by Dan Charnas
The profound counsel infusing these instructions boils down to presence. “The tenzo must be present,” Dogen writes, “paying careful attention to the rice and soup while they are cooking. This is true whether the tenzo does the work by himself or has assistants helping him.” Dogen urges a presence as much mental as physical, a presence manifested through awareness (“Keep your eyes open”); in communication, as when he advises the tenzo to seek input from the five other high-office holders about meals; and by acceptance: Dogen writes at length about the tenzo’s responsibility to work humbly with the ingredients at hand.
Presence manifests for the tenzo as focus and commitment, turning work into a form of meditation. When sitting, just sit. When cooking, just cook. Care for nothing but the work when you work. “My sincerest desire,” Dogen writes, “is that you exhaust all the strength and the effort of your lives . . . and every moment of every day into your practice.” Dogen saw this form of complete immersion as a connection with the Divine: “To view all things with this attitude is called Joyful mind”—a curious juxtaposition of exhaustion with joy that resonates with modern chefs and cooks.
In the end, Dogen saw the tireless work of the tenzo as a gateway to personal growth. In serving others with magnanimity, joy, and with the care of a parent, he counseled, you are working to better your self. To Dogen, service wasn’t soft or self-effacing. On the contrary, Dogen advised his tenzo to compete with his masters. “If great teachers in the past were able to make a plain soup from greens for only a pittance, we must try to make a fine soup for the same amount. There is no reason why we cannot [surpass] the ancient masters. We must aspire to the highest of ideals without becoming arrogant in our manner.” Dogen’s kitchen was a laboratory of self-improvement, and the tenzo a dogged pursuer of both worldly and spiritual excellence.
Halfway around the world, in the royal courts of Europe, the cook was more slave than servant. He didn’t sit at the right hand of his king, but toiled in obscurity in a sooty cellar. When cooks created a dish or a sauce that found favor and fame—like sauce Béarnaise or sauce Béchamel or soufflé Rothschild—often their invention took the name or title of the cook’s patron, not the cook himself.
Then two events transformed the life of the European cook.
The first, around the time of the French Revolution, was the emergence of the restaurant—a business serving an emerging middle class where cooks served on-demand fare (or à la carte, meaning “from a menu”) determined by the conversation between cook and customer, not the whims of monarchs or aristocrats.
The second began in 1859 when a 13-year-old boy named Georges Auguste Escoffier started working in his uncle’s restaurant in Nice. By the time he died at age 88 in 1935, Escoffier had secured the global dominance of French cuisine and elevated the work of the cook to something honorable, if not quite holy.
The young Escoffier wanted to be a sculptor. Dragooned into the kitchen, suffering alongside his fellow cooks under his uncle’s physical and verbal abuse, Escoffier kept a positive attitude. “Even though I wouldn’t have chosen it,” he wrote, “since I am here, let me do my best to improve the standing of my profession.”
Escoffier moved to Paris in 1865 and found employ at Le Petit Moulin Rouge, a supper club that catered to the rich and the royal of Europe, whose obsession with French cuisine mounted even as the French empire waned. He worked his way through the various jobs, or “stations,” while keeping the soul of an artist. He found joy in creating new dishes and custom menus at the behest of his celebrity clientele.
When German soldiers invaded France in July 1870, Escoffier became the head cook for the second division of the French Rhine Army, which by the end of summer was encircled by German troops in the border city of Metz. Escoffier’s kitchen-bred penchant for planning sustained him, as he had stockpiled ingredients and animals to feed the officers and troops. For almost 2 months the French army and civilians were besieged and cut off from supplies. Things got bad when the cavalry started eating their horses. On October 25 Escoffier ran out of food. Three days later the French surrendered Metz, and he was taken prisoner.
After France’s defeat, Escoffier was released, but his time in the military seemed to have organized his thinking. When Escoffier began to run kitchens on his own, he transformed the structure of his stations and his crew into a more rigid hierarchy. Escoffier’s brigade de cuisine now gives modern kitchens around the world a common workflow: The chief of the kitchen, or chef de cuisine, at the top; the underbosses, or sous-chefs, beneath him; the chefs de partie who run the various stations of the kitchen, regimented into distinct areas of responsibility including garde-manger (pantry or cold food), sauté (cooking on the range), saucier (sauces), patissier (dessert), rôtisseur or grillardin (roast or grill), poissonnier (fish), and friturier (fryer). The brigade is assisted by the aboyeur (expediter) and the plongeur (dishwasher), and a myriad of other positions. At the climax of the industrial age, the brigade system became a replicable culinary assembly line.
In 1903, Escoffier published Le Guide Culinaire, an exhaustive 900-page masterwork that simplified, modernized, and codified the grand tradition handed down from predecessors like Marie-Antoine Carême, establishing common language and procedures that solidified French cuisine as a global standard. These culinary and organizational standards took hold in the British Empire and America in part because Escoffier brought à la carte–style dining to the first generation of modern cosmopolitan hotels—the Savoy and the Carlton in London, the Ritz in Paris, then the Pierre in New York City—and on luxury ocean liners that linked America and Europe. Meanwhile, he kept a tenzo-like disposition of service to both the rich and poor alike, supporting London’s Little Sisters of the Poor, an early version of contemporary food donation programs, reducing waste for his enterprise in the process.
As a result of these two Western, largely French, innovations—the restaurant and Escoffier’s guidelines and systems—the work of a chef became regimented across borders and language gaps. Fine kitchens in New York and Paris worked in much the same way as those in Moscow or Mumbai. These particular planning and organizational behaviors became common knowledge for culinarians, a set of principles that chefs taught their cooks, principles that those cooks would in turn teach to their apprentices. The chef became a contemporary Dogen, a unique if imperfect teacher of not only cooking skills but life skills.
A MASTER AT WORK
Thursday nights are hectic at Esca, a restaurant just a few blocks from Times Square in Manhattan. From 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., patrons pack the dining room for a quick meal in an elegant setting before they dash off to make their eight o’clock curtain times at the Broadway shows nearby. The waiters keep the customers relaxed by demonstrably worrying for them: acknowledging their departure time, advising them against dishes that might take too long to prepare, keeping service snappy, and delivering the check on top of coffee and dessert.
The New York City restaurant business calls this the pre-theater rush. But the chef, Dave Pasternack, moves slowly.
Everything about Pasternack runs counter to what you’d expect. Balding and burly, he’s built like a bodyguard and talks like a cabbie; yet he is one of the most esteemed chefs in the city, regarded as a seafood expert on a par with the likes of Eric Ripert of the four-star Le Bernardin. Pasternack rolls between Esca, the restaurant he co-owns with Mario Batali, and his soon-to-open second restaurant in Chelsea, dressed like a fishmonger in sweatshirt and jeans.
After he changes into his chef’s whites and scrubs his hands, Pasternack stands at his workstation in the kitchen, artfully arranging with his pudgy fingers small slices of crudo—tender, fresh, raw fish—on frosted plates to be carried to diners who are paying $10 for each tiny mouthful. After plating, he seals the containers of fish and returns them to the “lowboy” refrigerators beneath his station. He takes a white towel and wipes his cutting board clean.
The small printer on the shelf above Pasternack’s workstation clacks
and spits out curls of white paper. With each order that comes in, the chef repeats a process. First he calls for bruschetta: a tiny amuse-bouche (a “pre-appetizer,” so to speak) of toasted bread, tomato, olive oil, and herbs to be sent to customers immediately. Actually, he doesn’t call for bruschetta. He just says “Ordering!” followed by a number (“Two!” or “Four!”), and the crew at the appetizer station replies “Yes, Chef!” and produces exactly that number of bruschetta plates to be ferried into the dining room by the restaurant’s food “runners.” Then he shouts to his cooks over the whir of the air vents as he reads the printed ticket: “Order linguine! Order chicken! Order rombo!” The cooks at the pasta and grill and sauté stations call back in turn, “Yes, Chef!”
An order comes for crudo—the first of many, as crudo is the specialty of the house and Pasternack was the first person in America to serve what’s basically an Italian version of sashimi. The chef reaches with his right hand into the refrigerator beneath him to bring up plates. If the plates aren’t cold enough, he kvetches in Long Island–accented French to the Spanish-speaking dishwashers: “C’est chaud! Il faut froid!” They’re hot. They’re supposed to be freezing. He opens the door of another “lowboy,” reaches in, and grabs clear plastic bins of presliced fish. He plates the slices so they all face the same way. Pasternack reaches with his left hand into one of a dozen small containers of garnish. He pinches out pistachios, or crushed almonds, or one of an array of gourmet salts—salt with seaweed, red salt from Hawaii, gaspé salt, sel gris, fleur de sel. Chef has a similar number of options for gourmet olive oil, any one of which he drizzles on the fish before it’s whisked out to the diners. Back go the bins into the refrigerator, out comes the chef’s white towel. He regards his cutting board as he wipes it clean.
Across from Pasternack, sous-chef Greg Barr works his station. He handles dozens of dishes that will go out to tables across the dining room, and his movements are swift but smooth. “It’s a very Zen-like thing for me,” Barr says. “You’re so in the moment that you don’t have stuff from the past. I don’t have something from two o’clock here. I don’t have something from this morning here. Everything has been cleaned down, all my knives are clean, clean cutting board, clear space to work, clear mind.”
Barr and his fellow cooks are quick, clean, and good. But their plates must pass by Pasternack before they get carried to the customers. The chef will sometimes hustle them: “Got my potatoes? C’mon, guys, please.” Or he’ll make a slight correction: “Don’t make your linguine so dry, please! C’mon, dude.” His eyes scan the order tickets on the rack in front of him, timing them, deciding when to trigger each table’s next course. The clock above Pasternack’s station runs 15 minutes fast. All the clocks in his kitchen are set 15 minutes fast. Pasternack is never late. At least not in the kitchen, he isn’t.
Now Chef Pasternack leaves the kitchen. He walks into the dining room and sits at a table with guests, today some friends and family. He does this often. Pasternack puts hospitality on a par with cooking.
Minutes go by. The printer chatters out a few orders. Then some more. The paper curls and spills out onto Pasternack’s empty station. Click clack click clack . . .
Tonight two people scrutinize Pasternack’s every move. The first is sous-chef Brian Plant, who is “trailing” this evening—meaning he’s watching how Pasternack works so he can take over when the chef begins spending more time at his new restaurant. The second is yours truly, mushed against a wall between Plant and a trash can, wondering why Plant is just standing there while the printer spits out its white spool of new orders. In fact, no one steps in to “expedite”; that is, to call out these incoming orders for the cooks at the various stations and set the pace of service. Nothing happens at all while the chef is outside the kitchen. After what seems like an eternity I turn to Plant and ask why.
“It doesn’t matter how busy it is, it’s his space,” Plant says. “His place. His space. His pace.”
“What about the new orders?” I ask. What about the stuff that needs to be “fired”; that is, finished and collected from the various stations to go out to the diners?
“He knows,” Plant says. He knows what’s in here and out there. He’ll come back in when he’s ready. His place. His space. His pace.
What I saw in that moment wasn’t so much a lull in service as it was a kind of peace, a pause in time and space. This calm—seemingly willed by the mastery of the chef—comes from focus, one of the unsung wages of chefdom. A chef plans, and thus a chef gets to decide what happens and when.
A few minutes later Chef Pasternack returns, without haste, and is soon calling for bruschetta, reading orders, and plating his famous crudo. Everyone eats, everyone leaves on time, everyone is happy.
TO TRAIL A CHEF
Chef means “boss.”
In French, “chef” is the equivalent of the English word chief. A Parisian software engineer is just as likely to utter the words “Oui, Chef”—Yes, boss!—as is a Parisian cook. In English, the term chef became aligned with the culinary world as a shortened form of the French title chef de cuisine, chief of the kitchen. So many of our conceptions and language around food come from the French, including the term restaurant, which also has an interesting literal meaning: place of restoration, so named for the restorative soups (restaurants) that several of these early establishments sold. The restaurateur is someone who restores people, nourishes them. The chef makes that restoration possible.
A chef is a boss. A restaurateur restores us. A chef is a boss who helps restore us. There’s an English word that approximates that meaning—the boss who helps to restore us. The word is mentor.
In almost every profession one can find great mentors. Several professions keep the master-apprentice relationship at their core—medical doctors are supposed to be teachers, as are plumbers. But apprenticeship is baked into the culinary world. The chef-apprentice gives the chef her toil in return for knowledge and experience. Moreover, the tight economy of the kitchen and the complexity of kitchen work mean that good chefs must take the betterment of their charges very seriously. As we’ve seen, only half of that education is about cooking; the other half is about things like organization, movement, planning, dependability, communication—in other words, mise-en-place.
As a result, no professional in the modern world is more effective or experienced or responsible for teaching organization than a chef.
The chef has been teaching his charges for years; now the chef can teach us. Before the advent of the contemporary culinary school, the only way to get these particular skills was to work in a kitchen, whether that meant starting at the bottom as a dishwasher or, for the more experienced cook, “trailing” a chef—as Brian Plant trailed Chef David Pasternack.
What we are about to do is embark on a different kind of “trail,” not to learn how to cook, but to learn how to work, and work clean—consciously and efficiently—by exploring the system of mise-en-place and by practicing those behaviors in the world outside the kitchen, a world which sorely needs those values.
CHAOS
How we work without mise-en-place
Jeremy* checked the wall clock as soon as he pushed through the glass office doors. 9:30 a.m. Right on time!
This was no small victory. Jeremy didn’t hear his alarm when it rang at 7:00 a.m. because he had turned his cell phone ringer down the night before. His wife roused him an hour later. Cursing, he showered, grabbed clothes out of the dryer, kissed his wife and 9-year-old son, Adam, and dashed out without breakfast. His wife reminded him that it was his turn to take Adam to his soccer game tonight.
“Yep,” Jeremy said. “Be home by six.”
Since being recruited 7 months ago to run creative services for the tech division of a big financial firm, Jeremy had neglected his family to focus on his work. This was his first big corporate gig, his first time managing a significant workload, and he didn’t want to mess up. The previous night he had worked late going over résumés f
or a new hire and reviewing his team’s marketing ideas in advance of today’s big brainstorming meeting.
The list on his “to-do” software had grown so long that consulting it had become more confusing than helpful. And since Jeremy had no time to make a quick task list this morning, on the white-knuckle drive to work he made a mental note of the most important things he needed to accomplish.
■Finish the slides for his boss Stephen’s new client presentation so he’d have it by end of day.
■Pick photos for the new Web site and send to the designer.
■Hire the Web site copywriter and call her with instructions.
Jeremy had to complete the Web site on a tight turnaround, and he was already behind. So many things had taken longer than he thought they would, because on this job he had so many more things to manage. But the site had to launch next week or they’d lose customers.
Jeremy figured he’d have just enough time before the staff meeting at 10 a.m. to review the slideshow and send it to the printer. After lunch, he’d pounce on the Web site photos, call the new copywriter, and then maybe have some time to finally clean his desk. But as he pulled into the parking lot, he remembered: He hadn’t done the evaluation forms due to HR today. He’d need an hour or two to complete those forms. Cleaning would have to wait.
His desk had always been a problem in his previous jobs and in college. Now it had become an embarrassment. He was a new employee working in an open office, and everyone could see it. He had people working for him whose desks were spotless. Jeremy comforted himself with the conviction that he had less time to be tidy because he had so much more responsibility. As he hustled toward his cubicle, he could see his inbox overflowing with memos, padded envelopes, magazines, and packages.
He pulled out his chair and saw a piece of paper. Great! Michelle—the assistant whom he shared with John, his marketing counterpart—had gotten him price quotes for the Web site. He put the paper on his desk atop several other papers, tapped his computer keyboard, and was greeted by a flood of new e-mails—three dozen since last night, many of them résumés from people responding to his job posting. He sorted through them.