Craig looked at me, pausing for a moment to observe the thickness of my head, and said, “Ask him if he’d like something to drink.”
I knew the moment Craig said it, he was right, and off I scurried.
Mr. Metz, dressed sharply in a blazer and dark slacks, leaned forward on the table, apparently happily engaged in conversation with Mr. Forgione. I approached, pen perched on dupe pad, and waited. I don’t know if I spoke, but Mr. Metz, eventually sensing my presence, turned to me, smiled, his eyes their customary slivers, and said, “I’m O.K., thanks,” then returned to the conversation. If I recall correctly, I left the table the way a football player enters the game to kick the winning field goal in the final seconds.
Consciousness was impaired, clearly, but it had not abandoned me completely. Later, I glanced at my dupe pad and saw that I had written the words “I’m O.K., thanks” across the page. A small memento of the day, his first words to me.
The rest of the day did not grow smoother, though it was saved several times from disaster by the competence of Shaggy, my back waiter. We used what was called the Squirrel, a computer ordering system that sent, at the touch of its screen, one’s order to the kitchen. For some reason, the Czack order for starters did not arrive and was therefore late. Czack scowled at me every time I approached the table. I’d managed to record accurately their main course; everything would have been fine if I’d entered these into the computer. I neglected to do this because I got waylaid at table forty-one—“I just want to remind you that we are walking out of this restaurant at one-fifteen.” Two people at this table still had not arrived, the four who had arrived placed orders immediately, and one of the women requested herbal iced tea.
This was what stalled me. We had herbal tea that we served hot and we had big pitchers of iced tea at the bar. I explained that our iced tea was not herbal. The woman—no slouch; a tea drinker, after all—explained to me that if we served hot herbal tea, certainly we could put it over ice, no? I said I didn’t see why that could not be arranged. Anything for the customer. When I approached the bar and explained this to Craig, normally a happy and delightful soul, he looked at me as if I were being a pain in the ass. Just then, with horror, I remembered that I had not placed the Czack order. After this delay, Shaggy knew to keep a careful eye on the situation. He would eventually take their dessert order and bring their coffee because the problematic six-top, now in its entirety—four people eating their entrées, two people just beginning appetizers—demanded my exclusive attention.
The tea drinker was enormously impressed when I arrived with a teapot, in which an herbal tea bag steeped, along with a glass filled to the brim with ice.
“Now that is the way to do it,” she said.
I was deeply gratified, but there was a problem. I had noticed it at the bar. The tea bag didn’t seem to be steeping so much as soaking; the water was clear. Craig said it would be fine, take it away. I touched the teapot. It was cold. Craig had put cold water in the teapot. That was why the tea bag released none of its fragrant goodness. This was not right, I told Craig. He told me it was fine, go. I did as I was told, knowing it was wrong. I had already spent too much time on this tea, anyway, and Czack was giving me the hairy eyeball from across the room. When I saw the tea drinker pour into her glass what was clear tap water, squint at it, and taste it, my toes curled and my stomach clenched. The burnt root vegetables had come back to haunt me in the form of herbal iced tea.
Desserts, like everything at Czack’s table, were late, but coffee cups were low, so I was forced to make another pass with the coffeepot. Czack, who had declined a refill earlier, scowled at this, my second approach, but because everything was taking longer than expected, he said, “I’ll have a splash.”
I honestly thought this was another test, and I stood there, staring at him, he staring back. Perhaps, unbeknownst to myself, I was nodding, my lips curling out to reveal broad teeth. Eventually, it dawned on me that Chef Czack wanted more coffee and I broke from my Cro-Magnon stupor.
At one-fifteen on the nose, my elderly friend at the six-top and his spouse were making rapidly for the door, having foregone dessert because of their tour. At one-fifteen and a half, I was racing after the man, waving the leather check folder that contained his unsigned Visa slip.
Once the troublesome six-top had been dispatched with their three separate bills, I could attend without distraction to Chef Czack, but “Will there be anything else?” was all there remained to say. I slid the check folder onto the table; Czack did not owe anything but he needed to sign the check. I had taken a spot in the corner, hands behind my back. Czack took out his wallet; I could feel him glaring at me. I looked at him and when I did, he flicked a bill onto the table with a disdain I would do well to be grateful for, or so his expression seemed to suggest. I nodded once. As the Forgiones and Chef Czack stood to leave, Shaggy passed me and said, “Did you see that twenty spot on Czack’s table?” A 12 percent service charge was added to each bill to benefit CIA scholarships, all menus explained; “additional tipping is not expected or required.” Tips here were generally small, therefore, and often nonexistent; front and back waiters shared tips, thus Shaggy’s happy surprise to see a twenty-dollar bill on one of our tables.
Clearly, there was more to waiting tables than I had at first surmised. Weeds, I learned, grew in the front of the house, too. I was humbled and relieved to know that I, in my earnest bumbling way, had done better than some. Mark Zanowski, twenty-seven, a former English teacher from Milwaukee, said he couldn’t stop banging people in the head with his elbows. I saw Paul Angelis deliver a chocolate Bavarian to a couple that had yet to order their entrée. And Chen-Hwa Kang, an international student from Taiwan, spilled a glass of water into a woman’s lap. All part of a culinary education.
In the field, cooks and waitstaff form a quarrelsome marriage, neither party understanding, or willing to understand, the peculiar stresses of the other’s job. Future cooks being trained at the CIA benefited from the rigors of table-waiting—among other things, it enhanced their capacity for sympathy when, later, as they cranked out plates on the sauté station and a waiter failed to appear to whisk the plate away, they might now understand why.
Table-service class was a practical matter as well. If the Culinary were going to have restaurants, it had to staff them. And with all these able available cooks on campus, there was certainly no reason to pay outsiders to wait tables, an option that had been considered; the intent, though, was to ensure that cooks get to know front-of-the-house work and get used to interacting with customers.
And it became a privilege under Papineau’s instruction—indeed, it was here that one realized how vital good service was to a restaurant, and this was the most important lesson of all. As Mr. Papineau was quick to point out, many, many restaurants flourish serving bad food well, while few survive whose service is slipshod, rude, or incompetent. Service was selling power. “Learn to keep service happy so service can make money,” he told us. Students thus spent thirty-five days, seven weeks, the equivalent of two-and-a-half full blocks, waiting tables.
I engaged Mr. Papineau in conversation after service, when he could relax somewhat, though his sense of decorum and smoothness was such that in this room he always appeared to be on, perfectly smooth, never a wrinkle in his attire, never a skip in his effortless glide through the room. I noted that he appeared to like this work. He told me how lucky and honored he felt to be here; then, looking in both directions first, he grinned and whispered, “I’m like a pig in shit.”
I believe I actually jumped when he said this, so jarring was it to hear the polished gentleman use that phrase. But it made me appreciate what a powerful salesman he was. He was not polish to the core, he only appeared to be—which was all that mattered.
Sometimes, when he acted out a scenario during lecture, he was so good I felt that he was dangerous. He was so in control, the other party didn’t realize that he, not they, controlled the situation; it was merely that
Philip Papineau allowed them to feel in control without their knowing it. This was part of the game, and I could not help but sense, for all my admiration of his formidable skills, there was also wound up in the job a thread of wicked insincerity. There had to be, if only to balance the humility necessary to nod and beg a foul guest’s pardon.
After service one day, Mr. Papineau and I left the dining room for a small office he shared with the other table-service instructor and their fellows, beneath the restaurant near the lockers and two classrooms where Nutrition was taught (each day after service, kitchen crew and waitstaff would meet for an hour-and-a-half lecture and lab work on protein, carbohydrates, and fat).
“I teach the material, and try to change their perspective on table service,” Mr. Papineau said, leaning casually back in his chair, his jacket removed. It struck me then that all his movements were somehow bigger than life.
In truth, while he claimed only to teach, Papineau did much more than that. There were several facets to his work and they blended with each other, mixed, overlapped, and mimicked one another, so that you never knew which he was doing or when—it was all one thing. He was the maître d’ of a public restaurant. He was a lecturing instructor on the faculty of the Culinary Institute. He was a teacher by example; the posture he held and the values he practiced during service were observed and absorbed by the students around him. And he was a kind of private tutor for Craig. Excellence in one of these areas fed all the others and they fed it; the better maître d’ he was, the better teacher he became, and the students learned more. The boundaries between school and business, education and work were in fact nonexistent. Each was an expression of and fed the whole.
He said the dining room was a classroom, but this was not practice; real people came to eat here and pay well for their meal. The students were four blocks away from graduation at this point and it was time for them to know the people who would be eating the food they were learning to cook, but also to know themselves. This was among Mr. Papineau’s fundamental maxims.
“In a few short days,” he said, swiveling lazily in his chair, hands behind his head, “they learn who they are, they learn confidence. And when they have that they can learn more, faster.”
But the biggest thing one gained in table service, he said, was “wisdom about yourself.”
“They learn to be sympathetic and sincere, and strong, to lead people,” he said. “They’ll need to be role models.” How could you be all these things if you weren’t reflective, he asked, reflective about yourself and about how others responded to your own actions. “Know thyself” would be a waiter’s most important rule. Here, at the Culinary Institute of America, one learned Platonic cooking and Socratic table-waiting.
Philip Papineau was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1954 to parents who believed restaurants were entertainment. “I always loved the show,” he said. “I grew up going to restaurants. We weren’t rich—there were six of us, four of us and my parents—but every Saturday night, we went out to a restaurant.” Throughout school, he had always been the sort of student whose knees rattled during public presentations, pages quivering in his hands. The first table he waited on was at a restaurant owned by his brother and sister-in-law. His sister-in-law had listened in on his maiden voyage, told him he’d spoken so fast no one had understood a word—get back there and do it again. It was his first lesson in table service and he remained grateful for it.
Papineau graduated from Worcester State College in 1977 and continued to wait on tables. He had some friends in Poughkeepsie, moved there, and got a job as a waiter at a place called the Treasure Chest, a high-end formal French restaurant.
“My parents kept waiting for me to get a real job,” he recalled. “But to me, that was a real job.”
His seriousness paid off. When the Captain at the Treasure Chest left, Papineau was offered the job. The restaurant was a favorite of IBM vice presidents during an era of enormous expense accounts. “The money was just incredible,” Papineau recalled, with genuine nostalgia.
In 1984 he left the Treasure Chest for another restaurant and eventually applied for a job at the Culinary. He did not feel as though he was good enough—the other maître d’s had worked all over Europe; who was he, this American maître d’? “But I wanted to be here,” he said, his teeth gritted.
He had learned French service. If you only knew American, he said, that’s all you could do. If you knew French service, you could do anything. And he lamented the demise of such service.
I told him how much fun I’d had eating at the Culinary’s French restaurant, the Escoffier Restaurant, how the waiter, a young woman, had prepared for me the best Caesar salad I had had anywhere ever (it was her first, she told me), how they sautéed tableside in beautiful copper pans. Such service had long been out of fashion, and yet because it was so rare these days, I found it not stuffy, but instead thrilling.
“I - love - that,” Papineau said, lustily. “I - love - that.” To perform something by nature flamboyant and difficult and to do it low-key, he said, to do it with humility and subtlety and grace and perfection—the man’s eyes shined brightly. He did not want me to get him wrong though. “I like show,” he conceded. And he loved it when, as he said, “somebody’s really puttin’ on the dog.” But “low-key” was where it was at. He adored, he said, “the theater of it.”
Like Pardus, Papineau noted the downside: “You can’t celebrate Christmas. You can’t celebrate Mother’s Day. ‘I’ll have to see you the day after Mother’s Day, Mom.” Christmas, though, that was the rough one. He could manage the rest, but Christmas was when you really felt the rift between restaurant people and the rest of the world.
While he regretted that formal service had fallen out of fashion, he also noted that, as the cup and saucer were slowly reentering the scene, so too might formal service. “And these kids,” he said, rising forward in his chair, “will be the ones to do it. These kids will change the service industry.”
By Day Four, everything seemed to click. We would huddle at eleven-twenty. Mr. Papineau would check that everybody possessed crumber, pad, wine key, and pen, run down any specials of the day, what desserts were being offered. He would look at his watch and say, “It’s eleven-thirty. We’re officially open, let’s have a gooooood Friday.”
Service, after a few days, became as natural as conversation with friends. It was fun to serve people, to answer their questions—visitors wanted to know why we were here, what we were doing, where we were going—they were here “to dig the scene,” as Papineau had said.
Papineau’s lectures remained fascinating through to the end. Even the simplest queries offered him an opportunity to reflect on human nature, the behavior of humans in groups. One of the last things I asked him was how to prioritize various duties, and he said without hesitation words that would serve one just as well in the kitchen as in the dining room: “Do the job that can be done fastest, first. Take the deuce before the four-top, even if the four-top came in first, because the four-top will take longer, and a six-top will take even longer than that. That’s just the way it is.”
St. Andrew’s Kitchen
I arrived shortly after six A.M., stored my briefcase in a locker, and headed up to the kitchen. The day before our group had circled around group leader Gene Huey, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, of Chinese descent, as he briefed us. “You have to be here at six-fifteen,” he said. “This is not to scare you or anything, but if you’re here at six-sixteen, you’re late. The chef is very particular. If you’re in the bathroom, you’re late; if you’re downstairs, you’re late. Six-fifteen in the kitchen. Standard uniform. Two sidetowels, I believe. Keep a locker. Your knife kits up there are fine. So are tool boxes. Remember, this guy talks in grams. It’s about thirty grams per ounce. Read the handout, read the handout, read the handout.”
I was already familiar with the layout of the kitchen, having been a waiter, but any time I had crossed the line into the kitchen I’d felt like an intruder;
my posture and haste whispered “excuse me” and “sorry,” whether washing my hands or drinking from the water fountain. Now I was back in my whites and, with my fellow students, could take possession of the place. Part of my possessiveness arose from being added to the class roster. The chef, Ron De Santis, had put me on family meal. This would be the lowest rank in the kitchen; you cooked for your fellow students, often forced to put leftovers and on-their-way-out vegetables to use somehow; if you screwed up, people bitched but it didn’t really matter. You were the clerk of the kitchen, the gopher.
Nevertheless I was pumped up and ready because I had a job to do—John Marshall, Paul Angelis, and I were to make fifty plates of food for waiters, instructors, fellows, and the two St. Andrew’s dishwashers.
A voice over loudspeakers said, “Will everyone come up front?” I stowed my knife kit on a standing rack in back of the long kitchen and strode to the front with my comrades. The clock above the display-kitchen window read six-thirteen. We gathered before Chef De Santis. The chef was not tall—fiveten, five-eleven maybe—but he was trim and compact, his chef attire crisp and smooth, a good-looking man with sharp features. He read roll call—all here but for Manning and Mimi; no one knew where they were—and when the chef called the final name, the clock read six-fifteen exactly.
As always, the first order of duties was a tour of the kitchen, beginning with service stations. With our backs to the window looking past the bar and into the cool quiet dining room (Craig and Mr. Papineau were there, preparing for the arrival of a dozen-and-a-half new waiters), and facing the kitchen, pastry station was to our right, followed by garde manger, the cold station that prepared sandwiches and salads, then soup, veg, sauté, pasta, and grill in a counterclockwise semicircle. The kitchen had been built in 1989 and had been designed for cooking and service; that is, it had never been anything else, as was the case with many kitchens, and did not have to confine itself to an already existing space. A Y-shaped service counter, upside down from our vantage point, split the cooking area. The chef would stand in the crux of the Y, calling orders, expediting as it was called, and plates from any station came right down the same runway—an efficient design for getting a lot of different plates with many components from various stoves to the waiters.
The Making of a Chef Page 27