I am writing about this restaurant with the threat of legal action. On my first day staging, I was handed a confidentiality agreement to sign before I was allowed to suit up and get to work in the kitchen. I can tell you it is in New York City. I can tell you it is a very very fancy restaurant, with astronomical prices. I can tell you that it is the East Coast outpost of the West Coast original. Friends who cook will know by now which restaurant I am talking about. For friends that don't, all I can say is that there was a certain
je ne sais quoi to the atmosphere in the kitchen, a measured level of pompousness, spread in a thin but perfectly even layer, and cut into a precise brunoise. And it had better be cut PERFECTLY! Otherwise, I am going to curse at you, but under my breath and in a very polite manner.
I don't mean to bash the experience. It was invaluable to me. I have never worked in a kitchen of that caliber before. I have also never peeled celery for three hours. It was eye opening. The last restaurant that I cooked in for money, Ubuntu, in Napa, CA employed a certain nose-to-tail philosophy, even though the restaurant happened to be vegetarian. In the words of my Chef there, Jeremy Fox, we were cooking "from seed-to-stalk" and I fully embraced that mentality. Food should never be wasted, whether it is cramming the last few bites of food left on the table into your face, or peeling the upper stalks of fennel to get at the juicy flavorful core, which is almost always tossed away.
So, it was with nothing but my thoughts to keep me occupied for the hours of monotonous labor that I set about dissecting why I felt the way I did. I was already feeling at odds with the establishment, with the entire ethos of the place. I have worked in fine dining before, but just because you can charge almost $300 for a tasting menu doesn't necessarily mean that you should throw that piece of food away. Sure, the little guy is not quite as cute as the other baby turnips, but I'm sure we can find a place for him in the world. If we save it, and then we happen to find more hideous, retarded turnips just like it, maybe we can put them all together in one place. Then, when we have enough of these rejects, we could make a really tasty soup out of them. Stupid fucking ugly turnips they may be, but now we have taken advantage of them, turned them into profit instead of garbage. It's official. I have been peeling celery for WAY too long!
Finishing with the celery I get to make parisienne scoops of red beet, a difficult and dirty task. There goes another 45 minutes, now it's on to some knife-work, thank god. I thought I wasn't going to get to actually cut anything today. Brunoise (1/16th inch cubes) of cornichon for a mustard emulsion that is going with the Foie Gras tonight, 60 tournes (little football shaped cut) of baby carrots, and then my last task before service, picking 460 perfect little leaves of micro mint. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not telling you this to get your pity, this is just an illustration of what a lot of stages at fancy restaurants consist of. I am used to it by this point, the value I get from the restaurant is generally not in what I am able to do, but what I see.
During service at The Restaurant That Must Not Be Named, that is all I will do. I am instructed to stand, "over there by that wall" and observe. I am ok with this. The standards in this kitchen are impossibly high, I would like to watch the flow of service before making an ass out of myself. The brigade here is huge, 12 cooks for no more than 90 guests a night.
As the first ticket comes ringing in the Chef de Cuisine looks it over, and calls out, "Order in for two, one Chef's Tasting and one Vegetable" firmly but not loudly.
The ENTIRE brigade of cooks calls back, in unison, " ONE AND ONE!" with such thunderous force that I literally jump. Wow. It was probably the most impressive single display I have seen in any kitchen thus far on my trip.
Service is passing by in a blur, gorgeous plates of food whisked out to the dining room, with the cooks deftly preparing each and every component. There doesn't seem to be any wasted movement on their part. All the while they are calling back the orders from the chef in unison. The contrast between the volume of the call backs, "TWO AND TWO!" and then the immediate calm and quiet that follows is an impressive display of how the kitchen is run.
It's 7:30 and the pace is starting to pick up. I can tell because the entire board is filled with tickets. However, I definitely could not tell just by looking at the cooks, who I am starting to suspect are robots programmed to cook. I realize why I am standing, "over there by the wall". I am completely out of my league. As much as I want to jump in and help, it's not gunna happen, at least not on my first night. Confronted with this thought, my ego being challenged with each passing minute watching these cooks, I am filled with jealousy.
I want to grow up someday and be a cook at The Restaurant That Must Not Be Named! Then midnight rolls around, and the last orders are still leaving the kitchen. This would be ok in a normal kitchen, where you would clean your station and leave the deep-cleaning to the night porters. But this is not a normal kitchen. Night porters are not to be trusted, they don't have the same sense of clean as the cooks have been instilled with over the years it has taken them to even make it to their current positions. After the last order leaves the exhausted cooks, who have been here since before noon, wrap up all their mise en place for the next day and then clean the kitchen from top to bottom. Scrubbing the counter-tops, cleaning the flat-top stove, deck-brushing the floor, then mopping, and after everything else is finished we go back over all of the stainless steel with polish, as a finishing touch.
With the kitchen spotless we sit around a large prep table in the back kitchen and start the process of writing the menu for the next day. The menu changes every single day, not in its entirety, but enough changes to warrant an hour-long debate at the end of a 14 hour day. With all the issues for the next day covered, we finally walk out the back door and out into the NYC night, and it's 2:20 a.m. All the cooks will be back in the kitchen by 11:30 a.m. The pay isn't great so most of the cooks have to commute to Brooklyn or Queens to get some much needed rest. My knees are aching, my back is twisted into a knot, and my feet are swelling out of my shoes, but my head is glowing with all the images and intensity I just witnessed in the kitchen. This must be the reason someone would give their entire life to cooking dinner for rich people. I don't know if I could do it week in and week out, but I can say I have nothing but the utmost respect for those that do.
