I began to say things to my friends like “I have high hopes for this one” and “He might be a keeper!” He was one of the French Laundry staff living in the rented apartments on Fifty-seventh Street and, like many newcomers, loathe to travel outside of Manhattan. We spent more time in his building, which I understood also housed a few captains, some cooks, and André and Leigh, though I rarely saw any of them.
And then, on my birthday, he ended up in the men’s bathroom with a girlfriend of mine. I didn’t know this until the next morning, after my leather jacket had been stolen at the club, after he had come home with me and consoled me, after I had made him breakfast in the morning and left him asleep in my bed to go, starry-eyed, to meet the friend. She said he started it, he said she followed him in and attacked, and I sent both of them packing, too hurt to sort out the truth. It just so happened that I had already planned a party for myself and invited twelve girlfriends. Diva in distress! Send up a smoke signal! They arrived, bearing the four things I love most in this world (besides a whole bunch of other things):cheese, bread, chocolate, and red wine. When I told my mother about it later, she observed that these were all known to cause migraines.
So with a few Band-Aids on the ego and a new resolve to be fabulous, I charged on into false start number three. The birthday incident had stung, but I took the advice of the girls and got right out there again. One of the chefs at work had been bugging me to go out and, when he came through with a particularly good reservation, I agreed. “I am now, officially, a food whore,” I told a friend after I said I would go. He was perfectly sweet and even arrived with a box of chocolates. As painful as it was, I did seem to be getting the hang of this dating thing.
One never means to get so drunk and one never means to make extreme errors in judgment, but this one did. And when we awoke, I couldn’t get out of my house fast enough.
“Is it a one-night stand if you have coffee the next morning?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I cooed through clenched teeth and walked him to the subway.
I was hungover, embarrassed, and furious with myself. That was it. Just like Marilyn Monroe did at the end of Some Like It Hot, I would swear off love. Of course, as she professed the sentiment, she draped herself over a piano with her best come-hither pouts and her breasts spilling over a tiny cocktail dress. Furthermore, she ended up with a broke, womanizing saxophone player with a gambling habit. I might want to find another model for my despair.
THANKFULLY, I SOON had little time for despair. The restaurant was ready to reopen. The second opening took on a whole new tone. We were rested and ready to work and, after two months, truly happy to see one another. In the beginning, we had quite a few French Laundry staff to help us, but many of them had gone back to California to reopen the French Laundry. This time around, we would have no one to lean on, a fact that resulted in a deepened sense of camaraderie. The management had been busy, ordering the supplies proven needed during our first opening, organizing our workspaces, and creating more efficient storage. Someone, clearly, had bought a label maker.
Before the fire, we saw the kind of press for which most restaurants would kill. Numerous articles portrayed Chef Keller as the prodigal son, back with something to prove. Other pieces told the story of the Time Warner Center’s glamorous restaurant collection. After the fire, Per Se stole the spotlight, as headlights documented the sheer extravagance of the restaurant, the five-thousand-square-foot kitchen, the pricey stove. Informed guests came in asking whether it was true that we had a special sixty-two-degree room for making and storing chocolates. Friends who knew nothing about food and restaurants quoted the reservation policy to me, as well as the price of the menus, and a few famous dishes.
The biggest difference between the second opening and the first was the pace. Unlike the initial weeks of training, we had only a few refresher sessions this time around. After we had raced through those, there was barely enough time for friends-and-family, let alone for the staff to dine again. Before we knew it, we were working service as if we had never closed.
Within days of our second opening, guests had posted reviews of their experiences on blogs and foodie Web sites. Comments on the food were, on the whole, complimentary. Impressions of the room were less so. Early critics found the browns and grays drab, the lines stark and sterile, the marble and glass cold. At best, they described the room as “cosmopolitan.” The room was certainly not quaintly modeled after a farmhouse, as was the fashion in many of the “produce-driven” restaurants around the city; it did not have rococo scrolls and ornate flowers, the crushed velvet/bordello look, or the tarnished mirrors of a faux bistro. But to find fault with this would be to miss the point. The well-spaced tables, muted colors, and clean lines remained understated on purpose. To further the calming effect, the room was quiet (except for the occasional deafening fire alarm). Even the traffic in Columbus Circle swarmed in silence four stories below. Here, the vibrancy, humor, and artistry occurred on the plate and in the experience of dining.
It was one thing to critique the room, but when early reviews called the dining room staff somber, we were dismayed. This was exactly what we wanted to avoid. “Invisible” we could live with, but “ghostly” we would not. One could argue that good service is subjective. Some people find a waiter cold if she doesn’t introduce herself, treat the host like her favorite uncle, and write “thank you!” on the check in bubble letters. Others prefer an unsmiling man with an accent, a master of the bow-and-retreat default move.
These two varieties of service, the “Comin’ Right Up” variety and the “But of Course” variety, are only two in a broad spectrum of reserve. But I think everyone would agree that “funereal” should be avoided. This was not what Laura had in mind when she shaped the service style at the French Laundry. She designed it to be elegant yet relaxed to complement the luxury and the whimsy of the food. Laura herself exemplified this balance. I had found her intimidating until I realized that, like so many unreadable people, she was actually shy. Once she knew you, she greeted you like a friend and had this way of looking at you as if expecting something hilarious and slightly scandalous. Which, of course, inspired you to provide just that. It didn’t surprise me that she had all but escaped the spotlight while orchestrating a world-famous dining room. Guests and press often walk into a restaurant and ask “Who does your flowers?” but they rarely walk in and ask “Who hires and trains your staff?” She managed, like the best in the service industry, to make it seem effortless and fade into the background.
There were two points to address if we were to honor Laura’s philosophy. The first was the issue of tableside service, which occasionally required so many hands that a table of two might be completely obscured by somber servers. The Cappuccino of Forest Mushrooms, for example, called for one person to hold the soup terrine on a tray, one to hold mushroom biscotti, the mushroom foam, and the mushroom dusting powder (à la cinnamon) on a tray, and one to serve the soup. If a maître d’ stepped in to help, he made four. If the sommelier happened to be around pouring wine, he became a fifth. The backserver pouring water and serving bread made six. Soon after this review, we streamlined tableside service and made a rule that, unless completely necessary, no more than two people should attend a table at any given time.
The second issue came down to not taking ourselves so damn seriously. It seemed that, in the months of learning how to walk and talk and correctly place a glass on a table, we had forgotten the point of good service. It was like a man learning to waltz, muttering “One, two, three, one, two, three” under his breath and staring at his feet. Only when he stopped thinking and started feeling—the beat, his partner’s hand, the slight weight of her arm on his—would he begin to dance. True, we had been taught to place the wineglass to the right of the guest, directly above the knife. But only so as to be conveniently close to her right hand. If she moved it to the left, it behooved us to make room for it there and alert anyone else serving the table so no one moved it b
ack. If a guest wanted ice in his vintage champagne, we should offer ice with the Corton-Charlemagne as well. If a runner noticed that the table seemed irritated when he spieled the first course, he should alert the other runners to make it brief on future courses. As I watched the seasoned French Laundry staff, I noticed how often they bent the rules they knew so well in order to accommodate the guest. In one such instance, one of the runners delivered a dish to a table, an element of which was nuage. When the guests looked at her with confusion, she leaned in and, with a conspiring roll of the eyes, whispered, “Foam.”
There’s a fine line between being a graceful server and being a pompous ass. Grace depends entirely on keeping the focus on the guest, not on the server or the act of serving. Take the removal of cloches, the hatlike pieces of china placed over certain dishes to keep them warm. When serving the Bichalots the Oysters and Pearls, for example, the runner carried a dish in each hand. He placed the first in front of Mrs. Bichalot and the second in front of Mr. Bichalot. Then he walked back over to Mrs. Bichalot to remove the cloche from her dish before returning to remove his. The runner’s spiel, begun during or after the decloching, might go “This is Oysters and Pearls: Island Creek oysters and Iranian osetra caviar in a sabayon of pearl tapioca.” Then he would NOT say “Enjoy,” but smile and depart.
If there were more than two guests, two servers removed both sets of cloches in unison. A party of six required three servers, and so on. Sometimes, if a few sommeliers, managers, or backservers happened to be nearby, six of us might remove six cloches in unison. Depending on how we danced, it could be seamless and elegant, everyone moving together, every guest served at once. But if someone removed the cloche with a giant fanfare or studied precision, the effect was ruined. Now, what was meant to simply keep a dish warm became a pretense. It was a fine line and one we had to master if we were to make people comfortable. Depending on the table, that might mean making a joke while removing the cloches. I once served a man who got a kick out of taking his cloche off himself. When it was time to remove the next set of cloches, I stood behind him and said, “Now!” It may have been against the rules, but at least it wasn’t funereal.
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• A TIP •
There’s no need to say that you are allergic when you don’t like something. Not only are allergies very serious, but you have every right to your personal taste.
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• four-star mistress •
tHE SECRET TO service is not servitude, but anticipating desire. This occurred to me in the plenty of time I had to eavesdrop, while marking tables and refilling water glasses. If I overheard something important—that the guests were getting full, that they had a babysitter at home, or that he preferred fruit desserts to chocolate—I reported it to the captain. The captain might then ask whether they still wanted the cheese course, box up some macaroons for the babysitter, or switch the guest’s dessert without his having to ask. This had nothing to do with obeying the commands of the sort of demanding customer who snaps his fingers from across the room. Garçon! Miss! This was about the art of careful observation and the intimacy of knowing what someone wants before he does.
When we lost our first captain, soon after our second opening, I was given the opportunity to practice this art full-time. The captain in question was a wry but reserved Frenchman in his late forties who had worked in some of the finest restaurants in the city. He wore gray sweater cardigans and pleated khaki pants. One day, we were all huddled around large round tables in the windowless private dining room taking another one of our cippolini/cipolini/cipollini/cipolinni kind of tests when he stumbled in, wild-haired, decked out in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, and drunk. Upon entering, he began a highly amusing monologue, asking questions in a painfully slow slur as the rest of us tried to remain focused on the test.
“I am having trouble with number eighteen. Can someone define ‘sense of urgency’?” The phrase probably took a good twenty seconds to get out.
Managers rushed in. Ever calm, Laura locked eyes with the director of operations and silently ran her forefinger across her neck. He excused us immediately for an early lunch, and when we returned, we were down one captain.
Whenever possible, the company promoted from within, so it was from the pool of backservers that the next captain was to be selected. Since they were looking for presence and charm, I knew Patrick would be the first pick. But as it turned out, they also wanted a woman. I was surprised when the director of operations took me aside and told me that Patrick and I were both on the “fast track” to being captains and that our training would commence immediately.
It would be a relief to talk about something other than the bread, butter, and water selections. As a backserver, from the moment the first table entered my section to the time I had changed all the tablecloths at the end of the night, I moved nonstop. Pouring, marking, clearing, surviving the wrath of the captain who had barely survived the wrath of a chef or maître d’ and needed someone to blame. It was an exhausting job, but at least the time went by quickly. Being a captain, on the other hand, would carry more responsibility, but it would also be a hell of a lot more fun. No longer would I feel like a marking machine. I could make real connections with the guests, get to know the chefs better, and become even more familiar with the food.
In terms of food and service, I had been pretty well prepared during our initial training. What I hadn’t learned about my new duties then, I had figured out while working closely with the captains every night as a backserver. Knowing all of the other backservers as peers allowed for an even easier transition. I was aware of their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks and knew when to help them and when to ask them for help. The real trick would be mastering our medieval computer system and learning to withstand the whims of the chefs. When I made a mistake on the floor, I now reported to the expediting chef who stood at the pass. Jonathan Benno worked half of the shifts and, despite the persimmon business, we got along well most of the time. Corey Lee, feisty, Korean, and prone to biting sarcasm, worked the other half. It was clear from my first day as a captain that Corey did not like me in the slightest.
During my training, I trailed other captains, learning how to translate a guest’s request into something the kitchen could do and not hate me for. For example, at Per Se, meat was cooked au point, which translates as “to the point of perfection.” Every cut of meat had its own point of perfection. Tougher cuts like shoulders should be braised for hours, but venison or a wild game bird would be tough and liverlike if overcooked. If guests asked, we would tell them how the chef preferred to cook the dish, but the decision was ultimately theirs. Say Mr. Bichalot, for example, has ordered the nine-course chef’s tasting menu, on which we are serving duck breast as the first meat course. He requests that his duck be cooked “to a crisp.” When the captain goes to the kitchen to make the request, the chef will say that he is perfectly happy to cook the quack out of it, but we both know that it does the duck no justice. Might the guest like a braised pork shoulder? Mr. Bichalot loves the pork, the chef feels good about serving a dish he is proud of, and the captain has made no enemies.
I was quickly learning that, although the chef’s tasting menu was set, almost any change could be made to accommodate the guest. One perfect example, of which I became the mistress, was what I called the chef’s tasting menu for pregnant women. I think we can all agree that the first rule when dealing with pregnant women is never to ask unless absolutely sure. The salmon cornet usually gave it away because most pregnant American women are deathly afraid of anything raw. Immediately, we sent them a cornet made with tomato confit and eggplant caviar. Then they would be assured that the oysters were poached. We might discuss fish options depending on mercury levels, the extent to which they wanted their meat cooked, and whether the cheese (goat, cow, sheep, blue) was pasteurized. I also became comfortable with the chef’s tasting menu for the kosher guest (substitute cauliflower panna cotta without oyster glaze for the Oysters
and Pearls, substitute second fish for lobster, first meat minus the crepinette, second meat no dairy, substitute salad for cheese, sorbet, substitute no-dairy dessert) and the chef’s tasting menu for those who have been dragged to dinner and really just want a steak (soup, salad, pasta, lobster, steak, cheese, sorbet, dessert).
In contrast to the high-maintenance adults, we often hosted serious diners under the age of twelve. For some of them, we offered a few fun courses on the simpler side. Chef Keller insisted on feeding small children for free. Often the kitchen sent out something they called the “short stack,” a tiny tower of potato blini, quarter-sized at the bottom up to dime-sized at the top. They looked like pancakes, but tasted like mashed potatoes. There were also adventuresome children who wanted to do the tasting menu—the kind of kids who like their shrimp with the heads on. The whole staff fell in love with these young guests. Meanwhile, across the dining room sat the middle-aged man who refused to eat his vegetables, the woman who claimed to be allergic to anything too fishy, the food-phobic woman who started hyperventilating when she looked at the menu, the anorexic who spat all her food into the napkin that she shoved in a backpack under the table, the macho man who laughed at the portion size and demanded a few more meat courses before cheese, or the woman who became teary at the thought of eating anything on her personal “cute list,” an arbitrary list of mammals. Apparently lobsters aren’t cute. Across the room, Junior has cleaned his plate of rabbit rillette and is looking forward to a little stinky cheese.
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