Everyone for six generations in the Cioppino family album had been a great chef, saucier, or baker. According to Vincent's great-grandfather, Rigatoni, three of his great-great-grandparents had cooked for Columbus - one each on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The old coot, who died a week short of his one hundredth birthday, claimed a Cioppino was the pastry chef for the Last Supper.
Unfortunately for the young man, having dropped out from half dozen different culinary schools, he was unable to master even the simplest of cooking techniques. Boiling a pot of water required not only a thermometer, but also a pair of asbestos gloves and a fire extinguisher to control the ensuing blaze. Without an automatic coffee maker in his apartment, Vincent would have had to settle for Starbucks in the morning or wait for a scoop of coffee ice cream to melt in his mug. He had conquered microwave popcorn, at the expense of two good quality microwaves - both having exploded from the tin foil pans he shoved into them. And he made a tasty peanut butter and cream cheese sandwich, of course rarely ever getting the two ingredients anywhere close to evenly spread, and never on toast that hadn't been blackened.

Vincent's job at the Burger Chateau on 83rd and Lexington was the first one the twenty-seven year old had held for more than six months. However, in addition to making burgers at the slurp and gulp, he'd also been washing dishes, filling ketchup bottles, and when one of the waitresses took an unexpected night off; he stripped off his apron and grabbed an order pad and pencil.
The money was good, a much better deal than the grocery store on 105th Street that he'd walked nineteen blocks to all last summer for minimum wage and an unlimited supply of arugala. It certainly was cleaner than the fish market in the West Village where his ankle broke the year before that, sliding on the slush-covered floor with a ninety-pound tuna on his shoulder. At least he was still in the food business.
Of course, his position at the Burger Chateau came to be only through the last ditch efforts of a family member, fed up with Vincent's constant failure. Stracciatella, his sister, younger by four years, managed to convince a friend of a friend of guy who really didn't want to do the favor to give Vincent a chance in the kitchen at the Burger Chateau, knowing in advance that she'd need to repay the good deed in a less than desirable fashion some day. Vincent bid farewell to his previous job at a shoe store and its knee-deep malodorous stench the minute he tapped the End button on his cellphone, dropping his aluminum foot-sizer in the lap of the balloon-shaped woman he'd been helping into a pair of pumps, a size and half too small.

Eggface, the affectionate nickname he'd assigned to his sister when he discovered she'd been named after one of his favorite soups, promised Vincent that he would indeed be cooking and not just tossing stuff in the microwave like he'd done at the counter in the Greyhound Station last Christmas. Yet here it was, six months to the day since he'd started at the Burger Chateau, and he hadn't been close enough to the grill to tell if it was hot. Further stoking the young man's anger, he'd been practicing in his apartment and had finally mastered the basic concepts of stovetop cooking. Having permanently seared a variety of meats to several nonstick pans and boiled a barbecue sauce so deep into a pot that a hammer and chisel couldn't pry it loose; Vincent gave up and dragged his television into the kitchen. Nightly, he followed the instructions of the Cooking Channel's experts as though their words had been spewed from the burning bush itself.
Early on, his failures outnumbered his successes ten to one and he almost canceled his cable subscription in frustration. But within the last few weeks, he'd not only cooked an edible omelet, but had gotten creative and added a slice of mozzarella cheese the second time he watched the show. Admittedly, all four of his attempts at pan-fried chicken breasts ended with more batter pasted to his slicked back, ebony hair than on the meat and the bacon part of the BLT sandwich cost him another disposable fire extinguisher at thirty bucks a piece, plus tax. However, he had now cooked two dozen hamburgers and, as far as he was concerned, cooked them better than the crap from the kitchen of the Burger Chateau.

Enamored with his newfound prowess, the fledgling chef spent hours each night watching TiVo'd recordings of the shows he was unable to view while at work. He studied Barbie Flayed's handiwork around a saute' pan and a pound of butter with the intensity of a fourth year law student. Not one movement of the knife in Raucous Ralph's hands went unnoticed as Vincent did his best to keep pace with the master chef while he sliced and diced as if the man was snorting speed during the commercials.
Yet nothing he'd seen on the amazing network prepared Vincent for the premier showing of Senor Castro's "Let's Salsa, Yankees."
Senor Castro, who swore he was in no way related to the infamous dictator but wore a set of fatigues nonetheless, managed to work a jalapeno pepper into every recipe he produced for his viewers. Baked bananas stuffed with graham crackers and slivers of the spicy pepper, pan seared tuna with a remoulade designed around delicatessen mustard and diced jalapenos, even a macaroni and cheese casserole garnished with saute'ed onions, roasted garlic, and - you guessed it - red jalapenos, the real hot ones, stuffed with cream cheese and bacon bits.
Vincent, who'd never really had a taste for Spanish cooking, fell in love with the peppers by the end of the first week and spent that weekend with a box of Bubba Burgers and a dozen jalapenos.

Mindful of the potent veins and seeds, the suddenly inspired cook saved their fiery essence in a bowl, often adding a few to a spoonful of ketchup or sprinkling some into a saute' pan as he reduced a lump of butter. He took one of the almost inch-thick patties and butterflied it, stuffing it with the graham cracker and pepper slice mixture from the banana recipe. On another, he laid a mixture of chopped garlic, diced onions and jalapenos, along with a thick coating of tomato sauce that he baked in the oven until the grease dripping on the electric coil almost set it on fire.
Vincent's morning omelet was incomplete without a "jappy" as he took to calling them, sliced and then crushed under a sheet of waxed paper with a rolling pin. Even the cream-filled chocolate donuts from the Krispy Kreme on Seventh Avenue tasted better to the culinary scientist when enhanced with a quartered jappy he employed as a scoop to extract the sugary filling before consuming the empty pastry carcass.
So smitten with the pungent spike the tiny green and red peppers drove into his tongue each time he bit one, Vincent stayed up late into the night all that second week, grilling burgers, jappys, and everything from avocados to zucchinis mixed into, layered on top of, or pureed into a sauce for the chopped meat. His sister had stopped by several evenings on her way home from the kitchen at the Plaza Hotel to taste his daily creations, each time rushing for an alka-seltzer the minute she stumbled into her apartment.
Undaunted, Vincent took a sick day from the Burger Chateau on the following Monday to watch Senor Castro live for the first time when the cable guide announced that the day's episode was all about chopped meat dishes. In preparation, the student armed himself with ten pounds of the city's finest ground sirloin, two dozen jalapenos, a bag of onions, and sixteen different varieties of cheese. Vincent hadn't a clue as to what recipes would be demonstrated on today's show, but he was certain that if Senor Castro had an ace up his sleeve, he would have two.

The show opened with a quick and easy party salsa - one jappy, one onion, two tomatoes, a few shreds of cilantro, a sprinkle of fresh lime juice, a splash of tequila and, voila; somebody open a bag of chips. Nothing special, just enough to get the audience into the performance, and make everyone hungry. As the television chef dipped his finger into the bowl of salsa he'd just created for a taste, a team of young girls in matching fatigues pranced out from both sides of the stage carrying serving dishes of salsa for the audience. Vincent found it hard to believe that Castro had personally mixed each one of them before the show.
Then they brought out the beef. Easily twenty pounds of it, rolled in royally on a stainless steel cart and covered with a silver dome. Senor Castro scooped a small mound off with a mixing spoon, sniffed it, smiled, and popped the raw meat into his mouth to the applause and swoons of his studio audience. Vincent shrugged and did the same - for the fourth time since he'd opened the package.

While the station broke for a series of commercials, Vincent peeled and sliced a few onions, tossing the sections into a glass bowl that he covered with a dinner plate. He was about to start coring the bag of peppers when the show resumed.
Senor Castro's next dish was a Mexican treatment of the old standby - spaghetti and meatballs. The twist was dicing a few jappys into the mix and adding tequila to the sauce; again nothing new for the student, but he made the entree' nonetheless just for practice. The third recipe, though, was the keeper - Senor Castro called them "Depth Charges" - jalapenos packed with cream cheese and then stuffed into a fistful of ground beef, batter-dipped, and then pan-fried. Vincent took the telephone off the hook and double-locked the door.

He recorded the show on the TiVo while he watched it live and, three hours later, had made over fifty Depth Charges with every possible combination of cheese, tequila, chopped onions, diced tomatoes, and scrambled eggs he could imagine. And just as he was about to pull a cold beer from the refrigerator and run the segment again, Vincent spotted the container of ricotta cheese in the back on the bottom shelf.
Leaving the beer for later, he took the soft cheese and headed for the counter where his experimentation had paused, grabbing a handful of peppers from the bowl on his kitchen table as he passed. While the other cheeses he'd played with so far were interesting and probably would appeal to a small portion of the Burger Chateau's clientele, the eatery was located in the middle of a mostly Italian neighborhood where ricotta was the cheese of choice for stuffing. Hell, his mother bought the stuff by the gallon and had used it to fill everything including drafty cracks around the air conditioners. Why not try it here?
Coring four jappys, Vincent washed them quickly and stood them upright to drain. He put a few large spoonfuls of ricotta in a bowl and mixed in some tomato sauce, a dash of oregano flakes, and some crushed garlic. This he pushed into the pepper shells with his finger, tamping the mixture down tight and brushing the open end with olive oil. Then, following Senor Castro's technique, he grabbed a handful of ground sirloin and plunged the stuffed pepper into the middle of it. A quick roll in the batter and into the hot frying pan until done.

Vincent let them cool for a few minutes and then, when the anticipation overrode his common sense, picked one up and bit it in half. The Depth Charge hit his tongue and exploded, not from the flavor or the spice, because the damn thing was still too hot to eat. He spit the piece onto a towel and doused the burn with a glass of water from the sink. Gingerly, he picked up the remaining chunk and blew on it until the tip of his tongue could tap it without blistering.
Finally, he crunched down on the battered casing and through the meat to the pepper and cheese at its heart. The combination of flavors was astounding - it was the Italian ambassador and his Mexican whore meeting for a hot snack in an American Burger joint. Vincent walked over to the mirror on the refrigerator door and combed back his hair. His face broke into a smile that could hold a banana. "Chef." He pat his shoulder and winked at his reflection. "Chef Vincent."

Now, if he could sell his boss on this creation, the man would have to let him cook, to get some lackey to perform the menial tasks he'd labored under for six months, to put Vincent in charge for a change. He would join the ranks of the other Cioppinos and carry on the family tradition; his mother could boast in truth for the first time. And if the boss didn't let him cook? Screw 'im, this was a recipe worthy of any restaurant; this was his membership card into the ranks of cooks in every kitchen from White Plains to Staten Island. Even Eggface would be in awe of him and this recipe if he could just convince his boss to let him take the spatula and...

His boss...

Vincent kicked the kitchen table, rolling several jappys and the last onion to the floor. Shit, the bastard hadn't wanted him there in the first place and if he wasn't still banging Vincent's sister, there would be little chance for continued employment. There was no visible animosity between employer and employee, indifference perhaps, but with over forty on the payroll, the only ones he addressed by their first names were the waitresses who showed off their cleavage.
Maybe I should take the concoction to someone else, get a job on my own as a chef. Grundkin runs his restaurant from his wallet rather than his tastebuds. Shit, I could cook this thing at The Plaza and put Eggface out of a job.
It was then that the annoying cleaver of reality cut through the smoke and haze; his menu was limited - chopped meat and eggs at best. Were there any restaurants that still specialized in an Atkins style cholesterol fest or were they all grazing palaces where the predominant color was green? He'd never tried to cook anything not first performed on the Cooking Channel and had spent so much of his efforts studying this one block of the food pyramid that it would take months before he'd be able to handle the rigors of the three-course meal and its myriad combinations. Months that he'd have to suffer the ignominy of his current position, knowing that a white toque belonged on his head instead of stained apron around his waist. And it wouldn't be too many of those months before someone else cooked up a Depth Charge.
However distasteful it was, the Burger Chateau did specialize in eggs for its primary breakfast fare and burgers the rest of the day. If there was to be a mirror for Vincent to step through into his own private wonderland, it was hanging in only one kitchen in New York City.
He groaned and bent down to retrieve the fallen vegetables; the workday started in less than four hours.

Faustus Grundkin spun around twice in his chair before nodding his head at Vincent, who, despite a lack of sleep, stood tall and determined in the doorway to the office. "You want to cook today? You think you ready? Okay, I tell you what and you make sure you tell your sister I done this for your sorry ass." Pausing to yank a nose hair he'd been working on, Faustus wiped his hand on the bottom of the chair and pointed at Vincent. "Widderio is out sick with the good weather flu? You hear what I'm sayin'?"
Vincent nodded quickly and uncrossed his arms, letting them drop to his sides.
"Okay, Vinny, I give you a shot. But you screw up one order, piss off one customer, and you're outta here, capeesh?"
"Don't worry, boss. Your customers won't know the difference. I've been studying and I can cook everything on the menu and then some."
"I don't want no 'then some', dickhead. I just want you to cook what we sell. We make it through the day and maybe I let you be second chef sometimes. But for today, just don't screw anything up and I'll be happy. And you know how important is to make me happy. Okay?" Shoving back from the aged wooden desk, the chair squeaked in protest and then softly sighed as Faustus rolled his bulk out of its crinkled leather. He poked his finger into Vincent's chest, punctuating each word. "You. Don't. Want. To. Ever. Piss. Me. Off. Okay?" Stepping backward with each poke, Vincent was finally wedged up against the walk-in freezer. "Not a problem. I got it covered, Mr. G. Chef Vincent is on the grill."

Breakfast was a snap: twenty-four dozen eggs, enough toast to stuff a flock of turkeys, ten pounds of bacon - and not a single fire. There were eleven orders for pancakes that sent shivers through the novice chef's fingers, but luckily Dangle, the high school kid who did prep work for Widderio, the lead morning cook, stepped in and flipped them before they started to burn.
Tempted several times to embellish an order, he glanced down the hallway toward the boss's office and quashed the desire. Most of the omelets were standard fare, although his first attempt at a sunny-side up ended up in a scrambled yellow cloud. Vincent gobbled the two eggs when no one was looking and managed to get it right on a second pass.
Since breakfast was the longest meal of the day, starting at six a.m. and ending just before lunch at eleven, the chance to experiment with the Depth Charges was going to be delayed until after lunch, somewhere around three. "Good thing," he muttered, scraping another load of onion, potato, and pepper debris from the grill. The lunch menu was considerably more complicated and would require much more luck than skill to save his ass.

The half hour between eleven and half past was a pleasant lull in the action; Vincent took advantage of the respite to clean and core his jalapenos, working on the prep table around the corner from the grill where no one could see him. In less than ten minutes, he had cored a dozen peppers and stuffed them with his ricotta mix, prepared just before he left his apartment this morning. He wrapped the tray of the peppers in aluminum foil to keep their identity a secret and shoved it into the lowest tier of the refrigerator.

Lunch started slowly at eleven thirty - burgers, fries, chopped salad, a couple of fried chicken orders that required nothing more than dumping the frozen, pre-battered pieces in next to the fries and onion rings. However, the moment the minute Mickey had both hands lined up at twelve, it seemed as though every hungry person in New York City had strode, stumbled, or stomped into the Burger Chateau demanding to be fed.
A veritable ticker-tape parade of orders flew through the window into the kitchen, as everything suddenly seemed to be part of a film played at double the correct speed. Vincent started falling behind and as the clock hit twelve-thirty, at least four of the waitresses were standing side-by-side in the pass-through, screaming and slamming their fists. Dangle, the prep kid, nudged Vincent to one side of the grill, grabbed a handful of orders, and began tossing burger patties, hot dogs, and Sizzlean with the dexterity of a Las Vegas dealer. Vincent just stood next to him and nodded.
Between the two of them, culinary chaos was tempered to even-paced control before Faustus caught wind of it, and within an hour, the steady stream of orders had slowed enough for the kid to walk out for a smoke. Vincent, his pockets filled with burnt steaks, charred chicken, and the three hot dogs that had fallen on the floor, dumped a fresh bag of sliced potatoes into the deep fry and wiped the latest river of sweat from his face. With the cool breeze of the air-conditioned dining room wafting into the kitchen, he rested his elbows on the order window and stared out at the jumble of tables.

Now, it's not unusual to run into a celebrity in Manhattan. Several famous actors lived in both Vincent's neighborhood and the upper west side digs surrounding the Burger Chateau. Several times he'd seen the guy from Law and Order in a bar across the street from his apartment and had even walked over once for a fan moment, telling the actor how much he enjoyed the show but couldn't remember the man's real name.
However, when Emily Lasagna, the three-hundred pound brunette who followed Senor Castro on the Cooking Channel, bounced through the door with a gaggle of hangers on and her agent, it took Vincent a dozen thumping heartbeats before he was able to pry his hands off the stainless steel windowsill and back away.
Senor Castro cooked his food hot and spicy, but only Emily's meals could please Satan's palate. If Vincent could get her try one of his Depth Charges, he was certain the woman would drag him into her limo and whisk him off to fame and fortune before she was able to swallow. Faustus be damned, here was an opportunity the young chef would never have again.

Vincent tugged a chunk of steel wool from under the sink and quickly scrubbed a section of the grill clean. He oiled it with the can of extra virgin that was reserved for salad dressing instead of the slime in the plastic jug underneath the grill and sent Dangle for the chopped sirloin they used only for the twenty-dollar dinner burger.
There was no need to read her order; if she didn't like his specialty, Vincent wouldn't have a second chance to make it anyhow; Faustus Grundkin was on his way to her table. Pulling the tray of prepared jalapenos from the refrigerator, he started rolling the chop meat into chunks and plugging each of them with a pepper. There was just enough onion ring batter to cover six of them, perfect Depth Charges for the television star. Vincent placed them on the grill and rolled them around with a wooden spoon until they were crisp, presenting them on a small plate covered with lettuce and garnished with a sprig of fresh parsley.
For a moment, he considered walking the plate out to their table but decided a real chef would never do that. He put the plate on the "ready" section of the sill and tapped the bell for a waitress.
"Take these to table nine and tell the customer they're compliments of the chef." Vincent pushed the plate toward the waitress and then scurried back to the grill lest anyone suspect there was mischief afoot in the kitchen. Even with his back turned, every word, every hearty laugh from their table rolled clearly across the kitchen. He heard the waitress say, "Chef's special" and "Compliments of the house," and held his breath for the star's reaction.