This was The Life. The part they can't teach in culinary school, don't ever show on TV. The unscheduled death and disasters and heat and blistering adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the crashing din, smell of calluses burning, crushing pressure and pure, raw joy of it all as the entire rest of the world falls away and your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire; everything turning on the next call, the next fire order, the twenty, thirty, forty steaks in front of you and the hundreds on the way. This was what made everything else forgivable. And I knew that if I could just do this one thing, all night, every night, under the worst conditions and without fail, nothing else mattered...
Nat Damm
Related Content
More About
I wrote those lines about three years ago now—just a few of the thousands in the first book anyone had ever asked me to write about myself. It was called Cooking Dirty, a bit of line-cook slang from upstate New York meaning to work below your abilities, slinging hash to pay the rent while waiting for something better to come along.
In it, I told all the stories I could recall concerning the weird path I'd taken from know-nothing punk kid, dishwasher, mercenary cook, and French-trained chef to itinerant food writer. The story took me from Rochester to Buffalo, Tampa, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, Manhattan, California, Juarez, and Denver; saw me cooking in greasy spoons and Chinese bars, brasseries and fish houses; and behaving with a gross disregard for reputation, career, or physical well-being until I finally traded it all in for a girl, a byline, and health insurance. The thing was a monster. And when I finished it, I thought I'd said all I had to about food and cooks and myself.
Except I hadn't.
I was working as a restaurant critic and food writer for Denver's Westword (a sister paper of Seattle Weekly) when I wrote Cooking Dirty. I'd been there for five years at that point, covering cafes and cooks, sneaking in and out of Russian mob bars and secret Ghanaian house restaurants, eating everything that came into my highly erratic orbit, and often coming home at strange hours with whiskey on my breath and barbecue sauce in my hair.
After the book, I thought I'd be empty all over again, but I managed another two-and-a-half years in the Mile High City, which went by like ball lightning—all dramatic flash and sizzle, burning memories in its path that I'll never shake. White-lit pho shops in dead-end strip malls. A perfect bowl of shrimp and grits. Ten-dollar steaks on a sunny afternoon, tasting of grill char and poverty. My wife grinning at me over a bowl of croquetas still hot from the fryers. Everywhere I turned, there was another cook, another chef, another menu—generations of family history written in the sting of a nopales taco, the future in a cloud of seared balsamic vinegar, my own past neatly contained in a Friday fish fry, limp steak fries, and two pints of Guinness.
Now, it's Seattle. I no longer have any fear of running dry—of ever reaching the bottom of the well of stories that writing about food provides. The one thing I promised myself, though, was that after nearly 10 years, if anyone was ever foolhardy, crazy, or dumb enough to offer me a fresh gig in a new city, I would waste a little ink giving myself a proper introduction. It's only fair, after all: If any of you are going to take anything I say to heart, then the least I can do is let you know a little bit about me first.
I am a chef. I spent nearly 15 years dans la merde, and came away with the firm belief that, like president or general or convict, the title of chef is granted for life. No matter where you go or what you do, it follows you, because having been there—lost in the heat and madness and elation of the moment—changes you forever. So though I've been on the other side of the swinging door now for almost a decade, I had put in better than 50,000 hours on the line before trading in my Henckels for a pen. What's more, even after all those years away, part of me still considers this whole writing thing a kind of dodge—some dirty little secret I'll take with me to the grave just as soon as I can get out there and find another real job in a respectable kitchen.
That's how it started, after all—"Cooking dirty" with a pen in my hand, writing to pay the rent—when one day I found myself washed up in Albuquerque with no galley to call home. Like porn, local politics, or selling knives door-to-door, it was something I did out of necessity because, other than standing around screaming orders with a knife in my hand, I had no useful skills.
The lines opening this piece form the essential core of everything it would eventually take me several years and an entire book to say. They are my apologia and my exaltation, my explanation of everything I found beautiful about kitchens and cooking, and my reason for dedicating 15 years of my life to the kicks, thrills, joys, and nightmares of being a working cook. When I walked away, it wasn't because I loved it any less, only that the trade, it seemed, no longer needed me.
