The Working World

If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

If I had to choose the exact moment I started thinking seriously about becoming a chef, it would have to be the night a few months ago my girlfriend told me my steak au poivre was better than the one she’d recently eaten at a rarefied French brasserie.

I’d been hosting impromptu dinner parties for at least a couple years and become accustomed to recipe requests and collective praise of my culinary abilities over bottles of cheap red wine. But cooking was always a hobby, something to wile away the hours when I wasn’t out doing something important, like reporting a story or watching a television program about young chefs being judged by their food and ability to engage in drama.

But since leaving my newspaper job in Texas to move to New York this past summer, I had nothing but time on my hands. And seeing as my girlfriend’s apartment didn’t have cable, I found more and more day turned over to cooking.

As the country’s economic outlook became bleaker so too did my prospects of finding a decent job in journalism. Cooking, on the other hand, well, who wouldn’t want to be a chef?

There was no shortage of good restaurants in my section of Brooklyn. Within hours of hitting the pavement I’d been offered a “trial shift” at a well-reviewed restaurant in Park Slope known for its eclectic approach to new-American cuisine.

The shift starts at 4 p.m. that Saturday, and when I arrive the kitchen is already buzzing with cooks preparing what in kitchen parlance is known as their mise en place (or the ingredients prepared in advance). Passing waiters and cooks pepper me with questions about other places I’d worked, confused when I explain my last job was as a newspaper reporter. They shrug, probably assuming I’d gotten fired for stealing office supplies or worse.

I’m ordered to make a pot of risotto to accompany one of that night’s specials. Easy enough. Toast the rice in hot oil, add some wine and keep ladling on hot water until the rice reaches a thick, luxurious consistency.

Only, almost immediately I slice open my thumb while putting a fine dice on a white onion. While fumbling with Band-Aids and antibiotic cream in the bathroom downstairs, I briefly consider stripping off my chef’s uniform and slipping out onto the street. But instead I opt for the indignity of wearing a latex glove over my left hand for the rest of the night – a sure sign of an amateur.

As the night wears on, I only feel more out of my element. I struggle to cube butternut squash – the vegetable’s rounded, elongated shape seeming incapable of such things. I try to remember to yell “behind” when walking past the other cooks and shrink my body when the dishwasher dashes past with a towering pile of steaming sauté pans.

I bog down just assembling salads, always checking the menu to see whether the brussel sprouts get red onions, or which of the four vinaigrettes, in identical squeeze bottles, go on the spinach salad.

At one point, a crisis threatens to erupt and is quickly averted. Josh, the head chef, visibly uncoils and the kitchen regains its typical patter. I, however, feel like I just walked away from a three-car pileup. My senses are firing, and I know this isn’t for me.

Cooking, an act I so enjoyed at home, here seemed absolutely devoid of pleasure – the difference between a pleasant country drive and trying to get to the airport in rush hour. I didn’t feel like I was cooking at all — more like an autoworker on a Detroit assembly line, measured by my ability to perform an identical series of tasks over and over again.

Journalism can certainly be frenetic at times, but at least the newsroom is climate controlled and your boss doesn’t carry a finely sharpened knife.

James Osborne is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. Most recently, he reported on immigration and politics along the Texas-Mexico border.

Tags: hobbies, indulgences, making money