Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  As Henderson cultivated the cleaning reflex, she noted the more subtle changes that Dufresne knew she would. You cook the way you look. The cleaner her station, the faster she worked. The cleaner her station, the better her product. Her attention to detail deepened. The aesthetics of a clean station pleased her. She liked folding her side towel and replacing it at the top of her cutting board. She liked the look of the spotless counter. She strove to make it through an entire service without a spot on her apron, to look just like her fellow cooks. It made her feel better about her food, about herself. Plus, she stopped getting blasted by Wylie and Mike. They could teach her things now that she didn’t have to figure out what to do with her body and her space. She learned to taste, to deconstruct recipes, to make them, becoming part of wd-50’s engine of innovation. Dufresne now asked her to teach the things she knew to the new stagiaires. Make a mess, clean it now, move on.

  After 3 years, when Dufresne figured Henderson had learned all she could at wd-50, he sent her off to stage elsewhere. She cooked for a while at Mugaritz outside San Sebastian in Spain, and then in some renowned restaurants in Chicago. But in 2011, when Dufresne needed a sous-chef, he called Sam.

  For 2 years Henderson was Dufresne’s right hand in the kitchen, until he opened a second restaurant, Alder, that needed his attention. That’s when he promoted Sam Henderson to chef de cuisine. In the New York Times, he dubbed Henderson a kitchen ninja.

  “Super strong,” he called her.

  She needed to be: The beet-bloodied stagiaire would now be running his kitchen.

  WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW

  Chefs work clean

  For the chef, the first stage of mise-en-place is readiness—make your plan, gather your resources, arrange your space.

  Then you cook.

  What happens in these next moments is the second stage and true test of mise-en-place. Do the objects you’ve so carefully arranged go back to their rightful places, or does the station you’ve set become chaotic?

  Even the most refined systems become useless unless maintained. It is not enough to find a “right place” for everything. Cooks can’t use a static system; the system must move. So the real work of mise-en-place isn’t being clean, but working clean: keeping that system of organization no matter how fast and furious the work is.

  For chefs, cleaning as you go is a commitment to keeping order through disorder.

  Chefs clean everything

  The cutting board is the holy of holies, with its own articles of faith. Chefs believe nothing but food should ever touch the cutting board—not plates, not pots, not pans, nothing that can contaminate the board or spread a mess elsewhere. (Many Japanese cooks consider the cutting board sacred; when Bobby Flay jumped atop his board during a televised battle in 2000, his competitor Masaharu Morimoto retorted that Flay was “not a chef.”) Cooks constantly wipe the board with a moist towel; some chefs use a mild bleach or vinegar solution to avoid cross-contamination—for example, when salmonella bacteria in the juices of a chicken breast come into contact with raw vegetables.

  Chefs extend this meticulousness from the cutting board to the objects around it. Michael Ruhlman devotes a section of his fond monograph of Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in The Soul of a Chef to the cooks’ practice of wiping down bottles of cooking oil. Why, Ruhlman intimated, be this fanatical? Keller answered: Oil from the outside of the bottles transferred to fingers that then transferred to nice clean plates, making them not so nice and clean. The longer a cook waited to clean the bottles, the harder it would be to get them back to their original state.

  Chefs clear their minds by clearing their space

  The kind of cleaning that great chefs and cooks do transcends hygienic or aesthetic concerns. When a cook falls behind in her work—“in the weeds” or dans la merde (French for “in the shit”)—the first thing that her chef will look for is the cleanliness of her station. Often the chef will find a cutting board littered with food scraps and juices, dirty tools lying around, garbage everywhere. Messy station equals messy mind, chefs say. Clean station equals clean mind. In the kitchen, chefs train their cooks to wipe down their stations at the first sign of confusion or panic.

  When chefs and cooks talk about cleaning, the conversation often shifts to cleaning’s psychological and spiritual merits. Dwayne LiPuma teaches these benefits to his young students with an analogy that hits home.

  “Say you have a roommate,” LiPuma begins, “and your roommate’s a pig, really sloppy, unorganized, all over the place. . . . Tell me, how are you gonna feel knowing that the sink’s full of stuff, there are clothes all over the place? You start to build this anxiety, your mind starts to get cluttered, you start to get a little flustered. But you won’t pick it up because it’s not yours, because it’s not your job, right? But you get so frustrated that one day when your roommate is at work, you clean the whole house. Now it’s the way you want it. You sit in that chair, how’s your mind? How do you feel? You’re decompressed! You feel better.”

  LiPuma takes his students back to the kitchen: “Now you’re trying to cut something and you’re working around a box. You’re working around dirt. All this stuff and your mind starts to close down. You start to feel closed in. You get claustrophobic. But if I can keep my station open and clean, my mind stays open and clean. I breathe beautifully, and I just cook fantastic.”

  It’s no mistake that LiPuma cites the breath as a reason for cleaning. The breath powers athletes and artists. It underlies the great spiritual and holistic traditions of the East, like martial arts, yoga, and tai chi. In some traditions, connecting with the breath is not only healing and centering, but the highest aim of life itself.

  What many chefs seem to be aiming for, then, is not cleaning for the sake of cleanliness, but rather cleaning as a spiritual practice. Chefs see a direct correlation not only between the condition of one’s station and one’s mind, but also between the tolerance of dirt and the tolerance of distractions, and between the disposition of oneself to cleaning and to responsibility in general. Thus the idea of “working clean” is not only personal but collective. Our roommate’s mess becomes our mess. Our mess becomes our coworker’s mess. This collective responsibility is why our best kitchens often look and feel cleaner than our best hospitals. The chefs themselves—the “doctors” of the kitchen—do the cleaning.

  This holistic view of cleaning—that it should be integrated into every moment of a chef’s work, and that cooks clean not just for one but for all—creates the foundation for excellence in the professional kitchen.

  OUT OF THE KITCHEN

  No chef works clean primarily for the spiritual benefits. He works clean because unclean food can kill people.

  The chef’s fastidiousness may seem foreign to those of us who work in offices because we aren’t forced to clean. And many chefs don’t clean when they’re not forced to, either. Wylie Dufresne’s kitchen was among the most pristine I had seen. But Dufresne didn’t apply mise-en-place to his other workspace, his office—not only because his considerable willpower was tied up in maintaining the kitchen, but also because the physical imperative to clean his office simply wasn’t there. No one will die because our desks are messy. But we, the deskbound, miss the huge mental and spiritual benefits of working clean in our spaces and systems.

  Remember our friend Jeremy? (See “Chaos: How We Work without Mise-en-Place”.) So many of his problems during his dark day in the office could be solved by this one behavior, cleaning as you go. Jeremy fixates so much on drilling the work out that he doesn’t take care of his own physical, virtual, psychological, and physiological territory, the places from which all that work arises. He’s never conceived of working clean. Why take the time for something so frivolous when each minute spent tidying is a minute of good work lost?

  But when Jeremy “works dirty,” he loses time: 2 minutes looking for his notebook, 15 minutes finding that sheet of price quotes, 20 minutes solving someone else’s computer proble
m, 10 minutes searching for one e-mail, 5 minutes sifting through his inbox for receipts, 15 minutes walking around without thinking about where he’s going, plus all the delays and extra work he’s caused himself through carelessness, from chasing those release forms to an impending and tense meeting with Stephen, who is now troubled by Jeremy’s performance. Some brief moments taken to restore order (returning things to their proper places, putting paper in marked files) totaling no more than 10 minutes’ time could have saved him nearly 90 minutes, plus the harder-to-calculate but significant cost of the tension between him and his boss and colleagues. Working clean on a regular basis would likely take only seconds in transitions between tasks. But those seconds can make the difference between supporting and disappointing people, between success and failure.

  I recall how my desk used to look before mise-en-place, and I see piles of work left in place for weeks and sometimes months, work that I let ossify. I left those objects on my desk—papers, books, envelopes, random household items—with the best of intentions, to remind me to get them done. But these things clogged my professional arteries. They made my desk a place that I was slightly but perceptibly more reluctant to go. They also made my organization tools—my list and calendar—less effective because I knew that they weren’t comprehensive, that there were some items I deemed “too important” to go there and thus left lying about where I could see them. They made the job of cleaning more difficult because exceptions to cleaning breed ever more exceptions to cleaning. That’s the reason why the game of counting seconds and minutes spent or saved by cleaning misses the point. One simply cannot foretell the cost of chaos and mess.

  A story: I came home one day and went to throw something in the kitchen trash can while my wife was cooking dinner. My wife had placed an empty baking pan atop it. I grabbed the pan to move it and felt my flesh sizzling. I spent the next 24 hours dealing with second-degree burns on four fingers, time and pain that could have been spared if I’d had the presence to think before I grabbed the pan, or if my wife (whom I adore and who felt horrible about this) had taken the extra few seconds of process to put that hot pan in a safe place. The incident left us both feeling stressed and distracted. A few seconds of cleaning can save hours of trouble.

  In the office, working clean is a choice, not an imperative. But when we know the true benefits of cleaning as you go, our choice to do so can transform everything about our work lives.

  EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN

  COME TO ZERO

  The essence of mise-en-place is everything in its right place. But if we don’t move and use those things we’ve so carefully arranged, we can’t work. And we can’t maintain our system if we don’t cultivate the discipline to replace those things where they belong.

  In yoga, practitioners develop a habit of coming back to a neutral posture between each exercise. We’ll call this neutral state zero point. The concept of zero point can help us maintain our systems.

  In the previous chapter, you established your physical and digital workstations. You arranged them in the manner that best helps you do the work. This is your “zero point” for each of these workspaces. Now try this exercise to get you in the habit of coming back to zero point.

  For 1 day, every hour on the hour that you are at your desk, take 1 minute to reset both your physical and digital workspace, no matter what you are currently doing.

  In the physical realm, your tools (stapler, phone, pens) return to their homes; your papers slide back in your folders or file boxes, your folders go back in the files, your books back on the shelves.

  In the digital realm, zero point means closing windows, folders, or applications.

  You will, of course, have to resist the temptation to keep things out or open because you may use them again “soon.” Many times, “soon” isn’t quite soon enough, and you end up with a messy desk again.

  KITCHEN PRACTICE: CLEANING AS YOU GO

  The next time you prepare a meal, challenge yourself to do the following:

  ■As you cook, replace ingredients and tools exactly where you picked them up. Pot holders go back on the hook, not on the counter. Tongs remain near the stove, not across the kitchen by the sink. The sugar returns to the shelf right after you use it.

  ■Between cooking actions, clean whatever pots, pans, and dishes have accumulated in the sink.

  ■Every few minutes, wipe down the counter and stove, and straighten your tools and ingredients.

  Because our movements can become so unconscious in the kitchen and elsewhere, it’s effective and even fun to have a friend watch and coach our moves. We can learn how difficult it is to maintain a system, but that we can develop strong habits to do so.

  HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT

  PRACTICE PROJECT HYGIENE

  Develop a clear sense of the borderlines between individual projects and between the segments of your day by resetting the table.

  Try not to begin a new project without putting the old one away. Keeping your e-mail program open while you focus on a creative task may seem harmless. But odds are you’ll hear a chirp from the program and you’ll be tempted to check it. Closing e-mail takes a few seconds, as will reopening it. But it will likely save you time and headspace.

  On to the next transition: Let’s say you don’t finish your creative task by the time your next appointment arrives. You’ll be tempted to leave the papers on your desk or leave that document open on your computer desktop. Don’t do that. Will you lose a few seconds closing the document? Sure you will. But you stand to gain much more than that in your return to zero point: You’ll have the clear headspace that comes from a clean workspace. You won’t have that report yelling at you from your desk. You won’t risk it being buried under other projects and documents. You won’t be able to fool yourself—look at me, I’m so busy!—into thinking that work is actually being done when it isn’t. You will have to put projects away, thus encouraging yourself to schedule more discrete time to actually finish them.

  Making distinctions between discrete tasks by resetting the table creates important boundaries between individual tasks and is a great way to clean as you go.

  DEVELOP A REPERTOIRE OF CLEANING TACTICS

  We don’t wipe down our workstations like chefs do their cutting boards. But giving our desks an occasional dusting or straightening can do wonders for our state of mind and our work.

  Dusting and wiping. The difference between a clean and a dusty desk is subtle, but the subliminal effects are huge. Always have a duster and a wiping cloth in your tool kit. Buy a duster that’s easily washable in soap and water, or else buy a disposable duster system like Swiffer. You can also keep a cloth or disposable wipes at the ready.

  Kichiri, or straightening. In the Japanese culinary tradition, the apprentice, or oi-mawashi, must demonstrate proficiency in kichiri, or making things perfectly straight, with objects at parallel or right angles to each other. Kichiri means “exactly.”

  Straightening the items on your desk, especially during transition times, is like a beginner’s cleaning practice. Pile-o-maniacs and sticky note addicts, if afraid to actually put their work away, can begin their cleaning practice by simply straightening the items on their desk: You just take all that stuff and make everything neat. You create visual order out of disorder.

  New York–based designer and artist Tom Sachs practiced straightening while working in famed architect Frank Gehry’s furniture workshop. According to Sachs, a janitor named Andrew Kromelow had taken to cleaning cluttered work surfaces by spreading everything out and then arranging tools and other objects either parallel or perpendicular to each other, everything at right angles. Since Gehry was designing furniture for a company called Knoll at the time—and since that furniture was angular itself—Kromelow called the technique knolling. Sachs later codified it as follows:

  1.Scan your environment for materials, tools, books, etc., which are not in use.

  2.Put away everything not in use. If you aren’t sure, leave
it out.

  3.Group all “like” objects.

  4.Align or square all objects to either the surface they rest on, or the studio itself.

  Sachs made knolling a part of the system of organization for his own studio.

  Straightening creates quick, visible structure and reveals things that would have otherwise remained hidden.

  Containerizing. For tools and loose items that make a regular appearance on your desk but need to be handy—like headphones or cell phones or wallets—purchase small boxes or trays in which to quickly place and retrieve those objects.

  A chef’s reprise: Exit the stage

  Chef Wylie Dufresne transformed a Lower East Side bodega into a Zen monastery of molecular gastronomy. But by 2014, the Manhattan neighborhood that Dufresne helped revitalize with wd-50 was rapidly gentrifying. Developers snapped up empty parcels and old buildings around him to erect a condominium. Dufresne wanted to stay. The developers wanted him out.

  While Dufresne fought, Sam Henderson and the staff at wd-50 tried to ignore the rumors, both in the restaurant and online, and keep working. Henderson had another job on her mind, one she had to keep secret from Wylie: coordinating a surprise dinner party for him in April, celebrating the restaurant’s 11th anniversary. This epic modernist feast would be cooked by nearly two dozen of the world’s finest chefs, including Iñaki Aizpitarte, René Redzepi, Gabrielle Hamilton, Daniel Boulud, and David Chang, each creating his or her own version of a Dufresne dish. Henderson felt like a stage again, surrounded by icons she had dreamed of meeting, and yet she had to tell these men and women where to stand and when to cook, and to make sure that they didn’t make a mess of her kitchen.