Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  During the same conversation in which I’d asked him about Mullooly, I confessed that I was a little nervous about my lack of experience to Viverito.

  “Please,” he said. “How many are in your group? Eighteen? And there are, what, seven stations? So two people per? Do you really think you’re going to have weeds growing up around your ankles? Most students say it’s actually too easy, that it’s kind of boring. Don’t worry about it.”

  Laura and I set up at our station, which was in the middle of a bank of ranges running along a wall visible to customers in the dining room. If I did screw up, I thought, I’d get to do it in full view of everyone. I was more nervous than I’d anticipated, and I tried to think of what Viverito had told me, of what Perillo had said, and told myself, Just concentrate and just cook.

  At 5:30, Mullooly came to our station and showed us how to cook the trout—into buttermilk, dredged in flour, sautéed in a pan. The grain salad got reheated with some butter in another pan, and the sauce, made with butter, apple cider, apple pieces, thyme, and lemon juice, was done in a third pan. The pork was shredded, braised, and wrapped in caul fat. We were to give it a quick sear, put it in the oven for five or six minutes, emulsify the jus with butter, and reheat the asparagus—already blanched—with some butter too. We’d get gratin potatoes and some sweet potato puree from the station next to us, which was responsible for most of the side dishes on the St. Andrew’s menu.

  At 6:00, we watched the first diners filing in. Tommy, the teaching assistant, was at the pass up front, expediting all the orders. A few moments after the first diners were seated, the ticket machine sputtered out the first orders: soups, tortellini, a hamburger, and two trout. Laura and I looked at each other; we hadn’t stopped to figure out how to divide the labor.

  “I’ll do proteins,” she said. “You do everything else.”

  “Deal.” She waited for a few minutes until Tommy, now having told us the order was in, commanded that we go ahead and fire—start cooking—the trout. When he did, Laura dredged and sautéed the trout fillets, and, just as they were done, I melted butter in a hot pan, scooped in some of the grain salad, and melted more butter for the sauce. When we were done, we plated it and waited as Dan, running the grill station, finished cooking his order for a burger.

  “So that’s it?” I said to Laura.

  “Yeah,” she said, looking relieved. I guess she had been a little apprehensive too. “That’s it.”

  The whole kitchen had a few snags; we were lit up with first night adrenaline, and just fired our orders as they came in, forgetting that some dishes took a lot longer than others. So if we didn’t bother to ask each other how long a burger that went with our trout might take, or how long it would be until the chicken breast was finished searing, someone’s tortellini or pizza might be sitting up at the pass waiting and getting cold.

  For the first few orders and the first few screwups, Mullooly kept his cool. But when someone couldn’t keep up—and Stephen, who was on the side dish station, was having a hard time (he had the most difficult job there because every single dish came with some sort of side dish, plus they could all be ordered à la carte)—Mullooly got vocal.

  Stephen seemed to make a dozen fits and starts and stops and do-overs, and after a few moments of this—as dishes sat cooling, waiting for their accompaniments—Mullooly reared up next to him.

  “I need those vegetables,” he said. He waited about five seconds and, when they didn’t materialize, he screamed, “Give me those vegetables right now!”

  I turned and watched the guests in the dining room craning to look through the glass at the commotion. Everyone in the kitchen kept their heads down.

  I thought, I can’t believe these guys think that works. I wondered how the poor guy would be doing right now if, instead, Mullooly coached him—I mean, we were students—if he stood right next to Stephen and directed him—No, don’t do that. Try this. Or this. Now, do that. Do the other thing. Okay, now …

  When things didn’t improve, Mullooly kicked him off the line and sent him home.

  Bruce took over and, because he’d had some experience, there weren’t any more flubs.

  The rest of us kept putting out the food. Stephen was back the next day, and within another day, was doing fine. We always had some bumps—had them every night, in fact—something done under or over, a forgotten component for a dish. When it happened, Mullooly’s voice would rise and thunder. In the middle of service on the fifth night, my sauce for the trout kept breaking; the apple cider and butter kept separating. Mullooly was on me, howling in my ear, as I stood over the stove, heat baking my face, sweat running down my back. I tried tuning him out, but he was like an itch. I did the sauce again, and it broke and he made me toss it. Again, and it was thrown out. And again. And again. Until I finally got it right.

  “That’s it! That’s it!” Mullooly yelled. “That’s what I want!”

  And that’s how it went, night on night—things like that with me, with Laura, with everyone in the class. But they were minor bumps.

  Each evening, from 6:00 to 9:00, we just cooked. By this point, we weren’t bad at it. Every night was one more step in our evolution.

  “THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘service’ and ‘hospitality,’ ” Philip Papineau told us. “Service is a transaction. Hospitality is an experience.”

  The group had moved from the kitchen to the front of the house, meaning that we would be serving actual customers—not just our fellow students—and trying to provide them with a pleasant dining experience.

  We sat at tables that ran in a ring around a room in St. Andrew’s basement. Papineau had just arrived. He was well over six feet, with dark hair, and was impeccably dressed in a dark suit and sleek shoes. Each of us wore the CIA’s goofy service uniform: black pants, a white shirt, a black vest, a tie, and a long, brilliantly white apron, in the pocket of which we carried a corkscrew, a table crumber, two pens, and a dupe pad. Except for me. I had on a suit because my assignment for the first day of service in St. Andrew’s dining room was to act as maître d’. It was precisely the second time in my entire life I’d worn a suit, and I felt weird.

  “Why do you feel weird?” Jess had asked me before class began while we were waiting around.

  “Yeah, Grampa Dix,” Rocco said. He had recently taken to calling me this. “You look downright sexy.”

  “Hey—I’ve made major life decisions around not having to wear one of these things.” I said it as a joke, but I realized I wasn’t lying.

  Papineau spent a good while trying to put us at ease over what we were about to do, but I hadn’t known there was anything to be nervous about. I figured we’d go out there, take customers’ orders, bring them the food, ring up their checks, and send them out the door.

  But there was actually a bit more to it than that. He didn’t want us “auctioning off” the food orders; there was to be no “Who had the fish? Who had the beef?” so we really needed to be up on our seat numbers. Depending on the order, a customer might need a soup spoon, a fish fork, a steak knife, whatever. All these things had to be there on the table before the customer realized he or she needed them. We had very little idea, he told us, how awkward it could be asking someone for an ID when they ordered alcohol. The computer system, too, where we entered the orders, was somewhat complex. The customer is pretty much always right, Papineau explained, unless they’re drunk or abusive. And, he told us with a wry expression on his face, it could be difficult keeping that in mind when we dealt with students, who were allowed to make reservations on weeknights and eat one of their two daily meals there. “They love sending food back, because they think they know everything there is to know about cooking it. And they love to point out to you what you’re doing wrong.”

  Because the CIA was a destination spot in the Hudson Valley, we saw a lot of tourists. And because St. Andrew’s was the least expensive of the school’s restaurants, a lot of them ate there.

  “This is a real attract
ion for them,” he said. “They love that students are waiting on them and making their food. But keep in mind, they also love it when you screw up. It gives them stories to tell. But I don’t want them to be able to tell those stories. I want them telling a different story altogether.”

  As he walked us through a history of fine dining, the different types of table service—English, Russian, butler—the basics of face-to-face interactions (“Don’t tell people what your name is. They don’t care. Unless they ask, which means they do.”), it grew apparent how much Papineau loved the whole flow of service. He didn’t seem to look at it the way someone like Danny Meyer did—with an unfathomably deep devotion to customer comfort, although Papineau certainly wanted his customers comfortable. Instead it was like a game, or a psychological operation. The challenge was to control the customers’ experience without them realizing what you were doing. This required you to read their body language very closely, to detect nuances in their speech to determine how much attention they needed, whether they wanted their water glass filled every two seconds, what was making them happy or unhappy and how to maintain it or fix it. Serving a customer was not unlike a complex dish from a kitchen; you didn’t notice the individual components or the seasoning; you appreciated it as a whole.

  As maître d’, the sum of my duties was to answer the phone and take people to their tables. My very first customers were an elderly couple. I greeted them, saw their reservation was assigned to table 41, asked them to follow me, and set off. Papineau intercepted me when I was about halfway through the dining room. “Jonathan,” he whispered. “They’re moving at about two miles an hour. You just left them in the dust.”

  I turned and saw that the couple had barely crossed the threshold of the dining room and were very, very slowly following in my wake. He and I waited for a while at the table for them to arrive. “When you’re dealing with the elderly, you have to move like they do. Next time, not so fast.” He watched their approach, which was still a ways off. “I love elderly customers,” Papineau said. “They know how to behave. Although I find you often have to replenish the sugar holders after they leave.”

  When he later saw me leading a trio of customers toward the wrong table, he silently swooped in, put a hand on my shoulder and influenced me to the right spot, then darted away. I don’t think the customers noticed a thing.

  Papineau just seemed to be having a great time at his job, and he treated us as if we were in on those psychological operations with him, sharing the secret. That first night—with everyone screwing up the table numbers, putting all sorts of wrong orders into the computer, forgetting to give guests essential silverware, I saw his expression go stern just once, when Jon, a guy I hadn’t met before that evening, spilled a tray of water glasses onto two of the guests. It wasn’t just that they’d gotten a splash that needed to be blotted up; they were soaked. Even then, Papineau was much more concerned with drying the guests off than in upbraiding Jon. His one comment on it later when he did a postservice critique was an assertively enunciated, “We really need to be careful.”

  I was out on the floor the next night, as a server, taking orders, bringing food to tables, clearing them afterward, and talking to the customers who did actually seem to care what my name was. They asked a lot of questions about the school, what I was doing after graduation—which was, at this point, just a few weeks away—where I was from, and so on. Strangely, I found that I was really enjoying myself. Papineau’s enthusiasm was catchy, and playing the game with him was fun. From a few moments of conversation, I was able to tell whether people would be more interested in hearing that I’d taught before coming here, or hearing about Martha Stewart. I liked watching people as they ate, seeing some hint in their behavior—a gesture, an unconscious facial expression—and arriving at the table to see if there was anything they needed just before they were about to put their hands up and signal me.

  I also liked a good percentage of the customers. It seemed as if they recognized that part of having a good experience dining out was dependent on us, the servers, and that they’d get a lot more out of those servers by being courteous and friendly.

  But the good customers weren’t alone in the dining room. There was always a healthy number of nightmarish ones—people who let their kids run like maniacs around the tables, screaming; people who walked in dressed like they were just coming from the beach; people who snapped their fingers or whistled at us for attention; people who were condescending or hostile; people who made ridiculous demands, requesting that there be less ice in the ice water, or asking that we immediately remove a few scant crumbs they had just dropped on the table. People who seemed to enjoy fucking with us.

  One night, I stood in the doorway watching a table of ten. They were loud and raucous. They were finger snappers and whistlers. I watched one woman eating most of her meal—steak and potato gratin—with her fingers. Papineau was standing next to me.

  I asked him: “Is it me or do you think people’s manners keep getting worse?” I had been reminded of some of the kids in the Banquet and Catering dining room as I watched this party carry on.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. The woman had her steak in her hand and was tearing a piece off with her teeth. “It’s a whole new philosophy of dining out,” he said.

  “The new philosophy sucks,” I answered.

  “It does. It really does.”

  On quite a few nights, there weren’t many people in the dining room, and we had a lot of downtime. We’d do what we could to appear busy, but you can only fill water glasses so many times. So we stood off to the sides, hands behind our backs, appearing attentive, and talking among ourselves. Jeff told me that in addition to cooking, he wrote poetry and loved Rimbaud. It was surprising, not because he didn’t seem like he was incapable of writing poetry, but because these sorts of conversations never happened much. We all knew where each other was from, had heard all sorts of stories about one another’s externships, and often talked about experiences in past classes, but there were whole layers to one another that we never bothered sharing. I found out Micah wrote too, loved South American magical realist fiction, and was going to blog about the trip to Japan he and his girlfriend, Natasha, were taking after graduation. I found out that Carol was a devout Christian, and she ruminated endlessly about theology. As the nights passed, she and I would stand off together and talk about religion and philosophy. “Do you believe in evil?” she asked me once, holding a basket of bread in her hand.

  “No. Not as a thing in and of itself. I believe that you can describe people’s actions as evil, but I don’t believe in evil as a force.”

  “I do believe in evil,” she said. “But it bugs me because at the same time, if you believe in evil, you take away people’s individual responsibility. They can claim to be influenced or possessed by evil, and that washes away their personal guilt.”

  DURING THE FIRST FEW days of Papineau’s class, we were scheduled to take our Fifth Term Cooking Practical. The test would be given daily to six students at a shot, in the same kitchen as the first practical, using the same protocol, with the exact same menus, except instead of a soup, we’d be doing a fish course.

  There was no reason to be scared, but I was. The first practical had offered a few difficulties, and even though I knew my skills had blossomed in the interim, two and a half hours to do a fish course, a meat, and three side dishes was almost no time at all. One error—just one—and the whole thing was shot.

  The test would be proctored by Chef DiPeri, who had a hard-assed reputation for exactitude. Word was already out that any deviations from procedure—shortcuts, use of improper equipment or plates, mistakes of time—would result in a serious deduction of points. I’d found out a few times in the past that when you’re nervous, when you’re panicked, your hands can get stupid. No matter how much you’ve improved.

  I could do any of the potential practical dishes, and I’d done them each a number of times. Strangely, this made me nervous too. Fa
miliarity could breed carelessness.

  Days before the test, I had all the recipes ready. I had gone over and over the oral exam questions. I had envisioned myself cooking the dishes, broadcasting the inner eye footage over my own closed-circuit Food Network.

  The night before the test, I stayed up late studying. When I turned the lights out, sleep hovered just out of reach. When I replayed the footage of myself grilling a steak, or making french fries, I was including alternate endings of disasters and fire and food burnt to nothing. I finally drifted off around 1:00. I needed to be at school a little before 6:30. I awoke at 3:00 and, after tossing for half an hour, decided it was futile, got up, showered, and sat watching the sky lighten until it was time to go.

  At 6:30, all six of us plus DiPeri stood in the kitchen. DiPeri had us reach into a cup and pull out a slip of paper that indicated which menu we’d be cooking. I drew shallow-poached flounder with a wine-reduction sauce, chicken fricassee, glazed root vegetables, rice pilaf, and green beans. I would go first, with the next testee starting twenty minutes later.

  I was allowed ten minutes to stockpile whatever I needed. Almost every ingredient was gathered for me. I checked them over and supplemented the cache with butter, flour, cream, and oil. I grabbed all the pans I thought I’d need and I turned my oven on to 375.

  At 7:00, DiPeri said, “All right, go ahead and start.”

  I inhaled. I was exhausted. And I was wired. And something in my head said, Turn off your mind. Turn it off and just cook. I exhaled.

  Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I was done. I’d finished fifteen minutes early. I’d done all the hard stuff first, like making a roux for both a fish and chicken velouté, and filleting the flounder as the roux cooked and concocting a fumet, or broth, with the bones. The rest just flowed—flowed unconsciously, smoothly—from there. I broke the spell just once, stopping at the ninety-minute point to assess where I was. I saw what I had done and I knew I was fine.