Nights in the Pit

TW: Language

I believe that most of the guys who work in a kitchen were, at some point in their lives, the pickiest eaters on the planet. I, for one, would bare my teeth and recoil when broccoli or green beans would arrive on the paper plate set in front of me at dinner time. Sorry about that, Mom, but then again, they were canned. Though getting through even a cup’s worth of mashed potatoes is still a struggle, I promise my palette has changed. On the other hand, my brother Stu ate mashed potatoes by the handful when we were young. He couldn’t get enough. Maybe watching him eat it with his fingers is what instilled that disgust inside me.

Regardless, food tastes different when you aren’t the one making it, or even when you’re around it when it’s being prepared. There must be some sort of chemical change that happens to your body when you’re actually back there, tossing the pans and ladling sauces into bowls. I don’t know if there’s a word for it; I’m not as good with words as I am with a knife. 

I got my first kitchen job when I was fifteen. With a name like Terminal Gravity, you’d think the outside would be painted black and everyone would be headbanging to Slipknot in the back. Instead, when I dismounted my bike to hand in my resume, I was greeted by a lush green yard divided in two by a small creek, wooden benches, a small platform for local bands, and a restaurant painted mustard yellow with red trim. 

The managers hired me after they sat down and talked with me in the yard. I started the next night. The yard was full when I entered through the back. One of the salad cooks, Jen, guided me through the kitchen, getting me accustomed quite well despite her stutter. Finally, she showed me the dish-pit, my home for the next two and a half years. In my time working at TG, I was always reluctant to learn how to make any of the food on the line. There was this ever-present fear that I was going to fuck up someone’s food and it’d come out of my paycheck. Adolescent naivety at its finest. 

I did end up making nachos for the pantry side of the line whenever shit hit the fan and I think that’s what started to get the gears to turn. There was cheese and spicy chicken on those chips but the tomatoes were suddenly more appealing; fresher with crisp edges, like the ones you see in sandwich ads. They tasted sweet and acidic, complementing the saltiness of the chips and the fat of the cheese. I ordered a BLT a week later. Had my ten-year-old self seen me eat the whole thing, he would have vomited on his shoes. Suddenly, my mother’s begs and compromises started to resurface, all those times she told me to ‘Just try a bite’. Sorry, it took me so long to get around to it.

Also, with the rest of my tongue’s awakening, I should mention I never enjoyed spice at all before TG. Anything beyond a burger patty with ketchup and a bun was unappealing and pushing the limit. Why make it spicy? Those TG nachos came with jalapenos. I never knew that beyond the spice, those pickled peppers had a flavor so bold. In the end, a little bit of burning asshole was worth the taste.

Come July, I moved to Bend, OR, just a six-hour drive from Enterprise. ‘Beer Capital of the West’, they called it. This was in 2017 when the Last Blockbuster was on the verge of becoming the final location and there was more than one Burger King on Third Street. The Old Mill District reeked of fresh hops coming over the hill and the ticking of bike chains on the river trail grew ever louder as the weather grew warmer. That summer still remains one of the hottest I’ve felt. It grew hotter when I landed a job in another kitchen.

A month after I arrived in Bend, I was offered a job in the dish-pit at a restaurant Stu worked at. He’d moved to Bend six years before my arrival, the entire time working the dish-pit in several restaurants. Pastini Pasteria was fine to him but the hours stretched until two in the morning. Another guy from Pastini, Benson West -Bennie Westside to his friends- left to play head chef at a new kitchen dubbed Take-Two up in an athletic club at the top of Reed Market Road. Stu followed him, entranced by his knife skills and the brain between his ears. The day I was supposed to interview at some pizzeria on the westside, the lead dishwasher at Take-Two quit. Bennie told Stu if I did well that night, I’d land the job. Guess I passed with flying colors.

It’s funny; Stu and I lived in Bennie’s backyard in a tent for a week before moving into the garage. We grilled on the back porch, rotating bratwurst and steaming corn cobs. That night was my first time eating chimichurri and togarashi aioli. I was hooked. 

I worked at Take-Two with Stu and Bennie for three years. This was a kitchen unlike any I’d worked with before. Two pizza ovens, one brick and wood and the other propane; regular pizzas in the brick, and gluten-free in the propane. The pit was in the back, so naturally, I learned how to sling gluten-free pies all night. In the end, the tip out was fine but the wages could have been a little higher. I just thank my lucky stars Bennie didn’t bump my rent up when I moved into an actual room a couple of months after sleeping on the couch. 

Braised beef short-ribs with carrot puree, microgreens, and fingerling potatoes; the first dish I was handed for dinner at Take-Two. I can’t say I told Bennie it was the best dish I’d ever eaten because I didn’t. I was too busy filling my gullet with the meal to say anything remotely legible. My reflection stared back at me from the white plate, now wiped clean of sauce from the house bread. Not only would ten-year-old me be shocked at what I just ate but I think he’d have been immensely impressed by the beard growing like a briar patch down my cheeks to my chin. We frowned at each other and I threw the plate in the washer. 

COVID-19 fucked us all. Take-Two had a sister location, Leero’s, that was the main source of income for the owners. They decided they couldn’t maintain both without losing money. When the world finally went into lockdown, Take-Two was put to sleep, the kitchen stripped of equipment and the dining area mopped clean. The choking stench of sanitizer clung to the cafe countertops, replacing the scent of roasted coffee beans and chicken pesto paninis. My girlfriend Lynne and I shared one of those sandwiches and our first kiss on the roof in the summer of 2019. I never once complained about the funky taste of melted Swiss.

I found myself working in the pit at Leero’s for a few months after a solitary month of isolation. It took a second to accustom myself to the routine again but the muscle memory kicked in quicker than expected. I never truly liked the owners of the place. They were decent enough but the owner’s wife never seemed to like me, always regarded me as the lowly pit worker. Can’t say I didn’t feel put in my place when she would walk by and never give a hello.

Bennie also went to Leero’s and as far as I know, he’s still there. It makes sense, I guess; most of the dishes are the same there as they were at Take-Two. Southern Louisiana-style food; sauteed shrimp with grit cakes and slathered in creamy barbecue sauce, cajun crawdad gumbo with Andouille sausage, pecan carrot cake glazed with caramel, served with a fresh zest of lime and carrot. I’m not ashamed of falling into the category of people who gained the ‘Quarantine Fifteen’. It was food worth eating, worth listening to, worth watching. Bennie could dish a plate of mash with corned beef, cabbage, and celery root with his eyes closed. I’ve seen Stu plate three different dishes at once, each with different garnishes and aromas so strong it was almost nauseating to take all three scents in together.

I grew tired of it after a while. Dish work and morning food prep became bland. The caliber at which Leero’s operated required perfection on every plate. Take-Two was practically the same; the lack of the owner’s educated eyes left room for just a tad of human error. The consequences of performing anything under perfection seemed to me staggeringly terrifying. I left in the summer of 2020, found my way to a Costco morning crew, stocking shelves for almost a year. And I just have to say. Fuck. That. Shit. 

I think it was a mixture of the environment and the people. I’ve convinced myself until recently that it was just because the place was a corporate-owned business, but no. The benefits they offered were fantastic compared to what I’ve currently got. No, it was certainly the people. The managers and their inconsistent scheduling, the forklift drivers cranky that they had to get up at midnight for a bunch of twenty-somethings to get in their way, and the forty-year-olds that worked the front during business hours wishing they had left fifteen years ago. It made me sick to look at. Ultimately, my happiness wasn’t worth paying only $100 for dental surgery. And I have the worst genetics when it comes to teeth.

Stu offered me a job at the Tombstone Pub over by The Last Blockbuster. It was convenient for me because I could longboard to work and be there in five minutes. I already had a foot out the door by the time he had asked me. When I got the call, I put my two weeks in at Costco and bounced, carrying my work boots in hand and not saying goodbye to a single employee.

Entering Tombstone was like deja vu. The scent of a well-worked kitchen entered my nostrils and released a flood of memories from the last six years. Home I thought when we walked into the back. I met Austin and Mavis on my first day, Sean and Luca later on in the week. The morning prep I didn’t meet until my second week, half of them being on a family vacation when I’d arrived. 

“Our kitchen is more laid back than Take-two,” said Stu, walking me through the kitchen. He had just been promoted to manager after the previous guy quit the week before. God, he was so eager about it back then. “We’ll probably get you on the line here in a month or two. Standard dishes, easy to learn. Saute would be where you’d start, then you’d work your way down. Sound good?” 

“More than,” I said, feeling apprehension wiggle somewhere in my lower intestine. To the best of my remembrance, the first night went as well as it could have. The dishwasher model in the pit was the same as that of Take-Two so I knew my way around it. They were running a Cinco de Mayo special at the time; shrimp tostadas with fresh salsa made by Ramon -one of the night cooks- with squeezed lime juice. I’ve never tasted salsa as rich in flavor as Ramon’s. I went home with forty dollars in cash from that night, the average tip out for a Wednesday. Sleep didn’t come to me until an hour full of excited jitters passed, turning midnight into one in the morning.

“Good evening, good sir,” said Austin, sharpening his knives on a chalky, blue whetstone. 

“Likewise, my good man,” I said, entering the kitchen from the cage in the back and passing through the beer cooler. “How’s it been today, guys?”

“Bit of a pop at the beginning but nothing for almost an hour,” said Mavis. We shared a fist bump.

“I guessed by the lack of cars in the lot,” I said, setting my water bottle on the dish shelf pinned to the wall that divided the saute station from the pit. 

“You guessed correct,” said Austin. I turned, donned the black button-up shirt and apron in the changing room, and returned to the kitchen. 

“Still running the specials today?” I asked, pacing to the service window. A plate of salsa and tostadas sat wilting in the left pass. The tostada exploded with citrus and garlic and sea salt on my tongue. I could have sworn my mouth had an orgasm. 

“Well duh, focker,” said Austin, with the playful dumbfounded face he always wore when poking fun. 

“The only focker here is you, focker,” I said in return. It was stupid but never ceased to make us laugh. 

Ramon replaced Mavis at four and Eli came in tow. This was the majority of the night crew save for Stu, who was working in the office placing the Aloha Produce order. The service staff was just as playful as the line. Bartender Emma knew how to throw shade and take the lesbian jokes dished to her with slack-faced humility. Ulysses showed us his toothpick balancing trick before the dinner rush, his finger shaky as he went to apply the fourth toothpick to the vertical stack. 

A large crash came from the dining room. Ulysses’s toothpicks fell to the ground. Half of us, myself included, ran out to the front, behind the merch counter. On the other side were two people wrestling each other. I recognized Stu on the bottom, the guy on top unfamiliar. He drove a fist into Stu’s face.

“Give it to me, Stu!” he screamed, throwing another fist into Stu’s left eye. Ulysses and Emma were on it, sprinting forward and taking the guy by his belly and throat. They pulled him off as I came to Stu, extending a hand for him. His eye was already starting to swell and grow purple. At this point, the whole restaurant was watching, the folks at the bar leaning around the counter to see. 

“Rocco, do you want to take Stu outside? Get him some ice, yeah?” Austin said, face pale and eyes refusing to look away from the attacker. They had him pinned to the floor, face pressed like jelly into the concrete. I didn’t need another look. I took Stu outside with a bag of frozen french fries in my hand. We sat on the curbside. Stu spat blood.

“So…” I said, breaking the silence. Stu had the fries pressed to the left side of his face. “Who the fuck was that?”

“David,” Stu said, voice weak. He rocked back and forth slightly. At one point, I felt he might faint. “We fired him a couple of weeks ago. He came into the office, demanding his check when I know for a fact we mailed it to his address. Chose to pick a fight instead of talking it out.”

“I can see why you fired him, then,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “Anger issues out the wazoo?” Stu nodded silently. I gave him a side hug and his head fell on my shoulder, the ice of the french fries chilling my shoulder. The rest of the kitchen crew came out to check on us, Mavis holding a small bowl of mashed potatoes with gravy. 

“Figured you could use something,” said Mavis. Everyone nodded in silent agreement. 

“How are you doing?” Ramon asked, offering to take the fry bag and wrap a towel around it. The blood he got on his fingers was wiped onto Eli’s shoulder. 

“Stings and throbs,” said Stu, taking a bite of the mash.

“I bet I could have taken him,” said Eli, crossing his skinny arms over his skinny body.

“Shut the fuck up,” everyone else but Eli and myself said. Eli smiled and gave Ramon a playful punch.

“Thanks for checking on me,” Stu said. “I need to finish that order.”

“Let me handle it,” said Austin. “You taught me for a reason. I think we’ve got tonight covered. Rocco, are you cool with taking him home?”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Cool. Feel better, Stu,” said Austin. They all said their goodbyes, went down the ramp and into the back again.

“I’m gonna go piss,” said Stu, stumbling as he got up. “I’m fine.” He stepped to the bushes behind a Ford Explorer parked on the side and urinated.

“Ready to go?” I asked. Stu gave a silent, woozy nod. 

“You can have the rest of those. Just set the bowl on the edge of the ramp down there before we go.” Stu waddled to the car, rested his back against it. I looked down, took the bowl of mashed potatoes. They stared at me, mountains of fluffy white with brown gravy. The bite I took was conservative, the texture almost gag-worthy. But the flavor was superb; buttery, well-seasoned, and smooth. Ten-year-old me had a tantrum seeing me eat that bowl of potatoes. I set the bowl by the ramp and unlocked the car.

“I understand if you don’t wanna work here anymore,” said Stu. “We seem to attract some bad apples here.” I shrugged.

“I think everyone’s just picky about what they want, sometimes,” I said, starting the car. “I’m just fine here, thanks.”

“Okay,” said Stu before falling silent. “What a day, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. Stu obviously had the image of David’s assault playing on a loop in his brain. The mashed potatoes were looping in mine. “What a day.”