Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen by Jason Sheehan

A mind-blowing account of life at the adrenalin-fuelled kitchen front line -- the story of a career spent in grungy diners and other down-and-dirty joints, Cooking Dirty takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless new level.

From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at the age of fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked at all kinds of restaurants across America, from Buffalo to Tampa to Albuquerque; at a French colonial and an all-night diner, at a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. In Cooking Dirty he tells the story of one man's addiction to the urgency, stress, and adrenalin of minimum-wage kitchen work. His universe becomes 'a small, steel box filled with knives and meat and fire', where the kitchen is a fraternity with its own rites and initiations: cigarettes in the walk--in freezer, sex in the basement, drugs everywhere.

Cooking Dirty is a passionate, funny, electrifying memoir of addiction: an addiction to kitchen work. It reveals the hell and glory of restaurant life, as told by a survivor. Jason Sheehan is his own unforgettable central character -- edgy, driven, irresistible. Eating out will never be the same again. 

Genres: Nonfiction - Memoir - Food - Cooking - Culinary