Dig in to “Cooking Dirty”
I can’t cook, but I love to eat. And being a transplant to Denver — like so many escaping the vapid, humid sprawl of Dallas or the choking smog of L.A. — it took me a while to find the good restaurants in the city. (And I’m still looking.) Partly because I first lived on the suburban edge of nowhere and then in the foothills, playing mountain man with my one-foot-long chainsaw and drinking beers at the local roughneck, redneck bar while doing laundry next door, never hungry enough to try the fried pub food under the mournful gaze of long-dead deer and antelope heads mounted on the wall.
Cooking Dirty by Jason Sheehan
But then we moved to downtown, the small epicenter of the Denver nightlife and culinary scene. I needed a guide. I found Jason Sheehan in Westword, the foul-mouth critic who can run on a thousand words before you even know what he is reviewing, if he liked it, or if he would prefer to eat pork rinds out of a dirty ashtray instead. But his long, manic riffs on hamburgers and green chili are oddly engaging, often turning on the salivating waterworks in my mouth. I imagined him as a fat — after all, the guy seems to put away several meals and appetizers at one sitting — and loud Irishman, quick to drink and quarrel, a lusty foodie (a term he actually abhors) who once did a few turns in the kitchen himself, so he knew a thing or two about it.
It turns out he’s not really fat. But in his book “Cooking Dirty: A story of life, sex, love and death in the kitchen,” Sheehan reveals himself as a hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-driving chef in a memoir that reads like a Jack Kerouac story if the Beat writer had been a short-order cook in a combat zone, where frying pans are mortars and howitzers and the dregs of society have been recruited to fry eggs and burn toast. Sheehan boasts serving in about 30 kitchens over about 10 years or so — though the timeline is a little vague, scattered, like the novel “Dispatches” that he references in his own story, a book about the Vietnam war that many consider to have best captured the fragmented, hallucinatory experience of that brutal jungle warfare.
Indeed, the war analogy is a thread throughout the book. He even calls those not in the industry “civilians.” It’s a device he often uses in his reviews, and always seemed a little spurious to me until reading his book and seeing the insanely violent way these people — almost all men — allow themselves to be brutalized. Grease burns and chopped fingers, blitzed on cheap wines and weed, standing on their feet for 12-, 14-, 16-hour shifts, feeding waves of hungry people — the enemy — holding the line, barely acknowledging when someone would pass out in the Dante-Inferno-heat of the kitchen.
The story is fast paced. There’s lots of drugs and alcohol and general abuse of the senses that also beg comparisons to Hunter Thompson. There’s a woman, of course. And lots of stories about the good kitchens and the bad, the freaks and criminals that he calls his friends and family. The Life, as he writes, provided an instant ticket to excess and camaraderie, the tale romanticized and nostalgic to the point that I even thought it would be cool to live The Life. Until I realized it would probably kill me within a week.
My only quibble with the book is how often Sheehan pounds out the chaos, blood and fire in the kitchen. After a while, you want to say, “I get it. It’s trench warfare. You’re gastro warriors in an epic battle that you’ll always lose in the end.” I want to learn more about how he went from a cooking dervish to a writing whirlwind, but that story unfolds in only the last few pages, as if what he’s really ashamed of is the respectability and steady paycheck he started collecting seven years ago as a full-time writer.
All speculation, of course. He may just be saving that for the second course. And I’d definitely go back for seconds.
