The next time you grab a Seattle Weekly at one of the many Olympia establishments that display the free alternative paper, make a beeline for Jason Sheehan's byline.
If the James Beard Award-winning food writer's book, Cooking Dirty, is an appropriate indication (let me spoil the surprise: it is), you're in for a lot more than the usual restaurant critic rundown.
Published in 2009 and released last month in paperback, Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen is a breakneck-pace memoir of Sheehan's years spent working "on the line" -- beginning at age 15 scraping pizza pans, and ending at 28 with a stint at a Waffle House. Every alcohol- and drug-fueled tale from every low- and high-end restaurant in between is worth the read.
Sheehan tells readers up front what his book isn't:
"I feel like it's my responsibility as the teller of this story to say that if you're looking for some four-star confessional, for the cooking secrets of master chefs or some effervescent, champagne-and-twinkle-lights twaddle about bright knives, foie gras and sweaty love among the white jackets, go find another book. Plenty of other books out there deal with the glam end of cooking in what has become a gross celebrity-driven industry. Books about food obsessions that come from clean, clinical and intellectual places. About cuisine that isn't born of pain and damage. About chefs who don't have any scars."
Some critics have dubbed Sheehan the next Anthony Bourdain or, worse, a Bourdain-wannabe, and those both might be compliments in many a food writer's estimation. But Sheehan strikes this reader as an original. A distinct, strong voice on the page, married with the honesty about where he came from ("a blue-collar, rust belt diner kid, a beans-and-weenies, steak-and-potatoes simpleton"), and the knowledge that comes through years of laboring on the line.
That Sheehan never intended to be a food writer is part of what makes him so compelling to read. Years of journalism school can't create his prose style; one imagines the words were simply stewing inside him all those years, waiting to spew forth.
After 13 years in and out of a maddening menagerie of chaotic kitchens -- working some 50,000 hours in hellish heat and under skull-crushing stress -- Sheehan stumbled into a freelance food writing gig and soon hung up his shredded Misfits t-shirt and chef's coat for good -- and now South Sound readers are all the luckier for it.
Peruse the archive of Jason Sheehan's Seattle Weekly columns here.
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