10/2/2021
before i begin this post, i'd like to share with everyone that i'm currently drinking beer and watching dante's peak.
almost 5 years ago, i began my culinary career. my first job was at a fine dining catering company that, predictably, felt like an insane shit show every time i showed up for a shift. i'd clock in an 8 hour day at the catering company before heading to a shorter 7 hour shift at the climbing gym i was concurrently working at, biking across the city between jobs. i was trying to compensate for the fact that i was a little older than everyone i worked with. being the new kid on the block is pretty unforgiving in busy kitchens, so you either roll with the punches or someone actually punches you and tells you that you are a total waste of space. all because you didn't cut the broccoli correctly.
it was 5:50 in the morning and i had a huge event in the filmore district. this was my third shift catering and i felt more lost than i had previously, which is really saying something because i was definitely the weak link in the system already.
an hour later, after we had fully set up the kitchen in a small alley behind the event space, the kitchen manager, nicole, slapped a pastry bag in front of me along with a huge tub of herbed salmon cream cheese. 'pipe this...' she set a few sheet pans full of tiny polenta cups in front of me '...into that.' there were hundreds of tiny cups in front of me, and the simple task of piping cream cheese into these cups in the darkest hour before the sun comes up for the very first time seemed daunting. but i tried. i filled the huge pastry bag very full (because that would be easier right?) and proceeded to pipe uncontrollably all over the sheets of tiny cups. i needed coffee. i needed sleep. i needed to have more experience than i did because i truly had no idea what the fuck i was doing. i began to fear for my life. nicole was not a particularly helpful or forgiving chef, and when i would ask a question she would usually just scoff and walk away. i was beginning to feel really discouraged, looking around the kitchen at the horde of big dudes who didn't want to talk to me, who ignored me just as severely as nicole did.
and then there was glen.
glen began to set up his station next to mine. glen is about as tall as me, in his late 30s with a small moustache and a quiet demeanor. making glen laugh was pretty easy, getting him to talk required a small barrier for entry that mostly melted with a 5 minute proximity. then again, no one fucked with glen. he was too o.g. for everyone and they all knew it.
glen saw me fumbling in the dark with my oversized, overfilled pastry bag, and very calmly told me to set it down and remove some of the filling. he then walked me through the mechanics of a pastry bag and very pleasantly said 'i remember my first time, too' and we both giggled at the simple crass joke because, hey, it was nearly 6 am and neither of us was fully awake. after doing a few to show me the correct technique and after profusely thanking him, he continued to set up his station. the sun rose and had all of us sweating as the day wore on and the servers continued to come back for trays of small bites while complaining about the guests being needy or entitled or whatever problem a customer will have with the service provided for them. sunlight bounced between the two brick walls lining the alley we had set up the kitchen in, and the strange mix of unnatural sunlight and constant projects and occasional cigarette breaks had me in a blurry consciousness. throughout the day, glen and i began to become friends, talking a very polite version of smack about the shit we had to deal with while working an event like this and the shade of the hazing experience that sometimes goes along with working in kitchens.
he told me that he had a fourth job (somewhere between catering and notarizing) of dressing in drag on the weekends under the name 'goldie'. his act moved from venue to venue, in the natural order of the old, funky guard that made up san francisco when the city actually had some personality.
the hustle was unforgettable. we both had over two jobs and were trying to make it, somewhere. if i ever make a beautiful dish of all piped items in a restaurant where the names of dishes are more poetry than descriptions of food, i will name it 'goldie'