I Am The Chubby Gnome

Greetings, Internet. I am the Chubby Gnome


My interactions with food and the foodie culture are very much similar to that of The Chef Fatty's, but to paraphrase The Fat Kid; where The Chef Fatty is an artistic genius when it comes to food, I'm more of a technician. For me food stands strictly on the chemical pillars of meat (subpillar bacon), bread, booze, produce, and dairy. I've spent the last few years working in a number of Salt Lake City's dive bars and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Everything from the classy Meditrina restaurant just outside Spring Ballpark to the Bayleaf Cafe in the heart of downtown Salt Lake have been the homes away from home where I've hung my apron.

To me, a recipe is fluid, but still necessary. Without it you're just dicking around, and if you happen across something amazing in the process, you damn well better hope you can remember every little detail of how it came to be, lest it be lost to the sands of time.

In the same vein, just because a recipe works doesn't mean it can't be improved, and just because it exists doesn't mean it should be made. Any jackass can put a list of ingredients together with some half-assed directions and call it a recipe. A bad chef handed a recipe that makes gold every time is boring, because even if the bad chef followed it to the letter, it would only create the sum of its parts. Great cooking is a transcendence of mere quanta into something that creates delight on the palate leaves a sharp jiggling sensation in your genitals.

To me, cooking is an act of chemistry that is infinitely variable and impossibly beautiful, as is the presentation of the finished dish. Every bite, sip, smell, and swallow is an action with uncountable variables taking place at once. Every last quanta having a small input on the whole, everything from the quality of a roast's sear down to the temperature of my left pinkie toe plays a part in the eating of it (the roast, not my toe).

And here are we chefs. In the midst of a mindless chaos. Rattling of knives and forks on porcelain. The scrape of steel on hot, sizzling iron as sautes are turned, bubbling pots of pasta drained, then filled again. The constant growl of an industrial pizza oven that provides a background theme to everything you see and do. Shouting, toqued mental patients standing in sinks attempting to control the mob of barely sane individuals beneath. Crunching eggshells underfoot in a cramped, tiny kitchen as you sling pans and plates, dodging bubbling oil, and hoping just to make it another night without a meltdown.

Despite it all, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done, and I hope that you’ll join us as we all chronicle our study, revelry, and worship of this ancient act of controlled chaos we called food. Strap in and hold on tight. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

-Gnome