Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (4 page)

So when you enter the fish box, you’re checking on several things:

First is temperature. Whereas most foodstuffs keep well below 40°F, the fish box must remain between 34°F and 38°F.

Next is the manner of storage. All fish must be properly covered, protected from air, and shrouded with an abundance of ice. Whole fishes must be sitting upright in the ice—dorsal fins to the sky as if they were swimming—in order to preserve their anatomical constitution. Laying a whole fish on its side predisposes it to bruising, bone breaks, bloodline punctures, uneven air circulation, and a host of other unwanted conditions that compromise the integrity of the fish. Portioned fishes, on the other hand, must be wrapped tightly with food-service film, laid out flat and even in perforated trays (which keep liquids from pooling), and overspread with ice. Any deviations from these methods of storage must be rectified at once.

Next is the quality of the product. Everything must look fresh and smell fresh, or else it goes in the garbage.

Finally comes general hygiene. All surfaces—shelves,
walls, ceilings, and floors—must be spotlessly clean. The fish box, above all places, must be immaculate.

The other boxes come under a similar level of scrutiny. The produce box should smell of fruits and vegetables, the dairy box should smell of milk and cheese, the beverage box should smell of beverages—typically keg beer, which can be nauseating in the morning—and the meat box should smell of blood. Like the lowboys on the line, all these boxes should be below 40°F. The standard pathogens—
Clostridium botulinum, Listeria monocytogenes, Trichinella spiralis, Escherichia coli
, salmonella, etcetera—have difficulty thriving under 40°F.

In the case of produce, everything should be properly kitted up in plastic containers. Fresh lettuce glows green in Lexans, gold bar squash shines in Cambros. Every container should be easily visible and clearly labeled with its contents, the packing date, and the initials of the handler. If the product has not been properly organized in a “first in, first out” fashion, you should be able to identify the issue immediately and correct it without difficulty.

In the dairy box, your focus is on expiration dates. A major error to look out for when the deliveries have been unpacked is the placement of new milk in front of old milk on the shelf. It’s an easy corner that’s often cut. The way to solve the problem is to figure out who’s responsible for the error and bring him into the box to observe the situation. You might even read him the riot act. He’ll likely snicker or apologize, blame somebody else, and fix it.

In the beverage cooler, you check the inventory. While it’s usually the duty of the bar manager to maintain the beverage cooler, you keep your eye on certain pars, such as
bar fruit and juices. Additionally, you check the bottled beer for evidence of tampering. Most missing beers in the restaurant are blamed on the kitchen staff—your staff. A bottle here or there is usually no cause for concern, but you check to ensure nothing’s gotten out of hand.

You have one main objective in the meat box: to keep the chicken below and separate from everything else. Owing chiefly to production methods in most American bulk chicken facilities, the Department of Health considers the bird a terribly dangerous creature. It marinates in its own filth from the time it dies until the time you put it in the oven. It is a haven for bacteria. And its exudate—chicken juice—travels like quicksilver. No other protein can cross-contaminate its neighbors quite like chicken. When you enter the box, you make sure the chicken is never above and nowhere near anything else.

Likewise, you ensure that the eggs are safe. An intact egg is relatively innocuous. The expected bacterial distribution in industrially produced eggs is one contaminated unit per twenty thousand. Once that egg breaks, however, the potential for contamination spikes remarkably, as does the capacity for that contamination to spread, making the egg, too, a considerably dangerous entity. And so the Department of Health levies steep fines against restaurants for broken eggs. You take care in the meat box to check all the eggs.

When you are satisfied with the state of all the boxes, you go to task on checking the deliveries held therein. Overnight stewards and
A.M.
prep cooks are usually responsible for unpacking the deliveries, and they’ve been trained on how to put things away properly. But if something is
amiss, the hammer will come down on you, so it is essential, again, to double-check their work.

For this you need the invoices, which are usually in Rogelio’s custody. He will have decorated each invoice with check marks next to all the items that have arrived. You confirm with him that everything
seemed
to come in. He undoubtedly says yes, but you go through the invoices with a careful eye anyway. Often something will appear in one area of the invoice as delivered, but on spare sheets in the back it will be marked “unavailable” or “out of stock.” This happens most frequently in dry storage and with exotic produce items. Even though you might order and receive such items all the time, they are often secretly unavailable, which is to say: special-order. Just because violet mustard and crosnes
seem
to be readily available doesn’t mean that a given purveyor keeps them stocked in the regular catalog. It’s not uncommon to get shorted on things like this from time to time, especially when they require importing.

You also always have to check the invoices against the order sheets that the closing sous chef prepared the night before, to ensure that nothing extra was delivered. This is another phenomenon that the
A.M.
prep cooks and stewards are typically unaware of, but a technique that some purveyors enjoy utilizing. Sales reps are often held to delivery minimums, which they might not tell you about in order to keep your transactions smooth and comfortable. On some occasions, though, when your order is shy of that minimum, they’ll sneak something they know you use regularly onto the truck for you in order to prevent their bosses from taking it out on them. If this error has occurred,
you call that particular purveyor on the phone, communicate your feelings about the matter aggressively, and insist that they retrieve the unneeded product and strike it from your invoice. If that hasn’t occurred, however—if you’ve received everything that’s been ordered and nothing else—you complete the invoices with a signature of approval and put them in a file with the rest of the week’s paperwork.

Then, when the line is set and the fridges are clear and the deliveries have been meticulously checked, you do a final pass of the kitchen, making sure that all cardboard has been broken down, all trash has been bagged and taken out, all floors have been swept and mopped and are sparkling.

And like that, you’re done with rounds.

It’s ten-thirty now. Probably just enough time for one more cigarette before Chef arrives.

O
N YOUR WAY OUT TO THE LOADING DOCK
,
YOU
’
RE MET BY
your fellow sous, Stefan, who’s on his way in. He’s just been smoking himself—you can smell it on his fluffy parka. He decides to join you for another one. His breath smells of whiskey; his eyes are bloodshot. He was out last night. You sit on greasy milk crates and talk about it.

“Bro, shoeless drunk,” he says, blowing a pair of smoke tusks out his nostrils. “Completely shitballs wasted.”

It’s morning still and neither of you wants to discuss service yet. Instead, you chat about what happened at the bars after work, share gossip about coworkers. The food service industry is incredibly incestuous, and licentious things are always happening between colleagues after service. Stefan regales you with the evening’s inanities.

You stamp out the cigarettes and head in.

While Stefan changes beside you in the confined office—his bristly skin stretching and puckering just inches from your face—you sit at the computer and check on the numbers for the night. It comes as no surprise that the cover count is at two hundred and rising. You knew when
you woke up that it was going to be busy. It’s Friday night. This is your reality.

“Yo, is this the Brinata?” he says, picking up the sample of cheese. “Nice, guy.”

He cuts himself a wedge. You give him the breakdown.

Rogelio has been hard at work since 0600 and he’s gotten us off to a good start. The herbs are snipped, the garlic is peeled, the baby vegetables have been turned. The stocks are up and the chicken bones have been roasted for the Château-Chalon. The demi-glace is reducing. The shrimps are peeled and deveined. Croquettes are being formed. Brianne, the
P.M.
prep cook, is due in at noon and she’s scheduled to start immediately on the tomato confit. The prep lists that hang over the individual stations are side work for the cooks who are assigned to work there tonight. Items such as
pommes purees, soubise
, and other garnishes are the daily responsibilities of the
entremetiers
and will be completed closer to service, when they arrive in the afternoon. The majority of the meat fabrication is in the hands of Julio, our swarthy
rôtisseur
, who should be in by 1300 to set up his station. Much of the heavy lifting has been delegated down the hierarchy by rote. The only tasks that fall to you and Stefan are the finesse jobs: butchering the fish, rolling out the pasta, generating the specials. It’s up to the two of you who does what.

You start by sifting through the house to see what needs to be used up, burned out. There is a separate walk-in box in the back prep area devoted to prep work—the production box. Sauces, garnishes, dressings, cooked soups, cut vegetables, and so forth all reside here. Without regular attention, the production box has a tendency to become a
garbage dump for leftover mise en place. As such, it is the perfect place to initiate the creative process, to seek inspiration for specials. There is a quart of salsa verde tucked behind containers of chive oil; a six-quart Cambro of beluga lentils hides in the back; a can of piquillo peppers has been opened, half used, and dumped into pints; a tray of boquerones, mummified in plastic wrap, has found its way to the top shelf. Ideas begin to take shape in your head. There is an unclaimed lobe of foie gras in the meat box; fresh herring in the fish box will turn if unused; Piave, Taleggio, and Scamorza collect dust in the dairy box; there are girolles and velvet foots; there are the Brinata, the PX, the pistachios … It excites you to imagine what Chef might come up with for tonight. But since he has the final say on what goes out to the dining room, no real work on the specials will get done until he arrives. And since you have to be doing something when Chef walks in, it behooves you to get started on the two major tasks: one of you will do the pasta, the other will do the fish.

Stefan asserts that he’d like to make the pasta. “Because,” he says, “I’m better at it than you are. Your shit is mad doughy. Mine is elegant.” His real motive is to hide out in the prep kitchen all day. Pasta, of course, is a time-consuming process, but it requires little physical effort. It’s simple and relaxing. A hungover sous chef could immerse himself in the task all afternoon without having to reveal to Chef the state he’s in. Which is just as well as far as you’re concerned, because you consider fish butchery a specialty.

Stefan plucks a Pedialyte from the miniature refrigerator and sets off toward the back prep area. You pull a bib apron over your head and ready your knives.