When I first met Arlys she must have been tipping eighty years old, the last twenty of which she’d spent in the back prep area. She had a frizzy mess of hair like a woolly pad and shuffled around the kitchen stooped into the shape of a lowercase f, slinging five-gallon buckets of fodder vegetables as if she were working a farmstead instead of a kitchen.
I worked the grill with Klaus and Jorg, and sometimes Troy. Tonya took to the back, helping Arlys, whose job it was to peel all the vegetables: countless five-gallon buckets of russet potatoes, onions, and twenty-five-pound bags of food-service carrots so fat you couldn’t get your fingers around them. Arlys’s duties included grinding the ham for the ham salad, making the house cinnamon rolls, and washing the dishes. For a long time she didn’t so much as speak to me as growl. “Move it. Hands out of my dishwater,” she’d say when I hopped in to work on the backlog. A human routine, she wasn’t looking to hand off any of her daily tasks. Soon I came to understand her loyalty to the dish circuit when I watched her openly scarf uneaten food off the plates.
I knew we had come to a meeting of the minds, though, when one day she came in with a jar of pickled tomatoes, tiny pear-shaped yellow ones she had grown herself, and shoved it toward me. “For you,” she said, her rheumy eyes sparkling. The ring was caked with rust, throwing my trust for their food safety into doubt, but I had to admit, they were lovely and exactly my kind of thing.
On Fridays Arlys started her main vocation, which was making the dozen or so salads for the Sunday smorgasbord. In addition to the most obvious things, like an Italian-ish pasta salad with black olives and mini pepperoni slices, she also made a classic German salad of ham, cheese, and pickles that didn’t quite translate without good German ham; a herring salad with apples and Miracle Whip; a crushed ramen-noodle-fake-crab-almond thing with sweet sesame dressing, so addictive it was like the opiate of Midwestern salads; a greasy little turkey giblet mixture, nearly cleansed with a strong dose of vinegar (when I asked about the contents of that one, she always just cackled); serviceable deviled eggs, chilled to cadaver stiffness; a few varieties of Jell-O, usually orange chiffon or something with suspended cubes of canned fruit cocktail and miniature marshmallows; and chocolate pudding, which in some way had slipped into the “salad” bar—perhaps through the gate the Jell-O left wide open. Proper Midwestern salad buffets such as this one ensure that your meal is properly bookended in sugar, so that everything you eat before the meat main course is sweet, including the so-called savory salads, right up to the desserts that follow.
And we were constantly replenishing the salad bar. Arlys would toddle out there to check the lineup, her nude pantyhose drooping down to puddle around her ankles like excess skin, while one of the lowly kitchen assistants trailed quietly behind her holding a plastic bowl of luminous, unbroken Jell-O.
Jorg always had a new five-dollar-an-hour summer hire, usually a teenage boy, to dice the carrots, onions, and celery for the soups and of course to shred the potatoes for the hash browns. During the height of the tourist season the restaurant would sometimes serve over four hundred people a day, and as a great percentage of them ordered breakfast at any hour, we easily went through three large plastic bus tubs of shredded potatoes daily.
Jorg made hash browns as his mother, Gisela, had, beginning with a stockpot of russets. He covered the potatoes with water and when the water came to a boil he turned off the heat, let them sit for five minutes, drained them, and shredded each potato by hand. If they’d been fried in real butter instead of the mysterious semiliquid orange grease we squirted on them, they would have been phenomenal, but they were still easily the best hash browns around.
That summer I shredded my share, running the cold half-cooked russets against the sharp face of the box grinder, trying to imagine my arm as a pumping gear. When I was called away to work the grill, Jorg would stand at the prep table and furiously shred them himself, visibly fighting off childhood memories.
Jorg was loyal to his mother’s recipes, pounding out the schnitzels and sprinkling them with red paprika salt; boiling whole peeled carrots until they were as soft as putty and cutting them with a crinkle cutter; adding fresh grated nutmeg to the chicken noodle soup. Half of the cooking there was beautifully old-school and half was straight off the truck. He’d bring in a hog that he’d raised on the family farm, toting it over his shoulder, and we’d spend the morning running the slices through the tenderizer (which looked like an old-fashioned mangle iron) and freezing them in packages. His German noodles were particularly firm and chewy when fresh, and had he warmed them up in a pan with a little brown butter, they would have rivaled my mother’s. But out of habit he refrigerated them and then re-warmed them in a sieve set into simmering murky water until they were hot and overblown—at which point we plopped them onto the plate unadorned. The rye bread, moist with added mashed potatoes and thick buttermilk, was too soft and heavenly on its first day to go through the slicer, so he waited up to a day or two until it hardened to slice and serve it.
The lesser items of the book-length menu traveled a straight path from the freezer to the deep-fryer: fish patties, slipped between two butter-toasted halves of a confectionery bun; chicken-fried steak, squiggled with tan gravy base; breaded shrimp, fried into tight fists and sent off with a twisted lemon slice. The freezer also contained the sea sticks—fake crab. For chef salad orders, we thawed one out in the microwave, letting it ride in there until we could smell its peculiar crustaceous funk, deep but not offensive. A typical lunch special was a grilled ham and cheese with a cup of soup for $4.25.
One Saturday, the kitchen gears halted. A waitress didn’t show up, leaving the one whom Jorg accused of stealing from the till to work alone. Everyone was ordering smoked pork chop breakfasts, and we had to cut more chops on the saw. It was then that the five-dollar teenager dropped a tub of hash browns on the floor in a puddle of water. Jorg yelled at the kid with such force that he seemed to blow backward, his white apron a sail. Within seconds he bolted out the side door. We were down a kid and a tub of browns and the little bell on the front door was going crazy. People were just gushing in.
“Arlys!” Jorg bellowed. “Put on more potatoes!”
A food-service delivery guy showed up in the back hallway and called out, “Hey, Jorg!” Jorg spun around and then walked slowly to the back, reeling in his fury as if it were a loose rope. He spilled the entirety of his terrible morning, all the way up to the dumped hash browns, to the Sysco guy. The guy said, “Don’t you have a Hobart?” and pointed to the enormous standing mixer across the kitchen. It was an animal, six feet tall, with beefy steel arms.
Jorg nodded. “Ja.”
“Why don’t you use the Hobart shredder attachment to shred your potatoes?”