Terrible Story Time II: Take This Job and Shove It!

“Well, the foreman he's a riggity dog
The line boss, he's a fool
He has got a brand-new flattop hair cut
Lord, he thinks he's cool

One of these days, I'm gonna blow my top
And that sucker, he's gonna pay
Lord, I can't wait to see their faces
When I get the nerve to say

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more”

-David Allan Coe

There’s been MANY a time that I’ve been the “riggity dog” that ole’ David Coe is talking about. I’ve definitely have been too inexperienced, too naive, too overwhelmed, or too unprepared for my job in the past, and I’ve often bitten off way more than I can chew. I’ve seen/heard/felt the bitter scorn of employees muttering about my incompetence or stupidity, and they weren’t wrong most of the time, though sometimes they were just terrible in their own right. I’m happy to report that I’m a hell of a lot better at what I do now then years past, and we’re running a pretty harmonious shop at the moment, which is a great relief.

All this is to say, I recognize that my past bosses were just people with flaws like the rest of us, and that I, too, have been a terrible boss at times. We grow and learn and hopefully get better.

But sometimes there’s that one boss who is just so foul, so terrible, and so utterly messed up that there just is no way I could see that he could redeem himself. To me, that was “my chef.” We all have that one we call “my chef.” It’s that one chef at the place you learned the most from in those early years. We’ll call him Nigel O’Callaghan for this story (so I can avoid a civil suit).

Nigel was an absolute sadist. He enjoyed creating havoc and misery in the kitchen, and spent a fair amount of energy pitting one cook against another for his own amusement. His talent for inventing insults was unmatched, and his ability for stringing together lengthy yet extremely cohesive and articulate expletive laden diatribes were jaw droppingly impressive.

I’ll do my best to give an example without hurting too many people’s feelings.

“I’d rather you dig up a dead BLANKETY BLANK and BLANK her BLANK before I’d serve this garbage!!! Go back to FLORIDA you fucking fat fuck. You disgust me!”

Chef would usually go on a tear for a while, but sometimes when he was particularyly upset about the quality of your work, he’d just look at you and scream “You beast!”

Following such a tirade, a plate would likely zing right past your head and smash on your burners. Or he’d dip some tongs in the fryer and sizzle the back of your neck for punishment.

Once I saw him walk up to some salmons that were plated and waiting in “the window” for a server to take out while he was working expo. He touched one in passing, paused, turned around, and touched it again. They were overcooked, all four of them in the pass. The whole hot line looked up, breathless, and stopped what they were doing, looking at Nigel as he now just squeezed each salmon between his fingers, crushing them into a sort of paste, all the time contorting his face into a disgusted grimace.

John, the fish station cook that night, looked up in horror. Nigel ran up around the line, picked up a saute pan and lifted it into the air to hit John with it…the sizzling hot contents and smoking oil within flying into the face of the grill cook behind him, who gasped in pain. He hammered down the saute pan at John’s head but stopped a couple of inches from his face before muttering something about John’s Jewish ancestry and how’d he like to avoid a lawsuit from knocking him out. (Did I mention Nigel was a racist and anti-semite as well?) Chef then pulled out $160 dollars from his pocket (the menu price of four salmons) and threw it in the garbage can soooooo dramatically, screaming all the time. Of course I saw him pulling the money out of the can later.

Another time, I remember Nigel being very upset about a server making a mistake and calling him down into the kitchen. He grabbed the server by his tie, held onto it and cut it off menacingly with a chef knife. “You put me in the weeds, so I’ll put you in the weeds,” he snarled, “go find another tie.”

There are hundreds of such incidents that happened with good ole’ Nigel, and I don’t want to bore you with them all…but here’s one more before I continue with my story:

We had a new guy who always smelled terribly bad. Chef called him Stinky, so we all did. Stinky used to go on and on about his five year old son. Stinky called him his “little guy”

“Oh, boy, gee, I love my little guy,” he’d say to the line of thrashing, awful cocaine and alcohol fueled cooks snarling in delight at the opportunity to defile the wholesome moment with an off color joke.

In my memory, Stinky sounded a little like Mickey Mouse when he’d talk about his son, and everyone rolled their eyes and mimed vomiting whenever he expressed the love he had for him. We were all very, very awful people, but not to be outdone by our awfulness, Chef Nigel took a picture that Stinky had taped to the inside of his undercounter cooler and vandalized it. He did so in a manner in which I will not speak of, but try to think of the absolute most terrible thing you could do to dishonor the picture of a beloved child, and you might come close to the depths in which Nigel did sink. Real, real, bad.

Okay, so have I painted a vivid enough picture for you of this terrible place and this terrible man? Yes, this was the 1990s in New York City, but still, it was awful by even those standards.

One day, I had enough, and I let Nigel know.

The day started off regular enough. I was on sauce work, making family meal, and getting the fish station set for lunch. Nigel comes marching in and without so much as a hello, starts rummaging through the coolers. “Where’s my fucking celery root scrap?”

“Chef, I found some celery root scrap on the sauce shelf, so I used it to make celeriac flan for the egg,” I said. The Sauce Shelf was in my saucier walk-in and was where cooks put scraps so that I would utilize them for something. The egg I mention was a cut egg shell filled with some sort of savory flan baked within that we’d top with a brunoise ragout and serve with a demitasse spoon in an egg cup as an amuse. The flan I made that day was particularly delicious and I felt pretty proud that I had utilized all those celery root scraps to make it. I topped it with a leek and lobster ragout with lemon and fines herbes. So soigné!

“Those were my fucking celery root scraps…I wanted them for ME!”

I blinked a second then said, “Chef, they were on the sauce shelf, so I did what you told me and used them.”

“YOU WANT TO GET SMART WITH ME!? YOU WANT TO WORK IN THIS FUCKING KITCHEN!!???” he screamed, along with a few “fat fucks” or whatever else he would call me.

The problem with screaming at someone all the time is eventually they are immune. After two years of this nonsense, his screaming didn’t affect me the way he wanted it to anymore. He wanted fear and compliance. Instead I got very, very angry. I picked up the nearest thing to me, a skimmer, and threw it at this head while screaming as loud as and angriy as I possibly could.

The scene that followed was mostly just me throwing as many things as I could at him while absolutely destroying the hot line, tossing ice bins around, kicking the shit out of the coolers, and finally heading over to the walk-in door of my sauce box and just smashing the huge heavy door into the subway tiles on the wall while screaming “MOTHER FUCKER!” over and over again. Tile smashed and crumbled behind the door as I absolutely lost my shit. TWO YEARS I had taken the abuse from this bastard. I’d seen the cracks, I knew he was just a bully…I saw him back down before and knew he was really just weak. I absolutely menaced him that morning.

“AARON! AARON! I’m SORRY!!!” he pleaded.

“FUCK YOUR SORRY!” I continued to throw tools and smash things.

“AARON! AARON! I had a fight with my wife this morning and was in a bad mood! I’m sorry!”

“I don’t give a shit about you or your wife or your bad day.” I replied. I was over it.

I went about cleaning up and got the line together. He didn’t say another word to me besides calling orders. In fact, he didn’t really talk to me much until a couple weeks later. After the incident, he wouldn’t yell at me, but instead weirdly make me part of his terribleness. He’d be badgering some other cook and look at me and wink. One time he leaned over to me and whispered after chewing someone out, “I’m so full of shit” and then started laughing. It was absolutely bizarre.

I worked there for another year after that. Nigel mostly left me alone, though he did dig into me pretty hard sometimes, but the name calling stopped at least. I don’t know why I continued to work there. I didn’t like my coworkers very much, the food was good but not so excellent as to take this abuse. I think I just got stuck.

It took 9/11 to unstick me. After 9/11, our rythym was off. We shut down for a bit from regular service and were just making meals for first responders and rescue workers at ground zero. The time gave me a minute to look around and reflect. I wish I had told Nigel to take this job and shove it. Instead, I gave three month’s notice. On my last day, Chef Nigel opened a few bottles of champagne and the whole team toasted me. He made a speech sending me off, telling me I’d be missed, what a good worker I was, and how much he cared about me. I thanked him, packed up my tools, and wandered out. It’s amazing how much he misjudged our relationship.

The old school chefs always said you need to have a thick skin to work in a kitchen. Twenty some years later, I realize the only reason you needed a thick skin was because of them.