Being a cook is hard. Really fucking hard.

     Unless you’ve spent some time in front of a grill, flat top, fryer, pass or 6-burner stove cranking out 50 to 200 of the same plate, thirsty and hungry, with an aching back, aching knees, cuts, burns, and bruises, all while keeping up a frenetic pace and loving every minute, then you just won’t understand.

     Ours is a world that has become popularized and fetishized by instagram and slow-mo confessional documentaries. You might’ve seen Chef’s Table or watched Chef The Movie, but at most those things will get you as close to experiencing our lives as sitting at the counter of an open kitchen. At least in an open kitchen the view is unaltered. No slow-motion, no emotionally manipulative music, no cinematic shots, and no sentimentality. Just sweat, adrenaline, and hard work. Nothing short of jumping behind the line could possibly convey the physical demands and psychological pressures of a night of service.

     If I had to explain, however, gun to my head, surrounded by gawking foodies, eager to know the secret pains and pleasures we experience as we run around in their culinary zoo, I would point them toward Bo Bech’s “The Show.”

     Bech writes about a day at Geist the same way a cook works — deliberately, efficiently and with urgency. Hours disappear as quickly on the page as they do in real life. To anyone who has worked a line, like myself, chef Bech’s words are immediately recognizable as if he’s describing your day, your restaurant, your thoughts. An impending sense of danger looms over every moment. The pressures of prepping a station and executing a vision seem, at times, to be nearly impossible, but executing it flawlessly is a reward not unlike dodging a charging bull – a feeling of making it out alive. He savors the moments of rest, the cups of coffee, the cigarettes, the all too brief glimpses of the outdoors as much as he delights in the systems designed to combat the scheduled stampede.

     Each movement is timed. Each decision precise. The pace unrelenting. The structure both inescapable and necessary. The timing meticulous.

     Bech details our systems and schedules, but he does so with a poetic precision of the unspoken. The waves of dampened emotion. The contradictions we face. The minor accomplishments. The inner battles and the beauty we find in our often painful work. And the relief of being under a service’s trance-like movements.
     Above all, he exposes what myself and everyone in the food industry knows: the two distinct mindsets of a service. The show – that performance we put on for the customers. The shroud with which we conceal the brutality, mistakes and unpalatable necessities of our work. And the shift – the painful, meticulous and hidden work we put in to make that show possible.

     “The Show” does not convey a lifestyle or a story. Where Kitchen Confidential and Down and Out were about the life of one person in the kitchen, the focus of Bech’s short essay is on us and the thing we find most addictive; that thing which most customers want to know but don’t really want to know; that thing we want them to understand but not really, because it’s ours: our work. Our daily routine and all its beauty and masochism. So, please…