Riding Up Front (RUF)

“I came at those steaks with a blowtorch!”

I was pretty irritated with my driver. She couldn’t seem to figure out where I was, even though I’d explained in great detail. It was impossible to stay angry though, because when she finally pulled up, she gushed apologies and radiated warmth.

She spoke a little about her niece – she was Cuban, but had lived in Hawaii to become a pastry chef and had moved back to Miami to be closer to her family. Her sister’s daughter had just turned twelve, and she had made the “awesomest cake ever” for her.

“Are you a chef here?” I asked.

“Nah!” she shook her head. “Too competitive. But I’ll give you a list of really great places to check out.” (She did.)

“What do you do?”

“I’m a food artist now,” she declared. “I make food look real good.”

“How?”

“Oh shit,” she declared. “I mean, one time, they dumped me with a bunch of raw steaks for a TV show. ‘Make it look good in twenty minutes,’ they told me. It was like a kids TV show, where the kids were the chefs.”

“What?”

“I know. Seriously. Who the f*** thought of that. It lasted a season.”

“What’d you do?”

“I came at those steaks with a freaking blowtorch! They looked amazing. Got my aggression out too.”

“That’s good, I guess?”

“I mean, it’s almost the opposite of being a chef,” S lamented. “Chefs need to make food that taste amazing. Food artists just make them look good. I would never eat anything done for a TV show. It’s disgusting. I mean, those steaks were completely raw inside.”

“It sounds gross.”

“Yeah. But you know what?” She turned then to look at me.

“What?”

“It’s kinda like how life and people are like too, right?

”