Hungry Kid: Prelude & Backstory

Part I

Ok, where to start? I suppose I'll start, as they say, at the beginning. I work in the kitchen at a white tablecloth, upscale restaurant. We do our best to use as many local ingredients as possible, cook with the seasons, and make as much as we can ourselves. One of these things is stock. Stock is the workhorse and foundation of any good kitchen, and ours is no exception. It's a beautiful thing. A bad, greasy stock is still a good thing, and a great stock is something approaching ethereal. I won't wax too poetic on this subject though, because everything about stock that needs to be said has already been said, so I refer you to the masters. Here is what Anthony Bourdain said about stock in Kitchen Confidential:

"Stock is the backbone of good cooking...Life without stock is barely worth living."

In his awesome book about the fundamentals of cookery, The Elements of Cooking, here is what Michael Ruhlman has to say:

"In the creation of good food, no preparation comes close to matching the power of fresh stock. It's called le fond, "the foundation," in the French kitchen for a reason: stock lays the groundwork and will be the support structure for much of what's to come. Stock is the first lesson taught in the kitchens of the best cooking schools for a reason. The finest restaurants in the country are making stock all but continuously; were it not for this fact, they would not be the best restaurants in the country."

So that should be that. Stock is wonderful, but it's not the type of thing to just pour in a glass and chug...

Part II

Moving right along, another backbone of any good restaurant is it's WA's. Waiter's Assistants are the ones bringing you your bread, crumbing your table, making your cappuccino, and around a million other tasks you probably don't even think about. At the restaurant I work at, we have one in particular that is the point of this whole thing. He's still in high school, is only 17 or 18, and does a damn fine job. His hard work, however, is consistently overshadowed by his hunger. The kid is always starving and will eat anything you hand him. It wasn't long before he was tagged with the moniker "that Hungry Kid." The nickname stuck and he's currently known as either "Hungry" or the simplified "HK."

I honestly don't recall what started it, but a month or two ago, we started trying to get HK to eat a whole mess of butter. He finally acquiesced and ate the most massive spoonful of butter I have ever personally witnessed. He was rewarded with a Miller High Life for his efforts. As might be apparent, the professional kitchen at times might seem immature, or more like a high school locker room than a place of business. Perhaps it's a way of dealing with the potentially grueling hours or the relentless pace, stress and pressure of the job. For whatever reason, HK eating the butter became the stuff of legend and quickly deteriorated into a game of "What Will He Eat Next?" Well, tonight, we found out. That Hungry Kid drank a pork shake.