Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (9 page)

You cover the sheeted monkfish in plastic and place it under refrigeration to prevent bacterial development. At the same time, you remove the foie gras from refrigeration so it can temper. Meanwhile, the potatoes have finished as you were cutting the monkfish, so you shift your focus momentarily and get them out of the water and into the blast chiller so that they don’t overcook. By the time you’ve finished tending to the potatoes, changing out your cutting
board, and sanitizing your station, the foie will be the perfect consistency.

Cleaning foie gras is like performing an autopsy. A reticulum of unsavory blood vessels weaves among the edible material. It is important to remove all of them if you want to isolate the pure flavor and texture. To do so, you make a small slit at the nexus of the liver’s hemispheres and carefully peel apart the lobes using your thumb and the spine of a Petty knife. The goal is to unwrap the liver like a delicate gift, so that the blood vessels remain intact. Many of the veins still have blood in them, which could stain the tan meat an unattractive pink, so it’s important not to puncture them with the edge of your blade. It’s also important that the organ retain the greatest level of structural integrity possible, for the sake of its freshness, cookability, and texture. To mash it to smithereens would be brutish and wasteful; it would defeat the purpose. It should look like a beautiful brown orchid when you are done. When you’re satisfied that it is sufficiently clean, you roll it back up and place it in the fridge with the monkfish.

Suddenly you realize it is almost 1400. This task has taken you far too long. A show plate of each special is due up at 1630 so it can be explained to and tasted by the waitstaff during the premeal meeting. The time has come to begin delegating large chunks of work.

The first order of business is to account for all the proteins. Most important, of course, is to show Rogelio—who has hopefully finished turning the turnips, cleaning the mushrooms, and dicing the preserved lemon—how to roll
the roulades. When you ask him to do it, he will probably make a stink about it, but if you can get him on your side, he’ll stick around.

“I go home three o’clock,” he says.

“I give you overtime, baby.”

“Okay, Chef,” he says. “I stay.”

The pork is literally in Julio’s hands. He’s taken on the duty with a typical austerity and seems to be plugging through it at a good clip. He’s cut the meat to size and has begun labeling the boilable sous vide bags with the appropriate HACCP information. It also appears that he has resolved the guanciale situation with Chef—it is going in the bag, too, as you suspected. He’s also got a circulator bringing a water bath up to temperature. All he has to do now is seal the bags up in the Cryovac and take the little piggies for a swim.

You yourself have checked the herring and confirmed that they need to be cleaned, but you resign yourself to the fact that you’ll clean the two you need for the show plate yourself, and Brianne can finish the rest once the smoke clears around five o’clock. You don’t anticipate that they’ll fly out the door, and for Raffy to clean a few orders à la minute, though terribly messy and disruptive, is doable if necessary. So Brie can get to them when she has the chance.

The only things left are the pasta and the terrine, but you trust that Stefan and Chef will take care of those dishes between the two of them, so you don’t even allow yourself to think about them.

With the proteins covered, you can focus on the garnishes. They are relatively simple but require a fair amount of work. The “carrot” on the monk dish, for example, refers
to a carrot puree. The process is less obvious than making baby food. You have to cook the carrots under a cartouche in bay-and-juniper-scented carrot juice, which means that someone has to juice some carrots and chop up others. The “endive” in that dish refers to a classically braised endive, but someone needs to halve them before they can be cooked. The beluga lentils are cooked, but they need to be inspected for quality. The tarragon needs to be picked for the compound butter, and the mise for the sapori forte needs to be cut. The potatoes need to be peeled and dressed. The potato dressing needs to be made. The boquerones sauce needs to be made. Herbs need to be picked. The line needs to be set. The carrots need to be pureed—but they’re not even cooked yet. They’re not even cut yet. There is so much to do, too much to do.

You step outside to smoke a cigarette on the loading dock and figure out where your head is at.

When you return, the kitchen is abuzz with activity. New sounds can be heard: the whoosh of lighted burners, the splutter of fat in pans, the clank and bonk of steel on steel. All the rest of the line cooks have arrived. And they’ve all jumped right to action.

Raffy has gotten started on the evening’s sauces. He’s begun reducing wines, retherming bouillons, toasting spices, finessing fats into emulsion. VinDog and Warren have taken down the stocks and are now starting to set their lines, buzzing purees and turning vegetables, respectively. Catalina whips creams, rinses greens, and slices salumi in her corner on the cold side. Julio, arms bloodied, continues
carving away at thick slabs of meat, slicing portions from primal cuts. Everyone has multiple projects up and running and, like worker bees, they buzz away at them, quickly and quietly, as if to some inaudible universal rhythm.

Being surrounded by a whole crew of people hard at work is usually comforting, but today it’s only superficially so. The specials have utterly consumed you, and as a result, you and Stefan have completely neglected the regular menu. The line cooks are here to handle that problem. They’re here to work on their prep lists, which center on the everyday dishes, for which the mise en place must be done fresh daily. While they might be
capable
of helping you out with the specials, their focus must remain with à la carte.

What’s more, the work that everyone else has started has eaten up valuable real estate on the stovetops and tables. It’s cat and mouse now for burners and boards. People are beginning to get keyed up.

“Where the fuck are my third pans, Kiko?” squawks Raffy. “Every fucking day with this shit.”

“Vete a la verga, puto. Aquí. Tomale.”

“Whose rondeau is this on my flat-top?” says Vinny.

“My bad, dog,” says Warren. “That’s me.”

“Yeah, well, do me a favor and shit up your own station,” he says, shoving the rondeau onto Warren’s side of the stove. “This thing is about to explode. Pay attention.”

“Ladies, please,” wails Julio.
“Mucha
blah blah blah.
Ustedes ya me están dando dolor de cabeza.”

All you can do is put your head down and cook, which is fine, because you do it well when you do it.

You’re picking herbs for the plats du jour when out of
the corner of your eye you spot Brianne. Her arrival means it’s nearing 1500, which is unsettling, but it also means you now have a second set of hands to help pull you through.

“Yo, Brie, what up,” you say, extending your hand for the shake. “Listen, as soon as you’re ready I need you to hop right into a few special projects for me, yeah?”

“No problem, Chef,” she says. “I’m about to change right now.”

When she returns in her whites, you instruct her on how to cut and juice the carrots, and you tell her to bring them up in a pot when they’re ready. You’ll be able to keep an eye on them once they get on the stove, and they shouldn’t take more than half an hour. As far as pureeing them goes, well, they’ll be done when they’re done. You also show Brianne how you want the endive cut and the potatoes peeled, both of which she should be able to finish by around 1600, once she’s through with the carrots. The potato dressing will take you five minutes, so you are fine with pushing that to the bitter end. The braised endive will be a quick job, too, once the stove clears up. You can even set it to run into the beginning of service if you want, because endives don’t take very long to cook and you can store them in their liquor by the stove’s chimney once they’ve come up to temperature.

You’ve elbowed out some space on the flat-top for an
evasée
in which you’ve set some white wine and sweated shallots to reduce for the boquerones sauce, and you brought out some heavy cream, the butter, and the anchovies so you can toss them in directly when the wine has come down
à sec
. You’ve inspected the beluga lentils and certified that they are fit to be served, and you’ve located
some good duck fat, which will be used to pick them up. You showed Julio the rig for the tarragon butter and he’s agreed to take care of it before service starts.

“So do you think you can get it done by four-thirty?” you say.

“Do I look like an octopus?” he says.

“The butter’s out, the tarragon’s picked. It’ll take you two seconds.”

“It’ll take
you
two seconds,” he says.

“I’m not asking.”

The only major project left is the mise for the sapori forte. There is plenty of time for you to set up a board and get it done. You’ve moved your station to the pass, where you can observe both sides of the line. It is cleaner there, and you adjust your setup to fit the atmosphere. Your fish blades have been replaced by a lone ten-inch Gyutou—“Excalibur,” an old favorite—and your cutting board is smaller now. A quartet of two-quart Cambros flanks the board, and whole carrots and cornichons breeze beneath your knife from left to right, as with smooth strokes you convert the raw ingredients into usable food.

The afternoon is finally beginning to coalesce. You’ve pushed through the chaos, established a sense of control over it. You’ve hit your rhythm. You are getting it done. You’ve been so efficient, in fact, that you’ve even found time to throw in a quick pan of filberts to toast for Chef—garnish for the terrine, which he said he would take care of, from A to Z—assuming that he would appreciate your contribution to the dish. Your eyes still dart here and there every now and again, but you feel for once as if you are
going to make it out in time. A feeling of comfort comes over you.

All of a sudden Chef’s meaty hands come thundering down on your shoulders and the comfort goes to smash. Your knife slips a bit, nearly snipping a pinky tip.

“Talk to me,
papi
,” he says. “Where are we at?”

“Looking good, Chef,” you say.

“Ready by four-thirty?” he says.

“
Oui
, Chef,” you say. “Always ready.”

B
EING THERE MEANS BEING READY
. W
HEN IT COMES TO SERVICE
, being ready means having everything in its place by the time the first order comes in. On days like today, when you have a hefty prep list to contend with, getting there can be difficult. The only way to do it is to get a good rhythm going.

A good rhythm is any method of working that promotes maximum productivity. The specific method will vary from task to task, but it always comprises some specific succession of steps—(a) followed by (b) followed by (c), etcetera—which you repeat over and over again.

For simple jobs, this might be how you use your hands:

For something like whole animal butchery, the rhythm might be the way you choreograph your cuts:

For more complicated jobs, like
pommes fondant
, let’s say, it’s all about how you approach the project as a whole:

In all cases, you follow the sequence with precision. Not only does the repetition yield consistency, it also works to encourage speed. As your body acclimates to the motion, you naturally do it more quickly. You begin to move like a machine, without even having to think about it. And the less you have to think about it, the more brain space you have to look into the future. Like a skilled billiards player, you begin anticipating your next move and the one
after that, so that when one task is done, you don’t waste time trying to figure out what follows. You move seamlessly between activities, shaving precious seconds off the overall time it takes to complete your mise en place. Before you know it, you’re scratching items off your prep list in droves.