by Dan Charnas
WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW
Chefs abhor waste
In French, garde-manger means “guard of the food.”
It’s a lofty title for someone who, in the modern professional kitchen, stands just above dishwasher on the hierarchy: the guy or gal in the corner with the vast array of mise-en-place plating salads and preparing other cold appetizers.
But those cold preparations speak of the garde-manger’s original purpose: to make sure that the kitchen wastes nothing. For garde-mangers, that means packing meat scraps into molds and casings, sometimes with spices and congealed stock. A caviar-garnished terrine is one example of this. The humble hot dog is another. Garde-manger means, on a larger level, guarding the pantry: making sure that food doesn’t go bad prematurely through improper storage; that the ingredients ordered first get served before those ordered later; that the amount of food ordered matches the amount of food used; and that the recipes themselves use ingredients in an economical way. Nowadays that responsibility is spread throughout the kitchen, with the chef herself taking the ultimate responsibility for the economy and ecology of the enterprise.
We’ve said from the start that the kitchen’s unique circumstances—perishable product made by humans under deadline—give rise to a unique set of work behaviors. What we haven’t yet articulated is that all these behaviors are innately conservationist: not only to conserve ingredients, but to conserve the time it takes to prepare them, the movement to make the best use of that time, the space that allows for that economy of movement, and the wits and energies of the people who have to execute these tasks.
Focus and order are by-products of the values and the behaviors of mise-en-place. But the behaviors themselves, the things chefs and cooks actually do, are all geared toward restricting waste. The goal of completely eliminating waste is impossible. And yet this thought form provides the target at which all kitchen work aims: total utilization, in four interrelated dimensions—space, motion (or energy), time, and resources (including ingredients, money, and people).
Chefs save space to save motion. For chefs space can be more liability than luxury if not used efficiently. Chefs conserve space to help them make motion—their effort—easier and better.
Chefs save motion to save time. Conserving motion conserves the time it takes to move. Conserving motion also conserves a tremendous amount of human energy, both physical and mental, as in refining a task by finding a better process or transforming the motion into an automatic reaction so the mind can be free to think other things.
Chefs save time to save resources. Time is the beating heart that compels both human hunger and the microbes that spoil food. Conserving time preserves the customer and the food. Conserving time also liberates human energy, both mental and physical. Being able to work in compressed time gives us more of the one thing we cannot manufacture.
Chefs save resources to save the business. Chefs conserve ingredients because every dollar they don’t spend is a dollar they can keep. Don’t throw away half the carrot; find a way to use it. That’s one less carrot we have to buy, and also half a carrot not wasted. But a chef’s economic interest aligns with a greater good. Buying less means moving less, both in the kitchen and in the marketplace. And while conservation slows economies—that’s why Americans are urged to buy, buy, buy!—it also cultivates more respect for ingredients, which in turn promotes the cultivation of a better product. Saving money in this sense saves work and life.
Chefs save people
The most common ingredient in kitchens is people. Chefs spend much of their time finding, training, and retaining staff for the same reason other businesses do: It’s hard to find good people, and it’s tougher to lose them. And since chefs think the way chefs do, it turns out that they’ve developed a mise-en-place for people as well.
Years before Marc Djozlija opened his restaurant Wright & Company on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit—as one of several ambitious and idealistic chefs taking part in the revitalization of the city—he had learned the value of human resources. Djozlija (pronounced “Joe-zuh-leah”) opened a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in a new casino in Atlantic City, another declining locale where it proved hard to find a staff. One recruit taught him a lesson he never forgot. Djozlija trained him for 3 days on the garde-manger station. The cook made a mess, put the wrong ingredients in dishes, and confused orders. On the 4th day, Djozlija fired him.
The cook pled for his job: “Chef, all I ever wanted to do is work for a place like this. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll try harder.”
Suddenly Djozlija felt like the fault was his own. Maybe he wasn’t putting the cook in a position to succeed? The casino restaurant also had another kitchen serving a casual dining room with more straightforward items—pizza, fried calamari, salads—that required less finesse and more repetition.
It was like night and day. The kid totally killed it. Six years later the cook still works there.
Djozlija thought back to the restaurants in which he worked over the years, dominated by a small but vocal minority of ambitious careerists who would have climbed over the next guy to get where they wanted to go. But all these restaurants really ran on a silent majority of cooks—good people, hard workers—who liked to come in, crush their mise-en-place, power through service, and go home. Restaurants needed those people, too. And mise-en-place not only means every thing in its place, but also every person in his or her place.
Chefs save themselves
Gilbert Le Coze and his sister Maguy had built New York’s Le Bernardin into the first haute French fish restaurant in America, earning four stars from the New York Times. But when 49-year-old Chef Le Coze died of a heart attack in 1994, his protégé Eric Ripert was scarcely prepared to take his place.
For Ripert, the food part was easy. He just kept cooking the way he had since his arrival there. The people part was harder. Ripert had little idea how to be a leader. Like many French chefs, he had come up through tough, tense kitchens. Ripert himself had a temper—“a very powerful energy,” he recalled, rising “from the belly button.” Rage got the best of Ripert on occasion at Le Bernardin. Business dropped. Morale sank. He wanted to keep the restaurant’s stars, but he also wanted to keep his sanity and his staff.
Perhaps by providence, Ripert picked up a book on a recent trip to Paris: 100 Elephants on a Blade of Grass, by the Dalai Lama. Thus began Ripert’s personal Buddhist practice and his reckoning with the fire in his belly. He devoted time to techniques like visualizing his anger as a dark cloud and then destroying it.
He began seeing the kitchen differently. One day Ripert gave a brusque order to one of his best young cooks. He saw the cook’s hand shake. Ripert’s eyes met those of his second in command, chef de cuisine Chris Muller. Now the cook was trying to sauce a plate with that same shaky hand. It’s okay, they said. Relax, calm down. The hand stopped shaking. Ripert and Muller witnessed this a few more times. When they demanded something from him, his hand shook. When they encouraged him, the hand remained steady, and the plate would be better, too. To Muller, if cooks were shaking, whether externally or internally, then their focus wasn’t on the plate. This excellent young chef had traveled through all the stations in the kitchen and done well. If nurturing cooks created a better product, then what Ripert and Muller needed to do was change the way they handled their people. Just as there should be no wasted words, no words should lay people to waste. Anger wastes people.
In his quest Ripert went up against culinary history. Kindness is a relatively new concept for the professional kitchen. The notion of “nurturing” cooks was so antithetical to the pressure-cooker image of a professional kitchen that it had become a cliché for the masses: If you can’t take the heat . . .
Ripert changed his kitchen by changing himself. Muller, a mid-westerner predisposed to calm, became an excellent complement. Muller conceptualized and demonstrated the use of three voices: the normal, interpersonal one he called the “teaching voice”; the one he used to
call out orders over the din of the kitchen and roar of the vents, the “service voice”; and the one he tried not to use, in the midst of crisis and trouble, his “urgent voice.”
But adjusting volume and tone would only go so far. One of the reasons things got so tense at Le Bernardin was that Ripert and his cooks had a formidable number of plates to produce in very little time under exacting standards. To transform the kitchen, Ripert and Muller had to change the entire restaurant: reduce the number of tables, elongate seating periods, and double the number of cooks.
The stakes for mistakes receded, but Le Bernardin’s new peace came with a price. Serving less food to fewer customers with more staff meant less profit. Someone had to pay the difference. In the end the customer did—the entitlement of a four-star restaurant serving an entitled clientele. Many other restaurants didn’t have the luxury of that choice. But Ripert knew entrepreneurs who would never reduce their profit margins for their people, all the while decrying their staff’s low morale. Ripert now had a holistic spirituality, which came with a holistic understanding of business. One can’t pretend that goodness and kindness don’t have a relationship to economics.
Ripert tried to extend his consciousness to every aspect of the business. He made a point to greet his kitchen staff every day; to know the names of all his 100-plus employees; and to counsel his cooks’ careers. Like Escoffier did a century before, Ripert negotiated with a charity, City Harvest, to take as much of his leftover food as possible. And Ripert tried to preserve and purify his own time. He envisioned his life as a disk with three even slices—work, family, self—and tried to be so prepared, so practiced, and so present in each that there would be no spillover among them. Echoing the counsel of Dogen, when he cooks, he thinks of nothing else. When he is with his son or wife, he thinks of no one else.
A life of preparing, of practicing and perfecting process, and being present in everything. I wonder, how can Ripert teach those values to his staff?
“Be around me,” he says.
The results: Before Le Coze and Ripert came to America, if a chef in New York wanted the best apprenticeship, he or she had to work in France. Nowadays, Ripert and Muller receive stacks of résumés from young chefs in France and everywhere else, culinarians who want to come to Le Bernardin to learn at one of the finest schools in the world for how to cook, how to work, and how to be.
Chefs let go
Chef Marcus Samuelsson commands an army of cooks in restaurants around the globe. But on weekends Samuelsson demotes himself to prep cook.
He stands next to his wife, Maya, in the kitchen of their Harlem brownstone, peeling and chopping carrots while she helms the stove. He hands her the carrots.
“The pan’s got to be hot,” he suggests.
“It is hot,” she says.
“No, it’s got to be hotter than that.”
Maya dumps all the carrots in the pan. Marcus sighs. He knows that the pan wasn’t hot enough when she put the carrots in. Now all those carrots have cooled the pan down so that they won’t cook properly.
“Now you’re not searing them, you’re roasting them,” Marcus says. “That means you’re not going to get the flavor.”
Samuelsson, of course, can’t help himself; he knows too much about the chemistry and physics of cooking, but he knows enough about life to let it go. Maya has her own Ethiopian way of cooking; and this is family time, not work time. Samuelsson knows that if there is one truth in a chef’s personal life, it’s that you’re not the chef of everything.
While many chefs do like everything in their lives to be ordered, a great many others reserve the rules of mise-en-place exclusively for the kitchen. One need look no further for proof than to visit a chef’s spotless kitchen and then visit his shambolic office, or observe a cook during service and then hang out with her afterward. One cannot be so controlled for most of the day and not anticipate the urge to be a little out of control. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Chefs know there must be mess in our lives, too. A riotous environment filled with books and papers and meaningful objects can stimulate us. A chaotic schedule allows for chance meetings and impromptu conversations, the kind of serendipity in which inspiration flourishes and fortunes are made. Some studies have linked mess to creativity and higher incomes.
Mess is the cure for some of order’s ills, like obsessiveness and rigidity. And order is the cure for some of mess’s ills, like laziness and indifference. There is a time and a place for everything: A time to work and a time to play. A time to plan and a time to abandon our plans. And yes, a time to clean and a time to let things accumulate. The world’s mise-en-place encompasses all.
This balanced life is the true meaning of working clean. In these pages, clean doesn’t mean neat and tidy. And what great chefs mean by working clean is not necessarily a spotless, sterile environment nor a life without spontaneity. Rather, the meaning of clean is conscious, ordered, prepared, persistent, honest, honorable; the opposite of unconscious, passive, unprepared, lazy, ignorant, dishonest, dishonorable. So wherever mess serves our awareness, our sense of things being right, our fullness, our alignment with reality, and our ability to honor ourselves, our family, our work, and our world—then even being messy is working clean.
Anything else is just a waste.
OUT OF THE KITCHEN
Total utilization doesn’t ask us to milk every inch of space, trim every motion, use every moment of time and every resource for maximum productivity and efficiency. But working clean with resources does mean living a life where you properly value those things. Get your most important spaces in order because space is precious. Practice and perfect the motions that make sense to refine because your energy is precious. Honor time because you’re not getting any more of it. Use your resources wisely because ultimately we all must share them. And treat each other with care.
What’s the opposite of total utilization? We’re living in it, at work and in the world. Societies and nations don’t plan. We chew up land and leave other spaces wasted. We don’t start important things and leave others unfinished. We rush. We don’t see and hear things. We don’t communicate. We’re okay with mediocre. So much of what we do is halfway. So much of our attention is divided. We treat people as if they are worthless. In the face of our human failings, should we give up? No, the entire history of mankind is the dynamic between order and disorder. Total utilization challenges us to be alive without becoming an affliction to the world and each other. The goal of total utilization and mise-en-place is that you not waste life: yours or the planet’s.
At the end of our trail we see how chefs nourish with food and with wisdom, teaching their own and teaching the world.
Chefs restore. We, their students, can, too.
EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN
BETTER UTILIZATION EXERCISE
Before you attempt total utilization, why not try more utilization? Here’s an exercise.
What is your most important workspace? If it’s your computer, for example, organize it and leave the desk, shelves, and everything else for later.
What are your most important moves? Where do you tend to make the most mistakes? Are you not prepared for meetings? Improve those moves first.
What are your most crucial times? When do you waste the most time? Cultivate one good habit (or break a bad one) that will preserve more of that time for you.
What’s your most vital resource? What resource are you wasting the most of? For example, find one household or business expense to cut.
Who matters most? Who loses out the most in your life? Maybe one of your employees isn’t getting the coaching he needs from you? Maybe a spouse or child needs more of your attention? On the other hand, if you’re the type to give everything to others and leave nothing for yourself, pick yourself for a change and make things right.
“TURN OFF” EXERCISE
We are addicted to our technological devices—laptops, tablets, mobile phones. We are no
t simply passive victims of interruption; we seek stimulation. While digital devices connect us to the world, the light side of digital inputs and outputs, information and creativity, comes with a dark side: intrusion and escape.
We can remedy our digital woes by working clean with our devices. The suggested regimens below, in no particular order, can help you assume control of your digital life and assist you in creating healthy boundaries among your work, family, and personal lives.
■One day per week, don’t use your devices.
■For 1 week, turn off your devices from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.
■For personal or family times when you are expecting incoming calls or e-mails, restrict your checking times to once per hour, on the hour, for 5 minutes max.
■Don’t permit devices in your bedroom. That means no cell phone or tablet alarm clocks!
■If you must use a device for creative work, use software or willpower to block all communications apps for the length of your creative session. Make sure to turn off notifications or use your device’s “Do Not Disturb” feature.
Remember that you are stronger than the temptations and distractions of the digital world!
KITCHEN PRACTICE: WASTE NOT
Every week, log how many food items you discard from your refrigerator and cupboards because they’ve gone bad. After a few weeks, note any patterns. Ask yourself the following questions: