ONE OF THE great benefits of being a chef is that you get to travel. Cooking around the world has helped me learn about different cuisines, people, and customs. Traveling widely as a chef has also taught me a few valuable lessons about my own craft.
My first chance to see the world as a cook was at the age of twenty; I was on my way from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Gascony region in the Southwest of France, for a stage at a famed two-star inn and hotel. This was to be my first time away from home, and my family threw me a big going-away party. I left a couple weeks before my stage began, figuring it would allow me plenty of time to get to Gascony from Brussels, where my $99 People's Express flight would touch down. On the flight over I found myself seated near a friend, a waiter at a restaurant where I had worked in New Jersey. He was on his way to Brussels to work as a model. He invited me to join him for a week, as he was crashing in the apartment of two gorgeous Belgian girls—sisters. I quickly agreed, figuring that this, too, would be an important learning experience. The girls welcomed me enthusiastically. An actual American chef! They treated me like a rock star. The apartment was so small, it had only one bed. This was great! Let the education begin!
As I recall, I later found out that one of the sisters had a boyfriend. The other one was . . . uninterested, to say the least. I learned that striking out overseas felt exactly as it did at home—it sucked.
But life went on, and I had a great experience in France. My career steadily grew when I returned to the States, and many years later I found myself bombarded with invitations to travel the world over. I've cooked alone and with teams of chefs, on cruise ships in the Baltics, in the great hotel kitchens of Tokyo, for Olympic athletes in Athens, and for food enthusiasts in private homes around the world. It's always a thrill, but coordinating a meal (or numerous meals) in a faraway place is never without its hazards. As I travel from place to place with my cooks, trying to raise awareness for important causes or just to show people a good time, I've learned two things.
1. The folks inviting me will promise the world: a first-class kitchen loaded with the best equipment, an eager and skilled prep staff hungering for a chance to learn alongside a "celebrity chef," extraordinary local ingredients . . . wild game, organic vegetables . . . etc., etc.
2. I must never rely on this. Ever.
Plenty of events have found me and my loyal crew cooking in a shoebox kitchen with two working burners. We've learned that local staff often don't show up, or don't show up with knife skills; and as for those amazing, local ingredients . . . let's just say I've determined exactly how many frozen squab I can fit into my fishing bag. If I don't bring it, you don't eat it.
You may think I'm joking, but I'm dead serious. On one trip to the Bahamas, where I was asked to teach a cooking class, I packed a couple dozen squab into my fishing bag. All went well until I hit Customs in Nassau. The Bahamian customs agent didn't give a damn about my cooking class, but once I palmed him $50, he was happy to wave me through. From this I learned to always have some ready cash at hand—literally.
For bigger events, my cooks and I have the travel thing down to a science, but even so, things sometimes go awry. Once we were invited to cook an important dinner for Conde Nast's worldwide ad sales team, in a country club just outside Detroit. The event was a sit-down five-course dinner for 250 people. In other words . . . 1,250 portions, i.e., a lot of food. Experience dictated that I pack every last morsel and bring it all along with me on the plane. This might seem anal, but my relationships with farmers and growers have accustomed me to great ingredients, and my style of cooking wholly depends on this. So my cooks and I packed it all up—short ribs sealed in their Cryovac casing, shelled lobster claws and tails nestled into giant plastic bins, tubs of veal demi-glace and bundles of fresh herbs—crammed everything into large, insulated cartons and hauled it along with us to the airport. At the terminal, the gate agents informed us that the cartons each weighed too much to go on the plane. We offered to pay the extra fare—and were politely declined. As the minutes ticked by and boarding began, we offered to ship everything freight, but were told that the cartons exceeded FAA weight regulations. So I got on the phone to D'Artagnan, the legendary specialty foods company, whose warehouses were nearby in Newark, and asked them to rush over more insulated cartons, which they did. We missed our flight while my cooks and I opened each of the boxes in the middle of the terminal, and under the wide-eyed gaze of vacationing families, repacked the food into many more boxes, each weighing under the freight regulation 50 pounds. We were able to rebook onto a later flight, which would still get us into Detroit in time to prep for the dinner. The new cartons were wheeled off on hand trucks to wherever freight goes.
In Detroit we deplaned and awaited our boxes. They didn't arrive. The airline insisted that the crates would be on the next plane, due in two hours. My cooks snuck nervous glances at me and at their watches, and we settled into those plastic bucket seats in the Northwest terminal to wait. In the meantime, I chatted with the driver who had been sent to meet us.
"You know," I told him, "we have a lot of boxes coming. Dozens, in fact. And they're quite large."
The driver laughed it off. "I have a truck," he answered. "I drive entire hockey teams in that thing. You ever see a hockey team—those bags of theirs?"
I suggested he send for a second truck anyway. He shook his head at my worrying. I think he chalked it up to a New York thing.
Eventually the food arrived. My able-bodied cooks and I hauled them one by one off the conveyer belt and stacked them. The driver watched as the stacks grew, then shook his head. "No way are those gonna fit in my truck."
I sprinted to Hertz and rented two Ford Expeditions. We squeezed the food into the truck and the two vans and headed to the country club where 250 people expected the meal of a lifetime in a few short hours. We got there late. We worked our asses off. We sweated. Conde Nast arrived. The food went out. And none of the guests that night knew just how close they had come to going hungry.
On another occasion, however, they did. I had donated a dinner for twelve in a private home as an auction gift to a children's charity. The day of the private dinner arrived and we packed our boxes and loaded them into my SUV to drive out to the host's house in New Jersey. The weather report said snow, so we left extra early. The snow hit, along with driving ice and sleet, and the trip to this bedroom community—ordinarily a forty-five-minute drive—took three hours. The hostess began calling my cell phone at ten-minute intervals, alternating between tears and tirades. As her guests arrived, we were trapped in a highway whiteout. I felt awful.
We showed up to a house full of guests and flew into action. This is when I know how good my cooks are. We barely need to speak as we whirl around the kitchen dicing, sauteing, stirring, and plating; our communication is wordless and complete. Suddenly, I heard: "Oh, shit!" I looked up to find that Johnny Schaefer, my right-hand man at Gramercy Tavern, had gone pale. "We forgot the lobster," he said. Our piece de resistance that night was a favorite from the menu at Gramercy, poached lobster served in a lobster sauce gently scented with vanilla. We had the sauce, even the garnish, but somehow the lobster hadn't made it onto the truck.
A long beat while we all just stood there. Suddenly I hit on an idea. We had brought a few beautiful lobes of foie gras, originally meant to be roasted, sliced, and served on rounds of toast as hors d'ouevres, but the late hour had pushed us right into dinner. To make up for the missing lobster, we poached the foie gras and served it in the lobster sauce. The dinner was a hit. If I remember correctly, the wife got thoroughly drunk and hugged me on the way out.
There have been times when I simply can't bring food with me. Invited to cook a dinner on the Sea Goddess, a small high-end cruise ship set to sail through the Mediterranean, I was told I could purchase my ingredients before we set sail in the markets of Helsinki. I did just that, availing myself of the wonderful fresh produce and seafood. I loaded everything into the galley's walk-in and headed to my cab
in for a quick nap as the ship pushed off. A couple hours later, when I returned to start prepping, I found that my food was gone. The cooks, prepping for lunch and other daily meals, had seen my hand-chosen ingredients, preferred them to the stuff they normally had to cook with, and had helped themselves. From that I learned to label everything that goes into another chef's kitchens as MINE—DO NOT TOUCH.
One favorite trip is my annual jaunt to the Aspen Food and Wine Festival, in June. I'm always looking for ways to spend more time with my son, so one year I decided to bring Dante, then three, along for the ride. I was invited to participate in a panel discussion with a host of other chefs, and rather than track down a babysitter, I decided to stash Dante with his Legos under the table at my feet. The long cloth kept him hidden out of sight of the audience members who'd paid a hefty price to hear me and others talk about food. About halfway through the panel, I noticed that everything we "experts" were saying was eliciting peals of delighted laughter. I mean, we were killing them. One look down and I understood why. My son had lifted the long cloth, discovered hundreds of people in the room, and had started to entertain them with funny faces. Dante was such a hit that the festival organizers brought him up to the microphone at a later panel and asked him to introduce Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger of the Border Grill, aka the "Two Hot Tamales." Not one to waste the limelight, my son grabbed the mic and introduced the talented chefs as "Two Hot Poo-pies!" Boy, was I proud.
Another year at the Aspen Food and Wine Fest, Michael Romano and I were asked to cook a dinner for American Express Platinum Card members at the Ritz-Carlton. Again I had decided to prepare squab, one of my favorites, as the main course. The kitchen was a long trek from the dining room so I asked the hotel to set up a grill nearby. They accommodated me by placing the grill just outside the dining building, where it abutted a parking garage. Moments before the dinner, the smoke from the grill made its way to the parking structure's internal fire alarm and set it off, which in turn triggered the alarms for the entire hotel. Soon, panicked guests in their haste to get away began streaming out of the hotel's back door in various stages of undress, even knocking over our prep table, where my squab and Michael's food went spilling onto the concrete. One guy had apparently been caught in a hotel fire in Hawaii and no amount of explanation could get him to calm down. I learned there to look for hair-trigger fire alarms (and not set up my prep table in the line of traffic).
Traveling for work means performing a delicate tap dance with my schedule—one that allows me time in the kitchens of my restaurants, face time with my staff, as well as a decent personal life. But sometimes the dance falls flat. Case in point: recently I was invited to perform with a friend's rock band at D'Artagnan's gala twenty-fifth-anniversary bash. I'm no Clapton, but I take my playing seriously enough that I'd practiced nonstop for weeks in the early mornings and late at night, driving my poor wife to distraction. This was a dream come true for me; I was set to solo on two numbers and play backup on the rest, and I had to get it right. The only problem: I was slated to attend a major food and wine festival in Knoxville. The organizers had asked me to teach a cooking course one day and to cook at a charity dinner the following night, and the concert fell smack in between. So I arranged to fly home after the class, play the gig, and then fly right back into Knoxville for the charity dinner. As fate would have it, a freak March blizzard on the night in question kept me grounded in Knoxville and the band went on without me. That was the beginning and the end of my rock star career.
This past summer, I took off with Dante, now twelve, for the summer Olympics, where I was invited to cook for guests on a ship harbored in Athens. I was asked to fax the recipes ahead of time so that the food and beverage team could shop and prep for my arrival—this was crucial since scheduling conflicts were keeping me from arriving until the morning of my big dinner. As Dante and I boarded the boat, I was immediately summoned into an emergency meeting with the food and beverage team.
"We don't have your food," they told me.
I figured it was the jet lag affecting my hearing, but sure enough, there wasn't so much as a breadstick awaiting my arrival. "Didn't you get the recipes?" I asked. They had. But they hadn't understood them, they told me. So they did nothing.
I set up Dante in the cabin with a bunch of videos and immediately went to work, teetering with exhaustion. I marshaled a team to leave the ship and shop, another to start on the stocks, and somehow we pulled it off. My son and I spent the rest of the week enjoying the games, but it was a close call. From this I learned to call ahead and double-check. To not assume I'm being understood. And then to call again.
The travel stories are endless, but at the end of the day I guess all of these experiences have taught me that if I'm lucky enough to get invited to see the world one kitchen at a time, than ultimately it's my job to get it right—whatever that takes. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's nerve-racking, but the rewards always outweigh the inconveniences and mishaps. It's a job I wouldn't trade for any other in the world. Except maybe rock star.
This Whole Place Is Slithering
SCOTT CONANT
Scott Conant opened L'Impero restaurant in Manhattan's Tudor City in fall 2002, and quickly earned three stars from the New York Times, as well as James Beard Foundation Awards for Best New Restaurant 2003 and Best Restaurant Design 2003. In April 2004, he was named one of America's Best New Chefs by Food & Wine Magazine. In April 2005, Conant and his L'Impero partners opened Alto, also in New York City. Conant graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1989 and worked under chefs Paul Bartolotta and Theo Schoenegger at San Domenico, and under chef Cesare Casella as sous-chef of Pino Luongo's II Toscanaccio. Conant's short tenure as opening executive chef of City Eatery garnered him a positive two-star review from the New York Times. Conant's first cookbook, New Italian Cooking, will be published in fall 2005.
IN 1992,1 was the twenty-one-year-old saucier at an authentic Italian restaurant in New York City. In the small, 30-by30 kitchen, I was the only American, and along with two Dominican guys, one of only three non-Italians on the fifteen-man team.
Working in that kitchen was like going to my own private Little Italy every day. In addition to the overall mood conjured by the owner, the chefs, and the other cooks, one of the things that made the experience so thoroughly Italian was the ingredients. Everything was imported, from the prosciutto to the olive oil to the pasta to the cheeses. Italians are insanely partial about a lot of things, and none more than food: if it don't come from the Old Country, then it ain't the real thing.
One of the most impressive items we imported to that kitchen was eels. And when we did, it was a sight to see: two or three times a year, we received a delivery of live eels, 400 or 500 pounds of the little suckers, all packed up in plastic bags, which were in turn crammed into big Styrofoam crates that would arrive from overseas with all kinds of customs stamps and labels pasted onto the sides.
We purchased eels in such huge bulk quantities because, at that time, live eels were hard to come by, so the owner wanted to deal with the headache of acquiring them as infrequently as possible.
Eels range in size from 1 pound to 50 pounds. The ones we bought were 1 to lV2 pounds each, so the 400 or 500 pounds comprised several hundred eels.
On those few and far-between occasions when we received the delivery, a porter would stack the Styrofoam crates in a corner of the kitchen, until the butcher—one of the two Dominicans—had time to go through a one-man production ritual that involved killing, cleaning, breaking down (filleting), and freezing them.
First, he'd hoist the bags up out of the Styrofoam; the still-live eels would be squirming for all they were worth, causing the bag to swing in the air like a pendulum. They'd continue to squirm as he'd break the bags open over industrial Lexan containers—think of them as giant Tupperware—dust them liberally with sea salt, and douse them with vinegar, which would cause the eels to thrash more violently than ever, and to gasp pathetically,
as the salt dehydrated and killed them.
Then the butcher would snap on the lid, locking them in. He'd stack the Lexan containers, one on top of the other, in a corner of the kitchen and place heavy weights such as food-service-size cans of tomatoes on top of the uppermost container to keep the lid from popping off.
He wouldn't remove the eels from their plastic tombs until the next day, when he'd have to pull them out of a soupy ooze made up of their liquid, salt, and vinegar, hose them off, break them down, pack them up in clean plastic bags, and freeze them. Then we would thaw and use them as needed for dishes, such as a house specialty of eel wrapped in grape leaves and grilled.
One day, just before lunch service, one of those shipments arrived. The butcher got to work—loading box after box with the eels, topping them off with the salt-and-vinegar mixture, and stacking the boxes off to one side of the kitchen, weighing down the uppermost box with the huge cans of tomatoes.
Then the butcher went to take care of some other business, filleting lamb and breaking down chickens for the dinner shift. At one point, while crossing the small kitchen, he accidentally brushed up against the boxes of eels, which teetered precariously for a moment . . . and then collapsed.
All in a rush, the lids popped off of each box, and the eels slid out and across the floor, replacing the tiles beneath our feet with a sea of slithering black sea creatures, twitching in pain and sucking for air. To make matters worse, the extracted liquid and salt washed into any gaps between the eels, filling the room with an odor usually associated with high-school science classes.
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