The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  “Beer is getting to be like wine,” he said. “For those of you who will open your own place, make your beer list as complex, or almost as complex, as your wine list. It’s only gonna get bigger and there’s a lot of money to be made there. A big area of growth.”

  He moved into the food. Spice level was moderate. Soups required a bouillon spoon, which would be kept in the drawers of the side stations; the required silver must find its way to the table before the food. The open-face is served medium rare, the salmon medium unless the customer requests otherwise. The chicken and shrimp entrée was served over linguine with a spicy saffron broth and therefore required a broth spoon. Grilled beef tenderloin—a temperature was requested on that. And so on through the entire menu, on into coffee service. He went through the kitchen’s procedure, when it fired which course and when it picked up. He rumbled systematically through ordering procedure. The instructions ran from broad—there would be front waiters who would do all the order-taking and there would be back waiters who would deliver the food and clear plates—to specifics. Crumb and remove salt and pepper, then set for dessert. Coffee cup handles should be set at four o’clock—let’s watch the details, folks. Reset only the twenties and thirties (tables were all numbered), and never strip a table bare. A sloppy table will take the food down a notch, he warned. The customer’s eye goes to the mistake first—a crumb on the chair, fleck of tarnish on the tip of a knife in an otherwise sparkling silver setup. “When it’s right,” Mr. Papineau said, eyes narrowing at the challenge, “they don’t notice a thing.”

  Mr. Papineau knew that he was speaking to cooks and he wanted us to give to table service the same passion and precision that we brought to plating the food itself. Use your common sense, he instructed, have confidence, and leave your old waiter techniques, if you had any, behind.

  “The greeting includes the beverage list,” he said. “Ask if they would like something to drink. Don’t say, ‘Hi.’ Don’t say, ‘Howyadoin’?’ Don’t introduce yourself by name.” And when we saw that the table had finished and needed a check, “Don’t mention the C word. Why? Cuz.”

  If there were questions, ask, and he or Craig would instruct, even if the room were full of guests in the middle of lunch. This was a classroom first, he reminded us.

  “The customers are not here to challenge you,” Mr. Papineau concluded. “They’re here to dig the scene.”

  Mr. Papineau covered a lot of ground in an hour and a half. Some of my fellow students took notes; others simply listened. How could they be absorbing everything? I was trying to write everything down and could scarcely keep up, so relentless was the volley of information. It seemed only twenty minutes before Mr. Papineau said, “O.K., family meal’s up,” reminded us that at eleven-twenty there would be final inspection, and headed us into the kitchen to pick up plates of soupy lasagna prepared by the last class.

  I was assigned back-waiter duty the first day and therefore did not interact with the customers. Bradley Anderson, a twenty-two-year-old from Wisconsin who asked to be called Shaggy, was the front waiter. He waited tables at American Bounty (which often hired extra waiters in addition to those in the class), and he liked front-of-the-house work so there was little new about this to him. The day proceeded calmly because of Shaggy, because Papineau limited the number of reservations accepted on Day Ones, and because there were two people serving every table. Most of my time was spent standing in the corner with my hands behind my back, rocking from heel to toe, waiting for my tables to finish eating so I could clear and reset. This was going to be easy.

  When I asked Craig why he had chosen to do his fellowship in St. Andrew’s, he replied, “Mr. Papineau. He’s the man.”

  Philip Papineau, in my mind, was set somewhere in the 1950s in New York City, a bachelor in a small, dimly lit apartment. At night, he would read the newspaper in his T-shirt and slacks, a small plate with half a sandwich to his right and, perhaps, a full glass of tepid water; later that evening he would be seen by a neighbor closing his apartment door, turning the key, and, immaculately dressed, he would stride into the New York City night.

  It was not my inclination to create unlikely fantasies about people I watched, but there was something about Mr. Papineau’s dark eyes, dark complexion, and broad shoulders that gave him a studio-era leading-man look; his face was long, his dark hair cut short. His beard was heavy but he was always so cleanly shaven that his jaw and upper lip seemed almost to shine. He moved as elegantly as a dancer. He was likely none of the things I saw in him; perhaps he was simply so polished that one could see any number of reflections in him. In truth, one might call him a career waiter; he took his first order at the age of eighteen. The man loved table service, he was expert, and like every great teacher he was able to convey his personal love of the subject directly to his students.

  In his lecture on table-clearing he noted that we should, between courses, clear all silverware. You understood this man shuddered at the thought of a customer taking a food-smeared knife or fork off a plate to rest it on the tablecloth. “How many of you have put dirty silver back on the table?” Mr. Papineau asked, raising his own hand. “Come oooon,” he said in a deep, smooth voice. “Get your hands up. Everyone has done it.” He waited for everyone to raise their hand, then asked, “Why?”

  Todd Sargent said, “We don’t think we’re gonna get it back.”

  “Right!” Mr. Papineau exclaimed. “We have been trained by bad service. It’s a survival technique: ‘Hang on to your knife, buddy. You’re gonna need it.’” We would replace silverware frequently; no food was to be brought to a table until the table had been properly reset by the back waiter.

  A question on coffee would raise several dimensions of coffee service. I had already poured coffee for a customer and the coffee had splashed over the rim of the cup and into the saucer, enough to create a puddle in the saucer. I had asked if I might replace the cup and saucer—was this correct?

  Mr. Papineau instructed me to take it one step further: “Offer to take it away—while you’re reaching for it.” This gets Mr. Papineau thinking: “A word on coffeepots,” he said. “Coffeepots with short stems are drippy. Long spouts, like the ones we have, drip less. Don’t overfill a coffeepot; if you overfill it, it can jump out of the pot.” Once he started thinking about coffee, it seemed he couldn’t stop. “Never serve warm coffee,” he continued. “There is nothing worse than warm coffee. People will buy it iced, and they will buy it hot, but nothing else in between. Some people like coffee”—he stopped, rose slightly on his toes, and extended his chin—“melting hot. Normally older people—I don’t know why. It must be the dentures. If this is the case, make sure the cup is hot. If they can feel it on their lip”—he lifted a mug from the demo table he worked during lecture, pressed it to his lower lip—“they will perceive that the coffee is hot.” In such cases we wanted the mug hot as a soup bowl. And coffee, of course, would get him thinking about tea. “Who’s a tea drinker?”

  Mimi Anchev, twenty-three, from Westchester County south of Hyde Park, confessed with a tentative hand.

  Mr. Papineau glared at her, leaned in, and said, “Oh, you are a fussy lot.” To the class he said, “Tea service can be very complicated,” and into tea service he sailed.

  “Kids and the elderly,” he explained, “are very needy, very selfish.” Always, he said, attend to the children first. “If you make the kids happy, then who’s happy?” He paused. “It’s not a difficult concept. Who has made a lot of money on just that?” He paused again. “McDonald’s.”

  I grew to understand that Mr. Papineau—“I am a nut for communicating through gesture,” he often said—was less a table-service instructor than a professor of sociology and behavior.

  One had to be such a creature if one were to be excellent because one had to know what the customer wanted—whether it was water, to place an order, a warmer temperature in the room—then fulfill the need. “And to do this,” Mr. Papineau said with a reverential hush, but wit
hout losing volume, “before the customer knows they need it. That’s where it’s at. People will spend more if the service is good.”

  Why? They tend to order the extra course because they trust that it will arrive promptly, and they tend to up their tip by 1 to 2 percent, which is all that you can reasonably hope for. “You’ve got the big tipper, and you’ve got the tipper who’s incredibly stingy,” Mr. Papineau offered sagely. “Everyone else falls somewhere in between. You’re not going to change that. You’re just looking to move it up one or two percent.”

  Mr. Papineau stressed promptness. “If you’re late,” he said, “your service will always be on the defensive.”

  He could not emphasize this enough. You had no idea how long the time can seem, he said, especially if you were a deuce. He asked who had a second hand on their watch. He said, “Time one minute.” And Mr. Papineau began. He waited. He appeared to be listening for a small noise, hearing only silence. It seemed a long time before he spoke. With his volume a notch lower than normal, he said, “Can’t we get a drink?” Disgruntled but patient. He then waited. He looked right, looked left, looked right. A minute passed, and he said, a little more loudly, “All we want is a drink.” And then, after what had to be yet another minute’s wait, he whispered to his imaginary date, “Should we go somewhere else?” When the two people timing both raised their hands to indicate one minute had elapsed, he said in a loud, angry-customer voice, “We have been here for ten minutes and can’t even get something to drink!”

  He shed the angry customer persona, lifted his eyebrows, and tilted his head: Am I right? See how long a minute can last? Those who had waited tables were already nodding. Mr. Papineau said, “You can’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but it’s only been one minute.” Timing, promptness were crucial. “These are big issues,” he said.

  Service today is just terrible, Mr. Papineau would say often. He didn’t necessarily want formal, he wanted professional. He wanted polish. “I can tolerate technical errors, I suppose,” he said. “I will not tolerate rude, flip behavior.” I wondered what it would be like to go out to a restaurant with Mr. Papineau, hear a play-by-play analysis of the service. “For a hundred bucks,” Mr. Papineau said, “I don’t want rude. I want smooth. For a hundred bucks, I want smooooth.”

  He lifted a napkin from the demo table and snapped it free of its folds with a muffled pop. “I like show,” he said, “but I’m not big on woofing napkins. If you do have waiters woofing napkins, make sure everyone woofs napkins. Don’t just have one guy woofing napkins.” Mr. Papineau was a fine actor and could caricature customers’ behavior. “When someone goes to the bathroom?” he said. He lofted the napkin into the air and turned his chin up away from the table. The napkin landed a third on the plate, a third on the table, and the rest draping over the table’s edge. Mr. Papineau looked at his audience, raised his eyebrows, and nodded. He said, “Just,” and he lifted the napkin by its edges, folded it twice, said, “I’m not big on touching other people’s napkins, just fold it,” and he set it beside the plate, then over the arm of the chair, either one was fine. “So.” He turned to the class. “Don’t try to refold it into a pheasant.”

  There were, of course, many don’ts in table service. Mr. Papineau jammed his hands into both pockets, rocked from heel to toe, and looked exaggeratedly around the room. “This means,” he said, “not … ready.”

  “Don’t eat, smoke, or drink during service,” he continued. “Don’t do it. Don’t run through a restaurant. People think there’s a fire. When they see a waiter running, it makes them nervous.” Finally and importantly, he said, “You can’t laugh. If you’re laughing, who are you laughing at?” The whole class chuckled. “And you know there’s a lot to laugh at,” Mr. Papineau said.

  Table service was a gorgeous craft to Mr. Papineau. You had not perfected it, he said, “until you can fade into the woodwork and still be in the middle of the room.”

  Papineau’s lectures were not all sociology. They were also formal lessons. He had a large easel with a drawing board onto which he’d drawn a diagram identical to the one on our dupe pad—four course columns running across the top, and seven seat numbers descending the left edge. He turned it away from us, had four students take seats at the demo table, and performed proper order taking. “Grilled beef tenderloin,” he said, writing this down, but the point he stressed by caricaturing his own perfect execution was to repeat aloud what had been ordered to ensure the waiter and guest were in sync. “And how would you like that cooked?” He repeated while writing: “Medium rare.” And when he had finished the table, having collected all menus, he turned the board around to show us exactly how what had been communicated at the table should appear on our pad.

  As always there was something big about Mr. Papineau’s movements. He was on stage before us and his actions were loud as stage whispers. When he arrived at the table he didn’t simply walk up to it; he more or less zooped, his feet arriving first, followed by his waist, shoulders, then head—a figurative indication of speed and promptness. And once he was in place he was Jeeves incarnate, saying in his confident baritone, “Good afternoon. Welcome to St. Andrew’s Cafe.”

  Refinement hid itself within its own virtue. One could not easily recognize genuine refinement because true refinement directed attention away from itself. What made Papineau such a fascinating table-service instructor was that he could reveal his refinement without losing it. He showed us how table service worked. He was the magician revealing to his apprentices the prestidigitations and illusions of his trade.

  Day Two was my first day as front waiter. Shaggy, whose short hair was so blond it was nearly white, would be my back waiter at tables forty-one, a six-top, and forty-two, a four-top. Mr. Papineau had inspired me. I could hardly wait for service. I was eagerness personified.

  During setup, I popped out to the foyer to check the reservation list and found that across from table forty-two the name Czack. This would be Richard Czack, a 1958 graduate of the school, executive assistant to Senior Vice President Tim Ryan. We had never met, but I liked him because I knew he had spent part of his professional career in my hometown as a country-club chef and executive chef for Hough Caterers, a division of the venerable Hough Bakeries, once a flour and confectionery landmark of Cleveland. Czack did not look like a chef—balding, glasses, slight of frame; I didn’t know his age but he seemed elderly. His voice was nasal, fussy. He looked and sounded more like an accountant’s clerk. But Chef Czack was in fact a certified master chef and I was excited to be serving him and his guests, Mr. and Mrs. Forgione, parents of celebrity chef Larry, and an unnamed fourth. This would be fun.

  Chef Czack and the Forgiones arrived as scheduled and were shown to table forty-two, at the back of the room, immediately in front of the dormant fireplace. There was no fourth member, but Chef Czack told Gene Huey, group leader and maître d’ of the day, to keep the place setting. Then, like a horse out of a starting gate, I broke for the table, greeted the three guests, and, standing at Mrs. Forgione’s right, asked if anyone cared for something to drink.

  The Forgiones quickly perused the drink menu. Mrs. Forgione wanted something nonalcoholic and ordered a Sea Breeze. Mr. Forgione said that he had no idea what a Sea Breeze was. Chef Czack looked to me and said, “Tell us, what is in a Sea Breeze?”

  Certainly, Czack had asked for the benefit of Mr. Forgione. He had not asked because he himself was curious, I don’t think, or to test me in front of the guests, to show off the students, yet something in his tone led me to squint a little, as if to show I was working diligently at a tricky problem. I’d long known what a Sea Breeze was and we’d been tested on it as well, but I still made it look difficult. Then, with pride and confidence of having accomplished this difficult task, I said, “A Sea Breeze is three-quarters orange juice and one-quarter cranberry juice.”

  Chef Czack, if my recollection is correct, said something in response. He could just as well have been speaking Chinese for all I understood. Somethi
ng had gone wrong with my ears. I nodded and smiled. Chef Czack may have said, “Traditionally, what you described is a Madras. A Sea Breeze is made with cranberry juice and grapefruit juice.” I do know that he had not said, “Sorry, pal,” and he had not made a Jeopardy wrong-answer noise. Either of those would have penetrated the fog that had rolled into my head. I had become so oblivious that I did not even realize the mistake until later, as I tried to reconstruct the events of the day—much as one might glue together a broken vase.

  Mrs. Forgione, perhaps expecting orange juice, perhaps expecting grapefruit juice, said it sounded good and through sheer force of will, I was able to record this on my dupe pad in the proper square. Chef Czack and Mr. Forgione would share a large bottle of Solé sparkling water. I departed for the bar, where Craig poured a proper Sea Breeze.

  Mr. Papineau slid up beside me as I waited and, surveying the room, he said, “Take and serve their orders. If Mr. Metz joins them, we’ll take care of his order separately.”

  “Mr. Metz?” I said.

  Mr. Papineau nodded, then glided away.

  It is a measure, I think, of how thoroughly I had adopted the role of a student that I was all but stricken by this information.

  “Mr. Metz,” I repeated.

  My six-top arrived shortly after noon, four of them anyway, and one older gentleman announced upon being seated that they had a tour and would be leaving at one-fifteen, no matter where they stood in their meal. I assured them I’d be prompt and asked if they would like something to drink.

  Sometime after this, Craig said to me, “Mr. Metz is here.”

  I have no clear recollection when this was because from the Sea Breeze on, I had lost utterly my sense of time and other critical faculties of consciousness; the perception of faces, the sound of customers talking to me, depth perception and laws of gravity melted into an amorphous blob of table-service experience. Craig had spoken with a tone that indicated he shouldn’t have needed to tell me in the first place. By this point I had lost my composure completely and I said, “Metz?! What should I do?”