Clean
“Damn, that shit is sexy,” one of the line-cooks said as we hauled back the range and exposed the oil-caked side of the fryer. Our deep-cleaning job for the night was to scrape off as much as we could, a truly disgusting task not without its moments of gruesome satisfaction. It was like shaving Parmesan cheese: thick fatty layers that began to curl as they grew longer and then dropped from their own weight onto the C-fold paper towels I’d spread out on the floor below. I put my shoulder into it, scraping off layer after layer of months of grease. I wanted to get down to gleaming metal, but that would have taken a lot more time. And to be honest, what I really wanted was to go home.
I wish I could serve you up some elegiac bullshit about how much I love to clean, but unfortunately I don’t. I’ve read memoirs by chefs who extol the serenity of mopping floors and say they lose themselves in scrubbing down ovens. It sounds so nice. I am positive that people who love to clean are more moral, mature, better humans than the rest of us. If there are circles of heaven or hell, they belong in the slightly nicer ones. I’d be sad to be separated from Anthony for our eternal afterlives, but I know he deserves a better place than me because he scooped almost all the cat litter during our lifetime.
I’m not really that bad, but I’ve generally been the messy one. In my first college dorm room, all the socks and papers and random shit were scattered on the floor on exactly one side, creating a line that went down the middle of the room that made my degeneracy obvious. For years, I went around with smudged glasses and Anthony would rub them clean when he noticed, literally changing my view of the world. I don’t know why I can’t work myself up to be better. I recognize that cleaning is an act of care and attention, all the things that I normally celebrate in these letters. I feel like a fraud sometimes because I don’t find washing dishes to be a form of meditation. I’m not a monster, I do find it nice to put on an album and clean up the entire apartment every now and then, but most days I put it off because I think I have something more important to do with my time.
Being a cook is as much about cleaning as cooking. Throughout dinner service, we’re wiping down surfaces and keeping our station organized even when we’re working fifteen orders at once. When the last ticket comes in, we’re already starting to break down our mise en place to get all the stainless steel containers back to dish. Once everything is put away and I’ve done my nightly inventory of ingredients, I wipe down my whole station with soapy water and dry it off. I clean the deep fryer with a wet towel and spray the oven with degreaser. I take everything out from under the induction stove range, pull up the induction burners to wipe around them, and then clean the shelves beneath them before putting everything back. We sweep the floors and then go over them with a mop. We have different deep-cleaning tasks each day, like hitting the sides of the fryer or the wall and floor behind the range, which require stupendous feats of strength for moving the appliances around. I’m usually exhausted by this point and thinking about what I’m going to eat when I get home.
Nevertheless, I do the cleaning. I try to trick myself into liking it. “What a good oven you are, you did such a good job tonight,” I murmur as I wipe the streaks off its windows. It doesn’t totally work, but I think it’s good to practice, so that some day maybe I'll convince myself. I guess what I’ve learned about working in a restaurant is that only a tiny bit of it has to do with creating delicious flavors. Most of it is about process and responsibility and accruing the grit it takes to get through the hard parts. I’m not someone who likes to clean, but I do it anyway. Doing the stuff you don’t want to with the same care as the stuff you’d rather do is a muscle I’m learning to flex. Maybe they’ll even let me in to that bright, clean circle of the afterlife, with all the pooper-scoopers and window-polishers and people who unpack their suitcases within a day of returning home.