I stepped back, thinking, Oh, shit. This ain't gonna be good.
Fernando was possessed with a dark clarity that, if it weren't so scary, would have been impressive. He began barking orders to the kitchen staff: "You, go get me a bucket. You, go get me three bottles of vodka and two bottles of triple sec. You, go get a big mess of limes and squeeze 'em, and bring me the juice. You, bring me some ice."
Those of us who weren't scattered about to do Fernando's bidding stood there in rapt anticipation, watching our commander in chief, wondering where this was all headed.
"And me," he said, the glimmer in his eye approaching supernova status. "I'm gonna stand here and make five gallons worth of shots."
Shots? So he was going to get hammered? Big deal.
If only that were the case.
Fernando wasn't just going to get himself hammered. He had devised a new drinking game for the express entertainment of the staff of the Harbor Cove Inn. He summoned the entire crew—the waiters, the bartenders, the busboys, the dishwashers, and the cooks—and began to explain the rules. Normally, the maitre d' would've stepped in and put a stop to this, but—guess what?—he was invited to the party. The cat was away, so to speak.
"Listen up," Fernando said to us. "I've come to a decision and I feel strongly about it. This is what's going to happen tonight: if you are going to perform any duty that has anything to do with fulfilling your job, then before you do that duty, you must do a shot. So, bartenders, if you're going to make a drink, you do a shot. Busboys, if you're going to clear a table, you do a shot. Waiters, before you take a tray of food to a table, you do a shot. Dishwashers, before you take a rack out of the steamer, you do a shot."
We were all taken aback by this scheme, but before we could say a word in protest, Fernando cemented the deal.
"Okay. Right now. Everybody, let's do a shot. Come on!"
We obeyed our orders, even the fresh-faced kids, and knocked back a shot. Then we got into positions for the first guests.
I must admit that much of that evening is a blur to me. It was like being on a ship that was rocking to and fro; I and everybody else were doing our best just to stay on our feet, wobbling and weaving and fighting occasional bouts of nausea, yet somehow, miraculously, maintaining verticality.
As the evening wore on, Fernando got more and more aggressive with the game. Doing a shot became part of his commands: "We need some more saute pans over here. Bring me some saute pans and do a shot" "Table Twelve is ready. Pick up Table Twelve and do a shot"
By eight thirty, the kitchen was inundated with orders, and struggling to work through. Fernando, though drunk, had enough presence of mind to know that we were at the point of no return. He once again summoned the entire staff into the kitchen, including the front-of-the-house team.
With everyone assembled, dizzily listing to one side, or leaning on each other for balance, Fernando continued his fierce display of leadership. "Okay, guys. We're almost there. One last big push and we're through the night. I know you can all do it . . . so let's do a shot and keep on going."
As we all did yet another shot, Fernando came over to my station and turned the radio up full blast. The kitchen was flooded with the theme song of Hawaii Five-O: Buh huh buh buh buh buh. Ba puh puh puh puh.
Fernando took the wand out of my hand and began rowing an imaginary canoe.
. . . buh buh buh buh buh buh . . .
He did it with such gusto that I joined in, paddling in synch with the music and my fearless leader . . .
. . . bah puh puh puh puh . . .
One by one, the entire staff joined in, grabbing paddles, and when those ran out, tongs, spatulas, wooden spoons, anything that would get the idea across.
I later learned that, unbeknownst to us, at about the time Fernando was giving us his pep talk, Frankie had returned to the Harbor Cove Inn from his party. He had walked in through the front door and seen a dining room full of customers, with not one staff member in sight. No coffee was being poured, no bread was being served, no dirty plates were being cleared—just a lot of confused diners wondering what the hell was going on.
And at the moment that we were all hopping on board the incredible, invisible canoe, Frankie had come into the kitchen, witnessed the spectacle for himself, and slipped back out. Amazingly, he went unnoticed by the entire drunken lot of us.
The next day, I managed to find my way back to the Harbor Cove Inn. Fernando, professional that he was, was already there. Also on hand was the general manager, who had been at the party the night before. We didn't know why, but the manager gave us the cold shoulder all morning. "What's his problem," I wondered. "He got to go to the party."
Later that morning, we got a call from Delores, Frankie's secretary, informing us that Frankie wanted us to come to his office for a meeting.
Fernando and I smiled at each other. Surely, we thought, we were being summoned over for a belated apology for the party slight.
We drove to the complex that housed Frankie's office and took the elevator up to his suite. As always, Delores was sitting at the desk outside.
"Hi ya, boys, how ya doin'?"
"Great, Delores. You?"
"Okay, I guess."
"What's Frankie want?"
"I don't know. He wouldn't say. But go on in. He's ready for you."
Fernando and I exchanged a wry smile and I opened the door to Frankie's office, a huge, Spartan room with wraparound picture windows that offered a spectacular view of the Atlantic.
Frankie had one of those old-fashioned, high-backed leather executive chairs and when we entered the room, he was seated in it, facing the ocean. We couldn't see him at all. As we sat on the couch in front of the desk, we found ourselves staring at this monolithic wall of leather.
We waited in silence for what felt like a week. Frankie didn't make a sound, just let us sit there, wondering what was coming.
Finally, he spun around in the chair. His face was purple with anger. He stood up and leaned forward against the desk, putting the palms of his hands on the shiny black surface for support, and stared us both right in the eyes. But he didn't say a word. Instead, he picked up the newspaper and walked around to our side of the desk. Then he tossed the paper at our chests and sauntered out the door.
Fernando and I looked at each other in bewilderment, then down at the paper. Staring back at us was the "Help Wanted" section, opened to the page featuring Restaurants and Bars.
"Are we fired?" I asked Fernando.
"I don't know."
We left the office and found Delores parked at her desk.
"Hey, Delores, are we fired?"
"Yeah. I'm sorry, boys. Frankie just told me on the way out. He said to have you escorted out of the building, and to tell you that he'd like to never see either of you again."
I've been in the restaurant business for close to twenty years. That was the first time I was fired, and—since I own my own places now—probably the last.
Fernando doesn't own his own restaurants, but the two of us found work just two days later in another fine restaurant about five miles away from Frankie's joint, and Fernando's still working there to this day. So even though we haven't spoken in years, I like to think that he looks back on that night with humor and some measure of pride, for giving us one hell of an evening to look back on . . . even if we can't remember many of the details.
If You Can't Stand the Heat
SCOTT BRYAN
Scott Bryan is the executive chef of Veritas in New York City. He began his career working for his mentor, Bob Kinkead of the Harvest restaurant in Boston (currently the chef-owner of Kinkead's in Washington, D.C.), whom he also worked for at 21 Federal on Nantucket. Bryan went on to learn at many of the best restaurants in New York, including Gotham Bar and Grill, Restaurant Bouley, Le Bernardin, Lespinasse, and Mondrian, as well as Square One in San Francisco. In 1994, he became executive chef of Soleil, then of Alison on Dominick Street, after which he entered into a partnership with Gino Di
aferia that spawned a series of restaurants including Luma, Indigo, and ultimately Veritas. In 1996, Bryan was named one of the Best New Chefs in the United States by Food & Wine Magazine.
THIS is A story about practicality, or rather about the highs and lows that impracticality can visit upon you.
When I was a cook, I worked for a number of great chefs, more than most guys have. I took from each of them what I could. Alfred Portale was the best garde manger I'd ever seen; he did beautiful, graceful things with herbs and greens, dressing and seasoning them better than anyone I had worked with before, or have since. David Bouley was the most artistic; he could pull stuff out of his hat that nobody else would have thought of—and make it work. He also taught me how to plate food from the center out, a valuable technique that has stayed with me to this day.
But, in many ways, the man who had the biggest influence on me was one of the least famous chefs who ever hired me, Robert Kinkead, whom I worked for at a restaurant called the Harvest way back when I was just getting started.
I think of Kinkead as my mentor because he taught me about both parts of being a chef: technique and management. While less recognized, the second is just as important, because if you can't manage a kitchen, you can't get the food done the way you want it and you will fail.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't respect Kinkead only for his ability to marshal the troops. He was a great chef. I include him in my personal pantheon of masters because he was the best saucier I ever worked with.
But of the many impressive things I learned from Kinkead, perhaps the most invaluable was to let your staff express an idea. If you had a thought for a new dish, or even a way to improve an existing one, he'd listen. If he didn't like it, he would tell you why. But if he did, he'd implement it.
You can call it being modest, or humble, or just open-minded. Whatever it is, it's practical. If you see a better way, why wouldn't you go with it?
Unfortunately, it isn't like that in every kitchen. I remember trying to offer my two cents on a dish at Square One restaurant in San Francisco, and being quietly reprimanded with the house catchphrase: "We don't do that here."
Kinkead's lack of pretension and ego, his reverence for the practical, stuck with me so much that it would become the reason I left one of the most famous kitchens in the United States after just six months.
But it's amazing that it took that long.
I did things in the opposite order of a lot of guys. I had worked for a bunch of American chefs before I ever spent time in a French kitchen. My impression was that I had probably learned to do everything fast and half-assed, and I always wondered what it would be like to cook in a more formal kitchen organized after the French model.
This impulse reached critical mass the night I had an extraordinary dinner at Bouley in 1987. Restaurant Bouley was one of the few four-star restaurants in New York, and I came away from the meal having finally made up my mind to go for it and see how I fared in a place like that.
I spent the next few years working in some of the best restaurants in town, including Bouley itself, as well as Mondrian and Le Bernardin. But, without a doubt, the most memorable time I spent in a four-star kitchen, for mostly the wrong reasons, was at Lespinasse.
Lespinasse, if you don't know, was situated in the St. Regis Hotel, which had just undergone a renovation that cost something like $100 million. The new dining room was the most opulent one in town, so extravagant and old fashioned that you could have worn a powdered wig and Restoration-era costume in to dinner and looked right at home.
Gray Kunz, who now presides over Cafe Gray in the Time Warner Center, had made a name for himself at the Peninsula Hotel. Gray is a soft-spoken Swiss guy, a true gentleman, who was raised partially in Singapore and had worked under the legendary Fredy Girardet. He had also cooked in Hong Kong for years, so he brought all kinds of Asian ingredients to his menu, which was far less common in those days.
Lespinasse was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, and it was widely expected that it would receive four stars, which it did. After a series of interviews with Gray, I was hired as one of two poissonniers (fish cooks), starting work just two weeks after the restaurant opened.
There were two kitchens at Lespinasse: one for the restaurant, and another kitchen around a corner that handled room service for the hotel, which we had nothing to do with. As you might expect, the restaurant kitchen was an intense and serious place. Each cook kept his head down and was focused on the job at hand. When I started, I jumped right in, preparing the dishes that had been described to me in the morning, and cooking them for lunch service that day.
After only a few hours, however, I began to notice problems that seemed odd, especially for such a well-funded enterprise. The kitchen was big and roomy, with state-of-the-art equipment, but it was oppressively hot. The extreme heat was only aggravated by the fact that Gray, a classicist, insisted we wear hats and neckerchiefs at all times. (Eventually, I stopped wearing underwear to lower my body temperature a few degrees, but it didn't help much.)
Additionally, at the end of my first night, I discovered another, even more bizzare oddity: there wasn't enough staff. There were plenty of cooks, sure, but there weren't any porters, not a single one, and no cleaning crew, either. Which meant that after putting in a full day in a sweltering hot kitchen, you had to clean all your utensils, lay them out according to Gray's precise instructions on your prep table, and then mop the floor at your station.
Since we all started our day at about seven thirty in the morning, these late nights, which typically ran to one thirty or two a.m., cost the restaurant a small fortune, as we were each paid time-and-a-half after our first eight hours.
Impractical? To say the least.
But impracticality can also create some memorable by-products, and Lespinasse's food was stunningly, gloriously impractical. I'll tell you right now that I will never again see anything like the food we did there.
Most restaurants at the level of a Lespinasse strive to keep their food costs (the ratio of expense to menu price) anywhere from 30 to 40 percent. Ours, however, easily ran to 60. For example, one item on the tasting menu was a sweetbread dish that featured a perfectly turned, cooked artichoke bottom topped with a spoonful of wild-mushroom risotto and a nugget of sauteed sweetbread, all surrounded by a shallow moat of black truffle sauce. It easily cost thirty-five dollars to make, and it was just one of the five tasting menu dishes—a meal that sold for the whopping grand total of eighty-five dollars.
Chefs dream about those kinds of dishes, and it was something to behold so many of them under one roof.
I'll say it one more time: I'll never see that kind of thing again.
Every day at Lespinasse was crazed. We were all working ridiculous hours, eighteen to twenty per day, with just thirty minutes off after lunch service, and sometimes seven days a week. During my busiest week, I logged 126 hours.
Within a couple months, the nonstop hours and the pressure began to take their toll. Cooks were still able to perform their work, but they were often in a semiconscious state. Guys would get careless, cut their fingers, be too tired or distracted to keep the wound clean, and end up out for a week with an infection. One guy let an ingrown toenail go for so long that he had to take a leave of absence. I started to understand how soldiers did desperate things, like shooting themselves in the foot, to get discharged and sent home.
One Saturday morning, I was informed by the manager that Cristophe, the French cook who was the other poissonnier, had called in sick. I was going to have to run the station on my own.
"Did he give any details?" I asked.
The manager shook his head. "Just sick."
That's weird, I thought, because Cristophe had gone home the night before—which in that kitchen meant just a few hours earlier—looking fine. And Cristophe was a seasoned professional, with great credentials, having worked at such restaurants as Taillevent, one of the best places in Paris.
The next day, Cristophe called
in sick again. And the next. In fact, he continued to make a morning phone call every day for the rest of the week, all of them with the same message: I'm sick and I won't be coming in.
The following Saturday, Cristophe returned to the kitchen, looking fresh and pink cheeked. I pulled him into the walk-in and confronted him.
"What the fuck? You don't seem sick. You sure as hell weren't sick when you went home last Friday night. What happened?"
Cristophe looked off into the distance, which in the walk-in meant up into a plastic bin full of arugula on the highest rack.
"Man," he said, in his thick French accent, the word full of wistful weariness. "I went home last Friday night and went to bed. I woke up Saturday. I was so depressed. So I call in sick. I woke up Sunday, I was still depressed. I went out to lunch. It was so great to go to lunch. So I don't come in Monday . . ." I stayed at Lespinasse for six months. I might have stayed longer, but something happened that had nothing to do with how crazy the kitchen was, and everything to do with how impractical it was—and also with the lasting impression that Kinkead made on me.
At my station, there were two salamanders, long broiling machines that are open on both sides with a heating element under the lid. They were both to be kept on at all times.
But one quiet Sunday night, with few customers in the restaurant, I turned off one of the salamanders. We used them for only a single dish, a braised snapper that was flashed under the heat for a quick second before being served. I could get four servings in one salamander at a time, or eight if I turned the plates in a certain direction. And we never, not even on our busiest night, got hit with four orders simultaneously.
One of the sous-chefs, a guy about my age, came up to me and informed me that Gray wanted both salamanders on at all times.
"Yeah, I know, but it's wicked hot in here and we never get more than four orders at once."
"Sorry, Scott, that's the way Gray wants it."
Don't Try This at Home Page 7