“Your stations are set,” Chef De Santis said. “You have everything you need there. Day Two, you set your own station.”
“At nine A.M.,” he continued, “put your plates in the warmer or the cooler. This counter is hot.” He rubbed a palm across the bright stainless steel service counter. “Do not keep raw vegetables here.” This was the kind of important, small detail you had to learn coming into a new kitchen; every kitchen had its own quirks. And so did every chef. You had to learn these, too, and get a sense of the chef just as fast. Often, the chef and the kitchen were the same thing. De Santis was an easy read because he didn’t talk, lecture, or explain; rather he declared things—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but always clearly.
“There is the ice machine,” he said as we circled through the kitchen. “Before you take ice, you must check with me. We must be sure it’s available for service. You’d be surprised how little ice you really need … . The most important station here is the hand sink. You should be standing in line to use the hand sink. This, for lack of a better term, is the garbage station. We have a problem already.” The blue recyclable bin was missing, and someone hustled to roll it back into place beside the gray trash and yellow recyclable bins. “They do not move. That way you always know where they are.” We passed dry storage to the walk-in. “Only use the left side of the walk-in,” he said. “Not the right side. The right side is for P.M. mise en place only. If I catch you there, you will repeat this course. I wanna be real clear about that. If I catch you there—you will repeat this course … . Plastic wrap. See it?” He pointed to the huge roll beside the sink. “That’s where it always is. It’s a matter of efficiency … . While you are with me, you weigh, measure, and scale things. It is not an option. Two reasons. One, it affects quality and consistency. Two, we have nutritional parameters. Otherwise, it’s a joke what we’re doing.” On a board on the wall behind the grill station were kept various sheets (reservations for the week, parties, and so on), as well as a list of our names. “We sweep every half hour,” Chef De Santis said. “When you sweep, put an initial by your name. It works well. It’s always nice and clean here.”
He had told us a lot about his style already. Promptness. Efficiency. Everything in its place. Cleanliness. And something more. There was clearly something of Jack Nicholson in this man, the way he said “nice and clean” in almost a whisper, something theatrical and something ever so slightly demented. At first I thought he smiled a lot. But I saw him smiling when I knew he was very angry, and I realized this was just the shape of his mouth. Often his teeth were clenched while his lips were parted in a wide smile. This enhanced your caution when you were near him.
“It’s now six-twenty-four,” he said. “At six-fifty-five, that’s the last time we’re going to be able to order supplemental. Check your mise en place. Never assume everything is correct, fresh, servable. You are in charge now. Family meal. We begin plating at ten-fifteen. At ten-thirty, we’re gone.”
Chef De Santis told us that he considered family meal to be the most important station in the kitchen because it determined the tone and morale of its workers. He told us he’d once worked for a chef who instructed the family meal cook to make a bolognese sauce with the consommé raft and the restaurant suffered for it.
Still, I didn’t buy it. I figured he said this because over the years he’d realized that people on family meal have a self-esteem problem. Family meal had to be done, and that was about all there was to be said for it. Today’s family meal had been partly prepped by people who were now seated in chairs listening to Mr. Papineau’s Day One lecture, so we had plenty of time to put it together and had only one decision to make—the chef wanted us to use several pounds of carrots, to be served with the roast beef and mashed potatoes. John immediately suggested julienning them, then sautéeing them in butter with diced apple and caraway seeds; the chef nodded and left. Everyone had a few minutes to check their mise en place and familiarize themselves with their station before lecture, which began at seven. The restaurant, its new staff formally inducted, opened for business in less than five hours.
Day One lecture was simply a matter of going through the course guide on policies, dress code expectations, the things everyone had heard in every previous class. But Chef De Santis was going to make us interested in this even if we didn’t want to be.
“Skills, you’ll see three bullets there,” Chef De Santis said, looking at his own course guide at the head of the classroom. We’d convened downstairs in a long narrow classroom with rows of white tables on either side, an aisle down the middle, and in front, a desk, a podium, a board, and an overhead projector. “Mise en place, fundamentals, service. When we talk about fundamentals, it means everything you have to do till it’s seasoned and on the plate—that is fundamentals. If it says minced garlic, it doesn’t mean big chunks of garlic. It means very, very, VERY fine!”
The man knew how to raise his voice. And when he lowered his voice, it moved way down to a delighted, wicked whisper.
“I really believe in the dress code,” he said, continuing a description of how we were graded. “I think they’ve got it just right. I think symbols are important—it’s really a symbol. We can wear other clothes. We don’t. One violation is a seventy percent grade violation; it is possible to fail for the day because of a single violation. The second one, it’s a zero for the day. That means you repeat the class. I am serious about this. Work with me on this. I wear this.” He tugged at his neckerchief, neatly tucked in. “I button up. You can do the same.
“For the next seven days, you must speak like a professional … . I have zero tolerance for discrimination or intolerance. I will dismiss you on the spot if I see it. And I will do everything I can to have you thrown off this campus, permanently! Too much garbage goes on out there.” He paused. “Professionalism. You can’t buy it. You can’t order it from a catalog.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. “It’s not a thing. It can’t cut you. You can’t have it! It is something you work toward.
“At ten-thirty, you must leave the kitchen. Our industry, there’s too much workaholism. You don’t have to eat family meal, but you must leave the kitchen. That’s the point of being organized. You can’t work through family meal.
“By eleven-fifteen, we have to look like we’re ready to go. Even if we’re not. We are a display kitchen. You’ve seen people looking in. They’re ready to come in and siddown.” His eyes narrowed and he got that evil look in his eye. He said, “We have to glisten.
“If no one has said it to you already, welcome to restaurant row. It is the best time here at the Institute. It’s real fast. You will not believe how fast graduation comes. The work is much more independent. A lot of responsibility is given to you. You’re in charge. If you need a demo, ask me. If you need info, ask me. If you need an opinion, ask me. If you need feedback, ask me.” He gave out his office and home phone numbers, should a student need to call at any time. “Real strange hours I’d appreciate if it were an emergency.”
“There will not be a meeting at the end of the day. If the day didn’t go well we know which stations had a bad day.
“If you think you’ve made a mistake, do not throw it away. Maybe we can cook it longer, maybe we can season it. Do not throw it away. That’s the wrong message. Any amateur can throw something away and start again. Everybody, when you leave here you are going into business. Do you all understand? Food cost is a part of that.” But, he noted, “Don’t come to me with burnt. I can’t help you with burnt. Black. Crisp. Burnt? That’s way past mistake.”
He addressed service commands. “Order” was more or less advance notice. “Fire,” he said. “That means cook the food. Or assemble the item. The last thing the expediter will say is pick up. When is the best time to plate the food?”
A couple of people call out, “As close to pick-up as possible.” Chef De Santis asked “Why?” then answered it himself: “The food looks like—freshly plated FOOD! It’s glistening, steeeeeee
aming”—in that whisper of his—“juicy. What does food look like when it’s been plated too early? It looks like hot-plate food. It looks like it’s been sittin’ around for a while!”
I knew a talented actor when I saw one; seven-o’clock lecture would be fine with me.
By eight-thirty, Mimi and Manning remained AWOL. They had been slated for grill station, and with the restaurant planning to open in three hours, John and I were discussing carrots for family meal when the chef walked up and said, “John, you and Paul are on grill today.” To me he said, “Chen and Brian are going to help you with family meal.”
Chen-Hwa I think was glad to be in the kitchen. The previous week after table service, I asked him how he was doing and he said, “No broken plate, no water on customer. Good day.” Chen’s food English was proficient but he had more difficulty in conversation. His classmate, Geoffrey Rassmussen, from Staten Island, was helping him with that. When Brian, looking into a job position in Shanghai, asked Chen if the Chinese were friendly to Americans, Chen said, “Yes, all slant-eyes like honkies.” This was Geoff’s doing. Geoff was twenty-two, had been on his way to playing college football until an injury ended his career, he said. He had permed strawberry-blond hair, and during table service when the day was slow, he would goof around in the corner striking Calvin Klein–like poses. He said his modeling name was “Tyler” and we often called him Tyler after that.
The morning proceeded with calm industriousness. After family meal, I would prep the next day’s family meal (tomorrow: roast pork loin with a honey mustard glaze, rosemary-garlic potatoes, broccoli and carrots tossed with vegetable lié and fresh herbs) and help out where needed. Most other stations were so busy all the way through clean-up you scarcely had time to blink, let alone think about the food you were preparing. My family meal duties allowed me to wander the kitchen.
I was curious about the food. The Culinary billed St. Andrew’s, which opened in 1984, as one of the first restaurants in the country attempting to address nutritional and health issues within the context of a standard restaurant menu. It was not a health-food restaurant, but aimed to serve delicious meals—salmon, steak, pork, pasta, hearty soups like gumbo, and rich desserts—while altering technique to make these meals less bad for you. The concepts were simple, and most of America knew them by now: reduce calories, cholesterol, salt, sugar, and protein; increase carbohydrate-rich foods and fresh foods in great variety. This can often lead to serious compromise in pleasure, but some of the solutions CIA chefs came up with were clever and successful. A rich vegetable stock, liéd with cornstarch, replaced two-thirds the oil in vinaigrettes and mayonnaise. Yogurt and ricotta cheese, puréed till it was very, very, VERY smooth, replaced cream and milk for an “ice cream” that was surprisingly creamy and rich. The sausage that topped the sausage pizza used cooked Carolina white rice instead of pork fat. The point was not to eliminate all the stuff that made food taste good (fat), just reduce it when possible by increasing the use of stocks and vegetable purées (the grilled salmon, for example, was served with a grilled tomato coulis and a roasted poblano coulis).
After family meal, all were back in the kitchen quickly. On Day One, Chef De Santis cooked and plated everything on the menu—four pizzas, nine starters, and eight entrées—in about forty minutes, explaining each item in detail as he moved from station to station. This amounted to less than two minutes per plate, so the chef had to hustle.
The pork scallopini with caponata, polenta, and spinach was a popular item—I’d delivered many plates of it the week before—as was the panseared chicken and shrimp in a saffron broth. These items were to be handled by Mark Zanowski, the former English teacher, and Scott Stearns at the sauté station. Scott was a very large fellow, twenty-two, from Hanover, New Hampshire; he called me Raymond by mistake the first day and continued to call me Raymond from then on. I squeezed into the veg-sauté-pasta line to watch. The chef first put two pieces of lean pork loin, which had been pounded to about a quarter inch thick, into a very hot, perfectly dry sauté pan, and asked Mark why he did so.
“Because there’s fat in the meat?” Mark replied.
“Right. If the pan is properly heated, you shouldn’t have a problem.”
The pork did in fact stick, but the chef scraped and tugged and lifted the pork off the pan’s steel surface to flip it. It had browned nicely. As the pork cooked he got to work on the chicken and shrimp, searing the chicken in another sauté pan. When the chicken had color, he said, “Give me four ounces of broth”—and with a four-ounce ladle, he dropped it bubblingly into the pan—“cover the chicken and poach it.” Then back to the pork: “When you see moisture pushing up through the pork and some blood, that’s medium rare. That’s a good sight way of checking doneness.” He let it go a moment longer to medium.
Veg station—Chen-Hwa and Brian Geiger—had already been demoed. They sautéed the spinach, seasoned with shallots and drops of Pernod, and cooked the polenta that accompanied sauté station’s pork and caponata. The chef plated this simply, left it on the service table, and turned to the chicken. “This has been poachin’ away now for three to four minutes—nice and slow and gentle.” In a separate pan over a hot flame he dropped some linguine and a little veg broth to bring them up to heat quickly. “No dry food, O.K., guys? Gotta see liquid.” During the final couple of minutes, he added two shrimp to the poaching chicken and re-covered the pan. He delivered the linguine, now hot and coated with reduced vegetable broth, to a bowl (servers in the dining room, at about this stage in the item’s cooking, would typically be setting a broth spoon at the place setting of the person who would receive this item), placed the chicken breast on the pasta, and the two shrimp, pink and tightly curled, atop the chicken, poured the saffron broth over it all, and garnished the dish with flat leaves of parsley. Good to go.
On to pasta: group leader Gene and Geoff (a.k.a. Tyler) would prepare one appetizer—orzo with morels, Parma ham, and Parmesan cheese—and two entrées—linguine with tomatoes, caperberries, and calamata olives, and potato gnocchi with shitakes, oven-dried tomatoes, and a basil pesto. This station was all mise en place and these were done in a flash.
Next the chef hit the grill station, John and Paul. The clock read elevenforty, and the chef began to move even faster than he had been. He began by sautéing oyster mushrooms for the grilled bruschetta, and Martin, the outgoing fellow, said into the microphone, “Ordering one salmon, medium well.” The microphone, necessary for the folks on pizza in the back, made any speaker’s voice sound deep and formidable; the first order of the day—coming as if from the God of the Old Testament—always surprised me. John looked at Martin, surprised, looked back at the chef, then turned back to Martin and said, “Ordering one salmon, medium well.”
“Get the pan hot with a little oil, they sear up well,” the chef was saying. “It gives them some taste.” He reached for the hotel pan containing the white mushrooms he was talking about, looked at them carefully, and said, “Someone didn’t wash these mushrooms.” Some chefs instructed students not to wash mushrooms, only to brush them off, because they absorb water, which dilutes their taste. Chef De Santis looked at John and Paul and said, “Wash mushrooms. They grow in sterilized horse manure, but I don’t want to eat it. Wash mushrooms.” These would go with the steak as would some freshly shucked peas that he popped into boiling water. He spooned tomato relish—scallions, tomato concassé, brunoise green pepper and cucumber, minced garlic, seasoned with cider vinegar, salt, and pepper, and cooked just enough to heat through—into the center of the plate, placed the beef tenderloin John had grilled onto that. “You’ve also got roasted potatoes that go with that,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of things on this plate.” He returned to the bruschetta, the oyster mushrooms having sautéed nicely by now. The chef was moving like a speeded-up movie. “Load it up with mushrooms,” he said, heaping them on top of the grilled bruschetta, which had been rubbed with garlic. “Don’t be stingy with the mushrooms.” He popped this into the
oven to heat it all through and pulled out a sizzle platter with four long wedges of roasted potato. “These got a little too roasted; don’t roast ’em so much.” The chef piped four dabs of mashed potatoes around the beef.
“Fire four beef, two medium, two medium rare,” Martin intoned into the microphone.
John, startled again—priority was unclear; was this classroom or restaurant? —looked at Martin, looked back at the chef, appeared to consider not saying anything, then thought again, said, “Firing four beef, two medium, two medium rare.” He turned to put them on the grill and the chef, with an adrenaline glare, said, “Hey! I need you here.”
“I was just going to put them on the grill.”
“Just put them in the dry rub for now.”
John did and turned back just as the chef placed the point of a wedge of potato into the dollop of mashed potato saying, “This is your anchor,” and leaned it onto the beef. He sauced the plate with fond de veau, and moved on to the grilled salmon, served with roasted beets and smokey black-eyed peas along with the two vegetable coulis.
The Making of a Chef Page 28