A Trip Back Home Part 2: Fired Up and Fired…

The way I heard the story, Donny had paid for his first restaurant by selling cocaine to professors at Texas A&M in the early 80s. It was, I’m sure, just mythology, but I was 18 at the time, a bit of a wild card myself, and, far from slanderous, it made him sound like some sort of counterculture anti-hero, like a pirate, a buccaneer, an outlaw. The job was amazing. I came there from Red Lobster and from McDonalds before that, all told, less than a year of my life, but my first year in the industry (outside of my folk’s place, which had been gone for several years at that point…). Donny’s restaurant, ’La Taqueria’ (the taco factory), was the Tex-Mex joint where I ended up spending my second. It was cheap, fast and spicy and was marketed directly to 70,000-plus college students, most of whom lived within walking distance of our tiny, walk-up window with a patio and seating for maybe 30 or 40 folks inside. We sold tacos, burritos, enchiladas, fajitas… and margaritas and beer, LOTS of margaritas and beer. The guys and gals who worked at ‘La Taq’ (as we called it) were college kids as well; part-time, on their way somewhere else: to other jobs, other lives, the military (A&M is home to a massive ROTC program, locally referred to as ‘the corps’), maybe even to bigger and better kitchens… The restaurant was housed in a run-down old home; the kitchen was divided into four areas, a prep room, a walk-in refrigerator, a tortilla factory and ‘the hot line’. The line was in the foyer of the old house, a literal hallway filled with five or six large gas appliances, cranked up to full fire, and at peak service (this place was very busy) at least four cooks. In Texas. Without AC. It was a HOT line.

I never really knew Donny, the owner. He was more myth than man from where I stood. He hired me and interviewed me, and I saw him from time to time wandering from building to building in the neighbourhood... He had started his miniature empire with a burger place kitty-cornered across a parking lot from our location (The Deluxe), and when I worked for him, he was spending most of his time at ‘Café Eccell’ his new, somewhat nicer place across the street. Lots of the folks who worked with me had worked for Donny for years, moving freely among the three restaurants, and those that knew him well seemed afflicted with an earnest loyalty; they knew, unlike me at the time, that this thing he had created was a special sort of job. That a creative space that made everything from scratch, working with real ingredients, in a loose, casual atmosphere was a bit of a gift… It is, in fact, the exact kind of job I’ve been looking for, and more recently, looking to create, ever since he fired me. Not that I didn’t deserve it…

I was hired as a prep cook, and my first job was frying cornchips. I would stand over the fryer for two solid hours a morning, rotating quartered fresh corn tortillas through the grease, and frying them until they were crisp but intact…not burnt, not chewy, just… right. There was no timer for this, no premeasured quantity, just the learned art of the light but not too light touch… I would then turn the crisp chips out into buckets, salt them and bag them. Much of our business was selling fresh tortillas and tortilla chips in bulk for takeout and walk-up customers. I stood next to the flour tortilla maker, Steve, who would produce hundreds of tortillas from scratch every day out of what seemed like a bit of magic to me, especially after the year previous which I had spent removing pre-breaded and pre-measured frozen foods from plastic packaging and placing them into deep fryers for mechanically pre-determined periods of time. Steve weighed out each batch of ingredients on a triple beam scale, like the ones we used to use in science class, then mixed it in a giant 20 qt. mixer; he then cut, rolled and flattened each ball of dough with a series of practiced motions and a couple of purpose built machines, finishing each batch of a couple dozen flatbread masterpieces by flipping them in a precise ballet that involved attention, focus, an offset spatula and a flat-top grill. I seem to remember that the occasional ball of tortilla dough ‘fell’ into my fryer, found its way into a bowl filled with a little cinnamon sugar (kept around for precisely this purpose), and emerged as a perfect doughnut…Mmmm. The back room was populated with older Mexican ladies who mothered the rest of us and taught us the simple visceral pleasure of fresh guacamole on a warm handmade corn tortilla, food fit for a king. Maybe a god. I also remember that they would sometimes sequester a section of the flat-top to toast up a handful of ancho chilies before grinding them and sprinkling the resulting flakes onto fruit or their tacos at lunchtime. I learned how to work at each station in the back over the course of a few months, even that mystic art of scratch tortilla making under the patient instruction of my sensai, Steve. I could also never forget the incredible task of standing on a step-stool over a steam kettle filled with twenty gallons of bubbling pinto beans, armed with a 3 foot paint stirrer on a power-drill, whipping in handfuls of lard to produce enormous quantities of that Tex-Mex staple: refried beans. I remember what still seems like must have been a dream, the regular job of removing stems from a 25 pound sack of jalapenos before feeding them into a ‘buffalo chopper’; an action that literally required the use of an old-fashioned gas-mask like the ones you’d see on Hogan’s Heroes. I remember making guacamole, queso, chorizo, flautas, carne guisada, pollo asada, salsa, salsa ranchero, salsa verde and marinating pounds and pounds of chicken and beef skirt steak. Each new job was a rung on a ladder leading one place, and once I learned each station in the back, mastered each level in order, I moved up to the next, and then the next, and at the top? I eventually found my home, a place I have lived for most of my adult life since: that sweaty, noisy room, that blast furnace, the place where everything happens, the place where all of that prep ended up on its way out, through our hands and through a window, out to the rest of the world. The hot line. My first real hot line. Eventually, I found that space and I fell in love.

I think that I’ll have a hard time trying to explain the rationale for loving line cooking to someone who has never done it. It is not easy, but it is certainly fun. First I’ll explain what we do… OK, start by imagining that you are cooking supper. OK, now imagine cooking supper for 30 people or maybe 50 people. Now imagine that everyone, all 30 or 50 of those people, wants something either just slightly different and/or completely different from the person next to them. Now, imagine that they are all in a really big hurry. OK, now add to this, the people (3 or 4 of them) telling you what each of these people wants is young and attractive, yes, but also just slightly, how shall we put this? From down on the more ‘dramatic’ end of that long, wonderful spectrum of human personalities… and that those 3 or 4 ‘dramatists’ are also not necessarily emotionally prepared for the fact that when they tell you what each person wants that you may not be able, THIS INSTANT, to give each of those people exactly what they want. OK, are you starting to picture it? Now imagine that the entire event is happening in a room that would blister the skin off a bell pepper. Yeah, that’s kind of what we do. Every day. Like I said, it is not necessarily easy. But, believe it or not, it is also fun. The fun, as you can probably imagine, is not in the work, it is in the successful execution and, perhaps more accurately, it is in the buzz. There is a state that a line cook, in an ideal setting, achieves; an adrenaline high that comes on in the busy times on a well-stocked and organized line that is a feeling that is satisfying like few other experiences… I have never been a sports guy, but I imagine that ‘the zone’ described by athletes, or the ‘runner’s high’ might compare. I’ve had similar experiences jumping off rope swings or cliffs at swimming holes, racing around a sharp corner on a motorcycle, or even eating habanero chillies, and I suppose a skydiver would probably know what I mean, but I’ll probably never know that for sure (I crave adrenaline, but hey, you gotta draw the line somewhere!). Heck, maybe everyone has these moments in their work, the moment where everything is awake, alive, when you reach for something the moment it arrives, when everything is right where you put it, when everything is exactly how it is supposed to be. That is what line cooking is like when you are busy and well prepared, it is living in the moment, a pure moment; it is like living in a dream.

I’ve already mentioned Steve, my mentor and teacher who made the tortillas. He actually called me ‘grasshopper,’ a joke that was way funnier in 1989 as he taught me how to place the dough balls into the cutter, how to test the dough’s readiness by poking or with a couple of quick slaps, feeling for the give and listening for the sound of what he described as a ‘nice, firm ass’. He was also my ride to work fairly often, and my boss, sort of, along with pretty much everyone else who had worked there for longer than a year or so. But ‘the guy’, the kitchen manager, the chef (but don’t call him that, at least not back then) was a short, strong, eagle-eyed, motorcycle riding, ex-ROTC officer named Gil. This guy was one for whom the term ‘alpha male’ was invented. If no one had ever said he was the boss, most of us would have just assumed he was anyway. Gil, when I knew him, or as he explained it to me, anyway, was at low point personally. He was not in school when I met him, nor any longer in the ROTC. What he told me was that his entire life before La Taq had been on a clear path towards being a pilot; it had been his only dream, but after so many years spent in single minded pursuit of this goal, he had been blindsided by academic ineligibility. He told me in confidence that he had sometimes sacrificed his academic efforts by focusing on the harder work of mentoring the younger cadets, by throwing himself into his duties as an officer, and having known him, even ‘served under him’ as it were, I could certainly be comfortable taking him at his word. But for whatever reason, the loss of his dream had broken him down; he was drinking a lot—but we all were (it was college after all!), but he was also AWOL and officially, on the run. The way I remember it (probably a bit glorified and exaggerated), he never used his name on paperwork, he deflected strangers with obfuscation and misinformation, and he even avoided driving his unregistered motorcycle on the main roads. In the kitchen at La Taq, however, he was the confident leader he had been so rigorously trained to be, he was running the show, but outside of that world, he was a ghost. To me, he was an extension of Donny, the owner, a cipher, a man of mystery, an outlaw who, in Gil’s case, was actually even ‘on the lam’…
I don’t know if it was prescience, good delegation skills, laziness or what, but one day Gil handed me pricelists from three different purveyors and a highlighter—sat me down at a patio table and told me to go through them and find the best price for each product on the three lists. A managerial job, the kind of job I didn’t have again for years. It made me feel important, necessary. One day I was chopping tomatoes, striving for a perfect cut, he leaned in, said ‘go faster, don’t worry about perfect, that’s how they’ll know these were cut by hand instead of some machine,’ a piece of advice I have repeated a hundred times over the years and that honestly informed my entire philosophy of rustic versus fine cuisine. Every completed batch of salsa, guacamole, queso, corn tortillas, or whatever was a cause for celebration in the kitchen at La Taq; we all tasted everything, nothing went out without a passing grade—a ritual I have earnestly tried to enforce at every kitchen since. Lessons I learned from Gil still guide my hand to this day, he was a hero for me, it kills me to think that he was just a 25 or 26 year old kitchen manager at a fast food Tex-Mex joint, and yet he’s still one the very few guys whose leadership I strive to emulate some 22 years later as the owner of my own, much, much more complicated restaurant.

La Taqueria was a fun job, there were dozens of stories I heard while working there, a few of which I lived through myself, about cooks sleeping on the patio to avoid being late for a shift, about wild and crazy parties after work involving every member of the staff and stretching into the next day’s shift. Water fights that became coordinated attacks. It was a crazy place, it was fun, and it was, as I said, very, very busy, and in my mind, in my memory, it was not in spite of these antics, it was because of them. Those smiles on our faces were what those lines of people really kept coming back for, our good food, sure, it would not have worked without that, but it was our collective, infectious positivity that was what really kept us winning. And at the center of it was Gil, even as a tragic clown, he was still the clown at the center of it all that seemed to enforce that culture of smile.
I threw all in. I wanted to be like Gil; hell, I wanted to be like Donny! I wanted to settle into the space they’d created and make it my new, permanent home. I bought a motorcycle that year. I graduated from high school and moved out of my parent’s house. I had decided to ‘take a year’ before figuring out what to do about college. La Taqueria, for me, at that time, was enough. I mean, I also had the band... We were playing shows and I was enjoying it, we were starting to get a name, some of the La Taq crew had even started to come out to our gigs. I was having fun, lots of fun in fact, and, of course, I was partying a lot, (college!), but in my case, well, it showed. I was often late to work. Like many of my co-workers, my bosses even, my breaks were too long, and too, well, relaxed. Things were getting all around lax at La Taq, and I guess Donny didn’t feel like he could punish his fiercely loyal long time crew. But me he barely knew, at less than a year of employment, I was still ‘the new guy.’ That’s how slow the turnover was at La Taq. And then one day, I got called over to the office, I was handed a printout of my hours from the last few months with nary a single ‘on time’ arrival. I couldn’t argue with the proof. I found it strange that none of my managers or co-workers had not been summoned over as well; hell, my ‘manager’ had been my ride to work for much of this time… But it didn’t matter, I knew what it was really about. And I knew that he was right.

I have to admit that I was furious. Not because I didn’t deserve it. My ‘anything goes’ attitude towards the job might have been my misunderstanding of the over-casual culture but in retrospect, it wasn’t what was making the food good or what was helping Donny pay the bills… No, I knew that the reason it was me, specifically me, was for very good cause, for a moment a few days prior when Donny had been present as a buddy and I clocked back in from a slightly longer than usual ‘smoke’ break. When the redness in my eyes and the smell on my shirt told him where I’d really been. I knew he knew, (he was a pirate after all) and there was not one damn thing I could do about it. I was furious that I was fired, all right, furious at myself.
I loved that job, I still imagine it to be, no doubt glossed over by the filter of youth and time, easily one of, if not the best job I have ever had. And the fact is that I blew it.

For twenty some-odd years since that day, I have followed that passion that was sparked on that hot, sweaty line, chasing the adrenaline buzz of a busy lunch rush like the ones I learned to love there with a junkie’s fervour. I have even wrecked my body to some degree, trying to keep working at a line-cooking station that most guys my age have left behind years before. I have spent 2 decades trying to live up to an example set by Gil, the tragic clown, the young rebel, the outlaw, when, if I am honest, I should have been trying to live up to the one set by his boss.

Don made a tough call that day. I did some math when I started writing this and figured out that he was roughly the age I am now when I worked for him. Funny how that works isn’t it? Funny that it took me 20 years to realize that when he let me go, he was doing me a giant favour. I’m not saying that I grew up overnight, but I definitely never made a habit of taking my job for granted again. And though I don’t think I ever quite replicated the joyful energy that I felt working there, I think that has more to do with never getting to be 18 again than with anything that he or I did wrong. I did, at least, get to work there, and that is something that I will never, ever forget. Even through the lens of age, I don’t know how he did it. The loyalty he nurtured, the environment he fostered, even the tough calls he made, at least in my case, he was definitely right. And as to that rumour I heard? I don’t really think he was a cocaine dealer, maybe a little weed or something, (he definitely knew what it smelled like) but you gotta admit, it does make a good story.

The army caught up with Gil, as they do; he eventually did his tour and from what I hear, after that he went on to chef school and then on to run his own restaurant somewhere in Indiana. Steve, my teacher and friend, now teaches 5th graders… how cool is that? His patience and skills at teaching me the art of tortilla make me sure that he is exactly where he belongs. And Donny? He ran restaurants on that same corner in College Station corner for the next 15 years before cashing out and retiring… and I’m sure that lots of folks will never forget the worlds of joy, community, and taste that he helped to create. I should be so lucky and smart as to accomplish the same.

I mentioned last month that the story was ‘to be continued,’ and the story this month is the second part of a three part story addressing that ongoing set of changes. You see, La Taqueria was more than just the place where I fell in love with line-cooking and it was more than just the first and only time I ever got fired. It was also the place where I fell in love with artful, made from scratch, Tex-Mex cuisine. And it was not just the first and one of the best cooking jobs I ever had, it was also the place where I learned that making the tough call, the ‘not so fun’ call was not always the wrong one. The branch is on the verge, as you may have guessed, of making a couple of those tough calls, as well as some of the fun ones. But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for part three to find out just exactly what those calls will be…

Chef Bruce