Read Part One here.

The kitchen was tiny. A square space with a low ceiling. Like any small kitchen, every available area to put something, had something. The dish machine, they said, was from a submarine. A silver tube with a circular sort of revolving door that allowed one wash cycle at a time.

Every morning person in the kitchen at the Five Spice did dishes. A circular rack sat and when you dirtied something you rinsed it and placed it on the rack. If you filled the rack, you put it into the machine and pushed the button. A great system. In the mornings, there was one lunch cook whose job was to prepare the soups and curries. Our job, mostly, was to clean and cut vegetables for the stir fry dishes. I worked alongside one other guy about my age. A skinny dude with a long goatee named Jeb.

Chef Mary Ellen, “Mef,” prowled around during the day with a clipboard, checking things here and there, giving out suggestions and speaking to her kitchen manager, Jenn, also the lunch cook. Chef took me upstairs to the office and had me fill out my paperwork. Up there I met one of the owners, Ginger. An older woman with short curly hair, very kind and quiet, quick to laugh and smile. After I finished Mef handed me a bright, shiny Dexter Chinese cleaver.

“Welcome aboard,” she said.

“What’s this?” I said.

“Everyone here gets one. It’s all we use. This is yours. Our gift to you.”

I thought it odd. I had never used a cleaver before. Most kitchens had them up on the wall somewhere, dull, spotted with rust. First off, it was heavy which took some getting used to. I had only ever used the classic plastic handled knives supplied by companies who would come into kitchens and switch them out with razor sharp ones once a week or every two weeks.

Back down in the kitchen, I spent the day with Jeb, chopping vegetables and smoking cigarettes every half hour or so. Part of our workload was also making sauces. An odd assortment of weird asian fusion potions I had never heard of. “Thai Pla Tod” was one of them. All the recipes were in a black box on large cardstock and laminated. The originator of the recipe and the date in the upper right corner. The Pla Tod recipe, like most of them, had the initials MEF in the corner with ’94. The first couple of ingredients were normal–tomato paste, soy, and brown sugar–the last three, however, were odd. Tamarind, oyster sauce, and a foul smelling brown fluid called fish sauce which came in a glass bottle with a green squid on the label.

“What the hell is this shit?” I said.

Jeb laughed. “It’s made with rotten anchovies,” he said.

I nodded but didn’t believe him. I couldn’t imagine anyone making something with rotten fish. It made no sense. I stirred all the ingredients together, curling my nose and spoon tasted the final result. Tangy, sweet, unctuous, and decidedly odd.

The Thai Pla Tod dish itself on the menu was described thus: Perhaps the most famous of all Thai fish dishes. A richly flavorful tamarind sauce topping deep-fried tilapia. Served with steamed vegetables. Back on the menu by popular demand. SPECIFY MILD OR HOT.

Around noon or so I met, Jerry, the other owner of The Five Spice. A white haired, gnarled old guy with a quick wit and sharp tongue. Like many other Burlington residents, I was already well aware of who he was. His connection to the Five Spice was not where I had first heard of him. His volatile reputation proceeded him. He often appeared as a call in on local radio shows to voice his opinions on any subject matter. He regularly wrote to the the local rags about his radical left political viewpoints. I had first head of him from my old boss, Tom, over at the restaurant, Trattoria Delia, the Italian place I had worked for three years before I started landscaping. The two men had an extreme dislike for one another.

Jerry was not one to mince words. When we shook hands and I told him about my last restaurant job, he called Tom a “fake” and a “rude piece of shit.” Jerry liked to have relationships with other restaurants in town where we would often do food trades with them.

“I went over there when they first opened,” Jerry said in his thick Brooklyn accent. “I brought them a bunch of our food as a sort of welcome to the neighborhood gesture. He never thanked me. A month later I contacted him again and asked if he wanted to do a food trade. I called over there, told the person on the phone who I was, and asked to speak to Tom. The person on the other end told me he was too busy to speak with me. The motherfucker brushed me off. Twice. Fuck him.”

I laughed. I instantly liked Jerry. He was also one of the few restaurant owners I had ever met who actually worked in his own place. During the day, Jerry sat at the smallest table below the stairs and rolled dumplings. To say he sat there the entire time would be an embellishment, however. He spent most of the day talking to people, both guests and employees, getting to know them and the intricacies of their lives, for better or worse. He was known to get in serious political debates with his diners who after arguing politics with him, would never return to the restaurant.

Not only was The Five Spice Cafe different on the inside in terms of the ingredients, it was also distinct in the way Jerry and Ginger treated their staff. Each of us, after we punched out, were allowed to order a dish off the menu, sit at the bar, and even have a beer or two. The first drink was free and every one after cost a buck. The meal, however, was on the house. This applied to each and every employee.

When I finished with my shift I sat down, ordered the Thai Pla Tod, and an Anchor Steam in a bottle. Despite having worked in a half dozen restaurants at that point in my life, I had never experienced actual hospitality at this level in terms of how employees and especially kitchen employees were treated. In every single restaurant I had ever worked, the kitchen folk were considered an embarrassment, the second class citizens of the restaurant world. The servers were the polished members of the elite, counting their stacks of money as they enjoyed working in the air conditioning. At every other place I worked, a member of the kitchen wasn’t even allowed into the dining room, forget sitting down at the bar after work.

The Pla Tod arrived.

To be continued.