Culinary Fiction

Mending Broken Sauces

As many of you know I wrote a memoir documenting my life and experiences with food and the restaurant industry. I am working on polishing up a few details and hope to publish on Amazon by the end of this month. I’ve also played around with writing some culinary fiction. It fun and I love that I get to make stuff up and draw on a lifetime of experience in the restaurant industry. This is the journey of a chef named Sara. Enjoy and let me know if you want to read more of her story.

She flinched as the hot oil leapt from the pan and embedded itself in her neck. It had been five years since she had last worked in a commercial kitchen, yet it felt like yesterday. The burn scars on her forearms had mostly faded, yet all the work she had done on herself over the course of that last five years was fresh. A transformation had occurred since that day.

It was the tail end of a Sunday brunch shift and feeling numb, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she had quietly packed up her knife roll, left a full hotel pan of eggs poaching on the stove and slipped out the back door without anyone noticing. She was done. Twenty years of physical and emotional abuse was enough. She had endured being yelled at, burning hot pans being hurled in her direction and constant disrespect. The pressure to get the job done, no matter what, because “that’s the way it’s done” had driven her to the brink of suicide on more that one occasion and on this day she just shut down. Working under Chef Leonardo at the Royal yacht club for the last year had been a living nightmare. She had been hired as the lead banquet chef and after the Chef de Cuisine cracked his head open one night in a drunken brawl, the details of which where pretty fuzzy, but the rumor being that Chef Leonardo was somehow involved, she had been forced into his position. After a year of high stress, fourteen hour days, with only one day a week off, often times coming in for a manager meeting on that day off, she had cracked. Five days before this final brunch shift, she had received a phone call at around seven PM. She had picked up the phone in the back kitchen to the sound of her mothers voice. “Hi sweet pea” her voice sounded a bit shaky “what’s wrong mom?” - “your father had a heart attack and it’s not looking good, he’s in the ICU” - You should come home, her mother said. Okay mom, Sara said. I’ll figure it out. Hanging up the phone, she made her way towards the walk-in freezer. The freezer is soundproof and has less traffic than the walk-in cooler. For years the freezer was the place she went to get away for a second and pull her self together. As the frigid air it her face and the door closed behind her, Sara let out a scream. Fuuuck!! I don’t want to loose him she said to herself. Fuck you dad!!

Growing up in a run down neighborhood on the South side of Chicago, Sara and her dad had rarely seen eye to eye and she resented him, blaming him for the loss of her brother and his inability to be a supporting husband to her mother. Fuck you, you fucking asshole, she kept repeating to herself. Now was not the time for this shit. The club had four golf tournaments scheduled in the next five days  and the holiday weekend was one of the busiest of the year for the club.

Pulling herself together Sara made her way back to her prep station where she was in the middle of breaking down a hundred pounds of whole chickens. She could just quit and tell Leonardo to fuck off she thought, but she needed the money. Living close enough to the club in the Hamptons was expensive and she had a ton of debt. Her failed attempt at culinary school almost ten years ago was still a sizable payment every month and she had continued to max out credit cards over the years just to get by on the shity salary she was making. It seemed only the owners of any place she ever worked, where the only ones to make any money, yet they all complained how they could never make payroll. We can’t afford to give you a raise  this year they’d say, and we need you to work some extra hours to cut labor. Meanwhile they’d disappear for weeks at a time on some tropical adventure.

As Sara stood there slicing through each backbone one by one she started to let out some of her apprehension on the birds. How the hell was she going to ask Leonardo if she could leave the next day? Whack!!! Her large chefs knife crunching through the bone and landing hard on the cutting board. He’s going to fucking freak out. Crack!!! What if he just tells me no? Crack!! Raw chicken juice splattering against the wall with each hit. Splat!! As she methodically plowed through the dozens of birds in front of her she kept playing the tape over and over in her head of how she thought this conversation would go. I’ll just tell him I’m going and not leave him a choice, she thought. Maybe he’ll surprise me and respond with kindness and compassion. Finishing up the birds and sanitizing her station she knew she might as well get it over with and headed for the office where she was sure to find Loe pouring over some fucking spread sheet instead of doing the actual work that she desperately needed help with. The club would serve over three thousand guests this coming weekend and the prep list was enormous. She just spit it out “My dad’s in the hospital and I need to fly back to Chicago tomorrow, he might not make it” Without even taking a moment to respond Leo said “It’s the busiest weekend of the summer, we need you here. You can go on Monday, Leave tomorrow and don’t bother coming back, you’ll be out of a job” He never even turned around to look at her, saying all of this with no emotion and continued staring at the computer screen. But he had a fucking heart attack… it’s my dad. Sara responded, her voice a little shaky, fighting back the tears and the urge to take a swing at Loe’s head. “This conversation is over” said Leo still not turning around. Stunned, Sara turned and headed back towards her prep station. Pausing at the freezer door, she stepped in side. As soon as the door closed behind her she let out a long breath and the tears began to flow. Shaking and sobbing she could feel the tears starting to freeze to her face. She had to pull herself together. Fuck you dad!!! She screamed. Letting the anger well up inside her she wiped the frozen tears from her face and got back to work.

Standing back at her prep table, mind spinning, she tried to focus on the tasks in front of her. She needed to get some sauces going for the banquet that evening and if she didn’t get ahead on tomorrows breakfast prep the morning shift was going to be rough. Wait.. she thought. Am I even going to show up for that shift. Fuck him. I should just walk out now and get on a plane in the morning. But what the hell would I do then… go back and live with mom again? Mom and dad had been divorced since Sara was thirteen and mom had a little apartment right next to the 87th street red line station. The trains rattling by produced many a sleepless night in her high school years, and mom smoked, a lot. The apartment walls where covered in a black film from all the smoke and moms continuous battles with alcohol and drugs where to much to deal with. Fuck dad!! She thought… he couldn’t be bothered to show up when she was a kid, why should she show up now? After getting her sauces going on the stove she started cracking eggs for the next morning, trying to keep her mind from going in every direction. No one cared. There was no one to call who would give her good advice. No shoulder to lean on. Her regular crew at the dive bar wouldn’t belly up for another five or six hours. She needed something to calm down. Finishing up the eggs and headed for the bathroom, she made a quick pitstop at the club bar. Jimmy, she nodded her head at him, which he knew was the sign for “hook it up” He grabbed a glass and and did a nice eight count of tequila. Throwing it back in two gulps, she winced and headed for the bathrooms. Crouching down she checked to make sure there was no one else in the stalls, she went into her favorite stall with the large toilet paper holder so she could cut herself out a line. It had started a few years back when a few people she met at the dive bar had offered her a line, She had been really tired after a sixteen hour shift and the meth enabled her to hang out and party all night. She started doing it every weekend and felt like she had more of a social life but now it was just a daily requirement. She needed a line to function and was always a little out of it. She would go days at a time without sleeping and had lost a lot of weight. It wasn’t really a problem she told her self. She was functioning just fine, she had a job and wasn’t sucking dick on the corner or anything like that. After grinding the little pink rocks down with her last remains credit card, she rolled a dollar bill, held one nostril closed and drew in a forceful breath through the other nostril. Eyes watering and feeling that intense burn in her nose always seemed to invigorate her, at least for a moment. The familiar chemical taste and smell began to drip down her throat. Grabbing a few squares of toilet paper she wiped her eyes and cleaned of the spot on the toilet paper holder, wiping away any evidence of her crime. But was it really a crime? How the fuck else was she supposed to get through these seventy hour work weeks? Glancing in the mirror as she made her way out of the bathroom, she quickly looked away. Her own image was difficult to take in. Eyes sunken back in her head, a little sweat on her brow and looking just a lot worn out, she quickly moved on telling herself she was just fine.