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

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen by Sheehan, Jason. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780374289218.

THE GRIT AND GLORY OF RESTAURANT LIFE, AS TOLD BY A SURVIVOR OF KITCHENS ACROSS AMERICA Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life €œon the line€ in the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the Michelin Guide€”where most of us eat out most of the time. 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 worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial 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 a way of life in which €œyour whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire.€ The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a s