Work Clean (12 page)

If you happened to stop into Bed-Vyne Cocktail in Brooklyn in the summer of 2015, and waited in a long line that snaked from the door to the rear courtyard, when you finally got to the front of the line, you'd find Jarobi White serving his food.

“Tribe Taco Tuesdays” began as Jarobi's version of the Los Angeles street food tradition, powered by the continued popularity of A Tribe Called Quest. On the first Tuesday, Jarobi brought enough mise-en-place for 75 people; 100 came. The next Tuesday, he brought enough for 100 people and 200 came. The following week, his girlfriend Kamilah and a culinary extern cooked alongside him. Throughout the summer, the event grew with local and national media attention. When the crowds swelled to almost 300, neighborhood complaints forced the bar to shut the party down. Jarobi felt that old frustration. He wanted a place of his own, but being at Shorty's August had spoiled him. After working amid marble counters and cobblestone floors, every other place looked like a dump.

An offer from Chef Roy Choi diverted Jarobi's worries. Choi had pioneered the food truck movement in L.A., later inspiring and consulting with Jon Favreau in the making of the actor-director's 2014 movie
Chef.
Choi opened a slate of restaurants; a trip to one of them the previous summer had inspired Jarobi's taco experiment. Now Choi asked Jarobi to take over the pool deck of L.A.'s Line Hotel for Labor Day Weekend. Choi provided the mise-en-place; Jarobi secured the celebrity DJs, including hip-hop legends Jazzy Jeff and Cash Money. The success of the 3-day poolside barbecue dwarfed anything Jarobi had done.

One evening Jarobi removed his apron and was approached by a posse of thick-necked, tattooed OGs from the 'hood. “I brought everybody here,” the leader said, “to show them how you always have a chance to redefine yourself.” On another, Jarobi looked up from his mise to see Favreau and his teenage son walking toward
him. The actor turned out to be a fan. After service, Choi and Favreau cornered Jarobi:
This was fantastic. What's your next move?

“Food truck,” Jarobi said, as much a question as it was a statement.

If that's what you want to do,
Favreau said, nodding to Choi,
you're sitting with the expert. But that's not for you. You don't need to be on some food truck slaving away for 14 hours a day. You need a spot, a building to contain all the things that are about to happen to you. You need to be in the business.

Kamilah, however, suggested something different.
You loved the event. You love to travel. Why not keep doing this?
She meant: cooking one-of-a-kind meals at different spots around the country and getting a nice fee for it.

Jarobi went to the beach to think about the right move. After driving a while, he found himself in front of a huge sign. “Welcome to El Segundo,” it read. Funny, after 25 years, to have come all this way to find his wallet. To be touring still, not rapping but cooking. Maybe he was going somewhere after all.

One morning in the summer of 2006, Wylie Dufresne walked through the downstairs prep kitchen of his restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side, wd-50, to find a young
stagiaire
—a kind of “guest employee” in the kitchen, there to learn a bit and leave—standing in the midst of what looked like a bloody mess.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

“I'm juicing beets,” she replied, her apron, the floor, and the counter spattered with the results.

“Oh yeah?” Dufresne asked. “Who's winning?”

“I think it's a draw,” she said.

Dufresne raised an eyebrow. “You think? Maybe not.”

The chef shook his head and walked away, leaving Samantha Henderson to ponder the implications of the chef's sarcasm in the sticky red pool of her own making.

Unlike most other
stagiaires,
Henderson had not come from a culinary school. A willowy, quiet 25-year-old, she had never worked in a kitchen and possessed few culinary skills. She had waited tables at a restaurant and hated it. Henderson still worked a full-time job just 16 blocks away on Broadway—at Scholastic, the multi-billion-dollar children's publishing behemoth and the home of Harry Potter and Clifford the Big Red Dog. It was the type of gig her fellow graduates in the English department at New York University coveted. Henderson had moved from Georgia to Green
wich Village to write fiction and study Shakespeare, Nabokov, Paul Auster, Keats, and Donne. She adored Irish poetry because although it could be sad, it wasn't defeatist. They took their sorrow, transformed it, and moved on.

But the job at Scholastic hadn't matched her dream of reading through a slush pile of manuscripts to find the next great novel. She worked in the editorial offices of
Math
and
DynaMath
magazines, matching five-digit multiplication and long division equations with formulaic copy and kid-appropriate adjectives like “wacky” and “cool.” She liked her bosses and colleagues—all of them smart, funny, interesting people. But after 3 years, Henderson withered from boredom. To give herself a challenge, she ran marathons. The exercise made her ravenous. She started cooking for herself. Then, from cooking, a surprise: the genuine satisfaction of having made something from start to finish. She watched episodes of Jamie Oliver's
The Naked Chef.
She bought the
Larousse Gastronomique,
a 1,000-page technique and recipe encyclopedia with a forward by Escoffier himself. Henderson wanted to know how things worked. What, for example, do butter and flour do to milk if you keep cooking them together? She experimented. What little money she had, she splurged on trying ethnic cuisines and new restaurants. She'd eat something new and try to figure out how to make it. Finally, she called her parents and told them she had made the decision to apply to culinary school.

“You don't know that you want to do this for a living,” her mother warned. “Why don't you see if you can hack it in a kitchen first before you spend another 20 grand on school?”

Mom had a point. So on her lunch breaks from Scholastic, Henderson walked to different restaurants in Manhattan and asked whomever could be lured from the kitchen if they'd let her come in and work for free. She had no idea that she was asking to
stage;
she had never heard the word. But she did realize how unlikely it was for a good kitchen to employ someone with her lack of experience. Nevertheless, she pushed open the front door of wd-50, a restaurant that received two stars from the
New York Times
when it opened in 2003 for its “intellectual approach” to
food, “exhilarating” experiments, and Wylie Dufresne's “total lack of fear.”

A sous-chef named Mike Sheerin emerged from the kitchen to receive Henderson. “Can I come and hang out for a couple of days a week in the kitchen?” Henderson asked. “I'll do anything you want. I'll pick herbs. I'll peel potatoes.”

“We don't use that many potatoes here,” Sheerin replied, looking for a way out. Dufresne later remarked that Sheerin must have been in a good mood that day, because Sheerin went on to say: “Come next Saturday. Wear some comfortable pants and clogs, and bring a chef's knife.”

Samantha Henderson went to a housewares store, bought the cheapest knife she could find, and showed up for work. Sheerin put her in the downstairs prep chamber, far from the expansive, gleaming service kitchen upstairs.

Henderson honored her promise. She juiced beets. She picked spinach. She cut vegetables. And despite the messes she made, eliciting the occasional quip from Dufresne, she loved the work. Henderson decided that she wouldn't go to culinary school; she'd quit Scholastic, find a real job in a restaurant kitchen somewhere, and learn by doing. Dufresne and Sheerin offered to help her find a gig. A few months later, on her last day at wd-50, Dufresne called Henderson into his office.

“I know where you're going to work,” he announced.

“Where?” Henderson asked.

“Here,” Dufresne said. “We're going to give you a job.”

Henderson secured her place in wd-50's kitchen on reliability and attitude alone. Dufresne was saying
I will be your teacher,
just as Alfred Portale and Jean-Georges Vongerichten had done for him.

In the months that followed, the hardest thing for Henderson to learn was the fundamental lesson behind those mangled beets, one that Vongerichten himself taught Dufresne.

“If you can't clean, you can't cook,” Jean-Georges told him. “You cook the way you look.”

For Dufresne, that maxim meant more than making one's bones
with menial work, though earning the privilege to cook was a time-honored practice. It signified something more than sanitation, though that, too, was of particular importance. It involved more than the physical repercussions of clutter in one's workstation, of not having the room to cut and cook. Rather, the act of cleaning spaces maintained an optimal
mind state
for a cook
.
Thus the most important notion about cleaning was
when
cooks were supposed to do it:
all the time.

Cleaning as you go, not waiting to clean, separated true chefs and cooks from everyone else. If Samantha cleaned her cutting board and station as she made messes or mistakes, her environment would always be optimal for success and her system would remain intact. If she waited to clean and let things accumulate, she'd lose her attention to detail in a restaurant where the details mattered. You can't tend to the details if you can't see them. If she waited to clean, she'd also make cleaning harder and more time-consuming with every passing minute, as the detritus of her workday began to ossify into a culinary archaeology that she would have to excavate herself. New cooks make more messes than seasoned ones, so cleaning wasn't only doubly difficult for Sam, it was doubly important.

When Henderson worked at Scholastic, she kept a tidy desk. In the kitchen she put stuff everywhere—on herself, the cutting board, the counter, the appliances, and the floor. The floor thing made Dufresne crazy, especially when he saw cooks
deliberately
sweep a mess off their station and onto the tile instead of into their cupped palm. He'd send a dishwasher right in there with a broom, sweeping right over their feet. If a cook dared complain—
Hey! I'm working here!—
Dufresne would tell him:
I won't make him come over here if you don't give me a reason to.

Sam Henderson learned by watching the other cooks. She picked up little techniques. Like if she was peeling a bunch of parsnips, instead of peeling them onto her cutting board or into a garbage can—a risky, unsanitary habit—she put a half-sheet tray down on
top
of her cutting board and peeled the parsnips over the tray. Then when she finished, she could pick up the whole tray and
toss the peels in the trash.
Voilà
, clean cutting board. She learned that the tighter she arranged her station at the start, the cleaner she could keep it. And working clean meant that she had to be assiduous about putting every ingredient and tool back where it had been before she grabbed it. The moment she stopped cleaning, things spun out of control. If she made a mess on the counter—where it could be transferred to her sleeve, her apron, a bottle, a plate—she wiped it down right away and left nothing behind. She slowed her overall pace to clean better, because although delay was bad, it wasn't as instantly observable as a messy station. Wylie and Mike would bust her chops the minute they caught her slipping into disorder, and Henderson found the kitchen's social pressure potent. If the guy next to you was working clean and you weren't, that hurt your pride. If you spilled stuff onto his station, you were being rude. A messy station was
shameful.

As Henderson cultivated the cleaning reflex, she noted the more subtle changes that Dufresne knew she would.
You cook the way you look.
The cleaner her station, the faster she worked. The cleaner her station, the better her product. Her attention to detail deepened. The aesthetics of a clean station pleased her. She liked folding her side towel and replacing it at the top of her cutting board. She liked the look of the spotless counter. She strove to make it through an entire service without a spot on her apron, to look just like her fellow cooks. It made her feel better about her food, about herself. Plus, she stopped getting blasted by Wylie and Mike. They could teach her things now that she didn't have to figure out what to do with her body and her space. She learned to taste, to deconstruct recipes, to
make
them, becoming part of wd-50's engine of innovation. Dufresne now asked her to teach the things she knew to the new
stagiaires. Make a mess, clean it now, move on.

After 3 years, when Dufresne figured Henderson had learned all she could at wd-50, he sent her off to
stage
elsewhere. She cooked for a while at Mugaritz outside San Sebastian in Spain, and then in some renowned restaurants in Chicago. But in 2011, when Dufresne needed a sous-chef, he called Sam.

For 2 years Henderson was Dufresne's right hand in the kitchen, until he opened a second restaurant, Alder, that needed his attention. That's when he promoted Sam Henderson to
chef de cuisine.
In the
New York Times,
he dubbed Henderson a kitchen ninja.

“Super strong,” he called her.

She needed to be: The beet-bloodied
stagiaire
would now be running his kitchen.

For the chef, the first stage of mise-en-place is readiness—make your plan, gather your resources, arrange your space.