Hotel Kitchen

holden 23 Jonathan Holden Hotel Kitchen We never saw the audience we served. Downstairs in those steel kitchens, in the loud bucket-brigade of orders, pots and shuttling of dishes hand-to-hand, you couldn't hear the murmurous conversation of the rich at lunch. But you could feel them, scented, laundered, sitting on your head. You could feel it right through the floor, feel it so well that when we ran out of mashed potatoes once and Cookie skimmed some off a garbage pail, slapped it on a plate and dealt it off to Hernandez, the Head Chef, who flourished sauce on it and shipped it on our kitchen practically spluttered to a stop— a glee we somehow managed to strangle underground, to tie up the moment the manager strolled in. I juggled the bakery's steel bowls and pans. My buddy, Frank, tackled the garbage-can-size stew pots, wept his sweat back in them as he'd disappear headfirst, wrestling them down to reach the bottom and bark the black crust off. Once you've served below the ground like that, making the world materialize graciously above, where hunger is a problem in chamber music— once you've made chamber music in the kitchen, if you love chamber music, you must love it knowing what it means. ...