The other day, I went to my dry goods shelf to grab a 5 kilo box of 64% chocolate pistoles, and found that it had been vandalized. Someone had written ñiñita chucha in black magic marker on the front of the box. Random scrawlings around a kitchen aren’t all that strange. I’ve seen everything from “te gusta maiz?” (you like corn?) written next to the employee toilet, part of a long-running kitchen joke involving an escort service ad and an ear of corn, to expletive filled notes imploring coworkers to keep a given area tidy, to random cartoon renditions of male genitals, to altered labels on my pastry items (tart turned into a fart, buttermilk becomes simply butt milk, you get the idea) Suffice it to say it doesn’t take much to entertain a bunch of kitchen workers.

But ñiñita chuca was the first bit of graffiti to show up in my present workplace which had been, up to that point, generally free of expletives, shouting, practical jokes and general bad behavior. In other words, it’s been a bit atypical as far as restaurant kitchens go. When I casually asked the Spanish-speaking chef what ñiñita chuca means, he answered just as casually, um, it’s like, cute little pussy, in Guatemalan slang.  Huh? My relationship with the Spanish-speaking contingent with whom I shared the basement prep area had been pretty good up to that point so I found it unlikely that one of them would call me a pussy via a box of chocolate, and anyway, after years in kitchens, I’ve done my best to make sure I don’t come close to giving off a pussy vibe. So I gathered the three of them around, held up the vandalized box and asked, as non-accusingly as I could (I didn’t want them to think I actually cared about the grafitti, I just wanted to figure it out), why did someone write cute little pussy on my chocolate? The butcher, and the oldest of the three, looked a little surprised at the words that had just come out of my mouth but simply shook his head as if in exasperation, while the youngest started to giggle. He’s from Guatemala, he explained, pointing at the third, holding his stomach as he laughed, as if it all made perfect sense. And that was all the explanation I got.

I’ve noticed a pattern. Every time I post something of, shall we say,”questionable” taste, (kicking animals, the smell of poo) I lose a subscriber. So, for the record, my intention is not to glorify the smut and dark side of the kitchen, but to relay what I find to be the bizarre, sometime outrageous and often funny things that go on behind the dining rooms in some of the fanciest restaurants. You might not like it, but it’s all part of my workplace reality. So, as a disclaimer for anyone out there with a weak stomach or easily offended sensibilities…here comes another one.

I hired Jane (I will call her Jane) to fill a part time pastry position I had open in a 3-star NYC restaurant. She was far from ideal, but I’d been searching weeks to find someone and she was the best of the sorry lot. (Despite high enrollment rates at local culinary schools, it is still incredibly difficult to find quality kitchen employees.) I suspected she was going to have a bit of trouble fitting in with the tough clique of cooks when, early on,  she almost bragged that her ex-boyfriend had tried to push her out the window (cooks have precious little sympathy for sob stories and even less if they suspect said stories to be exaggerated or self-serving). Even I began to lose patience when she pointed out a tattoo she’d gotten the night before (her 12th she proudly pointed out) “on a whim.”  I don’t even care about the ink, she explained, I just like the way it feels. It was only a matter of time before the cooks unleashed their antics on her.

It was on one of my days off, of course, when Jane came in one morning to the pastry station and found that the cake decorating turntable (a sort of lazy susan on top of a pedestal) had been vandalized in her honor. The night before, the cooks had–quite  creatively and most likely drunkenly–turned the turntable into a “Wheel of Sodomy,” complete with chocolate feces and raspberry sauce blood.

Most people have a romanticized idea of my work place. They envision me happily mixing doughs, lazily measuring out ingredients, casually enjoying an espresso with my most recent creation, fresh out of the oven, all within a cozy room that smells like sugar, spice, and, well, everything nice. It’s a nice picture, and perhaps represents 5% of my day to day reality. I’ve written plenty on some of the ubiquitous and unpleasant stenches that crop up in every kitchen, but the other morning I was reminded, once again, of an unfortunate circumstance that often befalls the pastry chef. In at least three of the high-end restaurants in which I’ve worked, the pastry area is inconveniently located too close to the employee bathroom.

Restaurant employees are a “family,” and these families are comfortable enough to, shall we say, do their business together. When you work upwards of 12 hours a day, and drink plenty of diuretic coffee to boot, well, let’s just say that when you gotta go, you gotta go (and the early hours leading up to a brunch service worsen this scenario exponentially), and where you go is often a short breeze from the pastry area.

And so, while there often is cake in the oven, its delicious and tempting smell too often collides with the stink of the freshly made poo coming from the nearby employee bathroom. The only thing worse is the odor derived from futile attempts to hide the smell by spraying disinfectant or deodorizer. Few things make me gag more than minted-poo or worst of all,  rose-poo. I’ve never liked that perfume-y “old lady” rose smell and I sure as heck don’t want to smell her poo.

Some cooks are just dirty.  Like Pigpen from Charlie Brown, they seem to leave a cloud of dust (and grease and crumbs and chopped herbs–you get the idea) where ever they go. Pigpens make their lives more difficult because the more mess they make, the deeper they fall into a disorganized abyss and with line cooking–any cooking–organization and efficiency is key. A good chef will ride a Pigpen, constantly getting on his case: wipe down the station…stop wiping your filthy hands on your chef jacket…work CLEAN, and hopefully, over time, a Pigpen can turn the corner into cleanliness–the first sign of a good cook.

One Pigpen I worked with was not only a sloppy cook, but personally disheveled, as is so often the case. His hair always looked unwashed, he didn’t take care of his teeth, and his chef pants were always falling low and his apron riding high, so that a healthy band of flesh across his back waved to everyone in the kitchen. None of this prevented his luck with the ladies. (That Pigpen line cooks are appealing to the ladies is something I still don’t understand.) But, it did provide fodder for his fellow cooks who, not only teased him for bing a Pigpen, but would take any opportunity to drop a single green pea into his exposed butt crack when he least expected it.

In Denmark, when someone sneezes no one cares. At least, it’s not cause for any sort of acknowledgement and I, for one, am a fan of their system. It is just a sneeze, after all. In the U.S., of course, the polite response to someone else’s sneeze is “bless you,” “gazundheit,” or even, “santé,” but until I started working in restaurant kitchens,  I’d never heard the Mexican response.

One sous chef I worked with was convinced that her Spanish-speaking coworkers, most of them Mexican, were yelling out “sunchoke!” after a sneeze, and particularly after a trio of sneezes. “Sunchoke!” she would cheerfully call out after hearing someone sneeze, joining what she thought was maybe their own little joke (they did peal a lot of sunchokes) or maybe their cultural norm.  That her coworkers often snickered among each other at this participation was insignificant–they must simply have been amused at her attempts to join in.

It wasn’t until a year or two later, when I did some consulting work for a Spanish-speaking chef that I learned that “sunchoke” was actually “Sancho!” a man’s name. But not just any man’s name, this chef explained. If a man sneezes three times in a row, it means his wife is cheating on him with a man named, yes, you guessed it, Sancho. When you sneeze, you deserved to be teased, it seems. One chef took the explanation one step further. Not only is Sancho the “other man,” but if someone sneezes three times it signifies that his wife is cheating with Sancho at that very moment and by yelling his name Sancho will be compelled to pull out and therefore, will not impregnate the woman, saving the sneezer supreme humiliation. I can’t confirm that this extensive explanation is widely accepted as completely true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a version of the story limited to use among–or invented by–restaurant employees. Either way, the image is burned into my brain every time someone yells out “Sancho!” following a sneeze.

As I’ve said before, one of the real bonuses for me about working in a kitchen is that I don’t have to worry about how I look before going to work. There’s no need for make-up, hair style, fashionable outfits, high heels or nail polish. In fact nail polish is forbidden and a health hazard: it could flake off into the food. But this doesn’t mean I’ve been free from comments on my appearance, no matter how bland I try to appear at work. One time, a cook looked at me as I melted some butter on his station and casually announced that I had a long whisker growing out of my chin. When I came into work with a new haircut, one that revealed an inch of close-shaved hair on the back of my neck, the smarmy wine director’s only words were, ooh…can I touch it? When I cut my hair boy-short, a waiter asked the rest of the kitchen, who’s the new guy? Ha ha. But the cooks had been thinking about my “look” all along while playing the game in which they debate which celebrities would play them in the movie version of the restaurant (one cook was a dead ringer for Paul Giamatti). First, I was told, we thought you were definitely Anne Heche. I was okay, with that. I’d actually gotten the Anne Heche thing a lot. Then, the last time you cut your hair, we switched you to Ellen Degeneres. I guess I could deal with Ellen, even if she was 13 years my senior. At least she’s funny. Now, he went on, you’re Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman? Yeah, the cook answered, cause he can play anything.

I was working at a new job in a restaurant that was suspiciously normal.  Not only was the restaurant was highly rated according to Zagat and Michelin, it was well staffed (lots of restaurants keep their kitchen staffs to the bare minimum, in order to keep payroll down and the work load high), kept its walk-ins and dry goods areas impeccably organized and clean, had as many female line cooks as male (the chef even told me that he wished he could hire exclusively female cooks because they usually caused fewer problems), but the nightly family meal was well planned, thought out, often included a vegetable other than potatoes, and was actually tasty. Even more unbelievably, every day at one or two o’clock, the three prep cooks–the only employees who worked with me in the mornings and afternoons–included me in the lunch they made themselves. I was shocked the first time one of them handed me a plate of roast chicken, salad and roasted butternut squash. This place was too good to be true–and didn’t seem to live up to all the wacky restaurant norms I’d come to expect after years in the business. Where were the lewd comments? The drunken and hungover line cooks? The overflowing drains? The screaming and name-calling? The cast of freakish characters that I’d come to expect? Turns out, it was all just a matter of time.

I was suspicious of Joe, the sous chef who right off the bat took the liberty of bad-mouthing some of the other employees we worked with. But no one else seemed bothered by him so I let it go–maybe I was being too hard on him. But as time went on, Joe turned weirder and weirder. He nonchalantly showed up late. Joe bragged about how little he’d slept the night before. He pathetically gathered the old flowers from the dining room arrangements when they were changed only to re-package them for whatever girl he’d be seing that night. He mumbled about how unfairly he was being treated and how insufficiently he was being paid. He would randomly work without his chef coat on for a few hours in the middle of his shift. Seeing him hunched over a cutting board in just a short-sleeved t-shirt and wool cap skeeved me out in a very primal way. There’s a reason we wear chef coats–not just for the protection, and tradition, but to make us anonymous. I did not want to see Joe the hungover, un-showered, just-had-sex-the-night-before guy, I only wanted to see Joe the Sous Chef.  And as far as sous chef jobs went, his was cake. His work load was completely do-able, his chef was mild mannered and fair, the problems few and the pay good. All of this seemed lost on him as he slipped further and further into a victim’s cloud of false entitlement. His grumbling increased, he disappeared more often for cigarette breaks and who knows what else, and often in the middle of service, forcing the runners or bus boys to search him out in vain and leaving the rest of the cooks–those coworkers he was supposed to be leading and who needed food off his station to finish off a table–helpless.

I watched the downward spiral afar from my pastry station. Remember, I was the new guy in town and didn’t feel comfortable telling the chef how to run his kitchen or his staff. And why didn’t anyone else seem to notice? Why didn’t the cooks bitch about him? Were they all just too nice? Were they blind to this black mark on their Valhalla?  As expected, Joe quickly hit bottom when finally, on the chef’s night off, he pulled his disappearing act, this time using his time off the line to consume multiple alcoholic beverages, which resulted in a dining room of messed up tables, frantic waiters and unhappy diners, two of which just happened to be the owners. Joe, who finally admitted (sincerely or not) to having a problem with prescription drugs, was finally cut loose.

The day after he left, I was relieved to learn that the three Spanish-speaking prep cooks with whom I shared the basement, had given him a nickname: El Sonambulo or, The Sleepwalker. Around the same time, I noticed that a handfull of the cooks started playing a weird voice game. For a few minutes each day a bunch of them randomly carried on a conversation in a high pitched, squeely voice not unlike the Schmoo (for those of you who remember the cartoon) in Spanish. Maybe this place would live up to my expectations after all.

All of this leads me to a nasty smell I forgot to include in my last post, The Nose Knows.

Related to man fog is the hungover line cook. These cooks roll into work in the same clothes they left in the night before (hell, sometimes they spend the night inside the restaurant) still drunk, unbathed, probably-had-sex-last-night (maybe with more than one person) and also smoke cigarettes (yes, a surprising number of cooks kill their blessed taste buds with cigarettes). The resulting scent that comes out of their pores and gets trapped in small places like offices, changing rooms and storage closets makes you think twice about getting close to any man ever again, at least for the moments you are swimming in it.

Having been back working in a restaurant for just over a month now (is it any wonder there’s been a slight lapse in my posts?) I am reminded of how many things remain a constant in all restaurants, no matter the size, type or Michelin rating.  Spanish is the predominant language, cooks hate waiters, and inappropriate behavior and sexual comments abound (in my current workplace, this mostly involves the gay manager telling the not-gay diminutive Mexican prep cook how sexy he is day after day after day).

And then there are the smells.

Outsiders (as I refer to anyone who doesn’t work in a restaurant) often have dreamy images of me working with the fruity and sugary smells that lately have been showing up in all kinds of personal care products. Creme Brulee hand cream? Brown sugar sloughing wash? Vanilla-flavored toothpaste? After a long day in the kitchen, the last thing I want to smell like is dessert. But don’t get me wrong, I have loads of positive sense memories related to kitchen smells and some give me instant memories of exact moments in time. The scent of sesame oil and onions instantly brings me back to Nobu, reminding me of my early, inexperienced days.  Rose water takes me to my line cook days at a Mediterranean/Middle Eastern place in Tribeca. Everytime I open a package of kalalmansi juice (a Southeast Asian Lime) I return to my weeks spent in The Philippines where I “discovered” the fruit juice, mixed into iced tea.

But these are the good smells.  Below are seven more–bad ones this time–that pop up repeatedly in every workplace and always turn my stomach.

1. Roasting Lamb Bones - The stench of roasting bone and flesh of the already mutton-y animal (along with the sight of a tangled heap of the charred bones) is nothing like the delicious flavor of the meat and instantly reminds me that we are carnivores in the most primal way. I imagine our early ancestors roasting fresh kill over an open fire and then tearing the flesh from the bone with their bare teeth. I know, it sounds a tad melodramatic but that’s what pops into my head.
2. Garbage - Ok, this sounds like an obvious one, but the garbage areas in restaurants are like none other and somehow always seem to turn the same combination of smells (rotting dairy, fish guts and bones, bloody meat juices, leftovers, and general, well, garbage) into a hideous stench that is greater than the sum of its parts and one worsens exponentially day by day, for example, if the garbage pick up people have a holiday or go on strike or simply forget. If you are lucky (as I am at my current restaurant) the garbage area is far from your work space.
3. White Pepper - Smells like ass. Ask any cook (and I have asked many) and this is what he will tell you. Don’t get me wrong–it is a valuable and important spice that enhances many dishes. I have even used it (successfully) to flavor ice cream. But smell it and you’ll know what I mean even if you’re not really sure what ass smells like.
4. Simmering Octopus (also called simply “octo” or “pussy”) - It might just be me (since no one else in my very unscientific poll gets quite the stomach turn that I do) but a big old pot filled with water, octopus (baby or bigger), wine, carrots, onions, celery, bay leaves etc. smells like dirty ocean water that has been rotting for months. Don’t let this change your mind about eating octo, once the little guys are cleaned and marinated or grilled that stench is gone and they are absolutely delicious. And cute.
5. Man Fog -  If you happen to be the last one to change after a bunch of hot, sweaty waiters or line cooks, you do so amidst their man fog, a mix of sweat, stink, food aromas and yes, as sad as it sounds, crotch.  That some cooks  borrow my box of cornstarch to keep their nether regions dry, does little to curb the man fog.
6. Backed Up Drains - Overflowing drains are a constant problem in restaurants, and in different kitchens I have witnessed black, greasy goo shooting out geyser-style of a sink drain, water spilling generously out of the pipes beneath a sink (and sinks are an imperative in kitchens and a little pipe problem will not deter a cook from using them and adding to the pool on the floor), and numerous floor drains flooding entire rooms with inches of filthy water. On a few occasions I have seen actual pieces of poop–yes, poop!–floating through the kitchen. After a few times, cooks and dishwashers nonchalantly tie plastic bags over their feet and wade through the filth until the plumber arrives with his snake. When “The Drain King” arrives and solves the problem, you realize that he is, in fact, a king.
7. Grease Traps - An extension of the drains, but much worse. These are the traps beneath the sink drains or dishwasher drains that do exactly what you think they do: they trap all the grease and muck that makes its way down the drains. These need to be cleaned regularly, which entails a dishwasher sometimes wearing a garbage bag like a raincoat as well as a side towel or napkin wrapped around his nose and mouth to protect him from the horrors that are trapped in these boxes.  The goop must be scooped out and tied up into layers of heavy duty trash bags before disposed of in the garbage area. This job is usually done when the fewest number of employees are around (yes, it’s that bad) but some places, like the hotel I worked in, operate 24 hours a day. Not only does this mean that it can be impossible to clean the traps when no one is around but that the traps are bigger and fuller than those of a small kitchen. When witnessing the cleaning of a trap of these proportions you imagine that all kinds of appalling things will be scooped out and that they are, in fact, The Gates of Hell. Much gagging ensues.

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of friction between the back of the house (those who work in the kitchen) and the front of the house (those who work in the dining room). This is mostly because cooks think all waiters are lazy (they resent waiters for making twice the money in half the hours) and as a result they spend a fair amount of time tormenting them. Their tactics may be as simple as persistent and ruthless name calling (in one case, all one hostess had to do to get on the bad side of a liberal-hating sous chef was wear an anti-Bush t-shirt) or more complicated, like intentionally making ridiculously high-calorie family meal for weeks just to make a single hated waiter fat. Generally, this low-level combat is limited to cooks and waiters, but once in a while a manager comes along who has no hope of escaping the abuse.

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Some kitchen nicknames are born out of innocent teasing, some out of pronunciation difficulty and some are just plain mean.

I hired Rosa Maria to be my assistant not only because she seemed to be the most qualified (she’d put in time at some of New York City’s best restaurants), but because during her interview, she’d appeared alert and thick-skinned, a definite plus considering the crass, all boy-world I was hiring her into. The cooks teased and mocked one another relentlessly and I knew that anyone I hired would have to be able to tolerate them at the very least. That she never once used the word “passion” when talking about her love of desserts, a serious pet peeve of mine, had been a bonus.

And I had been right—sort of. Not long after she began, she joined the guys for a late night of drinking at the restaurant. It turned out (I was joyfully informed) that alcohol not only brought out the “dirty talker” in Rosa Maria, but also made her an object of desire. “You should have seen them,” one cook told me, “it was like two dogs fighting over the last piece of meat.” I never found out for sure if either dog sated his hunger that night, but she did end up spending the night on a banquette in the dining room. After that night, it was only a matter of a few short days before her new name spontaneously shot out of someone’s mouth one afternoon: Rosa Verga!, Spanish for Pink Penis. The guys loved the sound of it so much that it took hold with a vengeance, often being shortened simply to Verga! said with force and purpose.

At first, Rosa Maria was ignorantly happy for weeks with her name, pleased to be “one of the guys,” something she so painfully wanted to be. It wasn’t until a waiter revealed that it translated directly as “Pink Penis” that her heart sank–temporarily. She knew there was no way to escape their torment, and so she finally accepted her new name and the part she played in the kitchen name game. Rosa Verga smiled at the outbursts of her new name, responding cheerfully with “That’s me!”