Finding Meaning in a Meaningless Task

"Where were you when ... ?

For the baby boomers–my parents’ generation, born in the late forties–the conversational shibboleth was “Where were you when JFK was shot?” My contemporaries, the once-reckless-but-newly-tame Generation X, ask each other “Where were you on 9/11?” (I was fast asleep in a tent at Goat Rock State Park in Sonoma County, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and far west of the grid, when those planes hit the towers).

A notable inflection point in my own professional life–and one I ask other chefs about, though the answer is usually a blank or blinking stare–occurred one weekday morning in May of 1999. I was riding the N train into Manhattan from the loft that my roommate and fellow CIA student, Paul Faucher, and I shared in Long Island City. The two Yale fine-arts graduates from whom we rented the room were building a brontosaurine metal sculpture in the shop space under our room, and they banged and buzzed away all night long.

The neighborhood was a warehouse-ish district, mostly Brazilian, almost bordering Astoria, over there near the Harley-Davidson dealership and Western Beef. The Irish bar that Paul and I went to after work had one TV high in the back corner always showing horse races, and one man sitting at a formica table beneath it, making book with pencil and paper. It was a no-frills-whatsoever Irish bar, and all anyone ever seemed to drink were Budweiser longnecks and John Powers whiskey.

I boarded the 7:10 train, slid into my usual corner seat in one of the middle cars, and dug a folded envelope out of my pocket. My mom had mailed me an article she’d cut out from The New Yorker. The title of the article was “Kitchen Confidential”. I won’t rehash the contents, because you are, by now, familiar with Anthony Bourdain, both the man and the brand. I bared and gritted my teeth reading those bare-knuckled, grease-burned sentences for the first time. It was like discovering a poor culinary man’s Hunter S. Thompson. I realized I’d been holding my breath as the train sped under the river and into darkness. The lights came on; I re-read the article as I transferred to the 1/2/3 at Times Square and rode downtown to 18th Street.

My job–my paid 16-week internship for The Culinary Institute of America–was at a brand-new restaurant called The Tonic, on 16th Street in Chelsea, not far from Union Square. I usually bought a buttered bagel and small coffee for a buck-fifty from the truck at the top of the stairs and ate the bagel as I walked the last couple of blocks to the basement-stair entrance to the kitchen. I worked mornings with the prep crew and evenings with the banquet crew, but never had a set post those first few weeks. Soon, however, we opened for lunch, and I had to set up both my own station and Executive Chef Chris Gesualdi’s station on the hot side every day. I had gone from invisible and unnecessary to vital and hapless. Never once did I set up both of them correctly and on time for service, though I did once set a trash can on fire, and the Haitian pastry assistant had to come to my (and everyone’s) rescue with an armful of damp side towels. (But when I got back to the CIA after my internship, I knew how to set up a station on the line better than anyone in my class.)

The Tonic was closed on Sundays and didn’t serve lunch on Saturdays. Since I was the closest thing to unpaid labor, it became my Saturday morning duty to scrub the walk-in freezer floor. The freezer was lined with that diamond-tread aluminum flooring, and cooks would splash stocks or sauce on it out of the buckets and Cambros they were carrying and just not clean up (because it was cold and no one was watching). The freezer temp was about -1F or so. I’d have to go in there with a metal spatula, hot water, metal scrubbies, and a couple of dry side towels to get those discolored chunks of ice free from the floor. The work was meaningless, much like the dirt in the Captain’s hole in Cool Hand Luke, dirt that Luke has to shovel out and then shovel back in again.

After a few Saturdays, I had resigned myself to, and soon took pride in, a thankless task that no one but me ever did. That was my freezer floor. That fact that it was both forcibly assigned to me and absolutely nothing to envy did not dampen or dilute my enthusiasm. Just as Erich Fromm says that “There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself,” the meaning I found was in the act of scrubbing that damn diamond tread, and the satisfaction I took from it was not only a clean floor that no one would ever see, but also a tiny sprinkling of kitchen cred and respect from the line cooks I admired.

For a cook, or any novice artisan, one route to success is to find meaning and purpose in every task assigned to you. Don’t tell yourself “I have to,” tell yourself “I get to.” String these tasks together until you are asked to do more. Repeat the pattern. At some point you’ll look up and realize that your Saturday morning task will have evolved from scrubbing the freezer floor to writing the week’s menu. (Yes, some days you'll wish with all your heart that you could go back to scrubbing the freezer f____g floor where no one would bother you). To the cosmos, writing the menu has no more intrinsic meaning than scrubbing the floor. The practical progression is clear and obvious, but your satisfaction, and the meaning you take from the task, should remain one and the same.

Bourdain’s rocket-fueled ascent was as mesmerizing to portray in real time as his demise was disheartening and deflating. I didn’t aspire to his brand of chefdom or celebrity; long before writing “Kitchen Confidential”, he blazed a different path than the broad one I was following. Although I find his irreverent approach detrimental to some aspects of the professional workplace, I believe that he and I would agree on the degree of grit required to succeed in a professional kitchen. And I don’t mean the success of earning a four-star review in the Times or a James Beard nomination: I mean the success of performing a thankless task, finishing it, and asking, “What’s next?”