Chapter 3

The smell of frying potatoes and onions. A server old enough to be his mom’s younger sister carrying a plate with a patty melt and a half-full coffee pot. Formica table tops painted to look like wood grain. Clean but weathered white floors. Lollipops by the front cash register. Behind it, a fridge with cans of Coke, Pepsi, RC. None of the staff looked like English was their first language. 

He hadn’t seen the kitchen yet, but Tommy felt right at home.

Home would be called Olly’s now. 

“Sit anywhere you like,” the auntie server said. Patty melt deposited at a booth where an old man in a blue CTA uniform sat across from a gym bag with a Reader spread under his mug.

“Oh, actually. I’m here for an interview. With Martín?”

“What’s your name?”

Tommy told her and watched her disappear into the kitchen. She had both a gentle smile and hard eyes. 

The diner looked small on the outside, and it was, but there were more tables than Tommy had anticipated. A host stand and coffee station. Four-tops lining the walls, with a large corner booth to the left of the door. An island of booths with a half wall covered in planters in the middle of the dining room. Most of the walls had planters between the windows. Our Lady of Guadalupe watching over the back booths. When there was art, it felt like whatever the owner had found at a secondhand store over the course of a single weekend. One black-and-white photograph stood out: two men smiling in front of the restaurant, with a handwritten OLLY & MARTÍN caption underneath. 

Auntie server reappeared. Held out her hand for Tommy to shake. “Tommy? Amparo. Come back here.”

Double doors with porthole windows that were approaching opaqueness—likely due to a bus boy trying to clean the fake plastic glass with a scrub brush—led to a kitchen space that was equal parts lived-in diner grease hole and pass the health inspection or you’re out on your ass. The unmanned dish pit was piled with plates, a mix of ketchup and syrup gluing the towers together. The flat top was a shared space of breakfast potatoes being held at temp and burgers in varying phases of cheese melt. A line cook was shaking the fry basket and watching a soccer game on his phone while the other cook was folding a three egg omelet, probably called “the Cali” or some shit, judging by the spinach, artichokes, and avocado. In the prep area was another woman, likely the missing dishwasher, roughly chopping lettuce without gloves.

Tommy took it all in with the enthusiasm of a rich person browsing the spa menu at an all-inclusive resort. This place practically felt like destiny. 

The cramped office looked like every manager’s office he’d ever sat in. Banker’s boxes stacked everywhere. Shelving with backup flatware, dinnerware, what was clearly hotel pans, squeeze bottles, spoons. Paper rolls for receipt printers, a computer and printer, a locked file cabinet, half-printed menus with messed up ink. A milk crate full of cords with no clear place. Papers on the walls that, at the moment, were indecipherable cuneiform, but Tommy knew he’d have whatever this system was memorized soon. 

Some shouted Spanish, then the creak of the door being pushed open. Tommy looked over his shoulder to see a man leaning half into the kitchen, arm weighted on the door handle. When the man straightened, his kindly face barely matched the shouting. His eyes had soft edges and he had an easy, age-jowled smile.

“Hola, bienvenido. Tommy? Martín.”

“Hola, Martín, mucho gusto.”

“¿Tienes experienca en la cocina? ¿Limpiando mesas? ¿Platos para lavar? ¿Prepara? ¿Desayuno y cena?”

“Sí, senor. Todos los trabajos hay una cocina. Todos los trabajos en el restaurante. Sí. Para no—nunca soy—owner.”

Martín let out a laugh and gave Tommy a conspiratorial finger point. “Pretty good, guero. What, you got a Guatemalan novia or something? Anyway, I can read. I see your job experience. Can you be a good coworker, can you fit into a culture, can you work fast? These are my questions. I’m also wondering why you’re ditching the downtown life, the lakeside glamor, and riding the bus here?”

“Is there something unglamorous about a diner? I happen to think the best food in the country gets made at places like this. Plus, if the weather’s nice, I can walk here.”

“How kind of you. Look, I’m not trying to slander my environment. But why are you here?”

“Well, I’m not kidding. The best food is not being made at Trencherman or Girl And The Goat. Truly good food comes from an environment where people understand daily practice. The point isn’t something new and novel for every meal. The point is poaching perfect eggs every time while maintaining the boil bath for six hours’ rush on a Sunday, while also not letting the Hollandaise break on the hot line. Then doing that every Sunday, for people. It’s turning chicken bones to stock, turning chicken livers to a Friday night special. Because, sure, I like to be creative with dishes. But I also want to execute the basics perfectly, every time. And if possible? Serve a clientele that appreciates that, rather than clout-chasing rich people who spend more time Instagramming their meal than tasting it.”

“Ooh, que apasionado, qué iluminado. I say a burger is four minutes per side, how long do you cook it for?”

“Four minutes per side.”

“I tell you an omelet has cheddar cheese, what kind of cheese you put in it?”

“Cheddar.”

They went on like this a few minutes, Martín asking more situational questions and occasionally slipping into Spanish. Tommy tried to respond in whichever language Martín spoke, though he knew the cracks in his Spanish were starting to show. He’d sort of been bullshitting with that diner monologue, but only sort of. To Tommy, cook was a profession full of pirates, misfits, boozehounds, dropouts, and others on the marginalia of society, and he loved it. 

Still, there was a right way and a wrong way to approach this noble calling.

“So, listen,” Martín said, drawing out the O in a reedy tenor that suggested they were wrapping up. He looked over his clipboard. Tommy felt a flash of being back in that south side Irish bar. He was being regarded. Older generations distrusting youth. Every small business owner or manager had a no one wants to work anymore living deep within their soul, ready to be vomited out at the slightest hint of slacking off. 

Or maybe Tommy just made people think twice. 

“Can you start Lunes?” 

“Sí seńor, Monday.”

Tommy’s thoughts wandered to the kitchen. He imagined scattering hashbrowns on the flat top. He imagined knowing the grill intimately enough to be able to feel when it was time to flip a grilled cheese or an egg. He thought of a few recipes he could add to weekend dinners. He could define this place. It was a postcard picture of an all-American diner. It just needed an injection of new blood, some youthful energy and know-how from a thoughtful chef who also properly revered the previous generations.

“You’ll train Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday this week. Then I want you expediting Friday night. Just for you to see what that’s like. After that, we’re going to start you on Sunday dinner running grill, cover Wednesday and Thursday breakfast, doing eggs. Friday dinner you’ll be on prep. Saturday breakfast you’re on the fryer.”

It felt like a schedule for paying your dues. It felt like a schedule for a kitchen where everybody else had another job somewhere else, and they didn’t want to topple the current Jenga tower of a crew rotation. Tommy could already picture afternoon shifts stretching into evenings with dinner prep work. His back and knees were telling him how much drinking he’d be doing Sunday nights. But Tommy wasn’t in a position to complain.

—

Across the street and up a couple blocks, there was a bar, Jimmy’s Pub, that Tommy knew about. Here was a place that catered to workers, misfits, and people on journeys: it was open from seven a.m. to four a.m. and never had more than one person working. 

He walked out of the afternoon summer sun and into a dark, wood-paneled cave lit by kitschy neon palm trees and orange string lights. A lecherous-looking flamingo was painted on the back wall underneath some spotlights that only came on for karaoke nights, which didn’t happen anymore. Some college-age kids were playing pinball in a corner. At the bar, a white-haired guy wearing a faded Cubs shirt and hat combo was leaning on his elbows, talking to the bartender over a couple Old Styles. The bartender looked like he could dunk a basketball forty years ago. Droning, vaguely demonic shoegaze music played over the speakers.

Tommy ordered a double whiskey, rocks, and Faded Cubs Shirt didn’t break monologue.

“—so then the guy tells me, well nobody retires anymore. Guys take consulting gigs. I says to him, consulting gig? Consulting? The hell I’m gonna take some ‘consulting gig,’ who the hell wants me to consult about anything? No one’s ever wanted my opinion, except the people who have. Guess what? They didn’t listen to me anyway. They were wrong, of course, because I know what I’m talking about, but hey. That’s neither here nor there. Nobody’s ever listened to me, so what am I gonna consult? I wanna retire. But all those layoffs, so many jobs—I got a pension, I got a 401(k), my retirement plan—every job’s given me some sort of thing, right? But all of these things, I can’t make heads or tails of it, all of these things are somehow not enough to live above the poverty line?”

“It’s all a scam,” the bartender drawled, pouring the whiskey that Tommy had ordered during the regular’s monologue. Tommy couldn’t decide what had more reverb, the music in the hall-like establishment or the bartender’s voice. “All. A. Scam.”

“I see all these guys in their flashy suits, I see them driving their BMWs, I see them with their working teeth,” the regular continued. He was starting to chuckle. “They’re not thinking about hip replacements. They’re not thinking about cholesterol. They’re not thinking about A1C. You know what else they’re not thinking of? How much they’re gonna sweat at work today. Whether or not they’re gonna make their mortgage. Those suit-wearing kids,” the regular was laughing more, “when they walk, the ground gets softer beneath their dainty little feet. When automatic doors open for them, they get a little spray of rosewater. You and I don’t get that, do we? You and I don’t get bathroom attendants wiping our asses for us. You and I don’t get waiters at restaurants cutting our steaks, making Caesar salad tableside. You don’t see tableside salad when you’re guys like us. Guys like them, though? Boy, do they have it nice. That’s all I’m asking. Why I gotta bag groceries at the Jewel until the skin falls off my bones?” He was laughing hard and loud, clutching his side. “Why I gotta smile at housewives who are just looking back, watching my hair fall out and my teeth chip off in pieces like little fuckin whatdoyoucallem, lemon Tic Tacs, looking back at me like I’m some kind of freak show, because I don’t got one of them 401(k)s that actually works right? Those boys, though, they drive suits and wear BMWs.”

The bartender bent over and gave his own thinning hair an exaggerated rub. “Oh, cut yourself some slack, Frank,” he said. His body moved nimbly, he’d refilled a pitcher and made change for the college kids and rinsed a glass before pouring himself a water the whole time Frank had been talking. But his voice was impossibly slow, each syllable sweeping every inch of the cavernous bar before he uttered another one. Frank’s laughing had slowed to a wheeze. “You got great chompers.”

At this, Frank burst into mouth-open honking, revealing yellowed and chipped and silver-capped teeth. 

“What about you, kid?” Frank turned to Tommy when his laughter died down. “You got a job?”