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" I&amp;#039;d like to write something provocative and sexy about the restaurant industry. Unfortunately, I&amp;#039;ve been in the restaurant industry for about thirty-five years and I find it hard to see anything sexy or provocative about it. When I was a teenager, I got my first job as a dishwasher at a Swiss fondue restaurant in the small Vermont town where I grew up. I scrubbed burnt-on cheese from enamel fondue pots, soaking wet from head to toe in the dish pit, while the alcoholic chef screamed at the waitresses and threw pans at the cooks. He made B\u00E9arnaise sauce that smelled like his armpits. After the winter season was over, the restaurant went quiet and there wasn&amp;#039;t any work, so I went up the highway to the ski resort and got a summer gig as a busboy at the conference center. My first job was to find out what was stinking up the banquet kitchen after it had been closed for a month. It was a sour cream container full of rotten clam chowder. But I kept at it. When I graduated from high school, I moved to Vail to be a ski bum. Cooks got a free ski pass, so I took a job as a short-order cook at the Bridge Street Deli. I griddled hamburgers, bacon, home fries, eggs, steaks, bread\u2014all in puddles of Whirl, a fake butter shortening. My glasses were covered with a thick film of grease that I had to clean off every ten minutes so I wasn&amp;#039;t cooking blind. I had to sit at the back of the bus going home (we called it &amp;quot;the deli section&amp;quot;) because I smelled so bad from rancid Whirl and hamburger grease. And yet I soldiered on. Over the next twenty years, I worked in kitchens in California, Australia, New Zealand, Oregon, Alaska, England, on sailboats and fishing boats, slinging pizza, southwestern cuisine, Italian of all regions. I worked in prime rib joints, Mexican restaurants, old school UK meat and three veg houses, staged in Michelin-starred restaurants (where I was addressed as &amp;quot;hey, fuck&amp;quot;) and New American restaurants when that started being a thing. I quit cooking for a time back in the early &amp;#039;90s. There was a night when I watched a dining room full of people eating our kitchen&amp;#039;s hard, daily labor and it didn&amp;#039;t fill me with pride; it made me feel physically ill. At that time, it was the best job I&amp;#039;d had at the best restaurant that ever hired me. I can&amp;#039;t explain why, but I knew that I had to get out of the kitchen. I handed in my notice the next day. Unable to shake the habit, I hung on as a bartender for a few more years until I finally got weary of serving drunks for tips and became a house painter. I have to admit to painting a lot of restaurants over the nine years that followed and when I got sick of that, I immediately turned back to the restaurant world to make a living, risking all that I&amp;#039;d earned and saved to open my own place and re-enter the world I&amp;#039;ve just described so provocatively. It ain&amp;#039;t a sexy life, but it&amp;#039;s the only one I know now, and I wouldn&amp;#039;t trade it for another. This is The Spill, a new series on Eat Like a Man where chefs, food writers, restaurateurs, policy makers\u2014anyone who has something vital, incendiary, or earth-shattering (or just kind of amusing) to say about the food world today\u2014can write what&amp;#039;s on their mind. If you work in the food industry and are interested in writing for The Spill, please send your ideas to spill@esquire.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a28598/what-its-like-to-cook-for-a-living/>