"Just GET OUT! GET OUT OF THE FUCKING KITCHEN!!" The constant clicking from the computer, the background grumbling and swearing and cursing from the cooks, the back-and-forth questions necessary between line cooks working together like "Ready on Table Seven? Ready on those oysters and that scallop?" and the occasional whispered request from a runner combined was too much noise for the chef. He shouted: "SHUT UP! EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP! NOT A SINGLE FUCKING WORD! I WANT TOTAL SILENCE!"
He then issued orders for Matt to move some of the foie orders over to saute, put Dougie in exclusive charge of the toaster, told Orlando and Steven both to get out of the way, and took over the saute responsibilities himself, while abandoning expediting responsibility to me.
The pile of intermingled dupes I inherited was discouraging. The board itself—meaning the orders that had already been begun, or fired—was a mess, with orders already dispatched mixed up with stuff still to come. I had no idea what had been called and what had yet to be called. Fortunately, the printer had calmed down. There was silence, real silence, as Bobby stepped into saute and began putting together orders, running back and forth between hot-app station and his own to personally make sure tables were complete before putting them in the window.
We managed to get some apps out, and some more, and even a few more—before runners started whispering in my ear that they needed entrees, like now. The printer was strangely silent still, and I was thankful for it, figuring they were backed up at the terminals downstairs, or that maybe, just maybe, between all the orders in my hand and the ones that I was slowly feeding onto the board and the pile I was getting ready to call out, maybe we'd actually got the whole dining room in. I called out a few fire orders for mains but Bobby just screamed: "SHUT UP! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT!" He was cooking foie gras orders now, in addition to doing the oysters, and the beggar's purses, and dealing with the sole, and though a very fine line cook, he was biting off way more than he, or any cook alive, could chew. Alone in his head, out there on the edge all by himself, ignoring me, ignoring the waiters, ignoring the other cooks, he was slinging pans at high speed, just trying, as best he could, to knock down some of those hanging tickets, to get the food out. So I just kept my mouth closed and clutched my stack of dupes and held my breath.
The printer. Something was wrong with it. I knew it. It was too quiet. It had been too long. Not a click or a clack for twenty minutes, not a single fire code or dessert order. I checked the roll of paper. No jam. The machine seemed plugged in. Jumping on the intercom, I called Joe, the deejay and techie who knew about such things, and asked him discreetly to check and see if there was a problem.
Apparently there was. Suddenly the machine came alive, clacking away like nobody's business, spitting out orders in a terrifying, unending stream, one after the other after the other, faster than I could tear them off: twenty-five minutes of backed-up orders we hadn't even heard about. Worried front waiters entered the kitchen, took one look at what was going on, and retreated silently. Nothing to be done here.
It was clear to all of us by now—except maybe Bobby, who was still in his own ninth circle of personal restaurant hell, cursing and spitting and doing his best to cook, plate, and assemble orders, elbowing us out of the way as he ran heroically back and forth between stations—that we were now involved in a complete disaster. The situation was beyond saving. We could dig out . . . eventually. At some time, yes, we might feed these people. But we would not bring honor to our clan tonight. We would not go home proud. There would be no celebratory drinks at the end of this night (if it ever ended), only shame and recriminations.
Then I looked over at the kitchen doors and saw a particularly dismaying sight: three or four waiters clustered silently in the hallway. I hurried over to confer, away from Bobby's hearing. When waiters stop complaining, it is an unnatural thing. What were they doing out there? Things were bad in the dining room, I knew, but shouldn't they be down on the floor, putting out fires? Comping champagne? Reassuring their tables with self-deprecating apologies and offers of free cognac and port?
"What's up?" I inquired of the most reasonable of the lot, an aspiring playwright with many years of table service experience.
"Dude . . . they're drunk out there," he replied. "They've been sitting out there without food for an hour and a half. Drinking champagne. They've got nothing in their bellies but alcohol—and they're getting belligerent."
Veronica, a chubby waitress with (we had heard) a rose tattoo on her ass, was red faced and shaking. "A customer choked me," she cried, eyes filling with tears. "He stood up and put his hands around my neck and fucking choked me, screaming 'WHERE'S MY FUCKING FOOD?!' . . . It's out of control, Tony! I'm afraid to go out there. We all are!"
I rushed back to the kitchen, where Bobby was successfully putting out a few tables of appetizers. But orders were still coming back. There was more stuff coming back than going out, and with all the replates and refires, the caviar supply was running low.
"Bobby," I said, carefully. "I think we should 86 the oysters."
"We are not 86ing the fucking oysters," snarled Bobby.
The kitchen doors swung open. It was Larry the waiter with tears running down his face. Now this was about as bad a sign as you could see, as Larry only moonlighted as a waiter. His day job was as a cop in the South Bronx. What, on the floor of a restaurant, could be so bad, so frightful, so monstrous as to cause a ten-year veteran of the force, a guy who'd been shot twice in the line of duty, to become so traumatized?
"They're beating the customers," Larry wailed. "People are getting up and trying to leave—and security is beating them! They're going fucking nuts!"
"It's out of control," moaned Ed, the runner. "It's a nightmare."
NiteKlub, it should be pointed out, usually operated as exactly that once the dinner shift was over. Consequently, we employed a security staff of twenty-three heavily muscled gorillas. These folks, though quite nice when not frog-marching you out the front door or dragging you down the steps, were employed to deal with the more rigorous demands of keeping order in a busy dance club: organized posses of gate-crashers, out-of-control drunks, belligerent ex-boyfriends—many of them potentially armed. They were frequently injured, often for giving a momentary benefit of doubt, for instance, to some barely-out-of-adolescence knucklehead half their weight denied entry to the VIP area, who promptly sucker-punched them or cold-cocked them with a beer bottle. This kind of thing gave our average security guy a rather shorter fuse than most ordinary restaurant floor staff. That this was a tonier crowd was a distinction security could hardly be expected to make. Especially as the customers were drunk and outraged at having spent hundreds of dollars for nothing, and heading for the doors in droves. Though they were said to be dealing out beat-downs to middle-aged couples from the suburbs who'd only wanted a nice New Year's Eve and some swing music, they could hardly be blamed for following the same orders they had been given every other night.
"I'm not going back out there. For anything," said Larry.
We tried. We did the best we could that awful night. To his credit, Bobby cooked as hard and as fast as he could until the very end, pretty much doing everything himself, unwilling or unable to trust anyone to help him out of the hole he'd put us all in. It was probably the wisest thing to do. Between my calling and his cooking, there was a nice, direct simplicity, less chance of confusion. We served—eventually—a lot of cold baked oysters (many without caviar) and undercooked foie gras, leathery Dover sole and overcooked lobster, lukewarm birds and roasted beef.
1991 slipped into 1992 without notice or mention in the kitchen. No one dared speak. The word "Happy" in relation to anything would not have occurred to any of us. At twelve forty-five, in what was perhaps the perfect coda to the evening, a lone, bespectacled customer in a rumpled tuxedo entered the kitchen, wandered up to the saute end (where Bobby was still doing his best to get out entrees), and, peering back at the stove, asked, in a disconcertingly bemused voice: "Pardo
n me . . . but is that my appetizer order?"
He'd been waiting for it since eight forty-five.
I thought he'd showed remarkable patience.
At the end of the night, as it turned out, management had to comp (meaning return money) for $7,500 worth of meals. A few overzealous security goons had (allegedly) incited a few of our guests to file lawsuits claiming varying degrees of violent assault. And the effect on the kitchen staff was palpable.
Dougie and Steven quit. Adam became a titanic discipline problem, his respect for his chef declining to the point that it would, much later, lead to fisticuffs. Morale sank to the point that cooks arrived high—rather than waiting until later. And I got the chef's job after Bobby, wisely, went elsewhere.
And I learned. Nobody likes a "learning experience"—translating as it does to "a total ass-fucking"—but I learned. When the next year's New Year's Eve event loomed, I planned. I planned that mother like Ike planned Normandy. My menu was circulated (to management, floor, and every cook), discussed, tested, and retested. Each and every menu choice was an indestructible ocean liner classic—preseared or half-cooked hours before the first guest arrived. There wasn't an oyster in sight, or on any of the many New Year's menus I've done since. Just slice and serve terrine of foie gras. Slap-and-serve salads. My truffle soup the next year (it had been a good idea, actually) sat prebowled and precovered in a hot bain, ready to toss in the oven. I spread dishes around evenly between stations, imagining always the worst-case scenario. As, of course, I'd lived through it. My tournedos were preseared and required only a pop in the oven, some reheated spuds, a quickly tossed medley of veg, and a ready-to-pour sauce. My lobsters took a swift pop under the salamander. I'd be proud of the fact that my New Year's went flawlessly, that my full dining room of customers went home happy and content, and that I, unlike the vastly-more-talented-but-less-organized Bobby, brought honor and profit to my masters.
But the fact is, I could have served the following year's menu with a line crew of chimps. The food was nowhere as good as it could have been. My food arrived fast. It arrived hot. It arrived at the same time as the other orders on the table. But it was no better (or worse) than what a bunch of overdressed drunks dumb enough to eat at our club expected. Having tasted total defeat the previous year, when my last entree went out at eleven thirty, leaving only the mopping-up operations (aka desserts), I was ebullient. Not a single order had come back. I jumped up on the stainless-steel table we'd used to stack assembled dishes and beat my chest and congratulated one and all. We turned up the music, peeled off our reeking whites, changed into our street clothes, and I ordered us up a few pitchers of Long Island Iced Teas and beer. We drank like champions. And felt like champions. We went home exhausted but proud.
Sometimes, you just have to make compromises to get the job done.
Ship of Fools
JIMMY BRADLEY
Jimmy Bradley co-owns and operates a number of New York City restaurants that started out as neighborhood joints and wound up as destinations for diners from across the country: the Red Cat, the Harrison, the Mermaid Inn, and (the more grand-scaled) Face. After attending the University of Rhode Island, Bradley worked in some of Philadelphia and Rhode Island's top kitchens before becoming executive chef of Savoir Fare, a progressive Martha's Vineyard bistro where he began his trademark style of straightforward, boldly flavored seasonal cooking.
THIS STORY WOULD never happen today. It probably could only have taken place in the 1980s, when drug and alcohol abuse in the restaurant industry were at their zenith. The names of the restaurant, the chef, and the owner have been changed to protect the innocent, the not-so-innocent, and—most importantly—myself.
In 1986,1 was a young cook working in a seaside resort town along the coast of Rhode Island, not unlike the kind of place you might find along the Jersey Shore. I worked for a restaurant—we'll call it the Harbor Cove Inn—that was one of the better eateries in the area, one of the few places that didn't make its money on an autopilot menu of baked scrod with Ritz cracker crumbs, lobster Newburg, and baked stuffed shrimp.
The Harbor Cove Inn was as close to fine dining as it got in this town, a nondescript, carpeted dining room; walls papered with parchment; a staff of salty locals, high school students, and college kids; and a small but serviceable kitchen in the back.
Credit for our noteworthy offerings belonged to the chef—we'll call him Fernando—a Puerto Rican who had worked in New York City and, through some cruel twist of fate that I never really understood, wound up in this tiny hamlet. I liked Fernando. He was talented, both creatively and as a kitchen technician. And he liked me, enough that he promoted me from line cook to sous-chef in a very short time.
The third character in this ill-fated tale is the restaurant's My lobsters took a swift pop under the salamander. I'd be proud of the fact that my New Year's went flawlessly, that my full dining room of customers went home happy and content, and that I,unlike the vastly-more-talented-but-less-organized Bobby, brought honor and profit to my masters. owner, a Rhode Island wise guy who for our purposes will go by the name of Frankie. You've seen men like Frankie in the movies, or on The Sopranos—connected guys who have their hands in a mix of local businesses. Frankie owned not only a restaurant but also an auto dealership and a liquor store, and he was on the board of just about every committee in town. Like those movie and TV characters, Frankie had a base of operations, an office in a huge complex, where he ran his empire, his only visible aid coming from the "girl" at the secretary station outside his office, a sweet, maternal figure named (not really) Delores.
Frankie was a real local character. He might not have stood out much in New York or New Jersey, but in this little Rhode Island town, his three-piece suits combined with his diminutive stature and bruiser's gait made it easy to spot him from a mile away—as did his hair, which, though he was only in his mid- to late thirties, was prematurely gray.
I had been working at the Harbor Cove Inn for eight or nine months when, one February day, a ray of sunshine broke upon my bleak New England winter. Frankie strutted into the restaurant and, apropos of nothing, pulled aside me and Fernando. "Listen," he told us, "I just saw this new space that's up for grabs. I think we could do something really nice there. You guys can have some more creative freedom, the town'll get another good restaurant, and we'll all make some more money. Everybody's gonna win."
Fernando and I couldn't have been more excited. We drove over to check out the space and discovered, to our delight, a charming little converted house with enough space between its white clapboard walls and the street to allow for outdoor seating in the spring and summer. Inside, the dining room had space enough to comfortably accommodate about a hundred people—significantly more than the Harbor Cove—and a bar from which we could already imagine the flow of white Zinfandels and Fuzzy Navels, the drinks of the moment in 1980s Rhode Island beach towns.
We headed straight back to the Harbor Cove and started making up dishes for the new place—doing our thing with lobster, filet mignon, and veal—running them as nightly specials starting that very day.
Over the next four months, we did everything in our power to ensure that when the restaurant opened in the summer, it would make a big splash—continuing to evolve those dishes, designing the kitchen, and so on.
Come summertime, Frankie planned a big opening party for the new restaurant. We had what was supposed to be our last meeting a week before the party, but on the day of the party, Frankie abruptly summoned us to another meeting. When we arrived, Fernando and I were in sky-high spirits, chattering about how much fun we were going to have that night.
And then, Frankie threw a big wet blanket over the two of us. "Listen, fellas," he said, "the rest of the investors and I talked it over and we decided that, since this is really an invite-only party, you two shouldn't be there."
It took a moment for this to sink in. After all, how could the chef and sous-chef not attend the opening of the restaurant they'd just s
pent four months getting ready? Did it mean we were being fired? I glanced over at Fernando, who looked equally worried.
"Shouldn't one of us be there?" Fernando said, taking a shot at an appeal.
Frankie shook his little gray head.
"No. You guys did a great job getting the food ready, but I really need you to stay back at the Harbor Cove Inn and make sure things run smoothly there tonight."
Heads hanging low, and wondering if our livelihoods were at stake—not to mention feeling considerably insulted—we returned to the Harbor Cove Inn and did what cooks do: our jobs, sullenly starting to prep for that evening's service. In an attempt to take my mind off the situation, I turned on the radio I kept at my station, and even started making a big vat of spaghetti sauce for the next day, stirring it with a long, paddlelike wand as it simmered away.
But Fernando was consumed with anger. For the next hour, I watched it boil up within him. He didn't say a word, but everything he did was fueled by fury. When he'd put a saute pan to the flame, he'd bang it down like he was clubbing someone over the head. When he'd cut a cucumber, he'd bring the knife down so hard, I was sure he was picturing Frankie's neck there on his cutting board.
One thing was certain: if Fernando didn't get a grip, this was going to be a long night.
Less than an hour before service, Fernando was still stomping around, slamming refrigerator doors and flinging pans into the sink. The kitchen staff was on edge and the waiters were nervously keeping their distance. I took it upon myself to perform an intervention.
"Chef, what're we gonna do about this? We gotta find a way to chill out."
Fernando ignored me, continuing his sadistic vivisection of yet another hapless vegetable. But then, suddenly, he was gripped with inspiration. He put down his knife, turned, and looked me in the eye. "Fuck this!" he said. "You wanna know what the fuck we're gonna do? I'll tell you what the fuck we're gonna do!"
Don't Try This at Home Page 6