Service Included

by Phoebe Damrosch

  AS I RECALL, the next few days of training were mostly administrative. The human resources director went through health insurance and dental, both practically unheard of for restaurant workers. There was the option of a 401(k), which, I will be honest, goes under the heading of “Things That Took Me a Long Time to Embrace/Understand,” well below handbags, heels, lipstick, and a few other things I would have to know you better to list. There were forms to be signed, maps of the building, biographies of management, and fact sheets about Chef Keller’s other restaurants: the French Laundry in California, and his two bistros in California and Las Vegas, both called Bouchon. And there were rules. Many of them were of the usual no-smoking, no-gum-chewing variety, but a few caught my attention.

  * * *

  Rule #4: No cologne, scented lotions, scented soaps, aftershave, or perfume are to be worn during service.

  * * *

  Over the next year there were offenders to that rule, which was enforced by our peers even more severely than by our bosses. If I was to be parted from my Old Spice men’s deodorant (which I love, inexplicably, almost as much as I love Johnson’s Baby Lotion), some doe-eyed kitchen server sure as hell wasn’t about to traipse in smelling all sexy and musky. I would make sure of it.

  The point of this rule, of course, was to make sure that nothing interfered with the guests’ enjoyment of their food and wine. For the same reason, there was no art on the walls or music in the room: the focus was on the food and the experience of dining.

  A corollary to the rule, one we would discuss extensively during our training, defined how present we were to be when serving people. When I think of scents, I think of an enticing Frenchwoman in a slim skirt suit and knotted scarf and a cloud of Chanel in her wake. In contrast, the goal of a good waiter is to be present when needed or wanted, but also to disappear when not needed or wanted. That is hard to do when you smell like a bottle of Pantene Pro-V. And who knows—maybe the guest’s ex-wife used Pantene. Best not to take a chance.

  * * *

  Rule #20: When asked, guide guests to the bathroom instead of pointing.

  * * *

  I understand the logic of this. I hate wandering around restaurants, opening broom closets and storage rooms looking for the ladies’ room. Even when someone says it’s around the corner and to my right, I still manage to end up in the coffee station. At Per Se, unless we were holding plates in our hands, we were expected to show the guest the way. I usually saw them just past the bar because at least a few times a week, guests walked into the glass wall of the wine cellar; and if they didn’t walk away with a bloody nose, they certainly walked away with less dignity. After selling them the very wine that clouded their minds and blurred the line between air and glass, it hardly seemed fair to let them go unsupervised. Once past the danger zone, however, I gestured down the hallway to the well-marked bathrooms and let the guest take it from there. Even so, some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable, as if I planned to accompany them in and help. The eighteen percent you will leave me, sir, I always wanted to say, would not cover that.

  Some of my coworkers took this rule very seriously and walked guests right up to the bathroom and opened the door. If you are going to get them there, you might as well follow through, one of them explained to me. This made me very uncomfortable, but then, I am also the kind of person who gets stage fright when a bathroom attendant is present or even when peeing in someone’s studio apartment.

  * * *

  Rule #25: Hair must be cut above the ears.

  A. Women’s hair must be neatly arranged off the face

  B. Everyone’s hair must remain as it was when they were hired. (Rule #27 explains that the same goes for facial hair.)

  * * *

  Of all the rules, 25(b) was the most fascinating to me. I was beginning to understand what the management meant when they spoke of “image.” They didn’t hire someone with pink hair or a scraggly goatee, so they wanted to make sure they didn’t get stuck with one later.

  I pushed the limits of this rule and got away with growing my hair out and adding streaks of various hues, but was often chided for unruliness. “Damrosch,” Paolo, the Italian manager who interviewed me, would say with a nod toward a private corner, where he would look at my hair as if it were a burning bush and try to find the right words. “Your hair. It is flying away.”

  * * *

  Rule #28: Open-toe shoes are not permitted.

  * * *

  The rules for men’s formal shoes were straightforward and easy to follow: they had to have laces and be buffable. Not surprisingly, women’s shoes proved to be more of a headache. Try finding lace-up women’s shoes that aren’t sneakers and don’t have heels. That meant pumps and patent leather were out. Mary Janes and loafers had no laces, and boots did not count as shoes. I went to Macy’s, where I tried on (and swam in) men’s shoes, attempted to squeeze into boy’s shoes, and eventually ended up with the AARP crowd in Comfort Shoes, trying on thick-soled numbers that also came in navy blue and beige.

  Taking a cue from the kitchen, where most of the chefs wore clogs to support their backs and protect their toes, one of the runners discovered clogs with laces. They turned out to be so comfortable that, one after the other, most of us imitated her until we started referring to them as the “single white female shoes.” With broad, shiny black toes and thick rubber soles, we all looked like we were riding around with Lincoln Town Cars on our feet. Come to think of it, shoes this ugly might be a form of birth control the whole country could get behind.

  * * *

  Rule #32: If you’re going to be more than five minutes late for your shift, you must call—even if it means getting off the subway to do so.

  * * *

  This rule had to be written by a Californian. It’s one thing if you leave your house late, but if you are stuck underground, the last thing you are going to do is get off a subway train and hope for another one. If you live on the G crosstown, which is the worst train in the city because it neither crosses town as promised nor bisects any trains to which you might want to transfer, you might not see another train for forty-five minutes. This rule would never fly, I thought to myself, and I was right.

  * * *

  Rule #36: Staff may attend wine industry events at the restaurant with approval from the wine director or head sommelier.

  * * *

  During our training, I had a lot of time to observe different departments. The pastry department was the most alternative, with their punky haircuts and multiple piercings. But the wine team was having the most fun. While management seemed quite serious, Paul Roberts commanded a corner of the room with his three underlings where there always seemed to be a joke afoot. I had always thought of sommeliers as stuffy, old, and—usually—French, but this crew seemed to be the antithesis. I made a mental note to take them up on this rule in the future.

  AFTER READING ALL these rules, I began to think about my cornets and wondered if this was one of those times in life when it is important to play by the rules. Making soufflés and taking a driver’s test were examples of such times—not that I had attempted either. I would need patience and a decent mixing bowl before I would attempt to coax an egg white into stiffly peaking, and it would take a miracle to get me behind the wheel of a car. I had found one of the few places in the world where it is more convenient not to drive, and I saw no reason to inconvenience anyone, including myself.

  When I told one of the chefs in the kitchen a few months later about my first attempt at cornet making, he asked how it had gone. I told him that I had originally figured I would make do with my regular spatula and wrap the cones around a spoon or something instead of buying a mold. At this he laughed out loud, wiped tears from his eyes, and went back to dicing his red onion.

  So I decided to try to work things out with the cookbook, this time following it punctiliously. I considered inviting a guest or two, but figured I had better master the technique before I embarrassed myself. First, I took myself
and my credit card to Williams-Sonoma, where I bought cornet molds ($15), an offset spatula ($12), and a Silpat ($25). These were vast improvements to the hummus container and baking pan. The process went much more smoothly this time, although I still had to make some adjustments in thickness and oven temperature (I lowered the 400-degree suggestion to 375). For every four rounds of batter I fit onto my Silpat, one or two turned into cornets. A few sagged before their next crisping stage in the oven; others crumbled after being crisped. One batch burned and one had to be rewarmed because they started snapping when I tried to roll them around the cornet mold. The book recommends working on the open door of your oven, to keep the batter warm enough to work with. So I knelt before the open oven, realizing that despite years of English classes, I could not recall a single poem by Sylvia Plath. I did about thirty cornets, using some of the batter from the previous session. At a baking time of eight to ten minutes each and an extensive molding operation, the forming stage took about two hours.

  By the time I reached assembly, I had grown to hate my perky pink creations. I had picked up a pastry bag ($10) for the crème fraîche at Williams-Sonoma after the molding fiasco, not wanting to take a chance filling the cornets with the point of a knife as the book allows. There was no way I would risk fracturing any more of the remaining wafers. I spent two hours dicing the salmon and concocting the lemon oil for the tartare. I lacked the fine dicing technique that would have made a sharp tartare, but it seemed to be holding together. Miraculously, the red onion crème fraîche came out perfectly, with a tiny crunch of onion in silky, salty cream, but I taste-tested a few spoonfuls to be sure.

  I do not own a specially designed silver Christofle cornet stand, nor do I have a butler on staff. Anticipating such shortcomings, the book advises filling a bowl full of rock salt in order to prop up and serve the cones. I had no rock salt on hand and tried to make do with rice and lentils; I ended up with rice in my crème fraîche and salmon from a few decapitated cones strewn amid the legumes. I lost a few cornets by pinching them too tightly as I piped the filling. And by the time I had topped the last remaining cone, the first cones, much like myself, were drooping and looking a little forlorn.

  At the French Laundry and, eventually, at Per Se, an army of cooks bakes the cornets in perfectly calibrated ovens and stores them carefully in plastic containers. On order, a few are placed in another special wooden holder as the crème fraîche is piped in. The army makes uniform little balls of perfectly diced salmon on which a food runner places a tiny piece of chive, which was cut earlier in the day by some eager young extern. The runner wraps each cone with a tiny paper napkin and places it perfectly upright in a silver tray, after which they sail away in the hand of an Armani-clad waiter.

  Just about the only similarity between the above and my own adventure was the waiter, minus the Armani. Exhausted, I slumped down on the blue bar stool, the one place to sit in my tiny kitchen, and started flipping through the book again, soothed as I always was by the untouchable perfection of each photograph, but intimidated now by the thought of the expertise required for each dish. If the cornet preparation seemed daunting, the truffled egg was frightening. This party pleaser challenges the ambitious host with severing the top of an eggshell, cleaning the interior by removing the thin membrane that lines it, filling it with a white truffle-infused custard and a layer of black truffle ragout, and topping it with a double-sided potato chip. Said potato chip, which would have taken half the previous day to prepare, is made by slicing a sculpted potato on a mandolin ($160), placing a single chive between two chips and baking them. Once again, in the restaurant, there’s a chef to perform each of the tasks.

  Even if one were to forgo the more virtuosic dishes, I mused from my perch, it would be difficult to capture Chef Keller’s law of diminishing returns, which is the foundation of the cookbook. The home cook, even one equipped with a willing spouse, a decent kitchen, and more talent than I, would be challenged to prepare so many courses à la minute for a dinner party without spending the whole night in the kitchen. As Chef Keller suggests in his book, one course might include five different preparations of pork (one such dish he calls “head to toe” because it uses all parts of the animal, snout to trotters). And yet, if one changes the portion size to allow for larger and fewer courses, one loses most of the magic. “For every course, there is a perfect quantity. Some courses must be small because of what they are: A quail egg is small. One is enough; two eggs would be redundant.”

  The thought of quickly poaching quail eggs, placing them on small soup spoons with the requisite smoked bacon (for a dish called Bacon and Eggs); running back to the kitchen to grab the oysters in a sabayon of pearl tapioca and spoon caviar on top; race back to rescue the agnolotti from the pot before they become gummy; sear the bass; carve the lamb; scoop the sorbet before it melts; and drizzle, dot, and sprinkle the dessert into shape left me breathless. A cook who could attempt such a feat would not only disappoint her guests by her absence from the table, but would amass a mountain of dirty dishes rivaled only by an equally high mountain of debt to the specialty food store (where she miraculously found rue for the bass and Japanese yuzu in abundance).

  Just when you think you have found one dish to incorporate in a sensible party menu, you spot a final flourish that defeats you: a garnish of fried garlic chips, an infused thyme oil, an exotic herb salt. As Susie Heller, who tested all the recipes in the book, says in her introduction, “If the degree of difficulty of a dish exceeds your desire to make it, please remember that it’s all right to do only part of the recipe. Most people, I’m guessing, will not try the pig’s head preparation, but it would be a shame for anyone to miss the gribiche sauce that goes with it.” In other words, feel free to dumb it down, but don’t expect much.

  I closed the book and slid it back onto the shelf. It wasn’t just that I would be working restaurant hours and never cook, or that my kitchen couldn’t fit a table, let alone more than one guest. I knew that I would never cook again from this book. Back to food porn it would be—look, don’t touch, I thought. The French Laundry Cookbook sets up an unattainable model, but perhaps that is the allure. I flipped forward to the five-spice lobster again, knowing now that I would never butter-poach that lobster or sear the generous piece of foie gras. No, I would be perfectly content with the overly charred grilled cheese that I would make for dinner using the maligned ends of an aging loaf and questionable cheese. But I could still look.

  * * *

  • A TIP •

  Please do not ask us what else we do.

  This implies that (a) we shouldn’t aspire to work in the restaurant business even if it makes us happy and financially stable, (b) that we have loads of time on our hands because ours is such an easy job, and (c) that we are not succeeding in another field.

  * * *

  • mosquitoes on toast •

  wET PAINT AND newly laid carpet prevented us from fully exploring the dining room when we relocated to the restaurant from the Hudson Hotel. Instead, we stood on our toes and craned. A thick fireplace and chimney divided a wall of windows overlooking Central Park. On either side of the fireplace would soon stand four round, well-spaced tables. Another seven tables were to look over the dining room and across the park from a raised level, reached by four marble stairs in the center of the room. Through a wide doorway at the far end, a glass wall revealed a small private dining room. The party who reserved this sixteenth table might possibly have the best eight to ten seats in the city, with an unhindered view of the park. The doorway through which we peered stood closer to the front door, host stand, and second private dining room. Unlike much of the rest of the restaurant, that large, spare, windowless white room was nearly complete, which was why it had been chosen as the site of our training.

  We spent half our days attending food seminars, in which the entire staff sat facing forward in long rows, learning about barrel-aged vinegar, heirloom ducks, and such. The rest of the day, the chefs acquainted themselv
es with the five-thousand-square-foot kitchen while the dining room staff stayed behind for service training.

  In all sessions, instead of memorizing the information, our managers encouraged us to steep ourselves in it. Since the menu changed every day, and twice a day on the weekends, it was much more important, for example, to grasp that fish came before meat, which came before cheese, than to know whether the chef used Provençal or Tuscan olive oil. Eventually, we would come to know even this by the components in the dish, but for now, we needed the basics.

  Steeping proved challenging as they handed out sheet upon sheet of facts: the sculptor and date of the statues visible from the window, the acreage of Central Park, the biography of the private dining director. Every piece of handcrafted furniture and imported linen or tile had a story. By the time they distributed the three-page sample menu, of which I understood thirty percent or so, I wanted to kneel on the floor—made of imported Italian bronze—and beg for mercy. But if we found this intimidating, imagine how it would be for the guest who hadn’t gone through weeks of training. Per Se and the French Laundry take reservations sixty days in advance. That means that the guests have been anticipating the meal for two months before they walk in the front door. Have they dressed right? Will they use the correct spoon? Will they order the right wine? We had to understand this anxiety if we were to make them feel comfortable.