My kitchen is the size of your bathroom. It has been described as one of the smallest kitchens in New York City. I am not exaggerating to be funny. It is tiny, and we generate an astonishing quantity of food out of this very small space. A large part of the way it works is that the two people working the line are very tuned into each other at all times and do "the kitchen ballet" in such concert and harmony that Balanchine would be proud. Your knees are always up against your work station, your towel is always in your hand, your cutting board is always wiped clean and free of debris, your tasting spoon is always in your bain of clean water. You never ever stand with one arm akimbo or one leg casually out, you never leave anything extraneous on the counter taking up valuable real estate, and most important, you don't move -- ever -- without announcing it: "I'm behind you. Behind you, hot! Opening oven door! Open oven! Coming around! Coming around, hot!"
To work in this space, you have to talk a lot. You must constantly communicate, so that no one gets hurt. Because it's all fun and games until somebody gets, you know, their eye poked out.
But A. and I were not really talking on this evening. We were quickly in the weeds, reading tickets and cooking food that we had never seen before nor picked up on the line. One great part about learning your station is when you can do it on autopilot: as soon as you hear "lamb" your left hand moves to open the drawer that the lamb is in or pulls down the pan that the lamb is cooked in. You can be doing six other things but when a menu is internalized, your body can execute the food without your mind consciously thinking about it. Your eye registers the plate of mackerel in front of you and your arm automatically reaches over for the smoked almond vinaigrette to finish the plate -- with no conscious thought process.
A new menu fucks everything up. You don't know automatically what goes with what -- you have to read the notes you've taped up on your reach-in door. The pickup is the protocol or flight plan for a finished dish. It tells the cook what steps to follow and in what order. It's the map we follow to get to the plate. Does the duck leg go in a sauti pan on the stove top or on a sizzle plate in the oven? Do I reduce my cider sauce to order or keep a bain of it warm in my station for an easy ladleful at the finish? This can be complicated at the beginning, with ten or fifteen new items, all with their own unique pickup. Especially if you are not the person who conceived the dish or the menu. I, at least, had been mulling this stuff over in my mind for a few weeks and so had a decent mental picture of the pickup as well as the finished look of each item. A. was flying totally by instruments, no sense memory to guide her. It was grueling. And made no less so by having had to prep all day with so much adrenaline and urgency. When you are starting from scratch, there's a lot more to do, and by the beginning of our first seating -- of what would become a long night of service -- we were already exhausted.
So we weren't talking, and the atmosphere was thick and bitter and I hated A. and she hated me and I started to fry my first batch of fava beans for our first order. Wet beans in deep fat -- wet anything in deep fat -- make a raucous boil. I had, surprisingly, anticipated that; I'd experienced water in hot oil before. But what I didn't realize is that the skins of the beans would burst when submerged in the fat, sending hot globules of fryer fat streaking through the air like sizzling missiles. There were somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five beans per order and 75 percent of them burst in the fat. First came a raucous crackling roiling in the fryer -- exactly the sound of great sudden applause. I took a grandstanding Olympic bow to get A. to laugh but she was having none of it -- and just then whistling, hot fat bombs began flying through the air, stinging us in the neck, the cheeks, the hairline. To call this painful is obviously an understatement. It was stupidly painful and more than dangerous. One of those in the eye and it really would have been an end to the fun and games.
This is when A. started to throw things. A sauti pan flung into the dish station. An empty quart container hurled into the recycling bin. She would come around to plate without warning, and if my arm happened to be in the way of her hot sauti pan, then the resulting corporal's stripe of punishing burn on my forearm was my own concern. A simple "I'm thinking about changing the menu next week and here are my menu items" would have gotten me the customary courtesy of a "Coming around, hot!" but on this night, any bare skin I had -- and any utensil, sizzle plate, pot or pan, whatever the implement of "I'll get you back for this, bitch" -- was fair retributive game.
When you are in the planning stages of your new restaurant, fantasizing about how great it will be to own your own little place and cook delicious food in a warm atmosphere of great congeniality and fraternity, this kind of scene doesn't come up. I kept my head down and my tail between my legs and worked as fast and hard as I could to just keep the food coming and the new menu running. Of course, the artichoke heart with fried fava beans turned out to be the hit of the evening -- one on every ticket! -- giving me ample opportunity to learn my lesson, to really internalize my mistake. I vowed to apologize to A. in the morning, at length, and thank her for teaching me how to not change a menu.
But that, unfortunately, was not to be the simple end of it. Deep in the middle of the eight p.m. rush, while we were ducking fat bullets flying through the already thick air and squinting so as not to get one in the eyeball, A. looked up and out into the dining room and said, "Holy shit, is that Mario Batali at the bar?"
I froze and, with disbelief, followed her gaze. There in fact was Mario Batali eating at Prune for the first time. Suddenly I saw all my new menu items with different and appreciably less confident and permissive eyes, and felt sunken, embarrassed, and ashamed. It's one thing to go along glibly thinking up some food ideas, but is that what you want to present -- untested! -- to a serious eater, a person who is hugely knowledgeable and discerning, someone who will definitely know the difference between good enough and excellent?
I didn't have any idea where Prune was going when we opened. I didn't know that chefs would eat here and cooks and serious food lovers who were savvy and well traveled. In the very beginning, I banked on the adequate palate of the average diner -- and often took advantage of the fact that, for the most part, most people can't tell the difference. My husband, for example, thinks the turkey spinach pesto tortilla "wrap" that he eats for lunch at the hospital where he works is "delicious" but he also thinks the monkfish liver with warm buttered toast at Prune is "delicious" and so he really can't discern between delicious and delishusssss. I think most customers are like this. The problem is that a lot of cooks and chefs and restaurant folks eat at Prune and you don't want to show them your decent pair of eights. You want to kill them with your straight flush.
That night ended, mercifully, and neither of us lost an eye or suffered any other injury. Mario nodded to us encouragingly, paid, and left. We fed the staff a midnight meal. And A., after we had cleaned up, generously joined me in a well-earned lemondrop shot at the bar.
I have seen a lot of chefs refuse to be humbled by their staffs, refuse to learn from their mistakes, refuse even to consider that they are mistaken, but I do not count myself among them. I am grateful to have learned from A. -- albeit the hard way -- how not to introduce a new menu, and how to take good care of my cooks and the people working for me. I also am glad, in the end, that Mario was in the house that night, as it made it crystal clear to me that every night matters, that it's amateur to hope no one will notice.
It's the difference, I discovered, between being a cook and being a real chef. Which I learned by trying to fry wet fava beans.
About the writer
Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef-owner of Prune, which opened in New York City's East Village in October 1999. In 2006, Prune was named in New York Magazine's "101 Best Restaurants" and in Food & Wine's "376 Hottest Restaurants in the World." Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Saveur and Food & Wine.
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