Do You Know Who I Am?

Note: This is a companion piece, of sorts, to this and this. It is loosely based on my time as the general manager of a fine dining restaurant in an upscale suburb, but by no means are any of the characters in this story based on real people. Names and other details have been changed to protect me from litigation.

The front door of the restaurant leads you to the podium, where I stand sentry with at least one of my managers, a hostess, an Open Table reservation computer, and two phones that don’t stop ringing. To your right is a long L-shaped calacatta marble bar full of white men in their 50s leering at every woman of any age entering the restaurant, swilling martinis from our birdbath glasses, or double vodkas from Burgundy glasses as if dying of thirst. To your far right is the lounge, six low-top tables with soft chairs, an area I use strictly for walk-ins that remains full from 5:00 until closing most nights.

Past me is the long rectangular main dining room, which can fit two hundred, with a smaller thirty-seat private room all the way in the back. A hundred conversations echo off the walls and twenty-five-foot-high ceiling, mixed with a dated music mix that has become just white noise. The restaurant is halfway through a busy Friday night, during which it will feed about 450 guests. Outside, luxury sedans and SUVs that cost more than my annual salary fill the parking lot, a homogenous sea of white or silver cars, at least four of which bump into each other daily, in the eternal search for a parking spot closer than twenty feet from our entrance. The cops from the nearby precinct look out for me because I usually buy their meals when they’re on break, but they also know our lot is a target-rich environment for nabbing DUIs. Half of our regulars drive on suspended licenses anyway, repercussions are for poor small people.

“Good evening, Mr. Palermo,” I say, recognizing an attorney who might dine with his wife or his mistress, depending on the day of the week. Since it’s Friday, he’s here with Miss Salerno. Mrs. Palermo and the kids usually come wit him on Sundays. Palermo made his money suing various municipalities on Long Island as an ambulance chaser, and later founded a firm that litigated on behalf of those same municipalities. Our tax dollars at work.

“Danny,” the lawyer says, his lacquered teeth and manicured nails glimmering in the restaurant’s dim lighting. I hate that name when uttered by anyone other than two guys I grew up with, and even answer the phone as Daniel. Palermo shakes my hand, and I pull my hand away to stuff a folded twenty into my trouser pocket. Palermo never has a reservation, but I make them for him anyway, because his visits are as regular as his colon after a Metamucil. Miss Salerno smiles in our general direction.

I turn to Lisa the hostess, a college student who’s wide-eyed at the shenanigans of her town’s putative grownups. I’ve already had to warn a half-dozen dirtbags at the bar away from Lisa since she started, knowing that they have daughters older than her. “Table thirty-one for the Palermo party, please,” I say, a coveted corner of the long banquette that lines one of the walls. Lisa just nods, grabs two menus, and leads them away.

“Motherfucker,” Martin the manager mutters next to me, his Eastern European accent making his R’s roll. I couldn’t run this restaurant without Martin, who took my arrival in stride, even though the owners had considered him for the general manager position. There isn’t a player in this Long Island bedroom community that Martin doesn’t know, which is invaluable when we’re at the front. Then I see the motherfucker in question. It’s Mr. Merrick, he of the impressive height and a girth to match, longish gray hair that always looks a day past needing a shower, and about $20,000 in pinky rings. He does something related to real estate or mortgages, I never bothered to find out, and can’t even fathom that people would trust a guy with an affinity for velour track suits with their money. Like, did the Sopranos need a stand-in for Big Pussy?

“I can’t stand this clown either,” I say to Martin through clenched teeth. “Your turn, I dealt with him last time.”

“You owe me, bossman.” Martin gives Merrick a huge, fake, obsequious smile. “Welcome back, Mr. Merrick, good to have you.” Merrick is trailed by a smaller younger clone of himself, an older blonde lady whose boob job and facelift look like they should be insured by Lloyd’s of London, and a sullen teenage girl whose glare at her father’s back could freeze milk.

No hello, and more importantly for Martin and me, no handshake. Strike one, Merrick. “There’s four of us,” he says in that faux-Long-Island-guido-tough-guy accent that makes me want to pierce my own eardrums with chopsticks. Yes, thank you, we can count.

Martin maintains the charade. “What time is your reservation, Mr. Merrick?”

“Don’t need one, I’m playing golf with the owners tomorrow morning.” Ahm playin gawlf wid the ownahs tuhmawrra mawnin. Jesus wept, I have non-native-born employees here who speak better and clearer English.

I step in. “If the owners had just called ahead for you, I’d have saved you a table.” I make a show of looking at my watch while Martin retreats to the coat closet to keep from laughing. “Give me about twenty or thirty minutes.”

He gives me a look my five year old might give me after I take his cookies away. “But I wanna sit down right now.” Impatience? Sense of entitlement? A swing and a miss for Merrick, strike two.

“I haven’t got a table for the folks who do have a reservation.” The owners do, in fact, enjoy how I push back with some of our regulars, who believe that their excrement is not odiferous. I followed the owners’ example, glad handling but digging into an untapped and surprisingly deep reservoir of passive aggressiveness. “Please, wait by the bar, I’ll let you know.” And kindly get your complimentary case of kiss my big Korean ass while you’re there.

The Merricks retreat to the bar, where Martin tells the guys to put the Merricks’ drinks on the owners’ comp check. Ernesto the bartender slips me a rocks glass with two fingers of Jameson, which I gulp down quickly, then head back to the podium. The next guy speaks before I even turn to face him, because I’m expected to be clairvoyant. “I’m Mistah —”

“Huntington,” Martin finishes for him, and shakes his hand. Martin gives me a look, there was money in the handshake, then points his eyes down at a panting furry rodent in a ridiculous little stroller. “Mr. Huntington,” Martin says, “you know you can’t bring the dog in here.” Mrs. Huntington, pushing the stroller, looks like she might gouge our eyes out with her car keys.

“She won’t bother anyone. Just bring us a bowl.” Yeah, no. Last I checked, we don’t have nourriture pour chiens avec demiglace on our menu, and the Huntingtons had already made the mistake of admitting their rodent isn’t a service animal, which I do allow. I let Martin continue to work on Huntington while I help Lisa answer the incessantly ringing phones.

“Thank you for calling The Restaurant, this is Daniel, how may I assist you?”

“I need a table for five people in about half an hour.”

“Earliest I can do that is ten o’clock, otherwise we are fully booked.”

“What if I showed up now?”

“Then I’ll put you on the wait list, but not until you physically arrive. I can’t speak to how long the wait might be, though.” Because my middle name isn’t goddamn Nostradamus. Click.

“Thank you for calling the Restaurant, this is Daniel, how may I assist you?”

“David! It’s Marty!” Who? I’m already not doing anything for this guy if he can’t get my name right after I just identified myself two seconds ago. Marty, last name and face unknown, expects me to miraculously shit him a table — like the Immaculate Conception, but for Maître d’s — when I have a long enough wait list physically in the restaurant, most of them waiting patiently. “Nothing sooner?” No, I just get a kick out of the schadenfreude. Click.

I transfer the next call to the bar for takeout, and check the next guests in. A younger couple, younger for this town meaning not born before the Johnson Administration. She has the lean, hungry look of a bored Long Island housewife who spends most of her day doing yoga or spinning while studying for the realtor exam; he has the pallid, fleshy look of someone who spends way too much time in a Midtown office, pushing tidy piles of paper from one side of his desk to the other. They give me their name, I send them off with Lisa, and instantly forget them.

Mrs. Jones, arguably the den mother of the ladies who lunch and do yoga and go to spin class. Always a party of six, including four kids who barely acknowledge their parents’ existence except as chauffeurs. Of course you’re forty minutes early. Of course I still don’t have the table ready for you yet, because reservations work on other diners’ schedules, not yours. She says she’ll walk around, but make sure I call as soon as the table as ready. Otherwise, she’ll just be back in forty minutes. She’s a pill, but not always, and she did just hand me a ten, so I decide we’ll call. Maybe in thirty minutes.

Problem. Lisa hurries back to the podium with a few updates — who’s on dessert, who’s paying their check, who’s camping out — and a stack of menus clutched to her chest. I feel bad for the kid, who until two weeks ago had no idea what her neighbors — or, rather, her neighbors’ parents — are truly like. “Dan,” she says, “that couple doesn’t like the table. She yelled at me.” Don’t cry up here, kid, keep it together for fuck’s sake. I hand her the keys to my office, tell her to man the phones from downstairs, and get Erik up here. Erik is another of my managers with an accent of debatable provenance, one of those Mediterranean islands that always seems to either be a vacation hot spot or terrorist target. On busier nights, he’s my eyes in the dining room, but with a hostess on the verge of tears, I need him more as my other bookend opposite Martin.

Erik ambles up front, he’s so damn tall he could play center for the Maltese national basketball team if they had one. He looks like a blonde square-jawed Aryan recruiting poster, but claims that everyone in his family fought the Nazis as partisans during the war. What matters more for me is that he’s a classically trained waiter who came up to management years ago like Martin and me, and is utterly unflappable. One irate guest had recently told Erik that her party’s dinner was a disaster. “Madame, the Middle East peace process is a disaster. This is just dinner. How can I fix this for you?”

I leave the podium to deal with the complainers, who are standing next to table 41, a small rectangular table for two along the banquette wall, not a more intimate square table in the back where they can sit catty-corner to each other. Is it our best table? Not by a long shot, Palermo and his side piece are sitting there, but it’s hardly our worst. The husband speaks up while I’m still fifteen feet away and can still barely hear him over the crowd noise. “Listen, pal, I’m not gonna spend two or three hundred dollars tonight just to be shoved up against other people like this.”

The reply escapes me before my internal censor can keep up. “The guests on either side of you don’t seem to mind. We actually provide more space between tables on the banquette than [two of our competitors].” Okay, shit, I hadn’t wanted to say that, but in for a penny, in for a pound. If I back down now, the guests will see that as weakness and take advantage of it on their next visit. No mercy.

The wife taps him on the elbow, and I can just about intuit the husband’s next words. He even stands straighter as he says them, but I’m 6-foot-3 and not intimidated in the least by unarmed men. “You obviously don’t know who I am.”

It is definitely no-mercy time. “Yes, I do know you are,” I lie like a rug. “But I’ve also got two CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, a CNN legal analyst, the owners’ daughters, and the managing partner of a billion-dollar hedge fund dining here.” This is only partly a lie, the hedge fund guy has a reservation tomorrow, and the owners’ daughters left an hour ago. “Forgive the Orwell reference, but some animals are more equal than others, especially during a busy Friday dinner service.”

Pudgy man slouches ever so slightly, and I know I’ve won, but I decide to let him off gently. “If you’d requested a standard square table, I can always try, but I can never guarantee it. One of those will probably be available in fifteen minutes or so. Can I buy y’all a drink in the meantime?” That’s my other tool to throw people off, “y’all” is not a word often heard north of Maryland, and for damn sure not east of the Gowanus Canal. Pudgy man looks at his wife and shrugs as if to say, I tried, and I lead them to the bar. Behind us, busboys push two of the banquette tables together for the Merrick party. Merrick gives me a nod as he passes me — this could mean anything from thank you to go fuck yourself, I can’t bring myself to give one-third of a fifth of a shit. I stop by the bar, where Ernesto rewards me with another whiskey.

“Nice job,” Erik says, a satisfied grin on his chiseled face. “I would have made them stay there, though.” He would have, too, the soulless bastard. Then he and I turn to face The Douche. He’s a Thursday/Friday regular, usually at the bar, and is convinced with the conviction of a saved evangelical that all women want him, a taller version of Bob Hoskins’ character from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. His real name is George, and he owns car dealerships without which these townspeople would wither: Mercedes, Jaguar, BMW, Land Rover. My and Martin’s down-market but far more dependable Japanese hatchbacks look grubby in comparison in the parking lot.

The Douche is in full regalia tonight: an untucked striped shirt that strains against his belly, sleeves rolled once to show off the contrasting inner cuff, gold chains and Amazon rainforest of chest hair displayed by unbuttoning the top three buttons of his shirt, and sunglasses even though it’s almost 9:00. He’s by himself, but assures Erik that three ladies will be joining him shortly. Erik shunts him to the bar until The Douche’s ladies arrive, and we watch in horror as The Douche uses the olives in the bar’s garnish tray like a personal salad bar. Ernesto now has to discard everything in the garnish tray, then cut fruit and spear olives in the middle of the dinner rush.

Martin says what’s on my mind. “The odds are, he’ll drop his coke in the men’s room, a busboy will find it later, and we can sell it back to him next week. The girls will leave him because he can’t find his coke, so he’ll get drunk and try to start a fight.”

“Christ, I hope you’re wrong,” I say, because no one who doesn’t run a nightclub needs that kind of drama. Lisa is doing yeoman’s work downstairs, juggling four or five calls at a time, only intercomming us if she has a question, and her voice sounds more even. I wonder if she’s rifled through my desk and found my flask, it could do the kid a world of good.

Erik greets the next couple, whom he recognizes as regulars of our sister restaurant down the street, where he worked before transferring here. And of course the couple doesn’t have a reservation. Why should they? “Call your sister restaurant,” the guy says, without making eye contact, which I hate down to my bone marrow. “They know me there. He does, too.”

“Erik knows you,” I say, “but here, you don’t have a reservation.”

“Come on,” he pleads, because I dared to call his bluff, and sees that Erik defers to me.

“The wait without a reservation is about an hour,” I say, and watch while his face collapses into layers of jowls. “If they know you at our sister restaurant, they might get you in over there, but here it’s gonna be an hour.” The couple reluctantly places their name on the waitlist, and squeeze past a dozen people because by now the bar is standing room only.

I’m suddenly exhausted, and tell Martin and Erik to cover for me while I sneak out back for a smoke. The unspoken agreement is that Martin will poison himself next, then Erik. I glide through the dining room, ignoring Palermo’s wave, Merrick’s inscrutable nod, Mrs. Jones’ wagging fingers, through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Chef, yelling orders to his cooks, the back of his head covered in sweat in the hundred-degree sauna, doesn’t even see me, which is for the best.

Out back, which smells exactly like the loading dock of a restaurant should, a miasma of rotting food and deck cleaner, I lean against the wall and inhale carcinogens deep into my lungs. It’s blissfully quiet here, no phones, no people, just me and my cancer stick. To be perfectly honest, I don’t need the cigarette, but I’ve been addicted since the Reagan years and this is the only plausible excuse I have to leave the front during service. I rub my eyes, which are tired from staring through dim lighting at the reservations computer and people under the mistaken impression that I like them.

I walk towards the front of the restaurant, realize that the crowd waiting to be seated has thinned, and I can even see a few empty tables as we enter the downslope of dinner service. I give Erik a head bob and hand him the stash of folded and crumpled bills from my trouser pocket. Martin does the same, and Erik disappears into the coat room for a few minutes. Erik hands me my share of the door tips, and tells me he’s giving Lisa a half-share. I have no problem with that, and tell the boys I’m leaving after a thirteen-hour day.

“See you tomorrow, boss” Erik says, and I just give him a look. Back to the salt mine tomorrow.

Open For Business

Graphic by Associated Press

At last count, I’ve opened seven restaurants in varying roles, from bartender to general manager to owner.  A new restaurant opening (NRO) is a labor-intensive process that saps your strength, and often leaves you wondering how much you truly love and/or enjoy the restaurant industry.  Every full-service establishment will have to essentially treat the lifting of their state’s stay-at-home order as an NRO, with all of its attendant misery and then some, and I’m not 100% convinced that even some of my peers realize how brutal the process will be.  After almost seven weeks and counting of operating as a curbside takeout joint, how do you reopen to the public?

The key to every NRO is staff training, which will be necessary for everyone including managers, after months of allowing their restaurant muscles to atrophy.  Cooks have to get used to consistently producing the menu; servers need to remember not just the proper steps of service, but also how to describe menu items, food, and wine to guests; many furloughed bartenders haven’t made anything remotely like the intricate cocktails they made at work before the ‘Rona shutdown.  This isn’t to say that the training need be as intensive as that required by an NRO, but it will be indispensable for getting a front-of-house team back in a service mentality.  This all costs money, not just in food, but labor dollars a restaurant might not have, so expect a lot of bumps along this road.

Secondly, how many of your furloughed team can, or even will, you bring back?  Have they been tested for Covid-19?  How long has it been since they last had a fever?  Is that a pollen allergy, or the beginning of symptoms?  People you hired, gotten to know as individuals, whose major life events you celebrated in the prep kitchen before dinner service, are going to inevitably be permanently laid off.  The math isn’t in their favor, because operating at 50% capacity means you will only be able to rehire 50% of your team.  It will suck, and there’s no softening that blow.  I’ve fired, laid off, and furloughed hundreds of people over the years, and it never gets easier if you have even a thimbleful of empathy.

Your physical plant, not just your restaurant muscles, has also atrophied since your state shut down.  Stoves will need to be thoroughly cleaned, oven thermometers re-calibrated, every possible surface disinfected before your team can return.  Add to this every daily cleaning task you’ve simply abandoned since you transitioned to a curbside takeout establishment: polishing silverware and glasses, dining room floor either polished or the carpet cleaned, glass windows and doors cleaned, your dormant back bar display dusted and cleaned, light bulbs changed, plateware all rewashed before a single morsel of food touches it.

Entire floor plans will be redrawn to account for social distancing, with many restaurant managers I’ve informally polled talking about the wholesale removal of half their tables.  Speaking of social distancing, who in your restaurant will be nominated as the bad guy enforcing social distancing between guests at the bar and between tables?  Can, or will, you cap the maximum number of people at a table, as is happening in some Asian countries?  What will be your new protocol on table resets?  Should a busboy completely disinfect the table, along with the chairs or banquette, after guests leave?  What about menus; use the ones you had before, or use disposable paper menus to avoid more than one person touching that menu?  Should you hire an attendant to ensure single occupancy in your restrooms at any given time, then disinfect before the next person enters?

It goes without saying that everyone who works in your new/old restaurant will be masked and gloved.  This is for not just their own safety, but that of guests.  Then, finally, the elephant in the room, which not a single state governor frothing at the mouth wanting to reopen is mentioning: more widespread testing.  I’m the furthest thing from an epidemiologist, but how confident will any of us be, not knowing if the guests sitting in our restaurant aren’t Covid-free?  I sure as hell won’t be, until anyone who wants or needs a Coronavirus test can obtain one.

I’m as tired as I’ve been since I opened my own restaurant in 2010, and New York probably won’t reopen its restaurant dining rooms until June at the earliest.  The prospect of doing everything I mentioned above, when coupled with the cumulative fatigue from weeks on end as an unfamiliar takeout operation, is daunting, if not low-key terrifying.  With that said, all of this will be necessary for anyone in my industry to feel safe going to work.  I’ve been responsible for other people’s lives before, but that was in my former life as a soldier, and it weighs heavily; are my restaurant management and chef peers mentally ready for the same burden?

Knowing might be half the battle according to the 1980s G.I. Joe cartoon, but in this case, knowing what lies ahead adds to my sense of unease that we will witness an avoidable spike in Coronavirus infections among restaurant employees if we – as a state, as a country, as a nation, as a society – rush headlong and unprepared into re-opening for re-opening’s feckless sake.

Another Day Behind the Curtains

A good photo of the cramped confines of most kitchen lines. Pictured: Executive Chef Steve Brochu of Chartier in Beaumont, AB. Photo by Liane Faulder, Postmedia

Not long after writing this post, I was asked on Twitter to do a back-of-the-house corollary.  The usual disclaimers apply: if you like it, I gladly take all credit; if you dislike it, blame the folks who prompted me to write it.  Names and places have been changed, yadda yadda yadda.

Long ago in a galaxy far away, I worked at a restaurant near Union Square, working every station from prep to pantry (cold apps, desserts), to sauté and grill.  We were a small crew, but we worked our asses off and believed in our chef’s vision for the place: namely, be a consistently good neighborhood bistro.  Consequently, buerre blanc in its many and depredated forms was verboten.  We were paid well by the standards of the early-aughts.  I got $100 per day, which, considering we were open for lunch and dinner five days a week, and dinner on weekends, came out to about $8 per hour.  And before anyone gets their knickers twisted about the illegality of shift pay vs hourly pay, believe me, I know, I’ve taken more labor law classes than I care to remember; for someone like me, though, only planning to cook for about a year before I returned to a front-of-house management role, it was an education more valuable than six years at an Ivy League university.

Guiseppe, or Joe as he liked to be called, was our grill man, a throwback to the substance-abusing pirate days of restaurant kitchens.  He was in his late thirties when I met him in 2001, content to work as a line cook, with an almost citywide reputation as a guy you wanted in your kitchen when shit went sideways, and a guy you wanted next to you in a bar fight.  From the ponytail sticking out of the back of a grease-stained Mets cap, Fu Manchu mustache, and tattoos of his favorite Italian obscenities on the backs of his hands, to the ever present pint bottle of vodka in his back pocket, he was the poster child for a cook who needed an intervention.

Laura worked pantry/prep, and was the kind of doe-eyed recent culinary school graduate you almost wanted to shield from the cruel vagaries of our industry, while also not sugar-coating that for her.  Unlike most new cooks, and this is what really won Joe and me over, Laura put her head down during the rush and kicked ass without complaint.  She accepted that she was almost at the bottom of the totem pole, and bided her time until either Joe or I moved on, so she could take over both our station and our salary.  Since I was a short-timer, I’d been letting her work sauté on slower nights like Mondays and Tuesdays, while Joe and I coached her and covered the pantry station.

Laura, Joe, and I arrived by 10:00, each of us nursing some variation of a hangover because the waiters had taken us out after closing the night before.  We celebrated the beginning of our day with a cigarette before we trudged down the stairs from the sidewalk to the basement storeroom – this passes as a loading dock for most storefront Manhattan restaurants.  Manuel the porter had a key to the sidewalk hatch, which allowed him to accept fish, produce, and wine deliveries starting at 7am.  Our locker room, such as it was, consisted of milk crates stacked outside Chef’s closet office like book shelves in an undergrad’s dorm room.  Here we changed from jeans and sneakers, into baggy chef pants still stained from the night before and black clogs.  We grabbed clean chef coats and aprons from the linen company’s early delivery, rolled the sleeves halfway to our elbows, put our ball caps back on, and stuck Sharpies into our sleeve pockets.  And because restaurants have always been incubators for petty theft among the crew, I kept my wallet and phone in my chef pant pockets.

Manuel was responsible for getting the coffee machine working, for which we were always thankful.  We couldn’t begin prepping until we’d ingested enough caffeine to fuel twenty normal people.  The prep list on Chef’s battered clipboard never seemed to end, even though our menu wasn’t extensive, with prep continuing until we closed after lunch at 2:30.  Vegetables had to be cut for mirepoix, which would go into stocks and soups, which also had to be started; carrots julienned and radishes sliced thin for salads; dressings and sauces made; the house specialty, a mixed seafood chowder in both New England and Manhattan versions, had to be started; vegetables for accompaniments par-cooked and cut into the proper shapes; mussels de-bearded; fish needed to be filleted, pin bones removed, cut into exact seven-ounce portions and confirmed on a scale, then wrapped and labeled; this is only a partial rundown of the day’s prep, which also had to be accomplished while cooking for guests during lunch.

Lunch was its own special hell, interrupting our prep and occasionally infusing our day with people for whom a menu was a mere suggestion.  Given our location near midtown, it wasn’t uncommon to see a ticket for something as prosaic as our red snapper entrée, followed by ten modifiers changing sauces, cooking method, accompaniment, etc.  Chicken Caesar salad should be easy, you’d think, but you’d also be wrong.  The modifiers might include no dressing, no croutons (gluten allergy, insert international hand gesture for wanking), chicken breast plainly grilled without seasoning (are you also allergic to flavor, and AYFKM, we need to cook a separate special chicken breast after Joe already pre-grilled a dozen of them?), oil and vinegar on the side (which of the six vinegars that we have in this kitchen do you want, Einstein server, or are we supposed to read your mind during the lunch rush?), no cheese (let me guess, also a dairy allergy, and does this guest also live in a plastic bubble?).  Oh, and no anchovies.  We grumbled, but we made it happen.

We were always tired by the time we had to make the daily staff meal at 3:00, which was another albatross around the kitchen’s neck.  Make enough of something that will satisfy a crew of ten to twenty, depending how many were working that day, while using the cheapest ingredients possible.  Most of the crew would complain loudly enough that you began to hate those ungrateful front-of-house shits who disparaged food that you just slaved for an hour to make.  You thought to yourself, “hey, assholes, complaining while you grab a second bowl of gumbo I made from leftover chicken and veg, a thank you every now and then won’t kill you.”  Or, you could do what I did every other time I put up staff meal, and gruffly tell the assembled front-of-house crew, “you’re welcome” before walking away.  They had it good; several years prior, I worked in a restaurant where staff meal every single mother loving day was pasta with vegetable and fish scraps, and maybe a salad if we had enough greens washed and ready.

Most weekdays, I might have had just enough time between staff meal and the beginning of dinner to smoke a cigarette, grab a quart container of draft beer from the bar for fish and chips batter, only half a cup of which actually made it into that batter, leave a quick voice mail to let my girlfriend know I might be done by 10:00, then sharpen my knives before dinner started.  Every self-respecting cook brought his or her own knives.  I still have the Wüsthoff chef knife, offset serrated knife, boning knife, paring knife, and sharpening steel I bought while I was still in culinary school, and which I brought to work every day at this restaurant.  The blades were scarred from countless brushes against a stone and steel; I felt like I only needed linear burn scars on my hands and forearms to complete the grizzled-line-cook look.

Our narrow kitchen only had three stations – pantry, sauté, and grill, in that order – with saloon doors on either side and a large Plexiglas window for guests in the dining room to watch us like whales in an aquarium.  I usually worked sauté, responsible for half the dinner menu with six burners on my stove, an oven that stayed at 400° Fahrenheit, and a salamander (broiler with a pull-out cooking surface and no door) at eye level.  On the left rear burner sat a large pot of salted water heated to just below boiling, with four baskets for different pastas.  I kept stocks (chicken, lobster, or vegetable, depending on the dish), white wine, and oil in plastic one-quart juice dispensers on a shelf between my stove and the flattop, along with containers for salt, ground pepper, and butter.  Tongs and side towels hung on the oven door.  If I needed more sizzle platters or sauté pans, Manuel had left me stacks of each on top of my salamander; the evening dishwashers would replenish these during service as I dumped dirties into the plastic tub at my feet.

If I turned around, I faced the “window” at eye level, two stainless steel counters.  There was just enough space between my stove and the window for two cooks to crab past each other sideways.  The top of the upper counter had the ticket (or dupe) printer, stacks of plates, three different sizes of saucepans, and assorted spoons and spatulas.  The bottom of the top shelf had built-in heat lamps, for when I placed finished dishes on top of the lower shelf.  The eight-foot-wide low boy fridge was nestled under the window.  The top compartments held an array of hotel pans – square or rectangular metal containers of varying size, depending on what I used more of – with all of my mise-en-place, or meez, every accompaniment I needed to execute my part of the menu.  Below the meez were three reach-in fridges with backup containers of everything on the top rack, plus pre-portioned proteins (duck breasts, chicken breasts, fish, mussels) in pull-out drawers.  Finally, one long narrow cutting board occupied the low-boy shelf closest to me, glued to the stainless steel with wet paper towels.

Reality cooking shows give the non-restaurant public a false, antiseptic idea of what working in a kitchen is like.  Most places don’t have a pristinely clean tiled center island, or cooks not sweating so profusely that we wore sweat wristbands like tennis players; the combined heat from ovens, stoves, grills, and salamanders often kept the kitchen temp around 100°F despite the air conditioning; the roar of the ventilation hood above the cooking line eventually became mere background noise, but forced everyone to yell to be heard.  During service, everything from oven handles to aprons to cutting boards to shoes to fridge doors eventually got splattered with hot oil, some type of sauce or stock (or combination thereof), and/or softened unsalted butter.  Cooks wiped everything down as best they could, but there would always be another splatter somewhere.  Another thing I’ve seen on restaurant reality shows but hardly ever in a working restaurant: oven mitts – this was why cooks hoarded side towels, even washing their own at home for reuse at work.

Dinner always began slowly, first with apps for the bar, an occasional entrée, then dinner orders started with the buzzing of the dot-matrix printer, a sound I can still hear in my sleep.  Chef only called orders out if he was giving us an all-day, how many total of each item he needed, or when he wanted us to begin cooking for specific tables.  When the printer went off, I got the top copy, and grill got the yellow; we stuck each ticket into the slide on our side of the window, and began prioritizing what to cook first.  The dance was intricate, because both grill and sauté had to put up their dishes for a table at the same time, along with any side orders.  Screw up the dance, and one person’s plates would die under the heat lamp until the other guy came through.

If we were lucky, our small bistro filled up by 7:30 on weeknights, which meant that the printer wouldn’t stop going off from 8:00 until about 9:15.  If there were too many orders for oysters, Laura would be in the weeds with a mesh metal glove and a shucking knife, while Chef and Joe covered the pantry station.  On any given night at the height of the rush, I would have been staring at ten to twelve entrée tickets, knowing I couldn’t rush things but wanting to nonetheless.

“Chefs,” Chef addressed us, “listen up.  Fire tables six, thirteen, twenty-five, and bar one.”  I looked at the tickets and mentally added up all of my dishes.  Shit.  Then Chef confirmed what we already knew, but it was always useful to hear the time hack.  “All day,” he said, meaning total number of each dish on this turn, “I need two moules-frites, four salmon, two cod, one duck, one carbonara, three strips, one med-rare and two medium, one bar burger medium with caramelized onions, and one filet med-rare.  Time is 8:17.”  That gave us twenty minutes, according to the wall clock facing us from the kitchen wall, set to the same time as Chef’s digital clock on his side of the window.  “Laura, slide over and help Dan with sides by 8:15.”

“Oui, Chef,” we said, then repeated our station’s portion of the order.

Between sips of beer intended for the fish and batter, and water from an old one-quart canteen from my Army days, I put pots and pans on each of my five available burners, plus the flattop griddle between my stove and the grill.  Mussels cooked instantly but the broth didn’t, so I shoveled butter, garlic, and shallots into a rondeau (a wide, short pot) over the center rear and center right burners on medium.  One large sauté pan got a serving spoon of butter and a spritz of vegetable oil, then I put it over the right rear burner on high.  Two small pans with the same on the right front and center front burners.  The last burner got a small sauté pan with a generous handful of pancetta on medium.  Laura had a small sauce pot in her hand.  She reached across me for the pre-roasted fingerling potatoes in my mise-en-place, then sprinkled salt, pepper, chopped rosemary, and vegetable oil on them,  before leaving that on the flattop, which wasn’t as hot as a stovetop burner.  In another sauce pot she started mustard greens with shallots.  Diced chorizo started to render and ooze lovely red oil in a small pan, waiting for broccoli rabe to join it just before serving.  Into a fourth pot went parsnip purée, and now the flattop was full.

I dug four pieces of salmon, two pieces of cod, and one duck breast from my reach-ins, and laid them on paper towels on top of my cutting board.  After salting and peppering each piece of fish, I dredged one side of each piece of salmon in a shallow pan of crushed pistachios.  I shook the loose pieces of pistachio off over my station’s garbage can, put the salmon into the large pan, pistachio-side down for two minutes, then flipped them with my fish spatula.  The salmon spatula and cod spatula had different color handles, so that someone with a nut allergy wouldn’t have to worry about cross contamination.  The cod didn’t have a crust, but was so delicate that it required a good sear to hold it together.  As the butter in the pan browned, I’d tip the pan (always with a side towel around the handle so I wouldn’t burn my hand), then spoon that lovely butter onto the fish.  I had to be careful with duck, because the skin could burn.  The breast always went into a screaming hot pan skin side down, with a full sprig of thyme that would infuse the butter in the pan.  One quick flip of the pancetta, which was browning nicely, fat rendering off and filling my nostrils with the wonderful smell of salty pork belly before I turned the heat off.  I cracked a fistful of bucatini in half, and threw it into one of the baskets of my pasta pot.

Have I mentioned how hot it was, especially with all six burners on, plus the oven in front of my thighs and the salamander at face level?  I’d suffered less during the dry season in Malaysia, or summertime in Kuwait.  The tennis wristbands were an absolute godsend.  So was the beer; funny how much beer batter we needed during the dinner rush, but each of us would put a one-quart soup container in the window for the food runner to refill at the bar.  I don’t think I ever even tasted the beer, but it was great for thirsty cooks, as I recall.

Once the non-pistachio side of the salmon had a good sear, the fish was probably rare to medium rare.  I used my tongs to open the oven, stuck the entire pan inside, then quickly kicked the door closed so it wouldn’t lose heat.  Then, in went the cod.  I flipped the duck breast, basted it again with the thyme butter, then added that pan to my crowded oven to finish.  Using just the handle of the rondeau, I flipped the garlic and shallots, herding stray bits back to the bottom of the rondeau with a spoon until everything had softened.  I poured some white wine, flipped again, seasoned again with salt and pepper, then added heavy cream straight from a paper carton inside my reach-in.  Two orders called for a half cup, or half the container.  I added two pre-portioned one-quart soup containers of mussels, checking to see if any of them had opened and died before I could properly kill and cook them, and discarded those.  I tossed the containers into the bussing tub at my feet, then covered the rondeau with a mismatched lid.  I turned around quickly to check on the time, 8:13.  After checking my tickets to see what tables were coming next, I started planning which and how many pans I’d need.

I looked over at Joe, who shook his head.  Not ready yet.  He reached across my face with tongs to pull his sizzle platters out of the salamander.  He poked the steaks and burger with his index finger to check doneness, shook his head again, then stuck the sizzle platters back in.  Joe took a pull from his pint of vodka.  “Bello, I said, “drop the frites.”  Despite hailing from some rat-infested tigurio far from Rome’s tourist magnets, he was an absolute rock star with Belgian style pommes frites.  Joe, and only Joe (though he did teach Laura and me) cut the potatoes, soaked them in water, then blanched them in the fryer before laying them out on paper-lined aluminum sheet trays.   He grabbed handfuls of frites from the sheet tray, dropped them into a fryer basket, then plunged the basket in 300° vegetable oil.

That was Laura’s signal.  She hip-checked me out of her way so she could finish the sides for me, which I didn’t mind because I was already mentally preparing for the next all-day.  Her pans and pots moved from the flattop to the burners.  I pulled plates and bowls from the top shelf of the window and lined them up on my long cutting board.  I turned, reached around Laura for the rondeau, threw the lid into the bus tub, and spooned mussels and broth into wide shallow bowls.  Using tongs, I got the last bits of garlic on top of the mussels.  These I put under the food warmers in the window.  “Chef, mussels in my hand,” I said, right around the time Joe lifted the fryer basket from the oil, hit the handle sideways to dislodge excess oil, and pulled frites from the fryer basket with his bare hands into parchment paper-lined wire baskets.  That would’ve given any other cook second-degree burns, but the skin on both sides of Joe’s hands looked and felt like Kevlar.

“On your right, hot,” Laura warned, and I sidestepped left.  Using tongs or a spoon, she started placing lemon-rosemary fingerling potatoes, chorizo and broccoli rabe, parsnip purée, and wilted mustard greens onto the plates.  The salmon went right on top of the fingerlings.  The delicate cod went with the chorizo and broccoli rabe.  All I had to do now was give the plate rims a quick wipe, then lift them into the window.  “Chef, four salmon, two cod, up.”  I sliced the duck breast using tongs to hold it in place while I cut, arrayed the slices on top of the parsnip and mustard greens, skin-side up, then put that plate in the window.  “Duck is up, Chef.”  All the empty pans clanked when they hit the bus tub, which a dishwasher helpfully replaced with an empty so he could scrub this batch.

Chef finished most of the dishes himself on his side of the window.  Cod was finished with a red pepper emulsion.  Mussels got a sprinkle of chiffonade-cut parsley, and two ciabatta croutons smeared with garlic aioli resting on the bowl’s narrow rim.  He spooned pesto onto the salmon.  In a small mixing bowl he tossed frisée, thinly sliced pickled red onion, olive oil, Champagne vinegar, and slivers of duck confit before placing that salad next to the duck breast and parsnip.  Only then would he send the food runner on his way.  “Miguel, this is table twenty-five,” he said, while passing him dishes.  A good runner could balance three plates, one in each hand and another on a forearm; a rock star runner could palm three plates, plus one on the forearm.  Miguel was the latter type.  “Duck, seat four,” Chef started, so that the correct dish reached the correct guest – or so we hoped, but it wouldn’t have been the first time a server screwed up seat numbers.  “Salmon, seat three, seat two.  Mussels, one.”  He called for a server to follow Miguel with the pommes frites for seat one.

Finally, the carbonara.  I know it killed Joe that his station didn’t have this dish, but he did start it for me by whipping two egg yolks and one whole egg in a metal bowl.  Then he added half a cup of grated pecorino romano.  I grabbed a large sauce pot and added the egg and cheese mixture.  I pulled the pasta basket out of the pot, shook loose all the water, and added the cooked bucatini to my carbonara pot.  Next went the pancetta and all that wonderful rendered fat.  Carbonara was a finicky dish, you couldn’t add ingredients that were too hot, or the eggs would cook before it could bind the sauce.  To Joe, it was sorcery that only a true Italian cook could master; to me, it was just another dish to master through sheer repetition.  Joe had long ago begrudgingly admitted that both Laura and I could execute a proper carbonara just like his Nonna once made for him, which was still a backhanded compliment if you accounted for the fact that Joe didn’t believe he’d ever met his equal in a kitchen.  Using my tongs, I coiled the pasta and pancetta into the bowl, then placed the bowl in the window, where Chef would top it with another half cup of grated pecorino.

Another sip of water after a plating turn that really only took four minutes but felt like thirty.  Chef called another all-day, including my nemesis, the Dowager Empress, who never ordered off the menu and made us do culinary cartwheels on every visit.  Then, an hour later, the rush ended, our only indication the increasing gap between tickets coming out of our printer.  Chef and each cook took turns running outside for our first cigarette of the night, then we started breaking down our stations.  Mise en place had to be wrapped, labeled, then put on sheet trays that would be stored in our walk-in fridge downstairs.  If a cook had more of something for the next day’s par, Chef noted it on his prep clipboard.  Proteins were rewrapped and got a sticker noting the date it was cut; these also went on sheet trays for the walk-in.

We couldn’t physically bring everything downstairs until the restaurant closed, so we filled that time cleaning everything we could.  The long cutting boards on each station went to the dish room.  Sauce and butter and other splatters on the stovetop were wiped with a wet side towel I held in my tongs.  Joe used his metal grill brush on his grill grates.  Laura sent all the mixing bowls she used for salads to dish.  Joe always celebrated the kitchen closing by finishing the pint of vodka in his back pocket.  Every stainless steel surface had to be wiped down using towels and buckets of soapy water, including the knobs on my stove and oven handle.  I deglazed the flattop with water, then scraped up any built up fond into the drip pan, which I emptied into a floor drain and sent to dish.  Each cook made three trips from the line to the walk-in, rotating stock so that tonight’s leftovers would be used first tomorrow, then we were finally done.

Filthy chef coats and aprons went into the linen hamper.  Joe and I dressed in the nook next to Chef’s office, where behind a closed door came the smell of some really good weed.  Laura changed in the employee restroom between the office and the walk-in.  Once she was done, Joe and I washed our faces, ran water through our hair, and spritzed cheap cologne on ourselves to hide the line cook’s peculiar smell of butter and roasted fish.  By the time the three of us left the building, it was almost 11:00.  Joe disappeared to see his bookie.  Laura met up with her boyfriend, their relationship showing the strain of him not understanding her hours, a problem I was then having myself.  It was early in the evening, at least by our standards, so I walked three blocks to a cheap Irish bar, where I hoped I’d run into servers from our restaurant, the unspoken rule being that they were obligated to pay for cooks’ drinks.  Many of them were too new to realize that I could drink three of them under the table.  More’s the pity.  Back to the salt mines in just eleven hours.