First Things First

I'd like to begin our journey together with a touch of elegance.

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Not too long ago I asked my friend Dan Jacobs, executive chef at Odd Duck here in the beautiful city of Milwaukee, if he knew anywhere that was hiring.  I was desperate. I was desperate enough to, to the complete horror of my own eyes, type the word "dishwasher" in to the text box that contained my maudlin inquiry.  For those of you who are lucky enough to have never worked as a dishwasher in a busy restaurant,  allow me to give you some perspective.  Dishwashing is the sole job that exists in the kitchen that you can't possibly source any inspiration from.  Unlike other cripplingly dull jobs, you can't use your imagination to get out of it because it requires a rigid, mechanical and relatively focused mind. Things happen when you are washing dishes that knock you out of your escapist stupor. A clog, a sudden rush, a broken glass, some clunky cumbersome object that breaks the flow you've developed over the course of your shift.  Trust me, a Hobart claw amidst the homogenized ocean of silverware and plates can fuck your whole day up.

Washing dishes is not dirty, it's completely filthy.  It's not hard, it's agonizing.  It dulls the mind and crushes the body all at once.  This in no way meant to delegitimize dishwashing as good honest work.  If anything, a good dishwasher ranks high on the hard workers list. However, to the overprivileged, lily white, suburban bred porcelain doll that was 17 year old Tommy Ciaccio, it felt utterly Sisyphean.  In short, I think dishwashers shouldn't be employed; I think they should be drafted out of a pool of distracted high school students who are given six months stints in the dish pit, so as to give them some perspective on what life is like when you don't go to college.  But that's not the case.  They are employed, and the requisite years one spends in the dish pit before moving up in the kitchen make peeling potatoes and grinding meat seem like some kind of sweet heaven.

Despite all that, that's where I was.  If I didn't have a wife and mouths to feed (dog mouths, specifically), I probably would have chosen an easier route, like driving my car in one direction until it ran out of gas, and then just living in the woods forever.  But I have shackled myself to responsibility and thusly found myself in a pathetic plea for a dishwashing position.  I was sure somewhere had a vacancy that would allow me to fulfill my manic and admittedly baseless need for a change of scenery.

Dan knew better than to be deceived by my cunning wiles.  For a brief, humiliating period of my life, Dan had been my boss at Wolf Peach.  My arrival at Wolf Peach, appropriately enough, was too a product of desperation.  The restaurant I was working at had to suddenly shut down leaving both me and my then-fiancee-now-wife out of work.  Wolf Peach was close to opening and was hurriedly filling in it's last few opening positions. Determined not to be impoverished, I decided to snap one up. With an illegitimate amount of confidence, and opportunistic deceitfulness raging harmoniously together in my heart, I bluffed my way in to a cooking position at Wolf Peach. Bad move.

Twelve combined hours and five or six threats of physical violence later, Dan quickly and deservedly dispatched me to the dish pit.  It was only by virtue of his true benevolence that my frustrated boss didn't just straight up fire (or murder) me.  It didn't take long for me to break.  I just couldn't do it. Eight to ten hours of sweating through dirty, physically challenging work was just too much for me to handle. I was 26 years old and on the verge of getting married. I was fast approaching (and have since surpassed) one decade in the service industry and I wasn't even treading water, I was flailing and abjectly plummeting headlong back in to the goddamned dish pit.  Crestfallen, I quit, with a personal vow to never return to the service industry.

I decided to take a stab at normalcy, which manifested itself in working in retail at a major electronics chain in the wealthy suburb of Fox Point. After six months I felt it was time to move on.  And by "felt it was time to move on" I mean I could either quit working retail or experience what it's like when your soul bleeds out through your nose and ears and dies in a puddle on the floor in front of your eyes.  And there, as ever, was the service industry, ready to break my fall.  While I have returned to the kitchen, I do so with a forcibly ambition-less shroud cast over me.  Clumsiness and anxiety aside, I never want to be a chef, and while I love the place I work, a sense of permanence feels defeating when my face is already smashed against the ceiling of the potential it has as it pertains to me.

What makes the decision so heartbreaking for me was the fact that I passionately and truly love food.  Generally speaking I'm wildly intrigued by cuisine and spend hours poring over cookbooks and wistfully watching Anthony Bourdain live out every sane human being's fantasy.  I adore the vibe of a bustling restaurant kitchen, even to the point where I love the stereotypically sociopathic behaviors of the chefs I've worked for.  I've also had the privilege of being raised by two parents who cooked home cooked meals for us almost every single night of the week.  Food is as central as anything to my happiness. So what's the problem? Behind all the platitudinous gastronomic fantasizing that lives in my heart lies a clumsy and befuddled guy with comically imprecise motor skills and an anxiety disorder.  These traits are not conducive to a hot, fast and hostile environment that requires you to be fast on your toes and has zero room for error.

Which leads me to here, the birth of Rough Chop.  I felt the name appropriate as these are perspectives written by an unbridled epicurean who also happens to be an inept cook in a restaurant kitchen. Incidentally, this blog's existence should be at least partially credited to the same chef who verbally eviscerated me and sent me to the dish dungeon.  The reply I got in response to my counterintuitive plea for additional kitchen work was not a job, but a push in a more appropriate direction. Disparate from the unfortunate soul that is "Kitchen Tommy" is the (hopefully) more capable and confident "Blogging Tommy".  Frankly I have no idea where this little project will lead or how it will evolve.  At the very least I hope to illustrate to you, the reader, why the world of food and everything it entails is so absolutely important and powerful to me. I mean, if I can't cook food I might as well blather on incessantly about it.