How to get your ass kicked
Why I walked into a restaurant thinking I could hack it, and what I learned.
I couldn’t close my right hand for six months. Not fully. I’d be riding the subway and I’d feel my hand twitch with pain. Then when I went to curl my fingers, they’d stop where the handle of a chef’s knife would start. This was halfway through my tenure as a line cook at Cool World, a now-closed Greenpoint restaurant I walked into one day in the fall of 2022 unable to properly wrap a third pan of duck croquettes.
I was so nervous, all the time, that I gripped my knife until my muscles perpetually cramped. What if I mess up this order? What if my plating looks like ass? Wait, what even was that order the expediter just called? What if I’m a fraud who lets everyone down?
The thing “The Bear” gets right about restaurant work is the anxiety-inducing sound of the ticket machine. I’d stumble home at 1am following a 10-hour shift on the line, which had already followed a few hours doing my day job in tech. I’d shower so my partner wouldn’t have to smell the stench of oysters and fryer oil. And then I’d lay there absolutely wired, hearing nonexistent tickets print into oblivion.
Locals say the Cool World space is cursed. It might be. But for a year it’s where I had the most fun, exhilarating and demanding job of my life.
“I don’t know man, that sounds hard”
I’m standing in a bougie Mexico City bar with my friend Rohan, telling him my plan. I’m going to move to New York from LA, and I’m going to try to get a job in a kitchen. He’s less excited than I thought.
“I don’t know man. That sounds hard.”
I think the implication is that I can’t handle it. He has good reason to think so. My current day job involves reading books by the pool, making long lunches, and occasionally sending Slacks or emails. I have no experience working in kitchens. I hardly even have experience working outside of an easy, mostly remote media environment. The hardest thing I ever have to do is delay a trip to a specialty grocery store in order to sit on a work Zoom with my video off waiting for the time to pass. And I think that’s why I want to do it.
So I get to New York and I start emailing all of my favorite restaurants.
“Okay, weird application, I know, but …”
I decide that if I’m going to do this, I’m going to try to do it at a place I love. These restaurants seem desperate for employees post-pandemic. And even if my skills are amateur, I’ve studied all these cookbooks, I work hard (I think), and I’ll figure out the rest. After a few days the head chef at Estela, a Michelin-starred restaurant on Houston, emails me back asking if I want to come in for a Friday night trail. I say yes. Then I Google, “What is a restaurant trail?” And, “What do chefs wear?”
The chef smirks at me when I show up.
“This is definitely the weirdest application we’ve ever received. You’re a … marketer?”
“Yeah, but I’m ready to learn. I work incredibly hard, I’m extremely passionate about this, I’ll do anything you ask me to do. And I’ve cooked my way through most of the Estela cookbook.”
“That’s … not the same.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, well, let’s go.”
He takes me back to the kitchen and I’m stunned by how small it is. I’ve had some of the best meals of my life in the dining room, yet it’s so tight back here that every time I turn around I nearly take someone out. Here’s the plan: I’ll shadow the two cooks working the cold station, making salads, plating tartares and shucking oysters. Maybe I’ll hop in and handle a dish pickup or two. Then they’ll cut me at some point in the middle of service after judging how I hold up.
The three of us set up on a station that’s long enough to comfortably fit one and half people. One of them starts plating the restaurant’s famous endive salad, directly and concisely explaining each step but not stopping to make sure I’m keeping up. The other arrives holding a quart container full of cold water, labeled with my name on tape. It’s a gift.
They quickly get in the weeds.
“Can you shuck oysters?”
“Uh, yeah, I mean, at home, I don’t know if I’ll do it, like, the way you …”
“Did you bring an oyster knife?”
“What?”
“Here.”
They tell me to start shucking. The pickup involves placing six perfectly shucked oysters on well-composed mounds of salt, and then precisely topping the oyster with finger lime and sea grapes. I pop open the first oyster easily, experiencing a rush I’ve never felt before. No one else reacts. I finish plating and move on to the next one. Busted belly. I try again. Busted belly. They finish the plate themselves before I get a second oyster open. I push through the creeping doubt that this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done and try to remain helpful.
I get asked to go strain a stock pot on the hot line. When I grab the handle, I burn my palm so badly that a nice fat mark sticks around for the next two months. The sauté cook rolls his eyes and points to the towel hanging on his apron. When I get back to the cold line, they put me on salads.
“Fire endive.”
Here we go. I think to myself: Someone just ordered one of the best dishes in the city, they’re about to pay $28 for this before tax and tip, and they have no idea I’m the idiot back here making it. I chop and taste and season and taste and plate and sweat and try to balance being careful with being quick. One of the cooks breaks off a piece of endive from my mixing bowl and takes a bite.
“That’s good.”
They send it out. Before I have time to process what just happened, I’m fired on two more, plus a squash dish. I slowly find a groove. They don’t end up cutting me. Instead, one of the cooks ventures off to recipe test a dessert, leaving me on their station. As service slows closer to 10pm, other cooks start bringing around extra bits of steak and dessert and bread and butter for me to eat.
“Good work.”
“Where did you cook before this?”
“You’re totally gonna get the job.”
And I do. The head chef and I meet upstairs afterwards and make a loose plan for my schedule. He says he’ll hit me up over the weekend with more details. Unable to be chill, I text a few friends, “I think I work at Estela now?”
Estela ghosts me. Emails go unanswered. I finally assume they found someone better, and my Michelin-starred dreams are crushed. But then I get a reply from Q, the executive chef at Cool World. Q ran the kitchen at Wildair back when it was the best restaurant in New York City.
“If you are interested in dipping your toe into the life of a Back of House employee, I would love to invite you to come and trail and see if it is something you would be interested in taking on. I do have to warn you, cooking in a professional kitchen is very difficult and requires a lot of commitment to your craft and improving every day. It is absolutely a labor of love.”
I do the trail. They hire me because I wore the right Birkenstocks.
“Fuck brunch”
A couple months into floundering my way through this new gig at Cool World, we launch brunch. Brunch is a survival game. During dinner, the clock ticks incredibly quickly. A 5:30 opening turns into a 7:30 rush which turns into a final 9:45 push in no time. At brunch you can’t look at the clock. You’re hungover and you’re convinced you’re frying chicken for the worst people in Brooklyn and oh shit you just looked at the clock and there’s still three hours left.
The team decides they’re moving me from the cold station to the fryer. New cooks start on cold side because it has the lowest margin for error and the smallest chance you hurt someone else or yourself. You have to prove you can cook with heat. I had just started feeling like I kind of got my rhythm, and now a whole new set of challenges was dropped on me without warning.
But that’s how it goes. Every time I start to feel like I’m slightly comfortable, the team unlocks some new part of being a cook. They throw me into it and let me fail until I figure it out. When I mess up, they tell me what was wrong, to fix it and do it again. Coming from a corporate media environment, the direct feedback is startling at first.
One of the cooks jokes: “I don’t think anyone has ever been mean to Austin before.”
I start to love it. The rules and measures of success are so clear. You either learn and you grow, or you fall behind and you drag the whole team down with you. When I screw up, no one intervenes or kicks me off the line. No one says, “Here, just let me do it,” the way I have a thousand times with direct reports. They let four halibuts on fire turn into five and five turn into six until I get it right. If that breaks me, good. That means I don’t belong. But somehow I don’t reach that breaking point.
“Fuck brunch.”
I’m standing in the walk-in realizing this is the first time I’ve made a real, consequential mistake. The most popular dish at the restaurant is Q’s fried chicken sandwich. At brunch, we sell a ton of them and it’s my job to keep up. Space is limited on the line, so a busy service involves occasionally sprinting past the middle and sauté stations — behind — trucking down the stairs — corner, corner, corner — grabbing extra ingredients from the walk-in — where the hell does the fry cook from dinner leave the buns, again? — and then turning around to get back to the fryer.
Here’s the problem: There aren’t any more buns. Q and Andrew, our sous chef, had asked me before service if we got more delivered that morning. I confidently said yes. I was the first one in, and I remember bringing them down from the kitchen into the walk-in. Except … that memory was from yesterday, not today. After months of grinding myself into delirium, all days blend together. I take a breath and trudge upstairs.
“Q, I’m out of buns, I’m sorry.”
“What? You said …”
“I was wrong.”
“How many buns do you have?”
I count four. I’m fired on six and we still have more than an hour of brunch left. I’ve learned to ignore every instinct that says I need to apologize or explain or stealthily fix this alone. Q rushes out to the store. Andrew shuffles over to the pass to keep the orders flowing, warning servers which tables we’ll be dragging on. I stand around not knowing what to do because I can’t fire anything on my station without buns. The nine minutes Q is gone feel like an eternity. You know every extra delayed minute has compounding consequences, like:
These diners with delayed orders are less likely to ever return.
The food from other stations that is supposed to go with the food from my station is getting cold and will need to be refired. The other cooks will hate that.
The next round of orders will also be delayed if we can’t knock this out quickly.
We have less time to turn over the kitchen from brunch to dinner service, putting everyone behind on prep.
Q shows up with grocery bags.
“Thanks, I’m so —”
“Start dropping chicken. Now.”
“Heard.”
When service is over, I find Q at the pass and deliver a final apology. He accepts and the issue is squashed. I think about it every day for three weeks.
A list of more things that nearly broke me
That time a veteran cook watched me chop off a little too much of a scallion end, shook his head, and said, “So wasteful, chef.”
No longer fitting into my favorite jeans because I always had access to fresh fries.
Getting the “What’s up Austin” text and knowing I was about to cancel plans with close friends who would be disappointed in me because another cook had called out for the night. As the weakest link, I never wanted to say no when asked to cover a shift.
We had this one other hellacious brunch that rocked us so bad we 86’d like 75% of the dinner menu before 6:30. When someone calls out at your office job, maybe you roll your eyes. Maybe you say good for them for taking the time they need. When someone called out on the line that meant dropping chicken in the fryer for eight sandwiches, then running over to cold side to make four salads, then running back to the fryer to drop fries to go with the sandwiches at just the right time, then running down to the walk-in to get more oysters and ice and then …
I kept cutting my hand. Like a lot. Like a truly disgusting amount. Mostly with my oyster knife. But also the first time I worked sauté, I cooked this beautiful steak to a perfect medium rare, had it rested and ready to go at just the right time, and then proceeded to gash open my hand on the first slice.
I worked for like four months without ever sharpening my knife. I guess I just thought I was bad at everything and needed to keep practicing? There was one day where I was trying to cut grapefruit segments for a dessert, and I just kept screwing it up. Finally I went to get my knives sharpened and I could do it right away. Sometimes success is more about not being stupid than it is about talent.
I was there the night the health department showed up. And, yeah, that shit sucks.
Family meal
There’s one thing I do like about brunch: Getting in an hour early to make family meal in a quiet kitchen. I decide that in order to make up for my lack of skill and experience, I’ll put everything I have into cooking food for the staff.
This is where I really feel myself learning. Sure, I hone new techniques on the line. And I take the craft seriously. But when you cook family, you’re at the whim of the walk-in and your prep list. You don’t get to shop for what you want to cook or know you can cook. We have persimmons we need to get rid of? Okay, let’s do it with apples and candied walnuts. A new server has a nut allergy? And another has a pork aversion? And another is gluten intolerant? Okay, we’ll adjust. Your prep list is 11 items deep and you’re not sure you’ll be ready for service? Accept that you’ll start off in the weeds and make sure the team has a delicious meal. To me, nothing matters more.
I spend my free time coming up with plans for family meal. Making sauces and dressings and doing knife cuts. Diving into cookbooks for ideas. It is both the lowest stakes and highest stakes task. I want to get the dishes right during service. But I also want to make these bulked up salads as satisfying as possible because I love and care about the people eating them, and their opinions mean the world to me. My instincts sharpen with every dish I put up.
Late in the spring, a server tells me that she always knows when I make family meal because she can taste the love in the dish. It’s a cringe compliment, the kind of thing I hate in any other context. But it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
A list of more things that kept me going
Quart containers full of soda water bitters on ice.
A permeating fear of letting people down.
Hearing Q call, “All in savory.”
That when someone brings you the onions you asked for, you get to say, “Thank you onions.”
Watching Q or Amanda, our pastry chef, create a dish from scratch.
I put “Cool World line cook” in my Resy bio and people started sending me things compliments of the kitchen. This happened at a work dinner I booked and I had to try to explain it.
Getting cut because we didn’t need as many hands in the kitchen as we thought and being unable to leave because sitting at the bar felt like home.
The gossip, oh my god the gossip.
The Infatuation torching the restaurant.
The insane trajectory they let me take from cold side to fryer to plancha to sauté in like nine months (even if I never got remotely good at sauté).
The Fry Platter
I get a dish on the menu. Kind of. Well, it’s not actually on the menu. But it becomes an off-menu special for friends and family and people in the know. If one of those people comes in, we drop two orders of fries and then I run around filling ramekins with every sauce we make in-house. Black garlic ranch, green goddess dressing, chicken gravy, charred scallion mayo, tahini sour cream, chili crisp. It’s fun for about 12 minutes when it hits the table, and all of the other diners gawk in envy. But it’s also kind of ridiculous because you’re absolutely cooked by the time the rest of the meal hits.
One time Q has friends in for a birthday so he blows it out by stacking mini portions of the best apps from the menu on top of the fry platter. It’s so dumb and it totally rips. But then a few days later, we get a ticket sent to the kitchen labeled “Platter.” That’s weird. That’s not on the menu.
A server explains that someone was in last week and they got this medley of all the best dishes and sauces and they want to order it again. They were a guest at the birthday party. And our POS has a platter option in there from an old dish. We’re running a small kitchen team tonight, only three of us. Tables are starting to fill up. And now these strangers want this thing we are not at all prepared to give them.
We do it anyway. We have to. We’re scrambling to keep up with other tickets. It’s a mess. A beautiful, absurd mess. Don’t let your secret menu items get out until you’re ready, I guess.
A list of more things I learned
If all the prep were done before they showed up, most good home cooks could probably work the line at the restaurants they visit. The dish-to-dish execution isn’t the hard part. The hard part is when you’re fired on six things and you thought you had enough of the sauce that goes with a dish, but all of a sudden you don’t, and now you need to bust out quarts of black garlic ranch on the fly and do it precisely while also bringing four salads and two crudos in unison with the steaks coming from the sauté cook. And you have to remember the fires and what’s on the board. And you have to follow that black garlic ranch recipe exactly. But don’t look at the recipe too closely because then you’re going to ignore the salad. Then another ticket prints and you don’t just think you’re gonna fail but you know you’re gonna fail.
Don’t trust anyone. Not in a bad way. Just know that when a cook says there’s enough rice to get you through dinner tonight and brunch tomorrow, check it yourself. Or you’ll regret it.
A cup container of salty peanuts and candy corn is the best Halloween snack.
Plate with organic shapes in mind.
A sense of urgency will get you much further than technique.
The name of your restaurant probably matters. If you name your restaurant “Cool World”, it fails that test of people being excited to say, “Oh, you have to go to Cool World, it’s amazing.” You know what’s amazing? Torrisi. Yoshino. Raf’s. Bernie’s. Estela. Cosme. Sailor. Le Rock. It ain’t that hard.
86
The restaurant isn’t consistently busy. Weekends are packed. There are big pops on some weekdays. The momentum never really hits, though. We start having DJ nights. We open for lunch. We know it’s not gonna last. Now it’s a Ray’s, but I hear they’ve kept the selfie-inducing bathrooms.
I don’t want to romanticize or dramatize something millions of people do for a living every day. But for me this year was life-changing. It didn’t make me want to be a professional chef. It did make me question why I would waste my time doing anything other than what I was absolutely passionate about. What thrilled me and scared me and challenged me and made me feel totally defeated so I could later feel better than I ever had. I left my day job and found something that gives me exactly that.
One night last winter my partner asked me what the biggest accomplishment of my life was. We were doing that 36 Questions That Lead To Love thing, as a bit. I laughed because my answer was going to sound so stupid.
“I got fired on two seafood platters.”
“What?”
“No, listen. I got fired on two seafood platters at once. So that’s six oysters, a shrimp cocktail set, a complicated fluke crudo and a seafood tostada on the same tray. Twice. I got fired on that during a busy service a few weeks ago and no one stopped to help me. No one looked worried, like, ‘Oh man, Austin is in trouble.’ They just let me do my thing. And I did it. But I think more than me doing it, the fact that I had earned their trust … that these incredible cooks who I respected so much and whose opinion meant the world to me … that they believed in me after watching me fail over and over again, after watching me slice my hand open trying to keep up ... I’ve never accomplished anything like that before.”
Those cooks are some of my favorite people in the world. They always will be. I’ve never felt more compelled to just randomly tell coworkers that I love them. I miss it every day.
Working in a restaurant should be a prerequisite for all SF Tech and Brooklyn media jobs.
yessss. love this.