Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,70

full gallon of pancake batter over in your reach-in—both wasting a product you desperately need and now creating a jam in your reach-in because you can’t work with pancake batter all over everything. The expediter does not stop calling out tickets just because you have a mess in your station. The orders, all of them at least in part your responsibility because every dish at brunch comes with eggs, keep pouring in while you hustle to get that glop cleaned up and your station back on track. The circumstances won’t change. You are always, always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees. No matter how well set up you are, how early you came in, how tight and awesome your mis en place is, there will be days, forces, events that just conspire to fuck you and the struggle to stay up—to not sink down into the blackest, meanest hole—to stay psychologically up and committed to the fight, is the hardest, by far, part of the day. The heat, the crush of customers, the special orders and sauces on sides, the blood-sugar crises—none of it is as difficult as the struggle to stay in the game, once you have suffered a setback like dropping a full quart of ranchero sauce, which has cracked open and exploded in your station all over your clogs and the oven doors.

I like to swear the dirtiest, most vulgar swear words I can think of to get me through it. It can be very Tourette’s Syndrome back there when I am working that egg station and the expediter has failed to tell me about a sauce on the side or a well-done poached. I always, to be sure, take the moment to apologize to everyone around me, to promise them that I am not serious, that nothing is personal—but then I rip it out, jaw tight, and spewing combinations of the word fuck that even David Mamet has not thought to put together. I have fired people who can’t suffer their setbacks and petty failures. If they go down early and spend the rest of their five-hour shift that way, it threatens to sink the whole boat and that can’t happen just because you burned your first omelette and had to refire it. You’ve got to get your GI Jane on.

From too many years of going all day without eating—that freakish thing about restaurant work: Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink—I have blood sugar issues. And they can feel serious. There are a couple of points in that shift—every single time I work it—that I legitimately fear that the entire brunch service will come to a screeching halt if I don’t get some orange juice, iced Ovaltine, and a full quart of ice cold Coca-Cola down my throat in seconds, and in that particular order. In a generous light, I am that boxer in his corner, his trainer squirting Gatorade indiscriminately at his face while the boxer keeps his mouth open like a gasping fish, hoping for the jet stream to get to his throat. But I can, in a less generous light, feel like a dirty glue huffer—shoving my head discreetly and desperately into my cool reach-in—sucking, and I mean sucking, down a quart of chocolatey, malty, milky Ovaltine over a quart of ice—like an addict puts that paper bag of paint fumes over his nose and mouth and pulls that shit into his body with a terrifying force—made more terrifying by the utter calm and clarity and complacency that overtakes you once your hit kicks in and reaches the right places. The Coca-Cola so tannic and sweet and achingly cold that it makes my eyes tear up. And then brunch is back on track.

During the eighth round, close to three o’clock, I get dizzy stupid. I don’t even know what I’m cooking. By which I mean, I know what each individual item in front of me is, but I don’t know what I’m cooking in the larger picture. Is this the eggs Benedict that picks up with the salmon omelette? Or is this the benny that picks up with oatmeal and lamb sausage? This may seem inane to anyone on the outside, but in my industry, which benny is which matters. You don’t just cook food indiscriminately, without phrases, without groupings, and carelessly shove it all to the pass to let the expediter sort out. You have to time your food, according to a system, so