Kitchen Confidential

Reader Response from The Fray (to be read after the final entry):

No matter how far you are from Paris, in French you have your liaison between your final consonant and your opening vowel (or silent h), so Les Halles is Lay Zahl. Does Jeffrey like his meat au juice too?

--Richard Riley

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I've had a theory for years (20 years in the business and culinary school) that most restaurant people end up in the business by accident. They had no idea what they really wanted to do with their life, they get jobs out of highschool as bussers, waitstaff, dishwashers and prep-cooks and just end up staying year after year wondering what they are really going to do with their lives. Some get interested enough in the creative or business end of it and focus their energies into becoming managers and chefs or even owners, but a lot of help in restaurants are frustrated, depressed, and angry people who stay for an income gained by the only work experience they've managed to acquire in life, or for the "tips" if they're waitstaff in a happening place. The long and often thankless hours of underpaid, underappreciated hot and frustrating work takes its toll. The business breeds alcoholism and drug abuse and therefore doesn't judge (right or wrong) its existence in the kitchen and dining room for the most part. If someone comes in on time, isn't obviously wasted and does a good job, he's accepted and kept as good help, because those qualities are hard to find and hard to hold on to.

I worked in an exclusive country club where the general manager got a club member who had connections with the DA to get a jailed breakfast cook on work release fast because it was a big tournament weekend and the cook was indispensable to the smooth running of it. We all got a good laugh about it. He came to work joking about the bad food in jail, ate good while he was at work, and right before he had to go back to jail for the night went out and got stoned with the dishwashers.

--Barbara

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What's the problem with weekend diners? As a Manhattan resident, am I not supposed to eat out on weekends? Maybe in the winter it's OK, because then I have an excuse for not being in the Hamptons?

--Confused in Manhattan

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[Note from the Fray Editor: Barbara--see above--came and explained the realities of weekend dining out in such a way as to persuade Confused, or in fact anybody, to eat at home those days.

And about those bathrooms at Les Halles--here's the review.]

(7/28)

Lighten up. There has been so much horror about this book--the rough and tumble lifestyle Mr Bourdain describes seems to shock certain sensibilities. Sure a kitchen, a locker room or a boardroom can be calm, courteous, sex- and drug- and punk rock-free, but, then again, folks who know nothing about the subject matter wouldn't even consider buying a book about them. This book was a lark akin to Bill Buckley's sailing adventures--I know nothing about either, but we all wish we could have been there to see for ourselves.

--Dave Quast

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Bourdain is typical of about 80% of chefs that I have worked for: the drugs, the chicken-orderers, the waiter-loathing. All of the above keep them in the business.

--Tamara Key
(Former waiter)

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The realities of being a chef are funky, down-to-earth stuff like food costs and making good food for your customers no matter how many or when. Finding a way to do whatever you can, do it well, and not put your owner out of business. I don't suppose sojourns in cooking school or that haute-cuisine French place required you to deal with a case of black chanterelles that will last just one more day unless they are "specialed" in an en croute preparation that will recoup their outrageous cost. Or that you ever had to work so hard and so fast that you cut yourself. This book is full of useful information for the diner and exuberant descriptions of the men and women who thrive in the working-class reality of restaurants.

--The Optimistic Curmudgeon

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I do think twice about "dropping $50 for a weeknight diner" or for a weekend dinner, or anything but maybe a really significant anniversary diner, when all the planets are in alignment, the horses all came in, and my number came up. In that kind of giddy excitement, I too might mistake the kind of art that I would drop $50 for at a restaurant for the kind of art that I expect when I pick up a book. Insulting your taste in food is not the same as writing poorly, even if you live in the rarefied air of New York.

Those people in New York who think nothing of dropping $50 for a weeknight dinner: for that, they do not expect art. They expect craft.

--Aaron Crim

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(7/25)

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• Robinson: Ugly Politics at Justice | Q&A