Food and Footage

I have been thinking lately about how I look while I am working. Unless you are a personal trainer or an actress, you really can’t see yourself while you work but over time, I think, we come to recognize patterns in the faces we make. When I used to work at a computer all day, I made a lot of open mouthed, fly-catching faces. When the sun got strong in my window, I made  squinty pursed mouth faces at the screen.

But in my new, more physical job as a cook, my faces have become more like a pro-basketball player’s. I do head rolls, I nod at teammates, I gasp at the heat. The extremity of the job really forces me to resort to comforting facial gestures and body movements.  So here is a list of what I perceive to be the most common faces I make while working:

1) The Straw-suck Face–Cooks need to hydrate a lot and often can’t refill their water during a shift. To remedy this, we fill a water pitcher with ice and water, wrap it with saran wrap and stick a straw in it. This is what we suck on throughout the night. The Straw-suck face is a dead-eyed fish face. The eyes focus on nothing while the mouth purses down and takes in as much water as the moment allows. This face is repeated whenever there is a lull in the shift.

2) The Tongue-out Precision Face–This is the face I make when I am slicing a steak with concentration. I am thinking about the angle and trying to make it all fit nicely on a plate. Once and a while this face is accompanied by a “please let this be medium-rare” eye-plea. But the overall face is face down, tongue slightly out and held between teeth. Maybe this is the same face a Laker would make while setting up a free-throw shot.

3) The Eye-Roll Dick Waiter Face–This is the face we make when a waiter is a dick or fucks something up. It is a full eye roll to all kitchen members sometimes followed by a crude comment and a chuckle. This is how the kitchen builds a collective spirit amongst themselves. Without a bad or dick waiter, we cooks wouldn’t like each other as much. By fucking things up they are actually bringing the team closer together.

4) The Lifting Heavy Shit Face–We all know this face. It’s the face you make when you are straining to get something safely down or through a narrow passage. Somehow it feels like my nostrils flare more while I am engaged in these activities. My mouth is closed. My jaw is clenched and my eyes are so focused they feel like tiny beacons in my face. Imagine an angry horse.

5)The Fuck I Burned Myself Face–An indignant wince. Equal parts anger at oneself and brief fleeting pain.

6 ) The End of Shift Face–Actually, it’s not so much a face as it is a twinkle in the eye. If someone says anything remotely funny at this point, you will laugh. When your drink is finished, you will laugh at not funny things.

I have been working at Nostrana for a  week now, manning the grill, discovering the fragile web that separates rare from medium rare, and inhaling more smoke than the Rat Pack.

You see, one of the attractive things about Nostrana is their adherence to very pure and ancient cooking practices. The pizzas are fired in a wood oven, and the meats are grilled over a wood fire. That fire adds a lot of flavor to the food, but it also requires a lot of man power to keep the system running smoothly.

On my second day of work, one of the cooks–lets call him No Smiles, took me to the wood shed across from the restaurant and gave me a basic lesson in humility. See, up until that moment, I had assumed that my duties stopped in the kitchen. I was finding it adequately rigorous to manage the various proteins, coordinate timing with other stations in the restaurant, and clean the enormous grill at the end of the evening. I felt proud and a little bad ass about being the only woman running the grill station. Having all that meat under my control and making sure the fire didn’t die down, seemed tough and sexy, and worth bragging about. Leaving work every night, I smelled like a camp fire. My clothes were dusted with wood shavings and my fingers were covered with soot.

Which is why I sort of froze when No Smiles informed me that in addition to the strenuous duties I had already undertaken, I would also be responsible for chopping the wood. He pointed to a stump in the middle of the shed with an ax buried deeply inside it. I don’t think I could even heave an ax forcefully enough to plant it into a stump, let alone chop multiple smaller pieces clear in half. I kept imagining the axe slipping and my leg being cleaved clear in half.

Losing face, it turns out, is more frightening than losing a leg. So with the stoic look of an expert chopper, I placed a log on the stump, raised my axe and lowered it so forcefully that a tiny chip came off the edge! I squealed with delight. No Smiles…not so much. “Try to hit the center next time.” he said, clearly masking his great excitement over my accomplishment.

Second swing and I’m all stump. Third swing and I get a slightly larger chip. No Smiles tells me to put down the axe. He gracefully chops 6 logs in what seems like 10 seconds. When he finishes. He says, ” I usually do this job so no one else has to.” I try to look disappointed and mumble something about wanting to share the load equally, but, honestly, THANK GOD!

Lets all raise our axes to No Smiles for keeping my legs intact.