Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

by Gibney, Michael

  “Everything all right, guy?” you ask.

  “Yeah, I’m cool,” he says. “Everything is cool.”

  His face is pasty and beaded with sweat. His eyes dart around. He seems to be busy trying to look busy, instead of actually accomplishing work—he’s boondoggling.

  “But, hey, my printer’s running low on ink,” he says. “I can barely read the dupes. Could you hook me up with another cartridge?”

  To make life easier for the cooks, every section has its own ticket printer. This way they don’t need to rely on memory alone when a multitude of orders rushes in. Nor do they have to fetch duplicate copies from Chef when a table is flagged with special instructions—the tickets are right in front of them. The trade-off is, the cooks themselves are responsible for ensuring they have the requisite paper and ink. You make an exception and head toward the office to fetch a backup for Raffy.

  You find Chef in there, bent under the desk, grabbing a cartridge for you. He spied your interaction with Raffy like a predator.

  “Your boy don’t look too hot,” he says, tossing you the ink.

  “I know,” you say.

  “Brew flu?” Chef says.

  “Definitely the brew flu,” you say.

  “Listen,” Chef says. “I want you to keep an eye on him. If he doesn’t snap out of it in the next hour, he’s gonna go down in flames when the push hits. And you’re gonna be the one to dig him out when he’s in the shits.”

  “Oui, Chef,” you say.

  “Good. Let’s boogie.”

  Back on fish roast, Raffy’s got the shakes. He’s drinking water now. He can’t keep it together. Your hands are steady as you load the ink into his printer.

  “Listen,” you say, calmly. “What’s your deal?”

  “What do you mean?” he says. “Oh, you mean the sink. Yeah, no, it’s cool. I cleaned it up. I’m cool. Just something I ate or something. Fucking street meat.”

  “Can you do the job?” you say, soberly.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he says.

  You’re pretty sure you can’t trust this response. But the alternative is sending him home, which means you would have to work the station. This is not an attractive alternative because, simply put, working a station is hard. The pass is much easier. There is less sweating on the pass, less bending and lifting. There is less fire. Plus, you get to practice your plating skills on the pass, which is not only enjoyable but also crucial for your development. No matter how much you love cooking, working the pass on a busy night is almost always preferable.

  So since Raffy is not actually asking to go home, which is usually what the hungover cook will do when he sees a way out, you figure the best bet is just to see what happens. Sometimes vomiting makes you feel better when you’re hungover. Maybe he pulled the trigger intentionally. Maybe he’ll be better in an hour, after he’s sweated a bit.

  You finish installing the cartridge and slap down the printer’s lid. As the plastic snaps shut, a ticket begins to emerge, as though your filling it with ink were the cause. You look around. The printers on the other sections begin to activate as well. A mechanical buzzing fills the kitchen.

  It is the first order of the night.

  All heads cock silently toward Chef, awaiting direction.

  “Ordering …” he says. “Four-top. First course: two agno, one white asparagus, one terrine, and a crudo. Followed by: one pork, one skate, one gnocchi, and a monkfish”

  “Oui, Chef!” everyone exclaims.

  “You sure you can handle it?” you ask Raffy.

  “I got it, man,” he says.

  You clap him on the shoulder and join Chef at the pass.

  Stefan is there in a moment as well.

  “How was the shit, guy?” you ask him.

  “Radioactive, bro,” he says, tying the strings on a crisp new apron.

  SERVICE

  IT IS OUR FIRST THOUGHT IN THE MORNING; IT IS ON OUR minds when we lie down to sleep. It’s what we spend our days preparing for; it’s the focus of our evenings. Service: the work of a servant; an act of help or assistance; employment in or performance of work for another; an organized system of labor used to supply the needs of the public; the act or manner of serving food and drink to guests. Food service. This is our industry.

  Service in a restaurant begins the moment the doors open to customers. For our purposes, this happens at 1700. All that came before and all that’s yet to come matters only insofar as it influences the flow of service. Prep work matters. Attendance matters. Readiness matters. Inventory matters. Purchasing and receiving matter. Trifling arguments, hangovers, résumés, relationships, feelings, what happened at the bar last night, and what your trip in this morning was like—these things cease to mean anything once the first order reaches the kitchen.

  In the beginning there is the first seating, the first two hours, in which we hope to fill every seat in the house at least once, hope to do a “full turn.” But things usually come soft in the first seating. It’s easy, relaxed. Whereas a midservice pickup may entail making food for six, seven, eight tables simultaneously, first-seating pickups are often only two or three tickets at a time. Sometimes you can even afford to go table by table, one by one.

  Five o’clock is too early for people on Friday. The customers you get at this hour order light. They’re coming from work, taking late business lunches with colleagues, stopping by for drinks and a quick bite, no frills. Or else they’re the pretheater crowd: large, mussed-up troupes on budgets and timetables. Their numbers are big sometimes, but they always have someplace else to be and it shows: single-course meals, often forgoing entrées altogether. Entrées take too long for the stoppers-by. So in the first seating you get a bunch of easy tickets—duck soup here, apple pie there.

  As a result, the cooks remain unruffled. They are like tennis players during the first game in a three-set match. They catch up on prep, crack jokes, get a groove going. There is still plenty of time to do things right, plenty of time before things get crazy.

  According to the seating forecast, we won’t finish our first full turn until at least 1930. Yet Chef, aware of what a challenge the second seating presents, aware of how quickly things can spin out of control, aware of how important a flawless first seating is, stands poised at the pass. His back is straight, his legs are spread wide, almost obscenely so. He stands this way to minimize lumbar fatigue. When your legs are shoulder width apart or better, you don’t need to hunch your back in order to reach the things on the table. Your center of gravity is lowered. Your hands and eyes are closer to your work. But Chef also stands this way for logistical purposes. A wide posture prevents others from getting too close to his work, keeps them out of his light, keeps them from lousing up his fine touch with snipped herbs and spice dusts.

  He’s flanked on his right and left by you and Stefan, respectively. You’re his wingmen, each responsible for one half of the brigade. Stefan receives food from the meat side, you take the fish. Your job, as the hot pans flock to the pass, is to taste the cooks’ work for seasoning, texture, and temperature. You are quality control. You taste all of it. If the fluke is cold, you send it back; if the pommes purees are lumpy, you send them back; if the sauce has a skin, if the soubise needs salt, if the turnips are hammered, you send them back.

  You do this, first, so that Chef doesn’t have to. He has other things to do. Not only does he have to plate almost everything, but he also has to expedite, which is to say manage the tickets, group the pickups, control the flow. Plus, when you send a pan of food back to a cook, you have the power in you to keep it under wraps, make light of it. You are capable of doing it nicely, unconcernedly. Chef? No. His temper is incendiary. Allowing something imperfect to reach his hands might set him off, and the shrapnel hits everybody when he blows.

  The other, more important reason you taste things and send them back to cooks is so that guests don’t have to. Not so much because a guest’s opinion matters—many people have an opinion about the way
things should be cooked, but few understand what the best way is and why—but because food that comes back after it’s gone out to the dining room is incredibly disruptive. It breaks up the flow.

  We call anything that returns to the kitchen a refire, because usually it returns to the stove or the oven. It’s not the right doneness, it needs more time. It needs to go back into the fire. What really happens to it, though, is it goes into a sort of purgatory. Its mates have already reached the table, they’re already being eaten. The cook who originally prepared it is on to the next pickup, he’s stabbed the ticket, he can’t remember what the order even was. Yet here it is, this rogue plate of food. And now the cook has to stop what he’s doing to figure it out—quickly. If it’s a piece of meat (which is unlikely, given Julio’s aptitude with temperatures), perhaps it can be salvaged by a turn or two on the grill or in the oven. But suppose it’s been overcooked. Or suppose the customer’s cut it to bits and it’s unplateable now. Or suppose it’s a piece of fish (forget it—fish can never be salvaged). In this case, he has no choice but to start the mental process of the dish all over: find the ticket, decrypt it, fire a new piece of the appropriate protein, throw down new pans for the appropriate vegetables, heat a new portion of sauce. He’s welcome to hasten the process by using another of the same cut that he’s already got working for a different table, but doing that will in turn slow down that pickup. Not to mention the unfavorable effect this process will have on the current pickup. Because he’s already begun working on something else, which he’s stopped to address the refire. He’s now got two minutes left to pick up the current table, yet he finds himself somehow working on a table from the past, and in so doing, complicating the tables of the future. The present moment is gone. Re-fires get gnarly in a flash. Which is why you, the sous chef, must make sure everything is perfectly cooked before you pass it on to Chef for plating.

  But your job is more involved than simply tasting food.

  When a server punches a table’s order into the restaurant’s Point of Sale system—the POS—all food purchases get routed by the computer to the kitchen in the form of a ticket, or “dupe,” which prints out in full on the central printer located at the pass. Chef plucks these tickets from the printer, decrypts their various built-in codes (table number, food order, order number, time stamp, seating assignments, guest count, course lines, special instructions, server’s name), and arranges them, based on what they call for, in chronological order on the “board.” The board is a metal ticket rack located at the pass, which not only holds the tickets in place so they don’t blow away, but also acts as an organizing post. Meanwhile, at the very same time, abridged versions of each ticket print out on each of the sections. The cooks similarly decrypt them and hang them on their own ticket racks.

  A given order may call for several dishes, but the POS is programmed in such a way that the dupe that each respective station receives lists only those items required of that station. This enables the cooks to isolate their responsibilities without having to sift through a half dozen other items. But since Julio can’t see what Raffy has on board, and vice versa, it’s important that upon receipt of the order, Chef read out to everybody what has come in. This way, Raffy won’t start a piece of fish that takes five minutes if he knows it’s going with a steak that takes ten, and neither of them will start anything if the table has ordered loads of appetizers for Catalina.

  Chef will start by saying “Ordering …” which gathers everyone’s attention. To flag the announcement with the word “ordering” is important because it allows the busy cook to distinguish unrelated or unimportant line chatter from new responsibilities—actual ordering. People need to communicate, and often that communication between linesmen involves the rereading of tickets to each other. But a seasoned cook knows not to begin making anything new until he hears Chef call the order.

  “First course,” he will say, reading out the appetizers, “followed by” midcourses and entrées, and occasionally desserts. When he’s done calling the ticket we all say “Oui, Chef.” We do so in unison. The call back itself is a confirmation that the order has been heard; that we perform the call back in unison is a confirmation that we are all working at the same tempo, dancing to the same rhythm. In the best kitchens, the “Oui, Chefs,” loud and clear, seem to issue from one single, machinelike creature.

  These “followed by” items Chef mentions are considered to be “on board,” meaning “to be made later.” Items that require a long time to cook might be started right when the ticket comes in. For quicker preparations, a cook may not start the work until the server punches in a “fire” ticket. When something is fired, we begin the final stages, the last couple of minutes of work. For a goose that has been roasted in advance, to fire it may be to cut the meat off the bone and crisp its skin under the salamander. For a skate wing that cooks very rapidly, to fire it is to put it in the pan.

  If a table hasn’t ordered appetizers for some reason, Chef will start by saying “Order fire …” meaning “make this immediately.” If they’re in a hurry, we’ll make it “on the fly.” If they have ordered appetizers, but they’re eating slowly—suppose they are a couple on a date, and they’re spending more time looking deep into each other’s eyes than they are digging deep into their food—they get “pushed back,” literally to the back of the line of tickets on the board, and we “hold fire” until the server notifies us that the table is ready.

  Ideally, tables with multiple courses should be punched in as a single unit, with each course separated from the next by a course line. The alternative is to have the server hold on to the entrée orders and punch them in when he or she sees fit, based on how quickly the guests are eating their appetizers and based on how long the server thinks it will take to prepare the food. But in reality, there are too many variables for even the most talented server to be able to forecast accurately how long a lamb will take, how many monkfish we can pick up at once. Only we know precisely what is going on in the kitchen at any given moment, and thus only we know precisely how long certain things will take to prepare in that moment. So it’s essential that we have all the information for all the tables as soon as it becomes available, and in the most consolidated form possible—one ticket.

  Even when multiple-course tickets are punched in appropriately as one unit, they are not necessarily without difficulties. Special instructions can be a nightmare. There is only so much that can be entered in the POS system’s ticket template. For meats that require a choice of doneness, there are buttons built in that say rare, medium rare, etcetera. For pastas that are available in vegetarian format, there are buttons that say no meat. These basic instructions are called “modifications.” But outside the basic modifications exists a whole world of consumer possibilities, which, quite simply, would be impossible to accommodate with buttons on the computer. And so the server must type in these special requests by hand: light on the garlic, or no salt or pepper, add extra olive oil on the side. But since servers are often in a rush, and space is always limited, and there’s seldom a rigid formatting standard, what you end up seeing is something more like this:

  The permutations of interpretation are almost limitless; the ticket becomes a Choose Your Own Adventure story. Sometimes you need clarification from the front of the house.

  Back waiters like Hussein can often help. They overhear the servers’ conversations with guests; they see orders being punched in. Plus, because they usually resent the servers—for being short with them, perhaps, or for making more money than they do—back waiters are always eager to jump at any opportunity to sort out the dimwitted mistakes of the waitstaff. But since they’re not having those conversations with the guests, and since they’re not punching in those tickets, they can’t interpret everything. Which is why the server’s name is always on the ticket as well.

  Chef snaps in the direction of the back waiters. Hussein appears in an instant.

  “What on earth does this mean?” Chef says.

/>   “I don’t know, Chef,” Hussein says. “Fucking Candi, so stupid.”

  “Get her in here,” Chef says.

  And Candice will rush in, nervous, flustered, to explain the ticket.

  The only logical system, especially once service begins to accelerate, is to send out tables in groups. These groups are called “pickups.” As expediter, Chef choreographs the pickups. He does so by maintaining a steady line of communication with the front of the house and by keeping track of what food has gone out. As Catalina and the entremets chug out appetizers, Chef rearranges the corresponding tickets in their new order, the order in which second courses will be served, depending on what appetizers go out first. This is the way the flow is developed. Four or five tables get their first courses, and then the cooks start on the second courses for those tables, while Catalina proceeds with the first courses for the next batch.

  Chef must also keep track of the productivity of all the stations, their comparative levels of busyness. If VinDog on meat entremet is bogged down by pastas, Chef will rearrange the next pickup so that it’s meat-light. If Warren can’t get to the pass on time with the fish garnish, Chef will rejigger the pickup to accommodate him. If Catalina is inundated with salads and desserts, we’ll slow down all hot food until she catches up.

  Once a pickup is set, there’s no turning back from it. Chef calls out the tables by number, and the cooks say “Oui, Chef” and sequester the four or five dupes in the pickup section of their boards. Since meat and fish are most sensitive to time, Julio and Raffy have a brief conference when the pickup is called. They decide, based on their respective levels of readiness, how long it should take.

  “How long?” Julio belts out.

  “Four,” yells Raffy.

  “Four,” confirm the rest of the cooks.

  Every station has a digital timer. When the time is decided, each cook sets his or hers, and away they go, stirring, sautéing, searing. Only cooking sounds can be heard at this point, pops and fizzles, bubbles and squeaks. This is when the din is so rhythmic it can be mistaken for silence. Everyone knows what he has to accomplish and how long it must take him to do so, so there is no need to talk about it. All withdraw into a place of internal focus, saying next to nothing until the timers chime.