Читать книгу Sous Chef - Michael Gibney J. - Страница 13

A KITCHEN’S IDENTITY IS SHAPED MAINLY BY TWO THINGS: cuisine and technique—what you cook and how you cook it. They are the obvious differences from one place to the next—Japanese or Italian, say, four-star or greasy spoon. But there are other, less obvious differences as well. The layout, for example, is always unique. The storage spaces, the walk-in boxes, the prep area, the line—they’re positioned differently everywhere you go. Some kitchens have several floors and several rooms devoted to different tasks (pastry shops, sous vide labs, banquet lines, butcheries); other kitchens cram all the tasks into one space. The size and shape of things vary as well. Some spaces are big enough to hold eighty cooks at once; in other places you might cook through an entire night of service without leaving a four-by-four-foot space. In the big places, you use double-stacked combis—computerized super ovens—to make huge batches of things; in the small places you might do everything to order on one six-burner range. Some restaurants are all about volume, turn-and-burn operations where all that matters is the Z report—the financial breakdown at the end of the day; other restaurants focus on the food and the ambiance, exchanging high cover counts for the quality of the experience. Some places can do both simultaneously; such places tend to do well.

Our restaurant is on the finer end of the spectrum. It’s a “Modern American” eatery, tucked into the first floor of an old apartment building on a quiet street in the West Village. We have ninety seats in the dining room and about a dozen more at the bar. We have a small à la carte menu and we do half a dozen plats du jour. Our check average is around $75.00 per person (appetizer, entrée, dessert), plus drinks. We do a turn and a half most weeknights—about a hundred fifty covers, on average—and double that on Friday and Saturday. Monday through Friday we’re dinner only, but we open up for brunch on the weekends.

We don’t quite have the budget to be the finest of the fine, but we do what we can to approximate it. Of the three owners, one is a former chef, so a large chunk of the start-up capital went to outfitting our roughly two-thousand-square-foot kitchen with everything we need. All our equipment is kept in peak working condition, bought new, and well maintained. We don’t fight with finicky pilot lights, our pipes don’t clog, and our refrigerators’ compressors don’t ice over. When a lightbulb goes out, we change it, and if one of the tiles on the wall gets chipped, we have it fixed. We keep the inside of our ovens as clean as the day we got them, and we sweep and mop the floor constantly. Suffice it to say we have our heads on straight.

It’s not uncommon in kitchens like this to find guideposts hanging here and there—“Make It Nice,” for example, or “fi·nesse (fǝ-'nès) noun: Refinement and delicacy of performance, execution, or artisanship,” or some inspirational verse from this or that esteemed culinarian—which remind hardworking cooks to stay focused on what they came here to do. On the tiled wall above the entrance to our kitchen hangs a placard done up in bold print that reads:

FOCUS DISCIPLINE EFFORT CARE

Under this banner marches a group of cooks who resemble the cliché: defiant types with tattoos and chin stubble, carved faces and bags under the eyes; muscle-backed bruisers with dancers’ feet and calloused hands, arms burned hairless and shiny fingernails bitten to the quick. They are what anyone who’s watched a cooking program or read a chef memoir would expect of a kitchen staff. But behind the common façade lies an array of unique personalities.

Bryan, our executive chef, is a thirty-eight-year-old Brooklyn native with chin-length hair and a taste for Glen Garioch. He’s at least half a foot taller than most of the people you know—a lofty six foot five—and his arms and legs are tight with muscles from more than twenty years of service. But two decades of rich food have left his egg-shaped torso appropriately soft to the touch.

A precocious youngster, he dropped out of school at sixteen and moved to Paris. He studied at Le Cordon Bleu and did a four-year tour of apprenticeships at three-star restaurants in France, England, and Italy. That was the way young cooks used to do it: go to Europe, work eighteen hours a day, come back a better person. His was the generation that learned to cook by getting yelled at and pushed around by bulldog chefs in exchange for room and board and a glass or two of wine.

When he got back to America, he didn’t waste any time. Within weeks he fixed himself a position on the line at an au courant French house specializing in fish cookery. They had three stars in the Michelin Guide and four in the Times. By twenty-three, he was chef de cuisine there, second in command, leaving a trail of dejected strivers in his wake. Fluency in the language, European training, and a sadistic approach to competition helped him more than just a bit. A native misanthropy made it easy for him to stop caring about the throats he had to cut on the way to the top. Since then, he’s never looked back, helming several of his own places ranging from dives in Williamsburg to posh spots uptown. He’s traveled the country consulting on everything from restaurant openings to commercial mustard production.

With such a pedigree, it’s easy to wonder why he’s here now, at this midsize restaurant in the West Village that’s lucky to clear a couple million a year, when he could be making well into six figures in an easygoing position in corporate consulting or as a television personality. Here he works seventy-five-hour weeks, brings in about eighty grand, and deals every day with the incessant budgetary constraints, the half-baked floor staff, and the nettlesome hipster critics common to any midrange star-rated restaurant. For your average forward-looking cooks and chefs, these are simply the conditions of development, burrs under the saddle to be shed with growth in the industry. We fantasize about what great space and equipment and freedom we’ll have in our future fine-dining restaurants. We grin and bear the daily struggle with the conviction that there is something better a few years down the road. But Bryan, whose foot-long résumé shames all of ours, grapples with the difficulties still. And he seems to do so by choice.

You could say that he does so because a place of this size allows him to realize a vision—a luxury that the big paycheck of a larger operation might not afford him. In a corporate restaurant, the food he’d make wouldn’t be his, it’d be the company’s. To even get a dish on the menu at such a place requires an elaborate process of hoop jumping. Tastings with the director of food and beverage, with the corporate chef, with the national director of restaurants—it’s bureaucracy at its messiest. By the time a new dish arrives on the menu, it’s lost all traces of spontaneity and freshness. It’s gone stale. So you could say that Bryan is here because he has a special vision of how food is supposed to be made and he likes getting to do it that way every day.

You could also say that he does it because he is a chef of the kitchen, a chef who cooks, too. That is to say, he’s here because he wants to be here, in the flames, in the heat, on the line. He is captivated by the act of cooking, by the warmth that comes off the stove, by the sweat that comes with a full day of work. He likes having his hands on everything, his fingers in all the pies. And he knows that here, unlike the corporate kitchen (where the majority of one’s days are spent in the office analyzing invoices and managing food cost), here he actually gets to cook things.

Or perhaps you could say it’s something else. He is getting old in chef years, after all; perhaps he’s burning out. Perhaps it’s his only option. This happens sometimes in restaurants: a decade goes by and business dwindles. Ten years in this industry is like two dozen in another. The food one makes might still be great (a chef’s instincts stay with him always), but after so many years, customers inevitably grow tired of his fare. They want what’s cutting-edge, not the dusty old names of decades past. And with each passing year, staying ahead of the curve becomes harder and harder. So the chef gives the restaurant up, jumps ship. But what awaits him? His cook’s pittance is nothing to retire on; he has to keep working. All he knows is cooking, so he stays in the business. But since his name no longer attracts the avant-garde food enthusiasts, he does his cooking at a lower volume in smaller places—trattorias, bistros, ateliers—where he can engage the act of cooking and explore his curiosities without the same level of pressure intrinsic to high-budget establishments. He retires out of fine dining proper and into the small, privately owned house.

With Bryan, it’s hard to say which of these conditions apply. He’s still full of piss and vinegar over cooking; you can tell that he loves the process. And he certainly doesn’t lack energy in the kitchen, or creative ebullience. But the gray hairs nested around his ponytail, his ruddy skin, the distant look in his eyes when he slaps you up and says “See you in the morning”—these tell a different story. Like most people in his position, he’s difficult to read.

Whatever the case may be, he’s here now and he is Chef. And when he’s in the kitchen and the whites are on, it is embarrassing to think of addressing him any other way. There is no “Bryan” in the kitchen—no “Bry,” no “man” nor “dude” nor “buddy”—only Chef. He is the lodestar, the person everyone looks up to. He commands respect and exudes authority. His coats are crisp and clean, his pants are pressed, his hair is tied back neatly. He has more experience than anyone else in the kitchen; he knows more about food than anyone else in the kitchen; he can cook better than anyone else in the kitchen. He is the best butcher; he is the best baker. He’s the sheriff, the chief, the maestro. He choreographs. He directs. He makes the difficult look easy. His finesse is ubiquitous.

And then, what would any great leader be without his second in command? In a chef’s case, this is his sous chef. The sous chef (from the French meaning “under chef”) is the lieutenant, the executor of Chef’s wishes. He is at Chef’s side seventy hours a week or more, for good or for bad, a perpetual Mark Antony to Chef’s Julius Caesar. Out of this devotion grows a lasting bond. A chef always looks out for his sous chef; a sous is always “under” his chef’s wing—guided, nurtured, cared for, long after the stoves are turned off and the aprons are hung up. While other cooks are apprenticed to the kitchen, the sous is apprenticed directly to Chef. He is not there to learn how to cook properly or how to organize a restaurant—he is expected to have these skills already. Instead, the sous works with Chef on developing leadership, moxie, brio—the subtler elements of the craft. He’s not just learning how to be a cook, he’s learning how to become a chef. And at this point in his career he is one rung away from that achievement.

The position can be difficult. It requires a peculiar disposition that is foreign to most. Not only does it entail a uniquely large amount of physical labor—twelve to fifteen hours per day, six or seven days per week—but also it engenders a certain kind of ambivalence. That limbo between cook and chef, where the taste of clout is tempered yet by the burden of compliance, is no easy place to dwell, especially for the veteran sous. The gratitude and pride intrinsic to the appointment are not without some tinge of bitterness; the excitement of power is not without a trace of fear. To wit, you want to be Chef. You want your name on the menu. You’re tired of doing all the work and getting none of the recognition. Yet deep down you wonder if you’re really ready to assume all the responsibility that comes with authority, to take all the blame that goes along with credit. It’s a charge replete with dualities, and at the end of the day you’re left straddling the fulcrum, made to decide for yourself whether the student in you has what it takes to become the master.

In our kitchen, as in many others like it, there are two sous chefs: you and Stefan. To those unfamiliar with it, a setup like this might seem dangerous. Having a pair of lieutenants could be fertile earth for competition—who outranks whom, for example, who is the real right-hand man. But you know there is no room for rivalry in this part of the kitchen. The two of you represent the upper echelon and you must work in concert with each other, and with Chef as well, to form a unified corps of governance. Your cohesion as a group is crucial to the fluid operation of the restaurant. Dissension among you will undoubtedly lead to ruin: recipes get garbled, techniques and attitudes begin to vary among the cooks, consistency diminishes, and ultimately the restaurant goes bust. So you do well as members of the sous chef team to reserve your competitive zeal for the outside world.

Fortunately, each of you serves a distinct function for Chef. Like knives in a tool kit, he’s selected you individually based on certain character traits that satisfy specific needs of his. You each help complete the kitchen’s picture with specialized contributions.

At the most basic level, you are the opener and Stefan is the closer. You come in earlier; Stefan stays later. What this means is that Chef trusts you to arrive on time in the morning and get everything set for dinner service. He expects you to handle the detail-oriented matters of purchasing and receiving, inventory and organization. He expects you to turn the kitchen’s lights on. Because of you, he can wake up in the morning without worrying that some emergency requires his presence at the restaurant. He knows that you are here and so he can take his time getting in because, it’s assumed, you have everything under control.

He also has you opening because he knows your penchant for creativity, your gastronomical curiosity. Being the opener affords you the opportunity to help with the specials. Since you take the morning inventory and do all the purchasing, you are the one most fully aware of what we have in-house, you know what needs to be used up and burned out. And so, typically, when Chef comes in, he sits you down in the office and ruminates with you about what to do for service. The two of you brainstorm, philosophize, think about what’s possible in cooking.

The last, and likely most important, reason he has you opening is purely administrative. Since you have extra time during the day as the opener, and since your attention to detail has proved unflinching, he entrusts you with the payroll and the making of the schedule. Not only does this charge acquaint you with the logistical matters associated with operating a restaurant, but also it puts you in unique contact with the cooks. You are responsible for their schedules, so they come to you with requests and conflicts. You are also responsible for their paychecks, so they come to you with gripes. If they want overtime, they ask you; if they need an advance to cover rent, they ask you. You hold the key to their livelihood, and so you act as a sounding board for their financial woes.

Stefan’s position is different. He is the enforcer, the wiry disciplinarian. He has hewn closely to the gold standard of the modern high-order professional kitchen: go hard or go home. He has gone hard since the outset.

By the time he was sixteen, Stefan, a zealous Virginian, had already beaten a path up Hyde Park way. There was no career he was willing to entertain other than cooking and, in his mind, there was no better place to begin pursuing that career than the Culinary Institute of America. When externship season came rolling around, he shot straight for the top, and he hasn’t looked back. He cut his teeth at all the city’s best restaurants and continues to maintain a dogged resistance to dipping below three stars. He’s always checking the listings to see who is opening what and where; he’s always looking for the next hot spot, the next great opportunity. And he’ll take it, too, if it seems like a step forward in his career. He is a soldier of fortune, a survivor, and every success he’s enjoyed thus far he’s achieved by dint of pure tenacity.

His attraction to fine dining makes him the perfect disciplinarian. The only environment he knows is one of utmost intensity. He holds himself and those around him to the highest standard of performance imaginable, and Chef trusts him to preserve that standard at every turn. Although he may look a bit loose at the seams—perpetually scruffy, routinely hungover—he is incapable of doing things inelegantly on the line. He’s a prodigy on the stove, an ace on the pass. And he simply does not know how to conceal his disdain for poor technique. When a cook mishandles a situation, Stefan is usually the first to point it out, loudly and churlishly. He is cutthroat in this respect, and most of the cooks have grown to fear encounters with him.

Right beneath the sous chefs are the lead cooks, the big guns. They tend not to respond to Stefan’s antagonism. These are the people who cook the meat to the right temperature and handle the fish properly—the rôtisseurs and poissonniers. They are the cream of the cooks and they know it, one short step away from management. As such, their jobs require the most skill and trust, and more often than not, the most experience. They are typically older, more graceful, more powerful cooks with booming voices and a due sense of self-worth.

Julio, our rôtisseur, is a forty-year-old Dominican who speaks perfect English and takes insolence from nobody. You never have to worry about him. He is the first to the pass on every pick. His temperatures are always perfect. He eighty-sixes nothing. He gets the job done. And the poise and pride with which he comports himself, combined with his preternatural skills in meat cookery, amount to the perfect recipe for upward mobility, should he ever decide to take the next step in his career.

But Julio is one of those cooks who are content to remain on the line rather than move up the chain. Professional cooking is just something he has always done for work. It is a trade to him, an occupation more than a vision quest. His priorities are elsewhere. He is married, he has children, he owns a home. It seems that his life is full in the outside world, that he’s happy with it the way it is. And the gold wedding ring he wears while he works serves as a perpetual reminder of that.

Raffy, our poissonnier, is of a similar mold. Like Julio, he is phenomenal at what he does. Hailing from Basque country, he, like Chef, has European training, mostly French and Spanish. He is accustomed to long hours and high expectations. His ability with fish is surpassed perhaps only by Chef’s, and his sweeping knowledge of archaic technique (how to flute a mushroom, for example) is enough to incite jealousy.

Unlike Julio, though, Raffy seems fundamentally attracted to professional ascension. He is a sprightly twenty-something anxious to move up the ranks. He really wants to be a chef. And, based on ability alone, he should be. He should have nabbed at least a sous chef position by now. As it stands, however, he remains cloistered on fish roast. It’s his attitude that’s the problem. He’s been known to leave his station a mess at the end of the night; he shows up late from time to time; he tends to petulance when it gets busy; he gravitates toward alcohol after service perhaps a bit too frequently. Simply put, he is immature. So, while he might want to be a chef some day, he’s going to need to button a few things up if he ever hopes to actually get there.

Below the lead cooks are a group that do tend to respond to Stefan’s derisive approach. They are the vegetable cooks—the entremetiers. They are responsible for the “middle work,” which can be very intense. Most of the components on a given plate are prepared by the entremets. For every steak Julio broils or every fish Raffy sears, his respective entremet prepares anywhere from two to twelve garnishes—vegetables, starches, sauces, salads, etcetera. Leaving off the actual proteins, anything in a dish that needs to be sautéed, wilted, steamed, stirred, toasted, folded, roasted, tossed, shaved, pressed, grated, dressed, salted, seasoned, or otherwise treated before it reaches Chef’s hands is the duty of the entremetier.

This can be a special challenge in a restaurant where everything is prepared to order—à la minute. Your average entremet is accustomed to managing fifteen or twenty separate pans of food at once. As a result, usually only the most motivated cooks can work the entremetier station. They are typically young, exuberant cooks with a few years of experience, in the early stages of their development.

Warren and Vinny do this work for us. While their titles are basically the same, they as people could not be more dissimilar.

Warren, an early-thirties curly blond, is our entremet on fish side. He is one of these late bloomers who come to cooking by vocation after an unsuccessful attempt at another career. He studied entomology at Cornell and worked for years in the profession before first taking to the stove. But since his arrival here about six months ago, he’s shown an incredible amount of development. He truly wants to be here, almost needs to be here, and he tries very hard to be as good a cook as he can be. His manner is decorous, his station is spotless, he strives to impress, he is diametrically opposed to sloth, and he hates failure. The cooks call him Juan. Chef Juan, Don Juan, Juanita, Juan Gabriel, etcetera. It started with a general unfamiliarity with the name Warren—Kiko just thought the guy’s name was Juan. But now, though the misunderstanding has long been ironed out, everyone continues to call him that, even the white guys. They’re just razzing him, of course, but Warren’s really bugged by it.

Unlike Warren, Vinny or VinDog, our meat entremet, could not care less what people think of him. A brick shithouse with beefy arms and a bad attitude, VinDog is animated always by some urgent, unquenched irreverence. His neck is tattooed, his face is pierced, and something resembling a Mohawk has been sawn into his head. At first glance, he’s not what you’d expect to find lurking in the wings of a star-rated restaurant.

Nor does he appear to be here because he needs to be. He doesn’t need a restaurant to line his pockets or fill his spirit—he’s happy to get his share by hook or crook. But apparently he prefers cooking to, say, working construction or collecting trash. So about a year ago, when Chef offered to extricate him from a bar-backing gig in Alphabet City, VinDog saw fit to seize the opportunity. Had things gone differently, you’d probably find him slapping up Sheetrock in Chinatown or circling the drain somewhere in Bushwick. It’s questionable, actually, if his real name is even Vinny.

But VinDog exemplifies a fairly common contradiction. Beneath the ragamuffin façade is an intelligent, curious, resourceful person, almost custom-made for the kitchen. He takes hard work like water off a duck’s back and he never stops asking questions until he gets the answers he needs. While his street clothes may be dirty, his work is always clean; while his appearance may be suspect, his cook’s chops are nonpareil. That he owes his skill-set entirely to Chef’s mentoring is undoubted, but that he is able to survive in this environment speaks to his own adaptability and to that of the kitchen as well.

Below Warren and VinDog is Catalina, our garde manger. Garde mangers are the salad cooks, the appetizer specialists. They are usually entry-level line cooks, working out of a satellite station alongside pastry on the cold side. They prepare mostly small cold items such as hors d’oeuvres, amuse-bouches, and salads, with occasional responsibility for desserts. They have less seniority than the cooks on the hot side, but they almost always outrank the guys back in prep. They do work the line, as it were, which is always a source of pride and some variety of authority in the kitchen hierarchy.

Five-two, thirteen stone, gold-toothed, and bangle-wristed, Catalina assumes all the authority she can muster. She epitomizes the hard-nosed constitution for which Mexican women are famous. She has come to be a sort of matriarch in our operation and, as is to be expected, she tackles her motherly duties vigorously. After her day off, she’ll return to work with a stack of tortillas, a wheel of queso fresco, and a bushel of tomatillos and prepare flautas con salsa verde for the entire kitchen team. When someone burns or cuts himself, she is the first to arrive on the scene with ground pepper and tomato, to stop the bleeding, disinfect, and numb the pain. And on the unlikely occasion that a rodent should venture into the kitchen, she’ll make quick work of taking it down—often grabbing it with her bare hands, muffling it up in a to-go bag, dispatching it with a whack or two on the ground, and pitching it into the dumpster out back of the loading dock.

Catalina is esposa to the A.M. prep cook, Rogelio; tía to the P.M. prep cook, Brianne; and madre to our favorite dishwasher, Kiko. They make a nice little family, the four of them, and they contribute a significant amount to our operation’s skeletal system.

Rogelio, or Don Rojas, as we often refer to him, is indispensable. In addition to his duties receiving and unpacking deliveries, he’s also responsible for the bulk of our production work. He takes care of the daily basics such as sliced garlic, peeled vegetables, and snipped herbs, which need to be ready by the time the cooks arrive. But his main area of focus is the large-format projects. We have him doing all our pickling and preserving, making all our stocks and bouillons, and, probably most important, maintaining many of our sous vide systems. He is responsible for most of the ROP and HACCP logging, for monitoring the pars on our compression and infusion projects, and for executing all our multiday braises. Without him, our sous vide output would be a fraction of what it is. Suffice it to say, we get to cook the way we do in large part because of the work that Rogelio does.

Brianne is equally vital. She arrives in the afternoon and carries us through to the bitter end. Her strength is batch work—the foodstuffs that get made every couple of days: aiolis, sofritos, vinaigrettes, etcetera—and she devotes most of her time to working on projects of this sort. She’s possessed by a certain spirit of inquiry, so working with recipes and learning to perfect them is a main goal of hers. She is also ambitious to ascend the ranks, and it shows in her performance. Tireless, punctual (if not early), determined, eager, curious, never failing to lend a hand—these are only a few of the ways that Brie could be described. And it comes in handy, this work ethic of hers, especially on busy nights when the linesmen need to re-up on mise en place throughout service. Brie is the queen of ancillary prep work. She is always there to fill the gaps.

And then there is Kiko—our chef plongeur. The word “exhaustion” doesn’t appear to be part of this man’s lexicon. This is not uncommon among dishwashers—a steadfast devotion to hard, mindless labor, an appetite for constant activity. Kiko works basically around the clock washing dishes, putting in doubles most of the week. On top of that, he never turns down overtime. As a result, his paychecks are huge, which is probably why he is generally pleasant with everybody (except Raffy, whose insouciance toward the dish team seems to boil Kiko’s blood). He’s also the acting ambassador for the rest of the dish crew, which consists of an overnight steward, a weekend pot washer, and a pair of P.M. dish men, all of whom are seldom seen and even less frequently heard from.

Outside this core group of cooks and dishwashers, a few others join our team intermittently. We have the part-time pastry faction, consisting of a consulting pastry chef and baker, who come in extremely early on Mondays and Thursdays to set up the batters, doughs, and sauces for our dessert program; we have the stagiaire set, a regular rotation of cooking school externs who come in for a day or two at a time to study our technique; and we have the back waiters, a trio of low-ranking floor staffers led by Hussein, our Bengali chef de rang.

Back waiters are the unhailed linchpins of the dining experience. They are the people who run the food to the dining room and the people who bring back the empty plates. They are the ones who set the tables and the ones who clear them as well. They deliver glassware, light candles, refresh waters, and fetch sides of ketchup. And when a group of guests has left a table, they move quickly and efficiently to ready it for the next set. Simply put, they perform all the unobserved graces that diners have come to expect from restaurants. And whereas servers and bartenders and managers and maître d’s represent the face of the restaurant—taking orders, fielding questions, explaining things to guests—the back waiters do their jobs in relative anonymity.

But the most important role the back waiters play is informant to the kitchen. They are our eyes and ears out front. They tell us which tables are ready for their next courses and which ones we should slow down on. They let us know what sections and servers are slammed and whom we can expect big tickets from soon. They notify us when important guests arrive and they remind us where they are sitting. They have the presence of mind to alert us when the dining room is filling up so we can be ready, and the kindness of heart to inform us when it is emptying out so we can begin breaking down. And, unlike most other FOH staff, who can sometimes get caught up coddling customers, back waiters always have time throughout service (and usually make it a point) to update us on how people seem to be enjoying their meals. Which is why, even though they are technically a constituent of the waitstaff, we often regard the back waiters as members of the kitchen team—an affiliation they readily accept. They are back here with us most of the night, working out of the limelight, so their allegiance lies with us.

With all these individuals scampering around during service, much can go wrong very quickly. It’s a plate-spinning act, which could topple over in pieces at any moment. A chef’s goal during any given meal period is to prevent this from happening—to sustain a fusion of all the moving parts, to keep the team together, to keep the bus driving straight. There will always be the clatter of pots and pans, the din of voices—professional cooking is a loud racket—but when service is performed fluidly, artfully, all the noise can be mistaken for silence. There’s a certain harmony to the sound, and it’s almost as though you don’t even hear it.