Burkhard Bilger’s 2005 piece on the short-order cooks at the Flamingo hotel, who crack well over a million eggs a year, in a city built by breakfast specials.
—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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.” 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.
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