Las Vegas is a city built by breakfast specials. Sex and gambling, too, of course, and divorce and vaudeville and the creative use of neon. But the energy for all that vice had to come from somewhere, and mostly it came from eggs. In the early days, when depositing your savings in machines designed to cheat you still seemed a dubious proposition, the casinos offered cut-rate rooms and airfares. And eggs, always eggs. “They used to line up down the hall for the ninety-nine-cent special,” a cook from the old Lindy’s café in the Flamingo told me. “One time, so much grease built up in the ceiling that it came down the walls and set fire to the flat-tops. Pretty soon, the hood caught on fire and the extinguishers went off with that chemical that looks like smoke, and then the Fire Department came in. Everybody just kept on eating. They said, ‘Does this mean my food will take longer now?’ ”
The ninety-nine-cent special has been lost to history: the new Vegas rarely stoops to giveaways. The empty stretch of desert where Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo, in 1946, has become the center of the Strip, home to America’s thirteen largest hotels. (The MGM Grand, which has 5,044 rooms, is the largest; the Flamingo is eighth, with 3,545.) Up the street, at the Wynn hotel, which opened this spring, two eggs can cost eleven-fifty, and a caviar breakfast for two with Dom Perignon is three hundred and fifty dollars from room service. Even Lindy’s has had a makeover. It calls itself the Tropical Breeze Café now. Its nicotine-yellow walls have been repainted a sunnier shade, and it looks out on a water garden populated by turtles, koi, and some disgruntled-looking penguins from southern Africa.
Still, a good egg, honestly cooked, is what brings in most customers, and they eat them in staggering quantities. Last year alone, the cooks at the Tropical Breeze cracked well over a million of them. As a woman at the local Culinary Workers Union put it, “Egg cooks are worth their weight in gold in this town.”
At six o’clock on a recent Saturday morning, a few early risers and ashen-faced all-nighters were already gathered in front of the café hostess. Scott Gutstein, the café’s head chef, could hear the white noise of their chatter picking up volume, like the leading edge of some oceanic weather system. “You can feel it building,” he said, sitting in his cramped office next to a walk-in refrigerator. “I worked swing shift last night. Busy. When I came out at midnight, the streets were packed.” He scanned the inventory list on his computer one more time—on an average day, the Tropical Breeze consumes some three hundred pounds of bacon alone—then buttoned up his white, double-breasted jacket. He checked the pocket on his left sleeve for his kitchen implements, which were color-coded for quick access: blue thermometer, red paring knife, black pager, yellow highlighter. Then he leaned over to read a handwritten sheet taped on the door by his assistant chef.
“O.K., here’s the lineup,” he said. “We’ve got Martin, the omelette man, and Joel on over-easies. René is doing pancakes and French toast—he’s so strong, he just pushes it out—and we have Debbie on the eggs Benedict. I’m not used to watching women cook in high-stress situations, but she’s surprised the shit out of me. She kicks ass. Frankie will do the steak and eggs, and Edgar will fill in for whoever is taking a break.” He grinned. “You can’t hurt these guys. I mean, I’ve been all over the country in all kinds of kitchens. I’ve worked in New Jersey. I’ve worked in L.A. I thought I saw the best, but these guys? Nasty.”
Gutstein, who is thirty-eight, was born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, a loyal Yankees fan even in their most fruitless years. He keeps a dusty Don Mattingly mug on his desk and a picture of Joe DiMaggio at spring training on the wall, and likes to think of his cooks as their short-order equivalents. When he describes their feats at the grill, his voice grows clipped and overheated, like an announcer’s on AM radio: “I thought Bally’s was busy next door. This place annihilates it. By a thousand covers a day. With less people.” Gutstein has a round, eager face that’s perpetually flushed, with pale eyebrows and fleshy earlobes. He has wide brown eyes and short, sausagy arms, and the over-all demeanor of a very large and very precocious toddler, given to bursts of impatience and spleen, but mostly just happy to be there, watching things flip and whirl around him.
Saturday morning is zero hour for short-order cooks. The café, which prepares some twenty-five hundred meals on an average weekday, may serve an extra thousand on weekends, with the same cooks. As Gutstein made his way down the long galley kitchen, between the line of grills, griddles, and deep fryers against the wall and the stainless-steel serving counter, with its hot lights and warming trays, his cooks were entrenching themselves for the breakfast rush. They plunged quadruple baskets of chopped potatoes into hot oil, pre-poached three dozen eggs, and mixed hash in a tub the size of a baptismal font. Busboys squeezed past with stacks of plates two feet high. Runners jogged in with carts of diced peppers and onions, mushrooms, bacon, and shredded cheese. “They’re bringing the troops ammunition,” Gutstein said. Then he looked around with a satisfied smirk. “The best term for it is ‘controlled chaos,’ ” he said. “It gets crazy. I love it. Grown men come out of here crying.”
I first heard of the short-order cooks of Las Vegas nearly twenty years ago, when I was working at a breakfast place in Seattle called Julia’s 14-Carat Café. By then, I’d cooked at a half-dozen restaurants and hamburger joints, and spent two months as the chef at a nursing home, making dishes like American Soufflé. (Take two loaves of white bread, slather each slice with oleo, douse with egg substitute, and bake.) But those were just summer jobs, for the most part. Julia’s was full-time work, and it wasn’t clear that I had anything better waiting for me. I’d been out of college for a year, and frying eggs had begun to seem suspiciously like a career choice.
The classic short-order career began in the Army or the Navy, where kids who had never cooked were suddenly ordered to feed thousands. The military taught speed, volume, sanitation, and the rudiments of American comfort food, and the best cooks carried their skills into civilian life. Well into the nineteen-fifties, short-order cooking was a huge, informal guild with its own peculiar Cockney (“dog soup” for water, “moo juice” for milk, “nervous pudding” for Jell-O, “zeppelins in a fog” for sausages and mashed potatoes). By the nineteen-seventies, though, the craft had seriously declined. Fast-food franchises had replaced most diners, and “point of sale” ticketing systems—in which servers send orders from terminals in the dining room straight to printers in the kitchen—had helped silence the old diner slang. What was once a skilled profession was now largely the province of part-timers and students on summer break.
Julia’s was a throwback. A hippie coffee shop in the Moosewood mold, it made everything to order, from scratch: sourdough pancakes, alfalfa-sprout omelettes, toast with the texture and density of prairie sod. If all those wheat berries had any fibrous benefits, they were more than offset by the pounds of butter and bacon fat we used, but people didn’t seem to mind. The café was always full. A few local celebrities had made it their favorite hangout, including the cartoonist Gary Larson, who used to sit in the corner by the window while I made his breakfast. Julia’s had a high ceiling, heavy wooden tables, and an open kitchen that jutted into the dining room so that customers could witness a cook’s every oafish move. In the early weeks, I ruined several hundred eggs learning to crack them one-handed and flip them in the pan. I took comfort by imagining myself in future “Far Side” cartoons, having mordant exchanges with a chicken across the counter.
But mostly I just tried to keep up. The waiters scrawled out their orders in shorthand (“oe” for over easy, “sunny” for sunny-side up, “pot” for fried potatoes), clipped them on a revolving rack, and spun them around for the cooks to see on the other side of the serving counter. As business picked up, the wheel spun faster, till tickets filled its perimeter and began to double up. There were only two cooks per shift, and I once heard that we made an average of three hundred and fifty meals every morning, which seemed an astonishing number. Yet the other cooks never seemed fazed. They cracked eggs two at a time without breaking the yolks and kept four, five, or six pans going simultaneously. They moved with such unvarying precision that some suffered from repetitive-stress injuries. One of them, a scrawny black man who lived on a houseboat with his son, had developed a kind of tennis elbow from handling frying pans; another, whom I’ll call Jack, had thrown out his hip after years of pivoting from the stove to the serving counter.
When I called Julia’s recently—it’s known simply as the 14-Carat Café now—the owner told me that she had fired Jack years ago. “He was a worthless human being,” she said. “All he did was sit and eat coffee cake all day long.” But he was the fastest cook I’d ever seen. Tall and paunchy, with stringy brown hair and a drooping mustache, he managed to look crisp and light on his feet in the kitchen. His cooking was a seamless sequence of interchangeable tasks, reduced to their essential motions: crack, flip, scoop, pour, crack, pour, flip, scoop. It reminded me of an athletic performance in its unhurried intensity, its reliance on muscle memory. It reminded me of my mother. She had gone to cooking school in Switzerland, but her true skill wasn’t preparing gourmet recipes from a book; it was making the same beloved dishes—Spätzle, Reisbrei, Bratkartoffeln—perfectly every time. It was getting four or five of them hot to the table simultaneously, though they all required different cooking times, and doing so while phones rang and children squealed and pets wound their way between her feet.
I tried to explain this to Jack one morning, in somewhat less personal terms. We were leaning against the counter waiting for the place to open, watching the waitresses take chairs down from tables while customers gathered on the sidewalk outside. Before I could finish, he grunted and shook his head. “This is nothin’,” he said. “You want to see the real masters, you’ve gotta go to Vegas.”
The coffee shop at the Flamingo has been open day and night, weekends and holidays, for so long that its employees, like its customers, can’t always tell the difference. “This is my Friday,” a server will say on Monday, meaning that she has Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. The Tropical Breeze serves breakfast twenty-four hours a day and diner food with a trace of the islands—Caribbean pot stickers, Polynesian seafood salad. Its role at the Flamingo, like the Flamingo’s role on the Strip, is to appeal to the common palate, to give comfort to the outpriced and overstimulated. “The more daring we get, the more complaints we get,” Gutstein told me, pointing to a vat of shredded cabbage. “We went from coleslaw that was creamy to one that was tropical, with pineapple and vinegar. They can’t stand this shit. So now we’re going to go back to the old way. It’s a blue-collar place, this coffee shop. We don’t cater to these trendy customers.”
By seven-thirty that morning, orders were coming in once a minute. There were five egg and grill cooks and twenty waiters for close to three hundred diners, and tables were turning over about every thirty-eight minutes. The breakfast rush had yet to begin. Gutstein stood in the center of the kitchen, across the serving counter from the cooks, banging covers on finished orders and stacking them five high for the waiters to carry off. He was still a little cranky from a Yankees loss the previous evening. “I did the numbers the other day, and I figured that for every pitch Randy Johnson throws he gets four thousand dollars,” he was saying. “Could be a ball. Could be a strike. Could hit the batter. Four thousand dollars.” He might have added that his cooks work more than six weeks to make that kind of money, but then the printer spooled out four new orders. He smacked his meaty hands together and grinned. “Let the games begin!”
Gutstein is the college boy who took a short-order job and never left. He is the one who, instead of feeling trapped by the grinding routine, found it liberating. “I never in a million years thought I would be doing this,” he says. His father was a travelling salesman who studied trumpet at Juilliard; his mother was an office manager and a part-time caterer. In high school, he played defensive end on the football team and was good enough to earn a scholarship to Holy Cross. But he went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst instead, played intramural basketball, and majored in political science, vaguely intending to become a lawyer. “I wasn’t looking to do more work than I had to,” he says. After graduation, he spent six months trying to launch a landscaping business, but customers were so scarce that he had to find other work in order to pay the rent. “So there was a job cooking kosher lunches at a yeshiva in Longmeadow, outside Springfield. Two hundred dollars a week. Next thing I knew, I was feeding a hundred and fifty little Jewish kids. That’s when I caught the bug.” The work was hot and fast and deafeningly loud, but the time went by like this, he says, snapping his fingers. “I just found myself.”
Gutstein went on to apprentice at a French restaurant, starting out in the laundry and working his way up to chef de cuisine. After that, he took a series of jobs at larger and larger hotels in Hartford, Newark, and Los Angeles. By the time he came to Las Vegas, five years ago, he was married and had a six-month-old daughter, Hannah Brooklyn Gutstein. (“I went through all the other boroughs and none of them sounded right. Hannah Bronx, Hannah Yonkers . . .”) He says that he couldn’t get used to the newness of the place at first—the rectilinear streets and bulldozed desert plots; the jagged rim of mountains on the horizon. But real estate was cheap and the casinos needed chefs. So he bought a house in one of the stucco subdivisions south of town. Then he bought a newer, bigger house nearby and rented out the first. He had two more children, bought a charcoal-gray Mustang convertible, and slowly began to feel at home. “I was, like, ‘Holy shit,’ ” he says. “ ‘You can make it in this town.’ ”
When Gutstein arrived at the Flamingo, in 2002, after two years as a chef at Bally’s, Lindy’s was still there, like a Vegas burlesque of a greasy spoon: the servers were mouthy and demanding, the kitchen cramped and grimy. “Dude, it was a fucking nightmare,” Gutstein says. “I’m not kidding you. It was brutal. The cooks back there were losing their minds.” Several years earlier, a section of the floor in the kitchen had collapsed when water from a broken pipe eroded the ground beneath it. The servers simply skirted the pit until someone laid down a piece of plywood to cover it. The plywood stayed there for months.
Gutstein spent his first few weeks walking around the hotel with a legal pad, just trying to grasp the scale of the place. The Flamingo has more than four thousand employees, eleven hundred of whom work in food service. Its ten restaurants and eleven bars cover every major theme in American dining—Chinese, Japanese, Italian, steak house, fast food, buffet—like a carpeted, air-conditioned version of a Midwestern downtown. The coffee shop’s kitchen is half the length of a football field, and it’s only the tail end of an intestinal tangle of prep kitchens, washrooms, and walk-in refrigerators that are shared by the restaurants and that coil around and beneath the casino. Go down one service corridor and you emerge in Pink Ginger, a pan-Asian restaurant that looks like the inside of a young girl’s jewelry box. Go down another and you’re in Margaritaville, where the booths are like fishing boats and a woman dressed in a mermaid suit slips down a water slide into a giant margarita blender.
Like the restaurants in the casino, the hotels on the Strip are just subsets of other corporate megastructures. The Flamingo used to belong to Caesars Entertainment, which also owned Caesars Palace, Paris Las Vegas, Bally’s, and fourteen other properties. Then, this past June, Caesars Entertainment was bought by Harrah’s Entertainment, which owned twenty-five casinos. For the Flamingo, all this merging and acquiring has meant, for instance, that the onion soup, turkey gravy, beef broth, marinara sauce, clam chowder, and chili served at the Tropical Breeze and its other restaurants are made in giant steam kettles at Paris Las Vegas, where they’re pumped into two-gallon plastic tubes, loaded onto carts, and distributed around the Strip.
The newest hotels are designed for such economies of scale. (The juice room at the Wynn squeezes ten kinds of fruit daily; its bakery makes sixty kinds of bread.) But the Flamingo was built in stages, like the Vatican. Its pink glass towers stand on the ruins of a low-slung nineteen-fifties pavilion with a neon column that bubbled like champagne. Beneath that lie the elegant remains of Bugsy Siegel’s supper club and riding stables, from a time when horses could still be hitched in front of stores downtown. The result is a maze of ramps, stairs, and blind corridors that crisscross behind the hotel’s sleek new interiors, like something from an etching by Escher. “This is why they implode hotels,” a former head of food service at the hotel told me.
Two years ago, when the Flamingo began renovating Lindy’s to make the Tropical Breeze, Gutstein helped redesign the kitchen. He gave it larger cooktops and better flow, revamped its inventory system, and reorganized the staff. To keep his part of the casino’s vast mechanism in gear, he knew that he had to understand it in all its particulars. He had to know that the average meal takes five minutes to make and fifteen minutes to serve. He had to know how many pounds of corned beef, diced papaya, Cap’n Crunch, and kosher pickles the café consumes in a week, and how those numbers change if a convention or a sporting event is in town. (When nascar came to Vegas in March, sales of chicken-fried steak went “through the roof,” Gutstein says.) And he had to extrapolate from those numbers how many cooks and servers he would need on any given shift. But what he needed most he already had: three good egg cooks.
Martin Nañez Moreno, the omelette man, grew up on a small farm in Villa Lopez, Mexico, six hours southeast of El Paso. He came to Las Vegas eleven years ago with his brother-in-law. His three older brothers are all cooks in Los Angeles. Joel Eckerson, the over-easy man, was reared in an orphanage outside Seoul, South Korea. He was adopted at the age of eleven by a Christian couple from Duanesburg, New York, and joined the Navy seven years later, where he first worked in a kitchen. When he arrived in Las Vegas, in 1985, he took a job as a cook’s helper at the Flamingo and never left. Debbie Lubick makes all the poached-egg dishes at the Tropical Breeze. When she was growing up, her parents owned a fleet of eighty lunch trucks in Houston and San Antonio. Her father taught her to crack eggs one-handed when she was ten; by the time she was sixteen she was running the kitchen.
Standing shoulder to shoulder at the griddle that morning, they looked as oddly matched as three champions at a dog show, and just as self-possessed: Martin was dark and slender, with a debonair mustache; Joel was short, angular, and efficient; Debbie was tall and matronly, with a pale, sweet face edged with melancholy. Like almost everyone at the café, they’d come to Vegas from someplace else—I counted eleven Mexicans, three Salvadorans, five Filipinos, a Peruvian, an Iranian, a German, a Canadian, and an Englishman among the employees on one shift—but the egg cooks shared certain basic traits. They were all in their forties, all married with children, all deeply unexcitable souls at the heart of a hyperactive environment. They were the still center at the eye of the Tropical Breeze.
The Flamingo is a union house, like most of the large hotels in Vegas. Cooks start at about fifteen dollars an hour—servers make ten dollars, and generally collect another ten in tips—and work their way up the pay scale by seniority, from runner to cook’s helper to fry cook to broiler cook to saucier to sous-chef to banquet cook. Martin and Joel were sauciers. They made a dollar an hour more than fry cooks, and had the privilege of working the day shift from six to two. (The swing shift was from two to ten, the graveyard shift from ten to six.) Debbie was just a fry cook, after nine years at the Flamingo, but even that made her a rarity in Vegas. Most women in casino restaurants get shunted into waitressing, hosting, or composing fruit and salad plates in the pantry. When they do make it to the line, they’re not always welcome. “There are male egos involved,” Debbie told me one day in the break room, with a tight smile. “The guys will die before they let me come over and help. They don’t want to be shown up by a girl.” That’s fine with her, she said. “I have the easiest station on the line. Now I just tell them, ‘You don’t want the help? O.K., die.’ ”
The rush began at about ten o’clock. Or, rather, the first of a series of rushes: on weekends, customers come in waves, like Cossacks. When I arrived at the line, the heat seared my lungs—the griddle, at about six hundred degrees, was wreathed in steam from cooking pots and egg pans. Martin had ten omelettes on the griddle and was swigging something called SoBe Adrenaline Rush from a thin black can. Next to him, Joel had five pairs of eggs going and a hubcap-size pan of scrambled eggs. Debbie was fishing poached eggs from a roiling pot, while an assistant chef sliced red onions at a furious pace beside her, filling the air with a stinging mist.
“I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!” a grill cook at the next station shouted. Joel nodded. The grill cooks usually made their own eggs to go with steaks or pancakes, but they sometimes needed help: “four on two” meant four eggs on two plates. Joel ripped a spool of new orders from the printer and tucked them under a clamp above the counter, then started cracking eggs into pans two at a time. When he was done, he had ten pairs of eggs cooking: five from previous orders, two from the grill cook’s order, and three from the new orders. He finished the five original orders first. He put a pair of sunnys under a broiler and used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard. Then he flipped the eggs in that pan and those in three other pans that had been ordered over easy—one, two, three, four. He pivoted back to the counter, set five plates on it, and garnished them all with potatoes and bacon or sausage. He then flipped the over-hards and over-easies again, slid them onto their plates along with the sunnys from the broiler, and placed all the plates under the hot lights above the counter.
The whole sequence took about three minutes. Meanwhile, four new tickets had printed out, the potato bin needed refilling, the last five orders were ready to flip, and Debbie had asked for some over-easies to go with a chicken-fried steak. On Martin’s side, the omelettes were multiplying—there were fifteen now, all with different ingredients—nearly crowding the egg pans off the griddle. He pivoted and flipped them in one motion, catching the omelettes in the pan as it reached the counter, ignoring a small commotion that had broken out over at the grill station.
“Would you eat that?” a barrel-chested black waitress named Rose was yelling. “Would you?” Apparently, she’d asked Frank—a hulking young grill cook who had been there for only five months—for an order of pancakes with a side of over-easies, but by the time the eggs were done the pancakes were cold. Frank had made a second batch, but Rose had left them sitting so long that they’d gone cold again. “You need some manners,” Frank complained in a small voice, like a bike horn that had lost its squeak. Rose put her hand on her hip and cocked it to the side, then flung a flapjack across the counter as if it were a Frisbee. “I ain’t servin’ nothin’ I wouldn’t eat!”
Gutstein, being a cook, mostly blames the servers when things break down at the café, which they rarely do. “They aren’t bad people, but their nature is ‘I want, I want, I want,’ ” he says. “They get spoiled. They put in an order and want it within three or four minutes. So the cooks start sandbagging—preparing things ahead of time.” He went over to quiet Rose down but soon gave up and wandered back to his station. “Why can’t we be friends?” he sang in a gruff baritone. Behind him, a tall, buzz-cut waiter named Eric made a gesture as if bending a stick. “I can almost hear it snapping,” he said. “It’s bowed. It’s not broken. But it’s just about to snap.”
Short-order cooking is like driving a car: anyone can do it up to a certain speed. The difference between an amateur and a crack professional isn’t so much a matter of specific skills as of consistency and timing. Most diner kitchens are fairly forgiving places. You can break a yolk or two, lose track of an order, or overcook an omelette and start again without getting swamped. But as the pace increases those tolerances disappear. At the Tropical Breeze, a single mistake can throw an entire sequence out of kilter, so that every dish is either cold or overdone. A cook of robotic efficiency, moving steadily from task to task, suddenly slips a cog and becomes Lucy in the chocolate factory, stuffing candies into her mouth as they pile up on the assembly line.
On early mornings, well before the first rush, Gutstein would let me work at the over-easy station for an hour or two. After a few days, I could crack seven or eight eggs in a row without breaking a yolk—good enough for Julia’s but not for a rush at the café. When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Fabergé Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle. He was proud of this little move. It saved him about a second versus having to grab an egg from the bin. If he cracked six thousand eggs a week, the move saved him about an hour; in a year, it saved him more than a week.
The egg flip had to be equally flawless but allowed for more personal flair. I often wished that I had a slow-motion film of the different cooks doing it. Edgar Lopez, the sassy Salvadoran who filled in for those on break, liked to throw his eggs high into the air, like salsa dancers, catch them at the top of their arc, and let them slide vertically down the pan. Joel gave his eggs a quick little jerk, so that they stood up on edge and swung over like a door on a hinge. Martin barely moved his pan at all. His eggs just seemed to roll over on command. As for mine, they’d catapult up and turn an eager circle in the air, but every fourth or fifth pair would belly flop in the pan and spring a leak.
“The hard part isn’t flipping them,” Debbie said. “It’s catching them.” But cooking a dozen egg dishes at once, while filling supplies and fielding side orders, is above all a feat of timing. Even if your technique is perfect, everything in the kitchen conspires to throw you off. The customer wants crispy bacon, so you have to root around in a warming tray or toss some slices into the deep fryer. The trash hasn’t been taken out, so you have to dump your shells at the next station. A batch of eggs have been stored so long that their yolks are weak and more likely to burst. To keep track of every dish, you need a dozen egg timers in your head, all set to trigger alarms at different intervals.
Warren Meck, a neuroscientist at Duke University, has identified the neural circuitry that allows the brain to time several events at once. As it happens, short-order cooks are among his favorite examples. They’re like jugglers, he says, who can keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time. He calls them “the master interval timers.”
Whenever a cook sets a pan on a griddle, Meck says, a burst of dopamine is released in the brain’s frontal cortex. The cortex is full of oscillatory neurons that vibrate at different tempos. The dopamine forces a group of these neurons to fall into synch, which sends a chemical signal to the corpus striatum, at the base of the brain. “We call that the start gun,” Meck says. The striatum recognizes the signal as a time marker and releases a second burst of dopamine, which sends a signal back to the frontal cortex via the thalamus—the stop gun. Every time this neural circuit is completed, the brain gets better at distinguishing that particular interval from the thousands of others that it times during the course of the day. An experienced cook like Joel, Meck believes, will have a separate neural circuit set up for every task: an over-easy circuit, an over-medium circuit, a sunny-side-up circuit, and so on, each one reinforced through constant, repetitive use.
Meck has yet to put a short-order cook in a brain scanner, as he has done with musicians, but he suspects that the results would be similar: their oscillatory neurons will have grown far more synapses than those in the average person’s brain. If they are asked to time certain events, more of their brain will light up. His description reminded me of something that Michael Stern, the co-author of “Roadfood,” had told me about one of his favorite short-order cooks: “It’s like part of his brain is developed that I don’t even have.”
The servers at the Tropical Breeze like to say that they have the busiest coffee shop in the world, or at least that’s how it feels. Customers sometimes ask them if they actually live in Las Vegas, as if no one could really stand this pace or life style for long. “You can’t raise children here, can you?” they say. But the truth is, if everyone seems to come to Vegas from someplace else, no one ever seems to leave. The average length of employment among the workers I polled was a little more than ten years, and Clara, who made salads and fruit plates, had been there for thirty-six. “Sometimes it feels like it’s the only coffee shop in the world,” Inge, a seventy-three-year-old hostess from Berlin, told me.
We were sitting in Bugsy’s Backroom, the Flamingo’s employee cafeteria, deep in the netherworld backstage of the casino. Steve, a former high-school social-studies teacher, who turned fifty-eight this year, stubbed out his cigarette and nodded. “They say that if you can work here as a server you can work anywhere,” he told me. “None of us have easy jobs.” He jerked his thumb at Patty, the brassy buffet hostess beside him, who had dyed-blond hair and heavy-lidded eyes. “I mean, she’s only twenty-six, and look at her.”
Patty broke into a loud, throaty laugh. “And I just had a face-lift,” she said. She pointed to her powdered cheek. “This is my ass.”
All around us, groups of other casino workers were hunched over Formica tables in their gaudy uniforms, picking at food or watching TV on overhead monitors. There were craps dealers with gold shirts and flaming-sunset collars and cuffs; middle-aged cocktail waitresses wearing coat dresses with plunging necklines; gangs of scruffy young waiters from Margaritaville in Hawaiian shirts. In the far corner, under the cool fluorescent lights, a quartet of blackjack dealers with slicked-back hair were playing cards with a distracted air. “It has been ___ days since our last worker’s compensation accident,” a sign near the entrance read. “When we reach ___ days accident free there will be a reward.”
Why do they all stay? I wondered. What keeps them here, of all places? For most, the answer seemed to lie in the union buttons on their shirts. Las Vegas is a city where a waiter can still spend his whole career in one restaurant without being laid off or relocated. The casinos, for better or worse, are stuck in the desert with their employees. They can’t outsource their jobs to Bangalore. They can’t drum up an army of minimum-wage replacements overnight. So they pay a living wage, provide health insurance and pensions, and give their employees a certain leeway. Not long ago, a couple of workers told me, a Flamingo employee stabbed another worker with a ballpoint pen. She’s still working at the hotel.
“You have to fire yourself, just about,” Patty said. “It’s a trap, but it’s a good trap. For those of us getting older—I’m really fifty-seven—it’s a godsend.”
Still, that didn’t quite explain why the egg cooks stuck around. Joel had worked at the Flamingo for nineteen years, Martin for eleven. They were the fastest cooks that most of the café’s servers had ever seen—“It just shocks me, what those guys do,” one waitress told me. “My husband’s a cook, and they just run circles around him.” As sauciers in the union hierarchy, they could easily have shopped their skills around: Las Vegas has become a city enamored of fine dining. The new Wynn hotel alone has twenty-two food and drink outlets, ten of them run by three- and four-star chefs. Why were Joel and Martin still cooking eggs?
One evening, a few hours after the café’s breakfast crew had gone home, I walked up the Strip to Corsa Cucina, one of the Wynn’s flagship restaurants, to see how the other half cooked. Stephen Kalt, the restaurant’s executive chef, is a burly forty-nine-year-old with a bald pate and a lively, incisive mind. With his sleeves rolled up and his apron on, he looks like an Italian butcher but talks like an epicure—a perfect fit for the new Vegas. Before apprenticing at Le Cirque, in New York, and training with such culinary stars as Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck, Kalt owned a couple of pizza parlors in Tennessee with his younger brother. Watching him work is like seeing short-order set to opera.
The dining room at Corsa Cucina is long and dimly lit, with red leather banquettes and an open kitchen along one wall, like a lavishly appointed diner. Kalt stands at the center of the serving counter, facing an enormous red-tiled oven, in a circle of light cast by four pendant warming lamps. With his back to the dining room and his eyes fixed on a row of tickets on the counter, he cues his cooks one by one, as if conducting musicians from a score. “Fire one lamb, a halibut, and a tuna,” he’ll say. “And give me a side of spinach, a side of whipped.” The food that emerges a little later shares Kalt’s robust sophistication, a world away from fried eggs: lamb-shank tagine, poached halibut with buttered cockles, seared tuna with prosciutto-wrapped figs. To make sure the meal is perfectly paced and presented, Kalt sends runners out to spy on diners and inspects every dish as it goes out, wiping away stray flecks of sauce or butter. “The finer the dining, the more constraint there is,” he says. “If one of these guys smacks a plate down too hard, I’ll tell him, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”
And yet, from a cook’s perspective, the difference between Corsa and the Tropical Breeze is largely a matter of ingredients. Many of the dishes are grilled, deep-fried, or sautéed, just as they are at the café. Most are assembled quickly out of previously prepared elements. Instead of bins of shredded cheese, chopped ham, and bacon, Kalt’s cooks have bins of black-truffle butter, olive confit, and salt-cod brandade. Instead of tubs of sausage gravy and refried beans, they have squirt bottles of tamarind-honey sauce and Thai-basil puree. The cooks at Corsa have to execute a few recipes flawlessly. They have to know how to build a veal sauce and how to keep a beurre blanc from breaking. But they rarely make more than three dishes at once. The real feats of timing—coördinating multiple courses, sequencing orders so they’re done simultaneously—are all left to Kalt.
“If I was recruiting, those guys who can handle fifteen pans, that’s who I’d want,” Elizabeth Blau, a restaurant consultant and one of the impresarios behind the gourmet movement in Las Vegas, told me. “Forget French culinary technique. It’s not rocket science. Whether it’s cooking an omelette or cooking a beautiful piece of fish, it’s about precision. They can do the job.” Still, few of the cooks at Corsa came from short-order kitchens. Many were young, white, and male. Some had gone to culinary school; others were “homegrown,” as Kalt put it; most probably wouldn’t stay for more than a couple of years. They’d grow bored with cooking the same dishes and move on to the next restaurant, the next chef, hoping to run their own kitchen one day.
I asked Kalt what separated them from the short-order cooks at the Flamingo. “That’s a different animal,” he said. “That is a guy who grew up seventeen generations on a farm in Mexico. He isn’t raised, like us, to think that he’s going to be the President of the country. He’s raised to think about his next meal.” He shook his head. “Look, I’ve had guys from a little farm in Pueblo who were some of the best chefs I’ve ever seen. Phenomenal. Anything you taught them they could learn, and do. And yet they were happy where they were. They didn’t need to be striving for the next thing. I can get a guy like that to make the same chopped salad for me the same way for ten years. Never been happier. Because that’s the culture, that’s the rhythm—you put seeds in the ground year after year. You get an American kid, he would jump off a building already.”
It’s easier to turn a short-order cook into a chef than it is to turn a chef into a short-order cook, Kalt said. I wasn’t so sure. The cooks at the Tropical Breeze didn’t seem resigned to their jobs so much as addicted to them. Joel had been offered higher pay for easier work at one of the Flamingo’s gourmet restaurants, yet he’d stuck with the eggs. “I like it fast-paced, boom, boom, boom,” Joel said. “You don’t get bored.” After a few years at the café, kitchens like Corsa Cucina seem to move at quarter-speed. On the Saturday night that I was there, Kalt’s nine cooks prepared about four hundred meals. That same day, Joel and Martin alone made eleven hundred.
“I’ve tried to promote Joel,” Gutstein told me one night at his house, over some crab cakes he’d made. “I’ve given him the opportunity to be a manager, to get out of that bullshit five-hundred-degree heat for eight hours. I’m, like, ‘Come on, Joel, you’re better than that!’ But he doesn’t want it. Straight up? He’s in such a comfort zone that it’s hurting him.” Yet Gutstein wasn’t so different. When I asked if he would ever work at Pink Ginger, the Flamingo’s Asian restaurant, his shoulders shook as if a spider had scurried down them. “I wouldn’t be able to stand it,” he said.
If someone gave Gutstein a million dollars tomorrow, he’d probably quit the Tropical Breeze and open a bed-and-breakfast—“Like Martha Stewart,” he said. “Real homey.” But, in the meantime, he knew better than to doubt his good fortune. Growing up in Yonkers, he used to watch his father change jobs every few years. “I love my dad, but nothing was ever good enough for him,” he said. “And he’s still busting his ass. I think he’s selling those life-alert systems now. Before that it was Craftmatic adjustable beds, before that window-shade treatments, before that light bulbs. He changes jobs like I change underwear.” Now that Gutstein has a family of his own, he has vowed to stick to what he knows. “Because of the way my dad was, I’m pretty much Steady Eddie.”
As he talked, there was a scuffling sound at the front door and three children came tumbling through, hot and sandy from an excursion to Lake Mead, the vast reservoir behind the Hoover Dam, half an hour from Vegas. When Hannah Brooklyn Gutstein saw her father, she ran across the room and into his lap, dropping her towel along the way. She was as round and red-faced and freckled as her father—baked pink by the desert, as he had been by the kitchen. He handed her a crab cake. “We’re doing good,” he said. “We work hard, but we’re very lucky. I’m not after the golden egg.” ♦