MY RESTAURANT, the Fat Duck, currently possesses three Michelin stars, a fact of which I am exceedingly proud. I'm all the more gratified when I look back on our formative period, about a decade ago, and recall the many incredible struggles that faced me every day. Those were pretty damn tricky times, to say the least . . .
Thanks to the physical space itself—a copper bar originally built in 1550 as part of a cottage, which had been a pub since the 1600s—the Fat Duck was challenging from the get-go. It had low ceilings, just over seven feet high, with beams that made the room seem even smaller. Though we did a refurbishing, modernizing the space and painting the walls for a stony effect, it was still a mighty old building. In fact, it was so old that the loo was located outside. I'm quite sure that we were the only restaurant with an outside bathroom to receive a Michelin star.
When we first opened, the dining room was a rather Spartan affair. There were no tablecloths. The wine list could be printed on a single piece of paper, with only twenty whites, twenty reds, and a small selection of sparkling and dessert wines. Equally minimal was the staff—a new restaurant is faced with special hiring challenges, since if you have no name and no money in the bank, it's difficult to attract the best employees. So that initial year it was just me and a pot washer in the kitchen, with three front-of-house people in the dining room.
One of the most telling details of the early days of the Fat Duck was our system of communicating with the dining room team. The kitchen was situated behind the dining room, separated by a small passageway furnished with only a bench, where a staff member could take a very brief respite on especially busy nights, perhaps while waiting for the final dish to complete a table's order.
Between the passageway and the kitchen was a pass-through window. When the food went up on the pass, I'd do a quick double-clap to get the attention of a waiter or the maitre d' from the dining room. It was a rapid little sound that customers didn't notice, but to which the service team's ears had become highly attuned.
In time, our business began to get more robust, and I needed more help in the kitchen. Unable to attract any cooks of note, I found myself hiring a not-insignificant number of lowlifes: ax murderers, bank robbers, and the like. (Well, not quite—at least, no convicted ax murderers and bank robbers.) Anyone I could lure and satisfy with my unavoidably meager wages was fair game, including one chap who had been in army prison for a time and was trying to straighten out his life. He was huge, six foot six, with humongous, gnarly hands and a coating of tattoos over his entire body. Though only twenty-one, he gave the impression of a soul who had lived a long and tortured existence.
My motley crew in the back was offset by the front-of-house employees—the ones that the customers actually saw. Thankfully, this contingent was infinitely more presentable. There was a French waiter who showed a lot of promise. And there was an English maitre d' who had worked at a two-Michelin-star restaurant in London and was very good at his job. He was thirty-five years old, balding, impeccably dressed, and very well spoken. He did have some affectations, but I found them charming. For example, like many people who had worked in French restaurants, he had developed a habit of ending his sentences with a little "unh" sound to imitate the cadence of French language, such as "More bread, unh." Or "I'm going over here, Chef, unh."
He was a true service master, fastidious almost to a fault, and would walk the dining room floor, straightening curtains, always busying himself with the betterment of the establishment.
But then something happened, and it crushed him: He had a very young girlfriend who had gone off to university. A practical person, he was quite prepared for her to meet a younger man. Instead, while she was home on holiday, she went to a party, fell in love with his best friend, also thirty-five, and ran off with him.
That he wasn't prepared for, and he lost it. I didn't realize how badly until one particular evening.
This was a Saturday and we were serving about fifty-five people, a very busy night for us. My team of criminals was working like mad. I was putting the proper finish on every dish before setting it up on the pass and doing my little double-clap, wherein a front-of-house staff member would arrive and retrieve the plates.
At one point, round about eight o'clock, I put some plates up on the pass, and did the double-clap.
Nobody came.
I did it again. Clap-clap. And again. Clap-clap.
Finally, I pounded twice on the pass itself. BANG-BANG!
Not very quiet at all. I'm sure some customers heard that one.
But still nobody came.
For me, and for many chefs, to leave the kitchen during service is a nightmare. Not only does it slow you down, but you lose your flow and concentration—and you don't know what crisis might be waiting for you when you return. And yet I had no choice. I stalked out of the kitchen and into the dining room to see where my staff had disappeared to.
No sooner did I arrive on the service floor than I spotted my maitre d' standing over a table of three customers, laughing it up and having a good old time, completely oblivious to the operation of the restaurant.
I was positively fuming, but I had other priorities, so I made a mental note to deal with it later. Then I asked one of the waiters to come back to the kitchen and fetch the food, and got on with my evening.
When I had finished cooking for the evening, I had to run through the dining room, up the stairs to the restaurant office, and phone in orders to purveyors for the next day, before they closed.
As I made the trip, I passed a table of four—two men and two women—seated by the foot of the stairs. From their slouchy posture and uproarious laughter, it was clear that they'd had quite a bit of wine.
One of the men drunkenly grabbed my arm as I passed by.
"We have to tell you, we think your maitre d' is great," he slurred.
"Do tell," I said, trying to be every bit the charming, unruffled chef, but still crossly remembering the way the maitre d' had disappeared on me earlier.
"Well," the man went on. "He does the most amazing impression of Basil Fawlty"—this a reference to John Cleese's flamboyantly demonstrative hotelier on Fawlty Towers, a character infamous for his supreme lack of respect toward his clientele.
I feigned laughter, simmering under my cool countenance, and sought out more information: "How's that?"
"Well," the man said, the rest of his party already erupting in laughter at what was coming. "We were sitting here when a party of four came in the door. They asked your maitre d' if you had a table for four."
The storyteller paused here because he was too overcome with laughter to continue. "And then," he said, still struggling to compose himself. "And then," he said turning red with laughter. "And then" he said, finally getting on with it, "your maitre d' looks left, looks right, looks up, looks down, and says, 'No, we haven't!'"
The four of them burst into fits of laughter, banging on the table as though it were the funniest thing they had ever heard.
"Then" the man said, his shoulders shaking, "he walked off saying cf—ing customers. F—ing customers.' "
They all started slamming the table harder and convulsing with laughter, barely able to breathe now.
I felt like someone had just lit a bonfire in my stomach. Out of politeness, I forced a little chuckle and headed up the stairs to do my ordering.
I had scarcely picked up the phone when the French waiter appeared. "Chef, can you come downstairs?"
"When?"
"Now please."
I scurried down the stairs, through the dining room, and into the passageway to the kitchen. Sitting there on the bench was the maitre d', with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth.
"What on earth are you doing?" I demanded, pretty well fed up with his string of odd behavior.
He removed his hands, revealing a big, red lump on his forehead.
"He hit me," he cried, indicating the tattooed behemoth in the kitchen.
Before I could gather more fact
s for myself, the French waiter pulled me aside and explained what had happened:
A call had come in, and in those days when the front-of-house phone was engaged, the incoming call would automatically divert to a phone on the wall outside the kitchen. It was too far from the pass for me to reach it, but this hulking figure had no problem—he had stretched out with his big, meaty arms and answered the phone in his frightening, dungeon-master's voice: "Good evening, Fat Duck."
It was a customer, seeking a reservation. The cook put the call on hold and, at that moment, the maitre d' had come into the passageway.
"I've a booking for you," said the cook, taking the phone off "hold."
"I don't want to speak to any f—ing customers," said the maitre d'. "They're all f—ing idiots."
Rightly fearful that the customer on the phone could hear this, the cook stretched out his arm, trying to put his hands over the mouth of the maitre d' and silence him. Instead, he succeeded in striking him smack on the forehead, sending him reeling back onto the bench.
Taking the waiter's word as gospel—and really, who else could I trust in this situation?—I exonerated the cook and blamed the maitre d' for the whole ugly incident.
I had no choice. The next morning, I sacked the maitre d', giving him two weeks notice.
Funny thing is, there's a lot that's changed at the Fat Duck since that night. We now have a loo inside the building. The wine list is a book—rather than a scrap of paper—reflecting the formidable cellar we've amassed. We have beautiful leather-backed chairs and three Michelin stars. We make enough money and have enough of a reputation to snare the best possible job candidates.
We've made it, as they say.
But I still would hire this chap today—and I still would have wound up having to let him go. In the restaurant business, as in life, you can only have so much control over your fate. At some point, you're at the mercy of the universe.
And of your f—ing employees.
On the Road Again
DANIEL BOULUD
A native of Lyon, France, Daniel Boulud is one of the most acclaimed chefs in New York City. His empire includes the four-star dining temple Daniel, as well as Cafe Boulud and DB Bistro Moderne. Trained under some of the legendary chefs of France, Boulud made his name as the executive chef of the Polo Lounge and Le Cirque in New York City, before opening his own restaurants. He is the author of several cookbooks and the designer of the Daniel Boulud Kitchen line of cookware.
WE CHEFS FREQUENTLY find ourselves practicing our craft away from our own restaurants, whether for one of the seemingly nightly benefit events carried on around New York City, at private affairs, or at smaller occasions like a television appearance or book signing.
Whenever you leave the carefully calibrated setting of your own kitchen—a facility that each chef tailors and tweaks to his own ever-changing needs and specifications—there is a risk. Away from your home base, variables abound: the setting and infrastructure, the support staff, the kitchen equipment, even the serving vessels can cause unforeseen problems.
Out-of-house disasters are funny to look back on, but only because they usually end well. I'll bet if you ask chefs for their best stories from the road, they all wrap up with the food on the table and the customers having no idea of the chaos that transpired behind the scenes. There's a very simple reason for this: in my business, failure is not an option. The mark of a professional is that no matter what happens, no matter how catastrophic the circumstances, you complete your job on time and to your standards and those of your guests.
To minimize the chance of a disaster, many chefs transport, even fly, their own ingredients to event sites. But sometimes this is impractical, like the time I was in Tel Aviv, Israel, to do a gala dinner for two hundred with Norman Van Aken, Thomas Keller, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Toronto's Susser Lee. Susser was going to prepare a stuffed quail, but when the quail showed up at two o'clock on the afternoon of the dinner, boneless, limp, and corroded by kosherizing salt, I saw before me a man in crisis.
It was a truly terrible situation to be stuck in. Nobu, Thomas, Norman, and I wanted to jump in and help, but Susser had to completely change gears and literally didn't have time to collaborate. He ordered the support staff to just "bring me stuff, bring me stuff," in hopes that some new ingredients would spark his imagination. And they did: by the time the dinner rolled around, he had pulled off a lovely duck dish. The happy guests had no idea that anything had gone awry.
Equipment is another fertile breeding ground for trouble. I once did a dinner at a major New York museum, in a room that had no stoves, and which was forbidden by building regulations from having any gas or electric machines brought in. One of my new cooks, looking for a way to reroast the meat dish, put fifteen to twenty cans of sterno under a sheet pan in an enclosed wooden cabinet. When we opened the cabinet door, we were greeted by a fireball; the heat was so intense—easily in excess of 700 degrees—that the sheet pan had started to melt.
But the most difficult element to control is people, especially those you didn't hire and who will only be working with you for one day. For example, one of the most heart-stopping things that ever happened to me involved the most unlikely worker: a truck driver.
The year was 1989. I was chef at Le Cirque, Sirio Maccio-ni's legendary restaurant. Malcolm Forbes had famously decided to throw himself a seventieth-birthday party in Morocco, and to transport his seven hundred American guests, including such legends as Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters, he chartered two private 747s and a Concorde to fly out of Kennedy Airport.
Le Cirque was enlisted to prepare a four-star breakfast for the flights. We spared no expense, purchasing elegant little baskets and preparing individual meals of our own bread, a hard-boiled egg, sausage, Evian, orange juice, linen napkins, and so on.
To ensure the food was maintained at ultimate freshness, we hired a refrigerated truck the night before the flight. We prepped food well into the wee hours, then loaded the truck and instructed the driver to sleep in his seat and keep the truck parked outside the restaurant. We would return in the morning and head to the airport with him to present the food.
We went home at two in the morning, got a few hours' sleep, and came back at six thirty . . . only to find that the truck had disappeared.
If this story had happened today, the first thing I would have done was whip out my cell phone and called the driver on his. But this was in 1989. Almost nobody had a cell phone—except for Sirio, who owned one roughly the size of a man's shoe.
Once we recovered from the shock of the missing truck, we decided that perhaps the driver had misunderstood and gone to the airport. We piled into a car and made for JFK, with Sirio frantically calling anyone on the planet who might be able to solve this problem.
At the airport, hundreds of Malcolm Forbes's guests, a who's who of New York society, were filing into a private hangar that had been converted into a Moroccan lounge, with decorations, live music, even a belly dancer. There was everything you could imagine.
But not a single scrap of food, and no truck in sight.
At this point, I thought Sirio might actually kill somebody. And I'll be honest: I didn't know what we were going to do.
Well, everyone is entitled to a little luck and that was the morning when I got mine. At the last possible second, the truck came barreling down the runway and we just managed to get the food served to the guests, who had by then taken their seats on board the planes. It turned out that the driver had gone home and overslept, with the most famous breakfast on Earth parked outside in his driveway.
One place you don't ever get lucky is in the kitchen. You either make the food right or you don't. Without a doubt, my biggest challenge came on a day when we had made the food right, but it was undone by the on-site staff.
This was in the mid-nineties. I was still operating out of the original Daniel space on East Seventy-sixth Street, and I was enlisted to be the culinary chairman of a rain forest benefit, a seated dinner for
one thousand people that followed a concert by Elton John and Sting. I had complete creative control of the three courses we were to serve, except for one: they insisted that the first course be a pea soup featured on my restaurant menu at the time.
We didn't have the capacity to cook on that scale in my restaurant's kitchen, so we planned to do it at the hotel, enlisting the help of the on-site staff.
Just as it is in a home kitchen, one of the crucial concerns of making pea soup is chilling it as soon as it's been cooked, to prevent it from turning brown and to keep the vegetables from fermenting.
I love logistical challenges like this so I had already sat down with my calculator and notepad and determined how many batches we'd have to make to end up with twelve hundred servings, the one thousand for which we were contracted, plus a 20 percent contingency. I had also devised a system of keeping the soup chilled that involved storing it in batches in a number of 25-gallon stainless-steel containers set in ice water, and periodically stirring it to distribute the chilled portion within the canister and help bring down the overall temperature of the batch.
We made the soup the day before the event, then left the site, entrusting it to the hotel's kitchen staff. They were supposed to keep the canisters in the cooler, in regularly replenished ice water, and stir the soup every hour. As near as I can tell, when the shift changed in the midafternoon, the new guys didn't give a damn and just left the canisters sitting there, completely unattended.
At the end of the day, I dispatched a few guys from my kitchen to check on the status of things at the hotel. When they entered the refrigerator to inspect the soup, there was greenish-yellow-brown foam bubbling over the tops of the canisters.
Though the soup had undoubtedly fermented, this is one of those evaluations that only the chef can make, so my guys ladled a sample of the soup into a plastic container and had it shuttled up to me at Daniel. As soon as I saw it, I could tell it was gone, and a taste made this all too clear: the soup, all twelve hundred servings worth, was sour, useless garbage.
Don't Try This at Home Page 4