Excerpt
Trial by fryer
Some cooks think that because they throw a mean dinner party, they can run a restaurant. Until I tried to manage an overworked kitchen, an angry staff and an untested menu, I was one of them.
Editor's note: This essay is excerpted from "How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations From the World's Greatest Chefs," edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan and published this month by Bloomsbury.
By Gabrielle Hamilton
Read more: Cooking, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
Nov. 14, 2006 | There are people -- and as much as I'd like to distance myself from them, I once counted myself among them -- who think that just because they have a stove and a good recipe for duck they can open a restaurant. Because it's "only cooking," any hardworking, dedicated person could do it. What seems effortless -- you in the kitchen spooning reduced cider sauce over confited duck leg while your spouse hustles the front, overseeing the dining room with a warm touch and a glass of cabernet, just like the dinner parties you've been throwing in your apartment for ten years -- is not. The difference between being a good cook and being a good chef is as big as the difference between playing online Texas Hold'Em in your pajamas and holding a chair in the World Series of Poker.
When I first opened my restaurant, I improvised everything. Other than having an iron-clad work ethic and a certain compulsion for cleanliness, list making, and straightforward food, I did not know what I was doing. I ran out of items too early, too often. I drank wine during service. I sent incomplete orders out to tables making the last diner sit empty handed. I didn't really have the hang of the language of the line and would expedite tickets without phrasing them: calling out one giant, unpunctuated recitation of orders with no regard for their coursing, timing, or pick up. Worse, I would arrive in the morning and change the entire menu, without warning, for that evening. I did not rehearse, or plot or spend months in the laboratory testing new items until I got them just so. I did not research an ingredient and its best technique so that I fully understood it from all sides. I did not prepare my kitchen staff, and I most certainly failed to warn the floor staff, who had less idea about what they were serving than we had about what we were cooking.
I can assure you, several years later, that not everyone works this way. In fact, no one credible works this way and this is not at all how professional kitchens are run. I can also confirm that this amateurism can really piss some people off. Maybe it especially pisses off landlocked midwesterners who like to see something coming -- like a coastal tornado or the chocolate martini trend -- from a long way off and who like to hunker down and get prepared for it, or possibly it's people born under water signs in particular, I can't say for sure but I am certain that my sous chef, A., was pissed.
She was from Nebraska, at any rate, possibly a Pisces, and she was -- emphatically -- not a spontaneous kind of girl. She preferred a life lived close to the ground, on all fours, ears cocked and cold wet nose quivering to sniff out dangers, predators, and treacheries such as the peril posed by your chef breezing in at ten a.m. with a deli coffee in hand, a bright, fangy smile, and an entire new menu to be ready by six pm.
This concept was received with as much joy and "can-do" excitement as if I had proposed that she and I eat glass.
She, however, had actually run kitchens before and worked in real professional restaurants with pedigrees and French terms and she had been to cooking school. She had not spent the past twenty years, as I had, in shitty tourist restaurants where everyone just added cheese, curly parsley, and an orange half-moon to the plate to make it look better, or working for shitty catering companies where some poor bride's wedding food sat in the back of a cargo van, leaking onto the floor mingling with diesel fumes and the voices of five gay cater waiters sitting on buckets of "demi-glace" singing show tunes, while we drove out to the Hamptons.
No, A. had been diligently building her risumi because she wanted to be in this industry. She was the real deal, and I was lucky to have her. She had method, strategy, precision. My impulse to change the menu on a whim, like a gambler at the blackjack table asking to be hit in spite of eighteen showing, was an assault to her demeanor, training, and professionalism. Walking into a room of chaos and reining it in, my former preferred way of "rocking, dude," to show how competent I was, how durable under whatever circumstance, how willing and able I was to hump it, huff it, tough it out, bang it out (and then retire as soon as possible to the greasy mats outside by the dumpsters to smoke filterless cigarettes with the guys, K-Rock blaring out the screen door), was the equivalent of poking the dog with a stick until, at last, she's baring her incisors. While there are people who thrive on this kind of challenge, A. was not one of them.
She spent the day with the hackles up on the back of her neck, her low shallow breathing like the treble throaty growling of a dog who smells danger out in the black wilderness just beyond the campfire. She was the woman who put all kinds of order into this mayhem I called a restaurant in the first months. She scripted every improvised piece of this show we put on each night. She chased the butcher down when his meat came in too fatty. She put a prep schedule together that made us never run out of any item at any time. She coached us all in the language of the line: Order only! Order and fire! Picking up! All day! She permitted me some wine during service but dragged her finger across her throat as a signal to the bartender when I tried for a lemondrop shot.
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Warm, fried fava beans with a perfectly-cooked artichoke heart, salted. I thought it sounded delicious. But when I arrived with my notes and my prep list for the day and my freshly written menu, eager to try out my new ideas, I was received rather icily by A. It was not the usual convivial day of prep that we had come to enjoy. The amiable chopping and chatting and stirring the broth and having a spoonful of each thing to taste for salt or heat or body or acid had a very cool breeze blowing through it.
We had to be separated, in fact. I prepped in the basement on a stainless-steel table, singing along with the radio set on the golden oldies station, while she grimly prepped upstairs on the line. A. needed silence the way a lost driver needs the radio turned off and everyone in the back seat to halt all chatter until they find their exit.
As the hours passed and the waitstaff started to arrive, an impending sense of disaster began to poison the room. Not only was A. pissed off, but I, ever mature, became pissed back at her. What was her problem? I asked myself. Where was her positive attitude? I wondered. Glibly dismissing my part in bringing her mood down to subzero, failing to understand that if I had suggested a new menu a week in advance, begun to test it on Monday, and maybe run it by the following Friday I would have had a much more pleasant, even cheerful, experience. Instead, I just thought she was being a big downer. Now I know better and I follow the latter scenario; but at the beginning, I just threw all of us onto the fire thinking: I can cook, you can cook, so let's cook.
But I'm also the one who thought soaking the dried fava beans in warm water would soften them enough that when fried, they would still have a starchy satisfying interior with a crispy delicious fried exterior. Of course, I had never tried it out beforehand, but it just sounded logical to me. I remembered eating fried fava beans in Turkey when I was a backpacking teenager, and though I had no idea how to cook them, I relied on my intuition. Since the prep day had gotten away from us, I hadn't had a chance to test all of the dishes before service started, and as the fava beans seemed simple, I'd played triage with them. There had been so much to do all day and such unfamiliarity in doing it that we didn't even manage a family meal that night, which meant that each server had to approach her tables all night not only bluffing her game but doing so on an empty stomach. This fava bean and artichoke item, naturally, came in on the first ticket of the evening, submitted by a leery waitress keeping her distance from the uncharacteristically frosty kitchen where A. and I were silently and bitterly finishing the last set-up of our stations.