Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  The branzino, which was regarded as the simplest item on the menu, was my first nightmare. The fish (a Mediterranean sea bass) had already been cleaned by someone in the prep kitchen and stuffed with fennel and roasted garlic. The difficulty was the cooking.

  The grill was the size of an oven top, with flames coming up from long gas jets, and the fish was put on it at an angle. The angle was important: in the beginning, the fish pointed to the right-hand corner. This was the practice for the meats as well—cooked on the diagonal, always pointing northeast. Once it had cooked, you turned it ninety degrees, which gave it a crusty skin and a grill’s crisscrossing hatch marks. This also helped you to know where your meat was at any moment. Stage one: pointing to the right. Stage two: pointing to the left. Stage three: flipped over, still pointing to the left. The last stage, pointing back to the right. It seems obvious, but when the grill gets busy you need the obvious. With the branzino, you did the crisscrossing turn with a pair of tongs, by slipping one tong into the opened cavity and pinching the fish with the other tong from the top (not unlike grabbing a shoe from a fire, although I hated doing it at first, feeling irrationally that I was hurting the fish). Once one side was done, you gently rolled the fish over to cook the other side. The tricky part was the last stage, when you grabbed the head with a towel, slipped one of the tongs underneath the tail, and lifted it to get the final hatch marks. Three things could go wrong. If done lurchingly, the fish broke in half. If done too soon, the skin stuck to the grill. And if done too slowly, your arms went up in flames.

  On my first night, a lot of branzino was ordered. By seven o’clock, the hair on my arms had disappeared, except for one straggly patch by my elbow, which had melted into black goo. I broke many fish. Mark’s calculation was that twenty-one had been ordered, but thirty-nine had been cooked. For some reason, I couldn’t get the hang of diving into an open flame and grabbing a fish by its head. I panicked. I did it too slowly. Then I did it too fast. There were bits of fish flesh everywhere. Before I could go home that night, I was told to walk around the kitchen holding a branzino in my tongs. This made me feel stupid. Everyone else was very busy, and I was walking in circles with a raw fish. But by the second night I seemed to be getting it—such is the miraculous pedagogy of relentless repetition. After fifty or so branzino, even I figured out how to cook one.

  Learning to cook meat was learning to be at ease with variation and improvisation, because meat was the tissue of a living creature, and each piece was different. In this, I was coming to recognize that there are two kinds of cooks: meat cooks and pastry cooks. The pastry cook is a scientist and works with exact measurements and stable ingredients that behave in a predictable fashion. You mix a specific quantity of milk, eggs, sugar, and flour, and you have a pastry. If you add more butter, your pastry is crumbly; another egg, it’s cakey. Meat is done when it feels done. You cook a bird, like a quail or a squab, until you know from experience that it’s ready (or, if you’re me and don’t have that experience, you split one open slightly and peek inside). You cook a steak until your “touch” tells you it’s there. This can’t be taught by a cookbook—this feel, a thing you’re meant to learn until it’s stored in your memory like a smell—and I was having trouble getting it. Conventionally, a piece of meat—a lamb chop, say—is medium rare when it has a certain softness to the touch. To illustrate, Mario would press the softest part of his pudgy palm and say that meat should have “this kind of bounce,” a pillowy trampoline puffiness, which was no help, because his hands were like no one else’s, great mitts of excess, squat and wide. My touch was always heavy-handed, and I burned myself and wouldn’t know if it was the moment or not.

  Then I began touching the meat not for doneness but for undone-ness. I put my lamb chops on the grill—five of them, each a different shape—and touched one, even though I knew it was going to be soft and mushy. I turned the chop and touched it again. Still soft, like wet wool. I touched it, again, then again, and again, until finally one chop started to get firmer—but only just. Touched it. Firmer still. Touched it. No change. Touched it. Ready. The undone principle applied to the rib-eye steak as well: after the meat was grilled, it went into the oven, and a timer was set for five minutes. You then took out the meat to see how much it had cooked by putting a metal skewer into it, pulling it out, and putting it against your lips. The skewer was cold. You returned the meat to the oven and reset the timer. Once again, the skewer routine: still cold. Back in the oven, this time for two minutes, until, finally, the temperature changed, not a lot, but perceptibly: it was a little warmer than your lip—just above body temperature. That would be pretty rare. Back in the oven for a minute, and again the skewer routine. Now it was warmer than body temperature: that would be medium rare. A little warmer, and it would be medium. Hot, and it was well done, and your lip, alas, blistered. (Even so, I recommend the skewer technique—better than a thermometer—because you’re able to see the whole cut, feelingly.)

  I had been at the grill for two months when, in the kitchen’s phrasing, I was “hammered.” It was June, the hot beginning of a hot summer. The menu had changed again. Lamb shanks and short ribs were dropped. The duck was served not with barley but with a cherry compote and a cherry vinaigrette. Accompanying the branzino was a nine-herb salad, the same one I’d made with Andy, trimming off stems while being pushed around the restaurant: chive and chamomile flowers, parsley, chervil, oregano, lovage, celery florets, the fluffy fur from baby bronze fennel, and something called “salad burnet,” an explosion of summer greenness.

  It was ninety-three degrees outside. Inside? Who knew. Hotter. Once the service started, the air-conditioning over the grill was shut down. I was told to line up pitchers of water. “Get ready,” Frankie said: when it gets hot, everyone orders from the grill. (Why? Because the method says “rustic, outdoors, Italian”? Or because people know that the food comes from the hottest part of the kitchen—let’s make the grill guy suffer?) At five-thirty, there was the sound of the ticker machine. “Game time,” Memo said. A chart prepared by John Mainieri said that nearly two hundred and fifty people were expected. It turned out to be more, and the biggest number arrived in the first ninety minutes.

  One of the mysteries of a restaurant is that there is one thing that everyone seems to order, and you never know what it’s going to be. One night, it was two things, duck and branzino, and Dom and I were the busiest cooks in the kitchen—there were twenty-five branzinos and twenty-three ducks. It was a hot night; I understood the appeal of a grilled fish. But why duck? One evening, it was rabbit. Then: no rabbit. Tonight, it was lamb chops, cooked medium (medium rare was easier to feel, and well done was easiest of all—you just killed it).

  “Ordering branzino, two lamb medium, one lamb well done, one lamb m.r.,” Andy called out.

  I answered, “Branzino, two lamb medium, one well done, and one m.r.” Why, I remember thinking, does one go to an Italian restaurant and order lamb chops? They’re served on Jerusalem artichokes (sliced paper-thin and sautéed) and topped with red onions (cooked in beet juice for extra color), mint leaves, and lemon zest, with a spicy yogurt secreted underneath: that is, all the elements you’d expect from a Mario dish. But they were, finally, just lamb chops.

  The chop has a layer of fat along the outside, and, once you’ve grilled both sides, you roll it onto the rib to render some of the fat away. At one point, there was so much fat that it began to pool hotly under the grill. Then it caught on fire: fat flames, hot and difficult to put out. Although you’re cooking meat above a flame, you don’t want a fire—the taste is black plastic—and it’s imperative to put it out quickly. But there was so much fat that Memo told me to let it burn—it was the only way to get rid of it: just avoid the flames when I was cooking. The bottom of my grill, the part I was always having to lean over, was now on fire. Then the orders came, one after another.

  “Ordering!” Andy sang out. “Two lamb medium, squab, tender, rib eye.” I spun around, dipped into the low
boy, loaded up, spun back, dropped the meat onto the raw tray, and seasoned it. I lined up the chops on the grill in two rows of five, all pointing to the right, flopped the tenderloins into another corner, put on the rib eye, but hadn’t got to the squab when I heard the ticker tape: “Ordering three branzino and two lamb medium.” The same routine: another two rows of chops pointing to the right but in a different spot from the first batch (which I had turned and were pointing to the left), because these were medium rare. But what was I to do with the branzino? There was no room.

  The ticker tape again. “Ordering three lamb medium, branzino, rabbit.” More? I stopped what I was doing—I had to get the new orders on the raw tray to season them, at least that, because otherwise I was going to forget them with the next batch of orders, and if I fell behind I’d throw the kitchen into chaos. Uncooked meat was stacking up because there was no room on the grill. I noticed that Memo had taken up a position nearby, waiting to jump in if I got overwhelmed: what the kitchen calls “the meltdown” or “the crash-and-burn moment,” when there’s more than your head can remember.

  Again the ticker tape. This was starting to feel like a sporting event. Sweat was running off my nose, and I was moving fast, as fast as my concentration allowed, flipping, turning, poking, being burned, one row pointing to the right, another to the left, poking again, stacking up meat here, rushing over the branzinos that had been waiting for a spot, turning, the flames in the corner of the grill still burning, fed by the fat cascading off the new orders. Again the ticker tape. My mind was at full capacity, with only one stray thought, a question, repeated over and over again: What happens if I fall behind? And still there were more: lamb medium, lamb m.r. What’s wrong with these people? I was surrounded by meat. Meat on the grill. Meat on the seasoning tray. Meat on the resting tray, in big heaps. So much meat that it no longer seemed like meat. Or maybe it seemed exactly like meat. It was tissue and muscle and sinews. And still more orders. “This is the buzz,” Memo whispered, still behind me. “This is what you live for,” Andy said, picking up plates from the pass, adding, mysteriously, “it feels really fucking good.” And the remark remained in my head for the rest of the night, and I thought hard about what I was feeling: exhilaration, fear, weirdness, some physical-endorphin-performance thing. But good? It was, I concluded, my first glimpse of what Mario had described as “the reality of the kitchen”—a roomful of adrenaline addicts.

  And then, as suddenly, the evening’s first cycle was finished.

  It would repeat itself three more times—three “hits,” the last at eleven-thirty—but now there was a break. During a slow period, someone made food: fish, because, in the heat and grease of being hit, it tasted clean and unworldly and healthy. Once everyone in the kitchen wanted the restaurant’s spicy calamari preparation, and for a week that’s what we had: squid in a chili-hot broth. These were surprising moments, happy collegial meals, the cooks leaning against a counter, eating off the same plate, talking in a mixture of English and Spanish. During these moments, Mark would advise me about how to behave in the kitchen—how not to be noticed, how to observe the hierarchy—and I would ask him about his strange, late-night life that always began in a few hours’ time. (“Tuna grilled on skewers of lemongrass,” he said once, explaining a meal he’d prepared for a woman on his day off. “It never fails: I always get lucky. But then she realizes that on every other day of the week my evenings begin at two and things don’t go much further.”)

  I got a message that friends had appeared in the dining room, and I wanted to go out to meet them. I had to cool off first. I doused myself with ice water, put a cold towel on my head, and stood in the walk-in. Steam was pouring through my chef’s jacket. I removed my headband and wrung it out. Just then, Dom walked in and hooted at the spectacle of a man standing in a hot foggy cloud, trying not to move. I changed my jacket and got a new apron. I’d been thinking about the chemical process of cooking, about transferring heat, and how, in grilling, food is placed above a flame until enough heat has been absorbed to change its molecular makeup. But I now couldn’t get it out of my mind that the heat source—the agent of molecular change—wasn’t a flame but the entire kitchen. The workplace was an oven. I washed my face and walked out into the dining room, filled with well-dressed civilized couples, and I asked myself, “What’s wrong with them, that they all eat lamb chops?”

  The transition was abrupt. Cooks don’t come here normally. Except for Mario, who spends some of his evening at the bar, prominently, so that everyone sees him (for many, seeing him is a feature of their visit), cooks don’t leave the kitchen. The cultures of serving and being served are too different. The cooks’ hours are unsocial. Cooks work when others play; they work to allow others to play, preparing meals that they’re not earning enough to purchase. It’s easier to remain in the kitchen—the contradictions never surface. I saw the cooks go into the dining room only once. John Mainieri had popped in with news. “Hooker on table thirty-two,” he said, and one by one all the men filed out and then debated the woman’s price. Holly, the new cook and the only woman working that night, had a look of modest moral confusion. “Do I have to look, too?”

  The evening service exaggerated people; it was different from the prep kitchen. In the evening, they behaved differently. More sexist, cruder, harder. I liked it. I think everyone there did; the kitchen had a blunt, unapologetic reality. But what did I know? I had survived one night of being hammered. In fact, I had done only half the job. The other half had been done by Mark, preparing the contorni and plating the dishes. I had been so busy, so frantic, so panicked, I’d never once looked at what he was doing.

  I became a grill guy. During this time, Mario hadn’t been in the kitchen. He was away, promoting something, and by the time he returned I’d been a grill guy for nearly a month. Maybe I’d got cocky. Maybe I needed to be put in my place, but on his first night back he fired me from the line. I’d cooked two pieces of meat incorrectly. The plates were sitting on the pass.

  “Your pork is undercooked,” Mario said, peeling away slices of a loin and judging them to be too rare. “Replate.” He handed me the dish. “And your rabbit”—he pressed the white fleshy loin between his thumb and forefinger—” is overcooked.” The pork could be fixed by putting it under the salamander, an overhead grill that is used for reheating and flash-cooking, although it wasn’t ideal: the result, while no longer pink, was an unappetizing gray. But the rabbit was beyond repair and was handed to a runner and served anyway. Mario called Memo and Frankie over and spoke to them with his back to me, an inaudible mumble except for one word: “unacceptable.” He then walked off in what seemed like a huff and disappeared into the restaurant. Memo, who had been previously doing something in the walk-in, came over and told me to step aside.

  “It’s not what I would do. It’s what my boss told me to do.” He then assumed the duties of my station.

  There wasn’t a place for me to step aside to. I was in a quandary. Should I go home? For the next hour I considered the prospect. It was a long hour. I stood as straight as possible. I was pressed up against a hot oven, the same one I’d used to complete the rib-eye steaks. I was trying to be small. Actually, I was trying to take up no space. People were hurtling past me purposefully. The pantry guy uses the grill to reheat his octopus, and I had to squish myself against the oven to stay out of his way. Finally, in an attempt to be useful, I started seasoning the meat that Memo cooked: that was my job—the salt-and-pepper guy. A little salt, a little pepper, followed by a long wait until another piece of meat was ordered. I reflected: if I walked out, it would be tantamount to saying I can’t take it. I wouldn’t be able to return. I seasoned more meat. The kitchen had grown quiet. No one made eye contact with me, which I know because, without anything else to do, that’s what I did: I looked around at the people who were not looking at me. The kitchen fosters feelings of comrades in arms—the hours, the pressure, the need to work in unison—and this explicit public dressing-down, the look-
at-him-he-fucked-up spectacle of it all, made everyone uncomfortable: it seemed to go right to the heart of what it meant to be a member of the place. Had that been deliberate on Mario’s part—to create dissonance, to remind everyone that there are no friends, only results? Had I got too chummy? Maybe Mario was in a pissy mood. Was the pork really so undercooked? I was reminded of something Mark Barrett had once told me: Mario never screams, but when he’s in the kitchen he’s a different person and has been known to crush people. Then Mario reappeared. (Shit. Now what?) He went to one of the flattops and began making pizzas, “griddle pizzas,” the kind he intended to serve at his new pizzeria. The pizzas were his current obsession, and he wanted someone in the restaurant to taste one. He made several, topping them with gobs of white pork fat and hot chili sauce, a squishy melty concoction. Mario took a bite of one and it ran wetly down his cheek, a glistening red-hot rivulet of grease. I watched this because, again, that’s what I was doing, watching. He then marched over to my corner and shoved the rest of the pizza into my mouth—quickly and with force.

  “This,” he said, “is the taste America is waiting for.” He was inches from my face. “Don’t you think this is the taste America wants?” His head was tilted back, like a boxer’s, giving me his chin but protecting his nose. He had a wide, aggressive stance. The look was hard, almost sneering. He stared at me, waiting for me to agree.

  “This,” I said, “is what America is waiting for.”

  Satisfied, Mario took his pizzas out to his guests and went home, whereupon Memo ordered me back to the grill. “Mario is gone,” he said, “and you have to get back your touch.” It was a profoundly sympathetic act—generous, rebellious, correct—and, like that, I returned to the team.