Every few minutes, I hear the bell ring, as more stuff arrives. Segundo, the prep man, is downstairs checking off the orders as they leave the delivery ramp. Segundo’s a mean-looking guy. He’s from Mexico, and the other Mexicans at the restaurant claim that he carries a gun and sniffs paint thinner, and that he’s done time. But he’s the greatest prep cook I’ve ever had; he uses a full-sized butcher’s scimitar to chop parsley, filament-fine.

The last cook to show up is Miguel, our French-fry master. This is a full-time job at Les Halles, where we are justifiably famous for our frites. Miguel, who looks like the descendant of an Aztec king, spends his day peeling potatoes, cutting potatoes, blanching potatoes, and then dropping them into three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree peanut oil, tossing them with salt, and stacking the sizzling-hot fries on plates with his bare hands. I’ve had to do this a few times, and it requires serious calluses.

I work on a six-burner Garland. There’s another range next to it, which is taken up with a bain-marie for sauces, with onion soup, and with stocks—veal, chicken, lamb, and pork—that have been reducing at a slow simmer during the previous day and night. When we’re serving meals, one of my burners will be occupied by a pot of boiling water for Omar to dunk ravioli in. On another burner he’ll sauté lardons for frisée salads, sear tidbits of hanger steak for onglet salad, or sauté diced potatoes in duck fat for the confit de canard. This leaves me with just four burners on which to prepare most of the orders.

While I’m reducing gastrite—sugar and vinegar—for the currant sauce, I make room next to me for Janine, the pastry chef, so she can melt chocolate over the simmering pasta water. Janine is an ex-waitress from Queens, and although she’s right out of cooking school, she’s tough. Already, she’s had to endure the unwanted attentions of a leering French sous-chef and the usual chick-friendly Mexicans. I admire strong women in busy kitchens. They have a lot to put up with in our high-testosterone locker-room environment.

At eleven-thirty, I convene a meeting of the day waiters and run through the specials, speaking as slowly as I can, so that none of them describes my beautiful pheasant special as tasting “kind of like chicken.” Today’s lineup is not too bad: there’s Morgan, the part-time underwear model; Rick, who’s everyone’s first choice for Waiter Most Likely to Shave His Head, Climb a Tower, and Start Shooting Strangers; and a new waiter, who doesn’t know what prosciutto is, and who won’t be around very long, I suspect. There are also two busboys—a taciturn workaholic from Portugal and a moody Bengali. My runner, whose job is to shout out the orders and shuttle food to the dining room, is the awesome Mohammed, who is capable of carrying five plates without a tray.

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.
    -ESSAY: One Day—and One Night—in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen (Anthony Bourdain, Apr. 9th, 2000, The New Yorker)

Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.

A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim.

I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”
    -ESSAY: Don’t Eat Before Reading This: A New York chef spills some trade secrets. (Anthony Bourdain, 4/12/99, The New Yorker)

Chefs die all the time, and no one talks about it. There are a million reasons for this, but the thing is that it happens constantly and it's only spoken of in hushed tones so no one gets upset. Other people's feelings are awkward, and we as a culture are exceptionally crappy at talking about them. We're all afraid of making things worse, or seeing someone in a different way, or having them see us in a vulnerable state. But as I see it, you either have to deal with the slightly uncomfortable situation of having your line cook cry in front of you, or you cry at their funeral. I'm sorry to make it sound that dire, but it is. Especially today.
    -TRIBUTE: We Need to Talk About Anthony Bourdain: As I see it, you either have to deal with the slightly uncomfortable situation of having your line cook cry in front of you, or you cry at their funeral. I'm sorry to make it sound that dire, but it is. (Kat Kinsman, June 8, 2018, Food and Wine)