Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (6 page)

With Bryan, it’s hard to say which of these conditions apply. He’s still full of piss and vinegar over cooking; you can tell that he loves the process. And he certainly doesn’t lack energy in the kitchen, or creative ebullience. But the gray hairs nested around his ponytail, his ruddy skin, the distant look in his eyes when he slaps you up and says “See you in the morning”—these tell a different story. Like most people in his position, he’s difficult to read.

Whatever the case may be, he’s here now and he is Chef. And when he’s in the kitchen and the whites are on, it is embarrassing to think of addressing him any other way. There is no “Bryan” in the kitchen—no “Bry,” no “man” nor “dude” nor “buddy”—only Chef. He is the lodestar,
the person everyone looks up to. He commands respect and exudes authority. His coats are crisp and clean, his pants are pressed, his hair is tied back neatly. He has more experience than anyone else in the kitchen; he knows more about food than anyone else in the kitchen; he can cook better than anyone else in the kitchen. He is the best butcher; he is the best baker. He’s the sheriff, the chief, the maestro. He choreographs. He directs. He makes the difficult look easy. His finesse is ubiquitous.

And then, what would any great leader be without his second in command? In a chef’s case, this is his sous chef. The sous chef (from the French meaning “under chef”) is the lieutenant, the executor of Chef’s wishes. He is at Chef’s side seventy hours a week or more, for good or for bad, a perpetual Mark Antony to Chef’s Julius Caesar. Out of this devotion grows a lasting bond. A chef always looks out for his sous chef; a sous is always “under” his chef’s wing—guided, nurtured, cared for, long after the stoves are turned off and the aprons are hung up. While other cooks are apprenticed to the kitchen, the sous is apprenticed directly to Chef. He is not there to learn how to cook properly or how to organize a restaurant—he is expected to have these skills already. Instead, the sous works with Chef on developing leadership, moxie, brio—the subtler elements of the craft. He’s not just learning how to be a cook, he’s learning how to become a chef. And at this point in his career he is one rung away from that achievement.

The position can be difficult. It requires a peculiar disposition that is foreign to most. Not only does it entail a
uniquely large amount of physical labor—twelve to fifteen hours per day, six or seven days per week—but also it engenders a certain kind of ambivalence. That limbo between cook and chef, where the taste of clout is tempered yet by the burden of compliance, is no easy place to dwell, especially for the veteran sous. The gratitude and pride intrinsic to the appointment are not without some tinge of bitterness; the excitement of power is not without a trace of fear. To wit,
you
want to be Chef. You want
your
name on the menu. You’re tired of doing all the work and getting none of the recognition. Yet deep down you wonder if you’re really ready to assume all the responsibility that comes with authority, to take all the blame that goes along with credit. It’s a charge replete with dualities, and at the end of the day you’re left straddling the fulcrum, made to decide for yourself whether the student in you has what it takes to become the master.

In our kitchen, as in many others like it, there are two sous chefs: you and Stefan. To those unfamiliar with it, a setup like this might seem dangerous. Having a pair of lieutenants could be fertile earth for competition—who outranks whom, for example, who is the real right-hand man. But you know there is no room for rivalry in this part of the kitchen. The two of you represent the upper echelon and you must work in concert with each other, and with Chef as well, to form a unified corps of governance. Your cohesion as a group is crucial to the fluid operation of the restaurant. Dissension among you will undoubtedly lead to ruin: recipes get garbled, techniques and attitudes begin to vary among the cooks, consistency diminishes, and ultimately the restaurant goes bust. So you do well as members
of the sous chef team to reserve your competitive zeal for the outside world.

Fortunately, each of you serves a distinct function for Chef. Like knives in a tool kit, he’s selected you individually based on certain character traits that satisfy specific needs of his. You each help complete the kitchen’s picture with specialized contributions.

At the most basic level, you are the opener and Stefan is the closer. You come in earlier; Stefan stays later. What this means is that Chef trusts you to arrive on time in the morning and get everything set for dinner service. He expects you to handle the detail-oriented matters of purchasing and receiving, inventory and organization. He expects you to turn the kitchen’s lights on. Because of you, he can wake up in the morning without worrying that some emergency requires his presence at the restaurant. He knows that you are here and so he can take his time getting in because, it’s assumed, you have everything under control.

He also has you opening because he knows your penchant for creativity, your gastronomical curiosity. Being the opener affords you the opportunity to help with the specials. Since you take the morning inventory and do all the purchasing, you are the one most fully aware of what we have in-house, you know what needs to be used up and burned out. And so, typically, when Chef comes in, he sits you down in the office and ruminates with you about what to do for service. The two of you brainstorm, philosophize, think about what’s possible in cooking.

The last, and likely most important, reason he has you opening is purely administrative. Since you have extra time during the day as the opener, and since your attention to
detail has proved unflinching, he entrusts you with the payroll and the making of the schedule. Not only does this charge acquaint you with the logistical matters associated with operating a restaurant, but also it puts you in unique contact with the cooks. You are responsible for their schedules, so they come to you with requests and conflicts. You are also responsible for their paychecks, so they come to you with gripes. If they want overtime, they ask you; if they need an advance to cover rent, they ask you. You hold the key to their livelihood, and so you act as a sounding board for their financial woes.

Stefan’s position is different. He is the enforcer, the wiry disciplinarian. He has hewn closely to the gold standard of the modern high-order professional kitchen: go hard or go home. He has gone hard since the outset.

By the time he was sixteen, Stefan, a zealous Virginian, had already beaten a path up Hyde Park way. There was no career he was willing to entertain other than cooking and, in his mind, there was no better place to begin pursuing that career than the Culinary Institute of America. When externship season came rolling around, he shot straight for the top, and he hasn’t looked back. He cut his teeth at all the city’s best restaurants and continues to maintain a dogged resistance to dipping below three stars. He’s always checking the listings to see who is opening what and where; he’s always looking for the next hot spot, the next great opportunity. And he’ll take it, too, if it seems like a step forward in his career. He is a soldier of fortune, a survivor, and every success he’s enjoyed thus far he’s achieved by dint of pure tenacity.

His attraction to fine dining makes him the perfect disciplinarian.
The only environment he knows is one of utmost intensity. He holds himself and those around him to the highest standard of performance imaginable, and Chef trusts him to preserve that standard at every turn. Although he may look a bit loose at the seams—perpetually scruffy, routinely hungover—he is incapable of doing things inelegantly on the line. He’s a prodigy on the stove, an ace on the pass. And he simply
does not know how
to conceal his disdain for poor technique. When a cook mishandles a situation, Stefan is usually the first to point it out, loudly and churlishly. He is cutthroat in this respect, and most of the cooks have grown to fear encounters with him.

Right beneath the sous chefs are the lead cooks, the big guns. They tend not to respond to Stefan’s antagonism. These are the people who cook the meat to the right temperature and handle the fish properly—the
rôtisseurs
and
poissonniers
. They are the cream of the cooks and they know it, one short step away from management. As such, their jobs require the most skill and trust, and more often than not, the most experience. They are typically older, more graceful, more powerful cooks with booming voices and a due sense of self-worth.

Julio, our
rôtisseur
, is a forty-year-old Dominican who speaks perfect English and takes insolence from nobody. You never have to worry about him. He is the first to the pass on every pick. His temperatures are always perfect. He eighty-sixes nothing. He gets the job done. And the poise and pride with which he comports himself, combined with his preternatural skills in meat cookery, amount to the perfect
recipe for upward mobility, should he ever decide to take the next step in his career.

But Julio is one of those cooks who are content to remain on the line rather than move up the chain. Professional cooking is just something he has always done for work. It is a trade to him, an occupation more than a vision quest. His priorities are elsewhere. He is married, he has children, he owns a home. It seems that his life is full in the outside world, that he’s happy with it the way it is. And the gold wedding ring he wears while he works serves as a perpetual reminder of that.

Raffy, our
poissonnier
, is of a similar mold. Like Julio, he is phenomenal at what he does. Hailing from Basque country, he, like Chef, has European training, mostly French and Spanish. He is accustomed to long hours and high expectations. His ability with fish is surpassed perhaps only by Chef’s, and his sweeping knowledge of archaic technique (how to flute a mushroom, for example) is enough to incite jealousy.

Unlike Julio, though, Raffy seems fundamentally attracted to professional ascension. He is a sprightly twenty-something anxious to move up the ranks. He really wants to be a chef. And, based on ability alone, he should be. He should have nabbed at least a sous chef position by now. As it stands, however, he remains cloistered on fish roast. It’s his attitude that’s the problem. He’s been known to leave his station a mess at the end of the night; he shows up late from time to time; he tends to petulance when it gets busy; he gravitates toward alcohol after service perhaps a bit too frequently. Simply put, he is immature. So, while he might
want
to be a chef some day, he’s going to need to button a few things up if he ever hopes to actually get there.

Below the lead cooks are a group that do tend to respond to Stefan’s derisive approach. They are the vegetable cooks—the
entremetiers
. They are responsible for the “middle work,” which can be very intense. Most of the components on a given plate are prepared by the entremets. For every steak Julio broils or every fish Raffy sears, his respective entremet prepares anywhere from two to twelve garnishes—vegetables, starches, sauces, salads, etcetera. Leaving off the actual proteins, anything in a dish that needs to be sautéed, wilted, steamed, stirred, toasted, folded, roasted, tossed, shaved, pressed, grated, dressed, salted, seasoned, or otherwise treated before it reaches Chef’s hands is the duty of the
entremetier
.

This can be a special challenge in a restaurant where everything is prepared to order—
à la minute
. Your average entremet is accustomed to managing fifteen or twenty separate pans of food at once. As a result, usually only the most motivated cooks can work the
entremetier
station. They are typically young, exuberant cooks with a few years of experience, in the early stages of their development.

Warren and Vinny do this work for us. While their titles are basically the same, they as people could not be more dissimilar.

Warren, an early-thirties curly blond, is our entremet on fish side. He is one of these late bloomers who come to cooking by vocation after an unsuccessful attempt at another career. He studied entomology at Cornell and worked for years in the profession before first taking to the stove. But since his arrival here about six months ago, he’s shown
an incredible amount of development. He truly wants to be here, almost
needs
to be here, and he tries very hard to be as good a cook as he can be. His manner is decorous, his station is spotless, he strives to impress, he is diametrically opposed to sloth, and he
hates
failure. The cooks call him Juan. Chef Juan, Don Juan, Juanita, Juan Gabriel, etcetera. It started with a general unfamiliarity with the name Warren—Kiko just thought the guy’s name was Juan. But now, though the misunderstanding has long been ironed out, everyone continues to call him that, even the white guys. They’re just razzing him, of course, but Warren’s really bugged by it.

Unlike Warren, Vinny or VinDog, our meat entremet, could not care less what people think of him. A brick shit-house with beefy arms and a bad attitude, VinDog is animated always by some urgent, unquenched irreverence. His neck is tattooed, his face is pierced, and something resembling a Mohawk has been sawn into his head. At first glance, he’s not what you’d expect to find lurking in the wings of a star-rated restaurant.