Link to the slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2005/03/24/magazine/20050327_TATTOO_SLIDESHOW_1.html
Article itself (minus the pics)
DCW_NYCEvery profession has its rituals and idioms, but there is something especially
tribal about cooking. Chefs spend years developing their craft, working nights
and holidays in the celebrated pressure of a restaurant just so that a stranger
may enjoy a passing moment of pleasure. The devotion is beautiful -- and a
little lunatic.
Naturally, cooking ranks with the Navy and the yakuza as
one of the great tattooed vocations, though the images sometimes differ. The
most committed chefs are known to ink tools and ingredients onto their bodies --
a sign that they're in it for more than just the endless desserts. Not that
chefs aren't already marked by their trade. Look at their hands, and you'll see
cuts, calluses, scars; look at their arms, and you'll see burn marks from
reaching into an oven in a busy kitchen.
Once a friend was buying a
knife at Bridge Kitchenware, and he asked for a professional discount, a
standard practice, but he had forgotten his restaurant's business card. He held
up his ruined hands and asked, ''Will these do?'' The chefs on these pages could
have shown their tattoos. OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT
-H-
2 comments:
I love the chef who showed his hands as proof. I can attest to that after 20 years in the business my hands will never be the same.
Even after only 4 years my hands..and arms will never be the same.(I can't imagine in 20 what they will look like) I often wonder what people think when I'm in the public. Love that he did that.
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