by Scott Haas
“Two octo all day, one pork,” said Bobby.
Under his breath, to me, Danny said, “I swear to God, what a moron.”
Dakota, whose tattooed body, from the fork on his neck to the clown below his elbow, contrasted with his genuine innocence, piped up. “My knowledge of food, of what we do here, from what I’ve seen,” Dakota said, jumbling up the words in his nimble excitement, “it’s old-school techniques with modern amenities.” He paused and grinned. “I don’t know what that word means: amenities. I don’t know French cuisine yet. I don’t know American cuisine yet.”
Then he returned to his station to cook food that, as yet, had no name.
EIGHT
The Son, the Chef
IF I HAD TO DO IT ALL OVER, I WOULD WRITE THIS BOOK ABOUT MARJORIE Maws. I say that only half-jokingly, as Marjorie is certainly as interesting as her son, the chef. Unlike most people her age—she is seventy-two—Marjorie personally achieved financial independence. Her economic freedom contributed to her emotional confidence. I think her achievement gave strength to her son and made it possible for him to imagine his own future with assurance. Chefs also cook with someone in mind, and it is my opinion that Tony cooked and came up with new dishes to please his mother.
As in, unconsciously or not: What would Ma think? Hey, Ma, you like this? Ma, is this any good?
Marjorie ate in his restaurant all the time, too, so she was able to judge the food and service. She was not a cook, nor had she run a restaurant before Craigie, and she’d never expressed interest in going into business with her son. Tony, recognizing talent when he saw it, persuaded his mother to be by his side, literally, when he first opened, and to this day she still helped him run things. “He called me out of retirement,” Marjorie said. “ ‘It’s time,’ he said. Time to open his restaurant…I had an entirely different retirement plan! But when he decided to open his own place, he called me to help him run things. I bought a book on how to run a restaurant, got other family members involved, and we were off. It’s awesome! I’m so proud of him!”
A chef’s mother working in the kitchen or on the floor or at staff meetings is extremely unusual. This was not a simple bistro or trattoria; it was a luxury restaurant. Picture Daniel Humm’s mother seating customers or Paul Liebrandt’s mom at the stove.
As a parent I felt intuitively connected to her: Of the fifty-five or so people working at Craigie, only Tony, Chuck, Santos, and Marjorie had kids. (By the end of my time at the restaurant, four more parents were added to the staff.)
Marjorie and I met often during the eighteen months I spent at Craigie. The best conversation we had was at Hi-Rise, my favorite bakery in town, for what was supposed to have been forty-five minutes but turned into two hours.
The opportunity to talk to a chef’s mother! It was a psychologist’s dream come true. How often had I heard the well-rehearsed and impressive remarks of famous chefs and wondered: What does your mother think of you?
“Tony’s different from his brother, Alex,” Marjorie said after we had sat down. “For one thing, Alex is an ardent vegetarian.”
I knew from our conversations that Tony regarded vegetarians with…was it pity? Polite respect? An eye roll?
“Oh, Alex is a wonderful cook, too,” Marjorie said. “Very skilled. He makes great breads and delicious ice cream.”
“Is Alex also in the profession?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she said. She took a sip of her tea. “Alex lives in London and is head of education at a foundation called The Holocaust Educational Trust.”
I couldn’t help thinking: That would make a terrible name for a restaurant.
“But Tony, was he always interested in being a chef?”
“No,” said Marjorie, “not really. Not as a child, anyway. I never thought he would end up working in a restaurant.”
Marjorie explained that both she and her husband, Stewart, had worked long hours. She said that she and Stew typically got home late and that dinners often consisted of chicken with soy sauce, iceberg lettuce, Pearl kosher hot dogs, take-out Chinese, and pizza.
I knew from Tony that his years of work with chefs Chris Schlesinger (East Coast Grill), Mark Miller (Chez Panisse, Coyote Cafe), and Ken Oringer (Clio, Toro, Coppa) had provided him with the knowledge and experience needed to cook professionally, but without a palate fostered in childhood, what is a chef creating in his or her kitchen? One reason the French, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian cuisines are so spectacular in certain restaurants is that the chefs have the flavors in their bones. They have a sense of what has been done up to that point, a huge vocabulary of specific dishes and ingredients, and an inclination to perfect or refine the food.
However, several chefs—exemplified by Ferran Adrià, Wylie Dufresne, Heston Blumenthal, and David Chang—are inventive because they either reject the past or have little past to rely on. They can cherry-pick what they like from any culture or cuisine, and if the result is unfamiliar to them and their guests, even better! At Momofuku Ko, David Chang’s top restaurant, I had bone marrow in Gruyère broth. Where did that come from? But it was delicious and memorable. These new chefs saw themselves as futurists and food pioneers.
Was Tony a believer in this new way of doing things? Or did he have a tradition? Marjorie explained how Tony could have developed his palate as a result of Baba Hannah’s foods, but she felt that he was also influenced by the food they had around them when they lived in the South End before moving to Newton.
The South End was not an especially diverse or food-oriented neighborhood, having once been filled with single-room occupancies, marginalized African Americans with low incomes, and Spanish speakers. Then gay men and affluent, young careerists moved in. But Chinatown was practically next door. Marjorie recalled a time when Tony came home from kindergarten, and he was so proud of himself for winning the award for best chopstick skills! He’d beaten all the Chinese kids!
But at home? Tony did not cook for the family. He was not obsessed with food from an early age, nor did he have much exposure as a child to great examples of cooking.
This was puzzling. If Tony had not grown up eating amazing food, if he was not surrounded by a family in the dining industry, where did his palate come from? Surely there were early behaviors that he showed his mom that gradually formed a pattern leading him to become a chef.
Marjorie explained that Tony was clear about how he wanted her to cook. From age eight or nine, he would ask her to cook food according to the directions on the package. He stood by her side, in the kitchen, and read the package—it could be macaroni and cheese, it didn’t matter—and made sure that she was doing exactly what it said. Black and white, to the letter.
“ ‘Mom, follow the directions on the package!’ He was saying that when he was eight years old.”
“So you were his first line cook,” I said.
She wasn’t, of course. She ran her own management consulting firm. People skills, but it had nothing to do with food.
She assumed that Tony had restaurant jobs as a teenager because he enjoyed the experience and was good at waiting tables. That he was good at selling the food and made a lot of money doing it. When he got older, he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do. She saw his discomfort with a couple of office jobs and then a year to be a ski bum.
That was when it occurred to her that he might want to be in a restaurant and cook.
“What was your reaction?” I asked.
“I thought if I championed it, he wouldn’t do it,” she said.
Marjorie saw right away that Tony could do it. During the summer, living at her house in Menemsha, he was twenty-three, waiting tables. He’d help out in the restaurant kitchen, too, doing little things, whatever the cooks needed. The chef took him aside and said, “Why aren’t you cooking? You’re good. Why are you content just waiting tables?”
“What did Tony say?”
“He said, ‘I don’t know why!’ So he started cooking, which was a sacrifice.”
“Why?”
“Because of the great money he always made waiting tables,” Marjorie said. “He was such a great server!”
This was a long time ago, in 1993, when there was far less glamour associated with cooking and becoming a chef.
Marjorie’s view was that cooking was a blue-collar profession back then. Cooks did not expect to progress. They didn’t think about the next step. There was no Food Channel, there were no food shows, and there weren’t many celebrity chefs.
“Then the Culinary Institute added a course: Media Relations,” Marjorie said. “Media relations! Most of the kids there were never going to be chefs, but with this course the CIA got them thinking: ‘Hey, I can be a famous chef, too!’ I think that was a disservice. It misled them into thinking that if they went to the CIA they’d be famous chefs one day. Instead they went into debt.”
“Maybe that’s a problem with hiring cooks,” I said. “Maybe they have the idea that line cooking is beneath them and that after a few months they can quit and open their own place or move up the ranks.”
“Finding and keeping good people is a problem, yes,” she said.
A huge part of Tony’s success is due to his mom’s direct involvement then and now. She continues to check the budget, supervise staff, take on design projects, handle difficult customers, run the website, and respond to written complaints.
“What was that like? I mean, his first restaurant?”
“We divided up the responsibilities. We had a fifteen-thousand-dollar budget.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “I have good marketing skills. I have good organizational skills. I was soon working full time as business manager and marketing director. Some retirement! But I loved it! We brought in everyone we knew to help. We had three months to open up. We called ourselves Team Tony and later Bistrot Buddies. My brother is a lawyer—he helped with legal stuff. Alex and one of Tony’s best friends from high school, Peter Leis, designed the website. We had friends to shop for antiques to decorate the restaurant, wallpaper the bathrooms, and sew and make curtains. Tony’s dad, Stewart, and his best friend, Mike, did the wiring, plumbing, and construction.”
“So it’s always been a family affair,” I said.
“Absolutely. We used to be much more like a family, too, when we first opened. Tony’s cousin was involved. My niece helped with PR. Literally everyone who could manage it in our family was working for Tony in one capacity or another.”
“And with families, anger has a certain legitimacy.”
“I think we’ve made enormous progress in that regard,” Marjorie said, “but, yes, anger management with Tony has always been an issue. The thing is: It’s almost always legitimate. It’s how he expresses his anger that can be a problem.”
She shared her son’s impatience with the cooks who were disorganized or did not work hard enough, but she understood that leadership required patience to nurture and train them. Marjorie felt that cooking for a busy room on a weekend night created enormous pressure, that it got to Tony, and that it led to his becoming enraged or even yelling. She wanted him to find new ways to deal with that pressure, ways that were more productive.
“Tony has a history of inappropriate responses. I know that Tony Maws is one in a hundred. I understand that. But I keep telling him: ‘You can’t expect people to work at your level! You can’t treat the people below you as failing.’ ”
“To which he responds?”
“Oh, he thinks I’m fed up with him,” she said, and laughed.
I laughed, too. We were both doing a lot of laughing. It was like talking about the boss behind his back. Guilty laughter based on fear and affection.
“Maybe if he responded to his frustration the way he responds to his son, Charlie, that would work,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I tell him. ‘Talk to them as if you’re talking to Charlie.’ I don’t mean that his staff are children.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean show them the same patience and love you demonstrate to your son,” she said.
We were nearing the end of our long talk. Marjorie was driving to Hyannis later that morning to catch the ferry to the Vineyard. She would spend four or five days there each week, throughout the summer, coming back midweek to work at Craigie.
“It’s so much fun at Craigie,” she said. “It’s cool. A high: When you stand at the pass and watch Tony cook? I feel mesmerized and proud.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, thinking of other people her age who lacked the rapport, trust, and intimacy with a child whose enterprise she was involved in so routinely and meaningfully. She must have done many things right as a parent. The question of palate aside, her ability to be frank with Tony, knowing he trusted her, surely had enabled him to cook with profound confidence. His mother loved him deeply.
“When I’m in the restaurant, the world is in color. My friends sometimes ask me: ‘Hey, Marjorie, didn’t you plan to retire? When are you going to retire?’ But outside the restaurant, the world is in black and white.”
“There’s a great Italian saying Mario Batali quoted in his Babbo cookbook, and you made me think of it. ‘No one gets old at the table.’ ”
“Exactly,” she said. “The challenge we face is finding staff who want to share that kind of intimacy. Assuming talent and motivation, you have to buy into our mission.”
“Which is?”
“Honesty. Being proud of being associated with that. If the fish is cut up wrong, don’t serve it. No exceptions.”
NINE
Rock Stars
I WAS RINGSIDE WITH TONY. “I DEAL WITH THE LIMITED SKILLS OF SOME of my cooks by using technology,” he said. “Making things idiotproof. I’m not eliminating the cooking, I’m just making it easier for them. Like the low-heat convection oven I use to keep the burgers warm. Like sous vide.”
One reason for the rise of sous vide methods in restaurants—food that is poached in plastic packaging very slowly over low temperatures in a tightly controlled, reliable, and scientific way—is that it takes a great deal of guesswork out of cooking. With sous vide cooking, sous chefs can prep most if not all the protein dishes, except for items meant to be served raw, and instruct line cooks to finish what they started. Prep and line cooks work with sous vide, too. You do not need a great palate or high-level abilities to put things in Cryovac, place them into a machine that vacuum-seals them, and store the products in a walk-in for later use.
Most of the protein served at Craigie—pork, chicken, beef, lamb—starts out sous vide. No different from The French Laundry, Restaurant Daniel, Momofuku Ko, Robuchon, and other top restaurants.
Sous vide cooking originated in France as an economical way to cut costs, as less protein is lost when poaching in plastic. Chef Joël Robuchon was among the first great chefs to see its potential. He introduced it to first-class passengers on the high-speed TGV trains. Wolfgang Puck understood that sous vide was the single most important technological advance in the business. With sous vide, Puck can have his food prepped in one location and have it shipped worldwide to his global empire of restaurants.
Chefs will tell you that sous vide creates more intense flavors because the methodology seals things in. This is true. It is also much easier to teach cooks sous vide methodology than to teach them knife skills. Tony permitted his cooks to work with sous vide, but only he could cut the fish.
What Tony lacked in tradition, he made up for by being passionate about how science can be used to solve problems in restaurant kitchens.
He loves gadgets.
One problem Tony had was that the sources of his palate, how he developed a superior sense of taste, were unclear. His lack of clarity complicated the task of trying to explain to line cooks what he was looking for in a dish.
I had seen this happen many times.
One night Zack handed him a dollop of diced cucumber in buttermilk, and Tony said that the sauce was too thick.
; “But,” said Zack, protesting, “that’s how you wanted it last night!”
“That was last night!” yelled Tony. He had his hands on his hips and then pointed to the spoon and then to the stairs, gesturing for Zack to go down and do it all over again. “That’s not how I want it tonight!”
The fluidity of Tony’s thinking was creative, but how was a cook supposed to keep up with it?
Not having a tradition with established rules meant that Tony had, as his mother said, a legitimate outlet for expressing anger whenever his unclear, changing method of doing things was not followed.
With sous vide, Tony’s cooks had a method that was relatively simple to put into practice and created the same results each time. The cooking involved technology rather than speed, hand-eye coordination, delicacy, or stirring. Sous vide methods are also used to create viscosity in shampoos and toothpaste.
I had determined that Tony had grown up in a very supportive household, was good with chopsticks from an early age, lived briefly in a neighborhood near Chinatown, bossed his mom around in her kitchen, began cooking professionally at age twenty-three, cooked in France for six months, and benefited from having a grandmother who loved food and cooked some dishes that involved long braises and slow roasts and an unabashed embrace of chicken fat, but it did not add up.
“I’m not even attempting to go to the science side of palates, the neurology,” Tony said when I asked him how he had gone about developing his. “I feel as if I was in the right place at the right time. I fell into something. It was a combination of things. I was getting ready to leave the East Coast Grill. Chris [Schlesinger] said, ‘Tony, it’s time.’ Chris said he had taught me everything he had to teach me. He thought I had more potential, that I could grow. So he said, ‘Where do you want to go? I’ll call whoever you like and try to get you a job there.’ ”
Immediately, France came to my mind. How its gastronomy had influenced Thomas Keller, Andrew Carmellini, and Daniel Humm, among countless other chefs who had not grown up with a French grandmere but who had recognized or felt that working in a French kitchen offered the finest techniques, rules, and methods. I thought, too, of Mario Batali, and Dave Pasternack, who went to Italy to discover the power of rusticity, regionalism, and ingredient driven cuisine. And David Chang, who had gone to Japan to learn about one of the world’s finest cuisines.