Squatters in Paradise: A Yellowstone Memoir by Perry James

Author:Perry, James [Perry, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: James Perry
Published: 2009-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

Fuck the Cooks

WE once had a student from the Culinary Institute of America working the line at the Old Faithful Inn dining room. He lasted about two weeks before demoting himself to kitchen prep. When I asked him why he'd given up the line job he scowled and said, "That wasn't a cook's line, that was an assembly line." This perception was shared by the columnist of a food magazine who was doing a series on restaurants in National Parks. After going into some detail regarding the culinary enticements offered by other park lodges, the dining room at Old Faithful received this curt review: "Grand Central Station." Another reviewer, with evidently more lax standards, instructed her readers to try our "famous potato salad." I asked one of the Pantry workers how our potato salad was prepared, to which she held up a carton. "We scoop it out of this box," she said. Then there was the summer we lost an entire cook's line because one night they decided to thump one of their own, leaving him beaten and bloodied in a dark parking lot. One can easily imagine the reason: "Don't you ever – whack – suggest a goddam – whack – en croute special again!”

To be fair, these guys were throwing together up to a thousand meals a night. Simple dishes, to be sure - trout, prime rib, fried chicken and burgers - but knocking them out at a blistering pace. That, however, is as far as I'm willing to go in their defense.

This rant is for the waits.

Yellowstone cooks have it easy. All they do is stand in the same place and sweat and curse and fuck up your food. They're averse to making anything that's not on the menu so if a waiter sends them a special order because a guest has an allergy or if they want a different sauce than the one that comes with the entree, the cooks shriek like stuck pigs and blame the waiter. Fuck the cooks!

Waiters, on the other hand, are diplomats; intelligent, adaptable, and able to lie convincingly to the public. We're the human face of the restaurant. Without us, most tourists would take one look at the back-of-the-house staff and brown bag it. In the dining room we're charming, patient, and attentive. In the kitchen we're bastards. It's the only way to survive in a busy restaurant. When a guest tells you that she has "a special dietary need," you nod and take note of her request, then you put the order into the computer and head into the kitchen where the lynch mob is already forming.

"Hey JP! You want your trout without any pecans? You're fuckin' outa luck! The pecans are already in the flour!"

"Then don't fuckin' bread it!"

"You want a trout without any fuckin' breading?!"

"That's what I fuckin' said!"

"Fuck that!"

You see, cooks make no distinction between waiters and diners. It's too difficult a concept for them to grasp. They work in a crowded, overheated environment, they do

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