I feel the need to take a brief respite from my usual kitchen ranting and say a few words regarding the recent disaster in Haiti. By all accounts, the devastation is dreadfully serious. To the Haitian people, and to our friends and relatives residing and working in Haiti, know that you are in our thoughts and we send you love, hope and strength. For those of you who have generously donated funds, food, supplies and services to the relief effort: we commend you. Please keep on giving. To anyone looking for a worthy place to make a donation, these guys have been doing tremendous work:

http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

Gack! For a while this war with Sole had me wound up so tight that I passed on the Four-Bars of Xanax and dived right into the gin. Ah gin, nose and chin, mother’s ruin, needle and pin. WASP rage juice? Not this time. I cracked the seal and my stress level dissipated. It silently uncoiled and fell away, spooling into a loose heap at the bottom of a bottle of Beefeater’s. So after considerable thought and considerable drinking, I have decided to rise above and disengage from this petty nonsense with those hacks at Sole. Besides, I already put some good people on it. People who will worry about it so that I don’t have to. Yes, sometimes it’s good to be the boss.

Georgina is interviewing pastry chefs this week because she thinks there has been too much booze in our desserts lately. She has scheduled no fewer than eleven interviews over the course of two days. One thing I’ll say for this sad economy: if you happen to be looking for out-of-work pastry chefs, you are in luck. They are out there in boatloads.

Seriously. Right now: Grab a Bundt cake and run to the nearest bar. Stand just inside the doorway, close your eyes and let that cake fly. Now open your eyes and look around. I will bet you fifty bucks you got some cake on at least three out-of-work pastry chefs. They will be the ones licking their fingers and smarmily scrutinizing your ganache.

If you happen to be an out-of-work pastry chef and you are reading this, please feel free to email your resumé to me at chef@finrestaurantgroup.com. I will be quite happy to add it to the pile and forget about it.

I was going to follow Adrienne’s advice and actually write about food today, but in light of some recent events, I need to put that on hold. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to wait a little longer to get the skinny on conch fritters with caper aioli. I have other things on my mind.

As you may or may not have heard, a competitor with the unfortunate name of “Sole”, hung their ugly shingle and opened their doors for business last week. Normally, I wouldn’t give this a second thought. Restaurants come and go all the time. Besides, Sole (sort of makes you think of shoe leather, doesn’t it?) is on a different block, even a different street. What do I care, right? The trouble is, Fin and Sole happen to share the same back alley. And the people working at this particular dive are proving to be less than good neighbors. It all began when one of our line cooks, along with a rather inept busboy, were lured into the Sole fold with promises of another buck an hour and an employee dental plan. Still, no big deal. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’m used to it. What doesn’t happen all the time is what happened next.

Arriving to work the other day via the back alley, Henry found the rotting carcass of a salmon nailed to our back door. Stuffed in the salmon’s slimy mouth was a Xerox copy of my recipe for Baked Pineapple-Prosciutto Popovers. In addition to this blatant aggression, a few members of Fin’s kitchen staff have been verbally (and somehow, visually) accosted by Sole employees while having a smoke in the alley. Now, perhaps I may have mentioned this before, but on occasion I have trouble controlling my emotions, particularly anger. This is something I have been working on. I have been trying to practice the art of letting go; to learn to rise above the petty affronts and foibles that life sometimes throws at me.

Well, fuck that. Not this week. I am perfectly willing to crawl around in the shit and duke it out with these cocksuckers. If they think they can push my people around they’ve got a big fucking lesson coming their way. The gloves are off. From now on, I am requiring all Fin employees to buddy-up when heading out to the alley. Or just take Delroy, if he’s not too busy. Truth be told, Delroy would never hurt a fly. That’s just not how he rolls. But there is something about the presence of a glowering, 6’-7” Rasta with the build of an NFL Defensive End that tends to make people think twice before talking shit. Additionally, I have stashed a 3-foot piece of rebar behind the dumpster, in case things need to get ugly.

Oh, and one more thing. I just got off the phone with our insurance carrier. All Fin employees now have full dental coverage, effective immediately. There’s even a cosmetic buy-in for Dean and his questionable obsession with teeth whitening. Just my way of saying thanks, and closing the ranks. So until next time: smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, but be careful out there.

One of my more intense cold snaps occurred during the taping of one of those local, afternoon TV magazine shows. This was after Buffalo, but before the thing with the saucier in Albany. I was supposed to do a cooking segment to promote whatever mediocre, mid-market restaurant I was shilling for at the time. I think I was making a roasted root vegetable stew. Also appearing on “Shitty Regional Afternoon-Filler Program” that day was a local whack-job who made these kids’ puppets. They were sort of like crudely rendered Muppets, only uglier, more robotic and they stunk like spray paint.
One of the show’s producers (who was also the co-host, as well as the local weekend news anchor-no big surprise there) thought it would be fun to combine the two segments. Not thinking, or more likely not thinking clearly, I agreed to this. The cameras pushed in. The red light went on. The tape rolled. Now, you’ve seen these segments before. You know the drill. The chef speeds through the recipe, while the program’s host or whoever, does something simple, like peel a carrot or dice a potato. Six minutes later, the host tastes the pre-made result, feigns gastronomic orgasm, and then bumps to a local auto dealership commercial. Easy. The trouble in my case was that instead of a human assistant, I was stuck with a puppet resembling an unfinished Ernie with sticks for hands. The puppet and his useless puppet hands couldn’t help me. The puppet could only talk. And talk. And talk. I was determined to forge ahead with the demonstration anyway, but the puppet kept cutting me off. He was hell-bent on stealing the show, and he tried to squeeze-in these lame vegetable jokes at every turn. I made a concerted effort to stay focused, but the puppet just would not shut up. I can still remember those googly, plastic eyes, that hideous felt face, opening and closing with every “yuck yuck yuck.” But that’s about the last thing I remember. Because, apparently I just snapped. While the cameras rolled, I flew into a blind rage and beat the fuck out of that puppet. By the time they calmed me down, there was stuffing and chicken wire and felt and tube socks all over the studio floor. Needless to say, that episode of “Weekday Half-Hour Of Local Shit” or whatever never aired. I think they ran an old “Family Ties” instead. I left that job and that town soon after. I wonder if anybody kept that tape.

Brr. It’s cold. Winter tends to drive people inside and makes many of them a little loopy but does it to me in spades. Cabin fever, mountain madness, Seasonal Affective Disorder, call it what you will. It sinks its icy teeth into me in early November and doesn’t let go until at least a week into baseball season. Not that everything is all sunglasses and orange juice the rest of the year, but while sweltering heat causes my rage to seethe, boil and eventually bubble over, bitter cold usually shivers my anger alive with a quick, sharp, unpredictable snap. Old Man Winter and me, we don’t get along so well. Some cold snaps in my past:
One frigid January in the 1980’s I found myself managing a steakhouse in Buffalo, NY. It was one of those big, dark, ugly places frequented by traveling salesmen and professional hockey players. Long story short, a particularly inebriated Left Wing got too friendly with a waitress I was dating, and suddenly I’m outside in the parking lot, swinging a mop handle at the entire 2nd line of the Hartford Whalers. I have avoided Buffalo ever since. What a grim place.
Then there was the thing with the produce broker in Denver (yeah, you know who you are) who tried to fuck me over two hundred pounds of rotten Mexican strawberries some ten Decembers ago. You will recognize him by his wandering eye and his limp.
On the warm and fuzzy side, business at Fin is picking up. We had yet another big weekend, a few new hires, and I have some new names and faces to learn. Things are looking good, but I also know winter and I know me and I’m playing it safe. For now, I’m hiding in the kitchen, where it’s nice and warm.

The turnover in this racket can be brutal. Sometimes it feels like I spend an inordinate amount of time bouncing around, hiring people, firing people, or else hiring people to fire and hire people for me. After years of doing this, watching the faces, names, and social security numbers on W-2’s come and go, everyone sort of morphs into this collective blur. I am terrible with names anyway, and it usually takes me a several weeks of working with someone before I can get it together enough to refer to them directly with anything more specific than “hey you,” “pal”, or “doll.” The one glaring exception is Johnnie Walker. I remembered that dude’s name the first time we met. Nicknames seem to help. The more physically descriptive, the better. I mean, I know Kool Aid’s real name is Tammy, and yes,  …I  DO know Round Guy’s real name, but mostly on account of all the fucking Worker’s Compensation paperwork I’ve had to fill out for him. Forgetting names used to really bother me, but not any more. I have come to realize that most people don’t care what you call them, as long as your smile is big and broad. It is strange, though. Why is it that I can’t remember the names of the people I work with, yet I can easily rattle off say, the cast of The Golden Girls? Is age finally catching up with me? Is it all those years of booze, pills and illicit powders? I’m not sure. But still, check it out: Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty. I don’t even remember watching that show, and I didn’t have to look it up on the Internet, either. All this leads me to my latest question –and maybe Georgina, or Henry, or Dean can answer this- Who is the guy doing all the fucking peeling? He seems vaguely familiar, but I don’t recall hiring him. Did you hire him, Georgina? Not that I’m complaining, as he seems very quiet, focused and extremely competent. At least as far as peeling things goes. Just wondering where he came from. And how long has he been working here? Days? Weeks? Months? Well, whatever. I’m completely fine with it, just so long as he isn’t another one of Bourdain’s  people.

Huge New Year’s Eve at Fin. Prix fixe menu for the evening. We filled up quickly. Even ran out of the tamarind glazed lamb chops. It was hopping all night, we made a bunch of money, and none of the staff quit. Although I think Kool Aid passed-out/fainted and was locked in the mop closet by 9:30. I love it when we are busy but especially on New Year’s Eve. My first time ever working the line in a kitchen was on a New Year’s Eve, many years ago. I was in my early 20’s and had managed to land an extremely cushy job at a popular, provincial French restaurant, in a tony suburb of a large Midwestern city. I was hired to work the service bar, which was actually just a closet off the kitchen. It was stocked with all kinds of fancy, colorful bottles of exotic liquors and wines. A waiter would come to the door, I would hand him an obscenely expensive bottle of wine, and I’d garner a 15-percent “commission” right off the top. A couple bottles of Pétrus would pay my rent and keep me in Jim Beam for a month back then. It was like printing my own money and I didn’t even have to pull corks! Occasionally, I would make a Kir, or pour a glass or two of overpriced port, or ancient cognac, but most of the time I just sat on a stool in that closet, reading and listening to the radio. No one ever bothered me, I didn’t have to wear a funny suit, and I barely even considered it work. Like I said, it was a cushy gig. But on New Year’s Eve, the place went crazy. The reservation list had already been filled two weeks before Christmas, but starting as early as 6pm, people were phoning ahead and they had to be accommodated. Not just ordinary people. Important people; like 2nd-string NFL half-backs, coked-up MTV VJ’s, and one of the guys in Styx. The maître d’ was such a greedy little sycophant, that he just couldn’t turn anybody with money (new or old) away. The usually relaxed and competent kitchen staff was freaking out. They couldn’t keep up and when the Sous-Chef showed up at my service bar/closet, he was asking for more than his usual mug of scotch. “Um …so, you ever work on the line before?”  I told him I hadn’t, but that I knew how to handle a knife. He just nodded, took a long belt from the mug, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grabbed me by my shirt collar. The next thing I knew I was dressed in a kitchen coat, chopping shallots. It must have been stressful evening for everyone else, but for me, the night just flew by. I liked the action. I liked the comaraderie. I got to wear a ridiculous hat. This was cool. The saucier was fired the following week for not showing up to work, someone else got a promotion, and they made me a Commis. I still kind of miss hiding in that closet full of booze, though. …Which reminds me, someone should probably check on Kool Aid.

Okay. I mostly detest movies because most movies are too long, too boring, and tend to be dumbed-down versions of otherwise decent stories. That said, I really enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, even though it took me two tries to get a ticket this weekend. It was a fun, nefarious romp through industrial revolution-era London. My only complaint is that I was kind of expecting it to be gayer. I’m not really sure what Rachel McAdams and that other beard were even doing in this thing. Maybe the sequel will include some hot Holmes-on-Watson action? I mean, I’m not even gay, and I thought this movie could stand to be gayer.

At some point, I will see The Road. As I mentioned earlier, I thought the book was the cat’s ass, but I haven’t really read anything else by Cormac McCarthy. I just can’t get into that cowboy shit. The movie, The Road, looks promising, though. I mean, Viggo, roving bands of cannibals, the obliteration of society, Nick Cave music… what’s not to like? As soon as I see it, I will let the world know what I think. In the meantime, I suppose I will just get drunk and read Tropic of Cancer again.

I am probably going to have my liver handed to me for admitting it, but I very rarely go to the movies anymore. I have some great friends who work in the film industry.  Actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, cinematographers, and grips.  Even a few crusty Teamsters who spend their days hovering over craft service tables, chain smoking, and bitching about traffic. I love show folk. Honest, I do. But (out-of-work pastry chefs not withstanding) who has the time to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers for two hours? Nobody working@ FIN , that’s for sure.

There is often a whole lot of “hurry-up-and-wait” in most kitchens our size. It seems that we are either deep in the weeds, trying to keep up, or standing around dumbly, wearing thousand-yard stares, waiting for another dinner rush onslaught. The restaurant business, especially in Manhattan, can be thanklessly stressful. Personally, I prefer it busy. It means we are earning. When the dining room is full, the bar is crowded, and the kitchen is humming, I almost begin to feel like we actually stand half a chance to succeed. It’s the slow times that stress me out.

Stress manifests itself in people quite differently. For example, when he is stressed-out, Henry grows seethingly quiet and stops answering questions. Dean usually says something cruel, and then slaps someone across the face. Kool Aid hides in the walk-in with a bucket of chicken and a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. Georgina continuously adjusts her breasts and sticks more pencils in her hair. I either throw things or run away. The healthiest option for me is escape. I escape by reading. I read whenever and wherever I can.  On the subway, in a cab, in my office, at the bar. I’ll even read on a date if things aren’t going particularly well. Or even if things are going well and I’m waiting for her to slip into something more comfortable, or whatever.  So maybe I can’t find time to catch a movie, but I can always find time to read. I recently finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy and it deserves a special mention. For as much time as I spend reading, I am not really all that familiar with Cormac McCarthy. I think many of his books deal with anti-hero gunslingers in the old west and I’m just not really into all that cowboy stuff, to tell you the truth. But The Road was a different beast entirely. A harsh, spare, moving narrative; it is a powerful book. It won McCarthy a Pulitzer Prize and hung around the best-seller list for a nice long time. Usually, I make it a point to avoid things that everyone else likes. Double that for things that win prizes, but The Road struck me differently. I know they recently turned it into a film, but I can’t imagine it could be even half as gripping and brilliantly rendered as the book. I loaned my copy of The Road to Georgina and told her to read it. And guess what? She did. You can check out her ringing endorsement here:(            )

Maybe I should kick some more tomes her way. At the very least, it would give her something to do with her hands. I mean besides constantly fussing with her own breasts.

I don’t hate Brussels sprouts. I don’t hate Mondays. I don’t even hate Richard Nixon so much anymore since they turned that David Frost interview into such a compelling play. What I DO hate is having someone breathing down my neck while I’m trying to keep all these fucking plates in the air.

See, I have been asked – no, instructed – to be, oh I don’t know, less like me I suppose. I have been told I need to be friendlier, smile more often. Spend more time writing about food and less time wallowing in my own indignant anger. I considered this for about six seconds, then dismissed this criticism with a derisive sneer and a half bottle of George Dickel Bourbon hurled against my office wall.

Sorry, reader, but I would only be cheating the both of us if I simply blathered on about the subtle, crispy vs. creamy nuances of a perfect crème brulée. If you want to hear that kind of garbage, go watch some more fucking television. Those boring foodie shills are all over the place. Every fat, charismatic douche bag chef with a pasta sauce recipe has his own fucking show these days. They are handing out TV shows like they are Grammy awards or something.  It’s spun completely out of control. I just don’t have the patience to play that game. This isn’t Hollywood. It is a greasy kitchen, inhabited by broken-down, chain-smoking, failed 12-steppers who happen to be very talented with food. You see, what I’m after is a bit more truth. Less predictability. More “real” reality.  If this sounds like something you want too, then pull up a chair, have a seat and you’ll eat what I serve you. Someone will be with you shortly. Bon appétit, motherfuckers.