Manifesto, et al.

Wherein I say what I want to say, once, not in terms of locking myself into any one thing, but really railing against the institution as it is, saying who I am and why I'm doing this. Once. And then, maybe posting things on a semi-regular basis.

So. I'm a cook. Not a chef, not some guy that likes to cook a lot at home, but an honest to god real life bonafide line cook. In a restaurant. Actually, a pretty fancy one. Um. very fancy. And very expensive. And unlike these guys, I don't have any debt to speak of. Because I fell into cooking the old fashioned way--I got so fucked up on drugs I dropped out of high school. I ended up a dishwasher in western Washington at a little breakfast place. I was good enough at that that they asked me to start cutting onions, washing potatoes, stuff like that. A year later I was a line cook.

And a year after that I moved back in with my parents in New York, sent out a bunch of resumes to restaurants and ended up working at Trader Joe's. But after a year I landed a job working garde manger at a very trendy, very yuppie bar/restaurant in the west village. I moved to a New American, family run joint in Park Slope, and then scored this spot at the Fancy Restaurant.

Not including my time flipping eggs, I've been cooking for a year and a half. And I'm where every culinary school graduate wants to be, plus thirty grand. And I'm having as many second thoughts as those guys, except that I never had any illusions as to what kind of money I'd be making in a kitchen, because I worked my way up, made shit for years and am finally on my feet, sort of. It's just that I've got something in common with everyone on the other side of the line--I got into this really because I wanted to do something else, wanted to write. Knew that I'd never be able to wait tables, or clerk somewhere, so I took the kind of day job that was actually interesting to me--it was challenging, it was creative, it has the potential to be financially rewarding in itself.

I thought I could write in my free time, except most of my free time is spent drinking coffee so that I can wake up enough to get to work. When your day job eats up sixty hours of your week, it's not "what you're doing so you can do what you love," it's what you're doing. Which is a long way of saying that this is really an attempt to start doing what I set out to do in the first place, before I got caught up in the reality of being a good cook in a good kitchen in New York City.

This is part M.F.K. Fisher, part Ruth Reichl, part Anthony Bourdain (who himself is redolent of Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs). This is a celebration, not a diatribe. There are things I hate and things I love but I'm not about to get lost railing against anything for its own sake like so many culinary writing hipsterati. This has the potential to be a space for reviews, and observations and Savarinisms and gossip and news and whatever it decides it might one to be. Stay tuned.