Monster Children

The Hospitality Diaries.
Posted By Jason – 26.07.2012

I was perusing the many food blogs that I like to peruse daily (because I really give a shit about food, the people who rate food, and the moody fuckers charged with preparing food) when I came across an interview with rotund, redheaded super-chef Mario Batali. It was an okay interview. The questions were fine, the answers were acceptable, but it definitely seemed a little, shall we say, off. 500 words in and the peculiarity revealed itself: Mario Batali was pretending to be a normal human being. He was being level-headed, patient, affable and fair–in short, he was being the exact opposite of every chef I’ve ever met.

Chefs are bad people. They’re angry drug addicts with dangerously inflated senses of self-worth and the social skills to go with it. They are insane, and they are to be avoided. Quick story: when I got out of high school I took a job washing dishes at a restaurant to help me save for my big move to the city. There was a chef at the restaurant–head chef–German fellow by the name of Adolf. Adolf was (and I hate to use this word in mixed company) a cunt. In fact, he was the second biggest cunt who ever lived, the first of course being his deranged namesake. Adolf liked to throw hot pans at me. ‘HOT PAN!’ he’d bellow, but only after the pan had landed in the sink and sent a wave of dirty dishwater over me. Cunt. On my birthday, Adolf offered me a cigarette in the car park. ‘It’s your birthday?’ I said it was, and he held his pack of cigarettes at me. He didn’t say Thanks for working on your birthday, or How old are you today? He didn’t even say Happy Birthday. He gave me a cigarette and three-minutes of icy silence. What a fucker he was. But Adolf isn’t the only chef I’ve tangled with; I slaved away in the hospitality industry for years–more years than I’ll ever admit–and I've met gangs of the fat, pasty-skinned, barking-mad bastards.

So this is a new column called The Hospitality Diaries, and you can thank Mario Batali for it. If that interview of his hadn’t been littered with jarringly civilized utterances like ‘I use chestnut honey, and I love it!’ and ‘I'm really digging bottarga right now!’ I might not have thought to blow the whistle on the whole thing.

Next week: my first job was at KFC!