Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men"

This post marks the first of what I hope will be a series of retrospective reviews of New Yorker stories that I remember with pleasure. Today, I begin with a look at one of my all-time favorite pieces, Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005).

I’ll structure my review around the following four questions:

1. What is “The Egg Men”?
2. How is it constructed?
3. What is its governing aesthetic?
4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “The Egg Men”?

Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is a fact piece about egg cooks who work at the Tropical Breeze Café, in the Flamingo hotel, Las Vegas. It’s approximately 8000 words long, divided into nine sections. Here’s a brief summary of each section’s contents:

Section 1 – Describes the Tropical Breeze; tells about Scott Gutstein, the café’s head chef; describes café’s kitchen, as the cook’s “entrench” themselves for Saturday morning breakfast rush.

Section 2 – Tells about Bilger’s experience working as a short-order cook at a Seattle breakfast place called Julia’s; describes a cook named Jack whose cooking “was a seamless sequence of interchangeable tasks reduced to their essential motions: crack, flip, scoop, pour, crack, pour, flip, scoop.”

Section 3 – Returns to the Tropical Breeze kitchen, at seven-thirty, Saturday morning; describes scene (“There were five egg and grill cooks and twenty waiters for close to three hundred diners, and tables were turning over about every thirty-eight minutes; continues with profile of Gutstein.

Section 4 – Describes Tropical Breeze in further detail (“The coffee shop’s kitchen is half the length of a football field, and it’s only the tail end of an intestinal tangle of prep kitchens, washrooms, and walk-in refrigerators that are shared by the restaurants and that coil around and beneath the casino”); tells about Gutstein’s involvement in the kitchen renovations two years ago.

Section 5 – Describes the Tropical Breeze’s “three good egg cooks” – Martin Nañez Moreno (“the omelette man”), Joel Eckerson (“the over-easy man”), and Debbie Lubick (“makes all the poached-egg dishes”); describes the scene in the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen when the morning rush begins (“When I arrived at the line, the heat seared my lungs – the griddle, at about six hundred degrees, was wreathed in steam from cooking pots and egg pans”); describes a sequence in which Eckerson cooks ten pairs of eggs simultaneously; describes a kitchen incident in which a waitress refuses to serve an order of pancakes because they’re cold.

Section 6 – Describes techniques of egg-cracking and egg-flipping; describes short-order cooking as “a feat of timing”; tells about research findings of Warren Meek, a Duke University neuroscientist, who calls short-order cooks “the master interval timers.”

Section 7 – Describes Bugsy’s Backroom, the Flamingo’s employee cafeteria (“deep in the netherworld backstage of the casino”); considers why Las Vegas casino workers seldom quit their jobs; puzzles over why Joel Eckerson, who has worked at the Flamingo for nineteen years, and Martin Nañez Moreno, who has worked there for eleven, are still cooking eggs.

Section 8 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Las Vegas’s Corsa Cucina restaurant “to see how the other half cooked”; describes Stephen Kalt, Corsa Cucina’s executive chef (“Watching him work is like seeing short-order set to opera”); reports Kalt’s view that the Tropical Breeze short-order cooks are “a different animal” in that they “grew up seventeen generations on a farm in Mexico,” that they are happy where they are “Because that’s the culture, that’s the rhythm – you put seeds in the ground year after year.”

Section 9 – Tells about Bilger’s visit to Gutstein’s home; reports Gutsteins comments regarding his attempts to promote Eckerson (“I’ve given him the opportunity to be a manager, to get out of that bullshit five-hundred-degree heat for eight hours. I’m like, ‘Come on, Joel, you’re better than that!’ But he doesn’t want it. Straight up? He’s in such a comfort zone that it’s hurting him”); reports Bilger’s assessment of Gutstein (“Yet Gutstein wasn’t so different [from Eckerson]. When I asked if he would ever work at Pink Ginger, the Flamingo’s Asian restaurant, his shoulders shook as if a spider had scurried down them. ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand it,’ he said”).

I set out the contents of “The Egg Men” because I want to show the rich combination of ingredients – cooks, kitchens, restaurants, autobiography, neuroscience, Las Vegas, etc. - that Bilger folds into it. He creates quite a literary omelet! And I devour every delicious word of it.

2. How is it constructed?

The core of “The Egg Men” is its description of the Tropical Breeze’s kitchen reality. Five of the story’s nine sections are set in that kitchen. The first section shows us the kitchen “at six o’clock on a recent Saturday morning.” Bilger says, “Saturday morning is zero hour for short-order cooks. The café, which prepares some twenty-five hundred meals on an average weekday, may serve an extra thousand on weekends with the same cooks.” Bilger shows Gutstein to be completely at home in the kitchen’s high-stress environment. He quotes Gutstein as saying, “It gets crazy. I love it. Grown men come out of here crying.” Section 1 sets the theme: Las Vegas short-order cooks, in general, and Tropical Breeze short-order cooks, in particular, are a special breed.

Section 2 of the story cuts away from the Tropical Breeze and takes us back twenty years to Bilger’s days as a short-order cook at Julia’s in Seattle. The flashback from the Tropical Breeze to Julia’s is smoothly executed, and the section is key because it explains Bilger’s fascination with short-order cooks - what makes them tick, their extraordinary multi-tasking ability.

Sections 3, 4, 5, and 6 are located back in the Tropical Breeze. They contain many sharp, precise, vivid descriptions of short-order cooking. For example, here’s Bilger’s wonderful description of Eckerson in action:

“I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!” a grill cook at the next station shouted. Joel nodded. The grill cooks usually made their own eggs to go with steaks or pancakes, but they sometimes needed help: “four on two” meant four eggs on two plates. Joel ripped a spool of new orders from the printer and tucked them under a clamp above the counter, then started cracking eggs into pans two at a time. When he was done, he had ten pairs of eggs cooking: five from previous orders, two from the grill cook’s order, and three from the new orders. He finished the five original orders first. He put a pair of sunnys under a broiler and used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard. Then he flipped the eggs in that pan and those in three other pans that had been ordered over easy – one, two, three, four. He pivoted back to the counter, set five plates on it, and garnished them all with potatoes and bacon or sausage. He then flipped the over-hards and over-easies again, slid them onto their plates along with the sunnys from the broiler, and placed all the plates under the hot lights above the counter.

That “used his forefinger to break the yolks on a pair that had been ordered over hard” is a superbly noticed detail. Bilger brilliantly crafts sequences of kitchen action. Here’s his description of Eckerson’s egg-cracking technique:

When Joel cracked eggs, his fingers were as loose and precise as a jazz guitarist’s. He held one egg between his thumb and his first two fingers, another curled against his palm. He rapped the first egg on the rim of the pan, twisted it into hemispheres, and opened it as cleanly as if it were a Fabergé Easter egg. As the spent shell fell into the trash, he shuttled the second egg into position, as if pumping a rifle.

In section 6 of “The Egg Men,” Bilger makes an audacious move; he describes the workings of short-order cooks’ minds in neuroscience terms. His piece shifts from talk of sunnys, over-hards, and over-easies into scientific terminology – “burst of dopamine,” frontal cortex,” “oscillatory neurons,” etc.

Then, in the article’s final three sections, Bilger shifts again. His narrative moves from the Tropical Breeze in search of even more meaning. Bilger looks for insight into why the egg men at the Tropical Breeze choose to remain egg men, why they refuse to climb the culinary hierarchy, why they seem happy in their work.

Of these final three sections, my favorite is section 7 in which Bilger visits Bugsy’s Backroom. It contains this terrific description:

All around us, groups of other casino workers were hunched over Formica tables in their gaudy uniforms, picking at food or watching TV on overhead monitors. There were crap dealers with gold shirts and flaming-sunset collars and cuffs, middle-aged cocktail waitresses wearing coat dresses with plunging necklines; gangs of of scruffy young waiters from Margaritaville in Hawaiian shirts. In the far corner, under the cool fluorescent lights, a quartet of blackjack dealers with slicked-back hair were playing cards with a distracted air.

Detail by detail, a way of life is being evoked here. Bilger serves us a succulent slice of it. “The Egg Men” is built in stages, focusing first on the egg cooks at the Tropical Breeze, then opening out into other locations – Bugsy’s Backroom, the Corsa Cucina, Scott Gutstein’s home - as it expands its meaning in a setting (Las Vegas) that’s often used to represent meaninglessness.

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

It would be easy to say that the art of “The Egg Men” is in its details. But you could say that about most New Yorker pieces. “The Egg Men” brims with fine details: “nicotine-yellow walls,” “sausagy arms,” “a mixed hash in a tub the size of a baptismal font,” “toast with the texture and density of prairie sod,” "a pale sweet face edged with melancholy,” eggs thrown high in the air “like salsa dancers.” But its art is also in Bilger’s descriptions of the egg cooks in action, e.g., Eckerson cooking ten pairs of eggs simultaneously. Crisp, precise descriptions of short-order technique are essential to this story, the tagline of which is “How breakfast gets served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.” Bilger shows us how in writing that enacts the craftsmanship of the cooks he describes.

4. Why do I like it so much?

Reading “The Egg Men,” I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.

I look forward to when Bilger collects “The Egg Men” in a book. I’d snap it up faster than you can say, “I need a four on two, sunny and scrambled, both wearing sausage!”

Credit: The above photograph is by Hans Gissinger; it appears in The New Yorker (September 5, 2005) as an illustration for Burkhard Bilger's "The Egg Men."