Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  There would never be a Spanish restaurant. I was convinced. At the end of my lunch—Joe’s having agreed to have one more talk with Andy—Joe asked Mario if he wanted to go for a ride. There was a site, not far from the meatpacking district, that he wanted Mario to see.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were standing outside it, a large, empty building, as Joe elaborated a highly detailed daydream. “What about a five-hundred-seater,” he said, “with sweeping stairs and valet parking and a tabac shop off to the side.”

  “It’s Joe’s idea of elegance—valet parking,” Mario explained.

  Joe ignored him. “Let’s go all out and show New York you can have a four-star Italian.” Improvising, more ideas coming to him as he talked, Joe said, “No, on reflection, it shouldn’t be Italian, but Italian American”—a return to his roots, a homage to the cooking of his mother, Lidia. I was witnessing a creative side of restaurant making—an exhilarating thing—and, within six months, Joe had got a lease, hired an architect, and begun constructing a version of the vision that had come to him in the street in front of me. The place would have an Italian name, Del Posto. Posto was Italian for “place.” What it wasn’t was Italian for “Andy’s Spanish restaurant.”

  MARIO HAD assumed he had a clear picture of the Babbo kitchen, even when he hadn’t been there, because he’d been counting on Frankie to be a reliable spy. Frankie was his Andy spy: that’s why Mario had been surprised when Joe said there’d been problems. (There were actually many spies. “Don’t tell Elisa,” Gina told me one day, “but Mario asked me to keep an eye on her.”) But Frankie would never say anything negative behind someone’s back. Face to face was different; face to face, you’ll never meet anyone blunter.

  Frankie was the oldest young person I’ve known. He wasn’t yet thirty but could have been fifty. Or maybe he was every bit his age but from a different era: a younger version of someone’s grandfather. He was from Philadelphia—“South Philly” (also fifty years behind the rest of the world)—and was lithe and nimble, and a very fast cook, with speedy street-smart reflexes: very male in an old-fashioned way, except for those eyelashes and a pronounced birthmark on his cheek, which was like the beauty mark of a woman from a time when women had beauty marks. He was close to his family and often went home on his days off: his mother owned a building (the tenant was a hair salon); his father, now retired and in his seventies, used to drive a truck. I accompanied Frankie on one of his visits—Philly cheese steaks, stromboli, chicken cutlets, an Italian-American street market, all the buildings brick, most of them two-story, evocative of Edward Hopper paintings and the movie Rocky. We drove around, and I was shown the ’hood: the church where Frankie had had his first job, helping prepare supper for the parish priests; his mother’s building, which he hopes to take over one day and make into an eatery (“Nothing fancy, just good food—I’ll run it with my sister and her husband”); his street, where every September he’d wheel a tomato juicer from house to house. The juicer was a hand-cranked food mill, the kind that Italians still use to skin and seed tomatoes to make a sauce. In Frankie’s neighborhood, it was called “gravy.” In September, all the women bought tomatoes by the bushel.

  Frankie pretended to go to a community college (“I dunno—accounting”), but he wasn’t a good student, and one day he came home and found brochures for cooking schools on the kitchen table. His mother had sent away for them. Four years later, he got his first big job: at Le Cirque, then a four-star restaurant, when the head chef was the Cambodian-born, Paris-trained Sottha Khunn. At first, typically, Frankie wasn’t allowed to cook. “For the first three months, I did starters, just like Alex is doing now. I did everything Sottha Khunn told me to do. It was always ‘Yes, Chef. Whatever you say, Chef. Right away, Chef.’ It was a French kitchen, so I was his bitch. Okay, if that’s the way it’s done, that’s what I’ll be. Three months later, Khunn told me to watch the guy on the grill. I wasn’t supposed to cook, just watch. Then one day, he put me on the line—not on the grill, though, but at the fish station. The fish guy hadn’t shown up. I wasn’t trained. ‘No time to train,’ Khunn told me.” It was a disaster. Frankie was nervous, and everything went wrong, and at the end of the night, disgraced, he was sent home: from now on, he’d be working mornings.

  Sottha Khunn was a screamer. “If he asked for something, you gave it to him. If he wanted it in a different way, you did it. You never questioned, you never argued, because in the back of your head you knew that once he started screaming your evening was ruined. He didn’t stop until you were sent home or fired.” Khunn was also a perfectionist and, for Frankie, an inspiration. “I learned more in three months of Le Cirque than three years of the cooking school. I went to cooking school so I could get a job with someone like Khunn.” Trained by a screamer, did Frankie then grow up to be one? Because as Frankie assumed more and more responsibility at Babbo, that’s what he seemed to be becoming: the kitchen’s screamer.

  Alex got most of the screaming, although he admits he sometimes deserved it. He was still working the pantry station, but it wasn’t any less busy than any other spot. There were thirteen appetizers, each with its own complex construction, and he wasn’t, he conceded, always ready when the service started: a terrifying admission. It means you’re doing your prep while orders are being called out, and the orders come fast.

  If Alex wasn’t ready, he fell behind. (“I wasn’t used to being so busy—I made three or four hundred appetizers a night—and didn’t have the time to reach up and get a glass of water.”) A table might have ordered a pasta and a starter, and the pasta would be done, ready to go out, starting to cool, and Alex was messing around with his beans.

  “Hey, Alex,” Frankie shouted. “Do you know what mise en place means?”

  Alex, characteristically, didn’t get the point of the question—he was so caught up with what he was doing that he hadn’t realized people were waiting for it—and he responded literally. He thought Frankie was asking for help with a French expression. He stopped and pondered the phrase, conjugating the verb, and was about to provide a translation, when Frankie stopped him. “No, you dickhead. It means having your shit in the right place in time!” Alex looked stunned. “Sometimes,” he said to Frankie, “the way you give information is not entirely appropriate, and I think you could afford to be a little less coarse.” It got worse. Frankie started timing Alex’s dishes and counting off the seconds. He sent back others. The salads weren’t high enough. “Replate!” They didn’t have enough greens. “Replate!” He hadn’t wiped off the dish first. “Replate!” The rosemary wasn’t fine enough. The beans were overcooked. He’d forgotten the pancetta.

  “He was busting my balls,” Alex told me. “I’d become his bitch. He’d singled me out to kick my ass.” In fact, Alex hadn’t been singled out.

  “I’m a dick, I’m a dick, I’m a dick!” Frankie announced routinely. “I’ve got to be a dick so we don’t lose our three stars. I don’t want friends.” He turned on Mario Garland. Garland was the guy who’d replaced Mark Barrett at the pasta station. But his dishes were too wet. (“I made the mistake of being nice to him,” Frankie told me. “He thought of me as a buddy rather than management.”) He turned on Holly because she kept “talking back.” “She wasn’t getting enough color on her duck”—meaning her pan wasn’t hot enough and she wasn’t browning the bird sufficiently—“and I told her, ‘You need more color,’ but she wants to explain. We’re in the middle of service. I don’t want an explanation. I want to hear ‘Yes, Frank, right away, Frank, whatever you say, Frank.’” Every place Frankie looked, he saw something he didn’t like. “There are a hundred ways to cook an ingredient. I’m here to make sure that it’s done Mario’s way.” The trouble was that Mario wasn’t in the kitchen. “I’ve told him to show his face. I need people to see that what I say is coming from him. They’re not listening to me.”

  Frankie wasn’t naturally a manager; he was naturally sociable and capable of being one thing one moment (a friend, a confi
dant, a prankster—whipping up a bowl of egg whites and pretending to sneeze them down the neck of the dishwasher) and a frightening, abusive person the next. When he showed up at midday, I’d scrutinize his face to see which Frankie we were going to get. It made for a peculiar work environment, although one that was never dull. I may have been entertained more easily than the others, because I had so little at stake. I didn’t mind being criticized—I was there to learn—and accepted my servile status. “Yes, Frankie,” I would always say.

  “Am I right, Bill?” he’d shout so the whole kitchen heard.

  “Yes, Frankie.”

  “Am I always right?”

  “Yes, Frankie.”

  “Is it possible that I could ever be wrong?”

  “No, Frankie.”

  Then he’d smile.

  But my turn was bound to come.

  The occasion was a staff shortfall. Abby had taken six days off. For some time, she’d been entertaining the notion of having cosmetic surgery. This had become a peculiar subject—should she? shouldn’t she?—but not much more peculiar than any other kitchen confidence: Holly’s sex life, say (a vivid chronicle), or Garland’s efforts to impregnate his wife (an ongoing one, with daily updates). When you spent so much time together, you had no secrets. And then, decisively, Abby resolved to have it done.

  She was expected back on the following Monday. I had been working with her at the grill, splitting the job into a two-person station, as I had done with Mark. In the beginning, I cooked the meat and she prepared the contorni, and in time I was also preparing the contorni and plating the dishes, although Abby was nearby in case something went wrong. On the Sunday, she phoned. There were complications. She needed one more day. Who could cover for her?

  I’d been hoping for such a moment. It was March 17th—fifteen months after my first day in the kitchen. Was I ready? Yes and no. Yes, because I almost knew everything I had to do. No, because I only almost knew everything.

  The prep alone was so complicated that you never mastered it until you had no choice. (Or rather, I should say, it was so complicated that I’d never mastered it until I’d had no choice.) I had a map of the station and had just about committed it to memory. The meat and fish were under the counter in the lowboy. That was under control. The problem was what was on top: the little trays of contorni and various embellishments. There were thirty-three different ingredients, and most had to be prepared before the service started, including red onions (cooked in beet juice and red wine vinegar), salsify (braised in sambuca), and farotta (cooked in a beet purée). There were six different squirter bottles, two balsamic vinegars, two olive oils, plus vin santo, vin cotto, and saba, not to mention the Brussels sprouts and braised fennel and rabbit pâté—and damn! Today, I look at the map and am astonished I had any of it in my head.

  I was nervous and started off in characteristic fashion by slicing myself. I was preparing Jerusalem artichokes, the knotty, remarkably ugly bulbs that look like dirt clods. But sliced thin and fried very hot, they have an earthy flavor that someone must like. Mario, I suppose. (Sometimes I’d put these dishes together and wonder: how in the world did he think this combination was a good idea?) Once the chokes started to brown, you added shiitake mushrooms and a splash of vinegar and finished them with a handful of parsley: it was a vegetable bed for the lamb chops. But it was edible only if the Jerusalem artichokes were cut very thin—a thinness you get only by using a meat slicer, that round spinning blade that you see at the deli. The slicer is big; the chokes are small and slippery. There was a grinding sound. I did my customary leap. Everyone froze. Tony Liu bent over to see if he’d find my finger jammed in the blade.

  “No, no,” I said. “Just the nail and fingertip.”

  I did my routine: disinfectant, bandages, and a rubber guard, which I slipped over a now foreshortened forefinger.

  It wasn’t a good start, and I was now behind on my prep. Actually everyone was behind, and there was a feeling of pressure—a nasty, pissy kind of pressure. Elisa stayed later than normal and in her rush dropped a container of cockles, which scattered across the floor like marbles. Frankie said something. “Fuck off, Frankie,” she said. He mumbled something else. Elisa repeated herself loudly. “Frankie, fuck off.” She was irritable. Frankie was irritable. Was I the irritant? I was taking too long slicing my rosemary, Frankie said. I was taking too long preparing the thyme.

  Tony Liu joined him. “You have to move faster. There’s a lot of prep. You’re too slow.”

  The service started, and for the first two hours every piece of meat I cooked was inspected.

  Okay. I’m being tested. Don’t panic. You know how to do this.

  There was an order for lamb chops, medium rare. I cooked them, assembled the plate, was about to put it up on the pass, when Frankie stopped me, took the dish apart, and squeezed each piece of meat. He said nothing: no eye contact, nothing. A rib eye, medium rare, and four people immediately crowded round the meat after I cooked it, prodding it with a skewer, and then touching the lips with it to judge the meat’s doneness. A pork tenderloin; the same routine: the dish was taken apart. The meat was fine. I could see Frankie’s disappointment. “Put it back together,” he said.

  Tony Liu saw my hand. “Get rid of the plastic.”

  “I sliced my fingertip,” I reminded him.

  “Get rid of it. You can’t cook meat wearing plastic. You won’t have the touch.”

  I peeled off the plastic and threw out the bandages. For a while, I tried to use my other fingers, but they were ineffective. I couldn’t do the quick touch. I had to use too much of my middle finger to get a reading and burnt it and then couldn’t interpret what it was telling me—and so I gave in. I pressed my forefinger against a lamb chop on the grill, pressing the wound into meat. The wound spread and opened. The meat was salty and glistened with hot fat. I felt the salt (burning) and the fat (another kind of burning). Well, that was the drill. I turned to rinse my hand in the sudsy plastic container, but it was black, except for the surface, which was shiny. I paused and then dipped in my hand.

  Frankie was inches from my face. “You don’t have Abby to protect you. Tonight you’ve got me. It’s just me and you.”

  He picked up two slices of pancetta, which I was cooking on the flattop. They had the string around them. “We don’t serve string,” he said.

  I knew that. This particular pancetta had been badly rolled and was coming loose, which Tony had observed when he’d delivered it to me from the walk-in: he’d told me to cook it with the string on and remove it when I plated the pancetta. I started to explain, but my explanation was provoking.

  “Yes, Frankie,” I said.

  He peeled off the string and threw it in my face.

  “You’re with the big boys now. You’re on your own.”

  I filled a sauté pan with orange juice, reduced it, added some butter, and dropped in the fennel. The fennel goes with the branzino.

  Frankie picked up the pan.

  “Do you think this fennel is good enough?” he asked. I thought he was going to throw the pan at me. I braced myself. He didn’t move. I looked at the fennel. There were two pieces, each one a third of a bulb. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Would you be happy if you had so little fennel on your plate?”

  I looked again. Okay, maybe this bulb was a little small.

  “It’s not fucking good enough,” Frankie said. “Do it again.” He picked up the hot fennel pieces with his fingers and threw them at my face. He missed. They landed on the tray where my meat was resting, spraying it with buttery orange juice. I picked up the bulbs, tossed them, wiped off the meat, and started another pan.

  “Tonight you’re with the big boys. Tonight you’ve got to carry your own weight.”

  Andy fired a rabbit.

  It was a favorite dish, because it was the most complex. The rabbit is cooked three ways—sautéed, grilled, and confit—and served on dandelion greens. It’s done in stages, requiring severa
l people to work together. During the day, a prep cook roasts the foreleg and back leg. Just before service, I brown them in a hot pan, add thin slices of parsnips (which caramelize quickly), a splash of vin santo (which explodes in a flame), pancetta, and rabbit stock (a radical French addition, and I’m still not sure why it was tolerated). I then put the pan away until it is needed. The grilled bit is the rabbit loin. And the confit is a pâté, which is spread on a piece of toasted bread like a crostino and placed on the top of the dish, very architectural.

  It takes two people to finish the dish, me and Frankie.

  I’d prepared a shelf of sauté pans before the service. I took one out and put it on the flattop. I placed a loin on the grill and got another pan for the dandelion greens. When the loin was almost done, I put a slice of bread on the counter, which Frankie was meant to toast. While it was toasting, I got out the pâté. That was the routine, anyway.

  I put out a piece of bread.

  Frankie smashed it.

  That was confusing. Was there something wrong with the bread? I looked up at Frankie. He was full of rage.

  “Get me another.”

  I cleaned up the smashed bread, wiped away the crumbs, and got another piece.

  Frankie smashed it.

  This piece had been identical to the last one. I didn’t know what was wrong.

  “Get me another.”

  I cleaned up the smashed bread and got another piece. Frankie smashed it. I looked at him. What the fuck are you doing? He was profoundly, irretrievably irrational, as though some scary chemical thing was going on in his head. I looked for Andy, but he had turned away. This, too, was peculiar. Wasn’t he waiting for the very dish that we were failing to complete because Frankie was smashing the bread that needed to be toasted?