Work Clean (23 page)

For 5 years while he built the restaurant into one of Philadelphia's hottest, Rob Halpern lived at Marigold, and not in the metaphorical sense, either. Halpern slept in a small room upstairs not much bigger than a closet.

One day in 2014, however, the chef decided that his work there was done, and that he and his fiancée were getting married and moving to California. With that, Halpern left. Tim and Andrew bought Marigold from him for somewhat less than Rob's asking price of $300,000 and renegotiated the lease.

One year after my first visit, I dropped by to see how things were going.

Tim and Andrew promoted Keith to executive chef and kept as many of the crew as they could after a pause of several months for renovations. They simplified the cooking, removing most of the retro references and nitrogen-powered items on the menu. They focused on a more classical approach while retaining a bit of Halpern's whimsy. They simplified the stations; at the new Marigold, everyone was encouraged to be a “roundsman,” meaning someone able to cook every dish on the menu if called to do so. And they simplified the communication, too. Gone were the references to obscure white male progressive rock artists. Gone were the annoying little sticky notes that Rob used to leave for them on their stations: “This could have been cleaned better.” They did keep the reference to the pass—the place where waiters picked up food from the hot line—as “Station Four,” even though there wasn't a Station One, Two, and Three, nor had there ever been.

Keith's cooking kept the good reviews and customers coming in. But the new chef had to swallow one bitter pill: It was he, and not Rob, who had actually prepared that truffled crab macaroni and cheese that won Rinna Diaz's heart. The guys in the kitchen break Keith's balls about it all the time.
Just think, Keith. If Rob hadn't
taken credit for it, Rinna could have been yours.
Instead, it's Rob in California and Keith at Station Four.

At that very moment, Rob Halpern was likely enjoying the sunshine on his 30-acre almond orchard outside Paso Robles. Outside his 1,600-square-foot home, chickens were probably poking around in the soil among his persimmon, peach, and pear trees. He might be driving to the farmers' market, or else to the winery or retreat center where he was serving as exclusive chef for special events. And when Rinna returned from her job as an operating room nurse, they'd drink wine.

Back in Philadelphia, Halpern's old crew had no clue. “I think he has some land,” Keith said. “He told us potentially he was opening a farm.”

Is he gonna cook?
I ask.

They shake their heads. They haven't heard.

The critics agree: Bill Telepan can cook.

Frank Bruni, a writer for the
New York Times,
shrugged when he first entered Telepan's eponymous restaurant after it opened in late 2005. The food press heralded Telepan for his seasonal cooking at fancier digs like the Judson Grill in Midtown; this new place, Telepan's first as an owner, was humble, tucked away on a residential side street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “An oddly configured series of rooms,” Bruni wrote, “created from the joined first floors of adjacent townhouses.” The menu looked “prosaic.” But in his 2006 review, Bruni described being startled, again and again, by unpretentious food that burst with flavor, “none of it precious but all of it vibrant”—a vegetable bread soup, a juicy fillet of salmon, smoked trout on little blini pancakes. The food, Bruni enthused, “shuns trickery and puts its faith in fundamental virtues: its freshness; the pureness or punch of its flavors; the skill with which it's been cooked.” Other reviews, like the one in
New York Magazine,
found fault with the restaurant's decor and pricing, but conceded there was “no doubt about Telepan's talents as a chef.”

Of course, Bill Telepan didn't actually
cook
his food. As a chef-restaurateur, Telepan's job now was to
look
at his food. All the dishes were
his
recipes, but other hands made them, hands trained by Telepan. He watched his food and his crew as they
cooked it, listened to his customers and critics after they ate it, and made adjustments.

Telepan resembled his food: brilliance in an unassuming package, his refinement evolved by watching, listening, and adjusting along his own journey from the kitchen of a New Jersey deli into what Bruni called the “top tier” of New York chefs. He had come from a working-class family—his dad employed at a General Motors plant, his mother doing odd jobs. He started cooking in high school, ending up behind the grill at Garfunkel's—what Telepan called a “glorified TGI Fridays”—but left the restaurant to go to college. When Telepan became bored by his classes and missed the kitchen, the chef at Garfunkel's drove him up to the CIA and gave him a tour. In his 2 years at the CIA, Telepan's world and palate sprung open. He trailed at Charlie Palmer's River Cafe, and soon Palmer introduced Telepan to the man who would become his mentor, Alfred Portale.

The Gotham Bar and Grill was only 3 years old when Telepan arrived, but by that time Alfred Portale had transformed it from a mediocre restaurant into one of the most important in the world. According to Ruth Reichl—one in a line of
New York Times
critics over the years to give Gotham a coveted three-star review—Portale and crew “figured out how to make Americans feel at ease with fancy food.” At the forefront of “New American Cuisine,” the diminutive Portale liked his food tall, and, though exacting, remained as composed as any of his famous plates. Telepan recalled: “It was a busy kitchen with 350 to 400 covers a night at a very high level of service. So everybody had to be on. But Alfred wasn't a yeller. Alfred would get
disappointed
in you.”

Telepan worked on Gotham's line for 3 years, left for a time, and returned as Portale's sous-chef for 4 more years. The gangly Telepan—a Jersey kid prone to sudden bursts of full-body laughter—contrasted with the quiet, restrained Portale. He emulated Portale's dedication to ingredients, to uniformity, and crucially, to his role as chief inspector. Portale himself didn't make the food. The cooks did. Portale taught them how, inspecting and correcting their work until
they got it right. Portale could do this because, unlike other chefs of his stature, he stayed in his restaurant, at the pass, the last line of defense of his three stars and his standards. To this day he stays. “I like it better when I'm there,” Portale says.

The standards and refinement rubbed off on Telepan. And when his turn came to teach people how to cook
his
food, he followed Portale's example by constantly watching and training others to watch. At Telepan's restaurant, he always put three sets of eyes on every dish that went out: the cook's, the expediter's, and the head food runner's. Usually Telepan expedited, but when he stepped away, Darwin, his longtime back waiter, stepped in. After 8 years Telepan built a two-star restaurant with a rock-solid crew who cooked his food well. He had gathered great customers, a mix of regular neighborhood folks, foodies, and theatergoers for nearby Lincoln Center. He decided to open a second place.

Telepan chose a space in the upscale Tribeca neighborhood, where the food scene was hotter. Bill Telepan wanted to do an American version of a Spanish
tapas
restaurant with small dishes inspired by the comfort foods of his Jersey youth—haute versions of pizza, Buffalo wings, pigs in a blanket, shrimp poppers, grilled cheese, even gourmet Cheez-Its—along with plates of short ribs, sweetbreads, pork belly, and escargots. He called it Telepan Local.

The restaurant launched only for friends and family in January of 2014. Then Telepan decided that Local should stay open, quietly, and at least have some kind of income stream while they worked the kinks out. There were a lot of kinks. The restaurant hadn't yet installed enough natural gas capacity to run all the appliances, so many of the stoves and ovens remained inoperative. The kitchen didn't have heat lamps either, so plates went out as they were ready, and the kitchen and waitstaff had trouble nailing the timing. The waitstaff needed continual training.

Bill Telepan now spent more time downtown, nurturing his newborn. Telepan promoted his uptown sous-chef Joel Javier to run Local as chef de cuisine. Telepan coached him while Javier in turn trained a kitchen of new recruits on almost 30 recipes and techniques. On an icy evening in February, Telepan stood at the
pass next to Javier, who called out orders to the line and received the plates, inspecting them and giving each a sprinkle of coarse sea salt and olive oil before handing them to a food runner.

Javier talked about the difficulty of getting consistency while also maintaining finesse or
soigné
(French for “made with great care”)—the lesson that Telepan learned with Portale. “It's why fast food is so successful,” Javier said. “They've found a way that you can get the same hamburger and same fries anywhere, anytime. Of course, it's not very good.” One thing you couldn't do was automate
soigné
. That's why Javier and Telepan watched.

They both eyed a new extern, Diana, a Russian Studies graduate of Columbia University who had pivoted to become a culinary student at the nearby International Culinary Center. On her third day at Telepan Local, she still struggled with several of the six dishes for which she was responsible.

Telepan caught a glimpse of an order of mushrooms in parchment that Diana had just pulled from the oven and split open to plate. He saw that the food inside it wasn't cooked completely. There was no putting it back.

“Just start a new one,” he told her.

Diana continued to rush things. Diana put an order of Telepan's
pan con tamate
on the small grill at her station to toast before brushing with garlic and topping with a spread of chopped tomato and garlic. A minute later, Telepan caught her pulling it off the grill prematurely.

“That's not done,” Telepan barked. “Fire another one. Be
patient.
It's grilled cheese, right?”

“Right,” Diana replied. “Can't rush the chemistry.”

Javier counseled her. It should toast to a
good
golden brown, he said, or the garlic wouldn't release its essence when she rubbed it into the bread. And if she didn't toast it enough, the bread would get soggy faster when she spread the tomato on it. Telepan worried that the grill itself might not be getting hot enough. Another equipment problem, perhaps. “I know it's just a grilled cheese sandwich,” he told Diana. “But it's got to be a great fucking grilled cheese sandwich.”

“I'm Bill Telepan,” he said later. “I can't fuck up a grilled cheese!”

Telepan heard himself and exploded with laughter.

The restaurant business is hard.

A study published in 2005 found that 60 percent of new restaurants fail during their first 3 years. The challenge of feeding demanding customers meals prepared by hand from expensive, perishable ingredients is insurmountable for most entrepreneurs who try it. In fine dining the stakes rise: costlier ingredients, equipment, rent, and talent.

Failure can happen at any time. It can come as slowly as a season of half-empty dining rooms or as suddenly as a bad review. It can be sparked by a mistake in one dish, or caused by hundreds of mediocre plates. Failure may not arise from the food at all, but from the manner in which it is served.

A good restaurant requires constant vigilance. That watchfulness ensues not from a clichéd quest for excellence that one might see on a motivational poster, but from a fundamental, endemic, unending fear of failure.

Because the kitchen is the beating heart of a tough business that demands finesse from people who may not have much experience or many standards, the professional kitchen must always train and coach its staff.

Ergo the best kitchens are schools, the best chefs are teachers, and the best cooks are students.

Inspect and correct
is how the chef approaches perfection, “approach” being the operative word in that phrase, because perfec
tion is never achieved. At most, what the great chef can accomplish is
meticulous execution,
a phrase that kitchen designer Jimi Yui borrowed from Chef Gray Kunz.
Meticulous execution
encompasses the ambition of a chef, but also a bit of her stoicism:
You can only do what you can do.

As a system of ongoing education dedicated to becoming better at one's craft, inspect and correct requires humility, a commitment to
submission.
The chef submits to her responsibility to teach the cook. The cook submits to the wisdom and guidance of the chef. The cook submits to her own discipline and to honing her own processes. The chef submits to maintaining a balance between her own instincts and the wisdom and guidance of the customers and critics. And both the chef and cook submit to the fact that this submission never ends.

Inspect and correct happens primarily at a place called the pass, or pass-through, a checkpoint between the kitchen and the dining room. Think of it as the narrowest point in an hourglass, through which all orders from the customers pass through to the cooks, and all dishes pass from the cooks on their way back to the customers.

The person who runs this checkpoint is called the
expediter.
Many times it is the chef herself who stands here, but you may find a sous-chef or an experienced food runner expediting as well. The expediter acts in several capacities, first as a defender of the cooks—evaluating and pacing the incoming orders so that the kitchen doesn't get overwhelmed; second as a monitor of practices, processes, and habits as the food is being cooked; and third as the defender of the customer and the restaurant, evaluating each dish before it goes out.