Kitchen Jargon

That restaurant food is made at all is a miracle. The high-heat, high-speed, choreography of a kitchen requires clear, quick communication between all the cooks, and any hitch or delay or misunderstanding can derail it. The appetizers need to hit the pass first, followed soon, but not too soon, by the salad or soup. Then come the entrées and their special timing. The Pad Thai will finish as fast as the broccoli softens in the boiling sauce, but the steak was ordered medium-rare, which means it will sizzle and sweat on the grill until the flavor disappears. Beef is hearty and takes forever to destroy, so do you start it along with the appetizers or can it wait? What about those other five orders asking their own complicated questions? Then, how do you answer when you can’t speak with the other cooks?

When I slap down a ticket filled with orders on the stainless steel pass and shout, “Order, please,” the pidgin communication begins. Five languages are used in the kitchen at my restaurant. Of these, four are fully understood by four people, but those four are split into two bilingual groups – two cooks who speak Thai and Lao, and one cook and a utility man who speak Maya and Spanish. Emaciated English, comprising food names, numbers up to twenty, and simple commands, is all that connects the groups. Improvised sign language, mostly pointing, fills the gaps. The kitchen’s language is unique to this restaurant. It grew from the combination of languages, the proficiency of the speakers, the dominant personalities, and the cuisine. In a year this language might disappear in favor of another jargon.

In French-style kitchens (which means militaristic divisions of labor and hierarchy not a specific cuisine) the barking ball-busting sergeant is an archetype. In our kitchen that’s Louis, the sous chef or kitchen quarterback, a young, five-foot-six not huge but solidly built bundle of pissed-off. When everything flows, Louis warbles Spanish ballads, but the moment something offends him – a poorly wiped plate, a shoddy garnish or stumbling cook, anything imperfect – he snaps and seethes. When the bile reaches Louis’ eyes, it’s obvious he wants to dress down and humiliate the other cooks. But he can’t. His first language is Maya, a Native American language from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and the other cooks don’t understand Spanish. Outside of the restaurant, Louis is a painfully shy person who after eight years in Oregon never learned English probably because he couldn’t stand messing up. So his linguistically impotent anger is limited to a growled, “No,” then pointing to what he needs to fix this mistake. Somehow, as I stand there impatiently watching the cooks scurrying scared around Louis, the problem is solved. I always grin when Louis hands me the repaired plate, and he shoos me away, irritated.

When things go smooth, a normal exchange in the kitchen goes like this: Louis takes the ticket and shouts, “Lee, salad roll.” Easy. I wouldn’t add more to it. But what if the customer wants mango sticky rice, a dessert, as an appetizer and the som yum salad as an entrée and the pad Thai without gluten? All a properly prepared and timed meal has going for it are a few squiggles on the ticket and a conversation between Louis and me that goes, “Sticky rice, first. Som yum, dos. Pad Thai, no gluten, no soy. Si?” “OK.” “Gracias my man.” “Nada.”

Somehow, it works. Not always, but much better than it should. Somehow, a smattering of Thai, Spanish, and English food names patched with a few verbs and interjections create the most beautiful food I’ve ever served. I don’t know how, but I know that when God blew all those grand plans at the Tower of Babel to hell the kitchen still got its job done.

A Quick Note Before We Begin...

When Erin said, "It's the connection to a 1,700-year-old tradition that attracts people to those services," I knew what this blog needed to be about. Deciding the blog's subject had bothered me from the moment a new friend, and web developer, persuaded me that blogging wasn't just for political junkies and public-diary-keeping fifteen-year-olds. But what would I write about? Posting random thoughts and funny clips seemed unsustainable and uninteresting. Focusing on a single subject, like food or the Middle East, would be limiting and likely produce the moronic babble that I associate with the word blog. I'm not an expert on anything; I don't obsess about pop culture or the grit of local politics; I'm a journalist who would like to be paid for his well-crafted, agonized-over words. What do I write about?

Then Erin, my sister, and I veered into a common conversation: the allure of tradition. This bout started with our frustration that so much of American Christianity is based on an ahistoric, untraditional concept of the faith that stops at the resurrection and restarts with Jesus boxing-out John Hancock to sign the Declaration of Independence. Erin and her husband, Ryan, both raised as evangelicals, began attending a Lutheran church in Hungary that, because of them, started an English service. The tradition of the liturgy, a youngster at 500, attracts Erin and she knows why many Americans, raised in mainline Protestant or evangelical churches, are turning to the ancient services performed by the Orthodox Church. They join a one-and-a-half-millennium long lineage of believers led by priests who say the same words and perform the same motions as they did in the fourth century. It's a sense of rootedness that the modern fundamentalist church doesn't posses and largely belittles. When we finished our talk, that idea – rootedness – sunk into my thoughts.

Now, the artist in me winces at explicitly describing what this blog will cover (especially because it will evolve) but my rational-self keeps molding the idea, trying for some definition. Because my analytic-self is violent and mean it punched artsy in the kidneys and sent him to the bathroom – which is a long way of saying I'm going to co-opt your interpretive faculty and explain this blog. At its heart is rootedness in all its esoteric guises: connections, bonds, history, heritage, community, legacy, shackles, provincialism, obligations, limitations, steadfastness, tradition. Without realizing it, my work has explored these words for years. Whether I wrote about an Indian village facing a new round of modernity, a farmer maintaining a 100-year-0ld legacy, soccer players reconciling their dual nationality while changing the color of their team, or an inter-faith service wrestling with the nature of worship and the limits of tolerance the idea of rootedness asserted itself. Much of my draw to it flows from the same impulse that carries me to cultures and societies outside my own: it's alien. I grew up as a migrant-American, able to pull up and replant every few years, and concepts like hometowns and place-as-identity don't fit into my experience. I don't identify with a specific place or group as much as I relate, tenuously, to a broad region and a few half-thought ideas. This is an increasingly common condition in America and much of the world, taking the blame for alienation, dissolved societies, extremism, ennui, and whatever psycho-social reason everything sucks these days compared to some great past. I’m unsure it deserves this.

And I’m unsure how roots or a lack of them affect us. I’m as interested in how a farmer relates to a specific plot of ground and to well-loved though long-dead ancestors as I am to how migrant-Americans replace or replicate those traditional roots (if they are even traditional). Formation of subcultures is a well known example of this, though I believe the search for roots touches something simpler.

Take food as an example: More and more people buy their produce and meat directly from farmers and ranchers. Partly because the quality is better, partly because they know what went into their food, they trust it was done right, they trust an individual more than a long, knotted chain of production. I believe a large part is also a desire to make connections – to the farmer, to the animal, the land, the process, maybe even to history and tradition. That's not a new idea, but why was that impulse there anyway? Put another way, why is it so much more satisfying to drink a beer brewed down the street than a better one from Belgium?

That line of questions can run thin fast and go in circles. Even worse: It could get boring. The beauty of something as vague as rootedness for my subject is that it lets me write about whatever I want. I’ll cover cooking, sports and religion, family, farming, music and metal working, travel, moving, reading and couches, dogs, and, I hope in a few months, zucchini flowers. If anyone has a suggestion for a topic, let me know.

My artistic-self isn’t a total wuss and it will demand equal time on the posts, which will keep my explicit views of the subjects down in exchange for a nuanced, narrative take on whatever I'm writing about. I hope that posts like this (rambling, here's-what-I-think slog) will appear rarely. Most will be essays or articles. No diary entries. I hope to include profiles when they come along.

For this week an explanation will do.

The Magician

It wasn't until we peeled the first flaps of charred fat off the pig that we knew those five hours of grilling were actually a magic act. The heart racing grease, the burned-black sugar and spices, the pink and brown threads of meat, the woody smokiness lacing through everything -- it was pig as candy. For a group of Northwest boys who confuse grilling for barbecue, the alchemy of charcoal, wood, fire, meat, and, most important, time had never been so clear.

Grilling a seven-pound bone-in pork shoulder for an afternoon fails to qualify as proper barbecue, but I'd never cooked a piece of meat that long and my grill skills still sit somewhere between determining doneness with my index finger and freaking out at flare ups. This was also the first use of a new grill, my first grill, so I'll take even a bastardized version of barbecue. I'll take it especially for that moment when my friend, Dan Torres, and I pulled the shoulder apart with forks and the strands of meat became strings soaked with liquefied collagen and the fat and rub and meat pulled their last trick of the day.

Now I do believe that pig is a magical animal. I was just its assistant.