Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (5 page)

Proper butchery takes place behind the plastic-flap doorway of a chilled butcher’s room. The room should be equipped with a deep sink, firm tables, and large, flat, self-healing cutting boards. Band saws, meat hooks, and other nifty gadgetry are helpful and often necessary in larger operations, but our restaurant doesn’t generate the sort of business that necessitates massive amounts of protein fabrication, so we don’t have them. In fact, we don’t even have a separate room for butchery. Having seen such rooms before, however, you do your best to replicate the environment.

On a level stainless worktable, away from the ambient heat of the ranges on the line, you begin to set your workspace. You stretch a damp side-towel flat against the metal of the table, smoothing out any wrinkles, and place your cutting board on top of it to prevent the board from slipping. To the right are a stack of extra side-towels, latex gloves, fish tweezers, and a plastic container of water into which you will discard any pin bones. Above your board is a stack of empty stainless-steel half hotel pans of various depths, into which you will load the fabricated fish when you finish portioning it. Beside the pans is a gram-sensitive digital scale, which you will use to check your cuts for consistency and accuracy. To the left you’ve reserved a spot for the trays of fish that you will bring out from refrigeration successively as you are ready to work on them. Nearby are a roll of plastic wrap, a container of ice, and a slim-jim trash bin.

The knives you have brought out from your kit are
your specialty fish knives: the Yo-Deba, the Petty, and the Sujihiki. Like any diligent chef, you’ll take them to a stone before even thinking of cutting fish. But you sharpen your knives daily, so all they need is a few passes on eight-thousand grit to buff the edge to a shiny finish. The process is sensuous. They are obedient as you glide them across the smooth, wet surface of the stone. They’re lined with a slim glister in no time—keen as razors. You fell a few scraps of paper to loosen any burr. The paper flutters to bits at the blades’ touch. They are like katana. You are ready to cut the fish.

The first fish you retrieve from the box is the fluke, a flat whitefish native to the Atlantic waters just off the Long Island coast. Its flesh is a shady pearl color, moist and delicate. Its average weight is two or three pounds, but it can reach ten. It is sturdier than most fish its size, and it stands up to many cooking techniques. It is flaky and meaty at the same time. Its flavor welcomes bold combinations but stands as well on its own. It is versatile and delicious. Fluke is your favorite fish.

The spinal cord of the fluke runs directly down its middle. Whereas round fish are broken up bilaterally into a left and a right side, flatfish such as halibut and fluke can be seen as having four separate quadrants: top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right. Unfortunately, this type of fish allows the careless butcher to carve out four fillets without betraying a lack of ability to the untrained eye. You know, however, that a true craftsman with careful knife work maintains the connection between the two sides of the top half and the two sides of the bottom half. You know to trace the tip of your blade carefully along the spine of
the fish at the center, so as to preserve the membrane of skin between the cuts, allowing the fillets to retain their complete cellular integrity and yielding the amplest, supplest harvest of flesh. You try very hard every time you butcher fluke to achieve that. It’s almost a competition you have with yourself. Which is why you’ll cut fish before rolling pasta any day.

Your station is fully set, and the first fluke is on your cutting board. You take a deep breath and start in.

The first stroke of your knife glides hilt deep into the flesh of the fish. You can feel bone on your tip. You begin to trace the spine.

But a clattering at the back door interrupts your work.

“What’s up, bitches!” booms a familiar voice from the entryway.

You glance up from the cutting board. It’s the executive chef. Stefan materializes from the back prep area in a flash.

“What’s up, Chef,” you say, in unison.

“Good news,” says Chef, tinkering on his BlackBerry. “We got a twelve-top at nine o’clock, followed by the
Times
at nine-thirty. We’re at two fifty and climbing.”

Your knife wavers in your hand. You nick the flesh of the fish inadvertently—a letdown. Chef’s lips peel back like the Cheshire cat’s.

“You boys ready to get your shit pushed in?”

A
KITCHEN
’
S IDENTITY IS SHAPED MAINLY BY TWO THINGS
: cuisine and technique—what you cook and how you cook it. They are the obvious differences from one place to the next—Japanese or Italian, say, four-star or greasy spoon. But there are other, less obvious differences as well. The layout, for example, is always unique. The storage spaces, the walk-in boxes, the prep area, the line—they’re positioned differently everywhere you go. Some kitchens have several floors and several rooms devoted to different tasks (pastry shops, sous vide labs, banquet lines, butcheries); other kitchens cram all the tasks into one space. The size and shape of things vary as well. Some spaces are big enough to hold eighty cooks at once; in other places you might cook through an entire night of service without leaving a four-by-four-foot space. In the big places, you use double-stacked combis—computerized super ovens—to make huge batches of things; in the small places you might do everything to order on one six-burner range. Some restaurants are all about volume, turn-and-burn operations where all that matters is the Z report—the financial breakdown at
the end of the day; other restaurants focus on the food and the ambiance, exchanging high cover counts for the quality of the experience. Some places can do both simultaneously; such places tend to do well.

Our restaurant is on the finer end of the spectrum. It’s a “Modern American” eatery, tucked into the first floor of an old apartment building on a quiet street in the West Village. We have ninety seats in the dining room and about a dozen more at the bar. We have a small à la carte menu and we do half a dozen plats du jour. Our check average is around $75.00 per person (appetizer, entrée, dessert), plus drinks. We do a turn and a half most weeknights—about a hundred fifty covers, on average—and double that on Friday and Saturday. Monday through Friday we’re dinner only, but we open up for brunch on the weekends.

We don’t quite have the budget to be the
finest
of the fine, but we do what we can to approximate it. Of the three owners, one is a former chef, so a large chunk of the startup capital went to outfitting our roughly two-thousand-square-foot kitchen with everything we need. All our equipment is kept in peak working condition, bought new, and well maintained. We don’t fight with finicky pilot lights, our pipes don’t clog, and our refrigerators’ compressors don’t ice over. When a lightbulb goes out, we change it, and if one of the tiles on the wall gets chipped, we have it fixed. We keep the inside of our ovens as clean as the day we got them, and we sweep and mop the floor constantly. Suffice it to say we have our heads on straight.

It’s not uncommon in kitchens like this to find guide-posts hanging here and there—“Make It Nice,” for example,
or “fi·nesse (fə-’nès)
noun:
Refinement and delicacy of performance, execution, or artisanship,” or some inspirational verse from this or that esteemed culinarian—which remind hardworking cooks to stay focused on what they came here to do. On the tiled wall above the entrance to our kitchen hangs a placard done up in bold print that reads:

Under this banner marches a group of cooks who resemble the cliché: defiant types with tattoos and chin stubble, carved faces and bags under the eyes; muscle-backed bruisers with dancers’ feet and calloused hands, arms burned hairless and shiny fingernails bitten to the quick. They are what anyone who’s watched a cooking program or read a chef memoir would expect of a kitchen staff. But behind the common façade lies an array of unique personalities.

Bryan, our executive chef, is a thirty-eight-year-old Brooklyn native with chin-length hair and a taste for Glen Garioch. He’s at least half a foot taller than most of the people you know—a lofty six foot five—and his arms and legs are tight with muscles from more than twenty years of service. But two decades of rich food have left his egg-shaped torso appropriately soft to the touch.

A precocious youngster, he dropped out of school at sixteen and moved to Paris. He studied at Le Cordon Bleu and did a four-year tour of apprenticeships at three-star restaurants in France, England, and Italy. That was the way young cooks used to do it: go to Europe, work eighteen hours a day, come back a better person. His was the generation
that learned to cook by getting yelled at and pushed around by bulldog chefs in exchange for room and board and a glass or two of wine.

When he got back to America, he didn’t waste any time. Within weeks he fixed himself a position on the line at an au courant French house specializing in fish cookery. They had three stars in the Michelin Guide and four in the
Times
. By twenty-three, he was
chef de cuisine
there, second in command, leaving a trail of dejected strivers in his wake. Fluency in the language, European training, and a sadistic approach to competition helped him more than just a bit. A native misanthropy made it easy for him to stop caring about the throats he had to cut on the way to the top. Since then, he’s never looked back, helming several of his own places ranging from dives in Williamsburg to posh spots uptown. He’s traveled the country consulting on everything from restaurant openings to commercial mustard production.

With such a pedigree, it’s easy to wonder why he’s here now, at this midsize restaurant in the West Village that’s lucky to clear a couple million a year, when he could be making well into six figures in an easygoing position in corporate consulting or as a television personality. Here he works seventy-five-hour weeks, brings in about eighty grand, and deals every day with the incessant budgetary constraints, the half-baked floor staff, and the nettlesome hipster critics common to any midrange star-rated restaurant. For your average forward-looking cooks and chefs, these are simply the conditions of development, burrs under the saddle to be shed with growth in the industry. We fantasize about what great space and equipment and
freedom we’ll have in our future fine-dining restaurants. We grin and bear the daily struggle with the conviction that there is something better a few years down the road. But Bryan, whose foot-long résumé shames all of ours, grapples with the difficulties still. And he seems to do so by choice.

You could say that he does so because a place of this size allows him to realize a vision—a luxury that the big paycheck of a larger operation might not afford him. In a corporate restaurant, the food he’d make wouldn’t be his, it’d be the company’s. To even get a dish on the menu at such a place requires an elaborate process of hoop jumping. Tastings with the director of food and beverage, with the corporate chef, with the national director of restaurants—it’s bureaucracy at its messiest. By the time a new dish arrives on the menu, it’s lost all traces of spontaneity and freshness. It’s gone stale. So you could say that Bryan is here because he has a special vision of how food is supposed to be made and he likes getting to do it that way every day.

You could also say that he does it because he is a chef of the kitchen, a chef who cooks, too. That is to say, he’s here because he
wants
to be here, in the flames, in the heat, on the line. He is captivated by the act of cooking, by the warmth that comes off the stove, by the sweat that comes with a full day of work. He likes having his hands on everything, his fingers in all the pies. And he knows that here, unlike the corporate kitchen (where the majority of one’s days are spent in the office analyzing invoices and managing food cost), here he actually gets to cook things.

Or perhaps you could say it’s something else. He is getting old in chef years, after all; perhaps he’s burning out.
Perhaps it’s his only option. This happens sometimes in restaurants: a decade goes by and business dwindles. Ten years in this industry is like two dozen in another. The food one makes might still be great (a chef’s instincts stay with him always), but after so many years, customers inevitably grow tired of his fare. They want what’s cutting-edge, not the dusty old names of decades past. And with each passing year, staying ahead of the curve becomes harder and harder. So the chef gives the restaurant up, jumps ship. But what awaits him? His cook’s pittance is nothing to retire on; he has to keep working. All he knows is cooking, so he stays in the business. But since his name no longer attracts the avant-garde food enthusiasts, he does his cooking at a lower volume in smaller places—trattorias, bistros, ateliers—where he can engage the act of cooking and explore his curiosities without the same level of pressure intrinsic to high-budget establishments. He retires out of fine dining proper and into the small, privately owned house.