The Night Kitchen

CW: cannibalism

Everybody starts on the day shift, learning the rhythms of the restaurant during its tamer, more public hours. Not everybody is given the opportunity to work a night shift--only those with the aptitude for it, the stomach for it. I prefer the night shift.

Twisted Dishes in the morning is an upscale, popular brunch spot. We specialize in traditional American cuisine, incorporating new flavors, twisting the old classics to fit a more refined and mature palate. At night we cater to an even more select palate. We provide a one of a kind eating experience--I say this with full confidence that I speak the truth. 

Our kitchens are in the basement, lit by long rows of fluorescent lights whose perpetual low-grade buzz is heard only at the very beginning and end of each day after the oven and range and hood are turned off and a ringing quiet descends over the kitchen. The day cooks complain frequently, although never loudly, about the claustrophobia of basement work, the way time passes differently in a kitchen sunk below ground level. The hours of their lives neatly chopped up and served on clean white plates to hundreds of diners hungry for a meal prepared by unseen hands. But once you move over to the night shift, you develop a newfound understanding and appreciation for the lack of windows, the seclusion of the basement.

The day shift people, despite their grousing, clean well for the turnover. The majority of them, I’m sure, haven’t the imagination to conceive of the difference between day and night at a place like Twisted Dishes. But what they do know is enough to have them on their hands and knees scrubbing around the wheels of the lowboys, the smallest commis contorting their bodies into the refrigerated boxes to scrape the corners clean with their fingernails.

Night shift, too, is very clean. We have to be--not for our earnest little day staff, but out of a healthy sense of self preservation. We go through about a gallon of bleach every night. Last thing we do before lights off is pour out a cup of bleach down each drain. A deadly toast to another successful night.

We have three dinner services every week, reservation only. We’re booked out months in advance, which gives our clients (we think of these diners more as clients) time to fill out the extensive paperwork required for admittance. Clyde, a broad, intense Brooklyner who has worked here for ten years, checks registration at the door. He used to work as a mortician, a family business, but says that he values this job for the freedom it allows him. 

Three men, each vetted personally by Clyde, are posted at the remaining entrances and exits. They are responsible for keeping the clients inside throughout dinner. People rarely attempt to leave early, but there are those who have tried and have been detained in the appointed office adjacent to the dining room. They stay there until the boss and owner of the place, whose name and other identifying features I cannot disclose, goes and talks with them for a bit.

It was Clyde’s idea, actually, to convert the office closest to the dining area into a lounge space for our more restless clients. He has had many such good ideas--his background and extensive knowledge that he brings to the job makes him indispensable.

We take great pains to make the dining experience everything our clients wish and pay so highly for. We prioritize ambience. Heavy curtains are drawn across the dining room windows, candelabras glow in the corners. We have no strict dress code, but the majority of our clients dress as if for a black tie affair. Long, elegant dresses swish across the thick carpets, men in well-pressed three piece suits are trailed by clouds of expensive colognes, and everybody goes to great lengths to appear calm and collected throughout. We serve small glasses of expensive liquor. The most nervous are prone to bolt their drinks and those are the ones we keep a special eye on.

The first year we conducted these elaborate, very special dinners we had all of our servers don masks that covered them from chin to hairline, but we have since dispensed with the crude attempt at secrecy. It was not in keeping with our ultimate goal of normalizing eccentric cuisine. We must never make our clients feel as if they are doing something wrong, like naughty children sneaking an extra cookie when they should be in bed. 

We keep night shifts as close to a skeleton crew as we can. Most kitchens are eager for new blood, warm bodies to stand in front of the range and haul the bulging trash bags outside to the cans arranged in stalls like stinking horses. We prefer to keep our crew select, living by the maxim that less is more. There are five of us cooks, including Raoul, our butcher-man. Raoul is a bit too nervy for my liking, which comes most likely from his line of work. Raoul the man-butcher. The rest of us are rock-steady, though, especially Darla.

Darla is the sous-chef, responsible for overseeing every aspect of dinner service. She is infallibly quick with her knives and her advice. She has a talent for sniffing out new blood and is the main one responsible for any new bodies brought onto the night shift. If not for her, Raoul might have cracked up long ago, but a steadying hand and a few encouraging words from her are enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. But when he inevitably gets iced, she won’t bat an eyelash. 

I like Raoul and I hope he straightens out because he looks tough. All stringy muscles and big bones.

The night shift crew is a very carefully organized, incredibly efficient team. We liken our job to that of surgeons: everything clean, methodical, our tools neatly arranged at our sides, our individual jobs clearly defined. There’s not a kitchen crew to rival us.

Of course, it helps that every piece of equipment we have is state of the art. The best of it is reserved for night shift. After all, our skills and discretion and continued dedication to our business ensure the steady cash flow that keeps us rich in food processors and wine coolers and organic produce. 

While the standing mixers and Gentak Makara’s are nice, if I had to identify the most essential appliance, I would choose without hesitation our freezer. I say our because it is a freezer reserved solely for the storage of the more obscure ingredients we cook with.

The walk-in freezer is tucked in the very back corner. It stays locked throughout the day, and very few people know the ten digit code that unlocks it. The keypad is hidden in a nearby mop closet, where it hangs on the wall like a hard backed beetle with a single gleaming red eye. I have been the one to enter the lengthy code and turn that bright eye green, I have felt the catch in my chest at the anticipation of pulling open the heavy walk-in door. 

To walk into the frigid space, where your breath throws itself in front of you like a veil, is to enter a wonderland of sorts. Or perhaps a cabinet of curiosities. Our curiosities are wrapped in opaque plastic shrouds, stored on tall shelves or kept on rolling carts for ease of moving.

We receive the bodies whole, doing all the butchering and processing ourselves. We waste nothing except the hair and fingernails, although several clients have inquired about the possibility of commemorative hair jewelry after the Victorian fashion.

We find handling the human body is just like handling any other creature ready for the butcher’s block. I truly think the best argument in favor of this lifestyle is found in the arguments of other alternative eaters. I believe that the vegans and vegetarians are right. Humans are not inherently superior to other animals, nor should they occupy an exclusive place at the top of the food chain. If you feel no guilt at eating the parts of a cow or a pig or a lowly chicken, why should this be any different. Especially given that we have an undeniable ethical upper-hand: all of our humans gave explicit consent before their deaths. They were not raised in filth before being packed off to slaughterhouses. Like I said, we are eminently respectful in our work.

On any given night we have around thirty clients dining--which, when you consider the frequency with which we offer these dining experiences and the fact that we have an even ratio of new to returning clients, is more than you might expect. And these are people who, when they are not sampling unusual cuisine by night, are working as bankers, doctors, check out clerks, salesmen, and pilots by day. Our clients come from varied demographics, united, some of them, solely by their love of fine dining. 

Everybody starts on the day shift, but what is it that differentiates night from day? Some things cannot be articulated--true, we try to identify those whose sympathies and proclivities lie with the taboo, those with peculiar desires and tastes. Something in the turn of the head, a gesture, a prolonged look, a sigh, something familiar, something of ourselves reflected back at us.

Tonight we received a new shipment. Raoul is at his table now, covered from chin to toe with a long apron, his deft hands carving into the loins. Already I am several steps ahead of him. I am already seeing clean bones in a pot, fat rendered for lard. In my mind I am wiping clean the edges of each plate that goes onto the pass, sampling one last morsel of liver or sirloin. I catch Darla meticulously folding clean rags at her station, watching Raoul out of the corner of her eye. I catch myself wondering what Raoul would taste like.

I find that there are those who, like myself, have got a real appetite for this work. I love this bright, tense time, the night shift’s peculiar prerogative. I plan on spending every day of my life, and several of my death, here, in the night shift kitchen.