Stoned Soup

I came from an industry – manufacturing – that required all job applicants to pass a drug screening before being hired, and then be subject to random drug testing, (although we never did a random test without susceptible cause, as the omnipresent specter of a whiz-quiz combined with the need for a steady paycheck were generally enough to keep them from the ganja), or mandatory testing in the event of an injury or accident. One of my favorite pre-employment drug test stories (we all have them, don’t we?) involved a young man who called late on a Friday evening just as I was locking up for the weekend, wanting to know if we’d gotten the results from his drug screening, and had he passed the test. I asked him “what do you think?” and he answered, “I’m not sure, that’s why I’m calling to find out."

While I’m generally an advocate of respecting people’s privacy and personal liberties, all it took were a few incidences of valves being inadvertently left open causing nasty, very hard to clean up black stuff to spew out on the floor, forklifts crashing into the bright fluorescent yellow roof support poles located smack-dab in the middle of the fork lift aisle, or the wrong pump pumping the wrong stuff out of the wrong tank into the wrong mixer before I decided to shelve my “what you do on your time is your business” philosophy and start drug testing. Amazing how quickly the expensive, hard to clean and potentially dangerous drug-induced brain-farts virtually disappeared.

I’m not in heavy manufacturing any longer – no big mixing tanks, no pumps, no 150-hp motors or 4” ball valves making 2000-gallon batches of noxious goo. I’m now in light manufacturing – pots, pans, little Kitchen-Aide mixers and a consumer-grade food processor, manufacturing stocks, soups, salads, entrees and crème brule. No need for drug testing here.
Wait just a minute! How ironic that an industry where overstressed people are running around cramped quarters on slippery floors at a breakneck pace with BIG SHARP KNIVES IN THEIR HANDS doesn’t require their employees to be drug and alcohol free. Why is this?? How can this be?? Simple – if you drug tested cooks before you hired them, and then actually expected them to stay sober during business hours, you’d have a pretty limited labor pool to draw from, especially in Grand County, CO. (Having said that, we are blessed at The Riverside to not only have a drug-free, sober-during-business-hours chef, but one that out-cooks all of the other four-star hash hawkers on the mountain.) Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with our previous chef, and it was he who opened my eyes to the proclivity of chefs to indulge in, no, to mostly outright abuse drugs and alcohol. When I told our food supplier that I thought our chef was pretty much stoned all of the time, he said “welcome to the restaurant business.” This explained a lot. Let’s be honest; you probably can’t come up with something like Sautéed Soy-infused Lichens served over a bed of Squid-Ink Pappardelle without a little creative help.

Often times the creative aspect can be skewed a bit when one asks the ganja gods for too much help. For example, our straight chef prepared a beautiful apple custard tart for dessert – light flaky crust, apples artfully arranged on a bed of silken vanilla custard. It was a sight to behold, almost too beautiful to slice and serve. Enter Chef Hookah who, of his own accord and without consulting straight chef, decided the tart needed that little extra something to really make the dish special. That something was beet juice. We had just gotten some beets from our local vegetable purveyor, and Bong Boy felt that the logical thing to do with fresh beets was to dice them, put them in a pot with a little water, and slowly cook them down into a brilliant red, syrupy reduction. This fire engine red reduction was then Jackson Pollock-ed onto a white desert plate, upon which the soft yellow tart would rest – indeed, a feast for the eyes, but not for the palate. The beet juice tasted like – and I mean this literally – dirt. Dirt is not a good taste, and it certainly doesn’t enhance the flavor of apple custard tart. The only dish the flavor of dirt might work well with would be an earthworm flan, which I thought of but didn’t suggest to our Weeded Wonder, for fear that it would end up as one of the evening specials.
We sold all of the tart that evening, and to a diner, they described the taste of the beet reduction as ‘interesting’. Know that when someone uses the term ‘interesting’ to describe something in a restaurant, that’s never, ever meant as an acknowledgement of successful taste bud manipulation.

While many may argue this point, I’ll assert that being stoned to the gills can generally have a negative affect on motor skills, cognitive ability and overall job performance – unless maybe you’re Jerry Garcia. Or you were Jerry Garcia. I should get less of an argument on this point when you consider that the individual has thrown down 10 of my Budweisers along with 6-8 shots of Johnny Walker Red or Hornitos Reposada Tequila during the evening rush, on top of his usual afternoon of reefer madness. Do the terms “thick tongued”, “pie-eyed” or “cow-faced” conjure up any notion of a person you’d want active on your payroll? I ask, would you willingly pay work-comp insurance premiums for this individual while he was hacking up a chicken with a razor sharp Santoku, eyes lolling to the back of his head, drool pooling at the corners of his mouth? I think not – not even would Jerry Garcia write that check.

So Chef Doobie-Doer has moved on, and fortunately, he’s taken his passion for Maui Wowie, tequila shots and Budweiser into someone else’s restaurant. As long as I’m in this business, I know that I’ll have to employ and deal with those whose skills and creativities are fueled by a ‘higher’ calling, and just be thankful that we don’t use forklifts in our kitchen.