The excerpts below are from my memoir, “No Experience Necessary”. The title of this post and the photo that accompanies it refer to “The Midget Bar” where I worked in 1973. There is an entire chapter from those days. The Midget was my second cooking job. I worked the ‘graveyard shift’. The Midget was a BBQ place primarily. But it also featured some new musical talent that was beginning to call Key West home. One of the strummer/singers was a very young Jimmy Buffet. More on that in the book.
The front jacket has this beautiful quote from the late, great Anthony Bourdain.
“Norman Van Aken is the Jimmy Page of his profession—a man who was THERE at almost every important moment in its history. The OG of South Florida, New World cuisine, and a guy who knows where every body is buried . . . many of them to be found in No Experience Necessary”. -Anthony Bourdain
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Getting to Key West:
We rode through the late night, catching the last Greyhound bus out of Miami. We were dead to the world from our thirty-hour drive from Chicago, and we collapsed onto the hard bench seats and made pillows out of our rucksacks. The small, silent community of fellow travelers only held my conscious mind for a few minutes. I tried to see who we were bound together with on this journey to Key West, but in the inky black-but-for-starlight night sky of the upper Florida Keys, my eyes struggled and then crashed into a few hours of heavy sleep.
Learning to Cook:
Sammy worked with a grace I hadn’t seen in the kitchen until I met him. The veins in his arms throbbed as if he were willing some kind of fuel from his brain to his limbs in an effort to get the food out of the kitchen as fast as he could. He was probably about sixty years of age when I came to work at the Midget. His skin was a dusty black when he was cold and drinking his first coffee, but an hour or so into the shift and his sweat turned his complexion into a slick of wet leather. He had ramrod posture and although he was not large, his chest showed the definition of a man less than half his age. His voice was a Satchmoesque rasp most of the time, but he said more with a look in many cases.