A prim restaurant patron presumptuously demands an enigmatic “special omelet” not on the menu. The stressed waiter and cooks snap. Just minutes later the patron devours an omelet stuffed with sausage that—unknown to him—has been soaked in human urine.
“Oh, he loved it. Compliments to the chef,” recalls a cook in Gary Alan Fine’s Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work. In the mid-90s, the Northwestern sociology professor spent a year and a half in cooking school and at four restaurants in the Twin Cities. He absorbed—and recorded—the often-bizarre lifestyle of the American cook.
The book’s been republished this year, probably to coincide with the rise of the Mass Media Chef: Emeril Lagasse, Anthony Bourdain, Wolfgang Puck. But Fine isn’t studying the nation’s topmost (or most iron) chefs. Instead, he wheedles out the stories of the middle men, the Midwestern cooks.
Fine quotes liberally from interviews with kitchen workers. His exhaustive study oozes with enough first-hand accounts of pranks and mishaps to make a customer retch, or at least seriously reconsider swallowing.
A busy restaurant serves French toast off the floor. Bored cooks play catch with a steak to kill time. A cooking student accidentally douses his classmate in 350-degree grease.
Kitchens jumps between the absurd and the academic. A tale of pants-less cooks precedes sentences like, “Laughter is provoked by conversational mechanisms, grounded in shared understandings of the production of talk.” Fine’s book entertains as it enlightens.
It also whispers a tacit moral: Appreciate your cooks. Fine subtly depicts cooks as part-laborers, part-artistes. They are prankster-professionals, craftsmen of taste trapped by budgets and busy days. They sweat unseen and forgotten while servers reap the glory and the tips.
They’d never ask for your praise, but they’d sure like to hear it.
Check out our interview with Fine here.