Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

by Gibney, Michael

  “To the pass!” everybody says when they ring out. The pans come soaring in and the food gets plated. “Service!” Chef says when the plates are ready. The back waiters pick up the plates and take them out into the dining room.

  This is where your work on the pass becomes more involved. In addition to tasting all the food, you also need to organize it. What seems like a simple four-table pickup might comprise a dozen pans on either side when it arrives at the pass. This is a lot. Chef can’t be sorting through each pot and pan in search of the right food. You need to huddle them up by plate for him and even further segregate plates by table—these turnips are for table 7, while these are for table 25. This work is important because each pan of food has an identity and a destiny. It was marshaled onto the stove purposefully by its cook. Perhaps the John Dory that Raffy put down for table 19 is a bit big, and, seeing this, Warren adapted a particular pan of garnish to fit the fish properly. Perhaps VinDog sees Chef plating table 22 first and knows that of the two mafalde he’s got ready, one was started earlier than the other and should thus go out first, with 22, since they’ve ordered one. Perhaps there’s a PPX table—personnes particulièrement extraordinaires, the VIPs—and Julio knows that one rib-eye was marbled more handsomely than the others, a choicer cut. He’ll tell you this as he passes it over to you and it’s your responsibility to take note, make sure it gets where it needs to go.

  You are the kitchen’s middleman, the crucial catalyst in the chain reaction of service. There’s an oral transaction that happens between you and the cook when he delivers items to pass. It’s cooks’ argot, which you must interpret and communicate to Chef as necessary.

  “This cassoulet is the veg-head on 9,” Warren says. “Sin tocino.”

  What he means is that, of all the pans he’s giving you, this particular portion of beans has no bacon in it, satisfying the special request of a vegetarian guest seated at table 9. Overlooking such information could be devastating for the guest and for the restaurant, especially in cases when the special request derives from allergy. But Chef is not always available to have these sorts of conversations—he’s busy plating and expediting, or fielding questions from the front of house managers, or arranging special canapés for preferred clientele. So you have the conversations, at close range and in quiet voices, to avoid interfering with the work of others.

  These transactions are not limited to special requests and ticket modifications. There is a host of other information that you’re there to provide the cooks with as well.

  “Gimme an all-day on venison,” Julio says. He wants to ensure that the tickets he has on his board mirror the tickets on board at the pass, and that he has enough meat working to cover everything that’s on order. You inspect the tickets and count up the deer.

  “Ten all day,” you say. “Six on fire. Three MR, two medium, one M-dub.”

  “Good,” he says, with a wink and a nod. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Those herring ready yet?” Raffy groans, wondering if the fish for the special have been cleaned.

  “Brie’s on it,” you say. “No sweat, nothing on board.”

  “¿Tenemos más aceite de ajo cocinado ahi atrás, verdad, güero?” Catalina asks.

  “Claro que sí, doña,” you say. “There’s always more garlic oil.”

  These interactions create a bond that is central to the flow of service. It’s keeping tabs, checking up. Cooks need to know these things, but they might be timid about asking Chef such questions directly, for fear of trammeling his concentration or simply looking obtuse. While Chef is always tuned to every wavelength of the kitchen (he’s a virtuosic eavesdropper), he’s not necessarily paying attention to such moments. So the cooks confirm where service is at with you. You are their go-between. It is your responsibility to ensure that everyone is informed. You do so throughout the first seating by way of quiet conversation.

  This is where synergy is important. Your performance here directly affects your future success. The second seating hovers over you like the sword of Damocles. And there is no lull between now and then. Service spools up steadily. You must stay ahead of the curve. Pickup after pickup must issue from the kitchen flawlessly. Taking extra time on one project is robbing time from the next. And the projects are adding up. There is no time for refires now. There is no time for errors or miscommunication. Everything must be crisp and clean, cooked perfectly, so that when a hundred eighty people descend upon the restaurant around eight o’clock, you come correct.

  In cooks’ parlance, the closest relative of the idiom “come correct” is soigné. Soigné (swän’ya) is taken in Standard English to mean elegantly done, well groomed, sleek. In the kitchen it means, essentially, perfect. First-quality ingredients prepared using the best possible techniques and served in the most beautiful fashion. Etymologically, it is the past participle of the French verb soigner, which means to care for or look after, the way a nurse would, or a loving mother.

  You always want things to be soigné. Every table is PPX, every guest is a VIP. They all deserve to be looked after, cared for. We are here to cook for people. Alimentation: the provision of nourishment—this is what we do. And we continue doing it long into the night, not because we favor adversity, but because we know that in doing so we get the chance to create with our hands something that sustains people and brings them joy. And because we know that in all the details, all the minutiae, all the intricate flourishes, difficult and tedious as they often are, can be seen the sincerity of what we do. And even though our days are hard and congested and misaligned, we know that through persistent focus and discipline and effort and care, we have the continual opportunity to do something genuine.

  There is plenty of time in the first seating to cook this way, with love, as they say. But as guests multiply, so do their orders. There are more tickets to decrypt; there is more food to be made. It gets harder and harder to find the time to do things right.

  And now the dining room is beginning to get loud. You can hear the rumble from the kitchen. The second seating is arriving. It’s eight o’clock—showtime. Your throat tightens. Printers begin to buzz.

  “Hear that, boys?” Chef calls out. “Let’s do this. Ordering: two herring, one agno, one tartare. Followed by: two fluke and a rib-eye, MR.”

  “Oui, Chef!”

  “And …” he says, “picking up on 17, 9, 32, 47.”

  “Oui, Chef!”

  “Four!” Julio says.

  “Four!” comes the echo.

  Timers are set, pans clank about, burners blow on, the sizzle sounds swell. Smells abound of melted fat, aromatics, and caramelization.

  “Plates!” says Warren. You reach below the surface of the pass and produce a fresh stack of china. He heaves the plates off the table with a huff.

  “Kiko, sarténes!” yells VinDog. Kiko slides a pile of sauté pans onto Vinny’s flat-top. Neither has time to make eye contact.

  The timers say we’re two minutes out but the entremets begin lobbing up their pans in advance. There’s no time to mess around on this pick, and they know it. There’s not space on the table for every pan and every plate, so they start bringing them early, throwing them on flame-tamers and trivets where you can reach them.

  You start tasting. The lentils are good. The carrot puree is adequately fluffy. The potato salad is impeccably dressed.

  The endive, however is hammered. Where it’s supposed to be a beautiful golden brown, it’s black as coal. You send it back.

  “Again,” you say.

  “Oui, Chef,” Warren says. He activates a new pan on the flat-top, splurts oil into it, swishes it around.

  You take a mouthful of risotto. It’s underdone and short on seasoning. You slide the pan back onto the flat-top, splash it with chicken stock, dust it with salt. You sample the cassoulet. It needs acid. You dribble in some sherry vinegar. Warren wouldn’t be able to fix these things quickly enough.

  “Pull it together, Warren,” you say, firmly but gently. “W
e haven’t got time for this now. I expect more out of you.”

  “Oui, Chef,” he says. Sweat beads on his forehead.

  Meanwhile, Catalina is in the weeds on garde manger. With the influx of new tables, she’s buried in appetizers. You dash over to bail her out.

  “Yo no necesito ayuda, pendejo,” she says. “Necesito estos platos que se quita de la ventana. ¡No tengo espacio, puto!”

  “No hay pedo, baby,” you say, and you begin to remove the plates from the window above her station. As you do so, she begins to load a fresh set in. “Service!” you yell.

  Hussein hustles over. “What table?” he says.

  You look at Catalina. “Veintidós,” she says.

  “22,” you say. “Apps on 22. And come right back here for the next round when you’re done.” You hand the plates off and dash back to the pass.

  Timers ring out.

  “To the pass!”

  Everything is coming up now. It’s impossible for Chef to plate this whole pickup alone. You and Stefan jump in. Stefan takes to dumping pastas into bowls, you take to smearing swatches of carrot puree, laying down lentils. Your presentations aren’t as fetching as Chef’s, but they’re in the neighborhood. It is the best you can do.

  “Service!” Chef yells. A parade of back waiters stalks in. They pluck up the plates two by two and usher them out to the waiting guests.

  “Next pick: 13, 22, 11.”

  “Oui, Chef!”

  Pans hammer down again. More splutters, more sizzles.

  Four minutes evaporate.

  Timers go off. Food sails to the pass. Back waiters grab it up.

  The sound of the printers is ever present now. The space between orders has shrunk to nothing. Not even a second. When one order stops printing, the next starts—impatiently, as though it’s been waiting. Your focus, out of necessity, switches from doing things perfectly to simply getting them done. All you can do now is try to make them as good as possible. Chef’s focus, out of necessity, switches from plating most of the food to plating nearly nothing. All he’s got time for now is expediting, making sense of this river of tickets.

  “Order fire!” he belts out. “One monk, one goose. Shit. Julio, how long on those birds?”

  Julio has just recently put a fresh tray of geese in the combi, but they’re still way out.

  “At least ten, Chef,” Julio says. “Plus they have to rest.”

  “Call it twenty, then?”

  “Oui, Chef. I’m sorry, Chef.”

  Chef studies the ticket. “No, no, hold on,” he says, preoccupied by something on the dupe. He flips through the dead tickets on the spike until he finds what he’s looking for. “Son of a bitch!” he says. “I knew it! Hussein!”

  Hussein materializes in a flash from behind the kitchen’s swinging doors. “Yes, Chef!”

  “Get Devon in here, now!”

  Devon, the usually shrewd star server, has made the fatal mistake of taking expediting into her own hands. She punched in a table’s appetizers, then waited until she saw fit to send in their entrées on a separate dupe. Of all things, goose and monkfish require the most advance notice; they take the most time to cook. She should know this.

  After a minute, she slinks in. Chef gets right to the point.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to punch the whole ticket in all at once? How fucking hard is it?”

  “But, Chef, it’s a deuce. They’re a couple on a date,” Devon says. “They were taking so long to decide, I thought—”

  “When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it. In the meantime leave the expediting to the professionals.”

  “But—”

  “These people are going to wait twenty minutes now,” he says, crumpling the ticket and chucking it at her. “Because you like to do what you please.”

  She desperately petitions Julio’s help in speeding up the order.

  “Julio,” she says. “Puede—”

  “Listen, mami chula, an error on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine,” he says. “No soy mago, bebé.”

  “Look, Devon,” Chef says, raising his voice. “If you want to keep your job, you’ll shut your mouth and get the fuck out of my kitchen.”

  Stefan steals a sympathetic look at her. She stares back at him despondently, as if to say Help me out here. But there’s nothing he can do.

  “Sorry, Chef,” she says.

  “Out!” Chef screams.

  The cooks go silent.

  You have a look around.

  Everyone is shaken, yet thankful that Chef’s anger foamed over on her and not us.

  Everyone except for Stefan, that is. His face has gone rosy pink.

  We all wait for the call.

  “All right,” Chef says. “Where were we? Right, let’s finish this pick on tables 22 and 23, plus bar: 9, and then move on to the twelve-top at table 37.”

  The cooks slide up their food for the two tables and the bar customer and immediately start work on the big table.

  “How long on big table?” asks Julio.

  Just then, there’s a commotion on the fish side.

  “Aw, fuck you, guy!” yells Warren.

  A pan of garnish hits the floor. Its contents splatter everywhere.

  “¡Hijo de la chingada!” shrieks Catalina from garde manger.

  “What is it?” asks Stefan, leaning over to see what the fuss is about.

  It’s Raffy. Apparently he was wrong—he can’t handle it. He’s not going to make it. He’s doubled over, bracing himself against his station’s lowboy refrigerator.

  A gag can be heard. A hot splash.

  He’s vomiting into the trash bin beside his station.

  Everything stops.

  The only sounds are Raffy’s ralphs and the printer spewing tickets.

  The moment seems to last forever.

  “Saw this one coming a mile away, huh?” Chef says.

  The gags turn to dry heaves. Raffy’s got nothing left in him anymore. He is broken.

  “Sure did,” you say.

  “Well,” Chef says, clapping you on the back. “RTG?”

  “Oui, Chef,” you say. “Ready to go.”

  You need to solve this problem. You run to the office and grab your gear: Peltex, offset, forceps, spoons. You grip a cake tester in your teeth, shoulder a set of side-towels.

  Kiko is sloshing up the vomit when you return.

  “Puto borracho,” he mutters, dipping past you with the grotty mop.

  The station is a disaster area. Mise en place everywhere. Fish strewn all about, some cooked, totally hammered, already garbage, past the point of no return; others raw but for some reason seasoned to death, drying out, becoming useless; still others (the herring for the special, to be precise) in various stages of being cleaned, their viscera spilled out over the cutting board. What on earth was this kid doing? Most of this fish, it seems, can’t even be accounted for. At least, it’s not on order—the station’s ticket rack is empty. Yet, ahhh … Here an avalanche of tickets clings, untouched, to the printer. Pathetic. He didn’t even have it in him to keep his board organized. And now the whole kitchen is five minutes behind because of him.

  You look back to the pass. Chef’s attention is all on you. His brow is twisted in a mixture of anger and confidence. He gives you a nod. You nod back.

  “Oui, Chef,” you say.

  Now it’s time to cook.

  Cooking is an exercise in kinetic awareness, economy of movement, mastery of the senses. You can smell when a sauce is scorched; you can hear when a fish is ready to come off the plancha. You must trust these senses to help you through the night. Your whole body must remain active. No matter what recipes you know, no matter how much experience you have, each piece of fish in each pan presents a unique set of circumstances to which you must react, based on the sensory information at hand in the moment. You must take what you have before you and make something lovely out of it. And while it might be the same thing every day, it’s something ne
w every second.

  Since there is rarely only one guest ordering food in the dining room, it is rarely possible to do only one thing at a time. While one hand waggles a saucepan of demi-glace, the other lights the burner beneath a sautoir, to make it hot for the next piece of fish due to go down. While one hand lays that piece of fish on a drop tray to be seasoned, the other reaches for the salt. If you spin away from the stove to toss a piece of trash into the bin, you take the opportunity to grab a fresh side-towel from your station before spinning back. When your hands are full of mise en place you’ve just pulled from the fridge, a soft hip check brings the fridge door home. To take a pan from the stove, open the oven door, place the pan in the oven, and close the oven door is one fluid motion. While you read through the tickets on board, you keep busy cutting, chopping, stirring, sniffing, listening—all with a sense of urgency.

  To watch a good cook work well on his station is to witness multitasking of the highest order. But not all cooking happens within the wingspan radius of a cook’s personal station. It is not a one-man show, it is a collaborative effort. There is stretching, bending, leaning, and opening. There are infiltrations, encroachments, interferences. There is path crossing. There are truncated alerts—“Behind, hot,” “Door open,” “Knife”—which help everyone know what is going on around him so that collisions can be avoided.

  While no environment is free of accident and human error, the ability to work collision-free is expected of any good cook. In good restaurants, everyone works this way, with sprezzatura: a certain nonchalance that makes their actions appear to be without effort and almost without thought, an easy facility in accomplishing arduous tasks that conceals the conscious exertion that went into them. They instinctively move about one another in the narrowest corners without even the subtlest brushing of hips. There are no burns or cuts, no pans dropped, no spills or messes made. Its practitioners call this performance “the dance.” And while its choreography comes naturally to those of a certain acumen, it is important to develop proficiency in it if you have any hope for advancement.