Do not get wrong! The peak moment of a great chef is not that of sudden and divine inspiration for the creation of a new dish, nor the moment in which he puts his nose to the pot to verify that the sauce has turned out wonderful, nor the glimpse that tear of emotion to emerge in the tear duct of that client who has been pushed to relive a happy childhood running through green meadows full of poppies and butterflies. No. A great chef truly shines at the moment of passing, when his function becomes the same as that of a door hinge: distributing forces, settling tensions and organizing tasks, being the threshold of two opposing worlds where they meet. the rhythm and bearing of the room, with the fire and ferocity of the kitchen, enduring the friction without falling apart. Squeaking as little as possible. And hurry!
Outside of Olympus there is a very basic earthly experience that can bring them closer to understanding a little what it feels like to live the adrenaline and stress of the kitchen pass in a restaurant firsthand: putting the purchase in the bags in the supermarket.
We all go to the supermarket with the intention of taking the most and the best in exchange for our money, and each one has their own strategy. There are those who go with the premeditated shopping list, there are those who go without a list, and there are those who go smartly for the donuts at the back of the shelf, those that have just been replaced and with the latest expiration date. All good.
Like any normal person, I invest in inspecting all the packages of cookies thoroughly, the time it would take me to make the above mentioned at home, with the obsession of finding the package that seems to have the fewest broken cookies. The package with the fewest dents is the good one, and finding it sets a small flame of victory on my chest.
Up the aisle, down the aisle, in the cart they go to the back and, on the one hand, the robust and heavy containers of detergents and shampoos, imprisoning melons and watermelons so that they do not roll from here to there, and on the other, bottles of sauces or drinks, cans and yoghurts, which have to be upright and stable so as not to end up shaken, that a recently opened yoghurt without its pristine, smooth and crack-free surface looks like used yoghurt; on top, the bags with fruits and vegetables, delicate things, but not so much. Above all, as if suspended on an altar, that little bag of mezclum carefully selected where there doesn’t seem to be a single limp leaf, the blister of wafers without a single crumb, and that package of noodles where there are none broken. With such a car, she arrives at the checkout line wrapped in a halo of triumph and levitating two fingers off the ground. While you stand in line, your internal clock goes off and your perception of time warps and goes into “being tortured” mode. In the words of the psychologist Pau Obiol, of the Higher Institute of Psychological Studies of Barcelona, “when we are perceiving the situation in which we find ourselves as totally negative, our attention is directed to the passage of time, to counting the minutes and seconds of waiting. That is why time seems to pass more slowly. This trance combo is maintained until your turn comes, at which point you suddenly wake up and hit the ground running.
The most robust and heaviest products are the ones that will enter the conveyor belt first, with the idea that they arrive before anything else to occupy their positions in the lower part of the bags. Later, as they move away, those who don’t know very well where to put will come to play; but at the end of it all, sure-sure, the delicate things will go, the wafers, the breadsticks, the salad leaves, those perfect noodles, all placed in the reverse order of how they should be in the bags… as if matter.
The tape runs unstoppable, your belongings reach the scanner, cross it and accumulate at the end of the ramp. You can feel the density of the trance of those waiting in line behind you in your temples, the beep-beep of the reader insists on hurrying and, since you can’t be taking things out of the car, paying and putting things in the bags at the same time, always, inevitably, the moment comes when everything gets out of your control and chaos breaks out . The yoghurts fall flat and you suddenly feel vulnerable.
Defenselessness accumulates in your throat, the eyes injected with impatience from the rest of the customers stare into the back of your neck, and the boy in the beanie crushes the salad with the dishwasher and the pasta with the melon, looks at you insistently, waiting for pay, finish bagging the purchase, buy a lottery number and show the customer card, all at the same time everywhere, while inside you wonder if what has just been torn is the biodegradable bag or your joie de vivre, and if it is not for that reason it would almost be said that you feel like crying.
The next time you hear a chef complain about the stress or tension of a Saturday night dinner service at a trendy restaurant, raise an eyebrow and relativize his words. You already know what it feels like.
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