by Scott Haas
Still, it was always super highs and extremely deep lows. When Tony told me that there were protests against a new plan for tips he and Carl had established, he called it a near coup. But it was not a coup; no one got hurt, no regime was overthrown. He told me that Dakota was back in rehab and in crisis. It wasn’t a crisis; he was getting treatment. He had even been in touch with both Dakota and his mother. He said he had hired a new cook, Marian, describing her as a potential rock star, citing time she had spent at Cafe Boulud and 11 Madison as amazing. But was she? She had been at Craigie only a week. How did he know if she was any good? Hyperbolic rather than static, drama rather than calm.
It was the day before Thanksgiving and, for the third year in a row, Tony and the cooks were preparing a meal for the firefighters at the station down the street. He was also having a Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant for twenty-four friends and family.
“Hey, what’s up, buddy?” Jill said to me.
“Give me something to do,” I said.
She handed me a small knife and gestured to a pile of potatoes. We both began peeling.
“These peels would make great chips,” Jill said, “but no time for that, unfortunately.”
She explained that after the potatoes were boiled and mashed, she was going to add creamed leeks to them.
“Awesome,” Jill said. “In a little while, the cream will caramelize and it will get sweeter.”
While the potatoes boiled and the leeks cooked, Jill and I went downstairs to work on the sandwiches. She found a large loaf of bread.
“If I can get started on this now,” Jill said, “I won’t have to deal with it during service.”
Before we started making sandwiches, however, we had to go back upstairs to clean the plates, pots, pans, and utensils we had used for the leeks and potatoes. The rule at Craigie was that everyone had to do their own dishes until five P.M. I loaded a rack and shoved it into the Hobart.
“And that’s how that goes,” Jill said.
Between the time we worked on the mashed potatoes and were to start making sandwiches, it was time for staff meal, which was served routinely around 2:30 to 2:45 in the afternoon. Today’s selection was salad, fried potatoes, and “Buffalo” swordfish. The food was nothing like what the cooks made for guests, but it was no different from a parking lot at a BMW factory filled with the cars of the workers who assembled the luxury vehicles but could not afford to buy one.
“Okay, buddy,” said Jill, after we finished eating. “We’re gonna go make sandwiches!”
I loved her attitude. She was like a comrade: the ease of her movements, the way she seemed at home in her body. She was refreshing, no diva, and when we spoke, I felt comfortable. She did not judge me or herself.
We went back downstairs, to a dark corner, where Jill and I set up a prep area. We unrolled plastic wrap, arranged cutting boards, and took out a tray of house-cured bacon. Then Jill sliced the bread in half.
“Fuck,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s fucking rye. Fuck!”
“What do you want instead?”
“Pullman,” she said. “Fuck.” She held a knife in her hand, and put her head down. “Fuck. Hold on. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Jill found Matt. Matt explained that all he had was rye in the house. We returned to our prep area. We had to put everything back where we had found it.
“So now I have to do what I was hoping to avoid,” said Jill. “I’ll have to work on the sandwiches after five, and during service. That really sucks.”
Then Jill led me to the Robot Coupe. It had just two buttons: green and red. I loaded its container with mushrooms for a duxelle: hen of the woods, shiitake, chanterelles, and beech. One flip of the switch and I had pulverized them.
Next to me, Jess, in her own world, was making pastries, while listening to a Q-Tip rap on her iPod: “Breathe and Stop.”
Mushrooms done, I returned upstairs, where the room was filled with the sounds of “Tumbling Dice” from Exile on Main Street.
As Jill and I melted huge chunks of butter on the stove—more butter than I had ever seen used in cooking before; it must have been at least two pounds for twelve potatoes—Tony spoke about his new hire.
“Marian is great,” Tony said. “I’m very excited about her. Watch her work.”
Marian stood about ten feet away, moving with more speed and precision than I had seen in most other cooks at Craigie.
“Go talk to her,” said Tony.
Breaking away from Jill, I walked toward Marian, who was ruddy faced, with bright orange hair, blushing from exertion as she leaned in to slice a loin. Her sleeves were rolled up. I saw pink and white scars from burns on both of her arms. Marian talked about how she had been working at her family’s restaurant in Wisconsin up until she answered an online ad for a cook at Craigie.
“Scott,” Jill called me over. “Scott, salt!”
I ran to get her salt. She added a ton of salt to the potatoes and leeks.
“Pepper!” Jill said.
I ran to get her pepper.
Then we stirred and tasted.
“Fucking incredible,” Jill said. “Okay, let’s see what Chef thinks.”
She brought Tony a small, hot bowl of the mashed potatoes. He tasted them, closed his eyes, nodded, and said, “Thank you, Jill. These are delicious.”
She beamed.
Tony walked off to check on the progress being made by the other cooks.
“The wives of the firefighters are gonna want to murder us,” Jill said. “These are gonna be the best fucking mashed potatoes their husbands have ever tasted!”
We headed back downstairs to organize her prep area.
“What are your Thanksgiving plans?” I asked.
“After service tonight, I’m driving to Brooklyn,” she said. “I’ll probably get there around three in the morning. Then it’ll be a meal at my parents’ place, with all my siblings, and nieces and nephews, and then I’ll have to drive back here. Should be back by midnight. I have to be in the restaurant on Friday morning at nine.”
I wondered about someone who sacrificed so much of the love that many take for granted. She would miss the fullness of the family holiday to prepare food for customers in a restaurant.
Perhaps, however, that was the point: a good excuse for avoiding family. Saying that she would love to spend more time with them, but unable to do so, out of her hands, she had to work.
What seemed at first to be a downside to cooking long hours in a restaurant may have been an advantage.
We started cleaning up, and then Jill stopped, her hands on the table.
“Omigod,” Jill said, “I fucking love Thanksgiving!”
ON BLACK FRIDAY, JILL AND I WERE BOTH IN THE RESTAURANT EARLY.
She looked exhausted, shoulders slumped, moving slowly, drained of color. We stood beside a huge, deep pot of bubbling stock that smelled of bones, fat, and liver. Thin white bones protruded from the scum on the surface.
“I’m really busy today,” Jill said, “and there’s not much I can have you do, but if you go downstairs, I can set you up with the cheese. It needs to be shredded for sandwiches. Think you can handle that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Great,” she said. “Go to the dairy walk-in. On the bottom right you’ll find plastic trays of cheddar cheese and Comte. It’s for the world’s fanciest grilled cheese sandwich. That Comte is something like thirty dollars a pound. Cool, huh? So I want you to cut them into blocks about this size.”
She held up a small plastic container as big as a one-pound box of butter.
“Got it,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, “now go do it!”
Downstairs, I went into the walk-in to search for the cheese, which was not as easy as I thought it would be. Few things were labeled, and trays were stacked on top of each other and stuff was misplaced. I did not want to disturb the cooks, so I sniffed around, unwrapped cheeses, and found what I was look
ing for by smell rather than sight.
The next step was getting knives. Each cook had his or her own set. I have Japanese knives at home but had forgotten to bring them in.
I saw Santos.
“What up, buddy?” he said.
“Santos,” I said, pointing to some knives, “are these yours? Can I take one?”
“For what?” Santos asked.
“Cutting up cheese,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
I took the cheese and the knives to a small platform near Tony’s office and began working. It did not take long for me to stab myself in my left palm, but the wound was superficial and painless, so I dried the blood with a paper towel and kept cutting.
When the cheese had been cut into blocks, I got the Robot Coupe. It had not been cleaned properly. I scraped away bits of whatever had been left there. Flipping the switch, I fed the cheese into the machine and watched shreds of it fly out and into a big plastic tray I had set up at its spout.
“Buzz that cheese!” said Santos when he walked by.
Finally, I covered the tray with a lid and labeled the date on it with a black marker. Santos had a marker.
At last, job done, I presented my work to Jill for approval.
“Thank you, Scott,” she said. “Very helpful.”
When it was time to leave that night, a curious, satisfying thought came to me: What if this really was my family?
RETURNING TO THE RESTAURANT A FEW DAYS LATER, I FOUND JILL TEARING up sage leaves downstairs. I joined in. Afterward, she had me go upstairs and check on two enormous sweet potatoes by sticking a long needle into their flesh.
“Not done yet,” I said.
“No worries,” she said.
She said she was not worried, but she looked down. I asked Tony what was going on.
“Jill had a tough night last night,” Tony said. “It happens. I told her it happens to everyone. She felt like it was the worst thing that could have happened to her, but I told her, ‘Hey, this is just the beginning of your career! This is what makes you better.’ ”
I walked downstairs to her.
“Oh, shit,” Jill said.
“What?” I asked.
“I always feel like I’m fucking behind,” she said. “I could come in at nine twenty in the morning and still find a way to fuck it up.”
I did not see it that way and I told her so. It was obvious that Jill was highly skilled. However, she was so caught up in what she saw as failure from the night before that she did not believe me.
The answer to the dilemma, she decided, was simply to work harder.
“What the fuck,” she said as she rummaged in the walk-in for shellfish.
Eventually she found mussels, shrimp, whelks, and razor clams.
“Scott,” she said, handing me a few empty trays, “can you bring this up for me?”
“Where?” I asked.
“Dish pit,” she said.
I did what I was told and then came back to her.
Marian walked behind us sweeping with a small, yellow broom.
The kitchen was calmer since Tony had spoken with the cooks about hard and soft bodies. Less screaming, less name-calling. For one thing, there were now four women working the line when before there had been two. For another thing, the crew had more reliable, higher-level skills.
“Very weird to be in it,” Jill, said.
“In what?” I asked.
“It,” Jill said. She gestured around her. “This.”
She had posted a list in front of her of the day’s tasks: Herbs, whelks, mussels, razors, sammies, sweet pot, Brussels.
There was no end to it. It was true what Jill had said: No matter what she did, no matter how many projects she completed, there was always something left to do.
Orly walked over from garde manger to offer her philosophy on the predicament of being a cook. Tall, pigtailed, having spent the past seven years cooking at a resort in Jackson Hole, Orly was at once playful but focused and tough, like a volleyball player. She had worked in kitchens since finishing high school and was now twenty-five but with the maturity of a person much older.
“Practice doesn’t make perfect,” Orly said. “Perfect practice makes perfect.”
Jill nodded but remained distracted. She gestured to the board she was using to clean the shellfish.
“They keep giving me the same shanty-ass board,” she said.
Jill removed each razor clam from its dark, long shell.
I carried the dirty equipment to the Hobart and threw out the shells.
“Okay, everyone,” Tony shouted, “photo shoot!”
“Photo shoot?” asked Jill.
She did not look up from the clam shell she was prying apart.
Tony had told me that Serious Eats was stopping by to make a video of him cooking the burger.
Jill shook her head and smiled angrily.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Jill said. Then she added, “Everyone’s so fucking serious.” Then she stopped what she was doing and said resolutely, “Look, this…this is the craziest kitchen I’ve ever worked in. The craziest kitchen. Bar none. We’ll talk.”
I RETURNED SEVERAL DAYS LATER, BUT IT WAS JILL’S DAY OFF. AND WHEN I went downstairs looking for Nate, I learned he had quit.
“Hey, Tony, where is he?”
“Gone,” Tony said, without looking up.
Tony was hunched over his laptop and had opened the page to a travel site. We had talked about my family holidays, going back decades with my parents, at a place called Crystal Waters, in Negril, Jamaica, and after I had put Tony in touch with the property’s owner, he had booked a cottage. My relationship with him and his staff at the restaurant was taking intimate turns.
“Yeah,” said Tony, looking up and raising his eyebrows. “He flipped out.”
“During service?” I asked.
“No, thank goodness,” said Tony. “What happened was this: I mean, you’ve worked with Nate, you know he wasn’t doing a great job. He wasn’t getting it. We had the regular review with him, me and one of the managers, and we told him that. No surprise, right? But he got very upset and started crying.”
“That’s very sad,” I said.
“It is,” said Tony. “No doubt about that.”
Jess came by to ask Tony to taste a dessert made with pecans and caramel. I had some, too, and it brightened up my day. What Jess conjured with sweets was mood elevating. Perhaps she should supply inpatient units, which would decrease the need for antidepressants and mood stabilizers. Fine, people would put on weight, but what if hospitals built gyms and told patients that they would be required to exercise to have Jess’s desserts? Clearly, having these thoughts while eating the sweets was distorting my thinking. Jess was a great pastry chef.
“Nate’s parents drove up for Thanksgiving,” Tony explained, “and he had a meal with them in a restaurant. The next day he calls me to say he’s going back home with them. He wants ‘balance in his life,’ and he ‘wants to figure things out.’ No notice,” Tony said. “He just quit. So now I’m down a cook. Again. Welcome to the business!”
“What’s Nate going to do?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Tony. “For now he’s living at home. Look, he’s young, he’s only twenty-two, and maybe working in a restaurant isn’t for him.”
Patrick came by from garde manger with a spoon of pâté.
“Too salty,” said Tony grimly. “I’ll need to work on this with you.”
WHEN I CAME IN THE NEXT DAY, JILL WAS AT THE STOVE PREPARING STAFF meal with Tse, who was a new cook in garde manger. She was using whatever meat and vegetables she could find to make stew in a big pot. Then she would boil white rice and put together a salad.
“You’re just making it up as you go along,” I said.
“You got that right,” she said.
Marian was scrubbing down surfaces and singing: “Ninety-nine problems and a bitch ain’t one of them.”
Ji
ll chopped scallions and threw them into the stew pot. I took a few scraps of meat that had fallen out and put them back in.
“When can we talk?” I asked Jill. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You said that this was the craziest kitchen you’ve ever worked in. I want to find out what you mean.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back.
She chopped up some spices, threw them into the pot, and stirred.
“Lemme ask you something,” Jill said. “Have you seen the Paul Liebrandt documentary?”
Chef Paul Liebrandt, the chef at Corton, in Tribeca, was regarded by critics and chefs as wildly innovative, creating a cuisine never before seen. I had eaten at Corton some months back and enjoyed the food immensely.
Finished with the stew, having added some bits of sweetbread to it, Jill started to shell steamed mussels. She removed each mussel, shoved it to a side of her cutting board, and put the shells in a corner of the board.
Suddenly Tony was at her side.
“Don’t put the shells on the board!” he shouted. “Find a container!”
She nodded. I found her a container.
“It’s my fault, Tony,” I said. “I was distracting her by asking her questions.”
“Fucking Scott,” Tony said, and walked away.
I could not tell if he was angry, and thought to apologize further, but then I realized that not being able to read his mood was more interesting than the mood itself.
“You gotta see that movie,” said Jill, as she shucked more mussels. “I mean, here’s this chef working insane hours in his restaurant, totally consumed by what he’s doing, and his personal life is a shambles.”
“Do you think that’s necessary?” I asked Jill. “To be a great chef, you can’t have a life?”