Kitchen Confidential Read Online Free PDF

wrapping operations. The Dreadnaught lot, like every other lot in town, was suddenly filled with gore-covered cooks and dishwashers, laboring under flickering gaslamps and naked bulbs to clean, wrap and freeze the valuable white meat. We worked for hours with our knives, our hair sparkling with snowflake-like fish scales, scraping, tearing, filleting. At the end of the night's work, I took home a 35-pound monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I'd ever eaten, was due to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, Could anything be better than that?
    and I don't know if it to take on, but it hit about things, made me It was a protein rush eaten with the hands.
    As the season came to an end, the regular crew began to fade away, off to work ski resorts in Colorado, charter boats in the Caribbean, restaurants and crab-shacks in Key West. After Labor Day, I got my chance to move up for the last few weeks before the Dreadnaught closed for the year. I worked the fry station, dunking breaded clams and shrimp into hot oil for a while, racked up a serious body count of lobsters on the double-decker steamer, and finally was moved up yet again to do a few shifts on the mighty broiler. I cannot describe to you the sheer pleasure, the power of commanding that monstrous, fire-breathing iron and steel furnace, bumping the grill under the flames with my hip the way I'd seen Bobby and Jimmy do it. It was tremendous. I couldn't have felt happier-or more powerful in the cockpit of an F-16. I ruled the world for a few short weeks, and I was determined to make that station my own the following season.
    Sadly, things didn't turn out as planned. The next summer, Mario bought our faltering restaurant. Mario was kind enough to allow those of us who'd worked there the previous year to audition for our old jobs with a few shifts in his kitchen. I was thrilled by the opportunity, and headed up to P-town that April filled with hope and confidence, certain I'd make the cut, land that top-tier broiler job, the big money, the gig that would surely make me one of the pirate elite, an ass-kicking, throat-slitting stud who could lord it over the salad men and fry cooks and prep drones at less successful restaurants.
    I pulled into town, I remember, wearing-God help me-a spanking-new light blue Pierre Cardin seersucker suit. The shoes, too, were blue. Here I was, hitchhiking into a town that for all intents and purposes was a downscale, informal Portuguese fishing village and artists' colony, a town where people dressed unpretentiously in work clothes-denims, army surplus, old khakis-and in some deranged, early '70s bout of disco-inspired hubris, I chose to make my entrance in gull-wing shouldered Robert Palmer-wear, just itching to show the local yokels how we did it in New York City.
    They were pounding veal in the kitchen when I arrived; the whole crew, on every available horizontal surface, banging on veal cutlets for scallopine with heavy steel mallets. The testosterone level was high, very high. These guys were the A-Team, and they knew it. Everybody knew it. The floor staff, the managers, even Mario seemed to walk on eggs around them, as if one of them would suddenly lunge through the bars of their cage and take a jagged bite. I alone was too