Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (16 page)

Cooking is an exercise in kinetic awareness, economy of movement, mastery of the senses. You can smell when a sauce is scorched; you can hear when a fish is ready to come off the plancha. You must trust these senses to help you through the night. Your whole body must remain active. No matter what recipes you know, no matter how much experience you have, each piece of fish in each pan presents a unique set of circumstances to which you must react, based on the sensory information at hand in the moment. You must take what you have before you and make something lovely out of it. And while it might be the same thing every day, it’s something new every second.

Since there is rarely only one guest ordering food in the dining room, it is rarely possible to do only one thing at a time. While one hand waggles a saucepan of demi-glace, the other lights the burner beneath a
sautoir
, to make it hot for the next piece of fish due to go down. While one hand lays that piece of fish on a drop tray to be seasoned, the other reaches for the salt. If you spin away from the stove to toss a piece of trash into the bin, you take the opportunity to grab a fresh side-towel from your station before spinning back. When your hands are full of mise en place you’ve just pulled from the fridge, a soft hip check brings the fridge door home. To take a pan from the stove, open the oven door, place the pan in the oven, and close the oven door is one fluid motion. While you read through
the tickets on board, you keep busy cutting, chopping, stirring, sniffing, listening—all with a sense of urgency.

To watch a good cook work well on his station is to witness multitasking of the highest order. But not all cooking happens within the wingspan radius of a cook’s personal station. It is not a one-man show, it is a collaborative effort. There is stretching, bending, leaning, and opening. There are infiltrations, encroachments, interferences. There is path crossing. There are truncated alerts—“Behind, hot,” “Door open,” “Knife”—which help everyone know what is going on around him so that collisions can be avoided.

While no environment is free of accident and human error, the ability to work collision-free is expected of any good cook. In good restaurants, everyone works this way, with
sprezzatura:
a certain nonchalance that makes their actions appear to be without effort and almost without thought, an easy facility in accomplishing arduous tasks that conceals the conscious exertion that went into them. They instinctively move about one another in the narrowest corners without even the subtlest brushing of hips. There are no burns or cuts, no pans dropped, no spills or messes made. Its practitioners call this performance “the dance.” And while its choreography comes naturally to those of a certain acumen, it is important to develop proficiency in it if you have any hope for advancement.

In our kitchen it’s not a lack of experience, intelligence, or skill that compromises the dance; it’s that rare occasion when one of the cooks lets his emotions best him. He’s hungover, his mind is elsewhere, he suffers from a temporary bout of indolence, forgetfulness, unpreparedness, disorganization,
anger. In this state he can’t see clearly the deficiency of his own work, and it isn’t until an especially time-sensitive moment that he realizes the error of his ways with a grumble—“Oh, shit!”—and must spin or dash, and thus spills and splashes, burns himself, and messes up the station. And the messier the station gets, the harder it is to maintain organization. And the less organized you are, the more frequent the “Oh, shit!” moments. It is cumulative disruption.

Right now, Raffy has really screwed the pooch. Apart from fish lying everywhere and tickets getting backed up on the printer, his work this evening has been untidy, to put it mildly—detritus abounds. An hour’s worth of splatters encrusts the stove’s piano; the oven’s handle is slick with smears of grease; the spoon water hasn’t been changed since the beginning of service; the cutting board is filmed with fish tissue.

It would be impossible for you to work the remainder of the night with the station in this condition. You’d constantly be readjusting your technique to accommodate the mess. Your instincts tell you to put things that need cutting down on the cutting board, but since you know that fish guts have been rotting on it all night, you can’t do that in good conscience. You’d have to stop, think for a second, and find an alternate surface. You’d be losing precious seconds every time you did this, and you’d spend the whole night a step or two behind. The only way you’ll be able to catch up is by taking a moment to wipe everything down, refresh the spoon water, and change out your board.

“Yo, Juan,” you say, “this spoon water looks like the East River, dog. Do me a favor and change it out for me, will you?”

Warren drops what he’s doing and jumps in to help you get organized.

“This sack of shit better pull it together,” he says, dumping the spoon water into the sink and filling the bain up anew, “or I’m out.” A rare moment of recalcitrance from him.

“I think he’s done for the night,” you say, loading in a new cutting board. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“I don’t understand what Chef sees in him,” he says with a shake of the head. “Anyways, so who’s gonna cover the station?”

“Me,” you say, shuffling your tools into place.

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry, Chef.”

Just then Marcus, the front of house manager and part owner, swings into the kitchen cradling an armful of plates. He’s got refires.

“These flounders,” he announces, presenting Chef with a pair of fish, “they’re
rare
.”

His Brooklyn accent is thick and insulting. His eyes are dark with moral turpitude. He plonks the plates down on the pass before Chef irreverently, throws you a nasty glare, and storms back out into the dining room. Chef studies the plates a moment. Vasculature materializes on his forehead; his earlobes go purple as if gearing up to steam.

He lifts the plates in your general direction.

“Fix it,” he says.

He grips the plates firmly as you reach to take them from him. You look up at him. Your eyes meet. The look on his face seems to say
Never mind what Marcus says, he’s a total piece of shit. I know you didn’t cook this fish. I know Raffy is to blame. But now we need to fix it
. It’s a relatively comforting
look. Some glint in his eye even seems to say
We are in this together. It’s you and me now
.

“Oh, and by the way,” Marcus says, poking his head back through the kitchen door, “the
Times
is here. At table 6.”

The refires were the last fish that went out before Raffy went down. They looked beautiful then, but the customers have cut them open to reveal a gash of raw flesh. It tears you up to see fish like this. You should have known they were underdone when they came to the pass. You should have been able to tell. You should have taken a cake tester to them. They shouldn’t have gone out. It’s embarrassing. But at this point, it’s no use lamenting the situation; you just need to fix the problem. And you realize now that you need to do it before the order for table 6 arrives. You had almost forgotten that the
Times
was coming in.

When magazine and newspaper writers arrive, all the focus switches to them. Even if they aren’t proper “food critics”—if they write for the business section, say, or they have a travel column—the work they do is still public and the things they say can reach a large audience. That’s not to say that all public figures receive this attention. Hollywood personalities, for example, despite how they may be treated by the front of house staff, rarely arouse any special effort from the folks in the kitchen. Nor do political celebrities or sports stars. But people who write for periodicals always strongly affect cooks because they have the unique power to advance a chef’s career—or obliterate it, depending on what they say. So the instant the name of a publication
drops, ears perk up and the mood shifts. You still give plenty of attention to all the other tables, but your focus transfers from ensuring the magnificence of
their
dining experience to giving yourself ample time to satisfy the writer.

But first you have to rip through these refires and clear the board as best you can. You pull down a stack of pans and scatter them about the flat-top. Oil goes into two. You take two cuts of fluke from the fridge and place them on a clean drop tray. You pat their flesh dry with a C-fold towel and season them with salt, pepper, and freshly cracked coriander seed. When you season, you season from a height so that the spices sprinkle down like a light snowfall, evenly coating the surface of the fish. The pans you use are heavy-bottomed steel sautoirs, with a copper inlay, so they’re hot in no time. You lay each fish, one by one, into its own dedicated pan. You swirl them around to ensure that they don’t stick before letting the stove do its work.

“Up in three on the refire,” you say to Warren.

“Oui,”
he says, readying the accoutrements.

“How long on the twelve-top on 37?” Julio says, with something of a grin on his face. He likes it when you have to work on the station, and he gets a kick out of being ahead of you.

“Six,” you say, confidently. “And 42, 15, and 9 in eight,
oui
?”

“
Oui
, Chef,” everybody says.

Monkfish, skate wing, arctic char hit the pans; herring, wreckfish, and gambas hit the plancha. You flip and sizzle, slide pans side to side, slip some into and out of the oven, shove others into and out of the salamander. In three minutes you’re ready to head to plate.

“Let’s do it,” you say, and you make your way to the pass, where Chef and Stefan are in the fray laying waste—slicing meats and stabbing tickets something fierce. The sweat beading on their foreheads matches yours.

“Stef,” you say, “let’s get new plates on that refire.”

“Oui,”
he says, thrusting up the china.

You’re almost caught up when the printers begin to buzz again. They’ve been quiet for a while, which is curious since you know the dining room is full. The quietness suggests that the waiters have been busy elsewhere and haven’t had time to punch in tickets. All their focus has been on cosseting the
Times
table up front. This buzzing we hear now is probably the order. It is a big one, and when it’s finally done printing, all the cooks cock their heads toward Chef to listen as he plucks it from the pass’s printer.

“Ordering,” he says, pausing to look over the dupe in its entirety. “PPX. Four-top.” He glances up at you with a raised eyebrow. “Two herring, one gambas, one green-lip, one tartare. Followed by a monk, a fluke, a mackerel, two char, and a cheeks.”

This order is frustrating. Not only are there six entrées on order for a table of four people, but they’re almost exclusively fish. And the first courses, with the exception of the tartare that Catalina picks up, are all hot appetizers to be made by you as well. You look up quizzically at Chef; he shrugs as if to say
Sorry
.

“VinDog,” he says, “after apps go on 6, be ready to pick up four tastings of the veal tongue pasta.”

“
Oui
, Chef. Four soign-dog agnos, heard.”

“And, Catalina, let’s put out a round of canapés to start.”

“Sí, Jefe. ¿Cuáles?”

“Do Kumamoto and uni first, then the foie-lychee drops,” he says.

“Sí. ¿Cuántas?”

“Four and four.”

It’s the best Chef can do to help. He’ll send out these complimentary dishes because they’re blindingly easy to prepare and the minutes it takes the
Times
table to eat them will buy you an extra moment or two to pull together their real food. In some sense he’s sticking his neck out by doing it. Letting food critics know that they are being pampered is terribly gauche—it throws a chef’s confidence into question. But given the order that’s come in, it’s basically unavoidable. You need the time to collect the VIP set.

In good restaurants, all the ingredients are choice, sourced from the best farms and purveyors, harvested at their peak, sustainable, free of chemicals, and so forth. But when a PPX table sits down, you sift through your mise en place to find the choicest of the choice.

The green-lips should all still be tightly shut. Mussels open when they die, exposing their interior meat to the elements and accelerating the spoilage process. In order to be sure you have the freshest ones, you dump a couple dozen into a deep Cambro of cold water and wait to see that they float, which indicates that they are airtight, still alive. They should also, while they’re in the cold water, be thoroughly cleaned and rid of their beards. Their shells should be brown like almond skin at the base and blush into an electric viridian at the rim. They should be huge, but also similar in size, so that they pop open at approximately the same time when you steam them. The prawns for the gambas dish should also be uniform in size and
shape, but other features help you decide which to sell as well. They should be plump and hold their shape firmly. Their shells, legs, and digestive tracts should be cleanly removed, showing no sign of the butcher’s touch in doing so, and their heads and tails should be soundly attached, so that they don’t fall off with the administration of heat. Still other features help you pick out the herring. Their eyes should be clear and there should be no sign of decay on the fins. Their skin should be a brilliant aluminum tone and should wrap neatly and fully around a stout belly. If the eyes are cloudy or the fins are frayed, the fish is old. If the skin has begun to change color or peel away, the fish is old. And if the fish is old, you don’t use it—not for the
Times
.

The canapés have been sent out by the time you’ve selected the right food, and since they’re only
amuse-bouches
—small bites, mouth pleasers—they won’t take long to eat. So you don’t waste time waiting for the server to fire the apps.

First are the gambas, because they take the longest. You lay them on the hottest part of the plancha so that they can Maillardize without overcooking in the center. Then come the green-lips. You pour them into a screaming hot copper pan, hit them with a knob of butter, drop in four fingerfuls of shaved fennel, a spoonful of garlic confit, a splash of wine, and a dollop of soubise, then cover them with an inverted
sauteuse
and let it ride. You flip the gambas and drop the herring on the plancha.