By 11:00 a.m. we had our first batch ready, a hundred or so lobsters' worth. Off went the first vanload to Gerona. There was some slight relief at its departure, but it was mostly overshadowed by the suspense, the worry that the van might break down or crash or God knows what. In those days, we didn't have mobile phones. You couldn't keep track of the van's progress the way you could now. So what happened was that the van driver, under strict orders to reassure us, would phone us at intervals—the team in Barcelona and the two kitchens in Gerona—from a highway cafe or gas station to let us know that he was making progress, that he was edging his way up to his destination. "It's okay. All's well. I'm on my way. Relax, guys!" We would all cheer with relief. But between calls, it was hell. After what had happened, we were preconditioned for disaster. If anything could go wrong, we imagined, it would.
And yet, miraculously, it didn't. Five vanloads of chopped lobster successfully made it from the Barcelona aquarium to Gerona—each time inspiring the same drama of anxiety and reassuring phone calls—and finally, at about six in the evening, we looked at the dish, reduced to two pieces of lobster but beefed up with an extra helping of cepes carpaccio, and knew that, barring the habitual worries that always loom for a chef at this time of night, the immediate crisis was over. We had survived.
And, in the end, I learned some lessons from all this. First, never store things that need to be cold inside a fridge in closed polystyrene containers. Second, keep a closer eye on things, especially when you have so much to do in so little time, when your available reaction time, in case things go wrong, is drastically reduced. When you're feeding up to two hundred people there's a certain amount of flexibility built in, some room to maneuver. More than two hundred and you're in a totally new space. The logistical dimension of the exercise becomes so much more unwieldy.
The final and most valuable lesson I learned is that every day you start fresh. I know it sounds trite, maybe even foolish, but it's true. Every day is a new challenge, a new adventure, and you must never be complacent; you must be constantly on your toes, ready to deal with the unexpected, ready to respond—with as cool a head as you can—to whatever surprise comes.
(Translated from the Spanish and
co-written with John Carlin)
All by Myself
JOSÉ ANDRÉS
José Andrés was born in Asturias, Spain, and attended Escola de Restauracio i Hostalatge de Barcelona, apprenticing at restaurant El Bulli under celebrated master chef and mentor Eerrdn Adrià. In 1990, Andrés moved to New York City to work for the Barcelona-based restaurant El Dorado Petit. In 1993, he moved to Washington, D. C, to become a chef and partner of Jaleo Spanish restaurant. He has since opened two more Jaleo locations, and serves as executive chef-partner of Café Atlantico and Zaytinya, as well as the much-lauded six-seat minibar within Café Atlantico. In 2004, he opened Oyamel, a Mexican small-dishes restaurant. In 2003, the James Beard Foundation named Andrés Best Chef/Mid-Atlantic Region. His first cookbook, Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America, debuts fall 2005.
WHEN I WAS fifteen years old, I spent the summer working in a small restaurant in Roses, north of Barcelona, called L'Antull, that's no longer there. It was a traditional Spanish fish restaurant, and in the middle of the dining room was a tank in which we kept wild striped bass and live lobsters from the Bay of Roses.
Striped bass need room to swim, and this fish tank certainly gave it to them. It was enormous, and in comparison to the tiny dining room—we had only about forty seats—the tank seemed even bigger than it actually was, totally dominating the space. All day the bass would swim laps in the water, propelling themselves from one end of the tank to the other, gracefully turning, and swimming back, while the lobsters rested on the floor beneath them—an exciting, mesmerizing display.
In addition to the many fish dishes we prepared, we also made traditional Catalan dishes, like canelones, our version of the Italian cannelloni. L'Antull's canelones were so popular that a lot of people who never ate in the restaurant would order them to go, especially for large parties.
To prepare the canelones, we would arrange the boiled pasta shells on a big tray, top them with grated Parmesan and bechamel, and finish them under the salamander, a big, open-sided broiler, to melt the cheese and cook the cream.
One Sunday, a customer came in and placed a take-out order of canelones for twenty-four people. On Sunday mornings, it was just me and the chef, Pere. Because I had been cooking all my life, I was already very capable at all the things we had to do—shop, clean fish, cook paellas and other traditional dishes—so Pere tended to leave me on my own. Unconcerned, he told me to make the large order and pack it up for the customer, and then he went off to finish something else.
We had an incredibly long, thin stainless-steel tray in the kitchen, and I decided to use it to bake the canelones in one shot. I arranged about seventy-five little pasta cylinders on the meter-long tray, then topped them evenly with cheese and the creamy white bechamel. Beautiful!
The tray was so long that you had to put it under the salamander in three stages—broiling one end, then pushing the tray through so the middle was under the heat, and then finally doing the other side—cooking the canelones in thirds.
For a little kid, this was hard work. I started off on one side of the machine, and had to quickly run around it to hold the tray by the hot end while the final third was cooking.
Once the entire tray had been broiled, my next task was to pack up the canelones for our customer. I lifted the steaming hot tray, balanced it on a kitchen towel atop my open left palm, and steadied it with my right hand, also protected by a towel.
Now, remember, I'm just fifteen years old, so the tray was disproportionately big on me. As I struggled to keep my balance in the kitchen, the tray wobbled dangerously on my shoulder. I looked like a tightrope walker staggering on the line.
Pere noticed this and asked, "José, you want me to help you?"
What fifteen-year-old boy would admit defeat?
"No, no. I'm fine," I said.
"You're sure?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine," I insisted, as I continued to wrestle with the tray. Pere shook his head skeptically. You didn't have to be a wise man to know that trouble was on the horizon.
Finally, I got the tray steadied and started to leave the kitchen. I gently kicked the swinging doors open with one foot and stepped hastily through them and out into the dining room, the doors swinging shut safely behind me.
As a waiter passed in front of me, however, I stepped back to avoid a collision, and the doors, still swinging slightly, struck the edge of the tray, propelling it forward.
Things started to happen very quickly: I ran along under the length of the tray to keep up with it. But I got too far ahead of it and it started to tip backward, so I backed up. Then it tipped to the side . . .
I couldn't win. No matter which way I turned, I was either moving too far or not far enough. And the tray was lurching ever-forward, toward the center of the dining room, where the aquarium stood right in my path.
Finally, I just couldn't control it anymore. The tray tipped forward and off of my hands and slid right into the fish tank. A cloud of steam hissed up out of the water as hot met cold, and the water turned a milky white as the cheese and bechamel dissolved. Inside, the striped bass began voraciously attacking the sinking canelones, having a real feast.
I began to laugh at the sight of it, until Pere started screaming at me, telling me what an idiot I was for not letting him help. He apologized to the customer and sent him home, telling him that we would deliver the food to his house.
But it ended up being not such a terrible thing. I made another batch, and this time the canelones made it out of the restaurant and to their destination without incident. And I learned one of the great lessons of the kitchen: What you can do by yourself you should do by yourself. But it's just as important to recognize when you need help and to ask for it.
Meet David Bouley
DA
N BARBER
A native of Manhattan, Dan Barber worked in California and several restaurants in Paris and the South of Trance before returning to New York City, where he cooked at the original Bouley restaurant until it closed in 1996. In May 2000, Barber opened Blue Hill restaurant in New York City. The restaurant was nominated as Best New Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation in 2001, was named one of America's best restaurants by Gourmet magazine, and in 2002, Barber was named one o/Tood & Wine Magazine's Best New Chefs. In May 2004, he opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocatino Hills, New York, as well as Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, the mission of which is to help create a consciousness about the effect of everyday food choices. Blue Hill at Stone Barns received three stars from the New York Times and was nominated as Best New Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation in 2005, the same year Barber himself received a nomination as Best Chef/ New York City.
YOU'RE NOT TALKING to your fish," moans the chef. I A hear the moan from the other side of the kitchen.
There is mayhem all around. A nonstop circus of people appears and disappears through swinging doors. The expediter yells, "Ordering: two hamachi, three skate, a bass, and a halibut a la carte. Ordering: one crab salad—make that two—two crab salads, two sardines, and a finnan haddie on the fly . . ."
Cooks are everywhere, spinning, dodging, and impossibly stretching their way across vast distances to reach plates, spoons, garnishes. Chef's whites suddenly blur into a mountain of vanilla ice cream. I'm rushing now, fumbling for pans. I refuse to be licked.
But the expediter will not stop: "Waiters, pick up table seven. Hello? Waiters. Here we go, waiters!" he screams in a tattoo of insistence that cuts through the kitchen's screech and hurry. "One snapper, two veal, three is a duck—I'm holdin' a duck. I need a duck, please. Where the fuck's my duck? Where's my goddamn fuckin' duck, please?"
I am witness to an unfolding madness: a night in the famed kitchen of David Bouley. It is my first time cooking here, but I have heard stories of the intensity and the confusion, of the six-course tasting menus ordered by two hundred or so customers every night—twelve hundred plates of food flowing out of the kitchen in a matter of hours.
The sweat trickles from behind my kneecaps, down my legs. I am working on the fish line, and the chef has a hand in nearly every plate. Few chefs believe this is possible. Bouley, though, has made a career of confounding expectations. Years ago, no one in the culinary establishment believed that a self-proclaimed country hick from Connecticut, a mercurial dreamer, would be able to survive in the best (and toughest) kitchens of the world, as Bouley had done, some of them so abusive and demanding that Bouley himself can only describe them as "numbing."
"I said you're not speaking to your mackerel," repeats the chef, now incensed. I look dumbly at the stove. Could he possibly be talking to me? He's all the way across the kitchen. I've spread a dozen small saucepots on the searing heat of the flat top. Saute pans align themselves like train cars. I season furiously, dropping and flipping fish, basting, and seasoning again.
The expediter bellows orders from the pass, the window through which dishes travel from the kitchen to the dining room. Around him there is an orbit of madness. Are there twenty-eight cooks or have I counted the bread warmer twice? Here a cook lunges to sauce a naked scallop, as another picks sprigs of lemon thyme from one of the twelve herb plants standing at attention by the door; here a dishwasher waltzes through a sea of cooks, plates stacked so high as to obstruct his face.
Why all this confusion, I wonder. "Forget confusion," a cook tells me at the end of service. "Chaos. He wants the chaos. He needs it."
Another cook tells me about one evening's service when the orders were coming in slowly. Chef was unhappy with how relaxed all the cooks were during the first seating. "Changed the menu," the cook tells me, his eyes widening in shock and awe at the memory as though it were unfolding before him all over again. "Never said shit, neither. All of a sudden the second seating arrives, tickets come in, and the dishes ordered no one had prepped for. Totally nuts, man. He's four goddamn stars one night and Dirty Harry the next. Taught me a big lesson," he says, still wide-eyed, though he doesn't explain what the lesson was.
Steve, the philosopher-cook of the brigade, sums it up: "The qualities that mark Chef as a lunatic-genius are his absolute fearlessness, and his profound, unabashed enjoyment of his own strangeness. That's the sort of dementia these cooks respect, and perhaps even share."
The lunatic-genius's gaze intensifies in my direction, and cooks are beginning to look my way as well. I am scared, and losing control. I realize I'm the only one cooking mackerel, and that the chef, who was at the Fulton Fish Market after last evening's service until 4 a.m., who went home to "nap and shave" and return by 8 a.m., and cook straight through the day, a day so utterly exhausting that by the end of it you will often find him holding his left hand to the left side of his face—holding up his collapsed cheek so cooks can make out what he's mumbling—is, from a hundred feet away, in the midst of a crush of crazed cooks, talking to me about not talking to my mackerel.
Chef appears to be garnishing a plate of raw tuna from across the kitchen, but his eyes are somehow also locked on me. I have read that David Bouley's shyness is his most striking quality, that he relies on observation, rather than inquiry, to understand things.
This moment—our first "meeting"—confirms that assessment. He seems to be soaking up nuances and details. It isn't a hostile gaze, but it isn't exactly empathetic. He can have a big smile, an actor's guffaw at even the slightest quip, and act like he knows you well. And he's studied you so closely that you are sure he does know you well. The awkward thing is that you hardly know him, if you know him at all.
"Get that mackerel out of the pan," says the chef, mingling directive and threat. The kitchen falls suddenly silent as he appears next to me and pulls me close. Just as quickly, the noise roars back up. Everyone around us has resumed the whirling, except for Chef and me. We are in our own world. I hear the expediter: "Chef: table six—old man—he's fading. He won't last—he needs his food, he needs it now."
"Be cool," says the cool chef, with one hand pulling the fated mackerel from the flame, the other pulling me close to him. "You're not talking to your fish." He pauses for effect, bracing my neck against his forearm. We stand together and gaze at the mackerel. I'm about to introduce myself when he interrupts the thought. "I always talk to my fish," he says, staring at the sizzling mackerel.
"How else would I know when she's done?" In the observation of great Hollywood scriptwriters, the best endings must be surprising and yet inevitable; and the best of Bouley's pronouncements take this same shape.
"How else?" he asks again.
The expediter yells—there are twenty tickets on the board. I tense, trying to push free. Chef squeezes my neck with his bicep. Sweat is pouring from my face, and I find myself quickly, almost imperceptibly, rubbing my wet temple into his crisply starched chef's jacket.
"I'm going to tell you a story," he says.
"I need some tables, people. I need tables," yells the expediter.
"No time for stories," I mumble halfheartedly.
"Two bulls," Chef says, ignoring me, tightening the grip. We're still standing side by side, Chef's arm tightly wound around my neck as the kitchen blazes before us. I wonder if I might faint.
"Two bulls standing on a small hill, an older and a younger bull, overlooking a field of beautiful lady cows," he says to me.
"Oh, man," yells the expediter. "I need table six. I need that table."
The chef's lips are now only inches from my ear. "The younger bull looks up to the older bull: 'Hey, hey, you know what I'm gonna' do? I'm gonna' run as fast as I can right now, as fast as my legs will take me, as fast as I can run down this hill, and I'm gonna get me one of those lady cows and make her my own.'" He pauses now, as if to let me marinate in the genius. "Do you know what the older bull said back to the younger bull?"
As I shook m
y head no, that I did not know what the older bull said to the younger bull, I lifted my eyes from his arm and peeked around. Chaos of the sort I had never seen. Cooks were yelling at busboys who yelled at dishwashers who yelled at each other.
"I don't know, Chef," I muttered.
He put his nose in my left ear and leaned heavily on me. I felt the heat of his breath as he held me there. "Well, the older bull paused for a moment," and here too the chef paused. " 'Son,' said the older bull, T'm going to slowly walk down this hill, and I'm going to make them all my own.'
"Don't rush what you do here," he said, and let me go.
The Last Straw
MARIO BATALI
One of the most recognizable food personalities in New York City, Mario Batali is the chef and co-owner of a handful of restaurants that have redefined Italian dining for New Yorkers over the past decade: Babbo, Lupa, Esca, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, and others. Before he became a chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and television personality, Batali was reared in Seattle, attended high school in Spain, and went on to cooking school in London, the site of this formative anecdote.
AS AUTUMN FELL on London in 1984,1 was a student at the local outpost of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. For extra money, I tended bar three nights a week at a big, working-class watering hole (we sold pints mostly, with the occasional gin and tonic, no ice) on a parcel of private property in the middle of an essentially unremarkable road in Central London.
I hadn't been there long when the owners decided to convert the tavern into something much more ambitious than a tavern: a "serious" restaurant that served trendy, contemporary food, quite a sea change from the burgers and fries that were the top-selling items among our regulars. They blew out the back door of the place and performed an exhaustive renovation, transforming it—in a very efficient four weeks—into a sprawling restaurant with a garden out back.
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