Trampled Underfoot Update

Hello Readers!

So, I realize that it has been over a month since I posted a new excerpt on Trampled Underfoot. There has been a cumulations of events (including getting terribly sick, hosting my father-in-law for a weekend, and visiting a remote lake with no internet connectivity for memorial day) that have preventing me from spending my weekend time on Trampled Underfoot.

However, do not fret! I have begun working on a project to get the entire work published and available for sale online. In addition, because my father would like to share his story with the world free of charge, I will also be providing a soft copy download of the work for those who do not want to purchase the hardcover book.

It may be some weeks before the book is polished enough for publishing. In the meantime, I will continue to post new excerpts here on the Tramped Underfoot blog site.

We appreciate all of your feedback (positive or negative), so please feel free to post your comments!

Thank you for reading our story!

Happy cooking always,

Chelse

The Mecca of Chefs

Banquets settled down, so I started to search for a way to serve better food. Takashi would come to work every day at 1:00 PM and the first thing he would do was go pick up his food from the storeroom. He was the shit. He ordered stuff that I had never heard of like Turbot, Brill, Loup De Mar, and my new favorite fish John Dory (aka St. Pierre). I would show up in the storeroom everyday at one just to see what he ordered. I would also spend my nights off in Takashi’s kitchen. I would just stand there and ask him not only what he was doing, but also why he was doing it. It was a fun little game to him, because he would never tell me. He would just make me guess until I got it right. His answers were short and simple: If I was right, he would say, “That‟s correct.” If I was wrong, he would say, “No.”

He would cook anything he felt like for his guests. Whenever I was there, he would pass me a small plate to try, as he went along with his evening. I remember the first time I tried John Dory.

The Anatole

The year was 1984, and fourteen countries had just boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. There was a new girl on the music seen that called herself Madonna, and everyone was playing “Like a Virgin.” It seemed as good a time as any to get the hell out of Utah.

My sister Cindy was so excited about the possibility of Stacey, Chelse, and I coming down to Dallas that she had taken my resume to this super hotel with three thousand rooms and fourteen restaurants, called The Loews Anatole. I had three or four telephone interviews with this guy named Morris, the area director of banquets at the Anatole. Morris offered me thirty five thousand dollars a year to be a sous chef in charge of banquets. I accepted. After all, it was ten thousand more than Max was paying me.

Kicked Out of the Nest

The last year of my apprenticeship was totally different than the first two and a half years. Suddenly, everything had changed. Hodgi started to deal coke more and more at work. He got John, the director of food and beverage, hooked so bad that he was outside the hotel in his BMW waiting for Hodgi to get off every single night. John had a master’s degree from Cornell in hotel management. What a waste. He got fired and a couple of years later he decapitated himself in a single car accident flying down a canyon going to get just a little more from Hodgi. Hodgi was fired shortly after, and within a couple of years he was pulled out of a lake with a bullet in his head.

The Line Brigade

When I got back to the hotel Roget had already put the word out to everybody to not say a single word to me in regard to the food show. He could be kind like that sometimes. I guess he had figured that I had been embarrassed enough for one day. It didn’t last long.

A couple of days later Dorothy Hamill was in the Hotel for Ice Capades. You would have thought she was Mick Jagger by the way Roget was going off. She ordered a Seafood Louie salad. You don’t see it very often now, but in the seventies that salad was on every menu.  Roget had told me to make a perfect Louie. Tom quickly jumped on my station to try to hog some glory. Roget had gone to his office to get this book that he had famous people sign whenever he fed them. When he got back to her table with the book, we had already served the salad. Right after she signed it, she took a bite and quickly spit it out. We had served Dorothy Hamill rotten crab! Roget calmly walked back to the line.

Fishmonger

I had survived another conference, and Dawn and I were getting ready for a great summer. Life was so much better without having to fight with anyone (i.e. my mother). No one screamed at any one else, and everyone was kind and considerate. What a concept! Dawn and I finally started to see how other people lived. On top of that, I had really begun to move up at the Hotel. Three apprentices had quit, so I now had the third highest ranking seniority (of all the apprentices). Plus, it was fun teaching people twice my age how to cook.

One day, Roget got in a couple of hundred fresh whole king salmon. I loved to clean salmon. I was fast and good at it. When I first started my apprenticeship I butchered the shit out of them, so Roget made me clean every salmon in the whole hotel until I got good at it. That was over a year ago, but I had still cleaned a couple of salmon every day since. I was a very proud eighteen-year-old fishmonger. I had broken my arm riding my skateboard, so when I walked by and offered to help Roget clean all of the salmon, he declined. 

My Exit Strategy

I had spent my spring break and my seventeenth birthday constantly working.  I hadn’t been home in a week.  I decided to go home since I had school the next morning.  I remember thinking on the way there that all I wanted for my birthday was more than three hours of sleep. 

When I got home, there were some birthday cards on the kitchen table and a film container filled with pot from my oldest sister, Kris.  I noticed that there were also some suitcases in the living room.  I wondered who was there. 

Conference

It’s funny when I think about those days now.  All I remember is the food, and it was the bomb.  The food that was served at the Hotel Utah in the late seventies was as good as or better than anything I have seen to date.  Learning how to cook there has been the gift that has kept on giving, my entire culinary career.  Everyone was French, and it was exactly like learning to cook in France.  One thing about the Mormons is that they can afford to hire the best, and they did.  My training was regimented, complex, and diversified.  The kitchen brigade commanded respect, even if we were stoned all the time.

I was nine months into my apprenticeship when the Conference buzzes starting infiltrating the kitchen.  Conference is a four or five day period held annually in the Spring.  Essentially, Conference amounts to vast amounts of Mormons, from across the world, converging in Temple Square to eat, drink, and listen to their prophets speak.  The hotel would do over a thousand meals a meal-period through four different avenues: The Coffee Shop (called “The Coffee Shop” despite the fact that it didn’t serve any coffee), banquet halls, room service, and the gourmet restaurant at the top of the building, appropriately named The Roof.  We would start prepping four days in advance of the five-day conference, totaling nine days of continuous eighteen-hour shifts.  I was intimidated just thinking about it.

Candy

The year was 1977, and this new job just rocked my world.  Not only was my world changing, but everyone’s world was changing.  There were gay people proudly waiting on every table.  There was a new drug on the street called cocaine, and the Rolling Stones (my favorite band) had just sold out to this new kind of dance music called disco with their new album release Some Girls.  Everything around me was different, except my home.  It was the greatest summer of my life. 

Every day, all six apprentices would take our break at exactly 4:30 PM, marching out of the kitchen in a single file line.  We walked right past security to go sit in a van that was parked right in front of the Mormon temple.  We would smoke out, listening to the Grateful Dead.  I loved my new friends, they were all in their mid-twenties and they treated as if I was as old as they were.  I tried as hard as I could to act the part, thinking about every word before it came out of my mouth.  This, in turn, led me to say very few words at all. 

I’m a junkie…

Today is March 19^th, 2006. March 11th was my youngest son’s birthday, Todd Cody Hall. He’s been dead for quite a while now, but I still celebrate his birthday every year, silently in my heart. On January 28^th, 2006 (my middle son’s birthday), I was riding motor-cross bikes with my son Parker, nineteen, and my son John, the birthday boy at seventeen. There are few things on this earth that give you a rush like the one you get flying across the beautiful Arizona desert at eighty miles per hour, clamped down on a CR 450. Suddenly, I found myself flying through the air without my bike. I landed on my head and back. Then, when I came to, I couldn’t breathe. People have accused me of having a death wish, but, believe me, at that moment there was nothing more important to me than being able to gasp for air and stay alive.

Both of my boys were right on my tail when I bit it. They were both trying to figure out how to help me, taking off my helmet and goggles. The look in both of their eyes was shear panic and distress. I remember thinking, “They love me so much. Just look how worried they are.” I thought of how much I love them as well. It seemed like an eternity, but I was finally able to gasp for air, and the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m alright. I’m alright. Just settle down.” Simply hearing my voice telling them what to do, made them both feel a lot better.