These past eight months have been the longest time I have spent without working in a kitchen since I was seventeen or eighteen. When I was sixteen, my first kitchen job was at Gringo’s Burritos in downtown Guelph, working until four a.m on school nights to pay my rent and save up for a plane ticket to the UK to go and work grooming and riding, instead. Macdonell Grill, juggled with my full days at the horse farm. Horse farms and kitchens. Nights at Royal Electric interspersed with days at Tallery, no time to shower in between mucking stalls at changing into whites. Two years in a windowless corner of The Beech Tree, drawn, anxious, and mostly very happy, when Bob was still running the place like a party and we had unfettered access to the taps and all often stayed until three or four in the morning drinking, talking about food and cocktails and borrowing books and still really, totally in love with the industry. Two years a blur of Lucky Peach and pints and gin and services of a magnitude of intensity I actually am not sure if I remember them correctly. Kitchens, and restaurants, have anchored my life for a number of years, now. I feel completely out of synch without them, without the predictable order of the brigade system and order days and pre-service rituals, early morning prep days like meditation.
The Beech Tree was my first real cooking job, sometime around when I started cooking at Saturday Dinette, as well, turning away from serving. Journalism school dropout, finding the commute to Humber North almost impossible, balancing working a full-time job at yet another Burrito joint to pay bills, unable to afford internet at home and generally uninterested, I needed to establish a new career path and kitchens just sort of happened. A new restaurant opened in the neighborhood my ex and I lived in, something other than Irish pubs serving up fried foods and Gabby’s chicken wings. We sat at a warmly lit wooden bar with a rail of curated, high end liquors on the rail, were served warm olives and walnuts with house made flatbread. We drank one expertly made cocktail after another. The bartender slid a dish of the brandied cherries across the bar to us, snacks of candied nuts. In a sleepy area of Kingston Road, we were the only people in this restaurant. The chef would occasionally peek around the swinging kitchen door, peer around the empty dining room and heave a disgusted sigh before retreating into the back. At that point, it was Bob, Chef and the bartender, no servers, no cooks. Just the three of them waiting for customers to come in.
Bob loaned me a copy of Gabrielle Hamilton’s book, Blood, Bones and Butter, and I was hooked. “I could do that,” I thought, reading about the endless grunt work of the young cook, vegetable peeling and oyster shucking and frying and grilling and dishwashing and late nights and booze. The next time I was in to return the book and borrow another (I believe it was Nigel Slater’s “Toast”, and a few editions of Lucky Peach) I casually said to Bob “Maybe I’ll go to culinary school.” By this time we were no longer the only people in the restaurant when we went in. It wasn’t crazy, but we now sat at the bar because we had to, all the tables occupied. “I need to hire a cook,” he said to me. “Come in tomorrow at 3pm.” I had no fucking clue what I was doing, but I adjusted my schedule at my three other jobs, all in restaurants, and went in at 3pm with a few crappy Target knives wrapped in a dish towel.
My first service in a kitchen other than a fast food joint was a real kick in the ass. It took me a long time to get up to snuff and be able to cope, to time everything just right so I was pulling up baskets of perfect golden, crisp tempura winter veg at the same time as Chef was slicing a chicken supreme, to earn the knife skills to filet fish and trim short ribs, to learn how to knock out a forty item prep list before service, to read body language carefully and quickly and respond to it. Often I’d wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night whispering “Escarole!”, remembering the mystery item I had forgotten to add to my prep list.
This past year is also the first time I haven’t spent every holiday working behind a bar or in a kitchen. A hectic, sold out New Year’s service at Saturday Dinette, hip-hop blaring on the record player, shaking up margaritas and making Old Fashioneds the way Jonnie taught me, squeezing an orange cheek over the glass and catching the juice with a lighter and sending up bright blue sparks with the aromatic citrus juice. Outside the window the Gerrard streetcar rolls by, snow flying, picture perfect. Fridays we used to spend before service learning the essentials of service- a little bit of flair bar tending, how to drop drinks at a table without rubbing our grubby little server fingers around the rim where guests mouths touched, how to efficiently stack plates and cutlery to not drop any and only have to clear one plate of scraps for the beleaguered dishwasher, how to read a table and know which wants the doting, friendly involvement and which one wants you to be an attentive although silent ghost . Good service is an art, and not to be underestimated!
It isn’t just the familiar rhythms and clannishness of kitchens that I find myself missing, it is eating out at restaurants as well. I’ll eat out anywhere, anytime. By myself, on dates, in large raucous groups of friends. Restaurants have something to say about the neighborhoods they inhabit. They reflect and anchor them, change them, embody and uplift them. The Black Hoof was the first cool place on Dundas West, back when I first started coming to Toronto, and that stretch of street was inhabited mostly by winos and addicts roving from Trinity Bellwoods over to Spadina and through Kensington. We used to finish shifts at the Tree and streetcar down to Bar Isabel in our sweaty work clothes to eat grilled octopus and Basque cheesecake, spend our days off bopping around the city into every place that interested us.
When my friends are in Toronto I like to plan where to take everyone. It’s so hard to decide only one or two nights out, to hit everywhere I want to go. I feel like a conductor bringing in all the different strands, braiding them together into one piece, all unique and individual but together composing a wonderful whole. Start off a night at Ronnie’s or Embassy in Kensington, somewhere dim and dirty and intimate, where you know the bartender and they bring you shots of good whisky to bang back on the patio and don’t tell you you can’t smoke. A few beers, a few shots, the glow riding up your cheeks, meandering through alley ways to Detour for some live music, a few more blocks to Sneak’s, the drunk truly rising now. Loud, happy, belonging, right here right now the city is happening around us, the possibilities are endless. It’s early, maybe only eleven, and there’s a line up to get in to Sneak’s for nachos but it’s worth it. Inside in the grubby graffitied booths you see the names of your friends, people you know. There’s a hole in the bathroom drywall from where a friend fell into it one night after the hip-hop show on Wednesday, and on the way out the door you slip a salt shaker into your pocket and the pepper into your bra. Then, 90’s dance party at Clinton’s, followed by karaoke at Bloor and Christie, finally summed up with bugolgi at four thirty in the morning at Owl of Minerva, bleary eyed asking for a pot of ‘cold tea’ and receiving in due course a cast iron tea pot filled with Tsingtao. There’s a great little place in China Town East with three dollar bahn mi, and Starving Artist for hangover waffle eggs benny is never a miss.
When feeling very fancy I like to put on my silky black dress and Oxford kitten heels, burgundy lipstick, and drink cocktails in the bar at the Shangri-La before a meal at DaiLo. I enjoy doing this by myself, watching all the nervous couples out on dates and occasionally being ID’d as an industry person by the burns on my hands and arms, or just by some mutual feeling.
Arriving in Montreal last February, fresh off the bus, my friends and I go out in search of food. The next day while everyone I love is working I walk around on an unusually sunny day and eat at all of my favorite places. Coffee in Hochelaga at Atomic Cafe, where the barista has always been very kind to me and my awful French. When they open in the early afternoon, Dieu du Ciel for (more) charcuterie, and beers. And when everyone is off work and we can be together, we set off in a large group for Saint Houblon, where yet another friend is serving. All together again over food and drink, the night stretches out, promising and inviting. Put your trust into it and it will take you where you want to go- we end up at a rave in a warehouse, and I, eternal acid fairy, produce my gift to my loved ones. Julia, in an act of love, makes us endless pots of strong black coffee the next day while we blob around the house. “I want to do absolutely nothing,” I say. “Me too.” No obligations, we revel in the quiet, no pressure company, until some existential capability regained, I drift away to Darling for more beer and food. I was here yesterday, drinking some very good Nergronis, surrounded by strangers and feeling very much like a part of the city, a part of the world by extension.
There are a lot of things we have all sacrificed and missed out on during this unprecedented time of lockdowns, distancing and mass closures. The restaurant industry has been especially hardly hit. I look most forward to, in better and more normal times, walking into the Cornerstone and sitting at my usual table. It is a wood ledge across the front window, only one seat wide, looking out over Wyndham and Carden Street. I will order a chai latte and the Cornerstone Club, or maybe the antojitos, and I will sit there by myself with my book and my coffee and watch all the people walking by on the street, and wonder where they are going. My phone will buzz in my pocket- a chef friend, needing a shift covered for an out of commission sous, and I’ll review the menu a few times before slipping my clogs and checks on and gathering up my knife roll and going out like a mercenary to work wherever I am needed.