The Man Who Would Be a Machine

Peter Scott-Morgan had A.L.S. and hoped that, by using himself as a test subject, he could help the cause of others.

By Susan Orlean, THE NEW YORKER, Afterword

July 26, 2022

Illustration by Dadu Shin

In October, 2019, Peter Scott-Morgan (1958-2022) announced that he had evolved from Peter 1.0 to Peter 2.0. What that meant in practical terms was that, at that point, he had made enough modifications to his body that he considered himself to be something new entirely—less of a human, more of a cyborg. He wasn’t yet fully robotic, but he was fast approaching it and, as he told an interviewer, there was no technology he “wouldn’t consider.”

Scott-Morgan, a British scientist with an expertise in robotics and organizational theory, was tall and slim, with a floppy mop of blonde hair and a blindingly bright smile. He skewed full-on optimist; to scroll through his Twitter account is to be showered by exclamations of wonder and delight. Samples: “I so LOVE Hi-Tech!!” “I FIND MYSELF CELEBRATING how amazing Humanity is.” “Oh, I LOVE Science!!!” “2020 IS OFF TO AN AMAZING START!” In truth, though, Scott-Morgan would have had good reason to be a pessimist. In 2016, when he was fifty-eight and galloping along in his career, he noticed that he had trouble shaking water off his foot after a shower. That trouble was diagnosed as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, A.L.S. (known as motor-neuron disease in Britain), an incurable neurodegenerative disease that results in the progressive loss of muscle function. (Another British scientist, Stephen Hawking, died of the illness, in 2018.) Doctors told Scott-Morgan that, at best, he had two years to live. Given the usual course of the disease, he was likely to spend much of those two years “locked in”—that is, he would lose the ability to walk or speak or eat, though his mind would still be alert.

Scott-Morgan got the first Ph.D. in robotics ever granted by a British university—from Imperial College London—but he liked to say that he got his science education from watching “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek.” (His doctoral thesis is a little less jazzy than those shows; its title is “A technical and managerial methodology for robotisation: An approach to cost-effective introduction of robotics technology into industry with particular reference to flexible assembly systems.”) His first book, published in 1984, was called “The Robotics Revolution.” He believed that human life and machine life were destined to merge. When he got sick, he decided to use his experience to test his theories. What if he replaced his body parts, before they failed, with machinery? He thought that swapping out components might mean that he could survive for decades despite having A.L.S. or, at the very least, that he would still be able to communicate and move as his muscles froze and the disease advanced. His hope was that, by using himself as a test subject, he could help the cause of other people who had what he called “extreme disability.” He was certain that even the most severe limitations could be allayed by innovative technology. “I refuse simply to stay alive,” he wrote to a reporter from the Guardian. “I choose to THRIVE!”

Breaking ground seemed to come naturally to Scott-Morgan. In 1990, he and his partner of forty-three years, Francis Scott-Morgan, fashioned the merged last name that they both used. (They met in Torquay, in southwest England, on the day that a friend of Francis’s was murdered, in what Francis describes as a hate crime.) In 2005, they were the first same-sex couple in England to form a civil partnership, on the first day that such partnerships were legal. In 2014, they became one of the first same-sex couples in England to get married.

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In 2018, Scott-Morgan started the process of his transformation. He began with a complex surgery that redirected his digestion into a mechanized system. He then prepared for what he considered the most dramatic procedure—a laryngectomy. It would mean that he would no longer be able to speak naturally, but it would allow him to be hooked into a breathing apparatus that wouldn’t rely on muscle control. The inability to breathe and swallow is the most dire symptom of A.L.S. and often is the actual cause of death among those suffering from it, so Scott-Morgan thought this might forestall that. In preparation for the laryngectomy, he recorded twenty thousand words to be used in a synthetic-voice program. He also helped devise an avatar that he planned to have projected onto his face. The avatar would be able to move and show expression when his own facial muscles no longer could. An eye-tracking computer program allowed him to communicate. He had a souped-up wheelchair that employed every modification available and was able to raise him to a standing position.

The progression of A.L.S. proved to be unyielding, even to a human cyborg, which is what Scott-Morgan liked to call himself. (It was also the title of a documentary, on Britain’s Channel 4, that followed his process of surgeries and modifications.) In the end, he couldn’t outrace the disease. But he never stopped cheerleading for the process he had undertaken. A few months before he died, he tweeted, “Every morning when I wake I take stock of how hugely lucky I am – not least that I’m having so much FUN! And that I’m STILL ALIVE!!” ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Francis Scott-Morgan’s relationship to his friend who was murdered.

Afterword is an obituary column that pays homage to people, places, and things we’ve lost. If you’d like to propose a subject for an Afterword piece, write to us at afterword@newyorker.com.

Susan Orlean began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987 and became a staff writer in 1992. Her most recent book is “On Animals.”

At Laser Wolf, Dinner Is Even Better than the Sunset

At this Williamsburg-rooftop outpost of the beloved Philadelphia restaurant from the chef Michael Solomonov, the uniformly excellent salatim, an array of salads and dips, are followed by grilled skewers and brown-sugar soft serve.

By Hannah Goldfield, THE NEW YORKER, Tables for Two July 25, 2022 Issue

July 15, 2022

The view of Manhattan from the rooftop dining room is spectacular, yet secondary to the food and cocktails.Photographs by Jeremy Liebman for The New Yorker

On a recent evening at Laser Wolf, a new restaurant on the rooftop of the Hoxton hotel, in Williamsburg, a friendly but authoritative woman zipped dutifully from table to table, pausing at each. “We clap for the sunset,” she announced. “Don’t panic.” For a moment, service seemed to halt. Bodies shifted westward as the collective gaze settled on an unimpeded view of the Manhattan skyline. Phones were drawn. As the gleaming orb sank behind the Con Ed clock tower, blue sky melting into gold, dramatic rays backlighting cotton-ball clouds, applause went up, accompanied by cheers.

With a vista like this, food and drink could easily be secondary, not to mention a total ripoff. At Laser Wolf—an outpost of the beloved Philadelphia restaurant of the same name (a cheeky reference to “Fiddler on the Roof”), from the Israeli American chef Michael Solomonov and the restaurateur Steve Cook—it’s the setting that feels negligible. The last time I had eaten at a Solomonov-Cook restaurant was in 2018, just before they closed a Chelsea Market location of Dizengoff, their Philadelphia hummus counter. The windowless-corridor seating never deterred me from the exquisitely silky whipped hummus, a meal in itself, topped with ground lamb and pomegranate molasses, and the za’atar roast chicken.

What a relief to have that hummus back, as the centerpiece of Laser Wolf’s salatim, a bountiful array of salads and dips delivered to the table as soon as you order any of the menu’s grilled items, in the style of an Israeli shipudiya, or “skewer house.” Choose a cocktail—my party gasped at the beauty of the Saz-Arak, two cold, crisp fingers of rye and arak, an anise-flavored spirit—and a skewer, and you’re done with decisions; dessert is also included. There’s a small array of à-la-carte add-ons, too, but let me make it easy: get the double-cooked thick-cut French fries, sparkling with salt, and the gently spicy, sticky-sweet date-harissa wings, served with tahini ketchup and tahini ranch, respectively.

The salatim are uniformly excellent, a roulette with only lucky slots: creamy white gigante beans strewn with torn Castelvetrano olives; a surprising, refreshing combination of diced pineapple and shaved celery tossed in smoked-pineapple purée; earthy roasted mushrooms with ruffles of kale and a smidge of sour-cherry juice. The warm, pillowy pita is perfect, especially for swiping through baba ghanoush and the hummus, a generous whorl finished with olive oil, za’atar, and parsley.

After an opener so complete, the adjective “main” doesn’t quite apply to the next course, which is not to say it’s not an event. Luscious, shaggy short rib is braised in passion-fruit amba, an Iraqi Jewish sauce traditionally made from pickled green mango, before its edges grow crisp over smoldering charcoal. Velvety chunks of tuna are crusted in coriander and caraway seeds and glossed in a North African-style chili paste called harif. The chicken shishlik (Hebrew for “skewer”) can’t compete with the wings, but the gamy tang of the steak shishlik comes up from behind; it’s much simpler but no less exciting than the koobideh, made with house-ground beef and lamb seasoned with sumac, turmeric, and dill and celery seeds.

The tantalizing perfume of fried garlic and amba wafting off a grilled eggplant turned me into a cartoon character, poking my nose into the air, straining for another whiff. One night, I was disappointed to realize that I had inadvertently made my hard-won reservation for the counter, where I was perched on a stool looking at the open kitchen instead of the view. But I came to see the upside: a front-row seat at the ballet that produced that eggplant; a close look at a lineup of whole cauliflower on a trolley, dry-rubbed in shawarma spices and waiting their turn to be coaxed into collapse. I watched, mesmerized, as neat coils of brown-sugar soft serve emerged from a dispenser, to be topped with pistachios, cherry preserves, and minuscule puffed-rice pearls. I clap for the kitchen. (Grill items, including salatim and soft serve, $43-$175.) ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 25, 2022, issue, with the headline “Laser Wolf.”

Hannah Goldfield is The New Yorker’s food critic.

An Astonishing Array of Sri Lankan Specialties, at Queens Lanka

At an extraordinary new restaurant and grocery store in Jamaica, Queens, Rasika Wetthasinghe and Suchira Wijayarathne offer imported packaged goods, as well as dishes from their native country that comprise a thrilling number of components.

By Hannah Goldfield, THE NEW YORKER, Tables for Two August 1, 2022 Issue

July 22, 2022

The food at Queens Lanka is unfussy but incredibly complex, and all the more impressive considering that the chef works entirely alone.Photographs by Zachary Zavislak for The New Yorker

For many years, Rasika Wetthasinghe, the co-owner of Queens Lanka, an extraordinary new restaurant and grocery store in Jamaica, Queens, worked as a chef for the Hilton hotel in his native Colombo, Sri Lanka. Shuttling between eight kitchens, he prepared menus that spanned the globe—Italian, Chinese, Sri Lankan. In the decade that preceded covid, Sri Lanka’s post-civil-war economy showed promise, thanks largely to a newly vibrant tourism industry, buoyed by loans from wealthier countries—loans on which the mismanaged government eventually defaulted. Last month, after mass protests, the President fled the country and resigned by e-mail, abandoning his constituents in the face of mounting inflation, and food and fuel shortages.

Wetthasinghe had already left: in 2013, he moved to Staten Island, home to thousands of Sri Lankan immigrants, where he got a job at a restaurant called Papa’s Halal. There, he befriended Suchira Wijayarathne, who had come to New York in 2003, to study computer engineering, and who delivered food for Papa’s. When Wetthasinghe decided to open a place of his own, he asked Wijayarathne to join him. Both men have wives and children in Sri Lanka, whom they help to support and hope to bring to New York. In Jamaica, Queens—a stone’s throw from Jamaica Estates, a tony enclave of Tudor-style houses, where Donald Trump grew up—a Sri Lankan grocery store, with a kitchen, was for rent. Though neither man knew a soul in Queens, they signed the lease this past year and moved nearby.

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The grocery shelves have been sparse of late—it’s grown harder to import packaged goods from Sri Lanka, Wijayarathne told me the other day. Still, he’s managed to stock Munchee Hawaian Cookies, crisp, simple biscuits made with coconut, the perfect accompaniment to a milky cup of Sri Lanka’s famous, fragrant Ceylon tea; enormous sacks of red rice; jars of passion-fruit jam and chili pastes; glass bottles of slightly viscous king-coconut water.

In the cramped kitchen, Wetthasinghe, who learned to cook when he was ten and enrolled in culinary school at eighteen, turns out an astonishing array of Sri Lankan specialties. That he works alone makes the menu even more impressive: this food may not be fussy, but it is far from simple, with most dishes comprising a thrilling number of components. A plate of “rice and curry,” one recent afternoon, included four varieties of the latter—made with yellow dal, or split peas; batons of beetroot, almost chocolate-like in their melty richness; jackfruit; and pineapple—in addition to a tantalizing tangle of sticky-sweet deep-fried sprats, and a version of a traditional relish called gotu kola sambol, with finely chopped kale, red onion, and tomato. For kottu, roti is sliced into noodle-like scraps that are stir-fried with egg, scallion, green chilies, and shredded carrot, plus whole cardamom pods, curry leaves, and morsels of fish, chicken, beef, or mutton, then served with a gravy seasoned with ginger, garlic, and onions.

For seating, there were two tables on the sidewalk, but nothing to protect them from the intense sun. Inside, I shared a tiny counter with a fan meant to supplement a struggling A.C. unit, no match for the humidity. And yet, the ribbon of fiery spice running through almost every dish tempered the steamy climate, like drinking hot tea. The pleasure of unwrapping one of Wetthasinghe’s lamprais—from the Dutch lomprijst, meaning “lump of rice,” a dish that originated with Sri Lanka’s Dutch Burgher population—transcended any discomfort. A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter. Queens Lanka is a portal to another place, and a reminder of what is right in front of us. (Dishes $9-$18.) ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 1, 2022, issue, with the headline “Queens Lanka.”

Hannah Goldfield is The New Yorker’s food critic.

“The Bear” Is a Gritty Fairy Tale of Cooking and Grief

In FX’s excellent new series, the chefs at a Chicago hot-beef restaurant struggle to maintain a little pilot light of hope.

By Helen Rosner, THE NEW YORKER, Annals of Gastronomy

July 22, 2022

From left to right, the actors Jeremy Allen White, Lionel Boyce, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, in a scene from FX’s series “The Bear.”Photograph courtesy FX

The excellent new FX show “The Bear” takes place in a type of restaurant that only exists in Chicago. Not quite a diner, not quite a deli, not quite a fast-food joint, it is a storefront establishment with big plate-glass windows, grubby in a reassuring way, with illuminated signs that advertise Italian beef or gyros. The color scheme is brown and beige; the diverse, largely blue-collar clientele who line up for lunch every day are a glad-handing politician’s dream; the menus rarely stray from short-order classics and local specialties. I can summon in an instant the sense memory of stepping inside the doors of Johnnie’s Beef or Al’s on Taylor, and the newborn-like heft of a warm, paper-wrapped beef sandwich. (I get mine “sweet and hot, dipped”—both kinds of peppers, plus a full-sandwich dunk in the beefy broth in which the meat has braised for hours.) There’s a smell these restaurants share that’s found in no other place on earth: a layered, rough, masculine perfume of meat and garlic and fryer oil and Formica laminate and sweet, yeasty bread. It’s the aroma that would be pumped into a Smell-O-Vision showing of “The Bear,” which is about a decorated fine-dining chef who returns to Chicago to take over his family’s Italian-beef shop, and to try to save it from disaster.

The hero of the series is Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto, a driven hot shot who until recently had been running the kitchen at the (unnamed) best restaurant in the world, somewhere in New York City. He is played with rumpled intensity by Jeremy Allen White, who has the lake-blue eyes and crescent-moon profile of a young emperor unaware that he’s about to be murdered by the Praetorian guard. Carmy has returned to Chicago in the aftermath of his older brother Mikey’s suicide, after being willed his stake in the family restaurant, the Original Beef of Chicagoland, affectionately referred to as “the Beef.” The tragedy has sent reeling the ragtag world that revolves around the Beef, though the restaurant’s creditors don’t care. Carmy, a resourceful businessman, pays off a debt to a beef vender by selling a collection of selvedge denim, plus collecting quarters scooped out of the dining room’s neglected arcade consoles. But he is unsure what to do about the three hundred grand that Mikey had borrowed from their Uncle Cicero, a shady businessman (Oliver Platt, alternately lovable and terrifying), who might be the kind of guy inclined to break someone’s legs.

Into this swamp of missing money, lifer line cooks, and rag-stuffed grease traps, Carmy brings the sensibility of the classically trained chef. The language and expectations of the high-end brigade de cuisine have been imprinted on him like a tattoo on the soul. Why shouldn’t an Italian beef sandwich be a work of art? By the end of the first episode, Carmy has already retooled the Beef’s offerings. He’s braising the meat using a new recipe and tinkering with how the bread gets baked, and he’s taken the customer-favorite spaghetti off the menu. (His new version of an Italian beef, passed around to staff for tasting, looks almost unbearably delicious.) To the patient skepticism of his staff, he calls them all “Chef”—“It’s a sign of respect,” he explains—and expects them to call him “Chef” in return. When a young, ambitious cook named Sydney (a magnetic Ayo Edebiri) turns up with a star-studded résumé, looking for a job as a sous chef, she rattles off Carmy’s bona fides and then asks him, “So, what are you doing here?” He pauses and further ruffles his permanently ruffled hair. “Making sandwiches,” he says, and turns back to work.

“The Bear” has rightly been praised for its uncannily realistic depiction of restaurant life. Kitchen work has rarely been portrayed this convincingly onscreen. The creator of “The Bear,” Christopher Storer, is best known for his documentaries, including the 2013 film “Sense of Urgency,” about the illustrious chef Thomas Keller, and it’s clear that he knows how to capture the way restaurants really work. Little touches help the Beef’s back-of-house rhythms ring true: cooks drinking ice water out of quart containers, a general shortage of working Sharpies, the walk-in fridge used as a place of solitude and recovery, the back office cluttered with bottles of Fernet and Pepto-Bismol, Carmy’s insistence that the green painter’s tape used to label bins and containers always have sharp, scissor-cut edges, never raggedly torn ones. The show was shot in an actual Italian-beef restaurant in Chicago, so the space, and the way that people move around and against one another, feels genuinely functional and claustrophobic. There are a few false notes, by my judgment — can giardiniera, a pickled mix of vegetables, really be whipped up à la minute? Can an Italian-beef joint a few hundred grand in the hole really justify a full-time dedicated pastry cook?—but the over-all impression feels strikingly true to life.

The most authentic thing about the Beef might be how awful it seems to work there. Life in Carmy’s kitchen is neither glamorous nor fun. The chaos is not alluring. The pirate ship is not a party. In the past it has been tempting, when telling this sort of story, to paint violent self-destructiveness as a viable path on the artist’s way, and cruelty as a language of truth. But the “rock-star chef” archetype, so ubiquitous at the start of the twenty-first century, feels painfully dated now, and “The Bear” ’s rejection of that paradigm is in keeping with other recent shifts in food culture. The harsh realities of the restaurant business—issues of labor rights, physical strain, and mental health—have intruded on the glossy fantasy of professional cooking as pure creative expression. (Even Anthony Bourdain came to regret his role in spawning the trope of the emotionally wrecked chef as glorious fuckup.) Since “The Bear” ’s début, cooks and former cooks have commented on how viscerally it captures the anxiety and volatility of a working kitchen. “It was so accurate that it was triggering,” the writer Genevieve Yam, a former fine-dining cook, wrote, in Bon Appétit.

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“The Bear” is also unusually on point about Chicago. It is peppered with local references and shibboleths: Green River soda and Sprecher’s root beer, Vienna Beef, Bill Murray, the hockey legend Denis Savard. Carmy has a 773 area-code tattoo (a little lame, to be honest). Another character has reflexive disdain for “fuckin’ Piven” (i.e., Jeremy, the actor, a controversial native son). There’s a voice cameo from the WXRT morning-drive-time d.j. Lin Brehmer. A billboard mounted on the roof of the Beef advertises Malört, Chicago’s inexplicably beloved paint-varnish-like liquor. But the truest, most shockingly accurate nod is the show’s ambient Midwestern bleakness, its aesthetic of high-contrast grime and emptiness. The city is famous for its sparkling drifts of snow, but locals—not unlike restaurant workers—know that reality is rarely so picturesque. A true Chicago winter is colorless and hard, gray slush on gray sidewalks under a gray sky. FX and Hulu (on which “The Bear” is streaming) categorize the show as a comedy, and each half-hour episode has its funny moments, many thanks to the celebrity chef Matty Matheson, who appears as an adorably deranged handyman. But the series’ overarching concern is despair and self-destruction. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the late Mikey’s best friend and the Beef’s erratic manager, is adrift in his anger. The middle-aged line cook Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) hazes Sydney with malicious joy. Carmy undermines his own insistence on a respectful kitchen culture by indulging in frequent outbursts of verbal abuse. Through flashbacks, we learn that his behavior echoes the bullying he endured at the hands of the chef he worked for in New York (an exquisitely vituperative Joel McHale, in Heston Blumenthal glasses). Even Sydney, whose quiet competence initially appears to be a tempering force, has the capacity to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. All of the Beef’s kitchen staff are nursing deep wounds, and all rely on the rhythm of the work to mask their misery—even when the work is what’s causing it.

As the great Chicagoan Roger Ebert wrote, “A movie is not about what it is about, it is about how it is about it.” “The Bear” has the feel of a dirtbag fairy tale, but its gritty propulsiveness is shot through with grief. This is a show about a restaurant, but it’s also about the struggle to maintain a little pilot light of hope. Most episodes take place almost entirely inside the Beef, in its narrow kitchen and fluorescent-lit dining room, but in flashbacks and asides we learn about the outside lives of the people who gather there: the ephemera of Sydney’s failed catering business, the dashed major-league baseball dreams of one line cook, the bloody war that led another to flee his native Somalia; Richie’s broken marriage; Uncle Cicero’s estrangement from his brother. Carmy is full of despair that he doesn’t know how to articulate, and anger that he doesn’t know how to account for. He falls into surreal, meta-theatrical dreams and nightmares, including a recurring one in which a massive bear threatens to tear him apart.

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The plot of “The Bear” is, more or less, “How will the Beef stay afloat?” But the show’s weakest moments are those concerned with the will-they-won’t-they of financial survival, among them—vague spoiler—a frankly ludicrous deus ex machina in the final episode. (The series has been renewed for a second season.) The greater dramatic engine is the conflict between the competing qualities of refinement and grit that often exist side by side in restaurant kitchens. Carmy and Sydney want to elevate the Beef’s food, perhaps as a way of elevating themselves, and the beginning of the series sets up what seems like a predictable arc: the newcomers sweep through, teaching the magical properties of care and technique and friendship to a stodgy crew of disaffected old-timers. But the show doesn’t give in to the easy, upward pull of love conquering all. There’s more to fix at the Beef than the recipes, and there’s also more worth preserving. The brigade system isn’t a universal panacea, any more than simply calling a person “Chef” makes them stand up straighter in their Danskos.

In the series’ seventh and strongest episode, Sydney, frustrated by Carmy’s slowness to shake things up like he’s promised to do, spots a visiting restaurant critic in the dining room and sneaks him an ambitious, very un-the-Beef dish of cola-braised short rib over risotto. The critic publishes a rave review, which attracts an unsustainable flood of customers, a so-called hug of death that nearly breaks the little restaurant. The Beef has survived for decades cooking a handful of dishes, passably well, for just enough people to keep the ship afloat. Changing one thing, it turns out, changes everything else, too. Is change always a form of growth? In the first episode, Gary asks Sydney what she’s going to make for the staff “family meal,” one of her practical examinations as an employee hopeful. “Are you going with delicious, or impressive?” he asks. Sydney gives him a side-eye. “Delicious is impressive,” she says. ♦

An earlier version of this article misspelled the character Carmen Berzatto’s last name.

Helen Rosner is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the James Beard award for personal-essay writing.

Don’t Eat Before Reading This

A New York chef spills some trade secrets.

By Anthony Bourdain, THE NEW YORKER, Annals of Gastronomy April 19, 1999 Issue

April 12, 1999

Monday’s fish has been around since Friday, under God knows what conditions.Illustration by Adrian Gill

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.

A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim.

I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”

A year ago, my latest, doomed mission—a high-profile restaurant in the Times Square area—went out of business. The meat, fish, and produce purveyors got the news that they were going to take it in the neck for yet another ill-conceived enterprise. When customers called for reservations, they were informed by a prerecorded announcement that our doors had closed. Fresh from that experience, I began thinking about becoming a traitor to my profession.

Say it’s a quiet Monday night, and you’ve just checked your coat in that swanky Art Deco update in the Flatiron district, and you’re looking to tuck into a thick slab of pepper-crusted yellowfin tuna or a twenty-ounce cut of certified Black Angus beef, well-done—what are you in for?

The fish specialty is reasonably priced, and the place got two stars in the Times. Why not go for it? If you like four-day-old fish, be my guest. Here’s how things usually work. The chef orders his seafood for the weekend on Thursday night. It arrives on Friday morning. He’s hoping to sell the bulk of it on Friday and Saturday nights, when he knows that the restaurant will be busy, and he’d like to run out of the last few orders by Sunday evening. Many fish purveyors don’t deliver on Saturday, so the chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions. When a kitchen is in full swing, proper refrigeration is almost nonexistent, what with the many openings of the refrigerator door as the cooks rummage frantically during the rush, mingling your tuna with the chicken, the lamb, or the beef. Even if the chef has ordered just the right amount of tuna for the weekend, and has had to reorder it for a Monday delivery, the only safeguard against the seafood supplier’s off-loading junk is the presence of a vigilant chef who can make sure that the delivery is fresh from Sunday night’s market.

Generally speaking, the good stuff comes in on Tuesday: the seafood is fresh, the supply of prepared food is new, and the chef, presumably, is relaxed after his day off. (Most chefs don’t work on Monday.) Chefs prefer to cook for weekday customers rather than for weekenders, and they like to start the new week with their most creative dishes. In New York, locals dine during the week. Weekends are considered amateur nights—for tourists, rubes, and the well-done-ordering pretheatre hordes. The fish may be just as fresh on Friday, but it’s on Tuesday that you’ve got the good will of the kitchen on your side.

People who order their meat well-done perform a valuable service for those of us in the business who are cost-conscious: they pay for the privilege of eating our garbage. In many kitchens, there’s a time-honored practice called “save for well-done.” When one of the cooks finds a particularly unlovely piece of steak—tough, riddled with nerve and connective tissue, off the hip end of the loin, and maybe a little stinky from age—he’ll dangle it in the air and say, “Hey, Chef, whaddya want me to do with this?” Now, the chef has three options. He can tell the cook to throw the offending item into the trash, but that means a total loss, and in the restaurant business every item of cut, fabricated, or prepared food should earn at least three times the amount it originally cost if the chef is to make his correct food-cost percentage. Or he can decide to serve that steak to “the family”—that is, the floor staff—though that, economically, is the same as throwing it out. But no. What he’s going to do is repeat the mantra of cost-conscious chefs everywhere: “Save for well-done.” The way he figures it, the philistine who orders his food well-done is not likely to notice the difference between food and flotsam.

Then there are the People Who Brunch. The “B” word is dreaded by all dedicated cooks. We hate the smell and spatter of omelettes. We despise hollandaise, home fries, those pathetic fruit garnishes, and all the other cliché accompaniments designed to induce a credulous public into paying $12.95 for two eggs. Nothing demoralizes an aspiring Escoffier faster than requiring him to cook egg-white omelettes or eggs over easy with bacon. You can dress brunch up with all the focaccia, smoked salmon, and caviar in the world, but it’s still breakfast.

Even more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.

“It’s been done, but I don’t think it’s been redone.”

Like most other chefs I know, I’m amused when I hear people object to pork on nonreligious grounds. “Swine are filthy animals,” they say. These people have obviously never visited a poultry farm. Chicken—America’s favorite food—goes bad quickly; handled carelessly, it infects other foods with salmonella; and it bores the hell out of chefs. It occupies its ubiquitous place on menus as an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat. Most chefs believe that supermarket chickens in this country are slimy and tasteless compared with European varieties. Pork, on the other hand, is cool. Farmers stopped feeding garbage to pigs decades ago, and even if you eat pork rare you’re more likely to win the Lotto than to contract trichinosis. Pork tastes different, depending on what you do with it, but chicken always tastes like chicken.

Another much maligned food these days is butter. In the world of chefs, however, butter is in everything. Even non-French restaurants—the Northern Italian; the new American, the ones where the chef brags about how he’s “getting away from butter and cream”—throw butter around like crazy. In almost every restaurant worth patronizing, sauces are enriched with mellowing, emulsifying butter. Pastas are tightened with it. Meat and fish are seared with a mixture of butter and oil. Shallots and chicken are caramelized with butter. It’s the first and last thing in almost every pan: the final hit is called “monter au beurre.” In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal.

If you are one of those people who cringe at the thought of strangers fondling your food, you shouldn’t go out to eat. As the author and former chef Nicolas Freeling notes in his definitive book “The Kitchen,” the better the restaurant, the more your food has been prodded, poked, handled, and tasted. By the time a three-star crew has finished carving and arranging your saddle of monkfish with dried cherries and wild-herb-infused nage into a Parthenon or a Space Needle, it’s had dozens of sweaty fingers all over it. Gloves? You’ll find a box of surgical gloves—in my kitchen we call them “anal-research gloves”—over every station on the line, for the benefit of the health inspectors, but does anyone actually use them? Yes, a cook will slip a pair on every now and then, especially when he’s handling something with a lingering odor, like salmon. But during the hours of service gloves are clumsy and dangerous. When you’re using your hands constantly, latex will make you drop things, which is the last thing you want to do.

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Finding a hair in your food will make anyone gag. But just about the only place you’ll see anyone in the kitchen wearing a hat or a hairnet is Blimpie. For most chefs, wearing anything on their head, especially one of those picturesque paper toques—they’re often referred to as “coffee filters”—is a nuisance: they dissolve when you sweat, bump into range hoods, burst into flame.

The fact is that most good kitchens are far less septic than your kitchen at home. I run a scrupulously clean, orderly restaurant kitchen, where food is rotated and handled and stored very conscientiously. But if the city’s Department of Health or the E.P.A. decided to enforce every aspect of its codes, most of us would be out on the street. Recently, there was a news report about the practice of recycling bread. By means of a hidden camera in a restaurant, the reporter was horrified to see returned bread being sent right back out to the floor. This, to me, wasn’t news: the reuse of bread has been an open secret—and a fairly standard practice—in the industry for years. It makes more sense to worry about what happens to the leftover table butter—many restaurants recycle it for hollandaise.

What do I like to eat after hours? Strange things. Oysters are my favorite, especially at three in the morning, in the company of my crew. Focaccia pizza with robiola cheese and white truffle oil is good, especially at Le Madri on a summer afternoon in the outdoor patio. Frozen vodka at Siberia Bar is also good, particularly if a cook from one of the big hotels shows up with beluga. At Indigo, on Tenth Street, I love the mushroom strudel and the daube of beef. At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it; scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy Portuguese sausage.

Ilove the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.

Being a chef is a lot like being an air-traffic controller: you are constantly dealing with the threat of disaster. You’ve got to be Mom and Dad, drill sergeant, detective, psychiatrist, and priest to a crew of opportunistic, mercenary hooligans, whom you must protect from the nefarious and often foolish strategies of owners. Year after year, cooks contend with bouncing paychecks, irate purveyors, desperate owners looking for the masterstroke that will cure their restaurant’s ills: Live Cabaret! Free Shrimp! New Orleans Brunch!

In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family. It’s a haven for foreigners—Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Chinese, Senegalese, Egyptians, Poles. In New York, the main linguistic spice is Spanish. “Hey, maricón! chupa mis huevos” means, roughly, “How are you, valued comrade? I hope all is well.” And you hear “Hey, baboso! Put some more brown jiz on the fire and check your meez before the sous comes back there and fucks you in the culo!,” which means “Please reduce some additional demi-glace, brother, and reëxamine your mise en place, because the sous-chef is concerned about your state of readiness.”

Since we work in close quarters, and so many blunt and sharp objects are at hand, you’d think that cooks would kill one another with regularity. I’ve seen guys duking it out in the waiter station over who gets a table for six. I’ve seen a chef clamp his teeth on a waiter’s nose. And I’ve seen plates thrown—I’ve even thrown a few myself—but I’ve never heard of one cook jamming a boning knife into another cook’s rib cage or braining him with a meat mallet. Line cooking, done well, is a dance—a highspeed, Balanchine collaboration.

I used to be a terror toward my floor staff, particularly in the final months of my last restaurant. But not anymore. Recently, my career has taken an eerily appropriate turn: these days, I’m the chef de cuisine of a much loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where the customers eat their meat rare, vegetarians are scarce, and every part of the animal—hooves, snout, cheeks, skin, and organs—is avidly and appreciatively prepared and consumed. Cassoulet, pigs’ feet, tripe, and charcuterie sell like crazy. We thicken many sauces with foie gras and pork blood, and proudly hurl around spoonfuls of duck fat and butter, and thick hunks of country bacon. I made a traditional French pot-au-feu a few weeks ago, and some of my French colleagues—hardened veterans of the business all—came into my kitchen to watch the first order go out. As they gazed upon the intimidating heap of short ribs, oxtail, beef shoulder, cabbage, turnips, carrots, and potatoes, the expressions on their faces were those of religious supplicants. I have come home. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 19, 1999, issue.

Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018, was the host of “Parts Unknown.” His books include “Kitchen Confidential” and, with Laurie Woolever, “World Travel,” which was published this year.