Read Part One here.

Word spread like wildfire after the pastry class incident. Nope, I wasn’t a “real chef” just some hired schlub. Within one day, the students stopped calling me chef, and also stopped asking permission to “borrow” items from my station, the pizza oven. This was a gas powered job, not as nice or big as the one I used at Sweet Tomatoes, my first real kitchen, a year previous. This made the pizzas not as good but the job much easier due to no hauling of wood, starting the fire, and the constant removal of ash.

None of the chefs at the institute knew what the hell they were doing with the oven, so when Sammy left and I came on, I blew all their stupid French minds. I had been honed to razor sharpness in the depths of insanity at Sweet Tomatoes, the lone man who had been machine gunned at the stake with what we called “Santa’s Christmas list,” a flurry of tickets pumping out of the printer during crazy busy lunches.

After just a week they all had big plans for me and the delusions of grandeur flowed through my skull, emanating down through my long mane of hair. One day, Chef Robert took me downstairs and presented me with a pair of fitted Bragard houndstooth chef pants. Not the shitty, baggy, synthetic ones from Chefwear, but cotton with belt loops. A beautiful, touching gift.

I cooked pizzas for this coven of chefs including all the top dogs in the academy. Robert, Albert, Andre, and Chef Marilyn, the only woman as well as the only American. The big dog himself was also present at these meetings. Chef Michelle, the founder of the New England Culinary Institute, a small, older, cherubic French dude who had started the whole fiasco out with meager roots. He often took me aside to speak with me about all sorts of subjects, one of his favorites was during a busy service when he came over and asked “Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Exactly.”

“Huh? I’m not following you.”

“During each service there is a moment when everyone stops speaking, just for a second, and all you hear is the silverware on the plates tinkling.”

He and I went for a walk once on Church Street. He just came over to me, asked if I had a few minutes and we went out and strolled in our chef whites while he told me his whole story. The Institute started with just him and 10 to 12 students. He had visited Vermont, fallen in love, and moved his family over from France. Started the whole thing out in the seventies in Montpelier, the capital, and over the years it had grown into a full blown school in Essex Center, and evolved into a business with a catering company and a bunch of restaurants. His first real love, however, was teaching. Connecting with the students. He was a kind hearted and genuine man, a grandfatherly sort of air about him with everyone he came in contact with.

“The whole thing has become just a monstrous shitshow,” he said. “I never intended for it to be like this, but what are you going to do?”

On Fridays, after lunch service, I cooked pizzas for all of them, and we all ate and laughed up in the secret office on the third floor, a place reserved only for the head honchos. I blew their French minds with a simple BBQ rotisserie chicken pizza I had whipped up. Hanging out with all of them, watching them devour the slices with wild abandon, I dreamed of maybe becoming a real chef. They told me I could attend the school if I so chose, at a discount, and I seriously mulled it over, but at the time I was still intent on being an artist, the whole restaurant gig was something easy for me I used as a way to pay the beer and pot bills.

I still focused on my comic book art. I had lugged my drawing board all the way back from Florida, and sat at it every night, like I had as a teenager, working on my comic, The Tommy Gun Kid. My goal was to apply to the infamous Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art and eventually become a paid comic artist.

The wild pace during lunch at The Commons was a cake walk. The servers couldn’t keep up with me. I had all the tricks plus now, with all the technology at my disposal, I could torture them. On an exceptionally busy day, when the servers scrambled to pick up the pizzas on time, I decided to crank my personal plate warmer all the way to 220 degrees to burn their delicate hands. Fine for my tempered alligator callused mitts that once had held sizzle platters full of potato skins straight out of the salamander at places like B. Merrell’s, a wing shack in Tallahassee, Florida, but for the soft and pampered appendages of the waitstaff it was like touching flaming hot coals. Yes, an evil trick, dirty, but one of the oldest in the book. A maneuver that filled me with sick glee as I pumped out pies and called for pick ups.

I enjoyed yelling and seeing the pained expressions when they grabbed the hot plates, when they had to hold on lest they drop the pizzas on the floor and so had to endure the searing hot porcelain. That particular service was a dumpster fire of epic proportions. Me on one side and thirty or so students on the other in the saute and gardemanger areas. I had the rhythm and crushed them all in order to prove to the students not to disrespect me. By going too fast I threw all the timing off in the kitchen and could hear the chefs barking at the students to hurry. It was two hours of a total grind, people flooding through the doors. The front of house staff and managers running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

One particular waitress grabbed a plate, the scorching heat startled her, and she dropped it on the floor. I screamed at her. Heads turned in my direction. The GM came over to me to plead for the pizza to be remade as soon as possible. I agreed but intentionally put it behind the other tickets out of sheer malice in order to make the waitress look bad to her table.

After service, word got around and I was summoned to go down into the basement to speak with Chef Robert. He hardly ever smiled anyway and looked more stern than ever. He was a legend in his time, the head chef of an entire cruise line who had created protocols for sanitary practices in an era when those floating necropolises were poisoning people left and right.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll tell you a secret.”

I got ready for him to drop the bomb and thought about what crappy ass kitchen I would have to work in next. The Commons was a total shitshow but everything was new and the pay was great.

“I hate them too,” he said. “More than you think. They’re lazy and disrespectful, they make good money for too few hours and they stand around when there’s nothing to do and all they do is talk and gossip. They make my skin crawl…But they are a necessary evil.” He paused. “There was a time in my life when I was much like you. Young, talented, and angry. I did the same things you did to torture the waiters. But you have to listen to me when I tell you it is a weakness, not a strength, to be cruel to them. We have big plans for you here, but when you do things like this it shows you have brutality inside you and this is the thing you must focus on. I know the service comes easy for you but your biggest downfall is staring you right in the face. It is a challenge to be good to others you have no respect for. Trust me. I struggled with it for years. I want you to be more aware of this and work on it. Ok?”

“Ok, chef.”

“Thank you.”