Food Blog: Recollection the First

Lately I've been digging into the two worst sources when it comes to trying to keep my journalistic insights on the food industry at bay: Anthony Bourdain and Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan. I wrote a lengthy paper last week on the organization of the restaurant industry, and another analyzing a failure of the POS system. And it got me realizing that I have seen, in the last few years, the underbelly of the kitchen business.

I think its in the last year that I really came into my own within the industry. I'd quit being naive, and I'd stepped into a restaurant that cranked food out full time. Hard core, full bore, balls to the wall, and damn the consequences. I have worked under chefs who were teachers, chefs who were assholes. I have seen chefs who were so passionate about their jobs they burned themselves out trying to do their best, and I've seen chefs who couldn't give a rat's ass how the restaurant turned out. I have seen alcoholic chefs, druggie chefs, and chefs with bizarre sexual predilections generally involving reptiles. I have seen the lizard brain of the kitchen, because the industry runs on its lizard brain.

So I think I want to talk about it. I want to explain the grotesquerie of the kitchen, the yawning crevasse of the crazy men and women who throw themselves under the bus for the good of the business. I need to get some of this shit out of my head, and try to explain textually this strange obsession I have with the industry even as I try to leave it.

Prepare for me.