Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

by Gibney, Michael

  Two drags in, Chef pops his head out the door.

  “What the fuck?” he says. “You think you have time to smoke a cigarette right now? We’re up in fifteen minutes. Are you even ready? Do you have the descriptions together?”

  “Sorry, Chef. That’s what I was out here—”

  “Let’s go!” he says. The door slams shut behind him. You smush the cherry off the cigarette on the sole of your shoe, save the remnants in your pack for later, and hustle inside after him.

  Knowing that you guys will be doing the specials for the premeal note, the cooks have abandoned the line and taken seats elsewhere to break for a few minutes and be out of the way. The only people on the main stage are you, Stefan, and Chef. And Kiko, of course, is not far away, slowly making his way through the heaps of pots and pans that have accumulated over the course of the afternoon. His P.M. assistant hasn’t shown up yet and his face is twisted over it.

  Chef looks serious, too. He doesn’t smoke—most experienced chefs don’t because of the way it impacts the palate; it’s something you need to work on quitting sooner rather than later—and even though he says it’s okay for you to do so from time to time, you try never to let him see you do it. It is always bad when he has to fetch you from outside because he needs you and you are smoking. This particular occasion seems to have annoyed him thoroughly. Stefan can sense it as well. He raises his eyebrows, wrinkles his brow, avoids eye contact with you, keeps his head down, and just cooks. Everybody is quiet, intent. The air is hot and tense. It’s Kiko who finally breaks the silence.

  “¿Que huele, güey? Huele como algo está quemando,” he says.

  Chef looks up, trains a stare on you, takes a suspicious whiff.

  “Yeah, what is that?” he says.

  Then it dawns on you. The filberts. You forgot to take them out.

  “Ah, shit!” you say, and dash over to the oven.

  Thick smoke billows out when you open the door. It smells carcinogenic and burns your eyes. You wave it away to reveal the pan of filberts. They’re hammered.

  “What is that?” Chef says again.

  “It’s filberts,” you say. “I was toasting them up for you for the terrine.”

  “Why?” he says. “I already got them. I told you I had the terrine, A to Z. Was I unclear about that?”

  “No, Chef.”

  “Come on, man, get it together,” he says. “What’s with you today?”

  “Sorry, Chef.”

  “Get that shit out of here, it stinks.”

  “Oui, Chef.”

  You take the smoking pan to the back prep area. You shove on a faucet and toss the whole rig in the sink to cool it down. This is an important step, so that you don’t burn a hole in the trash liner with the hot nuts. But your embarrassment has you acting a mite too aggressively, and when the pan hits the bottom of the bay, its handle smacks against the corner and cracks loose.

  “God damn it,” you say. “Can I get a break here?”

  Without its handle, the pan is useless. You rinse the broken pieces in the cold water and toss them into the garbage.

  Rogelio and Brianne are back there to witness this entire affair. They don’t say anything, they only shake their heads. You can feel the humiliation in your cheeks.

  “Aghh, whatever,” you say.

  All right, so you’ve left the samples out, you’ve gotten caught smoking a cigarette, and now you’ve destroyed thirty dollars’ worth of nuts and broken a hundred-fifty-dollar pan. Bad start. But, listen, enough of these bush league mistakes. It’s time to get to business. It’s time to take these specials to the hole.

  When you return to the line, Chef is tossing the salad for the terrine and getting ready to go to plate. Stefan is bringing together the pan sauce for the agnolotti, mounting it with butter and fresh herbs. He has a bowl warming up under the salamander—hot food goes on hot plates.

  “Hey, push that pasta back a minute, will you?” you call out.

  “How long you need?”

  “Five,” you say.

  “Five,” he says.

  “Five,” Chef says.

  The idea is to get to the pass with all the ingredients in no more than five minutes so that Chef can plate everything. You start setting pans about the flat-top to get hot. You throw down an oblong cast-iron Griswold for the monkfish and a stainless steel sauté pan for the pork. You coat the bottom of each with a thin skin of soya oil. The monkfish will take the longest, so that has to go down first. The rest of the garnish will be picked up in one-quart saucepans, with the exception of the potato salad (which you dress quickly in a flat-bottomed bowl and set on the stove’s piano near the fire to take the chill off). When the Griswold is hot, you season the monk and lay it in gently. There’s a soft sizzle when the flesh touches the oil. The pork has already been fully thermalized in the circulator, so the cuisson is simple à la minute: a quick sear followed by a glace of pork jus. You cut the loin out of the bag and place it in the pan. Its own sizzle sings with the fish’s.

  Next is the garnish. You set up two of the saucepans on a wire rack toward the back of the flat-top. The rack is a flame tamer; the extra half inch it gives you diffuses the heat. This way you can warm things up without needing to tend to them as much. You ladle the sauces into those pans, boquerones in one, sapori forte in the other. Into another pan go the Tokyo turnips. They get a splash of stock, a dollop of soubise, a knob of butter, and a dash of salt. Into another pan go the lentils. They start with a spoon of duck fat and finish with stock and a knob of butter. Into another pan goes the pureed carrot. You whip it with a spoon to a fluffy consistency. Into another pan goes the endive. You bring it up to a simmer in the braising jus.

  When all the pans are up and cooking, you lay a pair of herrings down on the plancha. They only take a couple of minutes.

  You taste everything along the way for salt and pepper and acid. A sprinkle here, a dribble there, now a stir, now a shake.

  You roll the pork to reveal a golden brown sear. You spin the monk and it’s the same. It’s pure science: when the surface of a piece of food reaches approximately 300°F, certain sugars in the food begin to react with certain amino acids in the food and they rearrange to produce a series of nitrogenous polymers and melanoidins, which are responsible for a variety of luscious flavors and aromas. It’s called the Maillard reaction. When it happens before your eyes, though, it blows your hair back.

  “Two minutes out,” Chef says.

  “Two,” you and Stefan say back.

  In order to bring the monkfish up to temperature quickly enough, you must baste it. The technique is called arrosé. You drop a knob of butter into the pan. As it melts, you begin to spoon it rapidly over the fish. Tilting the pan toward you so that the butter pools in the corner makes it easier. The heat and the motion of your spoon agitate the butter and it bubbles and browns. The major advantage of the technique is that you’re effectively shrouding the fish on all sides with a blanket of bubbly brown butter, so that the flesh cooks not only where it is in contact with the pan, but all over its surface at the same time. It is a more delicate version of deep fat frying. The welcome side effect is that as the butter undergoes its own version of the Maillard reaction, it develops a rich nutty flavor, which impregnates the fish as you continue to baste. Adding a mashed garlic clove and fresh thyme enhances the flavor even more. Thus the fish cooks not just faster, but better. And since the technique works with meat as well as fish, you do it to the pork, too, for flavor’s sake, alternating between the pans every five seconds or so.

  After a minute, you check on them. Pork, like most land animals, seizes up as you cook it, so you can gauge its doneness by sight and touch. It should resist a poke of your finger in a certain familiar way. The monkfish, however, is a bit trickier. Since it’s been heavily processed, it is very difficult to compute the effect that the heat has had on the inside by sight and touch alone. And since there is uncured foie gras on the inside, you need to be certain it’s cooked al
l the way through.

  The way you do this is with a cake tester, a thin metal pin about the length of a pencil. You insert the cake tester into the center of the fish and hold it there for ten seconds. When you remove it, you place it directly against the underside of your lower lip. If it is warm, the food is done. This technique has been around for hundreds of years, and it has a provincial flair to it, but it happens to be complexly scientific as well. The temperature at which most bacteria die, and at which protein begins to denature in such a way that it becomes cooked, is approximately 130°F. The temperature at which human skin begins to detect contact with heat is roughly 120°F. Empirical evidence suggests that a steel pin will, on average, undergo a ten-degree temperature decline in the time it takes to transfer it by hand from the interior of a cooked product to your lower lip. Ergo, when the cake tester is warm on your lip, the monkfish is thoroughly cooked.

  “You there?” Chef says.

  “Oui, Chef,” you say.

  You remove the meat and the fish from the heat and set them on a small steel drop tray, lined with a C-fold towel, to rest. All meat needs to rest before serving, so that the juices can redistribute themselves throughout the interior of the flesh. Usually fish is the opposite. It should be served immediately, otherwise valuable juices will leach out and the cut will dry up. Monkfish is a strange exception that takes kindly to resting. Herring are oily enough that the difference is negligible in this context. You slide the tray onto the pass for Chef.

  Now it’s time to put the finishing touches on all the garnishes. You taste everything one last time for seasoning and temperature and consistency and then slide them onto the pass one by one as well. The lentils and turnips and potatoes get another fold or two; the carrots get one more whip; the boquerones sauce gets one last stir. The sapori forte gets mounted with the tarragon compound butter—but only at the very last minute. The butter is there for two reasons: it flavors the sauce and it brings it together. It’s science again. As the butter melts, its milk solids interact with the protein in the stock with which the sauce was made to become emulsifying agents. These surfactants, as they’re called, are attracted to both water and oil, so they coat the oil molecules in the butter fat, allowing them to suspend homogenously within the water molecules in the stock. This gives the sauce an attractive consistency and a glassy luster. But you do this last because buttered sauces become unstable quickly, and too much heat can cause the fat to break out of emulsion, which is ruinous. Also, if you put it in too early, the chlorophyll in the tarragon will denature and become brown and unattractive. Chef hates it when herbs go “doo-doo brown. They’re supposed to steep gently, like tea,” he always says.

  “To the plate?” Chef says.

  “Oui, Chef,” you say, sliding the rest of your garnish onto the pass.

  Watching Chef plate things is inspirational. He makes artwork with a flourish of the spoon. It’s as though he were born to arrange food on a plate.

  There is an inherent beauty to the agnolotti, which call for little intervention. The thumb-size parcels have that imperfect quality unique to handmade things, which gives the dish an inviting charisma and precludes the need for ornamentation. The shimmer of the butter glaze is enough. Chef simply gives it a fold in the pan, spills it into a bowl, and flecks the dish with fines herbes and freshly cracked pepper.

  The boudin blanc and squab confit concoction is a bit more of a composition. There is a certain amount of guesswork in the making of any terrine. Like the printmaker who can’t tell exactly what his first proof will look like until he peels back the paper, a chef can never quite picture his terrine until he cuts it open. A smooth stroke of Chef’s Sujihiki shows us that this one was a success—its cross-section is, as hoped, a kaleidoscopic array of colors and shapes. In order to accentuate this visual dynamism, Chef fashions the rest of the plate in geometrics. He places a carefully squared slice of the terrine on the left-hand side of an oblong board. Beside that goes the quince. He’s poached the quince in white wine with clove and vanilla bean and blended the lot into a velvety puree, which he’s able to quenelle, with a wave of the spoon, into the perfect prolate spheroid, a fragrant football of fruit on the board. Next to the quince goes a stack of ficelle toast points, which, when cut a certain way, recall parallelograms. At the far right he rests a bundle of arugula leaves, which add a feathery, peppery element to the arrangement. To finish, he scatters a few hemispheres of hazelnut and dots a few orbs of verjus fluid gel about the board.

  The herring dish is similarly artistic in construction. It starts with the boquerones sauce, a film of which Chef spoons down the center of an oval plate. Next come the potatoes. He’s ordered you to halve them across their short axis so that they don’t roll around when he puts them down. He stands them upright about the plate, seemingly at random. Next are the ramps, which he distributes adventitiously as well. And finally the herring, which he lays nearly (but not quite) parallel to each other, just off the center of the plate. A dusting of smoked paprika and some torn celery leaves finish the dish. When it’s done it looks like a field of Greek ruins through which a pair of beautiful fish have decided by chance to swim.

  The pork dish has a more bucolic appeal. The meat is a hearty slab and the sauce is chunky with ingredients, which give it the look of a stew or sugo. Chef starts with the sauce again. This time he’s a bit more scattershot with its application, drizzling it about in broad swooshes. Then come the turnips, laid here and there. The soubise cloaks them like cream, and in places the white sauce is allowed to drip a bit into the sapori forte. The droplets look like tiny pearls in a sea of other jewels. Now for the protein. Chef cuts a two-inch hunk off the end of the seared loin. The gentle nature of the sous vide process has lent the pork a special tenderness—the typically dry white meat is an even, rosy tone throughout, with a sheen of juices seeping up to the surface. He places it dead center on the plate to showcase the cut’s stark brawn. Sliced chestnuts and freshly snipped tarragon leaves finish it off.

  Finally there is the monkfish—a stupendous picture. It starts with a gob of carrot puree, dragged across the plate with the bottom side of a small offset spatula. The result is a cadmium orange swatch that looks more like oil paint than food. After that come the lentils, which he arranges in patches like shiny black moss on a forest floor. Then, with a pair of forceps, the endive goes down, its sharp cowlick of leaves saluting the sky. And then, finally, comes the fish. He cuts the shaft into four identical coins and shingles them down the center of the plate. As he does this, you notice that inside the roulade the foie gras has gone molten, which means you’ve cooked it perfectly.

  “Nice job on the fish, guy,” he says. “Exactly what I’m looking for.”

  “Oui, Chef,” you say. Pride wells up in you.

  He dabs a few drops of sauce rôti here and there. A couple of pluches of fresh dill, and the dish is complete.

  “All right, let’s do this,” he says, and you and he and Stefan grab all the plates and head out to the dining room.

  Out front all the floor staff have joined forces preparing the restaurant for guests. Servers stage out silverware sets and pyramid-fold serviettes, while back waiters steam-press linens and allocate centerpieces. Bartenders slice citrus wedges and channel out twists, while their bar backs stock the lowboys with bottles and fill the speed rack kits with mixes. Maître d’s and hostesses comb through the reservation books to determine when the big pushes are and which VIPs are coming when. Managers vet floral arrangements and scrutinize the cleanliness of everything.

  Chef’s presence captures everyone’s attention when he enters. “Achtung, malakas,” he booms authoritatively. All activity stops. He sashays into the middle of the room, you and Stefan in tow, and begins disposing the plates about a large central table. “Time to eat,” he says.

  The staff hastily gather around, elbowing past each other for prime places at the table. Save perhaps for a shift drink at the end of the night, this is the highlight of their
evening—a complimentary taste of the restaurant’s most special offerings, prepared by none other than Chef himself. And everyone wants as much as they can get.

  When stillness has settled over the throng, Chef folds his arms across his chest and gives you a nod. This is your cue.

  “All right, guys,” you say, clearing a frog or two from your throat. “Let’s start with the appetizers. First up, we have a lovely terrine of boudin blanc and squab confit, served with rocket, filbert, quince, and verjus.”

  Uncertain hands spring into the air immediately. This is always annoying. Just let me finish, you think.

  “Ahem. Boudin blanc,” you continue, “in case you didn’t know, is a French term meaning …”

  BREAK

  RELIEF ALWAYS ACCOMPANIES REENTRY INTO THE KITCHEN after the premeal note. Even if you’ve nailed your specials presentation, which you usually do, it feels good to be back in your own atmosphere, where only a few people ask you questions and almost no one’s eyes are on you.

  You gently place the licked-clean plates in the dish area for Kiko, making sure they’re not in danger of being broken, and join Chef at the pass.

  “See, now we take a break,” he says. “When the work is done. Go ahead and smoke your stupid cigarettes. Just make sure this pass is set before service.”

  This little respite is the equivalent of your lunch break. Ten cool minutes before service starts.

  “Thanks, Chef,” you say.

  “When are you going to quit that shit anyways?” he says.

  “Soon, Chef,” you say.

  Down the back corridor, you shove open the door to the loading dock, and the last remnants of afternoon sun spill in. You raise a hand to the sky and wait for your eyes to adjust to the glare of daylight in the shade of your fingers. You close your eyes and tilt your head back and allow the sun to filter its red blanket through your eyelids. When your vision has come to, you take a seat on a shady patch of curb and fire up a smoke.