Cooking Dirty

Starred review from May 4, 2009
Sheehan, a James Beard award–winning food writer at Westword
, Denver's alternative weekly newspaper, knows the tradition he's working in: he walked up to the editor at one of his first writing gigs and introduced himself as “your Anthony Bourdain motherfucker.” Before that, he'd spent years bouncing around from one restaurant kitchen to the next—first in upstate New York, then in a disastrous move to Florida, and back to New York before heading out west to reunite with the woman he met during his failed one year of college. Sheehan's memoir is emphatically not about “the glam end of cooking” or celebrity chefs, but about “a straight blue-collar gig,” where the kitchens are staffed by the kind of guys who get off on the fact that the work is insanely grueling. As Sheehan puts it, “I was being paid to play with knives and fire.” The war stories are as profane and outrageous as you'd expect, and Sheehan finds just the right balance between bravado and humility. There's a subtle shift in emphasis once his personal life (and, eventually, writing career) gains traction, but the kitchens where the best stories take place are never far from sight.