Cooking Dirty
A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen
-
-
4.3 • 7 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
THE GRIT AND GLORY OF RESTAURANT LIFE, AS TOLD BY A SURVIVOR OF KITCHENS ACROSS AMERICA
Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life "on the line" in the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the Michelin Guide—where most of us eat out most of the time. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place.
From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which "your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire." The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried—a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling.
With this deeply affecting book, Sheehan (already acclaimed for his reviews) joins the first class of American food writers at a time when books about food have never been better or more popular.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sheehan, a James Beard award winning food writer at Westword, Denver's alternative weekly newspaper, knows the tradition he's working in: he walked up to the editor at one of his first writing gigs and introduced himself as "your Anthony Bourdain motherfucker." Before that, he'd spent years bouncing around from one restaurant kitchen to the next first in upstate New York, then in a disastrous move to Florida, and back to New York before heading out west to reunite with the woman he met during his failed one year of college. Sheehan's memoir is emphatically not about "the glam end of cooking" or celebrity chefs, but about "a straight blue-collar gig," where the kitchens are staffed by the kind of guys who get off on the fact that the work is insanely grueling. As Sheehan puts it, "I was being paid to play with knives and fire." The war stories are as profane and outrageous as you'd expect, and Sheehan finds just the right balance between bravado and humility. There's a subtle shift in emphasis once his personal life (and, eventually, writing career) gains traction, but the kitchens where the best stories take place are never far from sight.
