Santa Fe Tequila Company

Albuquerque, New Mexico, about eight years ago...

The rush started around five. There was never any way to gauge it — nothing scientific, no outward sign. Though we flew a jolly roger from the fryer end and my guys comported themselves like the hippest of pirates (bandannas, tattoos, ear and nose rings, long knives and a certain roughness of language and manner), we could only have wished for the sailor's sense of turning weather, of a change looming on the horizon. One minute it was quiet, the stone-floor dining room cool and silent. The next, boom: They were on us.

This was the Range, one of maybe a dozen restaurants that defined the middle-mark of New Mexican cuisine at that time and in that place. Not fancy, but not a taquería, either — a sort of jumped-up bistro, with red-chile-spiked tenderloin over Michoacán potatoes in place of steak frite and green-chile stew rather than soup a l'oignon, staffed by a good and relatively happy crew of dropouts and throat-cutters, bossed by owners who knew their business well, who'd already made a mint in the industry and were really only concerned with making two or three more. I was on the books as a line cook (sauté end and expo) but stood the post of chef de cuisine because one was required and no one else seemed interested in stepping up. I did ordering and fussed with the schedule, ran specials that sold (most of the time) like they had crack in 'em, and still worked nightly with my pans and knives, first pop through to last call, while the galley radio drooled droning rave music and my guys jumped off repeatedly to top up from the communal well of whatever party drug was available. Seeing a grillardin struggling to map out twenty steaks and burgers while high was a pretty good laugh. But for true comedy, you needed to watch a fry cook, bent on Ecstasy, attempting to swim through a busy Friday-night turn without permanently crippling himself by trying to hump the labels off the Frialator.

When the first orders began spooling off the printer, the cooks came in from wherever they'd been (mostly the alley) and jumped on the early checks with both feet, working fast to take full advantage of that initial surge of adrenaline and to shave the curve — to stay ahead of the wash of tops that would follow, surfing the curl of customers without getting swamped by a flood of deep-fried chimis and wild-mushroom polenta.

Kitchens are funny things. A busy one will often work better and faster than the same galley stuck in the doldrums of a slow day, week or age. And the whole fighting-ship analogy is apt: a busy crew, left with little time to think about their sorry lot and forever running under the constant pressure of the ticket printer, is a crew less likely to get up to pointless mischief and more likely to work together tightly, with every hand knowing its business and every plate a thoughtless, reflexive iteration of the one before. For a working cook, there's no fear quite like the fear of being forced to stand, in heavy whites and checks, before a blazing flat-top hour after hour with nothing to do but think about how much better your life might've been if only you'd taken your mother's advice years ago and become a welder or maybe a car thief. I've seen kitchens mutiny. I've been part of a couple, even led one. And these days, when I sit down to eat in a slow house where I am the only customer (or close enough), I feel that same clutch of fear in my chest when I think about the boys standing on the line, brainlessly arranging and rearranging their mise, jumping out for longer and longer cigarette breaks until, finally, they decide just not to come back. "Jesus..." I think. "What if I'd ended up here?"

"Jesus..." I thought, sitting in the echoing dining room of the Santa Fe Tequila Company a couple weeks back, my spine straight against the faux-adobe booth back, fingers running across the brass brads decorating the edge of the table. "What if I'd ended up here?"

Luckily, my party was large and raucous enough that the place didn't feel so desolate. Luckily, we were drinking enough (disdaining margaritas because I always have, going for icy Coronas and shots and half shots off the long but fairly pedestrian tequila list, which wastes space on Cabo Wabo and Cuervo tequilas but also has Don Julio Real, even if it goes for fifty bucks a shot) that, after a while, our own company was all we needed.