Don't Try This at Home

by Andrew Friedman

  Beyond our deep, personal connection, Mary's been a huge supportive force in my professional career. I earned two degrees in college—applied math and computer science—but I was never happy in those fields. After college, I was killing time, driving a delivery truck for my dad's smoked fish company, when Mary got me a job working for a friend of hers at a local pastry shop and cafe. That was how I first became interested in becoming a chef. So I really do owe it all to her.

  Ironically, being a chef can be a relationship killer. There are weeks when we barely see each other—I come home after midnight and she often gets up and out at the crack of dawn to hit a yoga class before heading to her office.

  But we've made it work, so well in fact that I often find myself coaching young cooks on how to maintain a relationship.

  One of the ways Mary and I get along is by being available to each other by cell phone. If she has something to tell me, even if it's during dinner service, I'll pick up the phone and talk to her. At first, she would detect urgency in my voice, which understandably irked her. So I worked hard at, and soon mastered, the art of sounding like I have all the time in the world, no matter what kind of chaos might be transpiring around me.

  Being available in this way is important to me. Not only does it make my wife happy, but God forbid I wasn't there in a time of crisis because I was searing a piece of halibut.

  Or doing a demo . . .

  So when my cell phone rang that day, echoing through the hall thanks to my clip-on microphone, I glanced down and saw the name "Mary" in the caller ID window. I looked up at the two thousand people in attendance and said, "Sorry, folks, this is my wife, you'll have to excuse me."

  This provoked a few chuckles. Maybe they thought I was kidding. But I went ahead and answered the phone and proceeded to have a five-minute conversation with Mary, using my Zen-like ability to hide any sense of distraction in my voice. It didn't matter that I was on stage, with burners turned on and two thousand people waiting to learn how to properly sear a scallop.

  Finally, after about five minutes, there was a pause in the conversation and I told Mary where I was and what I was doing. She howled with laughter.

  "Okay," she said. "Talk to you later. I love you."

  I always reply in kind, even when I'm in the midst of twelve hardened line cooks—or two thousand strangers: "I love you too, honey."

  When they heard that, every woman in the place let out a huge, sweet, "Awwwww." I laughed. They laughed. And I felt instantly at ease.

  That ended up being one of the best demos I've ever done, once the ice was broken and I could stop trying to play the part of the "star" chef and just be, as I was on the phone, myself.

  Just Add Water

  HUBERT KELLER

  Hubert Keller joined Fleur de Lys as a co-owner in 1986, where he was credited with breathing new life into the San Francisco institution. Born in France, he has been the recipient of many awards, including Best Chef: California from the James Beard Foundation. The New York Times has described Fleur de Lys as being "arguably the best French restaurant in San Francisco." Fleur de Lys Las Vegas opened at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in September of 2004. Burger Bar opened at Mandalay Place in February of 2004.

  Now I HAVE to warn you: this story may discourage future generations of caterers from ever entering the business. And I'll admit, it might raise an eyebrow or two. If it weren't for the fact that I was caught smack dab in the middle of this debacle, I might not even believe the tale myself. . . .

  With all of that said, picture a young bride from Carmel, her well-to-do father and mother, and enough money to make anyone's dream wedding a reality. In theory, this would seem like that perfect party to host, the perfect party to attend and, like most fairy tales, it would end with the bride and groom riding off into the sunset—while the parents handed over the family fortune to me and my staff for services rendered. But Nature had a different plan that day, and as you will soon find out, no amount of planning could have prepared me for the disastrous results.

  The bride's parents lived on a beautiful piece of property that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. Their house resembled a Hollywood home on the Malibu coastline, where the gated entrance and driveway started at street level and descended down the side of a hill. They had spared no expense to plan a lavish wedding on site for 250 of their closest friends and relatives. The main event would feature a five-course menu by yours truly, and a $30,000 cake flown in from New York, a cake so huge and extravagant that it took four hired hands to deplane.

  The day before the event, while tents were being erected and flowers being delivered by the truckloads, I overheard the bride's father frantically asking where the three-hundred-year-old oak tree on the property had disappeared to. The bride's mother casually replied, "I had that old thing removed this morning, dear. How else was I supposed to fit the tent?" To conclude her point, she turned to me and said, "Hubert, nothing is impossible here. If you need it done, we'll make it happen." The father looked flushed, and I really couldn't blame him. I'm not particularly superstitious, but it didn't seem like anything good could come from such a frivolous act.

  I left the parents of the bride and returned to the kitchen. To accommodate my cooking needs, the bride's mother had essentially created an extension of her kitchen, including additional ovens, gas stoves, etc.—an indispensable addition considering the elaborate degree of preparation involved. There were floor plans, seating charts, endless checklists, and a wedding-day itinerary that was to be followed to the tee: one hour of cocktails and passed canapes, first course to follow immediately afterward. And the pace for the evening was set from there. There was absolutely no room for error.

  On the day of the wedding, while the family made their way to the church, I was again situated in that same souped-up kitchen, making sure that the staff was finishing the final details for the event. The first-course plates were all lined up, waiting to be garnished with components of foie gras and caviar. Cases of chilled champagne were being stacked behind the bar, while a steady stream of waiters filed in and out of the kitchen buzzing about the extravagance of it all: custom Bernardaud plates flown in from France, the infamous $30,000 cake, and enough Cristal (or so we thought) to make a rap star blush. The band had just finished setting up their equipment and was performing a sound check, when I noticed the waitstaff using the fine linen to soak up excess water from the floor. The water was seeping into the kitchen from beneath the door. I figured it was someone hosing down the front entryway, so I ignored it and went back to what I was doing. It wasn't until a little while later, after a hurried waiter had slipped on a suddenly sizable puddle of water and dropped an entire tray of plates, that I began to worry.

  When I went to investigate, I discovered that the groundskeeper had been scrambling around for the last fifteen minutes, trying to divert a massive flood of water from entering the house. A major water line, just outside the gate, had burst for no apparent reason, sending gallons upon gallons of water racing down the driveway and right toward the front door. The guests were scheduled to return to the property in less than an hour and the driveway resembled Niagara Falls.

  At least a dozen frantic phone calls were made to the city, demanding that someone come out immediately and fix the problem. Yet despite the fact that you needed hip waders just to cross the driveway, I remained confident that things would turn out fine. After all, the menu was right on target. The trays of hors d'oeuvres were ready to go, and the first-course setup had just begun.

  Unconcerned, I stepped outside for a moment to get some air . . . and noticed that the beautiful day that we had started out having had gradually turned to a dim, ugly gray. The sky was heavy with clouds, and the morning blueness had completely faded away. Funny thing, the bride's mother had mentioned earlier that there was "zero" chance of precipitation. According to the multiple weather reports she had checked, we were in store for a perfect weekend of sunshine.

  Twenty minutes later, someone did a
rrive—as promised—and turned off the flow of water. With the driveway rapidly drying out, and the house rescued from the impending flood, we were back on track. A white carpet was rolled out to welcome guests, uniformed valets prepared to park cars, and a lady with a headset and a clipboard screamed, "GUESTS ARE ARRIVING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, PEOPLE!" As the last of the water in the kitchen was being removed via mops and buckets, the first guests showed up.

  And that, of course, is when the storm hit. What had seemed to be just an overcast sky had swiftly transformed into a monstrous thunderstorm, with rain pouring down and pelting the disoriented guests. What was meant to be an indoor-outdoor reception had instantly turned into a very cramped cocktail hour. Instead of casually walking the grounds, sipping champagne, and enjoying the well-planned sunset for the afternoon, guests found themselves jammed between the banquet tables of the main tent, downing glasses of Cristal—and any cocktail they could get their hands on. The amount of alcohol consumed within the first hour of this rainy mess was unimaginable. Drunken guests mingled among workers with duct tape, who scrambled to patch holes in the leaky tent. The lady with the headset stormed into the kitchen and announced that everything was on hold until the tent was completely "patched up." Meanwhile the band, which wasn't scheduled to play until dinner, took it upon itself to appease the drunken crowd with an equally disastrous cover of "Louie, Louie." . . .

  The bride, the bridesmaids, the groom, and the groomsmen all remained in the guesthouse, waiting for a break in the weather. It never came. So two hours and many cover songs later, the wedding party relented and filed in, huddled under umbrellas—all except for the bride, whose grand entrance was thwarted by a nasty gust of wind and a broken umbrella. As I learned that day, 200 feet of uncovered walkway in a rainstorm can do a lot of damage to a delicate white dress and hours of makeup. Ushers tried diverting the soaked bride to the kitchen, where possible touch-ups could be arranged before her entrance.

  Just as she entered the kitchen, however, her makeup and hair a riotous mess, the sniffling bride slipped on the wet floor, landing with a vicious thud.

  And then the electricity in the entire house went out.

  There we all stood, in silence—until the bride wailed, "Does anybody care about what's happening here? This is my day, damn it! Somebody help me up"

  All I could do was huddle in the corner, nervous that in the event that the lights did return, the extent of her considerable anger somehow would be fully directed toward me.

  Festive sounds were still coming from the tent, where the by-now very drunk guests didn't seem to mind one bit that the music had stopped or the lights had gone out—had they even noticed? In desperation, the lady with the clipboard ordered the valets to pull the cars around the exterior of the tent and use their headlights to help illuminate the inside. At the same time, candles were being lit and distributed throughout the dining area, while an army of generators chugged along to keep the kitchen up and running.

  Finally, it was time for dinner.

  Once the lady with the clipboard managed to wrestle the guests into their seats, the show was on. Using gas stoves and Sterno cans to keep things warm, the lovingly prepared meal began—three hours into the reception, served to a roomful of people who could barely hold their forks, let alone find them in the dark.

  When the power finally returned, it was in the middle of the main-course service. If it wasn't for the band resuming play, the guests might have actually stayed in their seats to eat it. . . .

  As for the $30,000 cake, painstakingly attended by more staff members than the soaking bride, it sat pristine and untouched the entire evening.

  Toward the end of the night, I took a moment to walk through the tent, to see if I could help console the bride's parents. The band had just broken into a playful rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" when I finally found the couple, seated quietly, looking strangely calm and intoxicated. They seemed humbled by the fact that Mother Nature had put on such a show.

  Later, as the guests were leaving, and the skies began to magically clear, the three of us stood outside, next to the fresh tree stump, staring up as the stars appeared, and I thought, Who would believe this unbelievable story about an unbelievable evening that all started with the utterance of those four cursed words, "Nothing is impossible here"?

  An Italian in Paris

  GIORGIO LOCATELLI

  Giorgio Locatelli, from Lombardy, is considered by many to be the best Italian chef in the UK. Giorgio has been involved with several groundbreaking Italian restaurants in London, most notably Zafferano, where he earned his first Michelin star in 1999. In 2002, Giorgio and his wife, Flaxy, opened their first independent restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, which gained a Michelin star in its first year. Giorgio has a very successful TV career and has co-written a cookbook with restaurateur Tony Allan, called Tony and Giorgio. Giorgio is currently working on his second book, to be published in 2006.

  IN 1989, after four years working at the Savoy in London, I thought it was about time I finally went to Paris. In those days Paris was like a finishing school for chefs. The only reason I'd gone to London instead was because I thought it was a lot hipper than Paris, and also because the Savoy was the place where Escoffier had cooked and developed haute cuisine. Nowadays everyone is cooking Italian, but the big buzzword for a chef coming from Italy at that time was "international"; we had to cook all sorts of food, especially French, and the biggest stage of all was in Paris.

  So, after four years, I told the Savoy's head chef, Anton Edelmann, that I was leaving. He was pissed off at first, and didn't want me to leave. But he shared the same passion for food that I had, and he had traveled a lot by the time he was thirty, so he eventually wished me the best, even offering to set me up with a job in Paris. When he was younger, he had worked with the directors of Laurent, a famous old restaurant, and he sent me there. The pay wasn't going to be as good—in London I was a senior sous-chef, earning £400 a week, while at Laurent I was going to be a commis rotissier making about a third of that (and half of that would go to rent)—but I took it gladly, since it was important to me that I go to Paris.

  I arrived on a Friday, with just my knives and a few chef's jackets. I had a contact there, a girl with a room for rent in the Bastille district, very central and on a direct Metro line to the restaurant. We went out for dinner, and then the next day, while wandering the city on my own, I timed the route from home to work. Twice.

  On Monday morning, I was supposed to be at the restaurant at eight; I arrived at ten to seven. I sat in a cafe on the corner of the Champs Elysees, ordered a cafe au lait, and looked around me, for the first time realizing where I was. I have to admit I felt quite proud that I'd actually made it to Paris.

  The first thing they said when I turned up at Laurent was, "The laundry's over there." We got four jackets and two pairs of trousers a week, so I didn't need the few things I'd brought from London. The restaurant even had a shower.

  So I started work. The job of the commis rotissier, among other things, is to stay all afternoon when everyone else has gone off on a break, and to cook Laurent's famous pommes soufflees, served with chateaubriand and bearnaise sauce, a dish which has never gone off the menu.

  The trick to pommes soufflees is to slice the potatoes exactly the right thickness, then dry them properly, so that when they hit the oil in a big pan, at just the right temperature, they puff up perfectly. You can't let them hit the bottom of the pan, or else they are ruined. Trust me—I made so many of them in the first month that the skin on my arms was bright red.

  One afternoon, however, they refused to cook properly. I was supposed to have gone on my break hours before, and these fucking potatoes just would not puff up. I was getting more and more frustrated with them, when the sous chef walked in and, seeing me, said, "Well, what do you expect? You're a spaghetti. And, even worse, you learned to cook with les rosbifsl"

  Charming.

  The irony, though, was that the same guys who cal
led me "spaghetti" would come and ask me questions about the classic Escoffier repertoire. At that time, a lot of French chefs had come from bourgeois restaurants outside Paris and didn't really know how to do the fancy sauces, or which garnishes went with which dishes, whereas the Savoy taught us all of them.

  I learned a lot at Laurent, though. The Savoy was a restaurant on a truly grand scale, but Laurent was a much more human size, and it showed me that it was possible, with technique and timing, to do things I would have thought were impossible for a smaller place. The cost control was amazing: the cheese cellar was run like a military operation, with twenty-five different cheeses from twenty-five different farms, and the wine list was superb. Laurent was a model of a restaurant that I could imagine running; it was a fantastic, inspiring business.

  Laurent's owner was Sir James Goldsmith. When one of his daughters was getting married, naturally the reception was held in the restaurant. We had a huge, elegant, multitiered wedding cake delivered. It looked like a traditional British wedding cake, but it was actually much more fragile, with layers of cream, fruit, meringue and liqueur-soaked sponge. Of course somebody managed to drop it when we took it out of the van.

  This was a disaster. You can't have the boss's daughter getting married with a bashed-up cake, so we sent for an emergency patissier who turned up with his spatula in hand, looking a bit like Donatello. I don't know whether he repaired the cake with anything edible—in fact I know there was a chunk of polystyrene in it by the time he'd finished—but it looked pretty good. In any case, we hid the broken side against an enormous vase of flowers, so we just about got away with it, although I wouldn't have liked to get the slice with the polystyrene.

  Though I was eventually promoted to chef de partie in the fish section, money was still tight. Sometimes I got to supplement my wages with a bit of outside work, like cooking at Vincennes race course, for the Prix d'Amerique. Cash in hand was a real bonus, and it meant I could afford to go back home to Italy a couple of times a year. After one such trip, I drove my little Fiat Panda all the way back from Italy to Paris, and it was fantastic having a car in Paris. One weekend, I drove to Alain Chappel's restaurant; because he was a consultant chef for Laurent, I got to meet him. He was amazing. I even got to go to the market with him: he would visit every stall and pick up just one bunch of carrots, say, from each of them.