Monday’s fish has been around since Friday, under God knows what conditions.Illustration by Adrian Gill
Good
food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.
It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the
tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about
danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and
shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may
transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may
send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.
Gastronomy
is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society
whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face
of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members
of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew.
Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and
ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the
poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic
times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag
but their own.
A good deal has changed since
Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out
in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way
toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays,
most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they
have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star
athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of
more money, more acclaim.
I’ve been a chef in New
York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a
dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the
business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few
years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s
prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian
occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As
most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain
of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy
with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of
accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional
cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early
seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary
Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and
wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze,
the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering
chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne
(meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took
until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the
culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”
A year
ago, my latest, doomed mission—a high-profile restaurant in the Times
Square area—went out of business. The meat, fish, and produce purveyors
got the news that they were going to take it in the neck for yet another
ill-conceived enterprise. When customers called for reservations, they
were informed by a prerecorded announcement that our doors had closed.
Fresh from that experience, I began thinking about becoming a traitor to
my profession.
Say
it’s a quiet Monday night, and you’ve just checked your coat in that
swanky Art Deco update in the Flatiron district, and you’re looking to
tuck into a thick slab of pepper-crusted yellowfin tuna or a
twenty-ounce cut of certified Black Angus beef, well-done—what are you
in for?
The fish specialty is reasonably priced, and the place got two stars in the Times.
Why not go for it? If you like four-day-old fish, be my guest. Here’s
how things usually work. The chef orders his seafood for the weekend on
Thursday night. It arrives on Friday morning. He’s hoping to sell the
bulk of it on Friday and Saturday nights, when he knows that the
restaurant will be busy, and he’d like to run out of the last few orders
by Sunday evening. Many fish purveyors don’t deliver on Saturday, so
the chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking
around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what
conditions. When a kitchen is in full swing, proper refrigeration is
almost nonexistent, what with the many openings of the refrigerator door
as the cooks rummage frantically during the rush, mingling your tuna
with the chicken, the lamb, or the beef. Even if the chef has ordered
just the right amount of tuna for the weekend, and has had to reorder it
for a Monday delivery, the only safeguard against the seafood
supplier’s off-loading junk is the presence of a vigilant chef who can
make sure that the delivery is fresh from Sunday night’s market.
Generally
speaking, the good stuff comes in on Tuesday: the seafood is fresh, the
supply of prepared food is new, and the chef, presumably, is relaxed
after his day off. (Most chefs don’t work on Monday.) Chefs prefer to
cook for weekday customers rather than for weekenders, and they like to
start the new week with their most creative dishes. In New York, locals
dine during the week. Weekends are considered amateur nights—for
tourists, rubes, and the well-done-ordering pretheatre hordes. The fish
may be just as fresh on Friday, but it’s on Tuesday that you’ve got the
good will of the kitchen on your side.
People
who order their meat well-done perform a valuable service for those of
us in the business who are cost-conscious: they pay for the privilege of
eating our garbage. In many kitchens, there’s a time-honored practice
called “save for well-done.” When one of the cooks finds a particularly
unlovely piece of steak—tough, riddled with nerve and connective tissue,
off the hip end of the loin, and maybe a little stinky from age—he’ll
dangle it in the air and say, “Hey, Chef, whaddya want me to do with this?”
Now, the chef has three options. He can tell the cook to throw the
offending item into the trash, but that means a total loss, and in the
restaurant business every item of cut, fabricated, or prepared food
should earn at least three times the amount it originally cost if the
chef is to make his correct food-cost percentage. Or he can decide to
serve that steak to “the family”—that is, the floor staff—though that,
economically, is the same as throwing it out. But no. What he’s going to
do is repeat the mantra of cost-conscious chefs everywhere: “Save for
well-done.” The way he figures it, the philistine who orders his food
well-done is not likely to notice the difference between food and
flotsam.
Then there are the People Who Brunch. The
“B” word is dreaded by all dedicated cooks. We hate the smell and
spatter of omelettes. We despise hollandaise, home fries, those pathetic
fruit garnishes, and all the other cliché accompaniments designed to
induce a credulous public into paying $12.95 for two eggs. Nothing
demoralizes an aspiring Escoffier faster than requiring him to cook
egg-white omelettes or eggs over easy with bacon. You can dress brunch
up with all the focaccia, smoked salmon, and caviar in the world, but
it’s still breakfast.
Even
more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks
regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like
splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and
decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock,
fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.
“It’s been done, but I don’t think it’s been redone.”
Like
most other chefs I know, I’m amused when I hear people object to pork
on nonreligious grounds. “Swine are filthy animals,” they say. These
people have obviously never visited a poultry farm. Chicken—America’s
favorite food—goes bad quickly; handled carelessly, it infects other
foods with salmonella; and it bores the hell out of chefs. It occupies
its ubiquitous place on menus as an option for customers who can’t
decide what they want to eat. Most chefs believe that supermarket
chickens in this country are slimy and tasteless compared with European
varieties. Pork, on the other hand, is cool. Farmers stopped feeding
garbage to pigs decades ago, and even if you eat pork rare you’re more
likely to win the Lotto than to contract trichinosis. Pork tastes
different, depending on what you do with it, but chicken always tastes
like chicken.
Another much maligned food these days is butter. In the world of chefs, however, butter is in everything.
Even non-French restaurants—the Northern Italian; the new American, the
ones where the chef brags about how he’s “getting away from butter and
cream”—throw butter around like crazy. In almost every restaurant worth
patronizing, sauces are enriched with mellowing, emulsifying butter.
Pastas are tightened with it. Meat and fish are seared with a mixture of
butter and oil. Shallots and chicken are caramelized with butter. It’s
the first and last thing in almost every pan: the final hit is called “monter au beurre.” In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal.
If
you are one of those people who cringe at the thought of strangers
fondling your food, you shouldn’t go out to eat. As the author and
former chef Nicolas Freeling notes in his definitive book “The Kitchen,”
the better the restaurant, the more your food has been prodded, poked,
handled, and tasted. By the time a three-star crew has finished carving
and arranging your saddle of monkfish with dried cherries and
wild-herb-infused nage into a Parthenon or a Space Needle, it’s
had dozens of sweaty fingers all over it. Gloves? You’ll find a box of
surgical gloves—in my kitchen we call them “anal-research gloves”—over
every station on the line, for the benefit of the health inspectors, but
does anyone actually use them? Yes, a cook will slip a pair on every
now and then, especially when he’s handling something with a lingering
odor, like salmon. But during the hours of service gloves are clumsy and
dangerous. When you’re using your hands constantly, latex will make you
drop things, which is the last thing you want to do.
Finding
a hair in your food will make anyone gag. But just about the only place
you’ll see anyone in the kitchen wearing a hat or a hairnet is Blimpie.
For most chefs, wearing anything on their head, especially one of those
picturesque paper toques—they’re often referred to as “coffee
filters”—is a nuisance: they dissolve when you sweat, bump into range
hoods, burst into flame.
The fact is that most
good kitchens are far less septic than your kitchen at home. I run a
scrupulously clean, orderly restaurant kitchen, where food is rotated
and handled and stored very conscientiously. But if the city’s
Department of Health or the E.P.A. decided to enforce every aspect of
its codes, most of us would be out on the street. Recently, there was a
news report about the practice of recycling bread. By means of a hidden
camera in a restaurant, the reporter was horrified to see returned bread
being sent right back out to the floor. This, to me, wasn’t news: the
reuse of bread has been an open secret—and a fairly standard practice—in
the industry for years. It makes more sense to worry about what happens
to the leftover table butter—many restaurants recycle it for
hollandaise.
What do I like to eat after hours?
Strange things. Oysters are my favorite, especially at three in the
morning, in the company of my crew. Focaccia pizza with robiola cheese
and white truffle oil is good, especially at Le Madri on a summer
afternoon in the outdoor patio. Frozen vodka at Siberia Bar is also
good, particularly if a cook from one of the big hotels shows up with
beluga. At Indigo, on Tenth Street, I love the mushroom strudel and the
daube of beef. At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts
blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it;
scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy
Portuguese sausage.
I
love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the
crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to
work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and
simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the
flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds
you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are
in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our
backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night
off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.
Being
a chef is a lot like being an air-traffic controller: you are
constantly dealing with the threat of disaster. You’ve got to be Mom and
Dad, drill sergeant, detective, psychiatrist, and priest to a crew of
opportunistic, mercenary hooligans, whom you must protect from the
nefarious and often foolish strategies of owners. Year after year, cooks
contend with bouncing paychecks, irate purveyors, desperate owners
looking for the masterstroke that will cure their restaurant’s ills:
Live Cabaret! Free Shrimp! New Orleans Brunch!
In
America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit.
It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family. It’s a
haven for foreigners—Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Chinese, Senegalese,
Egyptians, Poles. In New York, the main linguistic spice is Spanish. “Hey, maricón! chupa mis huevos” means, roughly, “How are you, valued comrade? I hope all is well.” And you hear “Hey, baboso! Put some more brown jiz on the fire and check your meez before the sous comes back there and fucks you in the culo!,” which means “Please reduce some additional demi-glace, brother, and reëxamine your mise en place, because the sous-chef is concerned about your state of readiness.”
Since
we work in close quarters, and so many blunt and sharp objects are at
hand, you’d think that cooks would kill one another with regularity.
I’ve seen guys duking it out in the waiter station over who gets a table
for six. I’ve seen a chef clamp his teeth on a waiter’s nose. And I’ve
seen plates thrown—I’ve even thrown a few myself—but I’ve never heard of
one cook jamming a boning knife into another cook’s rib cage or
braining him with a meat mallet. Line cooking, done well, is a dance—a
highspeed, Balanchine collaboration.
I used to be a
terror toward my floor staff, particularly in the final months of my
last restaurant. But not anymore. Recently, my career has taken an
eerily appropriate turn: these days, I’m the chef de cuisine of a much
loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where the customers eat their
meat rare, vegetarians are scarce, and every part of the animal—hooves,
snout, cheeks, skin, and organs—is avidly and appreciatively prepared
and consumed. Cassoulet, pigs’ feet, tripe, and charcuterie sell like
crazy. We thicken many sauces with foie gras and pork blood, and proudly
hurl around spoonfuls of duck fat and butter, and thick hunks of
country bacon. I made a traditional French pot-au-feu a few weeks ago,
and some of my French colleagues—hardened veterans of the business
all—came into my kitchen to watch the first order go out. As they gazed
upon the intimidating heap of short ribs, oxtail, beef shoulder,
cabbage, turnips, carrots, and potatoes, the expressions on their faces
were those of religious supplicants. I have come home. ♦
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