The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.

I'll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't miss it for the world.

The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line.

As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.

Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.

What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.

As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system - and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter - disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system.

There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.