My first real line cook gig when I was 19 was at this Mediterranean place. There was a total of four line cooks in the entire joint, if you count the owner, who worked some mornings on the line. At night it was me and this badass Mexican guy who spoke pretty much no English. He could call out the menu items and point to things and that was about the extent to which we could communicate. I had no real experience cooking.

From the first day I got thrown into working the line with pretty much no training. The owner spent about twenty minutes going over the menu with me and then left. I was responsible for working two fryers, the twelve burner sauté station, plating rice, all of the salads, and setting up the cold items on wraps and gyros, and helping out on the grill whenever my partner yelled “gyro/shawarma/veggie burger here now!” at me. Maybe that doesn’t seem that crazy to some of you, but at the time it was nuts.

This place was right in the middle of a big college campus, and we got slammed every night. My shifts started at 5pm, and nothing was ever stocked on my station. So I’d be running around just trying to get my shit set up right as the dinner rush was starting.

And the kitchen was a fucking shitshow. I tried to do a deep clean on the first relatively slow night I experienced there, and the first fryer I pulled out had a half inch of green-grey grease caked on the sides. It looked like some artifact pulled out of an ancient shipwreck. The place had a huge rat problem that the owner seemingly completely neglected. When I mentioned it to him he blamed it on the hardware store next door. He also turned out to be a complete psychopath, but that’s another story.