Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen

Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life on the line in the neighborhood restaurantsfar from culinary school cable TV and the Michelin Guidewhere most of us eat out when we eat out. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place. From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen Jason Sheehan had the full range of kitchen experiences: in a French colonial bistro and an all-night diner; a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work as he describes it in exuberant sparkling prose is the last true American meritocracy. No one cares about your past or what you do on the outside. Can you cook? Thats all anyone cares about. The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: sneaking cigarettes in the walk-in freezer having sex in the basement surviving the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself as Sheehan tells it is a place in which lifes mysteries are thawed sliced broiled barbecued and frieda place where people from the margins find their community and their calling.