, even batonnet, allumette, julienne, fine julienne, large dice, medium dice, small dice, brunoise, and fine brunoise like some sort of human food processor. Each piece in each category was identical to all its compatriots, as if made by a machine. Minimal waste, station clean, every little pile complete and perfect. Patrick trained under both Marco Pierre White and Thomas Keller. He got his temperament from the first and an almost OCD level of perfectionism from the second. I often wish it had been the reverse.The whole time he was cutting, he muttered maniacally to himself about what a waste of time this was, mentioning, as he loves to do, that his time was worth approximately twenty-seven-hundred dollars an hour, and that everyone should be paying him for the lesson. When he finished, he picked up a leftover carrot, pointed it at her face, telling her to, “Get it right, or get gone,” biting the tip off viciously for emphasis, and then headed to his office and slammed the door.
    She sniffled for the rest of the day, and I had to take her over to Nightwood after work and let her vent. Twentysomething angst is enormously tedious, but some oversight of the culinary underlings is part of my job, so this comes with the territory. I don’t do the hiring; Food TV and Patrick’s executive assistant do that, so it wasn’t really my ass on the line for bringing her on. And Gloria runs the test kitchen, so she is in charge of training, and I don’t doubt that she was very forthcoming about how important precision is to Patrick. But I do try to keep an eye on show prep as it is going on, and am usually able to spot a potential problem and get it fixed before Patrick is aware of it. I try not to get attached; the show is a meat grinder, and by the time you learn someone’s name, they are out the door. I mentally call them by their most obvious attributes. At the moment we have Neck Tattoo, Geek Glasses, Orange Clogs, Bubble Butt Bike Boy, and little snifflepuss whom I’ve been thinking of as Sad White Girl Dreads, who sat across from me sweating chardonnay and asking me if she shouldn’t just quit. To their faces, they are all just “Chef.” They think it is a mark of respect and honor, but it really just saves me wasting mental space on name retention.
    Six months into my “tryout,” I had been on the receiving end of my own first Patrittack. I hadn’t had time to caramelize onions the way Patrick had asked for them. He startedcooking, reached for the onions, and then abruptly stopped the shoot. He came around from behind the stove and towered over me.
    “Miss A-la-na here seems to think that my pork medallion with caramelized-onion pan sauce is a little heavy-handed, that the onions need a lighter touch, a less intense flavor. Do you think the recipe needs altering? Hmmm? In your INFINITE wisdom and experience?” His voice dripped with sarcasm, smug and smooth and utterly contemptuous. And I was not in the mood.
    “In my HUMBLE opinion,” I began, equally quiet and calm, and no less scathing, “the recipe indeed needs some lightening. And since you
ostensibly
hired me to help make you look good and ensure that the recipes you put out in the world can actually