Drugs and Alcohol: Restaurants vs The Real World
Drugs and alcohol are the glue and the grease of the Food and Beverage Industry. They help us keep our shit together but also let us unwind and loosen up. The range of chemicals restaurant workers use to get through the day runs from aspirin to acid and many would be lost without something to help take the edge off. Sometimes people take it too far, on accident or on purpose, and the one thing we don’t hear a lot of is “Hey, you might want to get some help.”
O’Sullivans Wharf was my restaurant home for years and that place threw down. One night I was supposed to have a tequila drinking contest with my kitchen manager, at the time he was a guy who might start drinking Cuervo out of a wine glass an hour before he got off work. Instead, the night before the contest I got hammered, drove home in the rain and plowed my jeep directly into the side of a Post Office.
On a St. Patrick’s Day at the same place I saw a waitress get shit faced eating jello shots from the walk-in. The bartenders made hundreds of them and only about half were even intended for the customers. This poor girl got obliterated before noon and ended up walking out the back door and going home still wearing her apron with all of her cash and receipts. The FOH Manager was in a pickle that night. He finally got a hold of her but she was too embarrassed to come back in.
A few months ago a co-worker at a place with the same spirit as O’Sullivans, but a whole new generation of power drinkers, came into work dragging ass from the night before. He had gotten blackout drunk after his shift and spent the morning playing CSI with the evidence from the night before. He knew where his car started, and he knew where he woke up in it. Receipts in his pockets and the damage to his car allowed him to deduce that he had driven to an ATM 5 miles outside of town, pulled out $400, driven back…and ran over a curb and wrecked his rims. He woke up with no cash, a busted car, and no idea what happened. Naturally we gave him all kinds of shit, from telling him he probably got a hooker who robbed him, to convincing him he adopted a bunch of dogs that were waiting for him to pick them up.
Stories like these are normal in this industry. That doesn’t make them good, or acceptable, or anything to be proud of, but we get used to hearing them, as well as phrases like these: “The new server is hung over and running late.”, “The dishwasher just called from jail.”, “Can someone go pick up Kevin, he left his car at the strip club again.”
Most people forget nicotine is a drug but cigarettes are at the top of the list of things that help restaurant workers get through their day. It’s almost cliché, the image of the aproned cook standing by the back door of the kitchen smoking a cigarette. No matter what level they are cooking at, from a diner to fine dining, at the end of the rush you can almost always find a cook outside having a smoke while someone who doesn’t smoke is inside working. Yeah I said it. And the guy inside? He’s on Red Bull.
Every kitchen I’ve worked in has relied in one way or another on caffeine. Coffee and espresso, 5 hour energy, Rock Stars, Monsters, Yerba, Blue Sky (r.i.p), Red Bull, or just guzzling Ice Tea in a blazing hot kitchen, caffeine keeps us going when we forget to eat all day. Getting weak? Tired? You’re hungry but can’t stop to eat because you’ve only got 90 minutes before service and half a prep list to get done and the dish guy said he’s going to be late again because he missed the bus? You slam a NOS and dive back into the list. Then you blink and it’s 10pm and all you’ve had to eat all day is a crouton and energy drinks. Note to self…energy drinks are not food.
The real MVP of the kitchen however is weed. It’s in almost every restaurant in the country. I was at a Chili’s in the middle of nowhere Texas and didn’t know a soul in town but I needed some pot. I struck up a conversation with the bartender and by the end of my meal I had a bag waiting for me out back from one of the dish guys. Weed is the great equalizer. It helps you come down from the adrenaline pumping through you after a 3 hour push, you can relax while scrubbing equipment, and it makes it easier to accept your fate when you have to close the dishpit. Or if you’re by the book and wait until you’re done for the night before you light up, it’s still useful for getting you to a state where you can stop thinking about tickets and prep and what you have to do when you get in tomorrow and just sit for a moment and relax. Weed is everywhere…cooks are getting high in kitchens around the world whether it’s in the car, by the dumpsters, in the walk-in or even on the line…just blow it up the exhaust hood, it’ll be fine.
Which brings us to the bane of our industry…Alcohol. Most of us work within 20 feet of a full bar and it’s easy to clock out and have a drink in your hand within moments of sinking into that bar stool. You could be 3 shots and a couple beers deep before you know it just sitting there still at your job after work. You know who doesn’t have a full bar at work? Accountants. Grocery stores. Either does your mechanic, department store, bank, hospitals, or schools (although I support bars in the Teacher Lounges), and these are all good things. If Carol in the Housewares Department of Sears could do a few shots of Jaeger in the break room when she got off and then came in the next day and told everyone she smashed her rims doing doughnuts while blind drunk at 3am she would probably be put in a rehab. Somehow for us it’s not just acceptable but expected.
It’s simply the world we live in. You could walk into almost any restaurant in America and chances are you’ll find a grab bag of Scooby Snacks squirreled away somewhere. Coke, shrooms, meth, acid, amphetamines…at some point your food has been cooked by someone high on all of these. I used to love waiting tables on Vicadin...it felt like I was on ice skates all night. I’ve worked in kitchens that had house bongs, I had a manager get busted smoking weed in a freezer, and I once gave a Morphine tab I got from another line cook to my General freaking Manager when he asked me if I had anything that could help his back before we went on a catering. Dude was loose as a goose for the rest of the day.
Sometimes people cook their eggs a little too hard and end up needing some professional help…medical, mental…legal. My best prep guy once came in and said he needed 10 days off to go to rehab, right away. I said no problem and we all worked double shifts for a week until he got back clean and sober…but afterwards l kept the cooking wine behind the bar. I needed a lawyer for a DUI and the restaurant I worked at had a regular named Bobby Howlett (Best Lawyer in Norfolk) who had helped out so many employees he was basically on retainer. As an owner or a manager you can build a lot of loyalty if you understand when someone fucks up and give them a second chance. And maybe float their legal bills to get them out of jail and back onto the line too.
The point is restaurant people have lives normal people can’t handle. Hell WE can’t handle it sometimes. Sure, we party but we go to work early, we stay late, and we use knives and go from fire to ice all day long. We have to be creative and also exactly duplicate the same dishes day after day while thinking at top speed about every plate we’re working on. Coming down from that is not easy. I know of very few people in restaurants who don’t indulge in something to get through their day or to unwind afterwards. Whether it’s a whiskey, weed, or just chain-smoking cigarettes, using drugs and alcohol to help decompress is so widely accepted as to be considered a normal part of the job. This can distort the reality for anyone who actually needs help, which let’s face it, a lot of us probably do.
If you or someone you care enough about to have an awkward conversation with has a problem, here’s some numbers you can call. There’s nothing wrong with getting help either, whether for yourself or someone else. It isn’t being weak and if someone you know is fucking up enough that their employment is on the line, helping them to get treatment could save their job, and you know how hard it is to find good help these days. Jokes aside, take care of yourself...and each other.
The Alcohol & Drug Addiction Resource Center: 800-390-4056
National Drug Information Treatment and Referral Hotline: 800-662-HELP (4357)
Alcohol and Drug Abuse Helpline and Treatment: 800-234-0420
