Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (13 page)

As you’re rolling them up, you notice that the line has gone suspiciously quiet. Quiet like the inside of a soldiers’ boat bound for Omaha Beach. The cooks have finished stocking their stations and now they’re arranging the finishing
touches on their mise en place, slicing, chopping, turning, worrying. You feel compelled to march around and inspect their work.

You can tell a lot about a cook by the state of his station just prior to service. If it is neat and well organized you know he is in good shape. You can see he’s had the self-control to work clean to begin with, the discipline to put right any messes he’s made in the process, and the agility and efficiency to complete all his projects on schedule, while still leaving time to codify his workspace. That his station is free of clutter also suggests he has the mental clarity required to accommodate whatever toil service holds for him. In short, a clean station allows you to assume that a cook is ready, that he is
there
.

A dirty station, however, paints an ominous picture. If a cook hasn’t had a chance to stop and regroup—to change out his board, to wipe down the tabletop, to refresh his spoon water—you know he is in a bad way. You know he probably still has a lot of work to do, which means he might not be ready by the time the first order comes in. And if he’s not ready when the first order comes in, there’s a chance he never will be. He’ll be playing catch-up all night and he might go down in flames.

Fortunately for us, Warren and VinDog are completely dialed in. Their stations are ultratight and well supplied: towels folded, surfaces spotless, saltshakers, pepper mills, and fat and acid bottles full to the brim—their mise is truly en place. But no matter how nice things look on the surface, as their sous chef you still need to ask the question.

“Big night tonight, Don Juan,” you say sternly. “Are you ready to roll?”

“
Oui
, Chef,” Warren says. “Always ready.”

“What about you, VinDog? You going to be able to handle this push?”

“Tu sabes,”
he says. “Never scared.”

They’re so accustomed to being busy on the station that getting there, for them, is the easy part. You just give them the number and they will get done whatever they need to do in order to be prepared. Their ability to accommodate these massive numbers has yet to be determined, but they will certainly have all the mise en place they need for it.

Garde manger is also fully set. Catalina is rock-steady there. She’s been cooking almost as long as you’ve been alive. She is never unprepared. She always overpreps in large batches. It’s not the ideal way of going about it, but you know as well as she does that she’s always thinking a day or two out, so she’s always ready for even the busiest night. And her station is never,
ever
messy.

“¿Que onda, gringo?”
she says with familiar braggadocio, as you look over her rig.

“Nada,”
you say.
“Sólo digo hola.”

Julio is there as well. His first round of meats have been pulled out to temper, his sous vide baths are rolling at retherm temperatures, and his squeaky-clean cutting board awaits cooked cuts for slicing. As usual, his face is stoically emotionless. But he does express some concerns about the reservationist.

“What’s with the second seating?” he says. “Who booked that shit?”

“I know,” you say, checking the temperature on the
pork in the circulator. “It’s gonna get ugly. Can you handle it, baby?”

“We shall see,” he says.

This brings you around to Raffy on fish roast. Unlike the rest of the cooks, his station seems uncommonly sloppy. It’s not dirty, it’s not terribly disorganized, it’s not even understocked. It’s just not tight. He usually has a fresh box of gloves on the station; the box he’s got now is half empty. He usually has a stack of C-folds; now there are none in sight. He usually folds his side-towels meticulously; now they’re in a heap. The bag in his slim-jim is askew; his spoon water is dirty; his pepper mill is nowhere to be found. His station looks the way it usually does midway through service. But we haven’t even started yet. It’s uncharacteristic in an unsettling way. You expect more of him. Your brow furrows.

“Everything all right, guy?” you ask.

“Yeah, I’m cool,” he says. “Everything is cool.”

His face is pasty and beaded with sweat. His eyes dart around. He seems to be busy trying to look busy, instead of actually accomplishing work—he’s boondoggling.

“But, hey, my printer’s running low on ink,” he says. “I can barely read the dupes. Could you hook me up with another cartridge?”

To make life easier for the cooks, every section has its own ticket printer. This way they don’t need to rely on memory alone when a multitude of orders rushes in. Nor do they have to fetch duplicate copies from Chef when a table is flagged with special instructions—the tickets are right in front of them. The trade-off is, the cooks themselves are responsible for ensuring they have the requisite
paper and ink. You make an exception and head toward the office to fetch a backup for Raffy.

You find Chef in there, bent under the desk, grabbing a cartridge for you. He spied your interaction with Raffy like a predator.

“Your boy don’t look too hot,” he says, tossing you the ink.

“I know,” you say.

“Brew flu?” Chef says.

“Definitely the brew flu,” you say.

“Listen,” Chef says. “I want you to keep an eye on him. If he doesn’t snap out of it in the next hour, he’s gonna go down in flames when the push hits. And you’re gonna be the one to dig him out when he’s in the shits.”

“
Oui
, Chef,” you say.

“Good. Let’s boogie.”

Back on fish roast, Raffy’s got the shakes. He’s drinking water now. He can’t keep it together. Your hands are steady as you load the ink into his printer.

“Listen,” you say, calmly. “What’s your deal?”

“What do you mean?” he says. “Oh, you mean the sink. Yeah, no, it’s cool. I cleaned it up. I’m cool. Just something I ate or something. Fucking street meat.”

“Can you do the job?” you say, soberly.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he says.

You’re pretty sure you can’t trust this response. But the alternative is sending him home, which means you would have to work the station. This is not an attractive alternative because, simply put, working a station is hard. The pass is much easier. There is less sweating on the pass, less bending and lifting. There is less fire. Plus, you get to practice your
plating skills on the pass, which is not only enjoyable but also crucial for your development. No matter how much you love cooking, working the pass on a busy night is almost always preferable.

So since Raffy is not actually asking to go home, which is usually what the hungover cook will do when he sees a way out, you figure the best bet is just to see what happens. Sometimes vomiting makes you feel better when you’re hungover. Maybe he pulled the trigger intentionally. Maybe he’ll be better in an hour, after he’s sweated a bit.

You finish installing the cartridge and slap down the printer’s lid. As the plastic snaps shut, a ticket begins to emerge, as though your filling it with ink were the cause. You look around. The printers on the other sections begin to activate as well. A mechanical buzzing fills the kitchen.

It is the first order of the night.

All heads cock silently toward Chef, awaiting direction.

“Ordering …” he says. “Four-top. First course: two agno, one white asparagus, one terrine, and a crudo. Followed by: one pork, one skate, one gnocchi, and a monkfish”

“
Oui
, Chef!” everyone exclaims.

“You sure you can handle it?” you ask Raffy.

“I got it, man,” he says.

You clap him on the shoulder and join Chef at the pass.

Stefan is there in a moment as well.

“How was the shit, guy?” you ask him.

“Radioactive, bro,” he says, tying the strings on a crisp new apron.

I
T IS OUR FIRST THOUGHT IN THE MORNING
;
IT IS ON OUR
minds when we lie down to sleep. It’s what we spend our days preparing for; it’s the focus of our evenings.
Service:
the work of a servant; an act of help or assistance; employment in or performance of work for another; an organized system of labor used to supply the needs of the public; the act or manner of serving food and drink to guests. Food service. This is our industry.

Service in a restaurant begins the moment the doors open to customers. For our purposes, this happens at 1700. All that came before and all that’s yet to come matters only insofar as it influences the flow of service. Prep work matters. Attendance matters. Readiness matters. Inventory matters. Purchasing and receiving matter. Trifling arguments, hangovers, résumés, relationships, feelings, what happened at the bar last night, and what your trip in this morning was like—these things cease to mean anything once the first order reaches the kitchen.

In the beginning there is the first seating, the first two hours, in which we hope to fill every seat in the house at
least once, hope to do a “full turn.” But things usually come soft in the first seating. It’s easy, relaxed. Whereas a midservice pickup may entail making food for six, seven, eight tables simultaneously, first-seating pickups are often only two or three tickets at a time. Sometimes you can even afford to go table by table, one by one.

Five o’clock is too early for people on Friday. The customers you get at this hour order light. They’re coming from work, taking late business lunches with colleagues, stopping by for drinks and a quick bite, no frills. Or else they’re the pretheater crowd: large, mussed-up troupes on budgets and timetables. Their numbers are big sometimes, but they always have someplace else to be and it shows: single-course meals, often forgoing entrées altogether. Entrées take too long for the stoppers-by. So in the first seating you get a bunch of easy tickets—duck soup here, apple pie there.

As a result, the cooks remain unruffled. They are like tennis players during the first game in a three-set match. They catch up on prep, crack jokes, get a groove going. There is still plenty of time to do things right, plenty of time before things get crazy.

According to the seating forecast, we won’t finish our first full turn until at least 1930. Yet Chef, aware of what a challenge the second seating presents, aware of how quickly things can spin out of control, aware of how important a flawless first seating is, stands poised at the pass. His back is straight, his legs are spread wide, almost obscenely so. He stands this way to minimize lumbar fatigue. When your legs are shoulder width apart or better, you don’t need to hunch your back in order to reach the things on the table. Your
center of gravity is lowered. Your hands and eyes are closer to your work. But Chef also stands this way for logistical purposes. A wide posture prevents others from getting too close to his work, keeps them out of his light, keeps them from lousing up his fine touch with snipped herbs and spice dusts.

He’s flanked on his right and left by you and Stefan, respectively. You’re his wingmen, each responsible for one half of the brigade. Stefan receives food from the meat side, you take the fish. Your job, as the hot pans flock to the pass, is to taste the cooks’ work for seasoning, texture, and temperature. You are quality control. You taste all of it. If the fluke is cold, you send it back; if the pommes purees are lumpy, you send them back; if the sauce has a skin, if the soubise needs salt, if the turnips are hammered, you send them back.

You do this, first, so that Chef doesn’t have to. He has other things to do. Not only does he have to plate almost everything, but he also has to expedite, which is to say manage the tickets, group the pickups, control the flow. Plus, when
you
send a pan of food back to a cook, you have the power in you to keep it under wraps, make light of it. You are capable of doing it nicely, unconcernedly. Chef? No. His temper is incendiary. Allowing something imperfect to reach his hands might set him off, and the shrapnel hits everybody when he blows.

The other, more important reason you taste things and send them back to cooks is so that guests don’t have to. Not so much because a guest’s opinion matters—many people have an opinion about the way things should be cooked, but few understand what the best way is and why—but
because food that comes back after it’s gone out to the dining room is incredibly disruptive. It breaks up the flow.