Kab is one of the founders of the lindy food table, here we talk about his life as a cook, the current situation of the restaurant industry, ramp pesto, and much more.
Obviously, I didn’t get on twitter to find a bunch of line cooks but it just sort of kinda happened anyway. Very cool. – Kab
In this first issue, I am glad to host Kab (@traje_arrugado) on the Fernet con coca newsletter. Kab is one of the first guys to have taken a seat at the lindy food table and one of the more knowledgeable cooks I know.
The first time the “lindy food table” was mentioned on twitter was around a year ago (I first called it TastefulLindy Food) in a response to a thread Kab was making while cooking something:
It seemed natural to have him as the first guest on the newsletter.
We planned this to be a thirty-minute-long informal talk, eventually we ended up talking for more than two hours and still didn’t manage to cover everything we wanted. Today, we talked about how:
- How Kab ended up in a kitchen - Cooking for your friends and the uncomfortable spot of having to judge when they cook - The cooking profession as an advanced stage of the 4HL - Stories from the restaurant world - Restaurants and Covid - Ramp Season
At the end of this long interview, you will find a special recipe by Kab.
Grab a Fernet, kick back and relax. Buona lettura e buon appetito.
Jack
Hey, Kab! Nice to have you here. Are you ready to start the talk? What do you think about making this a written dialogue instead of a recorded podcast? I feel like a podcast is too demanding from both sides: the creator and the listeners.
Kab
Hey Jack thanks for having me on. Yes, I totally agree. The podcast format is super cool, although podcasts tend to run long. So, in order for someone to be like “Oh, I wanna listen to this podcast", he must consider putting aside some time in order to listen to it. I don’t listen to that many podcasts. There are a lot of people who just have the podcast running all the time in the background while they’re doing other stuff and naturally, they miss the point of what they listen to most of the time. You can’t devote one hundred percent of your attention to a two-hour long podcast if you have stuff to do, I can’t anyways. But at the same time, if you are reading something, it’s maybe more enjoyable and accessible. I think the transcript is a fine idea. Also, we get to keep only the good stuff.
Jack
It’s all gonna be good stuff.
Kab
Right, right. So, Jack, it’s good to talk to you man, tell me a little bit about yourself. You said you live in Estonia? What is that like?
Jack
Let’s say that it’s good for many reasons. Originally, I am from Milan, and the lifestyle is a bit too chaotic over there. The city I am currently living in counts something like 100.000 people, so not big at all. I like that everything seems to be moving at a slower pace. There is no rush nor peak hour for the traffic. The only problem… well, it’s the food. It’s always about food, isn’t it? I really can’t find anything here, many ingredients simply do not exist or have to be imported, therefore prices are higher than usual. Moreover, if you go to the central market, you’d expect to find something different, something of a better quality. Instead, most of the products there are exactly the same you can find in a supermarket. Maybe you have more cuts of beef or pork, but it pretty much ends there. My food posting is feeling the effects of this lack of variety. What about you? I know you are living in a kind of rural area.
Kab
Yes, I live in Western North Carolina. It’s an area with a lot of mountains and it’s where I live. I’m not totally deep in the mountains but nevertheless here things are a little bit slower than in the rest of country. For example, I don’t have an Internet connection, I use the mobile phone and that’s it. Before, I was living really close to Chicago, it was a much faster pace, it was a more connected type of place. Like down here you wouldn’t even know the whole corona virus thing is that important for the rest of the world. Before I moved down here, I came to check the place out and as soon as I arrived, I noticed that all the things that people are worried about in a big city do not exist here: people either don’t know about it or just don’t care. It’s nice to be away a little bit.
Jack
It definitely is nice to live away from big cities. Sounds also like a good spot where to open a restaurant.
Kab
Yes, I have always wanted to open my own thing but before moving here, I thought it was too early. In order to open a restaurant, you need to have everything together and also, it’s a huge amount of risk and it’s a major undertaking. I have always thought “some day later but not now”, you know, maybe in ten years or so. But then the whole covid hit and all kind of things started to move faster. I was living in a house in the suburbs and I thought that there wasn’t much time to spare, if I wanted to move somewhere, I had to do that immediately. My original thought was to fast-forward the idea of having a restaurant from much later to much sooner. I was considering having a kind of bed and breakfast going off the idea of the grottoes like they have in the south of Switzerland. I went there some years ago, more specifically to Ticino, close to Italy, and the food was great: northern Italian kind of food. They have these restaurants that are like taverns with a very small menu: a lot of polenta, risotto, ribs on the grill, wine in a carafe, and so on. They'll have dessert but it's maybe just a simple zabaglione or one kind of gelato. You can have a little shot of grappa with your coffee too. It’s all simple stuff, but the environment is amazing, it’s like an old-world style tavern: you can see the polenta being made in a wide copper pot over fire and it’s an amazing thing to see. When I started cooking, it was with a chef who was indeed from Northern Italy and we made a lot of risotto and polenta there as well and what I liked about it was the rustic quality of it, the old-fashioned simplicity of the dishes and the time involved to making them. The other thing too is that the place where you eat those dishes is cozy, you feel like you want to spend a lot of time there. It’s like being in someone’s house really, that’s the feeling I had in the grottoes in Ticino too. So, once I went there, I realized I wanted to have a place like that, but in America, and now where I am in the mountains it would be kind of appropriate, so this is what I’m working on right now.
Jack
This is amazing, it’s exactly the kind of place I would be looking to dine at in any place of the world.
Kab
It’s crazy how you end up following some dreams. I started working with this chef from Italy I have just mentioned when I was 18, before I was doing other cooking related jobs but there is a difference between “cooking” and “cooking in a real restaurant”, it’s two different things. What happens a lot in the United States is that in many places, such as pizza places, they hire teenagers to do food deliveries, cleaning up the place, and all that stuff that no one wants to do, and little by little they bring you in to doing some preparations: getting the dough ready, then mixing the sauce, and so on. I’m talking about New-York style pizzerias; there is definitely some sort of craft there but believe it or not there is also a lot of teenagers just not paying attention to the craft, working to get some money and that’s it. You could call that type of working “cooking”, I guess, but there is a big difference between that and touching a sauté pan. What happened to me is that I started working for the Italian chef kind of by accident, I quit my work in one of those pizzerias out of the blue because I got mad at the boss.
Jack
That is not unusual in the restaurant business, to get mad at the boss.
Kab
Yeah, you're just in a sort of constant state of being mad at the boss, just all the time. What happened was that we always had a radio in the pizza room with the music going pretty loud and the boss was always coming in saying “turn the music down!” and so we turned it down, then he’d leave and we’d turn it back up. He seemed to think that the louder the music got, the worst the pizza became, it was his mental obsession; he would forget that the pizzas weren’t great to begin with, I mean, you had a bunch of teenagers working in the kitchen who were not professionally trained to make pizza, what do you expect. It was all about the radio for him, and actually that radio was mine, I brought it in, it was a very good radio as well. One day we were behind with the work, we had a lot of tickets and orders coming in, the radio was playing loud as usual when the boss came in and he just ripped the radio off the wall and threw it across the kitchen into the prep room breaking it into a bunch of pieces; of course I got into an argument with him. This is how I stopped working there. Then I got a job at a place called Panera Bread, a franchise company making “comfort food”, basically a fast food disguised to be something better than it is. People would say “Oh I love Panera Bread, they bake the best bread” and things of this sort but let me tell you: they don’t bake any bread there, they reheat it. The bread comes in frozen from the franchise and then the so called “bakers” come in early in the morning and they put the loaves in the oven until the timer goes off and there you have your bread. Eventually I ended up leaving that place as well one day because I left some cheddar cheese on this guy's cutting board that he said wasn’t supposed to be there, and he started giving me shit. Guys from corporate were there that day too having a look around and it seemed liked as good a time as any for me to take my apron off and leave. Also, my high school girlfriend was working there, and it was bad news all around. So, I’m without a job again, but I know that down the road from where I was living at that time there was a little Italian restaurant that seemed like a real place. I decided to go down to this restaurant and I knocked on the door to apply for a job, which is like it’s done in restaurants a lot of the times.
Jack
Oh yes, Marco Pierre White started exactly like this as well.
Kab
Oh really, that doesn’t surprise me, you just go and show up. Now, I don’t really know if people still do this, but that’s how cooks used to get jobs: they just showed up. As for me, I didn’t know what I was doing, I sort of knew how to cook and make pizza and stuff, I just wanted a job and the Italian restaurant looked cool. The restaurant was famous around town for having good Italian food and it was built into an antique house, the location was pretty evocative, it was also a bed and breakfast, you could get a room upstairs. I had seen the chef before, he was the kind of chef that wore the full chef uniform and hat, he looked like a caricature of a chef that you’d see on a sign: he had a mustache, a big belly, he was short and extremely Italian looking. He totally looked like an Italian chef. He would wear matching chef pants, chef jackets, and chef hats which would go all the way from bright blue to bright red, he had one that had tropical fish on it and one with spoons and knives. I had seen the guy around, you could see him in the restaurant, he would be holding a glass of brandy walking around visiting tables, very classy and old school. But the day that I showed up, the guy himself answered the door and he was just in his little shorts and with a golf shirt on, he was smoking while he was mopping the floor. I barely even recognized him. He answered the door and said, “What do you want?”, and I answered, “Hey, I don’t know… I am looking for a job, I was wondering if you were hiring”, he goes “Ah, what can you do?” at that point I tell him I can do some basic cooking and pizza. As soon as he heard the word “pizza” he erupted in a load burst with a very heavy Italian accent: “No! Around here, I make the pizza!”. I knew his pizza was definitely better than mine so I said that I would love to try it. Few moments of silence, then he told me to come the day after. So, I came in the next day and worked for him and the sous chef, there were only the two of them in the kitchen and they needed a helper to do some prep stuff. I started working there and it was very cool. If you're like me, I had just done some simple jobs related to the restaurant business and then you suddenly see guys doing sauté and working fast on the stove, it’s fascinating, it’s the most amazing thing you have ever seen.
Jack
It’s definitely fascinating. At the beginning everything seems to work out as if by magic, speed of execution is key and it’s hard for someone new to the business to grasp everything that is really going on during the service.
Kab
Yes, with them I really learnt a lot. Things like, how do you know when the chicken is ready to be served? You have to touch it, to learn to recognize the smells and the color. I was really happy doing that kind of stuff, I was in college at the time, I was just starting, and I talked to the chef and he asked me if I could come in full time, something like 50 hours a week. I said that I was still in school and my schedule wasn't totally open to which he replied, "No, no, that don't work. You gonna come work for me, this like a culinary school, I teach you all about the kitchen. This gonna be your school". I had to choose whether I would stay with him and learn what he knew or go back to community college. I wasn’t very happy with what I was studying so I ended up dropping out and joining him. And that was a long time ago, I’m still here, still cooking.
Jack
Once you become a cook it’s almost a one-way road.
Kab
I guess that once you start cooking if you are lucky you get little opportunities down the road that if you take them, they can do a lot of things for you. In a lot of cases, it does not have to do with money as usually you don’t get paid much by being a cook, but knowing the craft opens up a lot of possibilities. Whenever you got to move somewhere else, you know you can count on your skills to quickly find a new job in the industry.
Jack
Restaurants are everywhere and you would hardly be out of job if you have some experience as a line cook.
Kab
Totally. It’s like a loophole. I didn’t really fall into this on purpose, it just sort of happened. You are a young guy and you see a chef cooking and you think “wow, that shit is cool, that seems like a cool thing to do”, and I still feel this way when I look inside a kitchen: I see the cooks rushing, I see the pans and I see the movement, it still amazes me. I mean, cooking is cool in general. If you want to get a girlfriend and you know how to cook, you should have a girlfriend, it shouldn’t take you long.
Jack
I know what you mean.
Kab
Right! And it’s not just that, everybody thinks cooking is a great skill to master. You got a girlfriend, good, but now you gotta meet her parents and friends and if you can cook for them everyone is going to be impressed, plus they get to eat good food. It’s the best presentation you can give of yourself.
Jack
Everybody loves eating good food, especially if they don’t have to cook it. This is definitely one of the best aspects of knowing how to cook. I just want to go back a little when you said that the cooking career is kind of a loophole, I think that’s a very fitting description. Once you are a cook, it’s very hard to get out and eventually you end up making a career out of it and there are not only positive aspects to that. At the beginning everything seems nice and cool but then something happens, at least it happened to me, and the job becomes a burden, you lose the joy of cooking, after every 12-hour shift you tell yourself you won’t show up the next day but then there you are again. When it happened to me, I had been cooking for a while and one day I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it anymore, not even home cooking gave me satisfaction as I had started to mentally connect cooking with my job and not my passion. Has this ever happened to you as well?
Kab
Well, yes. Especially if you get in at a young age then it’s very exciting in the beginning for reasons that are different than why it’s exciting later on. At the very beginning, it’s all very new and you are stepping in a sort of arena of people who are more professional than you and work harder than you and the kitchen environment in most cases it’s not the most accepting environment. Eventually you get accepted but you have to fight for a long time until you get to that point, this happens even if you are not new to the job. Sometime you have already got skills and have worked in many other places but stepping into a new restaurant is always a challenge. If you get excited by these kinds of things, then you can continue to be happy with what you’re doing but the work is so hard that you usually get aggravated: you don’t want to be there, shifts are too long, the pay is low, and so on. Once you get to a certain level of stress, you even start to hate the customers, which is wrong, you shouldn’t hate the people coming to eat at your restaurant but it’s a natural reaction to how bad you feel, emotionally you have to take it out on somebody so you end up sort of despising the people who are eating there. God forbid customers ask for a substitution on a ticket, then it’s like hell. It’s a loophole to get in that you can find and it’s work that can give you a lot, but then it’s a bottomless pit.
Jack
And you often end up working with other people who are even more stressed than you.
Kab
Absolutely. Even if your attitude isn’t great, there’s always people around you who have a worst attitude than you have. It becomes a negative environment. When I started cooking, I didn’t know anything about that, I thought everything was just cool: the cooks moving the pans and the chef with his glass of brandy, etc. When you are young it’s a very nice time to start cooking because you don’t notice all of the problems that surround the environment. As far as it being a loophole, you got to have the right constitution to do this type of work but I can’t really think of a better example of loophole because it has some good effects too on your personal life: you can cook for your family, your girlfriend, your friends, suddenly you become useful. All in all, I still think the upsides are great. Once you become the cook of the group or of the family, then good luck getting out of that.
Jack
Oh yes, don’t tell me. I had this problem many times with my friends and flat mates. They know I’m a cook and that I like cooking so they think that I can cook for them every day because “Jack likes cooking”, but that’s not how it really works.
Kab
I’ve had similar experiences. I think it’s nice that people want me to cook but actually the best thing that can happen to a chef is that someone else cooks for him, that’s like our dream but it doesn’t happen very often. You have to go to your grandma’s house or having a nice girlfriend who can cook for you. For most people, once they establish that there is a cook in the room, it becomes a little intimidating to even come up with ideas about food.
Jack
This happens pretty often when my friends are cooking around. I know that it can be annoying but if I see someone doing something wrong, I have to tell him, I can’t control it. I’m not being harsh on purpose, it’s just the way it is because if you are working in a kitchen and you do something wrong you are told immediately, there is no sweet talk around that. So, my first reaction when I see, for example, someone putting the sauce before the wine for the deglazing had evaporated is a loud and clear “No, no, no! Wait for it! What are you doing!”.
Kab
It totally happens to me as well. It becomes a problem when everyone knows that you are a cook and, hopefully, you are not bad-tempered, but it’s like an instinct when you are cooking with friends and suddenly all these people become your trainees, you don’t realize it but you are in a training mood. When a sous chef is training a new line cook, he’s not trying to be hard on purpose, he cares about the line cook being able to work independently as soon as possible. Information such as “let the wine evaporate” could be valuable to people like you and I and it seems like it would be valuable to show to everybody but for most people it’s not. If someone is cooking around me, I like to keep an eye on what is going on, I see someone putting the garlic in the pan and I try not to pay attention but even if I’m not looking at the stove, I know when it’s probably time to add the white wine or to stir it: that garlic has gone on long enough. Everybody who doesn’t know how to cook burns the garlic and once you do it the food is ruined, so if you don’t intervene you might have to fake your way through a bad meal.
Jack
And this brings us to another existential problem for us cooks. Once people cook for you, they expect feedback and you are put in a position where you can’t really say “this is bad” to your friends or girlfriend, but on the other hand there is something inside of me that prevents me from lying about food. It’s almost like an oath of office that I made with the profession: I can’t say a dish is good if it’s not.
Kab
You have to find your way around, you don’t necessarily have to give a complete feedback, maybe just compliment the wine. On the other hand, if you are present when they are cooking, the best that you can do is to step in and keep an eye on what is going on. I mean, what sort of cook would just sit there and not say anything when he sees that something is going bad or is getting burnt? Eventually everyone will be happy about it, I’ve been many times in the situation where I’m kind of coaching people and they learn and they are happy they improved.
Jack
That’s the right attitude. And again, if it ever happens that you are served something not exactly amazing, it can’t possibly be that bad.
Kab
Exactly, just eat it all, I think this is the most respectful thing you can do. It doesn’t matter how bad a dish can be, it will almost always be edible, unless something very wrong went on. Just make sure it’s not too much food to begin with if you notice something is off.
Jack
Being a cook is a 24/7 profession, even when you are not working you are still “the cook”, it’s a uniform you can’t shake off easily and it really surrounds all your personal life.
Kab
Being a cook is an advanced stage of the 4HL. Few days ago, I went back and looked at some of my old tweets just to revive some things that I’ve thought about before and one of those things I’ve posted about was suicide. Well, it wasn’t suicide per se, but I worked with a guy who drank himself to death while he was working at the restaurant. He was a waiter, pretty nice guy but when you are working in a restaurant, at least in America, there is a pretty strong division between the front of house staff and the back of house staff. Many restaurants try to stop this from happening but it rarely works. The kind of life that the cooks are living is undeniable: the number of hours they work and the generally low pay that they receive for their work, when you compare this against what the waiters are making in the US, it develops a rivalry. You get two teams, back of house and front of house, that are mad at each other, and I think that the cooks are generally more mad at the front of house than the front of house is mad back at them. Going back to our story, I’m sure this guy was a nice guy but I was a cook, he was a waiter, he was making tons of money, he had an attitude most of the time, and I didn’t understand how he could make so much money. He had a drinking problem but having a drinking problem in the restaurant business it’s not really uncommon, so he’d come in hungover and he’d be impossible to work with. Sometimes he would be really nice, he was volatile with his personality: you would hear from him how he hadn’t had a drink in thirty days and you could see he was a different person. You could see it in his face, sometimes his face was red and you knew he was still drunk from the night before; some other days he would look thinner, cleaner, not red in the face and definitely more friendly: you knew he had been sobering up for a while. He had been doing this back and forth for a long time when eventually one night he went out and got back to his roommate’s house, who was a line cook I worked with. He showed up completely wasted and my buddy helped him into bed. The next morning the guy was dead. No one really saw it coming, I mean, you can’t really see it coming, you would never think a guy could actually drink himself to death.
Jack
That is really a disturbing story. As you said, having a drinking problem in the restaurant business is no sort of news, I also had my days when I would be drinking a little bit too often but it was always under control. Working in the kitchen means you need to be consistent; you can’t really drink yourself to exhaustion every day.
Kab
I’m not totally surprised these kinds of things would happen to someone who is in front of house because maybe it has to do with the amount of money that they make. Front of house and back of house are very similar in some sense, they both work in the same place, they usually are similar kind of people, and so on, but front of house usually has more money to deal with. So, when the cooks go out after a hard shift, they can’t really go hard on drinking or they would spend all of the money earned that same day, or they would not be able to pay rent if they were to do this repeatedly. The front of house has a lot more of money to deal with so they can party really hard, late into the night, and often their shifts don’t start until two or three so they can stay out late. It’s tough to be a line cook and have the same lifestyle, first because of your salary, and secondly because you have to be in at nine: if you want to keep the job you can’t really stay out until seven in the morning. I was really sad when this guy died, there was nothing that anybody could do at that point, he definitely had his own troubles, who knows why he was drinking that much. He was only 33 and a good-looking guy, I don’t know where he was from, maybe Lithuania, but he was always around beautiful Russian girls, he would show us pictures of them, and all in all if he had had the drinking under control you could say he was doing pretty good for himself. When that happened, it wasn’t really a wake-up call, but it was surprising that a person can drink that amount of alcohol to get really wasted and then die. That’s kind of scary. But even more surprising was the fact that the behavior of everyone else working with him didn’t change after that, they kept drinking to excess as usual. The same crew he'd go out with every night. I think it’s a response to the type of work that is being done: you work all day, you either have to deal with lots of customers and guests, and that's aggravating, or you work in the kitchen and have to deal with the stress that is involved with that, and then after work you go and release the pressure: very unhealthy all around.
Jack
It’s a very unstable and pressuring environment. The shifts are infinite, you work until late night, you go back exhausted, and so on. I can see how this can take a toll on your overall health.
Kab
I don’t really know about people who are working in other 4HL-type jobs whether it’s coding or insurance or whatever, I don’t know if they are being pushed towards this detrimental lifestyle to such a degree. Sure, their jobs seem tough and everything but when I was cooking and I would see posts like “oh man, Saturday is finally here” I would think “Bro, I don’t have Saturday, I don’t have Sunday, I don’t even have Easter”. I’ve worked every Easter the last couple of years, everyone gets to have a great time, I was actually surprised to see how many people actually go out to eat on Easter Sunday. I was under the impression that Easter Sunday was about going to church and then you meet your family and someone has a ham or a roast and it becomes a family thing. But in the US Easter Sunday means that the whole town is out at the restaurant. I remember working in a place a couple of years ago and we weren’t ready for Easter. The boss said “Listen, we are not going to staff everybody for Easter because it’s probably going to be a slow day so we are going to go with a smaller crew”. Me and the chef asked twice whether he was sure of what he was doing and that we could really use some help in the kitchen, but he didn’t listen. Easter Sunday comes and man, we got obliterated. Every guy in town was walking around dressed as John F. Kennedy with his little pink shorts while women were with their best dresses and their little hats, plus all the kids and grandma and grandpa… Everybody was at the restaurant, the whole town was there. We ran out of everything but the owner was too committed to pretending that we had everything in stock so he told us to make everything on the fly: we were making mayonnaise on the fly, we were making soup on the fly, we were making everything as if we had enough. And I can tell you Jack, this particular Easter Sunday was the most beautiful day you had ever seen: blue sky, calm air, little clouds here and there, flowers… And we were all stuck in the kitchen.
Jack
It’s just the way it is, I guess. Nowadays with the whole covid situation those sound like distant memories though: restaurants full, people going out to have lunch with their whole family…
Kab
This covid thing is crazy, were you working when the whole situation went down?
Jack
Yes, here it wasn’t that locked down as it was in the US. I went to work every single day and people would still be coming in and eat as if nothing had happened. There were actually some restrictions such as reducing the capacity of the restaurants and keeping the safety distance but nothing more than that. I can only imagine the damages covid made to the restaurant business around the world.
Kab
It’s hard to say what the future of the restaurant industry will be. Restaurants obviously didn’t see this coming, in the restaurant I was working at last year people just didn’t take the risk seriously, they didn’t think it could have been a big thing. This led them to be unprepared to what was about to go down and therefore did not think of any solution to help themselves remain solvent. Most restaurant businesses work on a tiny margin just to be able to pay their bills, they all might have an amazing team and an owner with a dream but they probably are four consecutive bad weekends from not being able to pay the rent, maybe less. And if this is true for the majority of restaurants and on top you add the whole covid situation, you can see how the picture is grim for everyone. I think many people were also naïve and thought that it would have lasted just a couple of weeks, then they started panicking when the realized this wasn’t the case but no one was actually doing anything to avoid a disaster. And even if some restaurants came up with an idea, they were blocked by the local government, at least that is what I’ve seen in my area. At the beginning, the answer to covid was trying not to be in closed spaces, avoid being indoors, and so on. For a restaurant, the obvious answer was to move the tables outside whenever possible, take your tables and chairs out into the road and then you can serve food in the open air, but there was no help from local authorities. For example, if there is a city block where it’s mostly restaurants and small businesses, after five or six pm you ought to be able to take all your tables and chairs outside in the road, with umbrellas for the sun and whatever you need, and just close the road. This way the local businesses would have had a chance to make some money during that time, it could have been a good idea for local authorities to give restaurants a hand by giving them the permission to operate this way; but the permission wasn’t given, every idea had to go through administrative processes that no one can see the bottom of. As a matter of fact, a town I know is just now allowing restaurants to bring their tables onto the street after one year that this pandemic started. It took them a whole year to implement a solution. Another thing that you could have done was to turn restaurants into small groceries stores: restaurants are getting who knows how many briskets, greens, and everything else every week that they buy wholesale so they could sell it for a profit. At the time people were having a hard time getting ingredients from the regular supermarket, paper products too, while the restaurants still had decent access to their suppliers. I heard some places did do this. But where I was working the owner was too committed to his restaurant dream to convert into some corner grocery type place to make some money.
Me and Kab talking about restaurants closing
Jack
It looks like they moved too late and did too little. It had to be a huge blow for restaurant owners, not to talk about waiters and cooks.
Kab
Absolutely. I have a story about it. A buddy of mine was working in a restaurant during the covid first wave when you could only do takeout, they had transitioned from selling food that was supposed to go on a plate to selling food for the same price but in a plastic box. Anyway, in this restaurant there was still some money coming in by the way of tips from takeout orders because naturally people wanted to support local businesses and were tipping pretty well. So, my buddy was working at this place and he said that this began to be a big problem with management because all the tips that were coming in between the months of April and June – through Grubhub, UberEats, and even through the restaurant own delivery platform – amounted to 18.000 dollars, only in tips. That’s a lot of money, especially if you’re not even really open for business, but you also don’t have a wait staff, of course you have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen who are still having some work but there is no waiter, no bartender, and so on. At that time, it was all a developing situation, they didn’t know exactly what to do with all those tips yet until the staff approached the owner asking about all that money no one was getting, how was it going to be distributed and so on. Remember that the staff was also on a reduced salary wage and reduced hours. But the boss ended up taking all the tip money for himself, none of it got divided out. And it was actually a few more months after that before the boss agreed to some protocol where the tips would be divided among certain staff members and not just him. Good thing for him, maybe legally he’s even allowed to do that, I don't know. Obviously, all the staff was mad about it but no one was mad enough to quit, they were not really in a position to quit.
Jack
It was a power game they couldn’t win. It’s not that you can quit the job and immediately find another: who’s going to hire you in corona times?
Kab
Exactly, this is what my buddy said. He is a good bartender at this place and he’s really mad about it but what is he going to do? It’s pretty embarrassing to go and beg for tip money, he’s not going to do that, but he’s not also going to quit because he can’t get another job now. I think the restaurant owner just took the money as a way to survive.
Jack
This whole corona crisis highlighted how insolvent most restaurants are. There are restaurants that have been open for years and can’t afford to stay one month without income, where are all the savings? Where is the money?
Kab
It shows you how risky of a business this is. You can find the finances you need to start the place, you can get loans and so on so that the restaurant can open, but then it just takes a few bad weeks and you are already in a bad spot.
Jack
Definitely. Well, after all this talk, I would like to end on a good note. I know from your twitter posting that soon it’s ramp season and I also know that you make a great ramp pesto.
Kab
Yes, well, we are all here trying to invent something and hopefully it turns out good but yes, ramp pesto is a specialty. I mean, you actually have to go out and find the ramps but it’s just so good. Ramps seem to grow everywhere there’s woods, in the US you can get ramps pretty much everywhere as long as you know what they look like and where to go out to get them. The season starts in springtime, around April. If you like the spicy taste of fresh garlic and you are not afraid of real onion flavor, ramp tastes like the essence of garlic and the essence of springtime too. You can make a pesto out of it, you can use it as garnish, you could actually take the leaves and throw them on a barbeque. It’s a nice little snack and the cool thing about it is that ramps are available only for maybe two weeks, it’s almost as fancy as getting certain mushrooms, you gotta go and get them when it’s the right time and if you miss that time window, then it’s just gone.
Jack
That sounds delicious man, I’m glad you will be sharing your ramp pesto recipe with us. This is what I love about the lindy food table, it’s a niche community and I always find value in it.
Kab
Oh yeah man, it’s super cool to be part of this community. We’ve been sharing a lot of recipes among each other. I’ve got a lot of great recipes from guys like you of course and Rat Capital, Dirty Ernie, Lea Maric, Plongeur and, God, I love the cocktails by Otto Ingalls and the middle eastern food from Gloom and other guys, just a lot of good stuff.
Jack
I would absolutely love to have those guys on the newsletter too, they’re all great.
Kab
It’s a really cool niche as you say. It’s something different from, for example, just posting food pictures on Instagram, I know people that do that but they don’t really have a network they can talk to, it’s different. The Lindy food table is a special little corner with a lot of people that just share the love for food, it’s not just professionals, it’s very authentic: lots of good vibes and good conversations. It’s great.
Jack
It’s definitely great man. So Kab, thanks again for doing this, I’m going to cook something now as I’m pretty hungry. See you at the Lindy Table. Buon appetito e buon lavoro.
Kab
Alright brother, it was great talking with you. talk to you soon!
The following is the original Ramp Pesto recipe by Kab with pictures taken by Kab himself.
Ramp Pesto
Around the end of March til mid-May, if you're pretty much anywhere in the northern hemisphere in a temperate climate, go out into the forest with a little garden shovel and start looking for ramps. Any shady woodland area where you know there are a lot of oak trees, birch, poplar, maple, or other trees like that is a good place. I found ramps in a place that looked like this:
It's a pretty basic looking plant, so you'll want to make sure it's actually a ramp and not something else that looks like it. Lily of the valley looks a lot like a ramp, but it's poisonous. You'll know it’s a ramp if it undeniably smells like garlic or onion. That's how you know. They'll often come in patches, so if you find one there's probably a lot more to be found nearby.
Ramps ready to be taken
To clean them, just cut off the very bottom with a sharp knife and remove the little sheath of film around the bulb if present. Then give them a good rinse in cold water and shake them off to dry.
Ramps drying
Recipe 1 lb spaghetti coarse sea salt 150 grams ramps (very big handful) 2 tbsp pine nuts lemon wedge 1/4 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano 3/4 cup olive oil
Bring salty water to a boil to cook the spaghetti. While the spaghetti cooks you can begin making the pesto.
In a food processor, blend the pine nuts with a pinch of salt until they're ground up. Then add the ramps and some of the olive oil. Once a loose paste is formed you can add the parmigiano. Then begin adding more olive oil until the paste is nice and smooth, not too oily. Do not over process. Now squeeze in the juice from the lemon wedge. Taste to check the salt content and add a little bit if it needs any. Transfer about a cup of the pesto into a large bowl or wok/sauté pan.
How the final ramp pesto looks like
When the spaghetti is al dente, strain it and save some of the pasta water. Add the hot spaghetti to the bowl with a little bit of the pasta water and stir until all of the spaghetti are nicely coated. You can add some more grated Parmigiano too if you want.
Serve with some bread and an off-dry Riesling or Basque rosé and celebrate the arrival of springtime.
