Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  “No, no,” Tony said. “Why? Do I look worried?”

  “You do,” I had said. “Danny is cutting back next week. Meredith is gone. I can see you’re disappointed in the cooks.”

  “Normal,” he said, “all normal.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I get paid to worry about people, and you look worried.”

  “I’m not!” he said, laughing and protesting with raised, flat hands, as if surrendering, “I’m not!”

  He said he was not worried, but his behavior suggested otherwise. It had been clear from the modulation of his voice, his increased distractibility, and his impatience. However, I knew that I could not convince him.

  It was not that he was trying to keep emotion from me. After so many months of getting to know each other, he trusted me enough to tell me all sorts of personal things. No, he really believed that he was not worried, which I respected. Denial is the engine of resilience, and to be a chef you must be willing to bounce back.

  After going for a run, still thinking about how down, worried, and preoccupied he had been even before the latest e-mails in which he had told me to stay away, I texted Tony: Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you.

  He texted back moments later: Santos got jumped last night. Not sure what’s up. Think he’s in the hospital. Know how to butcher quail?

  I gasped.

  OMG, I M so srry, I texted back. Where is he? Which hospital?

  We have no idea, Tony texted. Sucks.

  Returning home, I tried to calm down by walking the dogs, and that worked for the duration, but I could not get the news out of my mind. I felt helpless. Was it my place to visit Santos? Would I be overstepping my bounds? Tony’s message was: Not now. I could not challenge him or question how he wanted to handle the disaster, but it upset me. I had met Santos more than a year ago. How could I help?

  I had to wait. It was not going to be easy, but Tony had made it clear that he needed time to sort things out. After all, the attack on Santos had come on top of whatever it was that had worried him the week before.

  When I came into the restaurant five days later, the next Wednesday, Tony put out his hand to say hello, and I asked about Santos.

  “Sounds like he actually got into a fight with one of his apartment mates and they got thrown in jail,” said Tony.

  “Unbelievable,” I said. Worried about Santos? No, now I was mad at him! How could he jeopardize his job by getting into a fight that landed him in jail? It must have been some fight! He wasn’t a kid.

  “I want to kill him,” said Tony. “I’m pretty pissed. It was the last thing I needed.”

  “I think I will kill him for you,” I said to Tony in what I hoped was a therapeutic tone.

  “I would kill him, but we’re weeded,” Tony said. “I’ll revisit this when we’re stable.”

  I mulled this over while Tony texted, responded to e-mails, and talked on the phone. I thought about Santos. When he left work, he was all wound up. How did he alleviate stress?

  I did not think that the stress from his work was the cause of the altercation; I understood how Santos had to take responsibility for fighting. However, leaving a stressful work environment and returning home without some outlet for pent-up emotion must have contributed to the poor judgment and impulsivity implicit in acting out.

  All the cooks left the kitchen late at night after spending hours on their feet, getting yelled at, cooking at great speeds, shouting, and occasionally getting burned. The floor staff? On their feet as well, and night after night keeping their truest emotions under wraps while they took care of hungry people wanting to feel very important.

  Staff were not in relationships outside the restaurant to which they could devote much time. Most of the most passionate experiences of their lives took place at work. The focus was about pleasing guests, cooking the food, and doing what the chef required. Love or personal fulfillment had little to do with it, which, ironically, was a relief; until, that is, they became aware of the emptiness, and then they felt stress. The stress, too, having been repressed while at work, was often magnified.

  Still, working at Craigie was a way to subvert the challenges of emotional commitment that are at their strongest developmentally in one’s twenties. Spending more time in the restaurant with the family there meant being able to remain forever young: unconquerable, unquenchable, and without limits. Get the food hot to the table, and you’re good to go.

  This also meant that stress stayed at its peak. Disappointments and acting-out behaviors were common among cooks and servers at Craigie and other restaurants. The subtlety, satisfaction, and patience that come from long hours with loved ones were missing. Life outside the restaurant was incomplete.

  “So,” I said, finally. The very last thing Tony needed to hear now was that working in his restaurant stressed staff out. I knew I needed to change the subject. “I guess I should think about shadowing another member of your staff. How about Bobby?”

  Tony looked up.

  “Bobby?” he said. “This is Bobby’s last week. He gave me a month’s notice.”

  “He did?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “You saw what happened,” said Tony. “He couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t do the work. He gave notice before I let him go. He didn’t get it. He was here for months and he never got it.”

  “I thought he was getting better.”

  “Maybe,” said Tony, “but it wasn’t good enough and it wasn’t consistent.”

  He went back to answering e-mails.

  “How about Dakota?” I asked.

  This was the story that Tony had not told me, and what had caused him so much pain.

  “We knew something was wrong,” Tony said. “Dakota was coming in looking washed out, as if he was hungover. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t hungover.” He paused and pursed his lips. “He was strung out. So last week, on a Sunday, he calls me on my cell phone and asks me to drive him to a detox. My HR guy found him a bed. He calls me to ask him for a ride.”

  “That’s beautiful that he trusted you,” I said.

  “It is,” he said. “I guess. But, look, I’m a chef. I’m running a business! I’m glad to help him out. I felt good about being there for him. But it’s hard to be the guy’s boss and do that. I drove him to the Dimock detox in Roxbury,” Tony said.

  Dakota was in rehab to get treatment for a heroin addiction. After driving him to the facility, Tony pulled up to the door and told Dakota that he had to walk in there by himself.

  A few days later, Tony heard from Dakota. Once he was discharged, he was not sure what to do next: He could go back home to his parents in the Midwest or stay in Boston and either look for a new job or see if he could return to Craigie.

  Tony’s lawyer recommended that he terminate Dakota, but he felt that this would be abandoning him. No matter what ended up happening, there was a more immediate concern: Dakota wanted Tony to help him clean out his apartment; he was afraid to go back there alone because “stuff” was there.

  “What a mess,” I said.

  “Welcome to the biz,” said Tony.

  I thought then of what it really takes to be a chef, and what advice I would give someone who aspires to be one. Running a restaurant starts with knowing how to cook, but the essence of the job, the skill that separates the best chefs from everyone else, is managing people: purveyors, cooks, floor staff, city health inspectors, immigration officers, electricians, plumbers, investors, the media, and guests. Once you can cook, it’s like the shrink said at the end of Portnoy’s Complaint: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”

  To try to lessen the tension Tony was expressing, I showed him a quote I had enjoyed from a review of Adam Phillips’s new book, On Balance, that had appeared in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books:

  In Freud’s original helplessness, we are infants crying for food, and therefore for our lives. When nourishment arrives, in the form of the encompassing warmth of the mother, a state of complete a
nd unrepeatable satisfaction is experienced—a state of grace in religious terms—that we are doomed to try to recapture in later years.

  “Interesting,” I said. “Probably helps to explain why people are eager to eat out, and why chefs have become celebrities.”

  Tony nodded sadly.

  “I think about these things, too,” he said. “When I’m not driving cooks to detoxes or trying to find out which hospital my butcher is in.”

  FIFTEEN

  Destroy All Robots

  ON MONDAYS, WHEN THE RESTAURANT WAS CLOSED, TONY WENT TO the farmer’s market in Central Square and often phoned me while shopping. He was in a better mood this particular Monday than he had been the week before: laughing, talking animatedly; it always made him happy to be around food.

  He had a simpler relationship to food than to people. It upset him when he could not please others or when he failed to meet their expectations. He could not change people or improve them the way he could food. Too bad that the biggest part about being a chef is not cooking, but managing people who have more ingredients than cassoulet.

  “How about Jill?” I asked.

  We were still discussing whom I would shadow next. Dakota had extended his stay in detox, Bobby was gone, and Santos was MIA.

  “I figured Jill would be good,” I said, “because she’s in garde manger, and she can teach me how to do some basic things.”

  “Excellent choice,” Tony said. “The problem is that Jill isn’t in garde manger any more. I need her on the line. It’s gonna be a crash course. Big promotion. Normally, it would be four months of training to go from garde manger to the line, but it’s gonna have to be four weeks…But we’ll see. I have faith in her.”

  I could hear him buying brussels sprouts, apples, Bibb lettuce, and spaghetti squash.

  “So who’s left in garde manger?” I asked.

  I wanted to work in garde manger because it was a step up from prep, but without the intensity of the line. Garde manger meant assembling cold appetizers, making brines, organizing the components needed for cooking on the line, and making sets of condiments. It was not easy, but it did not require the speed and focus of the line.

  “Nate,” said Tony. “I’ll assign you to Nate. He’s an interesting guy. Quirky. Yeah, that’ll work.”

  A couple of days later I returned to the restaurant and found Tony at the chef’s counter. It was late afternoon, and the cooks were humming along, trying to finish up projects needed for the night.

  “How are things?” I asked.

  “Better,” Tony said. “Still crazy, but better. Danny is gone except for Sundays, so Matt’s my only sous chef.”

  “I misunderstood, then. I thought Danny was cutting back to four nights a week from six.”

  “That was what he did for two months,” Tony said. “Now? Now it’s just Sundays. Danny is helping run his wife’s bakery in Brighton, but most of the time he’s ‘Danny the Nanny’!” He explained that Danny’s sister-in-law, a single parent, had a baby she needed help taking care of while she worked as a physician in New Hampshire.

  “Meanwhile Dakota came back this morning and Santos showed up yesterday.”

  “Lots of commotion,” I said. I thought back to Lydia, who was now running a very low-key, neighborhood restaurant, and Danny, helping his wife take care of her sister’s baby, after Craigie. Very atypical for sous chefs. It seemed that both Lydia and Danny wanted a break after years of intensity with Tony.

  “Totally,” said Tony. “Let me ask you something: Will people still want to eat at my restaurant after reading your book?”

  “Of course,” I said, “your food is delicious and your staff is very pleasant. Why would you ask?”

  “Because it’s like the Bronx Zoo in my kitchen!” he said.

  “No,” I said gently, “it’s not. It just feels that way because you’re in charge.”

  “Hmm,” said Tony, and he went back to reviewing the menu, crossing out dishes he would not be serving that night, adding others. Then he glanced at his watch, looked up, and yelled: “Okay, everyone! Finish up what you’re doing! Outside! Now!”

  It was freezing, almost November, but we all took seats beneath the trees next to the restaurant. Shivering.

  The weekly contest among cooks got under way. Tony invited each of the cooks to create an amuse bouche. The winner got his or her item served to guests. It was a competition, not a collaboration. Today four dishes were presented to Tony: rye crisp and roasted duck breast, some kind of horseradish custard with braised celery strips, a cheese and apricot concoction, and a chocolate and hazelnut dessert. It was very complex, with talk of slow cooking at 118 degrees, many unusual ingredients, and talk of methodology that would not have been out of place in a college chemistry class.

  Tony offered support to each cook, clearly impressed both by their efforts and by the end product, with the clear favorite, for now, a dessert made by Jess, about which he said, “I like it! But bump the hazelnut up next time!”

  After telling the cooks that the results of the contest would be announced at the end of the week, Tony became serious. So much had changed since I had first come in. The restaurant was in crisis. His trusted sous chef of nearly five years was gone but for Sundays, his butcher was just out of jail, and one of his best line cooks was newly sober and perhaps unreliable.

  “The past couple of months have been some of the roughest months in my years as a boss,” Tony said. “It has been an absolute, tremendous challenge, and unfortunately I have also been noticing an attitude in my kitchen. If you want to improve what you do, if you want to enjoy working at Craigie, there can no longer be any excuses. There’s always going to be a reason why something has gone wrong, but excuses don’t fix things.”

  Tony spoke compassionately and with disappointment, without a trace of anger, which made it harder for the cooks to absorb and accept what he was saying. He had a habit of being extremely frank.

  “Craigie has never been about expensive plates or expensive tablecloths,” Tony continued. “We can’t hide behind that stuff. We’re about the food—we’ve always been about the food. So when we’re not working as a team, it shows. What I see instead of teamwork are a lot of islands. I don’t see people having each other’s backs.” He paused. “I don’t see people doing their homework, taking notes, and communicating. We are not consistently walking the walk. You need to be accountable: This piece of fish ends up on the plate the way it is supposed to.”

  Sadness informed the tone of Tony’s voice.

  “We can’t rely on people not with us any more,” Tony said. “But change creates opportunity, and we need to embrace that. Problems? Of course. Talk to me. Anyone who has asked me, ‘Can I talk to you?’ I have always talked. If you think I am inaccessible, that is not true.”

  If the cooks had come to Craigie thinking that they were there to cook food, they were correct about that being the starting point. What they may not have known, especially the kids fresh out of culinary school or for whom this was their first job cooking professionally, was that this was a new home. Hearing Tony talk was like eavesdropping on a dad upset with his son for striking out: He knew the kid could do better.

  Tony took out a new book that had arrived in his mail the day before: Momofuku Milk Bar, by Christina Tosi.

  “I read this almost all the way through from the moment I got it,” he said, “and I like Christina. I met her when we were both working at wd-50—I was doing a stage there. She and I share the same outlook on the need for a level of consistency and a level of organization in everything we do.”

  He opened the book and began reading to his cooks.

  The chapter was about “Hard bodies who go above and beyond, who never complain,” compared to “Soft bodies—we like them as people, but don’t want to work next to them.” He closed the book and looked at every cook. “I would love to see Craigie filled with hard bodies.”

  This was not a speech any of the cooks could deliver. It was not ha
rsh, and it was not forgiving. The tone required maturity and vision. The cook who could learn to speak that way had a chance of becoming a chef.

  “We need to adjust,” said Tony. “We will keep on doing what we are doing. I will make sure that happens.” He paused, not for effect, but because he was overwhelmed momentarily by the emotional power of what he was about to say. “Craigie on Main will continue.”

  These were dark, cold days, I could see that, and the faces of the cooks showed what they were thinking and feeling. A lack of certitude, disappointment in themselves, fear, and not knowing what would come next if they could not meet the chef’s expectations.

  When the meeting broke up, the cooks sloughed back to the kitchen. Tony took Nate aside and told him that for the next couple of weeks I would be working with him.

  “Cool,” said Nate. “This could be cool.”

  Nate had shaved his head again and, as usual, showed little emotional response to what had just been said to him. Language was important to Nate, but it was not that important. I followed Nate in. His sleeves were rolled up: skull-and-crossbones tat revealed. We went to a small back room, next to the wine cellar, where Nate copied down the pickle brine recipe from a laptop. The pickles were for the burgers.

  “All the recipes we need are in a file here,” Nate explained.

  We sat next to an electric meat slicer and beside a box holding squash and pumpkins. The subway rumbled beside us; I heard rapid footsteps above. A food dehydrator hummed behind me.

  “Basically, we’re gonna mise this out,” said Nate. “Assemble it. The burger pickles are a pretty rare project—we make them about once every month and a half.”

  I helped him grab supplies: stainless-steel bowls, a scale, knives.

  Then we walked over to the prep area.

  Santos was working on octopus. He was subdued. Both sides of his face showed scars. It looked as if he had been cut by knives. He nodded hello.