This is what chefs and professional cooks say to themselves and each other when they’re deep in the weeds. I’m not talking about a regular old busy night, but a night from hell, with 20 or 30 plates lined up, the grill piled with meat and sweat dripping down the back of your neck and legs. And you, Happy Diner, sitting in the dining room in your date underwear with your nice glass of wine, you, who are blithely unaware of such drama, this madness is all for you. We want your money, and we want you to be happy when you part with it.

When have I been most in the weeds? At the now-defunct Chatfield’s. I was 21 years old and back in New Jersey on Christmas break from culinary school at Paul Smith’s College. I had worked the grill station at Chatfield’s in Peapack Gladstone, N.J., the previous summer, and it had been my first serious kitchen job. This was a real kitchen with a real chef who did not simply open a bag of frozen chicken fingers, throw them in the fryer and call it a day. This was real food.

In school, I was learning new skills at a furious pace and was eager to impress Chef Spinella. I asked if I could try out the sauté station over my school break. All went well until New Year’s Eve. In creating the menu for the evening, Chef Spinella had done a good job of balancing the work among the three stations: one grill and two sauté stations. You see, a chef never wants any one part of his or her kitchen to be more burdened than the rest because it will slow down the entire operation. Plates get dragged and servers stare holes into your head waiting for their tables’ food.

Usually, customers order a little bit of everything on the menu, but every once in a while one dish will be overwhelmingly popular. For a chef, this is impossible to predict and simply useless to fret about. (It is kind of weird how you Happy Diners do this. Do you decide via text message that you’re going to torture the kitchen of so-and-so restaurant by descending en masse to all order the shrimp? What’s the deal?) On the menu that New Year’s Eve was rack of lamb. The celebratory diners of Peapack Gladstone were hungry and they were hell-bent for some lamb, damn it! My planned busy-but-uneventful night of work and post-service Pabst Blue Ribbon antics were replaced by hell.

Total Waterloo. I had all six burners fired, searing off racks left and right in sauté pans. At a certain point, I realized I couldn’t finish cooking the lamb on the stove because I had too many orders. I resorted to searing them in the sauté pans and then throwing full-size sheet pans of lamb into the oven to roast. Rare, medium-rare, medium, medium-well. AHHHHHHHH!!!! The whole kitchen was waiting on me! Me, the fancy culinary school kid, was eating a big old piece of humble pie right in front of everyone. Except in Jersey, where I grew up, you don’t eat humble pie — you get it shoved down your throat.

When service was over, I walked behind the restaurant before I started cleaning my station. I am not ashamed to say that I cried tears of frustration and anguish. I wanted to be better, smarter and faster. Despite what I had already learned at culinary school in fancy French technique classes, I didn’t become a cook until that day, though I strengthened my resolve. Dinner service is a competition in which I try to be faster than everyone else. Now, as a chef, I try to shield my own cooks from having those harrowing experiences, not least of all because they reflect upon me. However, I suspect these evenings are unavoidable. Could someone be a great or even good professional cook without a few humbling experiences? I doubt it.

Midnight always happens. It’s what happens in the six hours preceding that kills you. 
   

Underground Butter is a new monthly column from acclaimed Motor Supply Co. chef Tim Peters about life behind the scenes in the restaurant world. Reach Peters at food@free-times.com.