To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  But I was able to pull my own weight and had developed the thick skin of a working cook, so I didn’t really have anything to worry about. Besides, the tight quarters afforded me a front-row seat to the machinations of my new culinary role model. I was keen to know where inspirations such as his came from. In time, from observing him, I realized one of the main lessons of my professional life: that true chefs are completely absorbed by The Food. Neat was the first chef I’d met who was engaged in what I’d describe as a symbiotic relationship with his cuisine. It was no wonder I’d felt such an inexplicable, love-at-first-sight type of attraction to what he was doing at Pied à Terre because I soon discovered that Neat himself was locked in a permanent, operatic relationship with food. It consumed him.

  I’m sure there are those who found Neat’s relationship with The Food bizarre, frightening, or just unnecessary, but it resonated with me. I’d been obsessed with other things in my young life, namely music and movies, but not having had the talent for a career in those fields, beyond my DJ skills, the interest was essentially recreational. That began to change under Neat, who operated on another plane altogether. Having long ago mastered the technical aspects of cooking, he was now essentially dancing with it, improvising with it, acting as the conduit through which their shared muse expressed itself. It didn’t take long to realize that everything about his food—the flavor combinations, the stylistic flights of fancy, the intuitive leaps that tied it all together—could only come from somebody who spent every waking hour, and then some, either thinking about food or actually cooking it.

  This made perfect sense to me. I thought of the way I related to food, assigning or imagining personalities and dispositions for ingredients as I’d done since L’Escargot, and began to understand that those observations weren’t mere quirks, but actual ideas that might become the beginnings of my own distinct style. I never had a chance to discuss this perceived kinship with Neat—he was far too impenetrable and unapproachable for that—but I felt certain that he must have had his own similar version of interacting with The Food.

  Lamb

  Richard Neat was the first chef I saw use multiple cuts of the same animal in one dish, and not primal cuts—for example, one of his compositions featured the trotter, ear, and cheek of a pig. As a cook, it gave me more of a feeling for the animal and a sense of how to tell a story on the plate. These three lamb preparations (shown below), based on elements of a navarin (stew), are part of a progression of dishes I’m apt to serve in the late winter or early spring months, using the tastiest parts of the animal—its neck, cheek, and tongue. The sheer ambition of the progression, and the variety of plating techniques it calls on, owes a debt to my formative days in Neat’s kitchen. (I must point out that the lamb I use today is from Keith Martin’s Elysian Fields Sheep Farm in Pennsylvania, which is remarkable for its consistent excellent quality.)

  Lamb neck with pumpkin, coffee, and hibiscus. The recipe for the Braised Lamb Neck can be found on this page.

  Lamb cheek, braised very gently, then served with white beans and pickled red onions that cut the richness of the other ingredients.

  Small cubes of pickled lamb tongue, paired with pickled cucumber, and dots of cardamom crème around the perimeter of the bowl.

  Of course, that level of immersion comes at a cost: Neat spent so much time alone with his thoughts that human interaction seemed an intrusion for him, and so his personality could be as unpredictable as the weather. Today I understand where he was coming from. It’s tough to switch gears and interact with others, even cooks, when you live in such a private mental space most of the time. There’s an almost unfathomable gap between what goes on in the mind of a chef and executing it in the physical world of the kitchen. Bridging that gap can sometimes feel like a Himalayan haul.

  In part, I think Neat relished the isolated vibe he exuded, and he would play mind games with the staff, most of them designed to create a sense of urgency in the kitchen. On occasion we would arrive to begin work in the morning, only to learn that he had locked the fridges. We’d do what we could, prepping newly arrived ingredients, all of us exchanging nervous glances. Finally, with mere minutes to spare, the chef would unlock the food vault, and we’d almost trample each other to get at what we needed and finish preparing for lunch service.

  Another similar bit occurred during service, when Neat wouldn’t tell one of the chefs de partie that he needed a particular dish for a table until the last possible second. When the captain emerged in the doorway, he’d nod surreptitiously at the chef, who would then say “envoyez,” whereupon the cook running that station would go into a frenzy, preparing the dish in record time.

  Neat also had a temper and an absolute devotion to perfection, which can be a lethal combination. During one service, upon discovering that a squab was overdone, he punched a hole in the white drywall, stuffed another squab into it with its head protruding, and drew a dialogue balloon on the wall next to it, writing “I am one well-fucked squab” inside the balloon.

  For all its apparent dysfunction, I related to this part of Neat’s mental makeup. With the notable exception of Vongerichten, I’d worked for stern taskmasters my entire career to that point, and the same was true of every young cook in London. It was part of the social contract of any kitchen worth its salt. What I appreciated about Neat was that he was just as unique in his tantrums as he was on the plate. That squab’s head sticking out of the wall was just another work of art as far as I was concerned. I mean, how many other people would even think to do that?

  Nevertheless, some guys just couldn’t withstand the tension and would either quit or be sacked. One morning, a bunch of us cooks were eating a breakfast of cold chicken pies from the previous day’s service. Neat was at his station, in a foul mood, hacking chicken wings that we used to make jus. He was enraged about something and held the cleaver in both hands, assaulting the wings with a special vengeance. With each clobber of the cleaver, the entire kitchen seemed to shake. Those of us who’d been there awhile were accustomed to such displays, so we went about our business, doing our best impressions of people who didn’t notice the thudding. But down the line from the chef was a new cook, on his very first day in the kitchen, picking parsley and trying to take our lead and ignore the display; still, he couldn’t help but shudder with each blow of the cleaver. The man eventually put down his parsley and simply walked out of the kitchen, never to return. As the newcomer passed by him, Neat brought the cleaver down again and gave him a look that said, “What the fuck is that guy’s problem?”

  But Neat could also be the supportive and protective boss every cook desires, and he’d sometimes get our backs in a surprising and touching way. There was a Northerner (a casual way of referring to those from Northern England) high up on the totem pole at Pied à Terre who had worked for Marco as well. Like so many guys in London at the time, this guy thought that he was Marco. One day, apropos of nothing, the Northern guy was all over a young cook who was brunoising (very finely dicing) a carrot. “How old are you?” he demanded. “You’re just a southern shite, aren’t you? Won’t amount to anything, will you?”

  As a subordinate, the young cook just stood there and absorbed the abuse, but when Neat showed up for service that night, somebody relayed all of this to him—whereupon he emptied the Northerner’s locker, gathering his clothes and knives, and hurled it all into the street. “Don’t you ever fuck with my boys again!” he bellowed.

  As bizarre as all of this side action could be, it was white noise to me. Neat was the first chef who inspired me creatively, and just to be in his presence was worth it all. L’Escargot was about a block away, and I’d walk by every day and look at the tradition-steeped menu and think how far I’d come in just a few years. This was nowhere more apparent than in that notebook I’d begun keeping back at L’Escargot. It was no longer merely full of other people’s basic recipes; instead I had begun to track my own new ideas, such as a tempura of rouget.

  And so it was especi
ally disheartening to me when, after I’d been at Pied à Terre just six months, we learned that Neat would be pushing off and that Tom Aikens would be replacing him. Aikens was a respectable talent, to be sure, but I had come to Pied à Terre to work for Neat, and with him gone, there was nothing there for me. I decided that it was time for the next adventure and that it would be a good thing to shake up my world a bit, to leave familiar London for something new, to act on the sense of wanderlust that had been planted at Vong and set my sights on my next destination.

  RABBIT AND CUTTLEFISH This is from a progression of rabbit dishes that recalls the audacity and ambition of Richard Neat, as well as his penchant for using lesser items in a sophisticated way—in this case, a cuttlefish preparation that’s almost Sicilian in its effect. To the left is tortellini of rabbit and cuttlefish wrapped in squid ink pasta. (The recipe for lemongrass velouté, which is poured over the pasta, can be found on this page.) Above is the progression’s main plate, an array of rabbit preparations, including Rabbit-Cuttlefish Rillettes, my play on rillettes (potted cooked meats, bound with fat), which wraps rabbit confit in cuttlefish, shaping the combination into little balls that are adorned with a green bread crumb mixture. The recipe for the rillettes can be found on this page.

  CRAB/ASPARAGUS/ALMOND MILK This is another Neat-like composition, with many of the springtime ingredients elevated by intricate knife work and plating techniques. I’ve cooked crab just about every place I’ve ever worked, but it was working for Neat when I truly came to love it.

  OUR OPERA This is my contemporary play on a classical opera cake, which takes banana and coffee as its main flavors. Although the layers look very traditional, the cream piped over the top is infused with Madras curry powder. I love the simple symmetry of this dish and the elegant integration of the yellow and chocolate tones.

  CITY BOY

  1997–1998

  The logical next step for me would have been to go to France, which at the time had long been considered a finishing school for young cooks. (It still is, of course, although in many ways Spain has nosed ahead as the mandatory stop on one’s culinary CV.) You could become a perfectly skilled cook in London, but going to France was a rite of passage that many dreamed of, but few attempted or pulled off. It was the center of the gastronomic universe at the time, with a culinary culture that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. In addition to my own professional older brother Simon, many of the best London chefs of the day had spent time in France, such as Gordon Ramsay, Richard Neat, and Tom Aikens. So I had it as a goal to cook in France myself. In addition to stamping my CV with a French credential, I also wanted to learn proper French, not just the paltry kitchen French I knew at that time. I took my stab at a long and proud tradition among young cooks, penning letters to an ungodly number of Michelin two- and three-star restaurants, offering my services for little or no money, in exchange for the technical wisdom and palate-sharpening cuisine available there.

  I wrote to no fewer than twenty-two restaurants. Despite what would be considered a short but formidable work history in London, not a single chef or restaurant responded to my overture, not even to turn me down. It was an exquisitely humbling experience, a reminder that in the fine-dining universe, for all of the toil and sacrifice I’d logged to that point, I was just another anonymous worker bee, with miles to go before I made a dent. (It probably didn’t help my cause that rather than enlist the help of a bilingual friend, I translated the letters myself with nothing but a French-English dictionary to guide me; I can only imagine how unintelligible they must have been.)

  The question, then, was what to do next. I knew that I was in need of stimulation, of something new, but for all the great restaurants in London, I felt sure that there was nothing there for me. Having worked for White, Neat, Vongerichten, Hollihead, and Cavalier, I reckoned, where my hometown was concerned, there was nowhere to go but down.

  All right, I thought, if I can’t go to France, at least let me expand my horizons and get out of the city. A chef friend of mine suggested that I go to a fine-dining institution, and I decided that I should go to Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, a luxury hotel in Great Milton, Oxford, in the countryside. So much about Le Manoir made sense for me, not the least of which was the fact that its culinary lineage was mind-blowing: a number of the best young chefs in England had cut their teeth there, including White and Neat. Moreover, working for a big operation rather than an intimate dining temple, and for a Frenchman rather than an Englishman, would all be new experiences for me.

  I phoned up Le Manoir’s chef, was invited to “stage,” and made the trip to the countryside by train, the gray cityscape of London giving way to a blur of green. After a night in a bed and breakfast, I took a taxi to Le Manoir the next morning.

  The application process alone was a window into the differences between the often improvised hiring practices of a smaller, stand-alone restaurant and one that was affiliated with a stately hotel. Instead of a few hours in the kitchen followed by an offer and a handshake, I was directed to a human resources department, where I filled out an “official” application for the first time in my life. The next step was to “stage” for two days, after which it would be determined whether a job offer would be forthcoming.

  The first thing that struck me about the kitchen at Le Manoir was its size: it was massive. It was a Sunday, and there were thirty-four people cooking for one hundred guests plus a private party. The room exuded a sense of history and importance appropriate to its place in professional British cookery, and that is what had drawn me there. I had worked for the best of the new, but other than as a stagiaire, I hadn’t spent time in a legendary restaurant such as La Tante Claire (but for a few days) or Le Gavroche—and now here I was at the Oxford of kitchens. The detail that stands out most vividly in my memory is the bronze bust of Blanc himself that lived opposite the stove, with all of his medals and accolades hanging off it like Christmas tree decorations. I was endlessly fascinated by the display—a physical representation of what one might achieve in this industry if you were talented and hardworking enough.

  On my second day as a stagiaire, the chef asked me to cook a dish of my own. Although I had a growing repertoire of ideas in that notebook of mine, this was the first time I’d been asked to actualize one of them in a professional setting. I slow-roasted some sea bass and served it over a langoustine and fennel blossom risotto.

  The chef seemed impressed. “Have you done this before?” he asked.

  “No, Chef.”

  “You just made this up?”

  “Yes.”

  He poked at it with a fork, flipping the bass off the risotto, silently evaluating it. As he cut himself a piece of the fish, he asked me what I thought. I wasn’t sure how to answer. “You tell me,” I said.

  He took a bite of the bass, and I detected the first hint of his estimation. “The fish is cooked beautifully,” he said. He took a bite of the risotto and frowned a little.

  “The risotto’s too al dente.” He looked at the dish again. “And I’d have much preferred if you’d set the langoustine on top or around the risotto. To show them off.” I didn’t agree, but I could see he was impressed, at the very least with my technical ability.

  I was hired and assigned to the meat station. The first order of business, as it often was, was to find living accommodations. I entered into an arrangement with a junior sous-chef and a pastry chef, in a house about two miles from Le Manoir. I had never lived in a house before—since leaving home at the age of fifteen, it had been nothing but crap flats in sketchy neighborhoods. Though luxurious by comparison, this new home was a bit disorienting. I didn’t know what to do with all that space. There was a proper kitchen, and when I made my morning cup of coffee and opened the back door, I found myself staring at miles of rolling hills and green pastures that flowed right on out to the horizon. It never ceased to feel like something out of a dream. I also traded in my bus fare for a bicycle, on which I rode the bumpy countr
y roads two miles to and from work every day. The morning ride was idyllic, a lovely, meditative way to begin the day. The reverse commute at night was harrowing, as motorists, many of them drunken guests from Le Manoir, nearly ran me off the unlit road.

  That nightly ritual became a metaphor for my feelings about the countryside. As lush and lovely as it was, I have to admit that the country never felt like home to me. Open fields and an unobstructed view of the sky are probably very healthful settings for the vast majority of the human race, but the truth is that I found the expansiveness overwhelming in only the wrong ways, like a giant abyss coming at me from all directions, amplifying my essential loneliness. I wouldn’t have been able to put these words to it at that time, but the truth was that I was a creature of the city, meant for the concrete canyons of a modern metropolis, where the tight spaces and skyscrapers whittle the universe down to a manageable scale and keep your more troubling thoughts at bay.

  Where I found solace was in the culinary benefits of the setting: Le Manoir was the first restaurant I worked at that grew much of its own produce. Rather than receiving vegetables in crates or from outdoor markets, I got to pull turnips, leeks, and other vegetables right from the earth. There was also a dedicated grounds crew who could be seen out the kitchen windows pushing wheelbarrows to and fro. These details put one in a pleasant state of mind, constant reminders of the connection to the raw ingredients and where they came from; this also fostered a sense of calm in the kitchen.

  Decidedly less mellowing was a daily ritual. Le Manoir employed a full-time staff member whose only role was to work the fish market at Billingsgate in London, procuring the absolute best fish possible. However, the fish team had to have its orders in by midday the day prior. So, on a busy day, while working our way through one hundred lunch covers, the on-site go-between might turn up at the nearby fish station screaming with great urgency, “On order! On order! What do you need? What do you need?”