Former Pano's cook writes about 'Cooking Dirty'
Jason Sheehan had already been working in restaurant kitchens before taking the night cook job at Pano’s. He was a career cook, with knife kit, the scars and the empty bank account to prove it.
It was the mid-’90s, and the popular Buffalo diner was still just a 26-seat shoebox on Elmwood Avenue, known as “a great place for souvlaki or to get your teeth kicked out,” Sheehan writes in “Cooking Dirty,” his recently published kitchen memoir.
Cooking Dirty
By Jason Sheehan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages, $26
At Pano’s, Sheehan got to live his short-order dream: One cook against the world.
As the 3 a.m. line of customers, many inebriated, stretched down the sidewalk, Sheehan found himself stretched to the limit. He fired souvlaki on the grill, dropped baskets of fries into hot oil and flipped eggs on the hot-top in a grease-spattered solo ballet, hacking his way out of the weeds one plate at a time.
“It was such a killer, man-alone Lord Jim trip that I would have done it for free,” Sheehan wrote.
“Cooking Dirty,” published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Sheehan’s story of how he fell in love with restaurant kitchens. Pitched to the ears of lifer line cooks and dish dogs, the book is by turns profane, embarrassing, triumphant and terrifying.
Since 2002, Sheehan has been the restaurant critic and food writer for Denver’s Westword alternative weekly. He won nationwide notice in 2003, winning a James Beard Award for food writing.
His story brings readers along for the ride as he shows how doing the impossible under unspeakable conditions can transform a kitchen crew into swaggering, minimum-wage gladiators. At least until the shift ends.
At times intensely personal, his story passes through New York, Florida, New Mexico and Colorado kitchens, and then to a Colorado paper, with several local stops.
Pano’s played to Sheehan’s strengths, but he quit after the new place opened and the buzz was gone. He turned up next at an Irish place in North Buffalo, where he explains what it’s like to prepare a literal ton of corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. There’s also his account of helping open up an ambitious multi-culti bistro on Elmwood he calls La Cite, which sounds a lot like Le Metro.
Like his hero, proto-chef-author Anthony Bourdain, Sheehan traded his chef’s knife for a laptop to carve his way to a new career. He hustled his way into kitchens without culinary school, and talked his way into writing about food with a handful of writing samples he bashed out while waiting for unemployment checks.
Bourdain’s writing did for kitchen workers what the Western movie did for the cowboy, elevating them in the public imagination.
“I have no doubt he was the reason I got my first food writing gig,” said Sheehan. Sheehan won his first job after overhearing an editor tell his staff he wanted a Bourdain, and Sheehan said he was it.
So now the former line cook, who once took pride in working his shift after putting a knife through his hand, finds himself donning the devil’s horns, as a critic. The ultimate outsider, reviewers are generally disliked by kitchen crews who accuse them of broadcasting judgments about a kitchen’s performance without understanding the struggles that went on behind the kitchen door.
“I will regularly describe my transition from cooking food to writing about food, as the day I turned traitor,” Sheehan said. “Bourdain said it first: No one gets to sell out just a little.”
Sheehan’s story is a strong antidote to chef glamour. He puts you in the shoes of a new kitchen commander in Western New York who just realized he forgot to thaw the haddock, on a Friday.
“Friday [expletive] fish fry is pure heaven on any restaurant’s books — a fast mover with low food cost, high menu price and customers commanded by God to eat it or else they’ll go to hell.”
Anyone who’s ever eaten a fish fry will goggle at his vivid depiction of how you can turn 80 pounds of block-frozen haddock into cookable filets in an hour.
Sheehan admits that his hands are soft now. In the day, he could reach into a 400 degree oven and pull out a pan, “and as long as I had it out of my hand in three seconds, I wasn’t doing myself any serious damage.”
Now he can feel the heat of his coffee mug.
“I’m too old, too tired, too lazy,” said Sheehan, who’s 36. “A line shift at one of the places I used to work would kill me. I’d be dead before the first rush.”
Every once in a while, though, he finds himself longing for the jagged joy of the rush, back behind the counter at Pano’s, a short-order ninja asking himself the questions adrenaline junkies never tire of:
“How busy can it get? How bizarre can it get? How many fights can there be? How many disasters can I survive and still get through this night and be there standing at 8 a. m. with the place all cleaned up and ready to go for the next shift?”
In the end, Pano’s and the places like it were less about cooking food than proving himself to himself, Sheehan said.
“I was in it for the challenge,” Sheehan said. “I was in it for the game.”
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