Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  “I wanted to work for Mark Miller,” Tony said. “In New Mexico, at Coyote Cafe. He was a Boston guy originally and got what I call his doctorate at Chez Panisse back when Judy Rogers and Jeremiah Tower were in that kitchen.”

  France and Italy were important to his way of thinking about food, but Tony was essentially a New World guy, an Augie March of the kitchen.

  “Mark had an unbelievable palate,” Tony said. “He wasn’t a great cook, but he could taste all the components of a sauce or a dish. All the spices!”

  “That’s an interesting way to define a palate,” I said. “I think of it as an ability to discern when something tastes good.”

  “That, too,” said Tony. “That’s important, too. But for a chef it’s also essential to know how to create the taste. You’d give Mark a mole to taste and he could tell you every spice that went into it.”

  That made sense. What I still did not understand is how Tony personally knew when he had achieved the taste he was after.

  “It’s simple repetition,” Tony said. “I have some dish in mind or some variation of that dish and I cook it again and again and again and again, sometimes for months, until I think it’s ready to put on the menu. Even the tasting menus, most of what’s on them, are comprised of dishes I’ve thought about or tried for a long time. Okay, a lot of it’s improvisation with an ingredient I know or want to try, but then…” He laughed. “…then you have to trust me!”

  I still could not see how he developed his deeper sense of taste.

  “You dive deeper, and deeper, and deeper,” he said. “Palates develop over time. Look, think of it the way you think of music. What’s your favorite rock album of all time?”

  “Let It Bleed,” I said.

  “Excellent choice,” he said and fist bumped. “One of my favorites, too, although I prefer Beggars Banquet because it’s not as well known. So think about it: How many times have you listened to that album?”

  “Oh, man,” I said, “I don’t know, maybe a bazillion. I still listen to it every day, no kidding.”

  “Okay,” Tony said, “so I bet that you hear things in the songs other people don’t hear, right?”

  “It’s interesting you should say that, because I was just listening to ‘Midnight Rambler’ the other day and I swear I heard chord changes in Keith Richards’s playing I’d never heard before.”

  “Exactly!” Tony said. “Exactly! Cooking is like that, too. You cook something a bazillion times and you discover things in the dish you didn’t know were there. You decide then to bring those things out. You might think a dish tastes the same each time, but there are subtle differences. I may decide one night to bring out different flavors in the same dish I’ve cooked for months or years in my kitchen.”

  “Ah,” I said, thinking of how this drove his cooks crazy, this pursuit, this lack of a fixed address.

  “It’s a fucking pain in the ass,” Tony said, “because I see things in a dish I want to bring out and meanwhile I’ve got to get the dish to the table.”

  “Yeah, well, even Keith Richards put down his guitar after a while and knew that he had nothing more to add to a song.”

  My thoughts were interrupted by Bobby and Danny, who were at Tony’s elbow with things for him to taste.

  First, Danny.

  “Wow,” said Tony, “this is great!” It was a piece of guanciale that had been cooked sous vide.

  “Thanks!” said Danny.

  “Perfect texture,” said Tony. “Nice balance.”

  Bobby inched forward. “Show him what you got, Bobby,” said Danny.

  It seemed that Bobby had had enough of being teased by everyone in the restaurant, from waitstaff to Santos.

  “Look,” he said to Danny, in an expressionless voice, “my name isn’t Bobby. It’s Thomas.”

  Danny laughed.

  “As long as you’re working at Craigie, it’s Bobby,” said Danny.

  Bobby shrugged.

  “Whaddya got for me, Bobby?” asked Tony.

  “Chorizo sauce for the octo,” he said, handing him a spoon.

  Tony tasted it.

  “Needs salt,” Tony said.

  “I think the salt will come when I add the anchovies,” said Bobby.

  Tony looked at him with disbelief and rage.

  “Bobby,” Tony said, “it needs more salt.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” he said, still completely unemotional. “I still figured that would come with the anchovies. The anchovies are very salty.” Was he clueless that in Tony’s eyes this amounted to a provocation?

  “More salt, Bobby, more salt, more salt!” said Tony.

  Danny jumped in. “If Chef wants to hear your opinion, Bobby, he’ll ask for it. Now get the fuck back to your station and do what you’re told.”

  Bobby’s back to him, Tony said, “My way or your way, Bobby? My way or your way?”

  To me, Tony said, “See what I have to deal with?”

  “Bobby’s sitting pretty,” said Mary, who was slicing hydroponic watercress at garde manger.

  A couple of other cooks laughed, but most of them were too caught up in the work they still had left to do in the ten minutes before the doors opened.

  Tony stood up.

  “Got to change for service,” he said. Out of college clothes. “Be right back.”

  While I waited, I watched Mary and Jill work in garde manger: swift, fastidious, with total concentration.

  Tony returned in freshly pressed chef’s whites. He went from cook to cook, high-fiving each person, a couple of fist bumps here and there. A lot of steady eye contact: He gazed into their eyes.

  “You ready, Dakota?” Tony said.

  “Ready to rock, Chef!” said Dakota.

  “Yeah, man!” said Timmy.

  “Let’s do it, Chef,” said Danny.

  I expected Tony to take his position at the pass, but he asked Danny to man it while he worked at the counter to its right. He took out a bowl, poured in a little olive oil, chili water, and a pure green liquid the color of English peas. He began whipping things up.

  “You planning on turning that into a purée?” asked Danny, over his shoulder, as he sharpened knives.

  “I don’t know,” said Tony.

  “I’m just asking,” said Danny.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Tony.

  Tony stirred harder.

  “Uh-oh,” said Danny, laughing. “Whoa! Hands off!”

  “I don’t know,” said Tony. “Back off!”

  “In three,” said Drew.

  Before the doors opened, Tony finished whatever he had been doing and asked Matt to hand him a small metal tray in which a beautiful, thick loin of tuna had been placed under a paper towel. Tony took out the fish, placed it on the counter, and began slicing perfect squares.

  “For the tasting menu?” I asked.

  “Right,” Tony said.

  “Doors open,” said Drew.

  People started streaming in.

  “There he is!” said a guest or customer loudly. As if he had been shipwrecked and spotted land. “There he is!”

  “Where?” asked his female companion.

  “There!” He did all but point. “Slicing the fish!”

  The two of them turned to the couple they were dining with and, starstruck, hesitated before Meredith, who wanted to lead them to their table.

  What a gulf Tony’s notoriety must create between him and his cooks, I thought, and between him and the ordinary world, the world of black and white his mother had spoken of only a few days before. No wonder he thought of himself as a rock star. No doubt he saw most of his cooks as roadies rather than as members of the band.

  He had said that of the cooks working for him now, there were two people who might be rock stars. What had Tony seen? What made them different?

  Jess was downstairs, in a tight corner, surrounded by countertops. On the surface of the counters were trays holding parceled-up meat, dead animals, bones, and
blood. It was a dreary place to work: low ceilings, too, and gray walls, and her work space no more than a narrow counter on which she had placed a mixer, bowls, a tiny scale, a blender, a food processor, and stainless-steel utensils.

  Jess’s life was a little bit easier than working upstairs, though; being in pastry, she did not have to conform to the time crunch faced by the line cooks. The new rule at Craigie, Meredith and Drew had announced last week, was that the first course must get to the table within ten minutes of the waiter putting in the ticket.

  “Hi, Jess,” I said, making my way past Santos, Gabby, and Alex.

  Santos was butchering. Gabby and Alex carried trays of food between cleaning up. Constant cleaning! Bobby and James were downstairs, too, doing what, it wasn’t clear, but it seemed to involve cooking. To my right was Aaron, tall and laconic and as thin and agile as a guy who ran track, who led the operation downstairs under Tony’s guidance. Aaron kept count of supplies, supervised the prep cooks, helped bake the sesame-seeded burger buns, and made sure nothing was wasted. It was all arms and legs downstairs, not a frenzy, but still constant motion.

  “Hi!” Jess shouted, over her shoulder, concentrating on the sorbet in the bowl before her.

  “So, Jess,” I said, “I’m here to find out why Tony thinks you might be a rock star.”

  Jess laughed.

  “Is that what he said?” Jess asked.

  I stood at her side.

  “Hold on,” I said, “let me look at my notes…‘Jess is one of the best pastry chefs I’ve ever had. She contributes to our menus—she’s the only person in eight and a half years to be able to do that.’ ”

  “I’ll have to thank him,” she said.

  Jess brightened up the place. It was not just her positive outlook that did it, nor her pleasant mien. Her intelligence did it. She opened up lines of communication between herself and the cooks and in doing so established order.

  Done with the sorbet, now Jess was kneading dough.

  “I moved to Boston because of a boy,” she said, pressing into the dough fiercely. “He didn’t work out, but the city did!”

  She had worked as a medical assistant for two years after getting her degree, and she spent her spare time going to farmer’s markets and cooking. Like many in their twenties without a clear vocation or family business, she had worked hard to decide what she wanted to do with her life.

  “One day I quit my job and applied to the Cambridge Culinary Institute, a one-year program, and after graduating looked for work,” Jess said.

  With a mother and a grandmother who are both artists and a father who taught math and science, Jess found that baking made sense. “It combines two elements in my family: the artistic and the analytical.”

  Jess rolled out the dough and then, using a wooden-handled slicer, cut it into thick, even sections. It was Jess’s seventh month at the restaurant. Before starting there she had been a waitress and later, briefly, a pastry cook at a French bistro in Boston’s South End.

  At Craigie, Jess is one of four women in the kitchen. “I’m a woman in a man’s world. It’s a challenge getting respect from everyone, especially from guys who come from other countries where they aren’t used to having women at work tell them what to do. They do what I tell them to do. They have to. We have a job to do.” She parceled out the pieces of dough and began to brush them with melted butter.

  “I just think we always have to prove ourselves,” she said. “The thing is: Being a girl, I’m like that naturally. Knowing that I have to prove myself, so: I prove myself. Being a girl in a restaurant kitchen, if you say you can’t do something, you’re judged. But, as I said, I’m not like that. I never ask a guy to do something for me simply because he’s a guy. Gets me in trouble sometimes…On my second day here, I was carrying a huge batch of poached quince downstairs—I wanted to seem tough enough—and I sprained my wrist.”

  Unlike the women who worked in the front of the house—behind the bar, waiting tables, and at the door—Jess, Jill, Rachel, and Mary wore little makeup, talked like sailors, and relied solely on their cooking to establish connections between themselves and their co-workers. I loved their vigor and found it inspiring.

  “So maybe being a leader among the men might help you to build the skills you need to take your career to the next level—to be a chef?” I asked. “Having faced adversity, you might get stronger. Ironically, being a woman in a man’s kitchen, which is a challenge, forces you to be a leader.”

  “Yeah, maybe, and maybe not. I joke fairly often; I say it a lot to Mary: I feel very maternal. Especially with the young boys cooking here. Sometimes it’s so mindless! I’ll say to one of them, ‘Just do what I’m asking you to do and make me a better mom.’ ”

  Dakota ran past us carrying a small aluminum tray. It was the middle of service, but seeing a CD of DMX on the counter, he stopped in his tracks.

  “Dude!” he said. “Dude! Whose is this?”

  “Mine,” I said.

  “You listen to DMX?” Dakota asked, incredulous. “A shrink who listens to DMX?”

  “It relaxes me,” I said, ironically.

  “Whoa, dude!” He put down the tray, and raised his left palm. “High five! Dude! That man is fucked up! Fucking crazy! You know DMX stole a 1988 Cadillac and ended up doing a three-month bid?”

  “I thought it was for reckless driving,” I said.

  “Dude, he makes some cold music,” said Dakota. He began to sing: “ ‘Where my dogs at? Where my dogs at? We right here, bro!’ ”

  “Dakota,” said Jess.

  “Okay, okay,” Dakota said, “I get it! I get it!”

  He picked up the tray he had been carrying and headed toward the walk-in.

  “Dakota’s gonna make me a great mom,” she said.

  Jess was placing the buttered dough on a long baking pan. She began to sprinkle brown sugar over the dough, scooping up the mixture with her thumb and three fingers. The immediacy of what she was doing was poetic, not something to puzzle over, but action with clear meaning. Not a classroom or playing field at college.

  “I’m here six days a week, fifteen-hour days,” Jess said. “I love the pace, the team-oriented approach to the work, and I love the opportunity to create.”

  “And when you’re not here?” I asked.

  “Hah!” she said, finishing off the pastry. “I watch movies in my bed or sleep.”

  Well, I thought, Jess is someone who gets it: The complete surrender required to work in the restaurant, the need to do what you’re told to do by the chef, the importance of coming up with new ideas that will appeal to the chef, and the ability to tell cooks to follow your rules. Her energy and poise were unique. I could picture her in charge of her own restaurant one day.

  “It’s something I think about for the future,” Jess said. “A bakery café–restaurant.”

  “Like Joanne Chang?” I asked.

  Joanne Chang owned three wonderful bakery cafés, each called Flour. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in applied mathematics and economics, she had turned to bread, pastry, soups, and sandwiches. I could only imagine the reaction of her parents when she told them that her $200,000 education would be used to open bakeries.

  “I love her food,” said Jess. “Maybe one day.” She handed me a spoon. “Taste this.”

  “Wow, delicious. What is it?”

  “Anise, ginger, salt, celery. Not done yet.”

  As I watched her finish the dessert, I noticed Bobby standing still and staring into space. He sipped milky-colored iced coffee from a straw. His blue cap was at a tilt, but he did not notice.

  “BOBBY!”

  It was Danny.

  “BOBBY! What the fuck, Bobby! Show me the Peking pancakes for the fucking pig! Fuck, Bobby! Upstairs! Now!”

  “Later, Jess,” I said.

  Jess nodded.

  I followed Bobby and Danny.

  Upstairs, an hour into service. The cooks were moving so quickly that it seemed as if they were in a
film that had been fast-forwarded.

  The music playing was Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.”

  Danny called me over.

  “I never see my wife anymore,” Danny said. He was plating dinners as he spoke. “It used to be okay. Now it’s not. She’s a chef, too. When she was working in restaurants, we had similar hours so we could see each other in the morning, but what happened is now she’s baking. She was looking for a spot for the past two and half years—finally opened one a few months ago: Treats on Washington. Only I literally, and I mean literally, never see her.” He looked drained of emotion. “She works from six A.M. to six P.M. six days a week, and I’m here six days a week from noon to midnight.”

  THINKING ABOUT THE SACRIFICES THAT DANNY MADE TO WORK IN THE RESTAURANT preoccupied me, but I needed to talk to Jill.

  As I made my way toward her, saying, “Behind you! Behind you!” I heard thick slices of peeled potatoes hit the hot oil of the Fryolator. The sound was explosive.

  “Crazy,” I said.

  “I love it,” she said, her shoulders hunched, as she began to chop up pitted, dehydrated black olives. “Love being driven. Love being focused.”

  She handed me half an olive.

  “Wow.” Wow had become a big part of my vocabulary since coming to Craigie. “This is really delicious!”

  She looked at me with a huge smile. “And?”

  It is the cook’s way of saying: What do you taste? Why does it taste good?

  “You taste a nutty flavor, then salt, then almost a sweetness. It’s umami. A long finish. The first thing you taste isn’t the next thing or the last thing.”

  “Amazing, huh? It’s a great example of why I love working at Craigie. The food gets better by technique, not enhancement.”

  “That’s fascinating,” I said. I was not sure I understood what she meant. “Say more.”