Surviving a day in the ‘taco factory’
This is the first column in Corey Mintz’s new series, Kitchen Temp. Each week, Mintz will be taking you inside Toronto’s hottest kitchens for a glimpse at how your favourite dishes are made.
Everything is going fine until I bend down.
During a 12-hour shift at La Carnita, the cooks work without breaks, snacking as they go, eating on their feet. By the time the chef puts me on the line during service, I’ve been working in the kitchen for eight hours.
Executive chef Jonathan Hamilton pauses only to munch on grilled corn, hopping back and forth as busy cooks zip around him, crema dripping down his chin.
None of the east-end taqueria’s ingredients are particularly expensive, says Hamilton, so he lets employees eat off the menu. Just before service, I sit down to devour a few tacos at the counselling of Ang McClusky, who acts as mentor, drill sergeant and den mother to the young line cooks, referring to them as “a good bunch of kids.” She was right. I needed to get off my feet.
At other restaurants they sit down for the staff meal. But every kitchen is its own world, a windowless room where different cuisines, ethnicities, characters, egos, attitudes, cooking styles and occasional politics mingle into unique microcosms. Each week I aim to tell those stories.
When I worked in kitchens, new people and outsiders were expected to be incompetent. Today and tonight, as Carnita’s kitchen temp, I hope to surpass that expectation.
Sitting for five minutes, the firm bar stool is so inviting, I am ready to go home and binge-watch Veep.
But minutes later, I’m on the line in the narrow kitchen. Chef de cuisine Zach Smith, a big guy with a bushy red beard, a toque and a taco tattoo on his left bicep, hands me little tortillas. Each one is toasted for a few seconds on the flat top, making it warm and pliable. He’s filled them with fried cod, confit pork and beef cheek. As part of our assembly line, I’m to sauce the tacos and push them to my right, where cook Jordan Bartholomew garnishes and puts them up on the pass.
As the tacos come fast and furious, the world disappears and it’s just me and the cook next to me, saucing and garnishing, arms reaching over each other to grab a squeeze tube of roasted chili sauce, three jalapeno slices or a sprinkling of anejo cheese.
During service — we do about 200 covers, total meals served — Smith occasionally hollers out that there’s a celiac or peanut allergy, that we’re all to wash our hands before assembling the next order. Or he steps over (we’re all about one arm’s length apart) to replate a taco that I’ve sloppily sauced. When my squeeze tube of crema runs low, I kneel to open the doors of the prep fridge at my feet for a backup. My knees bend a full 45 degrees and cry out, “We can still do this, just not well.” I’m getting too old for this shift.
Bartholomew, tall with an Oakland A’s cap shading his green-banded glasses, is only a bit younger than me, with two small children at home. He was a police dispatch operator before deciding to go back to school. This is his first cooking job. He’s been at it three days.
The cooks here compete at who can Instagram the best photo of a taco, hovering with their phones over food, produced exclusively for social media promotion.
When a few cooks look over my shoulder and tell the chef, “hire this guy,” I suppress a swell of pride.
That morning, I had the whole kitchen to myself. As each cook arrived, the work area diminished until I was chopping in about two square feet of space, re-remembering how to “work small.”
“What kind of knife have you got?” Smith asked. Cooks usually prefer to use, sharpen and store their own knives. I briefly felt hip because I thought the chef liked my Moritaka santoku. Instead, he’d noticed that the carbon blade, reacting to the acidity of dicing 50 tomatoes, was turning the onions a blackish purple. I pulled them all out and started again.
The staff are all eager to learn from Smith, Hamilton and McClusky, in what they call a “taco factory.” The least experienced gets put under McClusky’s wing for the afternoon. With 30 years of cooking experience, she’s patient, coaching his knife skills and efficiency.
McClusky tells him to pick up the pace as he turns to peeling mangoes. “I’ll bet right about now you’re questioning if you made the right career choice,” she adds.
It’s not cruelty. For all the reasons people end up cooking, not everyone is suited to be great at it.
When I was 32, I looked around the kitchen where I worked. I could tell, based on talent, passion and character, who would go on to become a chef. And I wasn’t one of them. That was the moment I decided to change careers. Email mintz.corey@gmail.com and follow @coreymintz on Twitter and instagram.com/coreymintz