Kitchen Confidential (18 page)

A bunch of us went out for drinks one night and I found myself among a party of eight, all of whom knew that of which I had yet to be informed: namely that I would be asked to step down, to work with the nauseating and sadistic little creep who was my chef de cuisine. (I caught him constantly hitting the Ecuadorians on the shoulder, them not knowing whether to take it as a joke or not, and immediately I offered a bounty of five dollars for every time one of them hit him back.)

The next night, at the end of the shift, the GM had a martini waiting for me at the bar. I knew it was over. He began, elegantly couching his words in all sorts of qualifiers, yammering on about redeployment, unfelt and insincere praise for my work etcetera. I quickly cut him off. I'd injured my thumb earlier, and in spite of a butterfly closure and three layers of bandage, it just wouldn't stop bleeding; blood drained onto my pants leg as he talked, fell on the floor in big noisy droplets.

'Just cut the shit and tell me what you have to,' I said. 'Am I canned or what?' 'No, no. . of course not,' he said, flashing a mouthful of pearly-white teeth at me, 'We'd like you to stay on-as chef de cuisine.' I declined his offer, packed up my stuff and went immediately home where I slept, nearly without interruption, for three and a half straight days and nights.

There is little I miss about the experience at Coco Pazzo Teatro. I do miss the food: strawberries macerated with balsamic vinegar, sugar and a little mint, Patti Jackson's wonderful watermelon parfait, the incredible focaccia, robiola and white truffle pizza, the carta di musica flatbread, served with sea salt and olive oil, the homemade pasta and freshly made tomato sauces.

And I think fondly of Pino, the times I sat at the table with him and some of his other chefs, sampling food, each taking a bite and passing to the left. I miss hearing him regale us with stories of his first few years in America, his difficulties and pleasures, and I think fondly of his enthusiasm for food, the food he ate as a little boy in Italy-the squid and octopus and mackerel and sardines-a time and place far from the life he lives now: the sharp-cut suits, cellphones and fancy chauffeur-driven cars, the attendants and supplicants. Despite all the things that some chefs who've been through Pino's wringer have to say about him-much of it undoubtedly true-lowe him a big one. He taught me to love Italian food. To know it a little. He taught me, by extension, how to cook pasta, really cook pasta, and how to manage three or four ingredients in a noble, pure and unaffected way. He also taught me to watch my back better, and to make the most of my opportunities. I picked up a slew of recipes and techniques that I use to this day.

And lowe him something else, for which I am grateful, as I am to myoId chef de cuisine, too. I amassed a lot of phone numbers in my brief time at Coco Pazzo Teatro and at Le Madri: some very fine Ecuadorian talent. The next job I landed, I peeled off some of the best cooks in his organization. They are close pals and valued associates to this day.

A DAY IN THE LIFE THANKS TO MY BIGFOOT training I wake up automatically at five minutes before six. It's still dark, and I lie in bed in the pitch-black for a while, smoking, the day's specials and prep lists already coming together in my head. It's Friday, so the weekend orders will be coming in: twenty-five cases of mesclun, eighteen cases of GPOD 70-count potatoes, four whole forequarters of lamb, two cases of beef tenderloins, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat, bones, produce, seafood, dry goods and dairy. I know what's coming, and the general order in which it will probably arrive, so I'm thinking triage-sorting out in my head what gets done first, and by whom, and what gets left until later.

As I brush my teeth, turn on the shower, swallow my first couple of aspirin of the day, I'm reviewing what's still kicking around in my walk-in from previous days, what I have to unload, use in specials, merchandize. I hear the coffee grinder going, so Nancy is awake, which leaves me only a few more minutes of undisturbed reflection on food deployment before I have to behave like a civilian for a few minutes.

I watch the local news and weather with my wife, noting, for professional reasons, any major sporting events, commuter traffic and, most important, the weekend weather forecast. Nice crisp weather and no big games? That means we're going to get slammed tonight. That means I won't come crawling home until close to midnight. By now, half-watching the tube, and half-listening to Nancy, I'm fine-tuning the specials in my head: grill station will be too busy for any elaborate presentations or a special with too many pans involved, so I need something quick, simple and easily plated-and something that will be popular with the weekend rubes. The people coming to dinner tonight and Saturday night are different from the ones who eat at my restaurant during the week, and I have to take this into account. Saddle of wild hare stuffed with foie gras is not a good weekend special, for instance. Fish with names unrecognizable to the greater part of the general public won't sell. The weekend is a time for buzzwords: items like shrimp, lobster, T-bone, crab-meat, tuna and swordfish. Fortunately, I've got some hamachi tuna coming in, always a crowd-pleaser.

As I walk up to Broadway and climb into a taxi, I'm thinking grilled tuna livornaise with roasted potatoes and grilled asparagus for fish special. My overworked grill man can heat the already cooked-off spuds and the pre-blanched asparagus on a sizzle-platter during service, the tuna will get a quick walk across the grill, so all he has to do is heat the sauce to order. That takes care of fish special. Appetizer special will be cockles steamed with chorizo, leek, tomato and white wine-a one-pan wonder; my garde-manger man can plate salads, rillettes, ravioli, confits de canard while the cockle special steams happily away on a back burner. Meat special is problematic. I ran the ever-popular T-bone last week-two weeks in row would threaten the French theme, and I run about a 50 percent food cost on the massive hunks of expensive beef. Tuna is already coming off the grill, so the meat special has got to go to the saute station. My sous-chef, who's working saute tonight, will already have an enormous amount of mise-en-place to contend with, struggling to retrieve all the garnishes and prep from an already crowded low-boy reach-in-just to keep up with the requirements of the regular menu. At anyone time, he has to expect and be ready for orders for moules marinieres, boudin noir with caramelized apples, navarin of lamb (with an appalling array of garnishes: baby carrots, pearled onions, niyoise olives, garlic confit, tomato concassee, fava beans and chopped fresh herbs), filet au poivre, steak au poivre, steak tartare, calves' liver persille, cassoulet toulousaine, magret de moulard with quince and sauce miel, the ridiculously popular mignon de pore, pieds du cochon-and tonight's special, whatever that's going to be.

I've got some play here: both leg of venison and some whole pheasants are coming in, so I opt for the pheasant. It's a roasted dish, meaning I can par-roast it ahead of time, requiring my sous-chef simply to take it off the bone and sling it into the oven to finish, then heat the garnishes and sauce before serving, easy special. A lay-up. That should help matters somewhat.

By the time I arrive at Les HaIles, I have my ducks pretty much in a row. I'm the first to arrive, as usual-though sometimes my pastry chef surprises me with an early appearance-and the restaurant is dark. Salsa music is playing loudly over the stereo behind the bar, for the night porter. I check the reservation book for tonight, see that we already have eighty or so res on the book, then check the previous night's numbers (the maitre d' has already totaled up reservations and walk-ins) and see that we did a very respectable 280 meals-a good portent for my food cost. The more steak-frites I sell, the better the numbers will be. I flip through the manager's log, the notebook where the night manager communicates with the day management, noting customer complaints, repair requirements, employee misbehavior, important phone calls. I see from the log that my grill man called one of the waiters a 'cocksucker' and pounded his fist on his cutting board in a 'menacing way' when five diners waddled into the restaurant at three minutes of midnight closing and ordered five cotes du boeuf, medium-well (cooking time forty-five minutes). I sip my cardboard-tasting take-out coffee from the deli next door and walk through the kitchen, taking notice of the clean-up job the night porter has done. It looks good. Jaime grins at me from the stairwell. He's dragging down a bag full of sodden linen, says,

'Hola, chef.' He's covered with grime, his whites almost black from handling dirty, food-smeared kitchen floor mats, and hauling hundreds of pounds of garbage out to the street. I follow him down, walk through the still wet cellar to the office, plop down at my desk and light my tenth cigarette of the day while I rummage around in my drawer for a meat inventory sheet/order form. First thing to do is find out exactly how much cut, fabricated meat I have on hand. If I'm low, I'll need to get the butcher on it early. If I have enough stuff on hand to make it through tonight, I'll still have to get tomorrow's order in soon. The boucherie is very busy at Les HaIles, cutting meat not just for the Park Avenue store, but for our outposts in DC, Miami and Tokyo.

I kick off my shoes and change into checks, chef's jacket, clogs and apron. I find my knife kit, jam a thick stack of side-towels into it, clip a pen into my jacket sideways (so it doesn't fallout when I bend over) and, taking a ring of keys from my desk, pop the locks on the dry-goods room, walk-in, reach-ins, pastry box and freezers. I push back the plastic curtains to the refrigerated boucherie, a cool room where the butchers do their cutting, and grab the assistant butcher's boom-box from the work-table. Knives, towels, radio, clipboards and keys in hand, I climb the Stairmaster back up to the kitchen. I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Heartbreakers, Ramones, Television and so on, which my Mexican grill man enjoys as well (he's a young headbanger fond of Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Rage Against the Machine, so my musical selections don't offend him). I'm emptying the saute station reach-in when he arrives. Carlos has got a pierced eyebrow, a body by Michelangelo, and considers himself a master soup-maker. The first thing he asks me is if I've got snapper bones coming in. I nod. Carlos dearly loves any soup he can jack with Ricard or Pernod, so today's soupe de poisson with rouille is a favorite of his. Omar, the garde-manger man, who sports a thick, barbed-wire tattoo around his upper arm, arrives next, followed quickly by the rest of the Queens residents; Segundo the vato loco prep centurion, Ramon the dishwasher, and Janine the pastry chef. Camelia, the general manager, is last-she walks to work-and we exchange 'Bonjour!' and 'Comment ya va?'

Soon everyone is working: Carlos roasting bones for stock, me heating sauces and portioning pavees, filet mignons, pore mignons, duck breasts and liver. Before twelve, I've got to cut and pepper pavees and filets, skin and slice the calves' liver, lug up cassoulet, caramelize apples, blanch baby carrots, make garlic confit, reload grated cheese, onion soup, sea salt, crushed pepper, breadcrumbs, oils. I've got to come up with a pasta special using what's on hand, make livornaise sauce for Carlos, make a sauce for the pheasant-and, most annoying, make a new batch of navarin, which will monopolize most of my range-top for much of the morning. Somewhere in the middle of this, I have to write up the specials for Camelia to input into the computer and set the prices (at nine-thirty sharp, she's going to start buzzing me on the intercom, asking me in her thick French accent if I have 'Ie muh-NEW).

Delivery guys keep interrupting me for signatures, and I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like to check over the stuff. As much as I'd like to push my snout into every fish gill and fondle every vegetable that comes in the door, I can't-there's just not enough time. Fortunately, my purveyors know me as a dangerously unstable and profane rat-bastard, so if I don't like what I receive, they know I'll be on the phone later, screaming at them to come and 'pick this shit up!' Generally, I get very good product. It's in my purveyors' interests to make me happy. Produce, however, is unusually late. I look at the kitchen clock nervously-not much time left. I have a tasting to conduct at eleven-thirty, a sampler of the day's specials for the floor staff, accompanied by detailed explanation, so they won't describe the pheasant as 'kinda like chicken'.

The butcher arrives, looking like he woke up under a bridge. I rush downstairs, hot on his heels, to pick up my meat order: a towering stack of milk crates, loaded with plastic-wrapped cotes du boeuf, entrecotes, rumpsteaks, racks of lamb, lamb stewmeat, merguez, saucisson de Toulouse, rosette, pork belly, onglets, scraps, meat for tartare, pork tenderloins larded with bacon and garlic, pates, rillettes, galantines and chickens. I sign for it and push the stack around the corner for Segundo to rotate into my stock. Still downstairs, I start loading up milk crates of my own. I try to get everything I need for the day into as few loads as possible, limiting my trips up and down the Stairmaster as much as I can. I have a feeling I'm going to get hit on lunch today and I'll be up and down those stairs like a jack-in-the-box tonight, so those extra trips make a difference. Into my crates go the pork, the liver, the pavees, filets, some duck breasts, a bag of fava beans, herbs and vinegar for sauce. I give Ramon, the dishwasher, a list of additional supplies for him to haul up-the sauces to be reduced, the grated cheese-easily recognizable stuff he won't need a translator or a search party to locate.

On my station (saute), I've got only a six-burner Garland to work with. There's another range next to it which is taken up with a bain-marie for sauces and onion soup, the rest of it with stocks-veal, chicken, lamb; and pork-which will be reducing at a slow simmer all day and into the night. One of my burners during service will be occupied permanently by a pot of water for Omar to dunk ravioli in, leaving me five with which to work. Another burner, my front right, will be used mostly by him as well, to saute lardons for frisee salads, to sear tidbits of hanger steak for onglet salad, for sauteing diced potatoes in duck fat for the confit de canard, and the cockles-which will leave me, most likely, with three full-time burners with which to prepare a wide range of dishes, any one of which alone could require two burners for a single plate. Soon, there'll be a choo-choo train of saute pans lined up waiting for heat, requiring constant prioritizing. If I get a six-top, for instance, with an order for, say, two orders of magret de moulard, a porc mignon, a cassoulet, a boudin noir and a pasta, that's nine saute pans needed for that table alone.

Reducing gastrite (sugar and vinegar) for duck sauce while the Dead Boys play 'Sonic Reducer' on the boom-box, I have to squeeze over for Janine, who melts chocolate over the simmering pasta water. I'm not annoyed much, as she's pretty good about staying out of my way, and I like her. She's an ex-waitress from Queens, and though right out of school, she's hung tough. Already she's endured a leering, pricky French sous-chef before my arrival, the usual women-friendly Mexicans, and a manager who seems to take personal delight in making her life miserable. She's never called in sick, never been late, and is learning on the job very nicely. She inventories her own supplies on Saturdays, and as I hate sticky, goopy, sweet-tasting, fruity stuff, this is a great help to me. As I've said before, I greatly admire tough women in busy kitchens. They have, as you might imagine from accounts in this book, a lot to put up with in our deliberately dumb little corner of Hell's Locker-room, and women who can survive and prosper in such a high-testosterone universe are all too rare. Janine has dug in well. She's already managed to infuriate the whole floor staff by claiming she inventories the free madeleines we give away with coffee. I'm pleased with her work, making an exception in my usual dim view of patissiers.

Next to me, Omar, my garde-manger man, is on automatic. I don't even have to look over at his station because I know exactly what he's doing: loading crocks, making dressing, rubbing down duck legs with sea salt for confit, slowly braising pork bellies for cassoulet, whipping mushroom sabayon for the ravioli de royan. I rarely have any worries about his end. I smell Pernod, so I know without looking what Carlos is up to: soupe de poisson.

Segundo is downstairs receiving orders from the front delivery ramp. I hear the bell every few minutes, as a few more tons of stuff arrive. He'll have my walk-in opened up like a cardiac patient by now, rotating in the new, winnowing out the old, the ugly and the 'science experiments' that sometimes lurk, forgotten and fuzzy, in dark corners, tucked behind the sauces and stocks. He's a mean-looking bastard. The other Mexicans claim he carries a gun, insist that he sniffs 'thinner' and 'pintura', that he's done a lot of prison time. I don't care if he killed Kennedy, the man is the greatest prep cook I've ever had. How he finds the time and the strength to keep up with deliveries, the nuts and bolts of deep prep, like cleaning squid, washing mussels and spinach, dicing tomato, julienning leek, filleting fish, wrapping and deboning pigs' feet, crushing peppercorns and so on, and yet still finds time to make me beautiful, filament-thin chiffonaded parsley (which he cuts with a full-sized butcher's scimitar) is beyond me.