Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (10 page)

Today your rhythm has been brilliant; you’ve been a paragon of efficiency. Chef threw a vicious curveball at you with all these complicated specials, but you’ve knocked it out of the park. It’s 1600 now—an hour before service starts—and you are already almost there. You take a moment to recap what you’ve accomplished.

The carrots are done. After you pureed them you passed the substance through a
tamis
sieve and it came out smooth as silk, bright orange, absolutely scrumptious. It is the essence of carrot. The mustard dressing for the potatoes is done. You shaved just enough truffle into it. Truffle can be dangerous. Too much can be pungently overwhelming, but just enough can give the right dish an ineffable warmth. The boquerones sauce is done. It is not overly fishy, not overly creamy, not overly salty. The monkfish roulades are done. They are wrapped and sitting in the fish box. The endive is done. It is sitting in a hotel pan on the stove’s piano, steeping in its braising liquid. The sapori forte is done. All its ingredients have been incorporated, with the exception of the tarragon butter, with which it will be mounted, à la minute, on the pickup. The agnolotti are done. The turnips are done. Basically everything is done. And you still have half an hour before the premeal staff meeting.

It’s important to use this time wisely. All the food might be ready, but it still needs to be organized among the stations. Typically, a line cook won’t fuss over mise en place for a special, because technically it’s not his responsibility to do so, it’s yours. You need to break the food down into a manageable storage format—quart containers and third pans are often best, because they don’t take up much space on the station—and deliver it to him. Plates, too, need to be collected. Catalina will definitely be picking up the terrine off the garde manger station on a wooden board, Chef’s standard approach to charcuterie. VinDog will pick up the agnolotti off meat entremet (which tends to double as the pasta station), and you can’t imagine it would go in anything other than a bowl. Raffy will pick up the sardines and the monk off fish roast, probably on an oval and a large round respectively. Julio’s got the pork, probably on large round as well.

When it comes time to pick up the show plates, Chef will demonstrate how everything is to be plated. He will not, however, give you much direction in the way of descriptions for the floor. You are expected to gather that information yourself. And since he hates talking to the people out front, you are expected to dispense it to the waitstaff as well.

Every new dish will prompt certain questions from the front of the house. You need to anticipate these questions and provide good answers.

Foreign words and obscure ingredients will come up straightaway. You need to know that
boudin blanc
is a white sausage made of ground pork, whole eggs, liver, milk, and pig hearts. You need to know that a squab is a pigeon. You
need to know that confit means “preserve,” and that the standard method of confiting savory foods is to slowly poach them in fat. You need to know that verjus means essentially “green juice,” and that it is made from the juice of unripe grapes, and that even though it is very acidic, it is not technically a vinegar because it hasn’t undergone the fermentation process that vinegar undergoes. You need to know that a filbert is a hazelnut. You need to know that rocket is arugula. You need to know that quince, also known as
marmelo
or
membrillo
, is a fruit not unlike an apple. You need to know that herring are native to the North Atlantic, and that they are small oily fish with immense nutritional value. They are rich in protein, vitamins D and B12, and omega-3 fatty acids, and, unlike their larger relatives, their heavy metal and contaminant toxicities are infinitesimal at best. You need to know that ramps are wild onions of incredible robustness from the Appalachian region of North America, which are available only in limited quantities for a very short amount of time beginning at the end of April, which is why we pickle them. You need to know that boquerones are white anchovies cured in oil with garlic, parsley, and vinegar, and that they are far more palatable than their salty brown counterparts. You need to know that agnolotti are a sort of oblong ravioli originally from the Piedmont region of Italy, which are filled, in this case, with a mousse made of braised veal tongue, lemon thyme, and garlic confit. You need to know that the “winter” mushrooms in this pasta dish are girolles and velvet foots. You need to know that preserved lemon is lemon rind that has been pickled in lemon juice, salt, and sugar. You need to know that monkfish is an anglerfish from the northwest
Atlantic. You need to know that foie gras, in this case, is the liver of a duck that has been specially fattened by way of the unlovely cornmeal gavage process. You need to know that beluga lentils are small, shiny black legumes. You need to know that endive, or chicory, is a bitter leaf vegetable from the daisy family. You need to know that black heritage pork is the meat of a large black European hog that is known for its special tenderness. You need to know that sous vide means “under vacuum” and describes the process of vacuum-sealing food in boilable plastic bags and slowly cooking them in a circulating water bath until they reach a highly specific internal temperature, so as to maximize texture and liquid retention. You need to know that the current law stipulates that pork must reach 145°F in order to destroy all vegetative forms of bacteria that might be naturally present in the meat. Cooking it sous vide allows you to regulate this with precision. You need to know that Tokyo turnips are baby turnips, similar in appearance to snow belle radishes. You need to know that guanciale is cured pig jowl from Umbria. You need to know that sapori forte means “strong flavors,” and that the name refers to the piquancy of the ingredients—the cornichons, the mustard, the raisins, the tarragon—which, in combination, work to balance one another with strong results. You need to know about allergens. Gluten, lactose, tree nut, shellfish, and garlic intolerances are extremely common, but there are other sensitivities to bear in mind: orange, strawberry, persimmon, apple, pear, jackfruit, eggplant, corn, red meat, eggs, caffeine, alcohol, sulfites, sugar, salt, pepper. There are also religious restrictions, most commonly kosher and halal dietary law. You need to know everything about everything that’s in
every dish, and you must be able to identify which items may conflict with which dietary guidelines.

After you’ve figured out answers to the standard questions, you need to decide how to endow your premeal note with some degree of panache. Servers are osmotic. The excitement you put into your presentation will drift into their presentations, which will in turn excite the diners and increase the likelihood that they will order one of the specials. Not only are specials a way to make money on in-house products that might otherwise have no outlet on the regular menu and therefore eventually become garbage, but they are also a way to develop new menu ideas and keep the atmosphere in the kitchen fresh and forward-looking. So you take care to include certain anecdotal material when explaining them.

For example, you might mention that quince is believed to have been the “golden apple” in the mythical garden of the Hesperides, known to grant its eaters eternal life; or that herring, one of the most salubrious fishes in the sea, has been part of human culture as long as written language, its consumption dating back to at least 3000
B
.
C
.; or that the Cosby Ramp Festival, in Cosby, Tennessee—which takes place on the first weekend in May—invites thousands of people from all over the world to come and forage the “little stinkers” by hand; or that beluga lentils borrow their name from the beluga sturgeon, whose hard roe—the familiar beluga caviar—are similar in appearance to the legume; or that a girolle is a French chanterelle (which you’d think is a French term itself) and that velvet foots are wild enokitake mushrooms found on tree stumps in mulberry groves. You might share as much of this information as possible,
so that the waitstaff can learn something. For the better of our servers, like Devon and Candice—the true professionals—this gesture will go a long way. They will absorb what you say and the energy with which you say it, and they will use it to sell more specials. For stooges like Rupert—the teenaged bungler who just came on board last week—your efforts may be in vain. But regardless of the extent to which they use or desire your presentation, it’s important to give them all the information they could possibly need.

This is how you approach the last half hour before the premeal meeting, getting things in order, pondering. Once the mise en place is set, each dish can be prepared in five or ten minutes, sometimes even less, which means that you need to be on the line at 1620. It’s quarter past now. Feeling confident about the shape you’re in, you step outside to smoke a quick cigarette and rehearse your presentation.

Two drags in, Chef pops his head out the door.

“What the fuck?” he says. “You think you have time to smoke a cigarette right now? We’re up in fifteen minutes. Are you even ready? Do you have the descriptions together?”

“Sorry, Chef. That’s what I was out here—”

“Let’s go!” he says. The door slams shut behind him. You smush the cherry off the cigarette on the sole of your shoe, save the remnants in your pack for later, and hustle inside after him.

Knowing that you guys will be doing the specials for the premeal note, the cooks have abandoned the line and
taken seats elsewhere to break for a few minutes and be out of the way. The only people on the main stage are you, Stefan, and Chef. And Kiko, of course, is not far away, slowly making his way through the heaps of pots and pans that have accumulated over the course of the afternoon. His
P
.
M
. assistant hasn’t shown up yet and his face is twisted over it.

Chef looks serious, too. He doesn’t smoke—most experienced chefs don’t because of the way it impacts the palate; it’s something you need to work on quitting sooner rather than later—and even though he says it’s okay for you to do so from time to time, you try never to let him see you do it. It is always bad when he has to fetch you from outside because he needs you and you are smoking. This particular occasion seems to have annoyed him thoroughly. Stefan can sense it as well. He raises his eyebrows, wrinkles his brow, avoids eye contact with you, keeps his head down, and just cooks. Everybody is quiet, intent. The air is hot and tense. It’s Kiko who finally breaks the silence.

“¿Que huele, güey? Huele como algo está quemando,”
he says.

Chef looks up, trains a stare on you, takes a suspicious whiff.

“Yeah, what is that?” he says.

Then it dawns on you. The filberts. You forgot to take them out.

“Ah, shit!” you say, and dash over to the oven.

Thick smoke billows out when you open the door. It smells carcinogenic and burns your eyes. You wave it away to reveal the pan of filberts. They’re hammered.

“What is that?” Chef says again.

“It’s filberts,” you say. “I was toasting them up for you for the terrine.”

“Why?” he says. “I already got them. I told you I had the terrine, A to Z. Was I unclear about that?”

“No, Chef.”

“Come on, man, get it together,” he says. “What’s with you today?”

“Sorry, Chef.”

“Get that shit out of here, it stinks.”

“
Oui
, Chef.”

You take the smoking pan to the back prep area. You shove on a faucet and toss the whole rig in the sink to cool it down. This is an important step, so that you don’t burn a hole in the trash liner with the hot nuts. But your embarrassment has you acting a mite too aggressively, and when the pan hits the bottom of the bay, its handle smacks against the corner and cracks loose.

“God damn it,” you say. “Can I get a break here?”

Without its handle, the pan is useless. You rinse the broken pieces in the cold water and toss them into the garbage.

Rogelio and Brianne are back there to witness this entire affair. They don’t say anything, they only shake their heads. You can feel the humiliation in your cheeks.

“Aghh, whatever,” you say.

All right, so you’ve left the samples out, you’ve gotten caught smoking a cigarette, and now you’ve destroyed thirty dollars’ worth of nuts and broken a hundred-fifty-dollar
pan. Bad start. But, listen, enough of these bush league mistakes. It’s time to get to business. It’s time to take these specials to the hole.

When you return to the line, Chef is tossing the salad for the terrine and getting ready to go to plate. Stefan is bringing together the pan sauce for the agnolotti, mounting it with butter and fresh herbs. He has a bowl warming up under the salamander—hot food goes on hot plates.

“Hey, push that pasta back a minute, will you?” you call out.

“How long you need?”

“Five,” you say.

“Five,” he says.

“Five,” Chef says.

The idea is to get to the pass with all the ingredients in no more than five minutes so that Chef can plate everything. You start setting pans about the flat-top to get hot. You throw down an oblong cast-iron Griswold for the monkfish and a stainless steel sauté pan for the pork. You coat the bottom of each with a thin skin of soya oil. The monkfish will take the longest, so that has to go down first. The rest of the garnish will be picked up in one-quart saucepans, with the exception of the potato salad (which you dress quickly in a flat-bottomed bowl and set on the stove’s piano near the fire to take the chill off). When the Griswold is hot, you season the monk and lay it in gently. There’s a soft sizzle when the flesh touches the oil. The pork has already been fully thermalized in the circulator, so the cuisson is simple à la minute: a quick sear followed by a glace of pork jus. You cut the loin out of the bag and place it in the pan. Its own sizzle sings with the fish’s.

Next is the garnish. You set up two of the saucepans on a wire rack toward the back of the flat-top. The rack is a flame tamer; the extra half inch it gives you diffuses the heat. This way you can warm things up without needing to tend to them as much. You ladle the sauces into those pans, boquerones in one, sapori forte in the other. Into another pan go the Tokyo turnips. They get a splash of stock, a dollop of soubise, a knob of butter, and a dash of salt. Into another pan go the lentils. They start with a spoon of duck fat and finish with stock and a knob of butter. Into another pan goes the pureed carrot. You whip it with a spoon to a fluffy consistency. Into another pan goes the endive. You bring it up to a simmer in the braising jus.