Life, on the Line (12 page)

The cleaned and polished tripe was packed carefully into the
brassier
between layers of carrot, onion, and celery—or mirepoix—that were added in an alternating, specific order. White wine, vermouth, and aromatics were added and the pot was placed in the oven for hours, only to be removed, repacked with fresh mirepoix and wine, and cooked again. We repeated this process three times.

Five days after the tripe arrived it was finished.

Every step along the way chef Keller was there demonstrating, watching, correcting, and guiding. He literally stood over my shoulder. It felt like I had been taken under his wing, like I was building the GTO all over again.

But this was different. Chef Keller was not just teaching me, he was protecting the tripe. He wanted that worthless piece of a cow to complete its transformation perfectly. And he was willing to get up early every morning to see that it did.

Chef Keller always talked about thinking “big picture.” He drilled that into all of the cooks at The French Laundry. With the tripe, he knew that if he showed us the right way to prepare it, he would be passing down not just a recipe but also a philosophy of cooking.

And chef Keller knew that someday, later in my career, I would pass along that same ethos.

 

I became good friends with Eric and would tell him regularly that if I didn't get moved to the line soon I would have to leave. Eric was on the meat station at the time and had worked nearly every station in the restaurant. He had a great rapport with chef Keller and was marked for sous chef. I figured whatever I told Eric would eventually filter its way up to Chef.

One morning Eric walked into the kitchen to find me rolling sweet potato agnolotti for the garde manger station. He said good morning as he passed, began setting up his station, and then slid next to me. “Ever been to Hawaii?”

“No, you? I hear it's amazing.”

Eric looked at me and smiled. “I'm sure it is.”

Thirty minutes later I passed chef Keller as he was on his way into the kitchen. We shook hands and he pulled me aside. “We have an opportunity to do an event in Maui in a few weeks. I was talking it over with the cooks last night after service and Eric suggested I bring you. He knows it'll be a busy trip, and he's been happy with the work you're doing. So what do you think? Want to come to Hawaii?”

Chef and I discussed the trip in detail and he filled me in on the events for the week. It was, in fact, going to be a lot of work. I could tell he was very concerned about leaving the restaurant. I had never seen him miss a service. Chef had already decided to bring the pastry chef Stephen Durfee along, and he asked me who else we should bring.

I was working closely with a new extern at the time named Richard Blais. He fit right in with the personality of the restaurant, taking the all-or-nothing approach and showing a good amount of natural talent despite still being a CIA student. I suggested we bring him along. He worked mornings, so it wouldn't impact the service team, and I knew he would kill himself to get the job done while we were there. Plus, I liked him and we got along well.

The suggestion was unorthodox to be sure. The trip was a golden ticket among the cooks. A weeklong trip anywhere with chef Keller was the stuff of envy, but throw Hawaii in the mix and people would be fighting over it. Typically, such perks were reserved for chefs with the most seniority. Bringing an extern would ruffle some feathers, but it was the way to least upset the flow of the restaurant. Chef Keller agreed with my suggestion.

Rich and I spent the next week organizing, prepping, and packing the
mise en place
for the event. Stephen and Rich left a day ahead to unpack the boxes and set up so that Chef and I could spend one more day at the Laundry making sure everything was set there.

Chef Keller and I got off the plane, recovered our bags, and hopped into the awaiting convertible for our ride to the resort. I felt uncomfortable being around him outside the kitchen. Here we were, sunglasses on and cruising in a convertible in one of the most beautiful places in the world—and I didn't know what to talk about. I wanted to ask him about his career, The French Laundry, the risks he took to make it happen, and the secrets he held about cooking, but I censored myself, knowing he must get asked those things a million times. We enjoyed the thirty-minute drive in silence.

We pulled up to the Kea Lani resort and were met by two women in hula skirts and white tops. They handed us cold towels to cool our foreheads and offered us fresh-squeezed guava juice.

This was unreal. Thomas Keller was being treated like a rock star.

I was rooming with Rich, and after getting a key of my own, Chef and I made plans to take an hour to relax before heading into the kitchen to check on the food that had been shipped ahead.

As I was about to put the key in the door it swung open quickly. “Dude. Man. This is off the hook. You have to see this.”

Blais was bouncing up and down and pulled me into the room and led me to the back door. It was March 1998, and El Niño had interrupted the migration pattern of the humpback whales, forcing them closer to shore. “The whales are coming right out of the water. Check that shit out!”

I stepped out onto the patio and watched one whale after another breach the water. We stood for a few minutes surrounded by palm trees, warm air, and the whales and I couldn't help but think I was the luckiest cook in the world. Except maybe Richard, who was here on his externship.

The weeklong event required us to prepare a demonstration, a lunch, and a dinner. Each event had nearly two hundred guests in attendance. We flew 2,500 miles and were cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen with makeshift equipment and a skeleton crew. Most chefs would create a menu that was low-maintenance in that situation, one that would allow them to spend more time on the beach sipping mai tais. Chef Keller did the opposite. His pursuit of perfection extended beyond his restaurant. The menu he created was the polar opposite of safe—it was highly ambitious. The lunch menu included a rabbit course that required the tiny racks to be meticulously frenched, a morel and asparagus course garnished with thumbnail-size gnocchi, and the first course on the dinner menu was a foie gras torchon.

The four of us arrived in the kitchen to find the resort kitchen team sitting on stools while prepping. We exchanged glances, confirming our mutual derision for such heresy and isolated an area of the kitchen where we could work by ourselves. Chef Keller immediately grabbed a bucket, filled it with soapy water, and began to scrub the area where we were working. A couple of members of the resort kitchen offered to help, no doubt as the management sensed that the famous chef should not be cleaning, but chef Keller politely declined. “I think we're in good shape, thank you.”

The task of deveining foie gras for the torchon preparation was extremely time consuming. The foie gras had to be cleaned, cured overnight, rolled, poached, and rerolled. The restaurant processed between eight and ten lobes a week, but Rich and Stephen returned from the walk-in carrying a giant plastic tub filled with milk and twenty-four lobes of foie gras bobbing about. Chef suggested we let the liver temper while we butchered the rabbits. As Rich broke off and started making the thousands of gnocchi for the morel course, and Stephen began to prepare the coffee semifreddo for the signature dish “Coffee and Doughnuts,” Chef and I started to break down and french the rabbit loins.

When it finally came time to put out the 205 plates, the resort's kitchen staff lined up to help. There were nearly twenty guys. “Great,” I thought, “we will rock this out quickly.” Then chef Keller told everyone except the four of us to go away. He did this for each of the three events, and though it made for a crazy stretch of breakneck plating, we knew that each and every one of the dishes went out perfectly.

Chef Keller, it seems, never let the bar drop no matter the situation. In the restaurant, or out.

After the final event Rich and I returned to our room to decompress and clean up before heading out for dinner. We sat giddy with excitement on the balcony of our suite overlooking the ocean. The events had gone smoothly and we were about to board a plane, fly to the big island, and eat dinner at Alan Wong's.

“We are taking an airplane to dinner. With TK. How cool is that?”

We had grown pretty comfortable with each other and sat there talking for a while. We couldn't believe the way the guests and the staff treated chef Keller like a star. We had never seen a chef as a celebrity, and clearly Thomas Keller had become one.

Blais asked me if I thought I would stay at the Laundry for the long haul.

“Yeah, I'll be there for a while. But it's a stepping-stone for me, not the end point.”

“Really? What do you mean?”

Having been in his shoes not too long ago, I could understand how hard it was to wrap your head around life beyond the Laundry. It was the pinnacle of gastronomic excellence, not only in America but also—as I learned the hard way—in the world. But I knew that I wanted something more. I wanted a place that was mine. That was what I grew up with, and that is what I knew.

“I have a lot more to learn from TK. But even as I'm frenching rabbit for what I know will be an amazing dish, I can't help but think about how I'll do it differently. I'm over buttered-out reductions, not because they aren't great but because there is something beyond them. I want to use it all but leave it behind, if you know what I mean. I want to do my own thing.”

Blais looked at me like I was posing and being a cocky bastard, but he didn't say anything. He was ambitious, too, and had landed here well. And we were about to hop on a plane to go to dinner. Anything seemed possible.

I wasn't just running my mouth, though. Even in the thrall of The French Laundry I tried to do as Thomas instructed—to see the big picture.

And while I couldn't see the details, I could see how things might fall in place.

 

Mark was the
chef de partie
on the garde manger station and would soon be moving to fish to replace Phil, who was leaving to join chef Daniel Patterson's restaurant Babette's in Sonoma. Mark emerged as one of the strongest cooks on the team, and I was happy that he would be the one training me for my shot on the line. He was like a drill sergeant, incredibly focused and serious. There was only one way to do something—his way. The
bain-marie
was in the same spot every time, and the spoon and palette knife handles always faced the same way. The
mise en place
rail was set up in the same order every day at the exact same time. The section ran like a machine because it was consistent and almost mechanical. “This is the way Chef likes it. Do it this way,” was the only explanation ever given.

I wouldn't argue with him. He obviously knew what he was doing, made clear by the way he interacted with chef Keller. Mark spent a week training me on the station and then moved on to work fish.

Finally, I was on the line.

Traditionally garde manger stations are removed from the hot line, but at The French Laundry it was one of the four stations surrounding the stove and directly behind the expediting station where chef Keller stood every service.

The Laundry had two menu options: the nine-course chef 's tasting or the five-course prix fixe, in which the diner chose among several options in each category. I was responsible for between six to ten dishes, all of which I had some familiarity with from producing the
mise en place
for them. Other ingredients I had cooked before with chef Keller, such as the veal tongue and beef cheeks that made up the dish “Tongue ‘n' Cheek.” I locked into the work quickly and with the support of Eric, who was on the meat station to my immediate right, and Mark, who was coaching me from across the stove, the transition from prep cook to line cook went smoothly.

At the end of service each night the cooks would huddle around the chef's pass and go over the orders and menu changes for the following day. One night, a few months into my time on the line, chef Keller let us know that a very important group of journalists would be in town for a food journalism symposium at CIA Greystone that weekend, and that a group of them would be dining at the restaurant the next evening. Among them were some of the most influential writers in the country: Ruth Reichl, head critic for the
New York Times
, Phyllis Richman, and Corby Kummer.

Not only did we have the most important critics in the country coming in, but they were all sitting at the same table. Chef Keller led the discussion about the menu we would prepare for them by asking the group what they would suggest. We spent an hour writing a menu that would showcase a broad variety of the best dishes we could prepare.

The next day we all arrived early knowing how busy the night would be and how critical it would be that everybody was ready to go when service started. We also knew that chef Keller would be tense and a bit edgy, especially if he sensed that the kitchen was unprepared.

I was rolling out pasta when he arrived. He walked briskly past me, reached out his hand and squeezed my elbow as a hello gesture that did not interrupt my work. Two steps past, however, he stopped abruptly and turned toward me. “We should do a different pasta course for them tonight. What do you want to do?”

“Are you kidding me?” I thought. Why the hell was he asking me, a twenty-three-year-old cook who had been on the station for a few months, to come up with a course?

I said nothing but immediately ran to the walk-in to see what ingredients we had available that were not already on the critic's table menu. I settled on foie gras, chanterelles, sage, and Swiss chard. I went back to chef Keller and proposed the dish. “Chef, how about a single foie gras tortellini garnished with chanterelles, Swiss chard, and sage? Maybe an acidic brown butter emulsion, spiked with sherry or banyuls vinegar.”