To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  Sundays were precious and cruelly short. We’d sleep as late as possible, then lounge around, savoring the fact that we didn’t need to be anywhere and didn’t need to be on our feet. Our youth was irrelevant; we were physically and emotionally depleted, and it required idling most of the day to recharge our weary bodies. In time, when we were all up and about, we’d go for a bite at a local pub, then come home and nod off. (As a sign of my relative youth, I’d also do my laundry at my father’s house at some point in the day, which offered a perfect, two-hour opportunity for me to catch him up on my progress.) Just about anybody who grew up cooking when I did had a similar experience with Sundays.

  Agnolotti of Cauliflower, Coffee, and Caviar

  Since working at L’Escargot, I’ve loved making pasta, which to this day I find to be a meditative, almost cathartic, morning exercise into which I can utterly lose myself. Making pasta transcends mere recipe-following, requiring one to develop a sixth sense for the unique rhythms of the task. When a new cook begins working with me, I spend a week making pasta side by side with him or her, to walk them through all the steps and help them develop an intuition for the look and feel of proper pasta.

  The agnolotti pictured here is ultimately a very simple dish, in which the caviar serves more as a seasoning than an embellishment, bringing an umami-like quality to the cauliflower.

  For my first year at L’Escargot, I was confined to very specific culinary tasks and education, not even thinking about the chef I might one day become, but my budding creative instincts did find an outlet, albeit an unexpected one. On New Year’s Eve, after one of the most brutal services of my life to that point, some fellow cooks dragged me to a rave. We piled into a taxi and drove to an abandoned post office on the outskirts of London. There were about two thousand people there, lights crisscrossing the darkened space, a snake pit of arms waving rhythmically above a dark sea of bodies. And it was all set to music spun by a DJ.

  I was transfixed by the scene and the energy, and by the next morning had decided that I wanted to be a part of it. I began socializing in the scene, returning to that rave and to many, many others, and met members of Spiral Tribe, a sort of DJ collective that spun all over England. One of the guys affiliated with Spiral Tribe owned a record shop in central London and became my unofficial tutor in all things DJ, showing me how to use turntables and a mixer and selling me all the necessary equipment which, for budgetary reasons, I purchased secondhand. I loved DJing; in many respects, it was my first true chef-like experience: I took disparate influences, blended them into my own creation, and projected them out to a public for them to experience and enjoy.

  My big break came when I was mixing records in a store and a popular DJ heard me. To my surprise, he was impressed and asked me to do a set with him. Next thing I knew, I was a regular presence at raves from London to Holland, working them into my schedule whenever I could, often leaving town after service in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to get to my next precious gig. For my name, I took Kraken, after the sea monster in the movie Clash of the Titans, the perfect union of my two nonculinary obsessions: music and movies. When I finally became a chef, there were times, many of them, when I’d look out over the dining room from the kitchen and for a moment feel the same sensation I did at age seventeen—in my T-shirt and jeans, my head down, a single earphone held to my cranium, pulsating to the music I was spinning, the only one in the place who knew what was coming next.

  I worked at L’Escargot for just under two years, from ages sixteen to eighteen.

  Toward the end of my first year, a delicious rite of passage occurred when a new kid came into the kitchen. Only a year younger than I, he seemed a generation my junior in attitude and body language. I had stepped onto that great conveyor belt that mints cooks and chefs, and here was the next one being placed on the assembly line behind me. The new cook was put under my charge, and I was delighted to have somebody to hand off my grunt work to, somebody who I could have scrub the stoves and chisel the grease off the equipment at the end of the night—not that I was exempt from my own tasks, such as climbing inside the refrigerator and detailing every square inch of it, every nook and cranny, every night.

  I also began to save what money I could to start dining at restaurants around London and expand my culinary horizons. For my adventures, I bought myself a shiny, green, double-breasted suit. I thought it was quite distinguished, but in hindsight I realize it looked ridiculous on me, especially with my string-bean physique. Usually, I’d go for lunch, when most restaurants offered a prix fixe menu, a relatively economical option at the time. Often, the staff at the restaurant had no problem identifying me as a young cook, and once in a while my status as a solo diner caused others to take pity on me, as when a tableful of bankers at Joël Antunès’s Les Saveurs invited me to join them for dessert and beckoned the chef out to meet me.

  About that same time, I moved out of the barracks. Much as I loved the camaraderie I found there, I had reached a point where I needed to get out on my own, so in my second year at L’Escargot, I secured a 25-square-foot room for myself in North London. It had a bed, a television, and not much else, but in addition to some necessary privacy, the domicile gave me a place to store my ever-growing collection of records, that I organized in wine boxes from the restaurant and that soon dominated the flat.

  For my second year at the restaurant, I was assigned to the pastry station and fell in love with cooking all over again. In most professional restaurant kitchens, the savory and pastry worlds are completely segregated, and the cooks who specialize in one discipline have little or no interest in the other. But I enjoyed working pastry. In addition to tasting great desserts for the first time, I loved the precision and the satisfaction of baking something as delicate as, say, a soufflé and having it come out perfectly.

  The unique demands of pastry taught me a mind-set and discipline that benefit me to this day, and I’d encourage any young cook to be exposed to a great pastry chef at some point in their development. The greatest value of pastry was the precision required. In those days, cooking savory food wasn’t necessarily rigid. Even in a restaurant of L’Escargot’s caliber, you were taught to add a splash of this and a pinch of that, and then to taste and correct for seasoning. Not that desserts were terribly complicated at L’Escargot—in the style of the day, they might be as simple as strawberry sorbet with a spun sugar antenna plunged into it. But even the most elemental desserts require exactitude, right down to the prep work. Tempering chocolate was especially challenging in the roiling heat of that kitchen, as was rolling out a pâte sucrée because of its high butter content.

  Similarly, baking desserts was much less forgiving than, say, roasting a lamb saddle. A minute or two beyond what was required could dry out a custard or blacken a crust. So for preparing desserts, we were taught to cook gently, to put a lemon tart in the hot oven and turn it off, allowing the residual heat to set the custard ever so slowly. Our method for making a chocolate tart, like that of other kitchens in London, was a version of Joël Robuchon’s much-celebrated dessert. Where his was essentially a crème brûlée base (milk, chocolate, cream, and egg), ours was made with a sabayon (sugar and eggs whisked to a frothy thickness over gentle heat), to which we folded in melted chocolate and butter, poured into molds, and gently baked.

  My pastry work also gave me a foundation for some of the visual flourishes and flights of fancy that, years later, would become a hallmark of my own personal style. Many of the signature contributions of the most important contemporary restaurants have their origins in pastry, as well. Ferran Adrià drew heavily on the pastry arts in his work at El Bulli with savory croquants and other flourishes. A pastry-driven approach such as his, rooted in exacting standards and precision, veers away from the standard protein-starch-sauce formula that has defined savory cuisine in the Western world for generations. I myself have followed in that vein, with savory meringues and other pastry-inspired elements. Moreover, I’ve tried to incorporate the disc
ipline of pastry into all of my cooking with recipes that require cooks to weigh out all ingredients, carefully monitor exact cooking times and temperatures, and portion each serving identically. It helps them learn to do things the right way and helps me achieve one of the most elusive and important goals of any chef: consistency.

  INTO THE FIRE

  London 1995

  By their nature, young cooks move from restaurant to restaurant, country to country, continent to continent. This was one of the things I loved about the early years of my career—the mercenary aspect of it, the awareness that you were actually expected to move on at some point, to roll up your knife kit and set sail for the next kitchen, the next adventure. This was especially true then, as it is now, for young cooks who don’t attend cooking school. The way I came up, a cook created his own curriculum, learning on the job and determining what the best next step was in his development.

  Unlike in many careers, the right steps for cooks vary from person to person. A native of Lyon, France, might be an expert in the ways of puff pastry and charcuterie by his early teens, while for somebody from London, those might be the last tumblers to fall into place. And decisions are not always made for the sake of knowledge alone. Cooks might take a job just to work in a country that attracts their curiosity or to work under a chef they respect or from whom they believe they might take inspiration. It’s a process that, depending on your temperament and tolerance of uncertainty, is either extraordinarily exciting or perpetually terrifying.

  There was only one next step I wanted to make in those L’Escargot days, and it was the same one that many of my peers would have wished for as well: to work in the kitchen of Marco Pierre White, who had just moved from Harvey’s to his eponymous restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel (today a Mandarin Oriental hotel). We all referred to it simply as “The Restaurant,” as though there were no other place to dine or to work. Among London cooks, White’s kitchen was known for being famously tough on the chefs, and customers there were the most demanding in town. White himself had earned a singular reputation for his erratic behavior in the kitchen—newspaper profiles proliferated, each with what seemed a mandatory story that illustrated the chef’s volatile temperament.

  Simon once said about working for White back at Harvey’s, “Before you’re even in the restaurant, you’re running, already having heart palpitations.” Working for White would be a test of my fortitude for sure, but my attraction had deeper significance. During the Reagan era of the 1980s, Americanism had all but dwarfed my native culture on all fronts, leaving us in the shadow of our cousin across the Atlantic. But things were changing with the resurgence and redefining of British culture. Pop bands like Oasis and film directors such as Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame were garnering worldwide acclaim, and the emergence of a new British cuisine followed in their wake. Where our food had long been a punch line for international writers and travelers—as if all we had to offer was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—all of a sudden we were demanding respect, and White had been the catalyst for that, starting back in the decade prior. Against a backdrop of French-accented conformity, this punk wunderkind was more than a breath of fresh air: he was exciting, dangerous, and unpredictable, and it’s almost impossible to explain the spell in which he held young British cooks. We didn’t want to be like him; we wanted to be him.

  Colston Bassett Stilton with Frozen Quince “Crème”

  My homage to the resurgent British pride of the 1990s, this dramatic composition presents traditional British flavors in an unconventional package, the powerful Stilton blue cheese taking a rock-star turn against a glam backdrop of sweet fruit. The quince “crème” is actually a simple sorbet fashioned from quince and lemon juice that captures the crispness and fragrance of the fruit without the toothsome texture. I like to serve Stilton a little cooler than most chefs, as you might chocolate from the refrigerator, slightly tempered so that it melts on the palate but isn’t too soft. That’s how it’s presented in this dish, for the best interplay between the cheese and the crème.

  For me, White’s kitchen would be the ultimate early test of my still nascent talent and the best possible place to rise to the next level. It would also, simply put, be cool. The upstairs maitre d’ of L’Escargot, Patrice, who had once worked for White, had heard about my interest in The Restaurant and arranged a “stage” for me. (In a chef’s world, doors open at random: next opportunities are often discovered at after-hours pubs or thanks to a casual exchange.)

  Everything in the kitchen at Marco Pierre White seemed bigger and grander. The space itself was physically larger than L’Escargot, with row after row of gleaming copper pots and silver trays, all the trappings of a beautiful three-star Michelin restaurant. At each station, chefs and cooks—about twenty in all—worked with an intensity I’d never witnessed. Their heads were focused downward, and their movements were economical, precise, and lightning quick. It seemed almost to defy the possible, as though I were watching filmed footage that was being fast-forwarded. The noise also seemed heightened, especially the admonishments of the chefs—“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Move your ass!”—that were almost nonstop and mingled with the other ambient noises of the kitchen to create a bizarre industrial house music that served as a soundtrack to the hive of activity.

  Despite my two years of experience cooking in a top London kitchen, I instantly felt queasy at the realization that I suddenly knew nothing. As I continued to scan the space, taking it all in, I discovered that even the most mundane tasks were being performed slightly differently than they had been at L’Escargot. The butchering of chicken and fish, the shaping of vegetables, and so on, were all done to White’s specifications, and I grasped for the first time that every kitchen lives by its own rules, each restaurant a universe shaped by its own god. Some gods were more demanding than others, and the specificity in White’s kitchen was breathtaking. For example, where that shallot-infused veal jus had many applications at L’Escargot, in White’s kitchen all the stocks were tailored to the dish in which they’d be used. And our purveyors moved heaven and earth to supply fish and meats of the size and quality we demanded, to fulfill White’s vision and standards for each plate. If, say, we had four-pound sea bass on order and the ones that arrived weighed six pounds, well, you could be sure that those would be returned before the morning was out.

  One area in which there was no difference between L’Escargot and Marco Pierre White was the screening process: a shift spent trailing, which here basically amounted to being shoved into a corner and told to pick spinach and stay the hell out of the way. Once they saw I could handle the environment, or at least was up for the challenge, there was the job offer, the handshake, and then the trial by fire began.

  I was stationed on garde manger, where my first tasks were elementary: picking chervil, slicing new potatoes and cooking them for a lobster and truffle dish, and—before too long—preparing a terrine of foie gras with a gelée made from Sauternes. All of the dishes were featured in White Heat, and I could scarcely believe that I was there in that kitchen preparing them—or parts of them—myself.

  The menu at The Restaurant was much more ambitious than what I was used to at L’Escargot. Instead of five first courses and five mains, here there were about a dozen of each course, and they were all more labor-intensive, requiring intricate techniques. Even though there were twenty cooks, there was more to do and more was expected of each of us. As a temporary means of survival, I cribbed from those around me, surreptitiously picking up ways of organizing myself and my station to work as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  In such a large kitchen, with more complicated food, synchronicity became a huge part of my development. So much of becoming a professional chef depends on the innate ability to sense where the cooks next to you are with each dish and to adjust your own timing to synch with theirs and with the overall kitchen unit. I’d liken it to what members of a band must do with every performance, almost intuiting what has to happen from one m
oment to the next for an hours-long show every night.

  Going into White’s kitchen was, as White himself described it, like going into the SAS, part of the British special forces. His team was elite, the best of the best in London at the time, and it was expected that you could pull your own weight. Even for a young cadet like myself, once you were shown something, you were expected to have the hands and the know-how to replicate it immediately. If, for whatever reason, the person next to you didn’t show up on the day, it was expected that—based solely on having observed that person—you would be able to jump in and do his work. To survive, one had to be cross-trained, ready for anything, and calm under fire.

  I was impressed by the lengths to which White’s kitchen went: the devotion to flavor would have been absurd were the results not so spectacular. In many respects, the kitchen was as parsimonious as any in London, but it was also almost comically extravagant. For example, we roasted a few racks’ worth of whole chickens every morning, then wrapped them in cellophane to allow the juices to collect. Then we’d puncture the plastic, drain the juice, and discard the chickens. The juices were used to flavor our jus—a sensational, decadent, and spectacularly wasteful commitment to producing the most delicious possible product. Would I do that myself today? Probably not. If nothing else, the societal pressure to use the chickens themselves in another preparation would be hard to resist. But I have to be honest: I respected White for that uncompromising approach, and if I close my eyes, I can still taste that jus today.

  To me, all of this was exhilarating. It was a shock at first, to be sure, but there was never any doubt that it was what I wanted—I knew I was in the right profession. It was what every person in that kitchen wanted. If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have ever set foot in there in the first place. The common purpose was absolute.