Chefs on Drugs

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iStockphoto; Getty Images What are the odds that your next restaurant meal will be prepared by someone on drugs? Very high. An ex-chef and former addict on why cooks and coke go together like salt and pepper.

Stepping in out of the sun, through the back door that let out into the grimy alley behind the kitchen, Andy snuck in, late, but with an alien grace. Work in the kitchen lost a pace: The tocktocktock of knives on cutting boards, the clatter from the dish machine and rhythmic rasp of the diamond steel as I cleaned up my edge for the night—all of it eased, because Andy was here now and he was fuuucked up, bent out of his head on opium, claiming that he’d eaten it (accidentally) on a salad in the park.

“Who eats salad from a stranger in the park?” we asked.

The answer: Andy did. We tried to send him home. He wouldn’t go, insisting that he was fine to stand his station. For the rest of the night, we’d call an order for a simple salad and would be handed a pepper mill. We’d ask for pâté, for rillettes, for a double-garden-on-the-side. We’d get half heads of lettuce dressed in skordalia, white plates doodled with sauce, completely imaginary salads: One plate set with a fork and a squeeze bottle. Andy was inventing Dadaist cuisine on the spot, and for a while we were having so much fun waiting to see what he’d come up with next that we forgot someone needed to back him up and actually do the job.

In the psychoactive hierarchy of kitchen work, a high-functioning junkie beats a one-time opium eater.

That task fell to Al, our emergency backup, all-hope-is-lost dishwasher and prep guy. He was a friend, and no matter when we put in the call, Al would show up. He was a regular abuser of strong chemicals—heroin, mostly—but in the psychoactive hierarchy of kitchen work, a high-functioning junkie beats a one-time opium eater.

When Al arrived, Andy was back out in the alley again, having a deep and heated conversation with a chainlink fence.

“What’s up with him?” Al asked.

Al was talking to the dish machine, but at least he was inside.

That was just one night. That was just one story. I was asked once how many kitchens I thought had employees who regularly used drugs. Without even thinking, I blurted out, “Ninety-five percent, easy.” It was like asking me how many kitchens had cooks in them. How many used knives. And while in retrospect (and out of an admission that things might have changed in the restaurant industry since I left the closed society of chefs a few years back, turned traitor, and started writing about kitchens rather than cooking in them), I might’ve tempered my answer somewhat had I taken the time to think before I opened my big, dumb mouth, it is also true that my own personal experience was different, too.

In the kitchens where I worked, that percentage would’ve been closer to 100.

So what is it with cooks and drugs? The common refrain these days—the wisdom—is that chefs are like rock stars and, thus, are both victim to and willing participants in all of the cliché rock-star excesses. Having rocketed so lately up the ladder from simple, rough tradesmen to a hundred strutting Mick Jaggers, it’s like they’ve suddenly been given the keys to some magical hoard of Perrier-Jouët, writhing supermodels, and high-grade blow.

Problem is, the wisdom? It’s a bunch of crap. See, I’ve been led to understand that with celebrity comes money, connections and willing fixers, groupies, dealers, and the kind of dim-witted personal assistants that can be tricked into carrying your loaded crack pipe through Customs. But I have to take this all on faith because I never approached anything even vaguely resembling the rock-star celebrity that some chefs have attained while I was on the line, and yet, that never stopped me from getting high. Nor did similar situations slow in the least the epic consumption and general bad behavior of the cooks, chefs, mercenary prep specialists, mad bakers, brilliant losers, and passionate, damaged freaks with whom I surrounded myself back when I made my living cooking dinner for strangers. The drugs (and the sex and, for that matter, the rock 'n' roll, too) predated the fame, the money, the connections. They predate everything, perhaps, but the food.

So if it isn’t fame, then, that drives this seemingly rampant urge to screw with one’s brain chemistry—if it isn’t celebrity (alone) or money (alone) or pure, unfettered access (alone)—what is it?

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