I put off reading Stanley Park for a while, not for any more involved reason than a preference for not reading a professor's material prior to going into their workshop. I don't like to write towards the instructor's work, which to me feels like an inevitable consequence of absorbing their voice.
With the caveat I haven't yet read Timothy Taylor's decades-later novel The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, I found parts of Stanely Park somewhat naive. The writing is brilliant, the concept is satirically satisfying, but maybe it's because I'm a later generation of cook that it felt a little too nice all around. Jeremy seems like a nice guy, a sweet guy, a chef one rarely encounters. And that's where it all gets a little too plated for me, because even at finest of my limited fine dining career, I never once met this guy in person.
In 2017 I was just about out. I never had what someone would call a cooking "career", just a series of jobs that began in a Quiznos in 2006 and ended when I walked off the SPUD catering team because I was tired of the backbiting climate, the overt ableism and the literal cockroaches. But it was the overpriced West Van cardboard pizza joint where I trained the staff and redesigned the menu where I finally put an end to it.
It wasn't just the thieving of staff tips from the debit machine that started me on the road of what I guess we could call "cook-lit", but the cheapness of it all. The tawdriness of the Vancouver restaurant industry, the seat-of-the-pants, shady below-boardness of it. The way businesses will seasonally hire and fire for 89 days to avoid the 90 day cause rule. The part time dishwasher who needs to be supplemented by the cooks. Getting dropped into an Irish pub without being told the favour being done you is actually a favour to someone else - as their failing business goes through a sales transition no one bothered to tell you about.
I liked Jeremy and I would've liked working with him. It would've made a real change from the dudes I worked with, ranging from bone head Gym-Tan-Laundry enthusiasts to ex-cons and professed antisemites. My ex was exceptional for being too sedintary and neutered to find his way to being a fully professed kitchen bigot, but you wouldn't know it by his search history.
We've got some very nice restaurants here but a lot of the bog-standards deserve to fail. You can't even find a decent dive bar that doesn't have layers of events and specials loaded on to what should be an uncomplicated experience. Rents are high, rates are high, it's hard to be a nice guy who wants to make nice food. In many ways, by maxing his credit cards, committing minor fraud and driving himself into insolvency, Jeremy is actually fulfilling what is now, in my experience, standard operating procedure. His psy-op on Dante doesn't quite land for me not because it isn't brilliant (and I won't look at a Stanely Park raccoon the same way) but because it just wasn't vindictive enough for me.
I was already plying that vindictiveness on a different day of the week in the TV Writing II workshop, where I had a half hour pilot that began as "White Meat" and later became the hour long Knives, which was my answer to all of my anger at the kitchen industry. I don't think it occurred to me to write prose fiction about it. Jeremy's coup de grâce at the end of Stanley Park is more of a prank than what I had in mind, though I wasn't read up in the matter at the time. I was mostly just pissed off, and it took my voice where it needed to go.
Stevie is my Jeremy, the me that might have been if I'd gone to culinary school instead of film school. I cooked my way through, holding down a series of jobs from gourmet pizziaola to Food Network Diner prep cook. In my late teens/early 20s I was good at talking myself out of a job and did so on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes it was my fault, but sometimes it was just the ethically ad hoc nature of the business. With or without portfolio you're a mercenary and they treat you like one. So I have the tattoos and the scars, but I don't have a whole lot of affection for the bosses.
Stevie doesn't choose her revenge - it chooses her. The daughter of a famed television kitchen personality now fading from alzheimers, she is aware she has a legacy to work around and she takes humbling position of second chair even though she's a better chef - and more important to me - a better worker and a better boss than the executive, Mike. She reports Mike's wage theft to the owner, unaware of the permanent consequences of her decision.
I knew pretty early Mike was going to end up on the special menu. "Knives" gets compared to The Bear a lot, which is flattering, but at the end of the day it's not about (or not wholly about) a love of food. It's about a woman working in a crushing industry, trying to pay her father's medical bills, and who ends up allowing herself to be corrupted.
A lot of my other influences came together to inspire that turn, as well as a personal desire to raise a middle finger at the culture of misogyny and abuse that coloured my experience as a utility cook. I didn't learn shit about making food from any one of my bosses that I can recall - the education was always lateral, from other cooks. So while I love food I am not particularly romantic about innovation, about the seduction of plating or the artistic trickery of pulling toothpicks through syrup to add dollars to an already inflated price point.
No, my gripe is pretty blue collar. Even The Menu is a satire on eating culture rather than on kitchen culture. There's a reason Bruno, the owner of my fictional Fausta, is actually an exceptionally courteous and considerate hands-off kind of boss - because he's also a killer. And if you asked the average cook today if they'd rather work for a teachable-moment-dispensing emotionally insecure nag who flies off the handle, or if they'd rather work for an excellent, reasonable boss who happens to murder people occassionaly, you'd get some hesitation before getting your answer.
I think part of the reason Stanely Park did not catch me earlier is that it was just before the wave set off by Anthony Bourdain. Kitchen Confidential came out only a few years before but it wasn't yet the cook's article of faith. He wasn't yet a household name, putting the hurt on preconcieved notions of fine dining, as well as finding the heart of locale by travelling outside of the respected culinary fortress. My feelings about him and his philosophy inform my relationship with food and cooking far more than my time in the industry ever did.
So while I like Jeremy and I like Stanley Park - from a cook point of view, there are many other reasons to read the book - I'm looking forward to The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf. Because of the "fall" part. I know a little about what's in the book, and I know a lot about wage theft, abuse and sexual harassment in the work place, and that all feels a lot less whimiscal and a lot more true to me.
So I'm looking forward to reading it, even though I know it's going to get to me. I enjoyed Stanley Park, but it didn't get to me.
