To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  By this time, I had moved to Deacon Road in Fulham, another district of London, with a waiter from L’Escargot who now worked at White’s other restaurant, The Canteen. Our inexpensive living quarters were not remotely close to either restaurant. Because the Underground stopped running at 11:30 p.m., and I didn’t finish in the kitchen until about one in the morning, I had to take a night bus home. I’d stand out on the street for about forty minutes waiting for the bus at Trafalgar Square, a mass-transit hub, where I entertained myself watching the inebriated get into late-night brawls, then travel another forty minutes to get home. If I was lucky, I could be in bed by 2:30 a.m. and get four and a half hours of sleep before waking up and starting the cycle over again. This was nothing out of the ordinary; it’s what young cooks do all over the world in the name of education and advancement.

  Guinea Hen and Langoustine

  This is a dish that positively screams of spring. Guinea hen and langoustine is a pairing that recalls Marco Pierre White’s dish of rabbit and langoustine, and is my play on the classic marriage of poularde (young hen) and crayfish. The guinea hen is taken off the bone, rolled in its own skin, and caramelized to crisp the skin. The langoustines, featured in a boudin (sausage), positively explode with flavor, and these and other elements are bound together by a potent crème made from Stilton, garlic, and ramp—a dish made for the spring when the ramps are still wild. I’ve included the recipe for the Stilton–Green Garlic Crème on this page, which made on its own is lovely with scallops or other shellfish. You can use it to dress chilled green vegetables for a Caesar salad–like effect.

  Much more than at L’Escargot, probably more than in any other kitchen I’d ever worked in, there was a rigidly defined hierarchy at Marco Pierre White. New guys like me were on the bottom rung of the ladder. Above me were the more seasoned cooks and chefs de partie (station chiefs), who exhibited the hardened air of those who had been to war. These were the guys who had Marco’s ear and spent social time with him outside of the kitchen. Because of the spotlight trained on that restaurant and on the star chef at its helm, their access to the inner sanctum infused them with a sense of power and prestige.

  As for White himself, I never interacted with him directly. But I watched him at the pass, hunched over plates, working quickly to finish them before they were whisked to the dining room. His movements were a mass of seeming contradictions: astonishingly quick but very precise; aggressive but balletic; fluid yet forceful. White was a big man, hulking almost, and hailed from Leeds, a northern working-class town, and his kitchen demeanor put proof to that lineage: he was in every way very direct, with no faffing around, not even with guests, with whom he spoke in a very elegant but concise manner.

  The pace in that kitchen was relentless from the moment you arrived in the morning until you left well past midnight. There was never any letup. During the winter months, I only saw the sun one day a week, Sundays. Nevertheless, I stuck it out and, before too long, began to prove myself. Verbal abuse ricocheted off my hardened exterior; I was able to hold my own during the heat of a service. For all of the unbridled machismo of the kitchen, there was also a deep and unspoken camaraderie—the after-work beers were all the more well earned. As it had been at L’Escargot, staff meals in Marco’s kitchen were all but nonexistent. We didn’t sit at a long table and eat and sip wine before service; if we were lucky, we’d have a bowl of cornflakes or the end of a baguette with some jam. The European kitchen mentality is that you put your head down and work, to the exclusion of everything else. Cooking at the level of what we did at White’s restaurant required 1,000 percent attention, and when it was all over, there was nothing left. You were shattered, a shell, comatose.

  Eventually, I got accustomed to the life and developed the emotional calluses necessary for survival. But I can’t lie: in those formative years, there were times I thought about throwing in the towel. On weekends, when I would see friends of mine in the DJ community in Holland and Germany, it would never fail to hit me at some point that the twenty-four-hour party they lived wasn’t just a weekend phenomenon, but a way of life. And there was an emerging frustration: having gone straight from the all-male crucible of a boarding school to the equally male-centric world of professional kitchens, I was deficient in my interactions with women. I cringe remembering my awkward chat-up lines at bars—a pale, disheveled string bean clumsily bragging that I worked for Marco, to little or no effect. Then I’d slog home on the bus and try to fall asleep to the thudding of my flatmate’s lovemaking.

  Does that sound like a lonely life? It was. I wanted friends and the companionship of a woman, but life in that kitchen didn’t allow for anything more than passing acquaintances in both the kitchen and the bedroom. This affected me most profoundly when I was privy to a glimpse of “normal” life. Once in a while, the chefs would dispatch me to borrow an ingredient from a friendly kitchen in the neighborhood. It was an intense and foreign experience to leave the kitchen, beginning with the sunlight, something I saw so infrequently. I’d linger in the street for a little while, watching people going about their day. It stopped me dead in my tracks to realize how foreign the whole scene seemed to me, almost like watching an alien race. I was especially fascinated by people chatting spontaneously and nonchalantly, as if they had all the time in the world and nowhere to be. I didn’t have friends like those people did. I kept remembering something Simon had said to me back at L’Escargot, about how at some point he had “stopped bothering to learn most young cooks’ names” because the vast majority of them would be moving on before he knew it.

  White’s kitchen was much like the special forces in that it created a culture of self-screening. The demands were so trying that if you didn’t want it bad enough, you’d resign in short order and move on to something else. And I’m not going to lie to you: there were times, many of them, when I questioned whether being a chef was worth it. When you’re standing out in the snow at one in the morning after a crap service, waiting more than thirty minutes for a bus, wondering why you paid rent for a flat you spent less than five hours a day in—all five of those hours unconscious from exhaustion—and knowing you’d be getting off the return bus just six hours later to do it all over again.… Well, why wouldn’t you question your profession at moments such as those?

  Though he’d never worked in a restaurant, my father proved to be a great source of strength to me during this time. We’d connect about once a month, usually for dinner on my night off. When I told him that I was struggling with the work I’d chosen to take on, he propped me up with the rigid love of a military man: “This is your life,” he said to me. “You have to make it happen. This is what you want. Make it happen.” Thanks in part to such stern encouragement, I stuck it out.

  There were still moments of longing, however, especially for that elusive first serious girlfriend. I would pass an occasional summer Sunday, the entire day, sitting outside a pub, drinking cold pints of beer and staring longingly at all the girls who went by in their summer dresses. Decompressing and dreaming of a normal life, I wondered if such a thing were even compatible with a life centered on The Food.

  SUMMER CRAB COMPOSITION Those lazy Sundays I spent girl-watching at British pubs are captured in this dish of peekytoe crab, lemon balm, anise hyssop, and nasturtium petals. The focal point for me, though, is the gelée, shaped like a summer dress and fashioned, appropriately enough, from Asian white beer.

  One day, I realized with a shock that I had been at Marco Pierre White for a year. I couldn’t believe that that much of my life was gone. To say that the time had flown by would be an understatement—and yet, a few of the more seasoned chefs had moved on, there were new kids younger than I, and I was an emerging veteran—not a chef de partie by any means, but a solid working cook, somebody who functioned well and helped keep the organism on track.

  JOHN DORY WITH GREEN MANGO, CELERY, BLACK TRUFFLE, AND BUDDHA’S HAND Depicted above in a progression that reveals its assembly, the dish pictured above r
eminds me of my days at The Restaurant, because the combination of fish and Savoy cabbage was central to one of White’s signature compositions. John Dory is a unique fish that yields three fillets and inspires my imagination; it also has enough texture and flavor to hold its own amid the other assertive elements here. The Tapioca Celery Jus (see this page for the recipe) is also a fine sauce for shellfish, especially lobster.

  The chefs moved me to the fish station, and a new chapter opened up for me. I fell in love with fish at that restaurant—not just the dishes themselves, but every part of the process. White had access to the best product money could buy, and the fish were something to behold. The most impactful to me were the ten-pound turbots: I’d stand there at the table and stroke the clean lines as though the beast were a new pet. Just as I’d had that feeling of communing with the ingredients at L’Escargot, I felt a personal bond with the variety of fish that we worked with at The Restaurant, and began to believe that each one had its own innate personality. The muscular turbot suggests a prizefighter to me, and today I treat it accordingly, pairing it with assertive flavors. Sea bass is fast, so I came to think of it as a sprinter. Salmon and trout lack the nuance of the bass, so they require straightforward accompaniments.

  A typical day at the fish station went something like this: My station mate and I would be in the kitchen by seven in the morning, which was about the time the fish arrived. I would survey it all to be sure it was of the quality we expected, checking for signs of freshness, such as clear eyes; the sweet, clean smell of the ocean; and rigor mortis. If there were any concerns, I’d update the sous-chef immediately so he could have it out with our purveyor, request or (if need be) demand replacement fish, and adjust the menu if necessary.

  Next up was the butchering, which I found intensely satisfying. For me, there’s an almost ceremonial rhythm to the craft of butchery, a ritual that begins with the sharpening of the knife and the cleaning of the board. Then there’s the scaling and gutting of the fish, removing its head, clipping off the dorsal fin, cutting down the length of the backbone with the knife, and teasing the fillet off the bone—working precisely and leaving no flesh behind. Then, laying the fillets down, inspecting them with a surgeon’s eye, and taking tweezers in hand to remove the delicate pinbones, periodically dipping the tweezers in a bowl of water to clean them. Then, trimming the fillets into perfectly chiseled portions, wrapping them individually in plastic wrap, and standing back to survey the work.

  For me, the most important thing at that time in my development was to try to be better the next day. Fish is one of the ultimate tests of a cook’s skill and mettle: there’s no place to hide if you screw it up. Make a hash of a ten-kilo turbot and you take your knives and go home. It’s as simple as that. Hence, the discipline.

  Turning something wild into a beautiful plate of food, the journey of it from one state of being to another, was transporting. Even today, when the dinner service arrives and I put the finishing touches on a dish, every part of me is gratified. Just like some of those dishes from L’Escargot, there are Marco dishes that I could prepare right now, so indelible is the memory: the turbot with grilled new potatoes and a tomato-and-cockle butter; a sea bass dish from Harvey’s with crisped skin, cream-enriched nage spooned over the top, and a spoonful of caviar for good measure; Scottish lobsters that we would split, cook under the salamander (broiler), and finish with béarnaise sauce; a scallop and oyster nage; and rouget with ratatouille. These weren’t, on paper, terribly complicated dishes, but they were the epitome of proper cooking. These were the days before xanthan gum, hydrocolloids, and other additives that chefs such as myself use today (which help make cooking fail-safe). We plied our trade with a knife, a whisk, a bowl, a spoon, some tweezers, heat, and a pan. It was good, solid, well-prepared French food.

  Having rhapsodized this way about Marco Pierre White, I must also admit that one of the more profound epiphanies of my career has been that no matter how privileged you may be to work in certain settings, even a summit such as The Restaurant, there is always a time to move on. It’s a moment when you must recognize that, despite the trust that’s been invested in you and what you were able to learn, the only way to truly honor that investment is to push off and continue your development elsewhere. After two years at The Restaurant, I sensed that it was time to seek out the next evolution and to expand my repertoire beyond classic French cuisine.

  Keep Calm and Carry On

  One of the most iconic images of chefs, especially European ones, is that of the temperamental taskmaster, hurling sauté pans at young cooks and cursing everybody from the front-of-the-house staff to the customers. It’s become a cartoon image, but in reality these figures are as terrifying as an abusive parent. In my early days, it hit me that some chefs thought nothing of screaming the most insulting, personal, and hurtful comments at their minions. The most awful thing I ever witnessed was the morning a young cook walked into work, his face a mush of pain, and told the chef that his father had died during the night and he’d need to miss a day of work.

  “What are you going to do about it?” asked the chef. “He’s gone. Work your shift and take care of your affairs afterwards.”

  There’s not much I can add to the canon of well-publicized incidents in this genre, except to say that everything you might have heard is true. I can also confess that I myself have been known to raise my voice an octave or ten in the kitchen. You know what they say: those who are abused as children are the most likely to abuse as adults. While I’ve moderated my tone over the years, I’d be lying if I said that I completely regret my outbursts, because it produces the desired result, and that’s worth a lot in a kitchen, more than almost any other consideration.

  What rarely gets remarked upon, however, is the culture of sabotage that goes on among young cooks. This is less of a factor in the United States, but the air of competition in European kitchens is so cutthroat that it leads nascent chefs to engage in behavior more appropriate to a penal colony than to a bastion of fine cuisine.

  For example, in my first week on the job in one kitchen, I was tasked with making langoustine consommé, a time-consuming process resulting in a clear, nuanced liquid that was like gold. One day, while vacuum-packing it, I noticed that a colleague had dropped a roasted chicken leg in the bottom of the cauldron to cause the consommé to cloud, ruining it beyond repair and requiring me to start over from scratch.

  Then there was the chef de partie of the meat station in one kitchen who made a habit of stealing my tomato concassé, a laborious chopped tomato preparation that required an investment of time and concentration. He would just smile at me when I’d return to my station and find it had gone missing, and because I lacked his seniority, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I couldn’t even tell the chef de cuisine: just like in prison, there’s nothing worse than a rat.

  I learned, though. In time, I learned. Just as my knife and plating acumen developed, so too did my instincts for self-preservation. The next time that prick stole my concassé, I gave him some payback: During service, when his back was turned, I scurried over and shut off his oven, so that when he went to pull his food out, it was cold. There were few moments more satisfying than when he gazed around the kitchen looking for evidence of his saboteur and found me, waving back, doing my best impression of the smile he’d sent my way the day prior.

  This is all part of the education of a cook, just one of the many tests that probe whether or not you have the stuff for survival.

  DISCOVERING THE NEW WORLD

  About two years into my time in White’s kitchen, I heard that Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a New York City chef of French descent, was going to be opening an outpost of his pan-Asian/French hybrid restaurant Vong at the Berkeley Hotel in London. Having enjoyed Chinese food since childhood, I felt the pull of other Asian flavors. It seemed like the perfect next step for my own idiosyncratic journey, combining French technique with a new world of ingredients. It would also be an adventure in
learning to cook for volume: Vong would have more than one hundred seats, and we’d be cooking food that wasn’t Michelin bait per se.

  I answered an ad in the Evening Standard and, after a brief meeting with Jean-Georges’s on-site executive chef, was hired. It was actually pretty easy to secure the job, not only because of my growing résumé, but also because the global export of American dining concepts was just beginning to take hold, and Jean-Georges—though one of the kings of New York City, if not America, at the time—was more or less an unknown quantity in London.

  I got off on the wrong foot with the chef when I confused my start date, showing up one Monday later than he wanted. It’s the kind of thing I’d sack somebody for, but fortunately they were more forgiving and didn’t give the job away. There were just seven of us in that kitchen, and I was to man the fish station, which meant that I was responsible for all the butchering, cookery, sauce work, and garnish. A typical day would require me to crack eighty lobsters, dice up all the vegetables required for garnish, and make eight different sauce bases; one of my favorites was a stock made with whiting, lemons, oranges, limes, sumac, and hazelnuts that we served over monkfish. It was hard, manual work, and mentally very demanding.

  I didn’t care much for the volume at the time, but in hindsight I realize that from a business standpoint, there was much to learn from Vong, which was designed and engineered to produce both good food and an enormous profit. The kitchen wasn’t much bigger than others I had cooked in. Because the food was built for speed, we could produce enough of it to serve a full house, with labor costs comparable to those of the other places I’d worked. In a world in which many of the top restaurants are, at the end of the day, money losers, this place was unapologetically built for success. The food was distinct and delicious, but the real genius was in the overall conception and execution, in dishes such as lobster with Thai herbs, and a langoustine satay with oyster vin blanc and fresh kaffir lime leaf.