This summer a bubbling pot of used squid oil tucked under the sink over which I scrubbed a pan caked with baked cheese provided me with a revelation. Got that image in place? Okay, so here’s the vision revealed to me: my place in nature is at the FRONT of a restaurant -- eating and drinking and maybe writing an article about the place – and not the back part ... and certainly not toiling away in the Kitchen, a dangerous hell of flames and shredded animal flesh that, to be blunt, pays poorly.

Read on.

Chef Sean Langan of Belltown’s Amore restaurant hired me (“as a charity case,” he said, charitably) with bright hopes of me working my way up to line cook. I took that gig with bright hopes of maybe getting a story out of the deal (here it is, with my apologies). So I spent 80 hours there this summer washing dishes and bashing open the occasional oyster and then I quit after my shift on July 29 when it was 103 degrees (the Earth’s hottest day, according to my reading) and 106 in the kitchen (any Earth kitchen’s hottest day, in my experience). That night I worked with a wet towel on my head, which had to be continually soaked with cold tap water (the towel, not the head ... wait, the head too), and they called me “Bin Laden” and I’ll miss that.

Delusional early-90s memories of toiling at Testarossa, (a local Chicago-style pizza place) and Giorgina’s (an all-lesbian pizzeria where I was the token male lesbian) spurred me to think I could hack it with the big boys in the kitchen again. I had the work ethic to wash dishes like a pro and chop some tomatoes and whatnot but when the tickets started going up and with the chef or maybe Ernesto or Roberto barking at me during a rush I felt helpless, like (me thinking), “Dude, your last restaurant job was almost twenty years ago and you’re a dainty office-wuss now. You don’t have the chops to bust out orders like these hard-core restaurant lifers.” And I weeped like an office-wuss ... well, no I didn’t, I just added that so you’d keep reading.

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In “Shop Class as Soulcraft - An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2009),” Matthew B. Crawford celebrates those who work with their hands: those who actually make things. Things. Hand-made three-dimensional objects that have a physical presence and value, made by people we can happily contrast with those who sit all day in front of computers mousing up iPhone widgets or arcane online advertising algorithms.

You know ... office wusses.

On July 26 The Seattle Times Sunday Magazine featured Belltown blacksmith (and Messenger staff photographer) Louie Raffloeur; showed a picture of him cutting some metal, a close-up of his hands, actually. The article celebrated all the romantic “Soulcraft” paradigms of which the writer found Louie to be a vessel. It read, “In tough times, the trades offer pride and a paycheck” ... after I read that I called Louie. “Dude!” I screamed, “You’re a hand model now! You’ve been feminized and objectified by another yuppie lifetsyle magazine!” Louie has been featured in dozens of media stories over the years; he’s been on the cover of the Belltown Messenger twice; he’s lent his image to underground films of dubious quality. And he knows that condo marketers love to use “the idea” of Louie – a person who makes artisanal things with his hands and has not yet been driven out of Belltown – when advertising the downtown condo lifestyle to folks who work at Microsoft.

Digital errand boys who use their hands only at keyboards, nudging virtual gewgaws at the behest of (equally soft-handed) middle managers.

Soft, dainty modern compu-hands.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the world of wuss-hands is chef Sean Langan of Amore, the hardest-working, cheapest bastard in the history of the Seattle restaurant scene. He is acutely aware of every nuance of his restaurant: how many salmon filets he has left, which of his employees are available at any given hour, how to get the most publicity out of the least amount of money (like the flattering and enjoyable article you are reading right now – another freebie for Sean).

Sean speaks fluent Spanish (or was it “kitchen Spanglish?”) and doesn’t use drugs or alcohol. He smokes but has cut down recently, and for sure there’s always a latte at hand. He is proud of being Irish, but took my racist Irish jokes with good humor. He does an AM radio show. He cooks up endless promotions and theme nights and cabarets and other entertainment, including regular stints by Seattle jazz octogenarian Ronnie Pierce. He made some turkeys for the homeless and got himself written up in the Times. He is nearly always on the premises. When the restaurant closes at night, he rockets away on his Japanese motorcycle for a couple hours of sleep.

Cafe Amore has been going for five years, and when Sean first opened, Messenger restaurant reviewer Ronald Holden and I were not kind when discussing his food. Back then the place was a hole-in-the-wall inside the Seattle Glassblowing Studios, across the street from its current location on the Northwest corner of Fifth and Bell. I obsessed unfavorably over the canned black olives he used in some dishes; Ronald has even more refined tastes than I and didn’t like some of the overly creamy sauces. Since then Sean and his food have grown. He seems to be making money. Anyone who survives through 2009 has to be doing something right. He does a great bar business even on weekday nights. His location at Fifth and Bell is kind of off the beaten path, as far as the Belltown late night weekend-warrior drink-and-puke bar scene goes, and that’s a good thing.

Did I say Sean was hardass? While doing my time at Amore I never saw employees being fed, and when I brought in a bowl of yellow plums from my tree one night they were eagerly gobbled up by lean waitrons. “Chef can keep going on coffee and cigarettes but we’re out on the floor and we need calories,” Duke told me.

Sadly I’m no George Orwell or Anthony Bourdain – experience-wise at least – so this article will seem half-baked to lovers of great literature. Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) was shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War and so has life experience on a level I hope I will never be able to replicate. And chain-smoking New York punk rock poseur-turned-TV chef Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential, 2001) is not going to write about off-the-radar Belltown restaurants anytime soon. For some reason I felt it was my duty to hang out at Amore a bit this summer and write something nice.

And there you have it.