Who needs a cook when you"ve got a low-end cook? Life and character The Guardian

Feeling the feverishness . . . cooks at work in a Hooters grill in the US Photograph: Alamy

These days, no one is a prepare any more. Everyone is a chef. Culinary honour is totalled in Michelin stars, repository centrefolds and the series of internal farms name-checked on the menu. There is an all as well usual idea that grace in in progress comes from a stiff white jacket, undiluted teeth, a publicist and a TV contract.

But that, of course, is untrue. Well-coiffed luminary chefs take honour in their perplexing skills, the mixture with that they work and the pleasing and tasty plates they produce, but cooks in low-rent restaurants take subsequent to honour in their speed, their scars and their capability to do a formidable pursuit well, infrequently underneath distressing conditions. I outlayed majority of my fifteen years as a prepare operative in these kinds of places.

Take the roadside fish residence in Florida where I outlayed my nights operative the fryers. This was not a great restaurant. However it was the kind of place that people eat in majority of the time — cheap, fast and easy; undiluted for grandma, the kids, and tourists with small income and less taste. But there was a honour in the kitchen that had small to do with cuisine, but all to do with food.

On a standard Saturday night, at the last probable impulse prior to the early-bird rush, I would begin to lift in the batch in volumes you would hardly believe. Two hundred pounds of precut, solidified french fries in slick brownish-red 10lb bags. Eight five-gallon buckets of floury drink batter. Hundreds of pounds of poor fish in cosmetic tubs. There were cases of calamari already going slimey in the wet air, some-more cases of breaded clam strips, of pressed mushrooms and duck cutlets. And this was only my station. All around me, the rest of the six-strong organisation were bringing in their stuff, stacking their prime pans on the wall racks in their own secret, special order; rambling the bottles of salsa and in progress booze snout-down in their speed racks, and slotting their knives in to the spaces in between slicing boards, pointed for fast draws. Over the subsequent 6 hours, together in the feverishness and the pile-up and the clamour, we would feed scarcely 1,000 people.

This was my group – not pretty, not nice, not important – but competent, fast and tough. They were professionals who could face down abrasive numbers night after night, anticipating excellence and value in simply you do the pursuit – branch and blazing by prolonged hours for low compensate with no holidays, no ill days, no reinforcements or service in sight. What"s more, they desired the food. Maybe not the actuality of it – this hamburger, that poor cut of haddock – but positively for being means to have something great come out of something so basic. A ideally parched chunk of foie gras or hulk truffles are pleasing things. But so, too, is a great clout when you need one, or a oily fish grill dripping in vinegar.

Fourteen hours – one plain change – on the prohibited line of any bustling internal will learn you some-more about the severe being of stuff oneself the open than any year in a small changed in progress school. Many of the great chefs operative currently proposed off as great cooks operative the neighbourhoods, next their ability level, only similar to me – in progress unwashed to compensate the rent until something improved came along. They schooled their moves in the feverishness and submarine alliance of a small torpedo galley, churning out cheeseburgers, falafels or tacos. And somewhere along the line, similar to me, they schooled to love not only the job, but the food, too. Any food. All food.

In the years I outlayed on the low finish of the trade, I knew chefs who"d roar and swear and throw pans and woe cooks for any small slight. I stood next to guys who went to prison for hidden food stamps from old ladies, for adhering up preference stores. But I"ve additionally seen these same people give up great jobs rather than do wrong by the food. I"ve well known cooks in oily spoons who desired their knives so most they declared them. Tex-Mex grillmen who worked total shifts with withering vessel browns or damaged fingers rather than let their friends down by withdrawal the line a chairman short in the rush. And immature sous chefs from travel dilemma bistros that no one has ever listened of who got butcher"s diagrams of pigs tattooed on to their bodies. I"ve watched them take lucent honour in a elementary vessel of mussels, in slicing a little brunoise, in the undiluted chain of scallops in a pan.

In the end, all cooks wear the same whites. They all do the same job: stuff oneself people, on condition that for one of their elementary needs. All else aside, that"s a eminent thing. • Jason Sheehan is the grill censor at the Seattle Weekly. His book, Cooking Dirty, is published by Atlantic on eleven Mar (£16.99).