Chef Stories

I met Alexander at the Starfucks, of course.  He’s such a great guy.  I see him there all the time, and he’s one of those people who just make you smile.  He’s a chef, and one day he let me tape some of his stories and take pictures.  I love hearing him talk about cooking…cooking is an art form of which I am jealous…because I can’t even boil an egg.  PS  Alexander is a great storyteller.  I think it is ’cause he’s from the South.  I got a theory about Southerners being the best storytellers.

Alexander:

This is goin back to very early 90s…a restaurant called Azaleas, one of the highest rated restaurants in Atlanta. In the city, real high end, the competetion was fierce, I was pulling a fasage (sp?) that night, that’s when you’re a cook and you work free…you wanna check out the kitchen, get in good with them, maybe get work one day…so you do it for free… they throw you in there…anyway, this night, they only sat about 75 at a time and they had a display kitchen…that’s where the people eating can watch you cook….so we got grilled sautéed salmon in a wok…our wok was run by a guy named Kim Sam…so I gotta paint Kim Sam for you… 5’2, 5’3 110 pounds dripping wet, right?  Kim was so small he had to order women’s small sizes uniforms and they were still too big on him…his chef hat, ‘cause we had to wear french chef hats, was the size of his torso…and ken was from Hong Kong, and Ken could really work a wok…working a wok is an emotion, it’s a feel, the wok is an entirely separate entity of itself…it takes ten years of working one to really develop that communion with the wok…like how French chefs are with their sautee pans…the more familiarity you got with something like that the better you’ll get…like with any artist, like a ceramists…they can make a teapot, and ten years later they can make a teapots and they have a much more tactile communion with the clay, much more of a relationship with it…a wok works the same way…people go to culinary school and think they will get out and be Emril in three years, and it just doesn’t work that way…you need ten twelve years of paying your dues before you got enough technique and skill under your belt….Ken Sam was an exceptional wok cook…he was 25….most guys who can work a wok like that are 35 and above…everyone wanted to work in this kitchen, worked for less money, took a step down because it was such a serious kitchen…one night we’ve got Andrew Young, former mayor, US Ambassador, he was there…Jimmy Carter was there…we only sat 75 at a time, and at least ten or fifteen of them were dignitaries or famous…late 80’s it was the Spago of Atlanta…the chef was John Achille, another picture I’ll paint for you…John was from Nigeria, 6’7, built like a brick shit house, looked like an African Grinch…he looked like the Grinch…he knew we called him that, he had this big grin….but this guy was one of the most accomplished chefs I’ve ever seen….he had no boundries, he was incredibly good.  He went to U of Texas on football scholarship….I was in the marines for five years and would be hard pressed to find someone that intimidating…so you got these two guys, right?  Life expectancy working for John was six months to a year, the record was thirteen months….he was insane.  Gordan Ramsey didn’t have shit on John Achille…this guy was brutal, hard, demanding…so we are doing plank salmon…planking a salmon is literally putting it in touch with the cedar wood…we literally lined the bottom of an oven with foil, put coal on the left and right, and had the salmon in the middle…a cedar plank that has been soaked in water…and the trick is to heat the plank, and the cedar smell gets up into the salmon…the trickiest part is you can catch your wood on fire…so here we are, in the middle of dinner, bout 9 o’clock….John the chef is actually out there talking to Jimmy Carter, the mayor of Atlanta, all at the same table….they are all in front of the display kitchen, watching everything…and you hear BOOM!  And everyone in the kitchen knows similar sounds, and I’m like, fuck, man, someone just threw an oven door open…you don’t make noise in a display kitchen, there is an economy of noise because your on display….you have to be truly trained to keep it quiet…people are watching you, you don’t disturb then while they eat…so that type of a noise was unheard of…this beautiful kitchen, totally stainless, and you see this orange and yellow glow just shining on this steel….next thing you see is Ken Sam, holding the plank salmon, the wood caught on fire…in the middle of the restaurant, stainless steel background, this little tiny cook in tie dye chef pants too big for him and a foo man shoo waiters jacket and a big hat…and he’s got a board, flames shooting out the side, fish in the fucking middle….and Ken’s only problem with communication is he still had a really hardcore Hong Kong accent, his English was broken at best, and Ken loses it, mind you, ex-president, ex-mayor ten feet away watching this…Ken Sam comes down the line holding the wood like this….

…there’s a whole salmon on the board and he’s got the wood, and his knees are above the wood, holding it like this…and he’s running and you hear “Oh shit, the fuhkin’ hood, the fuckin’ hood!”  and he’s saying wood…”John gonna kick-a mah fuhkin ass!”  He’s scared shitless, and the whole line is standing still watching…and it’s like, “Ken, fuck the wood, fuck the wood and save the fucking fish!  Get the fish!  And he comes barreling down, tie dye everwhere, flames shining off the steel…my ‘ood, my ‘ood!

It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen….they got the wood in the sink, and you hear him in the back, oh shit, oh shit, John’s gonna kick my fucking ass, the ‘ood! I never seen anyone shriek like that…

Well, we saved the fish.  We saved the fish.  Man, you do anything to save the food.

My hand:  well, there’s another story about that.  I mean true chefs, there’s so much damage, I got scars on my forearms, that’s how I can tell a real professional, and I got sixteen years….all these are old scars, old scars, hold on, lets see…old scars…this one here is my first wound in a professional kitchen, when I almost sliced my wrist open in France when I was fifteen…

This line here, where my skin changes, that was, from here down, got hit with hot oil, that’s a decade old, this one…

This actually, this wound right here…we’ll save that for another story.  That one has….such a sad connotation to it.  I tried to avoid it.  That’s what ended me up in the Marines.  Both my grandfathers did it, I had an affinity for it…you know, I came from a European family, its just different… your drinking wine with dinner in middle school…your ten years old you know how to make an omlete…I was born here, I’m the only one born in America…in the valley, believe it or not…when I was fifteen I lied about my age and got a job…I’ve been cookin’ ever since.