The door to Feld hides in its nook on Chicago Avenue. You could miss it in a blink. For Caroline Schrope, however, it’s the center of her Chicago.
On a Thursday in June, at around 11:30 a.m., Schrope, 28, her curly brown hair in pigtails, looped a black apron over her head and wrote 13 things on her prep list. By noon, she had crossed out the first three. Schrope sliced Benton’s 14-month smoked ham into small cubes at her station at Feld, Jake Potashnick’s year-old tasting menu restaurant in Ukrainian Village.
At Le Bouchon’s grill station on a Monday at noon, Kurtis Kincaid, 26, cut fennel as he waited for the servers on the lunch shift to hand him order tickets. His apron was tied loosely around his waist, leaving exposed the logo on his Vans T-shirt. Le Bouchon has served traditional French food in Bucktown since 1993.
When you eat at a restaurant, you spend time with your server. Maybe you chat with the bartender, maybe you don’t, but you can usually see them mix your drink. The chef’s name is probably on your menu, if it’s not in the name of the restaurant itself.
But you can’t spend time with line cooks because their hands are full. Behind a swinging metal door, they slice, dice, saute, fry, grill, stir. They stand for hours. Most of the time, they start the day before anyone else in the restaurant and stay well into the night.
Line cooks don’t make a lot of money. They also don’t get a lot of respect for their craft: Chicago foodies don’t toss around their names in conversation or discuss their creativity; celebrity status does not exist for line cooks.
Monday lunch: Le Bouchon
“We’re at 20 minutes for a snail,” said Nicolas Poilevey. Kincaid nodded and grabbed the pair of tongs resting on the oven handle. He reached into another oven and retrieved the cast-iron snail dish. It wasn’t hot enough, so he lit a gasoline burner with a stick lighter and shoved the snail dish between the stove’s rails. When the butter bubbled, he transferred the cast iron onto a doily on a ceramic plate and then carried the appetizer to the table himself.
Usually, the escargot at Le Bouchon takes a handful of minutes: they’re prepped in the back with scoops of herb butter, so Kincaid just has to throw them in the oven during service. But the kitchen’s excitement distracted him, and Kincaid had left his first snail cooking for too long.
He took a swig of his soda, stuck a toothpick with a paper French flag through a fried crab sandwich and pushed the plate onto the pass. He picked up a brioche bun he had slightly over-toasted, used a knife to scrape the most burnt part off, and then filled it with sausage, pouring grease from the pan on top.
The servers working the lunch service appeared with tickets in spurts. While the board was slow, Kincaid sliced fennel, his left hand moving machine-like. He joked with the person working saute behind him.
“I’m closer to the people I work with than I am to most of my family,” Kincaid said.
He has worked at Le Bouchon, on and off, for three years. Not a lifetime. Yet it has been more than enough time for his co-workers to see Kincaid at his worst and best, his drunkest and most sober moments, forcing down deepest frustration and cracking his funniest jokes. Three years, on and off, is hours and hours spent in too-close proximity, privy to one another’s mistakes, triumphs and growth.
Kincaid towered like a beanstalk in Le Bouchon’s small kitchen. At 6-foot-5, he is the tallest of the restaurant’s staff and therefore in charge of cleaning the walk-in fridge’s ceiling.
Kincaid grew up in Ionia, Michigan. He used to hide under the kitchen table while his grandmothers cooked so he could learn from them.
At 15, he asked the mom-and-pop diner his family frequented for a job as a dishwasher. His next dishwashing job was where he met “actual cook personalities,” like the town drunk who threw plates at Kincaid if they weren’t clean.
When he was 17, Kincaid dropped out of school and moved in with his older brother. He got his first real cooking job at Applebee’s, where he learned how to do things like cooling food and taking its temperature along the way. Tickets rang in fast and frequently, so Kincaid learned how to cook and prep at the same time.
It prepared him for the family-owned restaurant Olivera’s, which fed close to 500 people nightly. He would take orders over the phone while making four different pasta dishes. But when it stopped feeling like cooking and more like throwing ingredients together, Kincaid moved to Chicago.
He found his way to Le Bouchon and Obelix, both owned by Oliver and Nicolas Poilevey. When Kincaid was at Obelix, he was drinking too much, showing up hungover and making his co-workers’ lives hard. He quit to get a hold of himself.
Kincaid has finally settled into a stable routine at Le Bouchon. He works a double on Mondays and the morning shift Tuesdays through Fridays, so his schedule is almost in line with his girlfriend’s traditional 9 to 5 job.
For a few weeks, Kincaid thought he would return to school, earn a degree and seek a white-collar job. One that didn’t mean 14-hour shifts on his feet, one with paid time off and office happy hours. He is serious about his girlfriend and wants the opportunity to build a life with her. He also hasn’t been to a doctor in eight years and doesn’t have a credit card.
But Kincaid realized the restaurant life was his life, one he had embraced not because he stumbled upon it but because he chose it. And at what other job would the entire crew get matching wine cork tattoos?
“There’s always going to be soul in food,” Kincaid said.
