Your Lamb Shank Listens to Death Metal

Oven timers, sex jokes and experimental rock—the sounds of the back-of-house say a lot about your food and the lives of the cooks who prepare it.

Picture this: you’re properly hammered and en route to the local demolition derby. You follow the sounds of metal, fire, and engines through the town and to a metal door propped open on a dirt lot. Your search for the supposed loudest event in town has led you to a commercial kitchen. Don’t worry, there’s just as much drinking to be done here.

It’s no surprise that the sounds of the back-of-house are comparable to that of a spectacularly destructive motorsport. There’s a buzzing robot-coupe (commercial food processor) mincing vampire-eradicating quantities of garlic, a chef aggressively slamming a hotel-pan of bread pudding against a cutting board, and a fry cook who has found that the fancy oven’s timer buzz can be changed to a trumpet sound. Now, each time a side of bread is warm and ready, the back-of-house rings in a triumphant brass fanfare (chef is not happy).

The front line is just as deafening; Hood vents rattle above the range, a poor waitress drops an Aperol Spritz sending shards of glass across the dining room, and a 25-top bachelorette party is being sat in the corner. The newly hired expo calls out orders in a fascinatingly backwards manner, and chef yells toward the server’s station, “How many times have I said we don’t split by two!”

Outside of service time, some form of music is always playing. The music taste of a cook is wildly varying. However, I’ve been able to divide music-loving line cooks into two categories. First, you have the ones that balance the chaos of the job with smooth instrumentals and innocent singer-songwriter tunes. These are the types to start the morning with classic church music or a Disney soundtrack (one chef de cuisine’s choice was all too often “Under the Sea”). Then, you have the cooks that need an incredible amount of stimulation to start their fifteen-hour day. I fall into this category. I’m no cocaine user, so my lack of adrenaline has led me to the music of Death Grips, Lazer Dim 700, and Charli XCX as substitute for a morning snort. Other prime choices for these dopamine-craving cooks include Meshuggah, Chief Keef and Gojira.

It's all this cacophony that forces line cooks toward other forms of communication with themselves and each other. As tension rises, the kitchen becomes comparable to a tropical bird sanctuary during mating season. My buddy and Garde Manger man yells “lick my taint!” when he gets a new salad on the board—this is how I know he’s seen the new-in. The executive chef, who is typically the most professional man I work with, is prone to letting catchy TikTok audios slip through his lips during the dinner rush—this tells me he’s in a flow state. I once had a coworker who couldn’t help himself from adding “issss” to the end of all his callbacks. “Heard that, gumbisss, quailisss, bone marrisss”. Another would tap a bowl twice on the counter before unloading his fries. A signature tick of mine is to say “open season, open season” to myself about every five minutes. This is done entirely subconsciously. I’ll also let out a tense grunt here and there or a high pitched WAIEEE! whenever my mind tells me to.

In communicating with each other, the biggest dollops of auditory glue that hold a kitchen together are scattered, slightly-offensive name-calls and jokes—sex jokes, fat jokes, fat-sex jokes, you name it. Ironically, it’s things like this that tell me the speaker is no longer on edge and will be open to a serious discussion—yes, serious—such as a pitch for a special or an expression of contempt for the lazy new hire.

The sous chef slams a bratwurst-filled half-hotel pan in front of the chef de cuisine. “This is what your mom looked like last Saturday night.”

“What’s the difference between peanut butter and jam? Well, I can’t peanut butter this dick in you, but I can sure jam it.”

“What do you get when you mix Sir Elton John with a sabretooth tiger? I’m not sure, but you’d better keep it away from your ass!”

Of course, these examples are unrealistically tame compared to most back-of-house remarks that would never make it out of the kitchen without federal questioning. Once a cook’s apron is tied, their filter is off. They are free to stim, swear, and slander as they please. The hissing of red-hot sizzle trays in the sink and catfish in the fryer leave only the most aggressive exclamations for others to really hear.

The overwhelming wall of noise in a commercial kitchen makes the language of a cook progressively more hostile, but it also brings the kitchen family closer together. Try saying “help me” on the line. You won’t get any. Try instead yelling, “fuckin' cunt!” and flipping a middle finger toward your tickets. Someone will be there, with a genuine helping hand, to throw a few extra steaks on your grill. Profanity is how we show urgency and love in such a cacophonous environment. Being met with a “fuckin’ hell” or a “there’s that bitch again” is nothing but a warm hug translated into the only language that can be heard over the ringing of an oven timer.