From Knives to Wrenches
ABOUT THE AUTHOR — Jonathan Gibson came up on Indy hardcore and Cincinnati kitchens. Now he’s a Local 44 ironworker, a father, and proudly a bastard.
Ten fucking years.
No thank yous. No brass ring. Just the usual: a couple shift drinks, a joint in the alley, and the quiet understanding between me and the other masochists that we’d be back tomorrow to do it all again. A decade spent fighting clueless owners and cocky line cooks. Servers who thought they were the main character. Wealthy guests who couldn’t tip and never knew what they wanted. And whatever god was out there making sure the fryer broke at 7:30 on a Saturday night.
I gave it everything. Every ounce. And for what? For the privilege of peeling cranberry peas until my fingernails bled? For another weekend sweating over an eight-burner while my friends went to concerts and parties and lived their lives? Wack.
Chef Craig, mentor, big brother, professional asshole, once told me, “Lil Jon, if you don’t make it by thirty, you need a backup plan. You don’t have forever.”
I was twenty-five and sure he was wrong. I had momentum. Dream jobs. Better paychecks. Offers. Corporate nerds trying to recruit me. I was moving up. Fuck you, Craig, I thought. But by twenty-nine, I was drowning in rent, bills, booze, blow, fights and a life falling apart piece by piece. The passion was gone. The thing that kept me up at night thinking about the perfect recipe or the perfect plate had burned out. Without it, everything felt empty. I was stuck between burning out and spinning out. It was time to jump ship or ride it straight into the ground.
So I quit. I threw in the towel. Fuck it. I loved the craft enough to know that if I couldn’t give it the respect it deserved, it was time to walk away. Craig was right. I needed a backup plan.
I sat in a booth at Sitwell’s for three months, smoking too much, drinking too much coffee, getting sober, and asking myself the big question: how do I make real money without college or the military at thirty?
Union labor. Why not.
HVAC? No. Electrician? I’d drink fryer oil first. Ironworkers. The last real American badasses. Men who don’t care about your feelings. Men who weld steel in the sky and hang from beams and build things that last.
I signed up. Passed the tests. Got in.
Suddenly I was thirty, standing in a crowd of twenty-somethings with huge forearms and heavy beards. They looked at me like fresh meat. Maybe I was. But they didn’t know I already had scars. Different battlefield, same war. If I could survive a decade of fine dining and plates thrown at my head, I could put a bolt in a hole.
Then came the first real job. One hundred seventy-five feet up. Sitting on a beam, gripping it like my life depended on it, because it did. My foreman, Aaron, a few years older, sat down next to me twirling his loose lanyard and laughing.
“You said you weren’t afraid of heights. Different when you get up here, huh? You were a chef, right? What do chefs do on a Saturday night when the food’s running out, you’re short-staffed and the dining room is packed?”
“You make it happen. You execute. You get everyone together and step up. Those are the best worst nights.”
“Exactly. Well, this is your new Saturday night. You gonna quit? Climb back down, go home, tell your kid it was too hard? Or you gonna cowboy up and put these beams in with me?”
The same tone Chef used when I messed up. “It’s fine, Lil Jon. It’s easy for me. I’ll do it.”
“Fuck you.”
I stood up. I walked the iron. We connected two W12x18 beams one hundred seventy-five feet high inside an active steel mill in southern Kentucky. Below us molten steel churned and the air was filled with heat and dust that burned your skin. Something you weren’t supposed to breathe. We did two more. Then I went home at 3:00 p.m., covered in sweat and grit and more satisfied than I ever was after any dinner service.
That was almost four years ago. Now I’m finishing my apprenticeship. Soon I’ll be a journeyman ironworker with Local 44. I can weld. I can set steel. I can tie rebar. I make almost forty an hour, overtime after eight, double-time after ten, and I get all the benefits I never had when I was fighting for my life with a knife in my hand.
My tools are my mise en place. The blueprints are my recipes. The bolts and beams are the ingredients. The foreman is the chef. And we build structures that last. It’s the same work, just bigger. And when the job is done, it stays done. No guest throws it away or lets it rot in the back of their fridge.
I’ll always be Chef Jon. You can take the chef out of the kitchen, but not the kitchen out of the chef. And my knives will always be sharp.
But here’s what I know now. It’s okay to walk away. It’s okay to start over. The industry will survive without you. It doesn’t love you the way you love it. It never did. And if you ever leave, take the lessons with you. They weren’t cheap. And they’ll take you as far as you want.
So whatever you do, do it right, give a fuck, make it nice, and let it rip.
- JG
Post script
Rest in peace, Craigie. I loved you the most. You were my mentor and my big brother. I wouldn’t have made it this far without the lessons I learned at your side. I know you’re burning heaters and talking shit with Trotter and Bourdain somewhere above. You’re missed, bub. Thank you for turning me into the man I am. High Life and tequila shots in your name tonight as I write this.
(Also, no shade to the ones still cooking soigné food. Keep fighting the good fight. Keep your head, stay sober, and don’t let anyone block those chef dreams.)
