In 2007 I landed a head chef job, after following a Craigslist ad, at a vegetarian restaurant in the Lower East Side. As I toured the basement kitchen with the owner and GM, chatting with them about this and that, shaking hands with the prep cooks, a couple of dire truths about the whole situation began to dawn on me. 1: The last time I worked full time in a kitchen was in 2005. 2: My salary was $600 a week. In other words, had no business being there at all.

A dormant part of me wanted to do it for the challenge, but the realist in me knew it would be a total disaster. The looks in the eyes of the prep cooks told me so. The place was big. Vast even. My take home pay would be about $400 a week. My rent at the time, $600. I lived with my then girlfriend, Betty, in a small one bedroom apartment on 153rd St., between Broadway and Riverside, right across the street from the cemetery featured in The Royal Tenenbaums. We paid cash for the place each month. Stuck in under the door of our “landlord” a woman providing herself with extra money each month via a section 8 scam. My lease was actually a state document I had to sign and notarize stating I was a relative of the woman who lived there previously.

Betty told me they were hiring a lunch server at the place she worked. Serving? Oh man, if only my old cook buddies could have seen me then. Desperate and willing to fork over my soul for the mighty dollar. Back then, when a cook became a server it was aptly dubbed, “Going to the dark side.” The tensions between back and front of the house were even more intense in those days and when I say tension I mean we really hated them and did our best to make them suffer for their short hours and better money. Kitchens in the late 90s and early 2000s were chock full of miscreants back then. Mostly men like myself who had made really bad choices at some point in their life, had some sort of substance problem, were an illegal immigrant, maybe even a lucky combination of all three. Our common bonds, usually a broken or abusive home as well as an inherent shyness and total loathing for servers. The great hypocrisy of cooks: They bitch that servers make more money but would rather be caught dead than having to be clean, presentable, and having to smile and eat shit sandwiches on a daily basis. Servers, on the other hand, are terribly spoiled brats who whine about working more than six hours and most of them rarely even fulfill one week of their schedules without a day off or a switch of some kind. This is the business.

I discovered the brutal reality of serving when I began working lunches at Sfoglia, a great Italian joint in the Upper East Side. First off, the place was busy, real busy. To this day still the craziest place I’ve worked. The instant the doors opened, we were packed. Ten tables (two of them annoying communal tables no one wanted to sit at, a big trend back then) and eight bar seats. Just me and another server and our crazy red headed GM, Valentina. Not Val for short. Nope. Valentina. You had to say the whole name each time you addressed her. No busser. No barista. No bartender. No food runner. In order to get to the bar to the espresso machine we had to go “under the bridge” because the entryway was down and the only place to put our wines by the glass.

Small and gorgeous. Sfoglia’s decor combined rusticity with a sharp eye toward the right type of elegance. Wood floors, stuccoed walls, a long line of tastefully curtained windows, pink glass chandeliers, shelves of wine bottles, and the occasional right element adoring an empty space such as a stuffed pheasant or antique apple ladder. Sparse but magnetic. People who came in gushed about it and the simple yet outstanding menu which changed monthly.

The complimentary bread also brought them in droves. My lord, the bread. Fresh made every morning. Perfectly brown, crispy crust, with the inside a delicate, edible sponge. For each order we ran to the kitchen, threw a loaf in the Blodgett convection oven, pulled it out a few minutes later and “hot potatoed” it over to a cutting board in the dining room, sliced it to order, and brought the required amount, steaming and mouth watering to our awaiting customers (no guests back then) with a plate of olive oil. The unbreakable law was no bread until an order went to the kitchen, the first of many rules in the neverending power struggle between the diners and the kitchen for which the servers existed as the liaison.

This element of the restaurant is why servers exist in the first place. Otherwise they would be totally unnecessary and automated by now. No one, and I mean no one, actually wants what is on the menu and there’s not enough room on a sheet of paper to list all the ingredients in each dish. It didn’t help either that our menu was entirely in Italian. 2007 had begun what I call the “Great Era of Sensitivity” where people used the term “allergy” in order to get kitchens to give them exactly what they wanted. Yes, true allergies do exist, I’m not denying that, but a majority of guests use the phrase to their advantage to design their own dishes or keep away ingredients they dislike. At Sfoglia, another impossible rule was, “No alterations.” Yeah right. I found out quickly that half my time being in the weeds was spent going to and fro from the kitchen to the guest to relate one piece of information to the other. “These people don’t want mushrooms in the pasta, can we give them broccoli? No? Okay. Sorry guys the kitchen says no. Oh, I’ll ask if we can do the mushrooms on the side instead? Ok. Oh, you would like a side of broccoli? Ok. Uh, Chef please, they would like instead to do the mushrooms on the side and do a side of broccoli. $15? ok…” I also came to the realization of what an asshole I was when I worked as a cook. I gave servers the hardest time about this and now viewed this introductory level of hell as just deserts.

From noon to three our asses were stretched to the limit. The hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. Valentina helped, when she was in a good mood and not flying off the handle at us, which occurred twenty percent of the time. When she did help she streamed obscenities at us. Moody would be an understatement and unfair. I have some journals from back then where I am questioning my own sanity for ever having worked there. One entry starting with “Valentina screamed at us again today for leaving a tray of silverware for the nighttime crew the previous service.” On the rare occurrence she smiled at us and was sincerely happy it felt like a trap.

Of course, at the end of the service came the reward. An empty restaurant, a glass of red wine, and cold, hard cash. The night crew, the rockstars, began trickling in. A bad day was around $200, a good one upwards of $300, but the real money was at night where they made crazy bank and had a full crew at their disposal. Yes, after just a few weeks I began setting my sights on night shifts, namely the cushy position behind the bar.

Around four o’clock, loot in my pocket, I would walk up Lexington Ave. back to wait for the cross town 96th St. bus across Central Park in order to transfer to the 1 Train up north where I would disembark at the 157th St. stop and walk south on Broadway and then down the hill toward the Hudson and home. My big, brown, depressing, monolithic building casting its shadow over the sleeping dead.