The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  So, at great expense (including lodgings for his staff at various Manhattan hotels), he welcomed the French Laundry family into the 15,000-square-foot restaurant, with half of that space devoted to the kitchen. What a kitchen it was—or kitchens, rather. It included the Per Se kitchen, a separate kitchen for private parties (the business plan hoped for $2 million in revenues from such functions), a small refrigerated butchering room, a back prep kitchen. Beyond these luxurious spaces were dry storage areas, a laundry station, a staff bathroom, and a corridor leading to the offices. Beyond the offices was a small cool, enclosed patisserie station, and, finally, the small bakery.

  Again, Bourdain, this from an e-mail after Keller gave him a tour of the place:

  Jesus, Ruhlman!

  The Per Se kitchen is NOT just a dream kitchen. It’s positively fucking revolutionary! I was just gob-smacked amazed…. Thomas explained, for instance, the “transitional” breezeway for the waiters…the individual knife drawers for the cooks, the individual sous-chef drawers, the sight-lines for chefs and sous-chefs (and the thinking behind it all)…the centralized compressors for ALL the refrigeration units…the specific-use walk-ins, separate party/a la carte facilities. All figured by sq. foot vs. anticipated revenue generation. Just amazing. Amazing. If he wasn’t already a genius, he’d be considered a visionary in kitchen design.

  Bourdain may be a bit smitten by Keller, but this was especially valuable as comment because Bourdain had spent years as a chef in New York City kitchens and knew what was out there and what mattered in terms of design.

  One of the amazing features he didn’t mention in his e-mail was the ultraviolet light fixtures above the range that vaporized the airborne particles of grease that are the cook’s postservice drudgery, those cleaning the hoods anyway. No more laborious hood scrubbing.

  Still, Keller wasn’t completely content. The spaces weren’t completely right. He wanted one wall moved a few inches back. The window from the poissonnier’s station into the pot room could have been better placed. The cooks’ drawers, in which each kept his or her tools, needed a half inch more depth. The dishwashing station wasn’t level, so water pooled in places that should drain.

  “I had the chance to design a perfect kitchen,” he said. “It’s not perfect.” A moment later, thinking about it, he said, “I think perfection is an accident. The thing is to recognize when it happens,” and “I’m learning to tolerate a certain level of imperfection.”

  Later, watching the cooks at work, he would say of the kitchen, “You know what the other problem is—the kitchen is too big. Chris has to go all the way over there and he’s going to get distracted.” Chris L’Hom medieu, a sous-chef, indeed got distracted on his trek to dry storage and was nowhere in sight when Keller wanted him.

  I’d returned to New York about a week before Per Se was scheduled to open, mid-February 2004. Keller and Laura Cunningham planned to have several services of only family and friends to try to ensure a smooth opening night. (Also toward this end, Keller was flying his key dishwasher, Juan Venegas, in from Vegas, where he was training the dishwashers at Bouchon. Keller often called Juan the most important man in the kitchen, or sometimes he called him “Juan the Great.”) There were several media events planned around not only the restaurant’s opening but the opening of the Time Warner Center.

  The kitchen bustled. Fascinating food was everywhere. A five-gallon plastic stock container filled with chicken feet. A cook butchering a fish I’d never seen, called a yagara, he said, a long eel-like fish whose hard snout had been removed. The cook sliced open the belly and found various small fish and an undigested squid. Sous-chef Corey Lee removed large cod fillets out of salt. This fish, like many items in this kitchen, gets a brief but heavy salt cure. It would then be placed in 150-degree olive oil to cook gently.

  There were familiar sights, such as a commis standing before a huge pile of raw favas, carefully removing the skin from each hard bean. The pervasive use of rolling things in plastic wrap, everything from foie gras butter (foie and butter whipped smooth and creamy in a Robot Coupe) to pig’s head—when chilled and set up, the roulades could be sliced into small elegant disks.

  And I saw changes, too. The restaurant, for instance, would no longer poach lobster tails in butter as had been done at the French Laundry. Instead, single portions of lobster tails were placed in a plastic pouch with some butter, vacuum-sealed, and would be dropped into a specially built water bath kept at 51.5 degrees Celsius (about 125 degrees Fahrenheit; as in all of Keller’s kitchens, everything here is measured in metrics, a far more practical system for cooking). The lobster can be held in water that temperature, ready to serve in a snap.

  There was the same fanatical attention to detail, such as the careful cleaning of bones that would be used for stock. All the fat was removed from them by hand for the cleanest possible final result. And with this fanatical attention to detail was the pervasive tone of place: organized efficiency, vivid cooks in blue aprons working out of deli cups.

  Eric Ziebold, the longtime French Laundry sous-chef, had the previous September given his notice to Keller, intending to leave after nine years when the restaurant shut down in January. Keller had asked Zie-bold to stay on to help open Per Se, and he’d agreed. I’d known Eric as long as I’d known Grant Achatz and loved to talk with him about food and cooking.

  Ziebold, thirty-two at the time, from Iowa, had a dozen small beets in a pan, ready to be cooked.

  “What are the beets for?” I asked.

  “Borscht,” he said.

  “What’s going to make it special?”

  “The beef stock.” This would give the soup an extraordinary depth of flavor. He paused and grinned. “And the truffle sandwich that goes with it.”

  He was working with a younger cook. When he sprinkled sugar into the beet water, the cook tasted the sugar to make sure he knew what it was. Ziebold said, “Don’t be afraid to cook with sugar.” Then he added some sturdy, five-finger pinches of salt.

  “With simple food,” he added, “any imperfection is glaring. You’ve got to hit it exactly or it sucks.”

  Later I watched him work with what he called shirako, the sperm sac of Japanese cod. “It’s better than brandade,” he said. “It’s really good. If you can get over it spiritually.” He would blend it with milk that had been infused with aromatic vegetables and cooked potatoes, then strain and cook it very gently so that the proteins would thicken the sauce without breaking apart from it. It tasted like a brandade milkshake, very fine and elegant, and would be the sauce for a cod dish.

  This was a perfect example of Keller’s food—the intense focusing of flavors, the fish combined with sauce made from that same fish. Keller had become famous not for experimentation, noted Joshua Schwartz, chef de cuisine for the private-function kitchen and longtime French Laundry veteran, but “for doing innovative interpretations of classical dishes with the best possible ingredients.”

  Even classics that were pretty tired to begin with, such as duck à l’orange. His, of course, were scarcely recognizable as the classics that informed them. His duck à l’orange comprised chunks of duck breast sautéed and served with baby leeks, duck gizzard, a juniper-scented reduction, and a marmalade made from navel oranges.

  But he was also well known for his love of less familiar items.

  On Friday, February 13, after the kitchen had served one of its “friends and family” meals, he says to his sous-chefs Ziebold, Corey Lee, and Devin Knell, “Monday’s coming up and it’s time to start thinking about VIPs.” Monday was the official opening day. “Corey, do we have any cock’s combs?” Corey shakes his head. “Can we get some?” Keller asks. “Call D’Artagnan. Do we have any pig’s ears? Any brains? Any veal hearts?”

  Corey, a native New Yorker whose family emigrated from Korea, shakes his head inscrutably but will make sure these items go on the order list tonight.

  “Devin?” Keller asks. “Do we have any pop tarts?” Devin Knell created these i
tems—a shortbread dough, filled with chopped black truffle and coated with a truffle glaze—they looked exactly like mini Pop-Tarts. They’d been one of the canapés for a media party the day before.

  “No,” he said.

  “None?”

  “I cooked off three hundred for the party. I can make some more.”

  Service had slowly been improving. The “friends” meals were critical for getting all the cooks up to speed, an element of which is handling what’s not expected, such as when Paolo Novello, a manager, follows a server in and says, “Two no truffles.” The truffle custard canapés (served with chopped truffle in an egg-shell with a potato chip sticking out of it, a signature French Laundry dish) were to be sent to the table. Keller is at the pass expediting early in the service along with Corey Lee. Keller calls “Two no truffles” to the canapé station. Then to Paolo, “No truffle oil?” The oil is in the custard itself. “No.”

  “What do we have for canapé?” Keller calls. “Two canapé salads, let’s go.”

  “Yes, chef.”

  “I need those now, chef,” Keller says.

  “Yes, chef.”

  Two canapé chefs each make a salad on the fly. One dips into the curried butternut squash and mango appareil (for a vegetarian dish that’s still in development) on a square of roasted red pepper, topped with baby arugula. The other makes a shaved fennel salad with herbs, baby artichokes, and fennel tops.

  Service feels confusing with a lot of voices and an unusual noise level.

  Keller says, “Who’s running the pass? Are you, Corey?” Corey says nothing and takes a step back. Keller does not want to be in there and says, “No, no, I’ll step out.” This kitchen has to run without him.

  Lee is in the SAS station tonight. At the French Laundry, Keller had added a second chef behind the expediter to assist when things got busy. But this position wasn’t always busy and got the informal name among staff as the “Standing Around Station,” or SAS. When Keller asked what S-A-S stood for, though, a nervous cook replied “Sous-chef assistant.” Keller liked the name and it stuck—SAS is now on the work assignment sheet posted on the wall.

  Keller steps away, but the two canapé salads still haven’t come up, and he says, “Pick up two salads, come on, pay attention.”

  Corey is assisting Jonathan Benno, Per Se’s chef de cuisine, the one Keller will rely on to run this kitchen. Benno is a quiet, somewhat brooding chef with a shaved head and years of experience with Keller and a few of the city’s top chefs. A CIA graduate, Benno began at the French Laundry in 1994, left to do a year with Daniel Boulud, then a year with Christian Delouvrier, followed by four years at Tom Colicchio’s Gramercy Tavern, before returning to the French Laundry. “That first year at the French Laundry set the bar, set the standard,” Benno said, when I’d spoken with him earlier in the day. “I’ve never met a chef who’d go to the ends of the earth to find…” Benno looked up to see where Keller was. Keller happened to be near the dish station removing bubble wrap from an ornate wooden box, a new acquisition that had just arrived. Benno smiled and said, “…the perfect box for truffles.”

  Keller is now off to the side, watching service, rubbing his chin. Laura Cunningham is there as well, watching front staff. There seems to be a lot of activity without enough getting done, servers are bunching up at the pass before the food is ready to go. The nature of the “friends” meal is a predetermined timing and seating, so a lot of the same dishes are picking up simultaneously, like private-party dining.

  “Let’s go, gentlemen,” Keller says. “Gotta go, pick this up like a banquet. Pick up food. I’m not sure where we forgot how to do it. It’s twenty minutes to ten, come on, we gotta go quicker.”

  The servers begin to hurry as well and one, taking a plate in each hand, whips around to leave the kitchen. Laura is on him like a hawk. “Whoa whoa whoa,” she says, stopping him. “Never ever carry a plate like that.” The food could slide all over the plate, or even fly off it. She removes a towel that is draped over his arm, makes sure his hands are positioned correctly, and sends him out.

  The agnolotti course, Keller’s pillow-like ravioli, here filled with a rich celery-root puree, served with Vermont cheese, shaved Virginia ham, and butter a farmer makes especially for him, took twenty minutes to pick up, which is too long. Keller scratches out notes on a white legal pad:

  Too long for p/u

  No sense of urgency

  Need to engage people

  He wants his trainees on the line acting autonomously, calling back the orders, which they aren’t doing. The cooks aren’t in sync.

  One voice in the kitchen

  While the staff is progressing, Keller on opening day still says, “I’m nervous.” Small glitches continue to pop up—the ticket printer is malfunctioning, some people smell smoke from the fireplace in the dining room, a toilet backfired on a hapless gentleman customer.

  When I see Cunningham, she has a big grin on her face, and I comment on it. The smile not diminishing a watt, she said, “It’s fear,” and the grave intensity of her eyes says she’s not kidding.

  But ultimately the opening would scarcely feel like an opening, at least back in the kitchen, because everything was already begun. Keller and Cunningham had now opened four restaurants and knew what they were doing. Keller gave speeches to front of the house and back of the house before service on Monday, February 16, fairly standard words of encouragement and gratitude.

  “I hope it’s an extraordinary experience,” he told the servers, standing above them on the raised section of the dining room. “I have no doubt it will be every night. We want to give our guests an experience they can remember…. Our goal is to have an impact on everybody we come into contact with…. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. Thank you.” He begins a round of applause and departs.

  Cunningham has noted he’s gotten awfully chatty and speechifying of late.

  Keller heads into the kitchen and gathers the cooks. “Can I get everybody in here at the pass?” The cooks are slow to gather—cooks don’t normally do pregame motivational huddles. Michael Swenton, another Laundry veteran, starts to sauté off some cèpes in a very hot pan, and they smoke and sizzle loudly. Keller, annoyed, says, “What are you doing? Are you hungry?” Michael, having already got them in the pan, says, “Cooking mushrooms, chef.” What could he do? Swenton shakes his head. I imagine the cooks thinking, What’s with this meeting? We’ve got things to do, it’s almost service, and he wants to get sentimental?

  “This is it,” Keller says, “this is the beginning. We have guests coming tonight. This is our big debut. It’s a great moment when you open a restaurant.” He tells them that the success of it hasn’t come from him. People have been spellbound by the room, by the food, he says, “but also by the quality of the people in this room. You have made the standards here very high.”

  He thanks Benno, Ziebold, Swenton, Knell, and numerous others by name for all their work both here and at the French Laundry.

  “Look around you,” he concludes. “Look around and remember this. I don’t want you to forget it. Thanks.”

  He claps to signal the end of the speech and all applaud, and then, at last, they can get back to their work, setting up the pass, wiping down stations, checking mise en place one more time, Knell and Swenton going over order-fire-pickup instructions with the line cooks they’re training.

  Soon Benno calls out, “Ordering for two! One lango, one foie gras, one sturgeon, one mackerel, one duck, one pork,” and the restaurant is up and running.

  “Nobody can remember a better opening,” Keller would say the next day.

  The entire week leading up to the opening had been celebratory, filled with the top food journalists and celebrities, such as Bruce Spring-steen and Sarah Jessica Parker, wandering through the kitchen. All of Keller’s meticulous planning had paid off. And his decision to shut down the French Laundry had been a masterful stroke, giving him the time to focus his attention on Per Se and to prov
e to New York that he was as committed to this place as to any. And they seemed to be buying it. There was none of the lampooning Ducasse received on his entry into New York. All the proper sacrifices had been made. The gods, apparently, were pleased.

  As if to underscore the grace of the opening, the first paying customers at Per Se delivered Keller to his cooking roots and brought to this opening night a circular element that delighted him. Their names were Art Sherin and Sue Horsey, and when they finished their meal—he had a nine-course chef’s tasting and she a vegetarian tasting—they asked that their menu be signed by the chef. The server took away their menu but returned and told the couple that the chef had invited them back to the kitchen—he’d like to meet them and thank them as the restaurant’s first customers. They were thrilled.

  A short couple in their late fifties, Sherin and Horsey were led back to the kitchen, where Keller remained off to the side observing service and taking notes. He’s already got the first dollar bill the restaurant has earned, and he wants the couple who paid it to sign the first ticket, which he intended to frame.

  They entered the bright kitchen smiling and chuckling nervously, apparently thrilled and surprised by this invitation. Keller beamed and greeted them warmly.