Read Online THENASTYBITS by Anthony Bourdain - Free Book Online Page A

ability to endure.
    The Mexican ex-dishwashers usually come from a culture where cooking and family are important. They have, more often than not, a family to provide for, and are used to being responsible for others. They are, more than likely, inured to regimes despotic, ludicrous, and hostile. They've known hardship— real hardship. The incongruities, contradictions, and petty injustices of kitchen life are nothing new compared to la mor-dida, wherein every policeman is a potential extortionist, and what was, until recently, a one-party system. You see an expression on the faces of veteran American cooks who've been around the block a few times, had their butts kicked, a look that says, "I expect the worst—and I'm ready for it." The Mexican ex-dishwasher has that look from the get-go.
    As I've said many times, I can teach people to cook. I can't teach character. And my comrades from Mexico and Ecuador have been some of the finest characters I've known in twentyeight years as a cook and as a chef. I am privileged, made better, by having known and worked with many of them. I am honored by their hard work, their toil, and their loyalty. I am enriched by their sense of humor, their music, their food, their not-so-nice names for me behind my back, their kindness, and their strength. They have shown me what real character is. They have made this business—the "Hospitality Industry"—what it is, and they keep its wheels grinding forward.
    It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry . . . your oppressed . . . give me pretty much everybody"—that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are—and should be—a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones. Like our kitchens. We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.
    Lately, things have changed ... a little. The off-the-books, below-minimum-wage illegal has to some extent disappeared from view, at least in the good restaurants I worked in. The strata of Latino labor has enlarged to include saute, grill, and even sous-chef positions. But you don't see too many chefs of French or Italian or even "New American" restaurants with a last name like Hernandez or Perez or Garcia. Owners, it seems, still shrink from having a mestizo-looking chef swanning about the dining room of their two- or three-star French eatery—even if the candidate richly deserves the job. Language skills are not the issue. Chances are, Mexicans or Ecuadorans speak English a hell of a lot better than most Americans speak Spanish (or French for that matter). It's . . . well ... we know what it is, don't we?
It's racism, pure and simple.
    I'd go on, more than happy to open the next can of worms— the How come I don't see many African Americans in good restaurant kitchens? question—but I'll leave that to another,
    more reasoned advocate, hopefully one with better answers than I have.
    What's the number-one complaint from chefs and managers in our industry? I can tell you what I hear in every major city I visit, and I've been visiting a lot of them lately: "I'm having a hard time finding good help!"
    Solution? Simple: I suggest immediately opening up our borders to unrestricted immigration for all Central and South American countries. If the CIA grads don't want to squat in a cellar prep kitchen for the first couple of years of their career, or are too delicate or high-strung or too locked into a self-image that precludes the real work of kitchens and restaurants, then they should just stand back and watch their competition from south of the border take those jobs away for good. Everyone will end up getting what they deserve. It'll be a wake-up call for the home-team cooks and a boon to our industry—and the right thing