About this item
THE GRIT AND GLORY OF RESTAURANT LIFE, AS TOLD BY A SURVIVOR OF KITCHENS ACROSS AMERICA Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life "on the line" in the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the Michelin Guide - where most of us eat out most of the time. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place. From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which "your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire." The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried - a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling. With this deeply affecting book, Sheehan (already acclaimed for his reviews) joins the first class of American food writers at a time when books about food have never been better or more popular.
About the Author
Jason Sheehan is a former dishwasher, fry cook, saucier, chef, restaurant critic, food editor, reporter, and porn store employee. He was born and raised in Rochester, New York and though he has since fled the rust belt repeatedly, he still harbors an intense fondness for brutal winters, Friday fish fries, Irish bars and urban decay. As a young nerd, he fell hard for Star Wars, Doctor Who, William Gibson, Roger Zelazny and the spaceships-and-rayguns novels his father would leave on his bedside table. He dreamed of someday befriending a robot, stealing a spaceship and wandering off across the stars in search of alien ladies and high adventure. Since that hasn't happened (yet...) , he now writes about it instead--which is almost as good. And yet despite all this, his mother still kinda thinks he should've been an orthodontist.
