Kitchen Confidential - By Mark Geis (NOT Anthony Bourdain!)

Kitchen Confidential was a fantastic book written by the late, great Anthony Bourdain that exposed all the things everyone wanted to know, and didn’t want to know, about what goes on behind the scenes in restaurants (and these were the famous fine dining establishments, not the dives we all frequent as well)! It just so happens that I have my own experiences in the restaurant industry as well, so I thought I’d share my version of Kitchen Confidential with you all based on those experiences!

Anthony Bourdain (R.I.P.) was a loud-mouthed, vulgar, arrogant, irreverent, obnoxious person who also happened to be a fantastic chef and an engaging and successful TV personality. His book, Kitchen Confidential, exposed the underbelly of the restaurant business and what really goes on behind the scenes in some of the world’s greatest restaurants. If you haven’t read it, you should, but be warned, it sometimes reads more like a horror story than a happy memoir. Bourdain regales the reader with tales of all the craziness that goes in restaurant kitchens, including unappetizing and disturbing revelations about how food is handled and prepared before it reaches your plate, as well as how restaurant staffs behave with each other and the customers they serve.

Well, it just so happens that I have extensive experience in the restaurant world, having worked in a fine dining restaurant, The Girafe Restaurant, in Basking Ridge, NJ one summer during my college years (the summer of 1982 to be more specific!). It seemed like I worked there for years, but it was really only two-and-a-half months. I was a dishwasher, stock boy, kitchen prep guy, and general boodle boy for the chefs, servers, and anyone else above me on the kitchen staff totem pole (which was pretty much everyone, since I was at the very bottom of that pole). But that experience exposed me to the same underbelly of the restaurant world as Anthony Bourdain, and my experiences were just as scandalous as his! So, for the first time ever, I will share what I have kept secret for over 40 years – the REAL truth of what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite restaurant! Read at your own risk – you have been warned!!

First, there’s A LOT of R-rated stuff that goes on every day behind those swinging doors that lead into the restaurant kitchen. When I was doing kitchen prep downstairs in the restaurant basement, I saw a pretty regular stream of chefs, servers, and other kitchen staff pass by on their way to the storage room which is where bags of flour, sugar, rice, and the like were stored. The perfect location for mid-day trysts and fadoodling before and after lunch and dinner service began and ended. They could have cared less about me, and I certainly didn’t care about them – they didn’t even bother to hide their scandalous activities from me or anyone else! I just hoped they washed their hands after they were done.

Second, restaurants like to torture their low-level kitchen staff. For example, if you have ever been a dishwasher in a restaurant, you know that the dishwater is scalding hot, as are the plates and glasses that come out of the drying machine. My request to use rubber gloves to protect my hands was denied, presumably because they made it difficult to hold onto glassware which was expensive to replace if broken. So instead, I scalded my hands and arms for the first week until my skin became scarred and numb to the heat. After that, I didn’t even notice it but the first week was definitely painful!

Third, most of the waitstaff are truly nice people, but every restaurant has one or two that are nasty human beings who don’t seem to realize they aren’t the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies but think they are gods anyway. At the Girafe Restaurant, we had a particularly obnoxious waiter who was overweight, in his mid-50s and spoke with a deep French accent. He was arrogant and a bully – I suspect it was because he was a 50ish year-old waiter in a small restaurant in a small NJ town, and he probably had grander plans for his life growing up. Anyway, he took out his anger on me on multiple occasions. In one case, I was dragging a particularly heavy trash bag out to the dumpster and unbeknownst to me, the bag had ripped on the way, spilling out trash on the floor. Instead of just letting me know nicely, he yelled at me, told me what an idiot I was, and ordered me to clean it up ASAP before walking off in a huff. All I could think as I was cleaning up the trash was that I was glad I wasn’t him, and never would be!

Fourth, most of the chefs I worked with were generally stressed out, ill-tempered, and were oftentimes ready to explode on a moment’s notice if things don’t go their way. I faced the full force of their anger on one or two occasions. One morning I arrived in the kitchen before everyone else to start setting things up, and I found a large pot sitting in the sink with what looked like leftover soup from the night before. Since it had been sitting out all night, I decided to dump it and clean the pot so it was ready for lunch service that day. About an hour later, I heard the chef yelling, “What the F%#$?? Where’s my F&%$ing soup base? Who the F#!@ took my F%@&ing soup base?” I went into the kitchen and told him I didn’t realize it was a soup base and as a result, I had dumped it. He commenced to yell at me for the next 45 seconds, telling me how stupid I was, how I had ruined his plans for his soup of the day, and how I “better not F%&#ing ever do that again”. I really did feel bad, but got over it quickly because, I mean really, it was just soup, right? And he did leave it out overnight, which definitely wasn’t safe food-handling practice. I’d like to think I might have saved some customers from food poisoning that day!

Fifth, you just need to know that bad things happen to some of the food you eat that used to be alive in order for you to fully enjoy it. One of the signature dishes at the Girafe Restaurant were blue crabs from the Maryland Chesapeake Bay. We’d get them in 3-4 times a week and one of my jobs was to prepare them for the chefs. Now, these were pallets of LIVE crabs – squirming around with claws opening and closing. My job, should I choose to accept it (well, I actually had no choice), was to (1) cut their eyes off (because most people don’t like their food looking back at them), and (2) how do I say this politely – rip off their manhood. Yes, I was responsible for tearing off the reproductive organs of the male blue crabs, … while they were alive. Thankfully, they don’t have vocal cords or otherwise, I would have experienced nightmares of their screaming bloody murder as I emasculated them on a daily basis!

Finally, I’m sure you know this and try not to think about it too much, but the food you eat at a restaurant is only as clean as the person’s hands who prepared it – which is kind of scary. Let’s just say that I observed my fair share of bad food-handling practices while I was working in the restaurant industry. These included staff not washing their hands after going to the bathroom, not sanitizing work surfaces correctly after handling raw meat and the like, and seafood sitting out on the counter for hours at room temperature – you get the idea. Frankly, it’s a wonder more people don’t get sick eating out. Most good restaurants work really hard to maintain a clean and safe kitchen, but a lot can go wrong if one worker isn’t paying attention to the food safety rules.

So, those are some of the things I observed during my very short tenure as a restaurant worker – I hope you enjoyed my walk down memory lane! I also hope you enjoy your next dinner out (just don’t think about this post when you go)!!

The Girafe Restaurant dining room – circa 1982