Working clean, constantly wiping and cleaning, is a desirable state of affairs for the conscientious line cook. That chef was right: messy station equals messy mind. This explains why side-towels are hoarded like gold by good line cooks. When the linen order arrives, the smart cookies fall onto it voraciously, stashing stacks of the valuable objects anywhere they can hide them. One cook I knew would load them above the acoustic tile in the ceiling above his station, along with his favorite tongs, favorite non-stick pans, slotted spoons, and anything else he figured he needed on his station and didn't want another cook to get. I'm sure that years later, though that restaurant has changed hands many times since, future generations of cooks are still finding stashes of fluffy, clean side-towels.
It's not just clean that you value in a side-towel - it's dry. It's nice, wiping the rim of a plate with a slightly moist one, but try grabbing a red-hot saute pan handle with a wet towel, and you'll learn fast why a fresh stack of dry towels is a necessity. Some traditional European kitchens still issue two towels per cook at the beginning of the shift: one to work with while the other dries on the oven handle. This strikes me as criminally parsimonious. I like a tall stack, conveniently located over my station, in neatly folded, kitty-cornered, easy-to-grab fashion, and I don't ever want to run out. I'll rip through twenty of them in the course of an eight-hour service period, and if it costs my masters a few bucks extra, tough. I'm not burning my hand or wiping grease on my nice plates because they're too mean to shell out for a few more rented towels.
What exactly is this mystical mise-en-place I keep going on about? Why are some line cooks driven to apoplexy at the pinching of even a few grains of salt, a pinch of parsley? Because it's ours. Because we set it up the way we want it. Because it's like our knives, about which you hear the comment: 'Don't touch my dick, don't touch my knife.'
A fairly standard mise-en-place is a pretty extensive list. A typical one would be composed of, for instance:
kosher or sea salt
crushed black peppercorns (hand-crushed - not ground in the blender)
ground white pepper
fresh breadcrumbs
chiffonade parsley
blended oil in wine bottle with speed pourer
extra virgin olive oil
white wine
brandy
chervil tops in ice water for garnish
chive sticks or chopped chives
tomato concassee
caramelized apple sections
garlic confit
chopped or slivered garlic
chopped shallots
softened butter
favorite ladles, spoons, tongs, pans, pots
all sauces, portioned fish, meat, menu items, specials and back-ups conveniently positioned for easy access
Being set up properly, trained and coordinated is not nearly enough. A good line cook has to be able to remain clear-headed, organized and reasonably even-keeled during hectic and stressful service periods. When you've got thirty or forty or more tables all sitting down at the same time and ordering different items with different temperatures, the stuff has to come up together; the various stations - saute, garde-manger, broiler, middle have to assemble a party of ten's dinner at the same moment. You can't have one member of a party's Dover sole festering in the window by the saute station while the grill guy waits for a rack of lamb to hit medium-rare. It's got to come up together! Your hero line cook doesn't let the screaming, the frantic cries of 'Is it ready yet?', the long and potentially confusing list of donenesses all working at the same time throw him. He's got to keep all those temperatures straight in his head, remembering which steak goes with what. He's got to be able to tune out the howls of outrage from the chef, the tiny, gibbering annoyances from the floor, the curses and questions and prompts from his co-workers: 'Ready on seven? Via! Let's go! Vamos! Coming up on seven!'
The ability to 'work well with others' is a must. If you're a saute man, your grill man is your dance partner, and chances are, you're spending the majority of your time working in a hot, uncomfortably confined, submarine-like space with him. You're both working around open flame, boiling liquids with plenty of blunt objects at close hand - and you both carry knives, lots of knives. So you had better get along. It will not do to have two heavily armed cooks duking it out behind the line over some perceived insult when there are vats of boiling grease and razor-sharp cutlery all around.
So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something - be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here. They're comfortable with the rather relaxed and informal code of conduct in the kitchen, the elevated level of tolerance for eccentricity, unseemly personal habits, lack of documentation, prison experience. In most kitchens, one's freakish personal proclivities matter little if at all. Can you keep up? Are you ready for service? Can I count on you to show up at work tomorrow, to not let the side down?
That's what counts.
I can break down line cooks into three subgroups.
You've got your Artists: the annoying, high-maintenance minority. This group includes specialists like pâtissiers (the neurologists of cooking), sous-chefs, butchers, garde-manger psychos, the occasional saucier whose sauces are so ethereal and perfect that delusions of grandeur are tolerated.
Then there are the Exiles: people who just can't make it any other business, could never survive a nine-to-five job, wear a tie or blend in with civilized society - and their comrades, the Refugees, usually émigrés and immigrants for whom cooking is preferable to death squads, poverty or working in a sneaker factory for 2 dollars a week.
Finally, there are the Mercenaries: people who do it for cash and do it well. Cooks who, though they have little love or natural proclivity for cuisine, do it at a high level because they are paid well to do it - and because they are professionals. Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman - not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen - though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying. And I'll generally take a standup mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. When I hear 'artist', I think of someone who doesn't think it necessary to show up at work on time. More often than not their efforts, convinced as they are of their own genius, are geared more to giving themselves a hard-on than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers. Personally, I'd prefer to eat food that tastes good and is an honest reflection of its ingredients, than a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry. You could lose an eye trying to eat that. When a job applicant starts telling me how Pacific Rim-job cuisine turns him on and inspires him, I see trouble coming. Send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. I can teach him to cook. I can't teach character. Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: 'Shut the fuck up.'
FROM OUR KITCHEN TO YOUR TABLE
I SAW A SIGN the other day outside one of those Chinese-Japanese hybrids that are beginning to pop up around town, advertising 'Discount Sushi'. I can't imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi. Yet the place had customers. I wonder, had the sign said 'Cheap Sushi' or 'Old Sushi', if they'd still have eaten there.
Good food and good eating are about risk. Every o
nce in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I'm not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I've eaten them.
But there are some general principles I adhere to, things I've seen over the years that remain in mind and have altered my eating habits. I maybe perfectly willing to try the grilled lobster at an open-air barbecue shack in the Caribbean, where the refrigeration is dubious and I can see with my own eyes the flies buzzing around the grill (I mean, how often am I in the Caribbean? I want to make the most of it!), but on home turf, with the daily business of eating in restaurants, there are some definite dos and don'ts I've chosen to live by.
I never order fish on Monday, unless I'm eating at Le Bernardin - a four-star restaurant where I know they are buying their fish directly from the source. I know how old most seafood is on Monday - about four to five days old!
You walk into a nice two-star place in Tribeca on a sleepy Monday evening and you see they're running a delicious sounding special of Yellowfin Tuna, Braised Fennel, Confit Tomatoes and a Saffron Sauce. Why not go for it? Here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: 'Monday' and 'Special'.
Here's how it works: the chef of this fine restaurant orders his fish on Thursday for delivery Friday morning. He's ordering a pretty good amount of it, too, as he's not getting another delivery until Monday morning. All right, some seafood purveyors make Saturday deliveries, but the market is closed Friday night. If's the same fish from Thursday! The chef is hoping to sell the bulk of that fish - your tuna - on Friday and Saturday nights, when he assumes it will be busy. He's assuming also that if he has a little left on Sunday, he can unload the rest of it then, as seafood salad for brunch, or as a special. Monday? It's merchandizing night, when whatever is left over from the weekend is used up, and hopefully sold for money. Terrible, you say? Why doesn't he throw the leftover tuna out? The guy can get deliveries on Monday, right? Sure, he can . . . but what is preventing his seafood purveyor from thinking exactly the same way? The seafood vendor is emptying out his refrigerator, too! But the Fulton Street fish market is open on Monday morning, you say!! He can get fresh I I've been to the Fulton Street market at three o'clock on Monday morning, friends, and believe me, it does not inspire confidence. Chances are good that that tuna you're thinking of ordering on Monday night has been kicking around in the restaurant's reach-ins, already cut and held with the mise-en-place on line, commingling with the chicken and the salmon and the lamb chops for four days, the reach-in doors swinging open every few seconds as the line cooks plunge their fists in, blindly feeling around for what they need. These are not optimum refrigeration conditions.
This is why you don't see a lot of codfish or other perishable items as a Sunday or Monday night special - they're not sturdy enough. The chef knows. He anticipates the likelihood that he might still have some fish lying around on Monday morning and he'd like to get money for it without poisoning his customers.
Seafood is a tricky business. Red snapper may only cost a chef $4.95 a pound, but that price includes the bones, the head, the scales and all the stuff that gets cut and thrown away. By the time it's cut, the actual cost of each piece of cleaned fillet costs the chef more than twice that amount, and he'd greatly prefer to sell it than toss it in the garbage. If it still smells okay on Monday night - you're eating it.
I don't eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or have seen, with my own eyes, how they store and hold their mussels for service. I love mussels. But in my experience, most cooks are less than scrupulous in their handling of them. More often than not, mussels are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss in the bottom of a reach-in. Some restaurants, I'm sure, have special containers, with convenient slotted bins, which allow the mussels to drain while being held and maybe, just maybe, the cooks at these places pick carefully through every order, mussel by mussel, making sure that every one is healthy and alive before throwing them into a pot. I haven't worked in too many places like that. Mussels are too easy. Line cooks consider mussels a gift; they take two minutes to cook, a few seconds to dump in a bowl, and bada-bing, one more customer taken care of - now they can concentrate on slicing the damn duck breast. I have had, at a very good Paris brasserie, the misfortune to eat a single bad mussel, one treacherous little guy hidden among an otherwise impeccable group. It slammed me shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting. I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I'm the worst kind of atheist. Fortunately, the French have liberal policies on doctor's house calls and affordable health care. But I do not care to repeat that experience. No thank you on the mussels. If I'm hungry for mussels, I'll pick the good-looking ones out of your order.
How about seafood on Sunday? Well . . . sometimes, but never an obvious attempt to offload aging stuff, like seafood salad vinaigrette or seafood frittata, on a brunch menu. Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business. You see a fish that would be much better served by quick grilling with a slice of lemon, suddenly all dressed up with vinaigrette? For 'en vinaigrette' on the menu, read 'preserved' or 'disguised'.
While we're on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station. Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified, and strained to get out all the breadcrumbs and cigarette butts. Butter is expensive, you know. Hollandaise is a veritable petri-dish of biohazards. And how long has that Canadian bacon been festering in the walk-in anyway? Remember, brunch is only served once a week - on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'. One other point about brunch. Cooks hate brunch. A wise chef will deploy his best line cooks on Friday and Saturday nights; he'll be reluctant to schedule those same cooks early Sunday morning, especially since they probably went out after work Saturday and got hammered until the wee hours. Worse, brunch is demoralizing to the serious line cook. Nothing makes an aspiring Escoffier feel more like an army commissary cook, or Mel from Mel's Diner, than having to slop out eggs over bacon and eggs Benedict for the Sunday brunch crowd. Brunch is punishment block for the 'B'-Team cooks, or where the farm team of recent dishwashers learn their chops. Most chefs are off on Sundays, too, so supervision is at a minimum. Consider that before ordering the seafood frittata.
I will eat bread in restaurants. Even if I know it's probably been recycled off someone else's table. The reuse of bread is an industry-wide practice. I saw a recent news expose, hidden camera and all, where the anchor was shocked . . . shocked to see unused bread returned to the kitchen and then sent right back onto the floor. Bullshit. I'm sure that some restaurants explicitly instruct their Bengali busboys to throw out all that unused bread - which amounts to about 50 percent - and maybe some places actually do it. But when it's busy, and the busboy is crumbing tables, emptying ashtrays, refilling water glasses, making espresso and cappuccino, hustling dirty dishes to the dishwasher - and he sees a basket full of untouched bread - most times he's going to use it. This is a fact of life. This doesn't bother me, and shouldn't surprise you. Okay, maybe once in a while
some tubercular hillbilly has been coughing and spraying in the general direction of that bread basket, or some tourist who's just returned from a walking tour of the wetlands of West Africa sneezes - you might find that prospect upsetting. But you might just as well avoid air travel, or subways, equally dodgy environments for airborne transmission of disease. Eat the bread.
I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like. Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not. In fact, if you see the chef sitting unshaven at the bar, with a dirty apron on, one finger halfway up his nose, you can assume he's not handling your food any better behind closed doors. Your waiter looks like he just woke up under a bridge? If management allows him to wander out on the floor looking like that, God knows what they're doing to your shrimp!
Kitchen Confidential Page 6