Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen

THE GRIT AND GLORY OF RESTAURANT LIFE, AS TOLD BY A SURVIVOR OF KITCHENS ACROSS AMERICA Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life on the line in the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the Michelin Guidewhere most of us eat out most of the time. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place. From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire. The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a s