I am very clearly a product of the French culinary heritage. It has the longevity and depth to make it a resource of tradition as well as a source of evolution and creativity. Italian cuisine fits this bill too.
In Mexico City and New York, Enrique Olvera combines Mexican cuisine and modern technique at Pujol and Cosme. Rick Bayless has been mining this vein with great success for decades. In Portland, Oregon, Andy Ricker opened the first Pok Pok, a study in Thai cuisine. In San Francisco, Danny Bowien personalized Chinese food with many other influences. In Buenos Aires, the Argentinian Tomas Kalika has somehow managed to assimilate Eastern European, Sephardic, and Mizrahi food into an authentic remix of these disparate Jewish culinary traditions. In all these cases, you will note that the chef’s innovations remain within a tradition. I have personally always been most secure within the European tradition, but if you choose some other cuisine, first make sure that it awakens a passion in you, second, make sure that you know it well, and equally important, make sure that there is a market for it.
The thing you want to avoid above all is a crazy eclecticism. So you walk the line between innovation and tradition. You need the innovation, the eccentricity, to keep yourself interested and engaged. That is how I came up with a dish that I would call eccentric but also simple and direct. I always enjoyed eating sushi after work with the team or with friends at a convenient place that was open until three a.m. Beautiful Japanese mackerel. Toro as tender and pink as milk-fed veal. Hand rolls with spicy scallop and crispy oyster and superb uni. I rarely got out of there for less than $150. I would eat for hours, and I would not feel stuffed.
After years of eating there, I traveled in South America, where I became more familiar with ceviche. Given my love of these two raw cuisines, I felt confident that I should create something in the raw-seafood vein that would be true to my “inner chef.” The result—part Daniel, part Japanese, part Peruvian—was a Chincoteague oyster filled with slices of live scallop, Osetra caviar, a sprinkle of lime and zest, oyster liquor, grated horseradish, and a garnish of crunchy celery, radishes, minced chives, and a spoonful of uni. A simple dish, all about balance and composition, but mostly it is about the purity and freshness of the sea, slightly briny with notes of the aromatic sharpness of iodine. Key to the concept of this dish is that the ingredients are so fresh that they impart a delicate, almost fragile quality to the completed recipe.
Where did that dish come from? From the love of sashimi, the oysters of my childhood, and the ceviche bars of Lima. And from a certain hunger that goes off in a chef when you have assimilated tastes and techniques to the extent that a dish—or at least the idea for it—comes to you the way that daydreams do. All of a sudden, it is just there.
Creativity and innovation are forced upon you if you have a market-driven menu meeting the expectations of a knowledgeable and novelty-seeking clientele. When you are in tune with the markets and the seasons, you will come up with new dishes constantly. This is also where the whole team comes into play. For as long as I have been in the kitchen, collaboration has been one of the most exciting aspects of working with other people. It provides a daily dose of unfettered freedom of expression.
As a chef, you must have the confidence in yourself and your team that allows you to be open to the ideas of the other chefs. Believe me, they are full of ideas and excited for the chance to express them. New dishes or specials may come from a group of them or may start with one person’s idea and get discussed around the kitchen until finally there is something worthy of your dining room.
Go with the flow. Also, go slow. New dishes evolve, and they gain complexity as they do. They need new techniques, or at least new combinations of techniques, and most of all, their own unique balance of tastes. I do not have all the answers in my repertoire. We learn as a group. True, I give advice and direction, but my chef de cuisine or sous chef will have the main task of working it out and may know something new about an ingredient or a method that we will all share. The great lesson in all this is that new recipes are never written in stone. They evolve every day until you reach the perfect balance.
You may not even be the one on your team who makes the correction that completes a dish. You may take it 90 percent of the way, but then someone will add 5 percent and someone else will add 2 percent or 3 percent until an almost good enough dish becomes something new and exciting. Feedback from the front of the house is always helpful. Finally, when you have a new recipe exactly how you want it, then you do write it in stone. Turn your creativity to the next new dish.
Innovation and creation are what keep this job interesting. Of course, you must know how to make a perfect coq au vin, but if all you do is turn out culinary photocopies of the classic dishes, in time you will become bored, and even the classics will lose some of their gusto. Failed recipes are never the problem. Failing to maintain or re-create them is.
THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE
YOU MAY BECOME a marvelous chef, the inventor of a whole new cuisine. You may have social media ramping up over your cooking—but if the people in your restaurant who interact with the public are not on their game, it really does not matter. Your customers only think they come to a restaurant merely for the food. What they really come for is more complex than that. Sure, they want a good meal, but they also want a pleasant time, nice surroundings, and a staff that treats them as if service is a pleasure.
A great front of the house with just okay food is likely to be more successful than a restaurant with mind-blowing food and surly waiters and maître d’s. Everyone pays lip service to great service, but in the day-to-day crush of getting the meals cooked and served, it is easy to lose sight of what is going on outside the kitchen, beyond those double doors, where the check gets paid.
Do not ever lose sight of this. Every time you do, it will come back to bite you. If you really want to learn what service is all about, the best teacher—as in everything—is experience. When I was an apprentice in the kitchen in Lyon, I also worked as a server at the brasserie next door (on my day off). They were short one waiter, so I offered to help the owner. I figured he could use the extra hand, and by the same token I knew I could stand to learn a bit more about service. There was then (and to some extent, still is) a natural tension between waitstaff and kitchen staff. The front of the house is often thought of as more cheesy and superficial, with a tendency to put on airs. The kitchen often likes to think of itself as more artistic and pulling off more substance.
I quickly came to appreciate the mix of personality traits that go into the makeup of a good server: in a fine-dining restaurant you need to be intelligent, often multilingual, confident, and yet at the same time humble. I may have been smart for a young cook, but I was not a very good waiter. Still, it was a valuable experience. Up close and firsthand I saw that there are customers who are in a hurry, customers who change their minds, customers who “distinctly remember” asking for something other than what you serve them. There are chatty people, courteous people, and people who would not be pleased if Escoffier himself cooked the meal and served it on Napoleon’s personal plates.
The front of the house has to deal with all these types, and though it is a test of your composure, you must treat each of them with the same care. That is what being a professional means. Being courteous to a charming customer is easy; being nice to a pain in the ass is professional.
The job of the restaurateur is, regardless of the situation, to make people feel comfortable. In some cases, the inherent dynamics of the restaurant as a scene of social interaction work decidedly against you. I am thinking in particular of the customer who has a chip on his or her shoulder no matter what you do. Your being nice may not change things very much. Part of the explanation for the natural combativeness of some diners is that we live in a world where things don’t always go your way: Bad day at the office? Got blamed for something you didn’t do? You can always take it out on the waiter.
That the waitstaff has done nothing or very little to dese
rve this treatment is beside the point. The customer lets it out simply because he or she can. It is human nature. The anger has to go somewhere, and the restaurant’s failure to get the order exactly right or exactly on time is reason enough to dredge up the day’s stored resentments.
Do not take this personally but rather as a challenge. Remember, in this business we use one word for the whole ensemble of activities, from cloakroom to kitchen to dining room, that make up the restaurant experience. That word is service. Your job is to serve, politely, professionally, and sincerely. The little things that make people feel special—from a smile at the door to a well-considered wine recommendation—can mean so much. Bear in mind that in a well-run restaurant, the unhappy and unsatisfiable represent a very small percentage; still, if not dealt with, they can ruin the night for you and your staff.
Never, ever argue with a customer. Never allow your staff to do so either. Once, I had a maître d’ who came with very good references from some terrific New York restaurants. He also had miles of attitude. One day I saw him arguing with a customer. About forty-five seconds later he became my former maître d’.
Complaints, by the way, are not always unfounded. They are right as often as they are wrong, and they are invaluable. With a famous restaurant, almost everyone will tell you how great your food is and how great your place is. That is nice, but it does not necessarily help you improve. Not to mention that not all compliments are genuine.
Criticism, on the other hand, helps you make corrections. Teach your staff to be attentive and appropriately responsive to criticism. It’s an opportunity to make improvements immediately. Some customers will be very direct when they are not happy and will let you know it. Others may feel unsure or at least uncomfortable in voicing displeasure, but they too communicate through body language and loss of enthusiasm. A good server will take cues from this and work to turn the experience around. The staff must have their antennae up. Often they can sense dissatisfaction in the dining room and address it before it gets to you.
An unhappy guest often communicates today through social media: posting reviews, photos, and one-liners, or even writing a letter to food critics and food guides. In this situation, unfortunately, you may not know there was a problem until it’s too late. It is worth your time to pay attention to such posts. That doesn’t mean you need to be checking in every five minutes and certainly never during service. You might even leave the task to one of your staff, but there is a whole lot of feedback out there, some of it as good as what can be given by the best focus group. And by all means, resist the temptation to reply in kind to nasty, snarky comments. It accomplishes nothing and makes you look as small as your detractors.
Although some diners come for a transcendental once-in-a-lifetime experience, some of our most loyal regulars come just as much for consistency and familiarity. Our waitstaff quickly learns that these diners do not want to be dazzled by some new invention every night. They want their favorite cocktail, a specific wine, and the food they love. The challenge is to lead these diners past their old favorites to new dishes. This can be a help to the kitchen because these members of our dining family often will be more frank in helping critique a new dish.
You might also consider doing as we do and hiring completely anonymous reviewers to come to your restaurant incognito and deliver a thorough eight-page critique of a typical three-hour dining experience: from making the reservation, to describing how long it took to get a martini, to the attentiveness of the waitstaff, and, of course, to the cuisine. It is money well spent.
Problems, though, are unavoidable. Sometimes, a situation can start in the lounge with a delay in seating and can get carried over to the meal. The server in the dining room needs to know that the customer has been made to wait, and he or she should make the kitchen aware of the need to be super prompt. When we have potentially displeased customers, the waitstaff is fully responsible for steering the guest toward a feeling of trust. Essentially, we have a brief time with the guest, and by the end of the meal the guest has to be very happy. Period.
If, on rare occasions, we get a letter of complaint, we know who the server was, who the assistant was, and what was ordered. We figure out what went wrong and how to avoid the same mistake happening again. In this we are helped by our logbook, in which the head of each department records what happened that evening, from a waiter’s having run too fast in the dining room to the bread server cutting the bread too thick to a customer expressing dissatisfaction with a wine. The pluses and minuses in that logbook become the agenda for the next day’s preservice meeting, in which we revisit every issue and figure out how to do better.
Sometimes a problem is nobody’s fault. It is just the nature of the business. We try to predict in advance how the evening is going to play out. People arrive late. They cancel. Their reservation for seven becomes a reservation for three (or vice versa). Tending to 150 people in a restaurant over the course of an evening is different from entertaining 150 people in a theater. In the theater, the performance goes on whether 20 or 220 people show up, or a full house. In a restaurant, the “performance” is constantly in flux, and the whole evening is a series of separate performances, in a manner of speaking: each diner reacting to the particular way he or she is treated and whether the chef meets, exceeds, or falls short of expectations. The only thing you can be sure of is that a lot of curveballs will be thrown at you, and you just deal with them until the evening is through. A well-organized kitchen with a professional crew will alleviate issues.
If you are owner and chef, as I am, you may very well find yourself making a round in the dining room during service. I think this is a great idea, but it is not for every chef. Joël Robuchon, for example, rarely came out, but he was acknowledged as the top chef in Paris. Do it if you are comfortable, but be sure you are genuine.
Personally, I really enjoy working with the front-of-house team. Sometimes, when things are busy and the waitstaff is backed up, I will take an order or help serve something tableside. The staff appreciates it. The customers appreciate it. I just love pretending that I could be a waiter too. I often tell my team that to be a great professional in service you have to have “the eye of the falcon”—meaning you should be able to survey the room at all times and see from any distance if the guests miss or need something. You must always read the moves and mood of the guest. Anticipation is key, but it requires great focus, a real sense of hospitality, and a passion for service.
Bottom line: do whatever it takes to make service go seamlessly and keep everybody happy. You will be greatly rewarded if you have at least one talented professional in the dining room management who can teach someone the skills of making people feel at ease, of being attentive without being overbearing. Your staff should be generous and friendly with your guests while always staying within the boundaries of professionalism. They may forge relationships, friendships even, but they must remember they are the server to the guest.
The line between warm and hospitable versus casual and too friendly with guests is a thin one, but it must be maintained. I had the privilege to work with someone who mastered this nuance with grace and decorum. In the thirty years I worked with him, he had my great admiration and respect. Bernard Vrod and I first met in 1986, when I started as the chef at Le Cirque, and we celebrated his retirement (along with that of his wife, Ginette, who was our faithful gouvernante) in early 2016. His sister Cecile, son Yannick, and brother-in-law Giovanni have all worked at DANIEL over the years, and many of our regulars still associate Bernard with the restaurant. He had an incomparable ability to recall guests’ preferences, their dislikes, and their children’s names alike. He could charm a table with his personality, all the while respecting the guests’ privacy and the formality of the situation. Throughout his career he served seven US presidents, many foreign dignitaries, and countless famous actors and artists, but more important, if he was your server at DANIEL, he treated you the same way as he treated them: like royalty. And he did
it for thirty years without ever becoming jaded. He worked with joy and pride in the service of others and always inspired the young waiters with his knowledge and experience.
It is human nature to create a personal relationship with your best customers. After all, they have made the investment in you. Recently, I had a customer who had spent thousands of dollars on wine with us. At the end of one of my tasting menus, he said, “Wonderful, exquisite, but I would love some tripe.”
So the next week, when he came back, I made tripe for him as a surprise, a very basic peasant dish, but dolled up with chorizo, black olives, cranberry beans, calf’s feet, tomato confit, and a buttery crust of sourdough bread. He was beyond himself, beaming with joy.
I hope you will always listen to your customers and try to meet their wishes. It is the same in every great place, from roadside diner to Michelin-starred restaurant.
A SPECIAL KIND OF LIFE
ONE THING THAT becomes apparent to you very quickly is that when the rest of the world is having fun, you are working. Saturday night, you work; Christmas, you work; Easter, Fourth of July, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving… ditto. If you want to be a chef, you cannot compare your life to others’. The chef’s world is a different world. The hours are longer, the work more intense than in many other walks of life. But you really do not dwell on it. At least I never did.
Sure, I would love to go to more movies, go out with my friends more, spend more time at home, but I made a choice when I was fourteen and I never looked back. Restaurants are my passion and they consume me. If anything, as time goes by, restaurant life becomes more consuming. As perfection becomes more attainable, it also becomes more and more the center of your life. Where other passions may cool with time, the chef’s gets hotter.
Letters to a Young Chef Page 9