The beginning is the end is the beginning is the end

It’s been a while, but for the last few months I’ve been going through a bit of a crisis: do I really want to do this?

There have been days where I’ve been elated to work at what is one of the best restaurants in New York. There are days when I am envious of “normal people” and their ability to enjoy weekends and daylight, rather than spending their time indoors.

And then there are days where I’m terribly depressed at how shitty a cook I can be (a fact that is sometimes verbalized by my peers, although not so directly). But mostly there is a monotonous repetition that I’ve settled into at Marea, which has numbed me to a lot of my angst.

My usual day consists of arriving just before or during the lunch rush, and hitting the ground running with the massive prep list. Often that means picking through crab (very tedious, as the peekytoe meat we get is riddled with opaque, celophane-like shells); killing and cooking upwards of twenty lobsters; cleaning said lobster shells for soup/stock and portioning the meat; making the Granny apple gelee for the crab; making the salmoriglio sauce and salsa verde; candying fennel; butchering hamachi and rolling into roulades using our “meat glue” active; making chive and basil oils; and too many other tasks to list.

Some of these duties are kind of relaxing. For example, I enter a state of zen while slicing paper-thin sheets of lardo for our sea urchin crostini appetizer. Other jobs are very laborious, like the salsa verde, which is essentially gremolata. It involves washing and fine-dicing seven bunches of parsley, as well as tarragon, basil and mint, then making a paste out of lemon zest and garlic, mixing that with anchovy paste, and combining it all with olive oil. A lot of prep for something that is doled out on the side with our whole fish.

And it all begins anew the next day.

Repetition has helped hone some of my knife skills, though I am still far from good. It has also helped improve my plating so that I can get out almost every dish on my station well under a minute (the sea urchin crostini takes time, but toasting bread can only be done so quickly). But it also causes boredom. There are only so many times you can wash lettuce before you get bored. Fortunately, dirty joking with the Latinos in the prep kitchen and mariachi music gets me through those times.

The other plus is that we change our dishes every month or so, which means I get to watch as the chefs dabble (some of them have come from molecular havens such as wd-50 and Eleven Madison Park, which is why we sometimes incorporate chemical cooking into our routine). And I also get to pick up new techniques, also a plus.

After all the soul-searching I’ve done, I am back firmly routed to my “gunna be a chef” path. That may still change—I am debating with wifey a six-month trip abroad to work in a foreign kitchen, either Italy or Asia, and I’m still thinking about corporate cheffing or food writing eventually if and when I want to have kids—but for now, I’m going to stick it out.

There will surely be ups and downs in my career, and I’m now more than ever convinced the culinary lifestyle is a breeding ground for alcoholism, sex addiction, drug abuse and mental instability. I’m sure I can come out the other side without having to worry about those things, but hopefully I also come out with a greater appreciation of food, rather get burned out by the repetition of simple tasks.

Living the vida malsana

You know, this is a bad life, right?”

These were the words of encouragement given to me by a fellow cook at the restaurant this week following a particularly hectic service. I was initially puzzled—I mean, we get to work in an exciting atmosphere, occasionally sample great food—but I caught on quickly to what he meant.

Cooks live miserable lives and are distracted from their misery only through the grace of alcohol, drugs, sex or other vices. I learn this every night when, after service and during the laborious clean-up, I dream only of one thing: a frosty Budweiser from the family walk-in fridge (we always keep several cases on hand). Marie Antoinette should have told the masses to drink Bud instead of eating cake. Believe me, it calms your anger.

The unhealthiness doesn’t end at post-service substance abuse. The job itself is unhealthy. You work long hours on your feet, sometimes lugging back-breaking amounts of food up and down stairs, with little nourishment and sometimes less fresh water. Dehydration is a necessity for a good night’s work, it seems; if my piss isn’t a bright yellow when I stumble home, I know I’ve had too much time to drink water during service.

If you work the grill station, you’re likely to have burned-out forearms that look as though they are inflicted with some kind of skin disease. If you work prep, sharp knives are your best and worst enemies (mine happens to be the French mandolin, however). If you work the fry station, you could get splattering oil on you at any time. Pasta seems a relatively safe haven (maybe I should reconsider my previous comments), but I’m sure they have their own hazards.

Hell, even getting ice for the oyster station this week proved a hazard for me. The hinge on the ice machine apparently had broken earlier in the day, and when I opened it the door crashed back down against the bridge of my nose.

But despite that my hands now look like an old leper’s, despite that I see my wife maybe one night a week, despite that I usually eat a sandwich or leftovers at 1 a.m. for dinner, despite that I find myself licking my lips when I pass a liquor store, I’m still enamored with the profession. For now, anyway.

Do the right thing: eat less fish

It’s such a hassle to do the right thing. You may say you’re going to be a strict locavore, for example, and eat food that is grown only within a 30-mile radius from your home; chances are you’re going to slip and eventually eat something that was shipped from elsewhere in the United States or abroad.

When it comes to fish, my favorite protein, doing the right thing can be especially difficult. Consider the tuna, which is now overfished (but may soon receive some protection). It was apparently considered a “garbage fish” among the Japanese for sushi purposes until very recently. Now, however, tuna is sold for tens of thousands of dollars at Hunt’s Point and the Tsukiji fish markets.

Consider, also, salmon. To eat wild salmon from anywhere except Alaska is an ecological no-no. But locavores and other hippies say that farmed salmon is also a no-no because it is fed high levels of corn. Such fish are often white, and then “tinted” pink with food coloring to make it more appealing to Joe Consumer.

Many fish restaurants need to included endangered fish species to attract customers, though some, like Le Bernardin, do the right thing and keep threatened fish like monkfish and blue fin tuna off their menus. Other restaurants may be doing the right thing unintentionally by switching crappy fish for endangered species that are in high demand, or so says this researcher. Think the Komodo Dragon scam the Marlon Brando flick, “The Freshman."

One great resource to figure out which fish are okay to eat and which aren’t is the Environmental Defense Fund’s Oceans Alive site, which tracks fish populations. Check it out, and try to pass on Chilean sea bass next time in favor of some Artic char next time you have a chance.

A rant against marketing: Why can’t wines be simple?

Bear with me on this one. First, a bit more about my pre-culinary life. I was a journalist, yes, but I also was forced to write some marketing copy at my first job. Perhaps “forced” is too strong a word, as I wasn’t exactly churning copy for Kim Jong Il. But it was a requirement, and I despised every minute of it.

The hippies got it wrong: money is not the root of all that is evil, marketing is. It’s essentially the legal form of lying, designed to get people to buy things they don’t need or that are of crappy quality. Snake oil salesmen were famous for it, cigarette companies perfected using marketing for evil in trying to hook kids on cancer, time-share salespeople are annoying experts at it, and Hitler was a master at it, using propaganda to blame everything on the Jews.

And winemakers do it, too.

Wine-producing countries are obsessed with classifying their wine in different ways, and all the different ways are seemingly designed to be as confusing as possible. Italians have myriad classifications, Germans ramble as only Germans can with their precise eno-definitions, and the French … well, the French are the French.

Now, winemakers are certainly better than greasy-moustachioed salesmen hawking swampland in Florida, but they still sometimes market one thing as another, and rename willy nilly to make a simple wine seem extravagant.

France – One of the granddaddies of wines, the Premier Cru, means something completely different in several regions. In Burgundy, it could mean a high level of wine quality from a single vineyard. However, if there is no vineyard name on the bottle, it could also mean a blend of wines from several vineyards. In the Bordeaux region, it is the highest within a separate classification of wines called the Grand Crus.

Italy – Ever one to be provincial, Italians seem stuck in the city-state mentality when it comes to wine. In the north, wines adopt Germanic labeling (i.e., they go on and on about which winemaker, the name of the owner, his zodiac sign, etc.). In the south, they go crazy and label wines pretty much however they like. Case in point, Chianti. Now, these wines should be simply from the Chianti region, but because in the early 1900s Chianti became a hot wine, the region was “expanded” to include wines from neighboring regions. Then, because the Italians were worried the Chianti name lost its cache, they renamed true Chianti as Chianti Classico. Got it?

Spain – The Spanish try to use a number of names to pump up the importance of their wines. They might call a basic Rioja an “Imperial” wine, or a sherry as an “Entity.” Very weird, and ultimately it says nothing about the quality of the wine, just the Kappaesque attitude of the winemaker.

United States of America – U.S. classifications are plain vanilla. A domestic wine may list the state in which it was bottled, the state in which the grapes were grown, the region, the winemaker or simply say a product of the United States of America. Caveat emptor.

Due to all the marketing mumbo jumbo, I end up sticking to a few regular wines. Failing that, I just pick up a bottle of whatever, drink it uncritically, and ramble on much like good ol’ Orson here. I suggest you just find a wine you like, stick with it, and do the same.