How I struck oil at P. Terry's

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT WRITER
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

My heavy-meta moment came at about 9:15 on the Monday morning I worked a shift at P. Terry's Burger Stand for this story. I was cleaning a grease filter with paper towels behind the restaurant when Van Halen's version of "You Really Got Me" cranked through the sound system. I looked up and shook my head at Ashton Hecker, the operations director whose sorry job it was to train and humor me. "I was doing this same exact thing when this song was on the radio for real," I said.

In white pants, white shirt, red apron and black P. Terry's ball cap, I was a better-dressed version of the polyestered kid who started working for Jack in the Box in 1979. But I was still doing the grunt work. Draining, cleaning and refilling the fryers was the dirty job we would've saved for Mike Rowe back then, so disfiguringly hot and sludgy was the spent shortening. The oil had to stay hot even as we drained it, or it would congeal its way back into the 50-pound bricks from which it came, studded with scraps of charred food.

Changing the fryers at P. Terry's, I didn't even get my white pants dirty. Liquid canola oil can be drained from and poured into sleeping fryers, and the fryers here are treated with respect, filtered often and cleaned on a regular schedule, even when there's no new guy to pick on. This leaves more time for the new guy to do potatoes, which I have to say is better than hand-chopping the cafeteria-sized cans of pickled jalapeños to put on one out of every seven burgers the restaurant sells.

"Remind me to tell you about jalapeños and bathroom breaks," Hecker said. When he smiles, he's a dead ringer for George Clooney 10 years ago. "I learned that one the hard way." Thanks, Boss. All right if I stick with the potatoes for now?

I'd never worked with an actual potato on the job. Just bag after bag of frozen fries, onion rings, tacos and anything else a fryer could turn into crunchy gold cash. Hecker set me up with a 50-pound box of Idaho spuds, the idea being to inspect, wash, slice, soak, spin-dry and fry them to fill a fraction of the $1.45 orders of french fries that P. Terry's sells by the hundreds every day. When a restaurant sells "hand-cut fries," the assembly line runs all day long, and not much is more terrifying than falling behind on the line.

After scrubbing the last of the crop dirt from the potatoes and shearing off the stray black spots, I moved to the slicer, which looks like one of those handled piston machines that squashes aluminum cans. Except that this steely monster - hammered down 80 times per box - can break bolts off the wall. I ratcheted my way through 50 pounds in six minutes, then watched a veteran spud-cutter do the same thing in less than two.

When the lunch rush kicked in, Hecker put me on fryers to wrangle eight baskets across four deep vats, timing the double-dip cooking technique so that one basket at a time was ready to pour for the bagger, who got pitying eye-rolls from her colleagues and suffered at least one spatter burn at my hands.

More than once and without a word, I saw her scoop my finished product into the trash. If you ordered fries that afternoon, rest assured she did not let me mess them up.