Russ said, “Hey, Mike, ya got my tongs?”
I had completely forgotten Russ’s tongs, which he’d parted with so cheerfully during family meal. I said no, I had no idea where his tongs were. This annoyed Russ—he needed them for service, which was beginning now, and had to leave his station to look for them. I left mine, too, running off to the dishwashers to see if they were there, running back to the grill station to see if Russ had found them. “Sorry, Russ,” I said. He looked like he wanted to grab me by the neck and shake me. I was about to run back to look for Manning, who did in fact have them and who eventually got them back to Russ, but I heard the chef, in that first-order Old Testament voice, say, “Ordering: two beef, one medium, one medium rare.” This stunned me; I froze. Paul said, “Ordering two beef, one medium, one medium rare.” Then to Martin, the departing fellow, “Do we have any more beef yet?” We had only two filets at this point. Martin nodded. Tenderloins had just come in and he was on his way to portion it.
“Ordering one beef medium well.”
“Ordering one beef medium well,” I said.
“Ordering, firing, and picking up one sausage ap,” the chef said, reading from tickets that rolled out of a small box in front of him.
“ORDERING, FIRING, AND PICKING UP ONE SAUSAGE AP!” David Sellers shouted from the very back of the kitchen with marine volume that must have been audible in the dining room.
The chef smiled broadly to Dan, chuckled, and said, “I luv it.”
Soon orders began to fly and pickups were called. The chef said, “Where’s that bruschetta?”
I hadn’t even heard it ordered. Paul, popping a sizzler with a bruschetta heaped with oyster mushrooms into the oven, said, “Coming right up, Chef.”
“I need that bruschetta,” the chef said, called another order, then said, “Where’s that bruschetta?! I need it now!” He looked at another ticket. “Fire two beef, one medium, one medium rare.”
“Firing two beef, one medium, one medium rare,” I said, and popped two freshly butchered filets onto the grill.
Service had started and I had begun to cook. Almost before I knew it, I had four steaks and two salmon fillets grilling and one steak holding on the rack above the stove waiting for pickup; Paul was sautéing mushrooms, cooking peas, bringing his knife down on a large bruschetta piled two inches high with sautéed oyster mushrooms, plating the food and explaining it to me as he did when pickup was called so I could help plate. After about twenty minutes, entrées began to pour in. Paul stopped for one instant while mushrooms cooked to say, “This is when it’s fun. You are in it.”
I felt it, too. If we’d both been wearing helmets, I would have grunted and cracked heads with him. You needed that energy—it helped you focus; you forgot about the heat and were unaware of time. I would at various moments have on my grill five tenderloins, and one or two salmons, which had gone on at intervals and required different internal temperatures. I relied on touch and sight to judge doneness.
I made one mistake early. “Michael,” the chef said after I’d moved the first order of salmon to the front. “Put the salmon on the grill service-side down. That way when you plate it, you don’t have the fat side up.” The fat had turned gray and ran in a strip across the bright orange-pink flesh. He smiled, teeth gritted, nodding.
“Ordering one pork, firing one pork,” the chef called. “That’s three pork all day. Firing one chicken, firing one linguine, order, fire, pick up two orzos. Michael, what’s the status on that beef well?”
I spun to the grill, poked a fat fillet. My finger went deep—still very rare—and I said, “Five minutes.” Where I came up with that number, I have no idea.
The chef said, “Cut it in half.”
“Cut it in half,” I repeated, then to Paul I said, “Cut it in half?”
Paul took the fillet off the grill and, on a sizzler, he butterflied it with his chef’s knife, and slapped it back on the grill. I wasn’t sure I’d want my fillet cut in half, but in a couple of minutes it was well done and, remarkably, once it was folded back together, the incision was unnoticeable. Perhaps the chef figured anyone who ordered steak well done wouldn’t care or notice. When he wanted something now, he wanted it NOW! This also was a mistake on my part; I must not have put the beef on when “Fire” was called. Two mistakes. With Russ’s lost tongs, three mistakes.
The chef would ask where waiters were when the food was out, sometimes nicely. Waiters streamed through on the right, picking up plates, hefting large circular trays above their shoulders, and striding out through a door on the right.
Dan would watch the chef expedite—still learning—and wipe plates as they slid up the service line.
Paul ran out of peas. “Chef,” he said, “can we get some julienned pea pods?”
The chef said, “Yeah,” then into the microphone, “Mimi and Manning, up front please.” Mimi and Manning julienned like crazy and had two bain-maries filled in about a minute and a half.
“Teamwork,” Paul said. “That’s what it’s all about.” He was euphoric in the midst of all this heat and activity, adrenaline drumming in his head and limbs. “This is a great group. This is such a great group.” It was like he was on truth serum.
The grill station was doing a lot of business, as usual. When there was a pause in the action, Paul said, “Leaving the station,” and hustled to the drinking fountain, returned, and in a moment was back in the groove. He looked down at the instant-read thermometer in his pocket and said, “My thermometer reads a hundred twenty-four degrees.” This seemed about right to me. It was hot.
“I need a large gnocchi,” the chef said to the pasta station. “I also need a small gnocchi.”
“Coming right up, Chef,” Geoff said.
The chef checked with Dan to make sure table twenty-seven had in fact placed its order—it never occurred to me that I was standing still watching him do this—and then into the microphone, to my surprise, said, “All right. Everybody else. Break down your station.”
Paul put both hands high in the air to me and said, “Yes!” I put mine up; he smacked them, delivering a good sting. Paul was having a blast.
After cleanup before we were dismissed, Dan the fellow called us to the front before dismissing us and asked if we wanted to hear the numbers. Numbers of each item were averaged daily by computer to give us the “mix percentage,” what percent of customers ordered each item. If we were told to prep for a hundred covers, and the salmon mix percentage was 9 percent, you’d prep your station for twelve salmon, expecting to get nine orders. The method worked well, though there were occasional aberrations.
Dan read: “We projected eleven portobella, we sold six. Orzo, we projected six, sold three. Red leaf, projected eleven, sold thirteen. Bruschetta, projected six, sold six. Salmon, projected fourteen, sold thirteen. Beef, projected nine, sold eighteen.” And on he went through each item.
“You don’t learn to cook here,” Chef De Santis said. We were sitting after service in his shared office, which was all but consumed by the two desks, two chairs, and file cabinets. “What you learn here is the two desks, two chairs, and file cabinets. “What you learn here is the mechanics.”
He hadn’t learned to cook here, he said, though he’d graduated in 1980, and he hadn’t learned to cook in the marines before that. That’s not where or how you learn “real cooking,” he said.
I asked him what “real cooking” was.
“Real cooking,” he said, “is all the stuff you can’t explain. It’s looking, it’s touching, it’s tasting.”
De Santis said he didn’t start learning to cook till he landed at the Grand Hotel Continental in Munich, Germany, shortly after graduating from the Culinary, and after that at a small restaurant in Bamberg, Germany, called Michel’s Kueche Restaurant.
“The restaurant was sixty seats,” he said. “The kitchen was no bigger than this room, and from Tuesday through Saturday he’d turn those tables twice.” There was a single waiter. “He never walked f
ast,” De Santis said. Apparently, Chef Michel and De Santis just cooked like mad all night and the waiter would pick up whatever happened to be ready and bring it to the person who ordered it, regardless of whether the rest of the table had their meal; it was possible that one person at the table would have already finished.
When Michelin employees came to evaluate the restaurant, Chef Michel kicked them out, according to De Santis.
“He cared about freshness,” De Santis continued, “and doneness, and seasonality. He showed me local seasonality. He showed me how to work fast and hard under bad conditions. In that tiny little restaurant. Under fire.”
The best chefs I met at the CIA all had at least one such chef in their career.
This work takes its toll. I would have put Chef De Santis, the soul of health and vigor, at about the age of fifty-four, but he was actually thirty-nine years old, with a wife he met in Germany and two preadolescent children. I didn’t know what it was, this aged quality about chefs. Maybe it was me; as a student I unconsciously put a generation between us to make him a parent-mentor-teacher figure. But this could not be so because Chef Pardus still seemed like a graduate student to me, and he was only two years younger than De Santis. Perhaps it was all professional mien and military rigor and the fact that he’d been a teacher here for a decade.
Chef Hanyzeski, the P.M. St. Andrew’s chef, talked about cooking as if it were professional football; he was striving for advanced academic degrees because few could spend their entire life cooking. “You can only take so many hits,” he told his students.
But there was also something visual, something in the texture of the chefs’ skin that gave them this visual appearance of age. I could think of one possible reason for this, and it was especially clear to me after my maiden voyage on grill station.
All that work over grills, fire, hot metal, boiling water, heads in the oven, day after day, year after year. They literally cooked themselves. They were medium well before everyone else was even rare. And madmen to boot, touched by the moon. Cooks worked fifty- to eighty-hour weeks moving like they were in a time-lapse film. It seemed completely possible that aging might have less to do with chronological time than with how much living and working you did in your life. Cooks got more done than most people by working faster longer. Cooks put in more hours of life in less time and therefore got older faster than most people. This solution for the question of age, combined with the physical fact that they baked their flesh daily in 120-degree heat, gradually caramelizing it, made sense to me.
Taste
The following day, our Day Five in the kitchen, Day Twelve of the block, would be our tasting day. Each station would cook and plate two of every item they were responsible for, have it on the service line by ten, not a second later, and we were to taste the entire menu. Chef De Santis mentioned it straight away, after we’d gathered in the downstairs classroom, in his morning lecture.
“A reminder once again,” he said, “class tasting today. That means the food’s on the plate ready to eat at ten o’clock, not thinking about getting on the plate. Then we’ll take ten minutes, thereabouts, get a good taste of these things, break down, set up, get family meal rolling. Then we go eat some more.” He smiled. “This is a great life!” He nodded. “Let me tell you, this is a good living.
“O.K., plan for seventy-five again,” he continued. “While you’re planning Thursday, Friday, you need to plan Monday. Monday I have to have everything I need for the sixty-five customers coming in. That means when you walk out of here on Friday, Monday’s got to be ready to go.” A new class was in first thing next week, so this preparation was essential for a restaurant whose staff changed every seven days. “They basically have to heat it, plate it, Monday. You really have to keep me prepped out on Monday. Busy, busy day for Day One.
“When you leave your station, do not leave any notes on your trays. And when you walk into Caterina”—the next restaurant of restaurant row, Caterina de Medici, Italian cuisine—“you’re gonna have a lot of little notes all over everything. My advice: be very cautious of all the cute little notes they leave on the mise en place trays. You don’t know who was writing them. Here, we don’t leave little notes. When I came to St. Andrew’s, we got rid of those notes real fast.”
He stepped back to the desk, looked down at it, then looked up and stepped forward.
“I’d like to talk today about food,” he said. “That’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? I want to begin with fond de veau lié. We finally got a finished product yesterday. This is about a three-day affair.”
Once every seven days, Chef De Santis talked about St. Andrew’s food and the St. Andrew’s philosophy, but he would begin with what was evidently one of his favorite substances on earth: brown veal stock. I hardly need to explain, then, my affection for the man. If there were any doubts about the sort of cook he was, he put them to rest in his analysis and explanation of the recipe, on page 182 of Techniques of Healthy Cooking, for fond de veau lié, the ultimate brown veal stock.
The idea was simple: take really good brown veal stock, with a rich flavor, deep clear color, sturdy body, and make it better. The recipe was clear and simple, too; you could say that it was a standard recipe for brown stock, only you didn’t use water, you used that really good brown veal stock instead. Chef De Santis, though, was like an Oxford don, deconstructing a classic text from the Western canon, and bringing it to life for the students with the zeal of a hard-boiled preacherman.
Step one from the recipe book: “Sauté the onions, carrots, leeks, and celery in hot oil until the onions and carrots are well browned.”
Chef De Santis: “That very first step, sauté the onions in hot oil?” He paused, glanced around the room. “My suggestion to you is to do that slowly. My suggestion to you is to put it into a roasting pan, and put it into an oven at three-hundred-twenty-five degrees, and put in that very moist vegetable: the celery. When it starts to get color, add carrots, and cook them out. As the carrots start to get color,” his voice rising to a crescendo, “add the onions! And let all that brown up nicely, and then add the tomato paste! If we take our time, we’re going to get even browning.” He paused, nodding, his fixed smile not a smile. Then he shouted, “What’s the purpose of this mirepoix preparation?!”
A soft voice from the back of the room called out, “Color and flavor?”
“Color is primary,” Professor De Santis said. “Flavor is secondary. We’ve got a ton of veal bones going into veal stock. Veal bones, roasted. Do not make them real brown. Roast them till they have a great roasted aroma. If they start getting too roasted, with a natural reduction you’ll have a bitterness in flavor that you certainly don’t want. So,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “there’s a lot going on here and we didn’t even get past the first step.”
Fond de veau, he repeated, was a natural reduction, a contemporary sauce. “What are some other contemporary sauces?” he asked.
Slowly then gathering, we called out, “jus” and “beurre blanc” and “coulis” and “salsas” and “chutney” and “broth.”
“Broths!” De Santis shouted, rising to his toes. “Beautiful, a whole category, considered a contemporary sauce. Vinaigrettes, that’s a whole other category. You’re seeing them on grilled items, you see those citrus vinaigrettes on grilled this and that. How about juices? Vegetable juices? You’ve got those really neat juicers, you push it in, it comes out the bottom. Instant sauce.” In his evil whisper. “Luv that.”
De Santis returned to the fond de veau and its two main stages. “The first stage would be fortification,” he said, volume again rising to theatrical levels. “Strengthen, right? POWER! FORTE! STRONG!” And then he whispered, “We’re gonna fortify this already good brown veal stock. We’re gonna take bones and aromatics and wine and mirepoix, and BOOST that flavor, fortify that flavor. Now when you hear the words ‘good brown veal stock,’ certain things come to mind.”
He paused as we called them out: color, flavor, body,
aroma.
“Those are four key characteristics, that’s when we say good brown veal stock, we say, yeah, those things make sense,” De Santis said. “But the cook did something very fundamental to get all of those things happening. What did that cook do properly to make all of those good things happen?”
“Brown the bones right?” someone asked.
“Yes, brown the bones,” Chef De Santis agreed, but this was not what he was after.
“Simmered properly for the right time?”
“Yeah, O.K.,” he conceded.
“Skimming?”
“O.K., yes, slow simmer, that’s very important, take all the impurities off. What else, something extremely, VERY valuable did that cook do?”
“Good pincage?
“Yes.”
“Color?”
“Keep going.”
Everyone was stumped. No one could come up with it. At last, Russ, way in the back in a tentative soft voice, said, “The correct amount of mirepoix to bones to water.”
“YEAH!” the chef shouted, all but launching me from my seat. “You GOT that?! That cook MEA-SURED! Counted. We got a certain amount of bones here, we need a certain amount of water, here. And everything is beautiful, whether it’s brown or white stock. Everything works beautifully then. You,” dipping into his Jack Nicholson whisper, “have to mea-sure.
“So now we’ve got that good veal stock and we fortify it. Second stage, two things happen, one is reduction, and at the same time, clarification.” He described how one pulled the pot off the center of the burner so that only half the pot bubbled. “The beauty of this is that your impurities will collect on the cooler side of the pot, and you keep skimming it off. That’s how that clarification takes place. It happens naturally. So you’ve got these two things happening naturally to give it that very beautiful clear finish.
“Now, how do we know it’s reduced far enough. How do we know when it’s time to stop?”
Russ falls back on measure again, it had worked so well before. The chef said don’t do that. Another said put some on a plate? He looked around the room. No one knows?
The Making of a Chef Page 30