Is it vacation yet?

Eventually, some sins of the industry become unremarkable: baking hamburgers because people are afraid of carcinogens in the grill marks; microwaving the well done steak a guy wants to eat before his appointment in 20 minutes (really? you're coming out half an hour before your meeting?); deep frying the bacon that wasn't crispy enough. Getting all worked up (caring) involves more energy output than I have after a month of 80-100 hour weeks, and I have it easier than the salaried chefs who do the actual cooking.

So today, when a waiter walked up and said, "Are the vegetables vegetarian?" I couldn't help but take it seriously--they could be cooked in butter, or maybe the saffron sauce is finished with butter or even cooked in protein stock. Both the chef and I looked at him with the slightly wide-eyed exasperation of not enough sleep encountering another damn thing to take care of.

I should have known. Yesterday's question was, "Can you cook a hamburger patty in the tuna presentation?"
See, they do a tuna confit with traditional tuna conserva-style albacore fillets: dredge through salt and pepper, fennel and celery seed, then cook in 120 degree California olive oil until it's cooked all the way through (leave it in the oil and out of the sun and it'll keep through the summer). I'm trying to picture this--the hamburger patty slow cooking on one of the sideshoot induction burners, and chef says, "WHAT do they want?" with the intensity of, "WHAT did you just step in and smear on my new white carpet?"
"You know, like a confit burger patty on the white beans and baby greens?"
Just as the vein was starting to explode, the waiter laughed.

It's been a very long month.