Word: kitchener
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...diners, bars and neighborhood joints. Some of it is pure drudgery - like prepping a "literal ton of corned-beef briskets" at an Irish pub the week before St. Patrick's Day - but when the orders start pouring in, the pace and chaos and heat in even a low-end kitchen somehow fuse into a kind of mass lunatic joy. "I am God of the box," he writes, "the brain-damaged Lord Commander of a kingdom of fifty feet by five and made entirely of stainless steel, industrial tile, knives, sweat and fire...
...Melting-Pot Kitchen Some of the stuff in Cooking Dirty beggars belief - like the time Sheehan accidentally stuck an 8-in. (20 cm) chef's knife right through his hand, pulled it out and went back to chopping - but so far there has been relatively little actual post-Bourdainian fiction. Possibly the first novel of consequence is Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, set in a hotel restaurant in London. The restaurant's executive chef, Gabriel, has clawed his way up effortfully from the working classes, but having done so, he is now, at 42, having a midlife crisis...
...wrote the celebrated Brick Lane, gets the kitchen just right: the crushing pace, the fistfights, the grills and griddles and salamanders, the guy who's always walking around with a leek hanging out of his fly. But her interest in it is somewhat different from, say, Sheehan's. For Ali it is - at the risk of sending you screaming back to high school English class - a microcosm of Britain, a country that is also, not coincidentally, having a midlife crisis. The kitchen is a strange crossroads zone where high culture and manual labor collide. It's radically globalized and borderless...
...search of pure high-octane kitchen action, though, In the Kitchen is unfortunately a bit of a drag. Although they resemble each other in their manic masculinity, Ali's kitchen turns out to be the inverse of Bourdain's, and it demonstrates exactly what made Kitchen Confidential so appealing. The Bourdainian kitchen is not a muddle. It is in fact the last redoubt of clarity in a muddled world. Hot and filthy it may be, but it's the place where all the stuff that bedevils the modern human's attempts to pull together a stable, clear identity - race, class...
...Sheehan puts it, the restaurant kitchen is "the last true American meritocracy. No one cares about your past or what you do on the outside. Can you cook? That's all anyone cares about." Gabriel is a sympathetic and beautifully realized character, but one suspects he wouldn't last a night at the Waverly...