Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Read online

  We’ve been tenants in the building here longer than the past two co-op “presidents.” They’ve been very sincere, earnest people but I don’t think they have been particularly qualified for their endeavors. There was one president, a sort of self-styled “ambassador,” a guy who seemed to feel his diplomacy skills were such that he could broker peace between nations. He used to walk into Prune in the middle of the crush of Sunday brunch somehow genuinely expecting to take care of a little co-op business—an electric bill, a conversation about the boiler—and stand there stupidly in the middle of the fray, expectantly.

  Sunday brunch is like the Indy 500 of services at Prune. There is a roaring thunderous stampede every forty minutes as hordes of hungry, angry, mag-wheeled, tricked-out customers line up at the door, scrape the chairs back, take their seats, blow through their steak and eggs. The line is two-full seatings long at nine-thirty even though we don’t open the doors until ten. They are waiting for the go flag. Some have physically harmed the hostess as they sprint to get a table. I once worked the host shift on a Sunday brunch at thirty-eight weeks pregnant—and even my huge belly, my chronic shortness of breath, and my clear proprietary aura (you can just tell when I am in the room that I am not an employee; I exude ownership) even that did not stop the stampede that is Sunday brunch.

  We do a little over two hundred covers on a Sunday in five hours with only thirty seats, if that tells you anything. We hardly have the space on the tiny dining room floor to accommodate the crush of bodies, the trays full of Bloody Marys and beer backs going to every table, the large plates of eggs, potatoes, toast, and bacon sailing through the room—everything at brunch goes on a large and heavy plate to accommodate all the things a brunch special requires: fat, protein, starch, double starch. You can’t fit eggs Benedict with a potato roesti and a side of coiled lamb sausage on a small delicate plate. The staff are like professional drivers, taking the turns on two wheels, screeching around the room getting the tables turned, the bloodies shaken, the eggs delivered, and then the bus tubs hauled back to the kitchen. The hosts program loud, rocking music to keep the pace what it needs to be, music that is otherwise forbidden at dinner and lunch service when we are seeking a more mature, civilized experience.

  The kitchen for its part is hunkered down, the two full rails packed with tickets that all look exactly the same because it’s all pancakes, eggs, and bacon with no coursing to be done. Sunday is an order fire day. Every ticket comes in and is shouted out and is picked up immediately. We do not wait patiently while the customer enjoys a section of the NewYork Times over a nice bowl of homemade granola before firing up his sour cream and caraway omelette. We do not. We are sometimes laying down omelette pans on the flames by the half-dozen, and delivering that many omelettes in as many minutes. My station, if I am expediting and not working eggs, is at the front of the pass, where I can look out over the dining room while simultaneously keeping my focus on frantically assembling fruit salads, smoked fish platters, youth hostel breakfast plates, and ricotta with pears and figs and pine nuts, and buttering every piece of toast or English muffin that leaves this kitchen, which, on a weekend, is about 192 Thomas’s and 1,440 eggs. This is nothing compared to a hotel or even a big restaurant; the only thing that makes it monstrous is that we are doing it in a kitchen the size of a Lincoln Continental.

  In the middle of this high-octane frenzy is when Mr. United Nations strolls in wearing cutoff shorts and flip-flops and stands in the middle of what there is to our dining room as bussers, waiters, and customers blow by him on their way to the pass, the bus tub, or the table, with a wrinkled envelope in his hand containing our water bill or some other rather important item. Only to him could this look like the right time to talk to me about co-op business. Invariably, he gets flustered and hands the envelope to the bartender or a waitress who is relentlessly trained to be helpful and friendly no matter what, who shoves the envelope into the cash drawer behind the bar or in their apron pocket along with the dirty napkins and pens they’ve got accumulating in there, or he hands it to me and I retrieve it with buttery fingers and shove it in the first-aid kit for safekeeping where I forget all about it. All I can think is that if he had been left in charge of brokering the peace in a thousand-year-old tribal nation, the ethnic cleansing would have been complete as he stood there, in flip-flops, totally flummoxed.

  The only person from the co-op who’s been with us from the beginning and still with us today is a renter; an elderly woman who looks like she’s been avoiding animal protein for so long that her skin is now tissue paper and her hair is as brittle as shredded wheat. Annie memorized our phone number the day it was published and calls us every day to tell us to turn down the music. And she’s got us on redial. In the first few months, we were energetically neighborly and ultra-accommodating to all of the needs of all of the people in the building upstairs, and the building next door, and the building on the block behind us. And the building on the north side of us, and the west side and so on until we finally realized that when you open a restaurant, you are a magnet for every lonely, angry, unfulfilled New Yorker who can’t afford a better apartment, a haircut, or a meal in a decent restaurant. It’s like shaking a tree and out fall all the critics, the naysayers, the people with allergies to even the smell of anyone else’s success, or with litigious impulses over the sound of silverware in a dish rack being hosed down, or who call the fire department at the suggestion of meat grill smoke. You get all the people who moved from elsewhere to New York in the first place to bask in its nearly assaulting vibrance but who now write letters to councilmen and form committees to make it more like Main Street back home.

  Annie’s thing was “black music.” We could be listening to Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Johnny Cash, and The Talking Heads all night long at a healthy volume, and she wouldn’t ever call and as soon as Angie Stone, Stevie Wonder, or Finley Quaye tracks hit the rotation—we could set our watches by it—the phone would ring and Ms. Vegetarian in a faded terry-cloth robe would be shrieking at us to turn it down. She would come down in her robe and nightcap and complain about the bass, with a restaurant full of customers. To spare us both, we got with her and arranged a volume level together—she in her apartment, us downstairs in front of the stereo, both of us on the phone:

  “Can you hear it now?”

  Okay.

  “Can you hear it now?”

  Okay.

  “How’s this, can you hear this?

  Until, mutually, we agreed on a volume and we took white paint and black permanent marker and labeled the level on the volume knob ANNIE with two exclamation points, so that any host of any shift would know what not to go above. But after a while, she would again start to call constantly and when she complained that she was now sleeping in a hammock made of egg crates in her kitchen on a pulley system high above her dish cabinets so that the vibration from our sound system wouldn’t keep her up at night, we kind of realized it wasn’t us or our music. Our sound system is two shitty speakers from J&R Music World. We’re a small bistro, not a rave club with bouncers on headsets.

  These people make entertaining characters in your journal or your published essay or your after-work-with-beers bullshit session. But in the main, a six-foot-two, two-hundred-forty-pound guy with no shirt on, wandering around the building while I’m alone in it, can actually feel incredibly menacing. On an average day in my life, I could do without the added “color” they provide. This work is intensely stressful on its own, the hours are already long, the physical demands are significant. The egg shift at Sunday brunch alone could take down an average man. That heat in the egg station at brunch has a formidable physical presence. It moves about, undulating, coming at you in waves, some of them, like when you open the oven door, smacking you forcefully enough to tighten the skin on your face and make your eyes swell shut slightly.

  Much has been written about facing the shocking heat of a restaurant’s set of burners, and in spite of what it may reveal about me, I am the
only one I know who likes it. I always feel like I am a contender in a nicely matched bout every time we meet—especially every Sunday—when I enter that station at seven-thirty in the morning and begin my setup. Every time I step in front of those ten burners, in that egregiously tight space, less than twelve inches between the wall I am backed up against and the burning stovetop in front of me, I feel like we are two small-time boxers—me and the heat—meeting in the center of the ring to tap gloves. The fight begins with a little slap, totally manageable, when I put that first large pot of water on to boil, and then increases in ferocity from there when the large cast-iron skillet starts to vaguely shimmer and smoke and sputter, magnifying the already immense power of my opponent—inching up the temperature—as I start to render the pancetta for the carbonara. When the pig urine stench of that excellent pancetta hits me in the nose I am red-eyed and snotty—your nose runs in the heat and in the cold equally as it attempts to regulate your body temperature—and it’s only eight o’clock in the morning. That your eyes are already a little swollen and your nose is running and your skin is tight on your face gives you a Raging Bull kind of feeling—which gets me immediately in the right mindset. The whole crew feels it—that tension before a fight. The customers lined up outside before we have even turned on the lights and had our family meal, the total knowledge of what we know is coming—the relentless, nonstop five-hour beating—and we practically huddle up, poised for the bell, we are scared even, saying in psyched but tense tones, “Here we go!” as Julie unlocks the door and they flood in, scraping the chairs, and that milk foamer on the espresso machine rages its monster roar, and we stand motionless in the kitchen, looking out onto the floor, waiting for the panic of tickets, tickets, tickets.

  It’s important not to go down early in your shift. And there are things that will bring you down: You start your first ticket of the day and by accident you tip a full gallon of pancake batter over in your reach-in—both wasting a product you desperately need and now creating a jam in your reach-in because you can’t work with pancake batter all over everything. The expediter does not stop calling out tickets just because you have a mess in your station. The orders, all of them at least in part your responsibility because every dish at brunch comes with eggs, keep pouring in while you hustle to get that glop cleaned up and your station back on track. The circumstances won’t change. You are always, always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees. No matter how well set up you are, how early you came in, how tight and awesome your mis en place is, there will be days, forces, events that just conspire to fuck you and the struggle to stay up—to not sink down into the blackest, meanest hole—to stay psychologically up and committed to the fight, is the hardest, by far, part of the day. The heat, the crush of customers, the special orders and sauces on sides, the blood-sugar crises—none of it is as difficult as the struggle to stay in the game, once you have suffered a setback like dropping a full quart of ranchero sauce, which has cracked open and exploded in your station all over your clogs and the oven doors.

  I like to swear the dirtiest, most vulgar swear words I can think of to get me through it. It can be very Tourette’s Syndrome back there when I am working that egg station and the expediter has failed to tell me about a sauce on the side or a well-done poached. I always, to be sure, take the moment to apologize to everyone around me, to promise them that I am not serious, that nothing is personal—but then I rip it out, jaw tight, and spewing combinations of the word fuck that even David Mamet has not thought to put together. I have fired people who can’t suffer their setbacks and petty failures. If they go down early and spend the rest of their five-hour shift that way, it threatens to sink the whole boat and that can’t happen just because you burned your first omelette and had to refire it. You’ve got to get your GI Jane on.

  From too many years of going all day without eating—that freakish thing about restaurant work: Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink—I have blood sugar issues. And they can feel serious. There are a couple of points in that shift—every single time I work it—that I legitimately fear that the entire brunch service will come to a screeching halt if I don’t get some orange juice, iced Ovaltine, and a full quart of ice cold Coca-Cola down my throat in seconds, and in that particular order. In a generous light, I am that boxer in his corner, his trainer squirting Gatorade indiscriminately at his face while the boxer keeps his mouth open like a gasping fish, hoping for the jet stream to get to his throat. But I can, in a less generous light, feel like a dirty glue huffer—shoving my head discreetly and desperately into my cool reach-in—sucking, and I mean sucking, down a quart of chocolatey, malty, milky Ovaltine over a quart of ice—like an addict puts that paper bag of paint fumes over his nose and mouth and pulls that shit into his body with a terrifying force—made more terrifying by the utter calm and clarity and complacency that overtakes you once your hit kicks in and reaches the right places. The Coca-Cola so tannic and sweet and achingly cold that it makes my eyes tear up. And then brunch is back on track.

  During the eighth round, close to three o’clock, I get dizzy stupid. I don’t even know what I’m cooking. By which I mean, I know what each individual item in front of me is, but I don’t know what I’m cooking in the larger picture. Is this the eggs Benedict that picks up with the salmon omelette? Or is this the benny that picks up with oatmeal and lamb sausage? This may seem inane to anyone on the outside, but in my industry, which benny is which matters. You don’t just cook food indiscriminately, without phrases, without groupings, and carelessly shove it all to the pass to let the expediter sort out. You have to time your food, according to a system, so that you don’t produce a benny that sits in the window waiting for five minutes for a lamb sausage from the guy working the grill station. Five minutes in the life of a cooked egg, unlike a nicely resting piece of meat, is the difference between excellent and bullshit. At three o’clock, with the last pummeling of tickets on the board, I need to be told over and over by the expediter, and probably much to his irritation, which benny is this particular benny. I know all of the strategies and I use them—repeating back the ticket after it’s called—“echoing” the expediter, and constantly talking in minutes and seconds with my fellow line cooks:

  “I’m two out on benny/carbonara.”

  “Thirty seconds on huevos/pancake.”

  “Selling benny/oyster!” We break it down to each other from minutes to seconds to sold! But invariably all I can see by the last round through my red, swollen eyes is the pan and the egg in front of me. I’m just punching and hoping I land one on the guy’s jaw.

  To have a waiter pop back into the kitchen during this beat down and tell you that Arlindo is outside, drilling holes through the sidewalk down into our wine cellar to drain his flower boxes in a way so the water doesn’t pool up in front of his front stoop but instead now drains down—where? Into the earth, does he imagine? Into the great sweet clean aquifer. Just below his front stoop? Here, in New York City? No, when his landscaping fever passes and he realizes, at the same time that I realize, that his flower boxes now drain into his own basement, which happens to be where all our wines with their once-pristine labels are stored, I go slack in the neck from exhaustion.

  You want to own your own little place? You want to have a tight relationship with your farmer? Surround yourself with poet-philosopher wine merchants? Make your own ricotta and cure your own lardo? You want to be chef/owner? It’s not the eighteen-hour days and the hot kitchen that’ll get you. It’s all that plus a half-naked six-foot-two, two-hundred-forty-pound man in front of your restaurant drilling holes into the basement and then watering his ivy.

  11

  MELISSA CALLED ONE DAY, WHEN SHE WAS STILL WORKING AS AN editor at Saveur.

  “Gabs,” she says, her voice very, very low, not whispering, but very quiet, “get this, guess who’s here,” and then, even lower, “Jacques. Pepin.”

  Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Food Network Star? We don’t give a shit. Fla
vor of the month, right place at the right time, big-fish-small-pond? We are not moved. Jacques Pepin breaking down and boning out a whole chicken with a paring knife?

  Five phone calls. A play-by-play re-enactment. Later, when we meet for drinks, a physical demonstration. I stood here.… Jacques stood here.… He said … I said …

  She commutes into the city from Jersey. Sleeps on my couch three nights a week while her husband does the role reversal, dad-as-mom thing. Compared to those bleak winter days in that Williamsburg loft, we love being roommates. She’s the only one in my family who’s held on tight to me, and I will never let go of her.

  “What’s he doing there?” I ask.

  “We’re doing a piece on The Greats. The French New York Greats. Soltner. Saihlac. Pepin. You know, Lutèce. Le Cygne. Le Cirque. Before what’s going on now with the CO2 guys, and the Aspen swanaround. You know, Alsatian onion tart. Soltner, who missed only five nights in thirty-four years at Lutece … Anyway, Pepin; I’ve invited him for lunch.”

  “Very cool,” I say, understanding perfectly every word of this slightly free-associative answer.

  The following week, after Pepin, she invited Soltner. To anyone under thirty he’s not famous, and he’s not doing a show on the Food Network, not using hydrocolloids or glycerin. For us, however, he is a big deal and the real deal. She was prepared. And called to run it by me. As we do.