Day 89: Little. Yellow. Angry.

Listening: Time ain't standing still, and there ain't no way to get it back.

What's my problem? Ducks weren't defrosted.

So I have a reputation in the kitchen. I'm known both as the dirtiest (not to say unclean, but definitively the most crass) and the angriest guy in the kitchen. I make the meanest mama jokes. I tell things how they are. And I get irked by little things. So whenever I'm in a kind of get disgruntled, someone inevitably says, "ZEN!!!, Little. Yellow. Angry." That's me. I need a t-shirt with that printed on it. If I ever try out for a reality TV show, I'm going to send in a video with all of the people that I know saying that I'm little, yellow, and angry.

When I get in a press on the line, I tend to get a bit snippy. I start cursing. I start getting testy with people. Last night was a good example of it.

It started off a little bit shady to begin with during prep. The night before, we had set out a case of duck breasts to thaw. The next day, I was supposed to separate the breasts, remove the tender, and trim up and score the skin before marinating them. On an average night, the normal saute cook sells around fifteen ducks. I had fifteen ducks in the marinade before the case of frozen breasts. The most that we had sold in a night was twenty. When I got to do the butchering and marination of the ducks, they were still frozen. They're never still frozen the next day at three in the afternoon. The pastry chefs must have come in earlier than normal and chucked them in the walk-in fridge before they had finished defrosting.

So I had fifteen ducks in the marinade. It was a Wednesday night. We'll roll with fifteen butchered ducks. The third ticket that comes in orders five ducks and takes out a third of my stash. That's quickly followed by ducks on each of the next three tickets. Half of my duck mise en place is demolished. It's not even half past seven yet. I was already sweating the garnish on the dish too, because the normal saute guy didn't prep the starch two days in advanced like we usually do.

It seems as if whenever he works, he sells less than the average number of ducks per night, and when I work, I sell way more than the average number of ducks. By the time I had run out of ducks, the night wasn't even halfway over, but the ducks were defrosted enough to butcher and use.

I also normally render off a number of duck breasts before the beginning of service, so I don't have to spend the time doing it as the crush comes in. I started with eight rendered, and as I said earlier, they were all gone before seven thirty. So with every subsequent duck order, "Awwwww, fuck YOUUUUUUUUUU...." could be heard escaping from my lips.

Not only was I buried in duck all night long, selling the record for this season at twenty one, I was also running the bass special. If there's one thing that people love, it's bass. I sold twenty of those that night too. Another twelve tuna or so and at least thirty flounder topped it all off. I was selling at least four entrees for each one coming off grill.

There was one pickup where out of twelve dishes, I had ten of them, and then the guy working the plating/expediting station asked me if I can pick up another flounder and a tuna, my reaction was, "I don't give a FUCK!" So he adds it on. Then, not only do I not hear the extra tuna tacked on, thinking it was only a flounder that I had to add on, but he didn't call out that one of the flounders was a medium-well. So, I'm picking up seven flounder, two tuna, and two duck, but one of the tunas I don't know about. The guy guy working the plating station asks me the duck as I'm putting the flounder on the plate, and I'm like, "What FUCKING tuna?" Then he asks me which flounder is medium-well, and I say, "You didn't call out a FUCKIN' medium-well!" So I pick up a flounder put it back on a sizzle platter and grab the one that I had fired as medium-well, put it in the broiler and brought it back up to temp.

We did a hundred and fifty dinners last night and I'm sure that I did at least ninety of them. I think that grill did thirty five or forty, and hot apps did ten or fifteen apps as entrees (cheap ass mother fuckers). So, as I'm getting railed, I'm spouting expletives as I render ducks, pick up ten dishes at a time, sear and roast fish, heat up garnish, and think that the guy deciding the pickups is a moron for not analyzing the tickets better and putting together more realistic pickups. I think that if I was less organized and focused in on the order of operations, I would have been, not only buried, but totally lost in the weeds. There was only one time that I didn't have my all-day (all-day is what we call what we have on order), and it was on the last two tickets where I hadn't fired a flounder. Luckily, flounders are one of those dishes that you can do on the pickup.

But, yeah, I got railed all night long. I felt like a two dollar hooker getting fucked by a big sweaty beast for two hours straight. When the dust cleared, I was satisfied with my performance, and I had made it through the night without running out of anything, though the mise en place was DESTROYED. There was almost nothing left. I had vinaigrettes still, mussels for the tuna dish, scallions and that's about it. The regular saute guy had to rebuild the place from the ground up.

The night before, I worked the grill. We did a hundred and sixty people that night and I did a good job. There was nothing sent back and all of my food looked great. I got worked just as hard as the saute guy, and I had a lot of fucked up orders too. But I survived it with no one sending anything back or getting any negative feedback. I was so relieved at the end of the night. I didn't talk about how well I was doing all night long, like I was a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter. In my mind, though, I I was ecstatic that I had found a groove and that I was rockin' it.

Speaking of groove, I had a really nice moment last Sunday. The past couple of Sundays, I have been waking up early to catch brunch with a friend of mine. This week, I woke up and turned on the TV as I waited for my friend to get back to my text saying that I was up and ready to go. The end of the movie Groove was on TV, right at the part where Digweed walks into the rave and drops the epic track "Heaven Scent" by Bedrock. "Heaven Scent" has to be one of my all time favorite progressive house tracks. When I hear it, it still gives me goosebumps and puts the hair on the back of my arms on end. I can feel it tingling down my spine as the beat washes out and the synthesizers push the theme. Not only does it bring me back to my DJing days, but it levitates me just like it used to back when it was played on the floors of clubs and warehouses. It's an amazing way to wake up. I think that maybe I should wake up to that song every day.

Anyhow, today, though, was a bit of a wash. Originally, killa, the cookie and I were planning on spending the entire day at the beach with our brand new beach grilling permit, Pies' smokey joe, a cooler full of wine and grillable foods, and a frisbee. Needless to say, it rained today. All day. It's okay, because I was up until five in the morning watching TV and really just needed the day to relax. So, that's what I'm doing. Relaxing. You gotta chill out so you can be the little, yellow, angry guy on the line.