At Café Eurosia back in ’94 we had this super hefty kid, Vinny. We called him Wooba and despite his many good points he was a serious pain in the ass to work with. First off, he was my co-chef Timmy’s boy. Came to Boston with him and appointed himself T.C.’s watchdog, a 400-pound Chihuahua, running around yelping and nipping at the legs of the new guy in the house to see if he’d leave. He’d also eat half the food on the line before the night was through, with a particular fondness for shellfish. He loved everything edible but where shrimp were concerned he had a $30/night wholesale habit. That translates into over a c-note in lost revenue and I was having trouble impressing that on the big bastard. Didn’t want to fire him either – he brought color to the line and was dependable when things got hairy – but I was running out of ways to keep the crustaceans out of his giant maw.
My arrival at the helm of Eurosia meant that the Europe was generally out of the fusion equation and Southern US/Caribbean was in. With Tim’s expertise the Asian influences blew in more from the south and everything took on a more tropical flare. We had myriad chile types at hand and lots of stuffed distilled from them. As a Staten Island buffalo, Wooba had a low tolerance for spice and I turned to the hottest shit I had to break him of his shellfish addiction. He kept a small sauté pan to cook his shrimp so my initial efforts involved dumping minced habanero chiles in it when he wasn’t looking. Sent him screaming to the prep kitchen. Then into the walk-in fridge to guzzle a gallon of milk – it was priceless to see that rhino perched on a crate with rivers of dairy cascading down his face, chins, neck and coat. But it didn’t bring his shrimping to a halt – it just made him double check what was in his pan.
So I’d rub some minced habs on a shrimp or two on top of the others – the easiest ones to grab because laziness works at all scales for the extra tubby. He’d eat, choke on the fire in his lungs and scream his way back to the milk crates. Didn’t stop his pillaging but he was getting cautious. He began to inspect his shrimps carefully. I had to resort to stuffing the shrimp’s digestive cavity with a whole mess of habanero seeds. Doing that was starting to border on violence in the work place. But as this bastard was incorrigible the course of action seemed reasonable. And it was the funniest deterrent yet since he went smashing through bodies and equipment to drink more milk than ever just before vomiting it all back up. Most folks would have thrown in the towel at that point and turned to more cost-conscious gluttony. Isaac, the sauce guy, would prep extra scallion pancakes for my snacking so I could easily suggest he make a vat of batter for Wooba. But the big boy had to push his luck one last time – the same night some of Tim’s NYC pals had come in with a bottle of pure habenero extract. Whatever the fuck that entailed, it was black as evil and smelled like the core of the earth. The little drop I tasted was like having Satan kick in your teeth and jam a cloven hoof down your throat. And wouldn’t you know Wooba had been leering at the shrimp tin like a prawn pedophile. I smeared all the shrimp with that plutonium sludge and gave them a toss to make the color diminish – they looked no darker than some individuals in a lot of tiger shrimp. Things were slow enough for me to be off the line and Vinny resumed his perpetual feast while I watched from the lounge.
The howling was magnificent. With an open kitchen it scared the crap out of some customers, the clanking of flatware dropped on plates chorused Wooba’s pain. The usual routine ensued – milk by the bucket and some Herculean puking in the trash. The point was sinking in. But not ever was it fully made, go figure. He was still a poacher, but never when I was within sabotage range.
So is there lesson here? It’d be easy to think that some people just can’t be taught anything, But Wooba was probably more intent on not losing or at least not giving up until I did. Still we both could have benefited from having his humongous stomach stapled. But there is a little food science in the story too: Notice that Wooba’s agony increased as we moved from whole minced chiles through seeds and onto the extract? That’s because capsaicin, the actual anger in the soul of the pepper, is concentrated in the reproductive complex of the fruit: the seeds and pithy stuff they hang off of. If you take the seeds and trim all the whiteish ribs and whatnot from inside a habenero or other hot pepper then you taste their flavor contribution to a dish more clearly. You can always add some seeds later to rekindle the inferno.