Food is love. I've read about this concept in various places over the years. The gathering of people and ingredients, the sharing of cooking talents, making and eating. I think they said it best in the wonderful documentary "I Like Killing Flies", "Making food is about as intimate as it gets, I mean, they're going to put it in their mouth."
However if making food for friends and family is a way of bonding, a way of loving, making food for the public is War. Yes, I try to put Love into everything I make. I'm not joking. I think it tastes better that way. But working behind a sushi bar, where horde upon horde comes flooding through the door. There's an overwhelming feeling that we are out-manned and out gunned. How can these people still be hungry? Where are they coming from? Didn't we feed everyone in town already?
Prep time, before we open is all about getting ourselves ready. What are we preparing? Food sure, but more accurately: Ammunition. We want to make sure you never run out of bullets. So we stack our ammo, our tuna, our avocado, our rice, our sauce; we stack it high. On a busy weekend we'll go through 200 pounds of fish and 300 pounds of cooked rice. When we run out, things begin to spiral out of control, that foreign army gets a little closer, a little more irate, a little more unpredictable and we start to lose the battle.
Sometimes the noise level in the restaurant rises to the point that I have to use hand signals, two fingers pointed to my eyes and then at a table to let the waitress know from across the room to look at them. I found myself shouting out at customers mere feet from me because if I didn't they wouldn't understand. I turn my head to hear their response directly into my ear and nod, as if we're all hunched under a chopper that's about to take off.
While our bar works best in it's U shape, to maximize seating capacity, it's hard not to think that we've dug a trench and are now surrounded. When you leave the trench, to go to cash register, to help the helpless at the door, you feel as though your exposed, somehow in danger of being taken to floor and beaten for what little sushi you might have left.
To top this, more than half the time I have an extremely sharp knife in my hand, that I have, on at least one occasion, threatened a customer with and on many more occasions secretly thought of stabbing someone with. Think I'm crazy? Try not to think of it as a weapon when someone is yelling at you.
This brings me to final point. You see the face of Evil working in a restaurant. The way humans treat other humans can be both amazing and horrifying around meal times. I've seen the most disfunctional of dysfunctional families. I've see food thrown as live ammo. I've seen spitting indoors. I've seen grown men puff out there chests over who was on the list to sit down first. I've heard parents tell their kids that they're too fat to have any more. I heard jeaous wives ask their husbands if they wanted to just "fuck the waitress and get it over with".
And yet, like some kind of adrenaline junkie, I keep coming back to work. Because every night I get that rush, like I just might not make it out alive this time, but somehow at the end, they all go home and I live to fight another day.
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