Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (7 page)

Nor does he appear to be here because he needs to be. He doesn’t need a restaurant to line his pockets or fill his spirit—he’s happy to get his share by hook or crook. But apparently he prefers cooking to, say, working construction or collecting trash. So about a year ago, when Chef offered to extricate him from a bar-backing gig in Alphabet City, VinDog saw fit to seize the opportunity. Had things gone differently, you’d probably find him slapping up Sheetrock in Chinatown or circling the drain somewhere in Bushwick. It’s questionable, actually, if his real name is even Vinny.

But VinDog exemplifies a fairly common contradiction. Beneath the ragamuffin façade is an intelligent, curious, resourceful person, almost custom-made for the kitchen. He takes hard work like water off a duck’s back and he never stops asking questions until he gets the answers he needs. While his street clothes may be dirty, his work is always clean; while his appearance may be suspect, his cook’s chops are nonpareil. That he owes his skill-set entirely to Chef’s mentoring is undoubted, but that he is able to survive in this environment speaks to his own adaptability and to that of the kitchen as well.

Below Warren and VinDog is Catalina, our garde manger. Garde mangers are the salad cooks, the appetizer specialists. They are usually entry-level line cooks, working out of a satellite station alongside pastry on the cold side. They prepare mostly small cold items such as hors d’oeuvres,
amuse-bouches
, and salads, with occasional responsibility for desserts. They have less seniority than the cooks on the hot side, but they almost always outrank the guys back in prep. They
do
work the line, as it were, which is always a source of pride and some variety of authority in the kitchen hierarchy.

Five-two, buck-eighty, gold-toothed, and bangle-wristed, Catalina assumes all the authority she can muster. She epitomizes the hard-nosed constitution for which Mexican women are famous. She has come to be a sort of matriarch in our operation and, as is to be expected, she tackles her motherly duties vigorously. After her day off, she’ll return to work with a stack of tortillas, a wheel of
queso fresco
, and a bushel of tomatillos and prepare
flautas con salsa verde
for the entire kitchen team. When someone
burns or cuts himself, she is the first to arrive on the scene with ground pepper and tomato, to stop the bleeding, disinfect, and numb the pain. And on the unlikely occasion that a rodent should venture into the kitchen, she’ll make quick work of taking it down—often grabbing it with her bare hands, muffling it up in a to-go bag, dispatching it with a whack or two on the ground, and pitching it into the dumpster out back of the loading dock.

Catalina is
esposa
to the
A.M.
prep cook, Rogelio;
tía
to the
P.M.
prep cook, Brianne; and
madre
to our favorite dishwasher, Kiko. They make a nice little family, the four of them, and they contribute a significant amount to our operation’s skeletal system.

Rogelio, or Don Rojas, as we often refer to him, is indispensable. In addition to his duties receiving and unpacking deliveries, he’s also responsible for the bulk of our production work. He takes care of the daily basics such as sliced garlic, peeled vegetables, and snipped herbs, which need to be ready by the time the cooks arrive. But his main area of focus is the large-format projects. We have him doing all our pickling and preserving, making all our stocks and bouillons, and, probably most important, maintaining many of our sous vide systems. He is responsible for most of the ROP and HACCP logging, for monitoring the pars on our compression and infusion projects, and for executing all our multiday braises. Without him, our sous vide output would be a fraction of what it is. Suffice it to say, we get to cook the way we do in large part because of the work that Rogelio does.

Brianne is equally vital. She arrives in the afternoon and carries us through to the bitter end. Her strength is
batch work—the foodstuffs that get made every couple of days: aiolis, sofritos, vinaigrettes, etcetera—and she devotes most of her time to working on projects of this sort. She’s possessed by a certain spirit of inquiry, so working with recipes and learning to perfect them is a main goal of hers. She is also ambitious to ascend the ranks, and it shows in her performance. Tireless, punctual (if not early), determined, eager, curious, never failing to lend a hand—these are only a few of the ways that Brie could be described. And it comes in handy, this work ethic of hers, especially on busy nights when the linesmen need to re-up on mise en place throughout service. Brie is the queen of ancillary prep work. She is always there to fill the gaps.

And then there is Kiko—our
chef plongeur
. The word “exhaustion” doesn’t appear to be part of this man’s lexicon. This is not uncommon among dishwashers—a steadfast devotion to hard, mindless labor, an appetite for constant activity. Kiko works basically around the clock washing dishes, putting in doubles most of the week. On top of that, he never turns down overtime. As a result, his paychecks are huge, which is probably why he is generally pleasant with everybody (except Raffy, whose insouciance toward the dish team seems to boil Kiko’s blood). He’s also the acting ambassador for the rest of the dish crew, which consists of an overnight steward, a weekend pot washer, and a pair of
P.M.
dish men, all of whom are seldom seen and even less frequently heard from.

Outside this core group of cooks and dishwashers, a few others join our team intermittently. We have the part-time
pastry faction, consisting of a consulting pastry chef and baker, who come in extremely early on Mondays and Thursdays to set up the batters, doughs, and sauces for our dessert program; we have the
stagiaire
set, a regular rotation of cooking school externs who come in for a day or two at a time to study our technique; and we have the back waiters, a trio of low-ranking floor staffers led by Hussein, our Bengali
chef de rang
.

Back waiters are the unhailed linchpins of the dining experience. They are the people who run the food to the dining room and the people who bring back the empty plates. They are the ones who set the tables and the ones who clear them as well. They deliver glassware, light candles, refresh waters, and fetch sides of ketchup. And when a group of guests has left a table, they move quickly and efficiently to ready it for the next set. Simply put, they perform all the unobserved graces that diners have come to expect from restaurants. And whereas servers and bartenders and managers and maître d’s represent the face of the restaurant—taking orders, fielding questions, explaining things to guests—the back waiters do their jobs in relative anonymity.

But the most important role the back waiters play is informant to the kitchen. They are our eyes and ears out front. They tell us which tables are ready for their next courses and which ones we should slow down on. They let us know what sections and servers are slammed and whom we can expect big tickets from soon. They notify us when important guests arrive and they remind us where they are sitting. They have the presence of mind to alert us when the dining room is filling up so we can be ready, and the
kindness of heart to inform us when it is emptying out so we can begin breaking down. And, unlike most other FOH staff, who can sometimes get caught up coddling customers, back waiters always have time throughout service (and usually make it a point) to update us on how people seem to be enjoying their meals. Which is why, even though they are technically a constituent of the waitstaff, we often regard the back waiters as members of the kitchen team—an affiliation they readily accept. They are back here with us most of the night, working out of the limelight, so their allegiance lies with us.

With all these individuals scampering around during service, much can go wrong very quickly. It’s a plate-spinning act, which could topple over in pieces at any moment. A chef’s goal during any given meal period is to prevent this from happening—to sustain a fusion of all the moving parts, to keep the team together, to keep the bus driving straight. There will always be the clatter of pots and pans, the din of voices—professional cooking is a loud racket—but when service is performed fluidly, artfully, all the noise can be mistaken for silence. There’s a certain harmony to the sound, and it’s almost as though you don’t even hear it.

O
F ALL THE CONDITIONS THAT CAN DISRUPT A KITCHEN
’
S
harmony, anger is probably the most dangerous. There are many different types of anger in the kitchen, and each one manifests itself in a different way. Mistakes during service, for example, will always arouse immediate attack. If you break a plate, you will be called an idiot; if you drag on a pickup, you will be called a
tortuga;
if you overcook a piece of meat, you will be called a shoemaker. An especially charged service might aggravate the situation. When the dining room is full, say, or when a food critic is in the house, the stakes are high, and everyone tries very hard to make service perfect. At such moments, an error on your part might create an unnecessary emergency for someone else, and tempers may flare to even violent dimensions. Chef might throw a plate at you or trash your mise en place. He might drag you from the line by the scruff of your neck and throw you outside on the street. A line cook might shove past you in a huff, perhaps grazing your arm with a sizzle platter. A dishwasher might threaten to kill you. When the heat is on, everyone is at each other’s throat.

But anger that arises during service is short-lived. It is the result of frenzy, and it’s often forgotten before the last guest is served. Anger that arises before service, however, is a different beast. It is the slow burn, a wicked seed that sprouts like pea tendrils and strangles you until the end of the night.

When
you
are made angry before service—during your morning walk-through, say, or your afternoon prep—it is as though a small fire has been started somewhere in you that swells by the minute. A sense of increasing urgency accompanies each new task you take on, and before long you find yourself erupting vulgarly at the most insignificant things. You bump your head in the walk-in box and curse out the vegetables; your peeler slips and you rocket a handful of turnips into the trash. It’s very easy, when you’re busy and irritable, to begin believing that the whole world is against you. But it is critical at these moments to rein in your aggression, or else there might be serious consequences. Blue flames and steel blades don’t forgive. If you allow your anger to distract you, you could burn or cut yourself. And, among serious cooks and chefs, burns and cuts are terribly unfashionable. The only thing worse than a burn or a cut is the need for medical attention. Abandoning your fellow linesmen because you lost focus and flayed a finger is an unforgivable offense.

To make someone
else
angry before service, though—especially if it’s our capricious chef—can be pandemonic. Not only do you risk impairing the rapport of the cooks, but also you chance bringing out the despot in Chef, which invites a less obvious kind of stress into your day. It’s
not rage, but a dull, throbbing trepidation that takes hold, like a stiff neck that makes you fear turning your head the wrong way. You become preternaturally aware of Chef’s location in relation to your own, expecting him to pop out at every turn and find you doing something improperly. You consider the possibility that all your technique is rubbish and that everyone knows it. Thinking about it makes it worse. A prep list becomes a minefield of possible mistakes, and the more concern you give each task, the longer each one takes, and the closer you get to service, and the less time you have, and the more stress you confront, and the more poorly you perform your work. It’s an infinite regression.

And now Chef is heated. He went from jolly to crabby instantaneously when he found the samples you tasted torn open, chewed up, and scattered about the desk. The fact that they were opened doesn’t matter to him, but the fact that they were left out has dialed him up. Sure, he’s not the angriest you’ve ever seen him, but he certainly isn’t happy. His mood has definitely shifted. You felt the elephant enter the room.