After reading my last post, a friend emailed the following:
"Your last section made me wonder about something, though. Do you suppose that the refined movements of a ballet are the product of muscle memory earned through repetition every bit as unglamorous as the line cook's prep and the stylist's thousands of haircuts?"
I don't know. Ask the ballerina who spent a thousand excruciating hours of her childhood en pointe while some embittered old Frenchwoman rapped her on the calves with a walking stick to correct her posture. Dance, like any athletic endeavour, relies on the brutal monotony of training and repetition until the gesture itself is automatic, leaving the mind free to explore, express, synthesize. Miles Davis practiced a lot of scales before "Kind of Blue" came to be. Tiger Woods goes out and hits hundreds of balls after winning a tournament. It all hinges of training the body to perform fluidly as an extension of the mind, such that the gap between intent and action narrows beyond perception. A great cook works by feel, but the feel comes from doing it wrong, then doing it right, and learning to tell the difference intuitively.
I can sense when a pan is the right temperature to sear foie gras without looking at it or touching it, simply by the distinctive smell that its sprinkling of kosher salt emits at a certain point. I know the sound of a pasta dish cooking down too far and on the verge of sticking, and have developed the instinct to hit the pan with a splash of stock and give it a quick toss before the noodles begin to dry out and scorch. I can flip an over-easy egg with either hand depending on which is more convenient, and I know without watching a clock how long it's going to take for that ribeye to hit a perfect rested medium rare. Why? Because I've screwed up ALL of these tasks more times than I can count along the way before reaching a point where I don't even have to think about it.
I am by no stretch attempting to compare myself to Miles, or Baryshnikov, or Tiger Woods for that matter. Thomas Keller perhaps belongs to that rarefied ensemble, Jean-Louis, Eric Ripert...pick one, whoever floats your boat in the arena of name-brand chefs. My fellow journeymen and I resemble more an army of bricklayers and welders, shipwrights and pipefitters, craftsmen whose hands unerringly perform simple tasks that the rest of us would bungle hopelessly. Brain surgery it isn't, but I wouldn't ask a brain surgeon to make me a lobster terrine any more than I would attempt to excise a tumor from my banquet chef's cerebellum. Granted, the stakes are different by orders of magnitude but the premise is the same.
One of my earliest mentors was a crusty old dyed-in-the-wool Frenchie who taught in my culinary program. He had come up old school -- apprenticed at thirteen, beaten and abused for five years in the finest kitchens in Paris before making his bones as a sous-chef, then arriving in New York at the age of twenty with his knife kit, twenty bucks, and a handful of addresses. He worked the high-end "Frog Ponds" (to cop one from Tony Bourdain), cooked for celebrities and heads of state, then somehow found his way into the position of running the entire food service operation for Yale University. He then went on to found a cooking school, where the beatings were less frequent but the sense of discipline, humility, and professional pride was as much a part of the curriculum as the mother sauces or the methodology of creme anglaise. He sneered at the emergent culture of rock-star chefs, the Marios and Emerils who dominated the early years of the Food Network. I can only imagine what he would have to say about Rachel Ray.
"We are cooks"! He would exclaim, brandishing the twelve-inch Sabatier he had carried with him on a third-class steamship passage four decades ago. To be a chef was to claim a title, a position, a certain presumption of station arbitrarily taken on by two-bit hacks and shoemakers just as readily as by the giants of our profession. He would then produce his official French identification papers, which after forty years of circulating amongst the elite ranks of the American culinary establishment, still listed under the heading of "metier" the humble word "cuisinier". Cook, not chef. Bricklayer, not architect. This was a man who could conjure perfection from a pile of scraps, who taught us to make honest soups and to abhor waste in any form, who bequeathed upon us his mother's blanquette de veau and the recipe for lobster Americaine as he had made it for Mitterand.
Was he a Tiger, a Coltraine, a Wyeth? He could have been, were he driven by the raw desire to succeed. But Michel -- "Uncle Mickey" to those who survived a class with him -- was driven only by the fundamental integrity of producing great food in any context, whether a formal state dining room or a college cafeteria. His mission in starting a school was to produce cooks, nascent craftsmen with the basic skills, passion, and honesty to respect the ingredients and the guest. If we wanted to become chefs, that was our own damn business. Just show him a perfectly made cheese omlette and shut the hell up.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Vice-President in Charge of Everything that Goes Wrong (A Day in the Life Part II)
No juice, no bagels, bad eggs, late orders, moldy berries, lumpy oatmeal, disgruntled or absent staff... what I am attempting to convey here is that ALL of this is my problem. Somehow, some way, anything that goes sideways in any of the three restaurants, in any of the fifteen banquet rooms, on any of the countless room service trolleys that traverse the hallways night and day...anything food-related that goes awry ultimately redounds to me.
Which is interesting, because a very small percentage of my day is actually spent cooking anything. Sure, I'll jump behind the line when the breakfast cook is in the weeds and hammer out pancakes and French toast, or I'll hop on the sautee station in our seafood joint when they're two-thirds through a 200 cover night and my sous chef is hitting the meltdown point, but in truth I spend more time with a clipboard in my hand than a knife or a pair of tongs.
Damn, I miss being a line cook.
Life for a line cook is simple, an existence circumscribed by the menu, the hours of operation, and the flow of business. You have your station, which for a seasoned player is more like an extension of his own body, with key items placed so precisely that the best of us could nearly work blindfolded in a pinch. You have your mis en place, that critical list of everything that you need to be ready for service, encompassinge everything from clean dry side towels to proteins and sauces. You have a routine in the way you set up and break down each day, in the way you organize the rotation of prep such that veal stock always gets made on Tuesdays and Fridays, butchering happens Wednesday and Saturday, gnocchi every second day no matter what because it goes mushy by day three. A dedicated line cook may become so inebriated that remaining vertical is a challenge, but I'm willing to bet that so long as he clings to one last drifting splinter of consciousness that same cook could tell you with reasonable coherence the top five items on his prep list for the following day.
Cooks are creatures of habit, and we therefore loathe and resent any break in the routine which sends us in unaccustomed directions. It has been five years since I last worked the line full time, as saucier for the dining room, but I can still close my eyes and narrate in excruciating detail how I spent the first half hour of every shift, beginning with the gathering of pots and pans and cutting boards from stewarding, the carefull arrangement of saucepans on the stovetop to preheat while I cut meat scraps and neatly arranged the foundations of each sauce on five or six individual plates, the arrangement of my sauces from dark to light, left to right, such that I never needed to label them with post-it notes like some of my predecessors...(red wine sauce on the right, then lamb, then pheasant, then rabbit, then chicken...). While the wine in my sauces reduced and the stock came back up to a simmer, I did my butchering. Once the sauces were coasting along, it was either gnocchi or ravioli depending on the day but NEVER both on the same day if I could help it. Blanching vegetables came after the big stuff was done, and the pre-work like cleaning oxtail or trimming lamb shanks was left for the end of the shift when service wound down and we had a few spare minutes. I started my day at 2 PM and service began at 5:30, which meant that each quarter-hour block of time had to be accounted for in advance so that come gametime I had my sauces strained, my mis iced down, and time for a quick cigarette before the orders started rolling in.
Which is interesting, because a very small percentage of my day is actually spent cooking anything. Sure, I'll jump behind the line when the breakfast cook is in the weeds and hammer out pancakes and French toast, or I'll hop on the sautee station in our seafood joint when they're two-thirds through a 200 cover night and my sous chef is hitting the meltdown point, but in truth I spend more time with a clipboard in my hand than a knife or a pair of tongs.
Damn, I miss being a line cook.
Life for a line cook is simple, an existence circumscribed by the menu, the hours of operation, and the flow of business. You have your station, which for a seasoned player is more like an extension of his own body, with key items placed so precisely that the best of us could nearly work blindfolded in a pinch. You have your mis en place, that critical list of everything that you need to be ready for service, encompassinge everything from clean dry side towels to proteins and sauces. You have a routine in the way you set up and break down each day, in the way you organize the rotation of prep such that veal stock always gets made on Tuesdays and Fridays, butchering happens Wednesday and Saturday, gnocchi every second day no matter what because it goes mushy by day three. A dedicated line cook may become so inebriated that remaining vertical is a challenge, but I'm willing to bet that so long as he clings to one last drifting splinter of consciousness that same cook could tell you with reasonable coherence the top five items on his prep list for the following day.
Cooks are creatures of habit, and we therefore loathe and resent any break in the routine which sends us in unaccustomed directions. It has been five years since I last worked the line full time, as saucier for the dining room, but I can still close my eyes and narrate in excruciating detail how I spent the first half hour of every shift, beginning with the gathering of pots and pans and cutting boards from stewarding, the carefull arrangement of saucepans on the stovetop to preheat while I cut meat scraps and neatly arranged the foundations of each sauce on five or six individual plates, the arrangement of my sauces from dark to light, left to right, such that I never needed to label them with post-it notes like some of my predecessors...(red wine sauce on the right, then lamb, then pheasant, then rabbit, then chicken...). While the wine in my sauces reduced and the stock came back up to a simmer, I did my butchering. Once the sauces were coasting along, it was either gnocchi or ravioli depending on the day but NEVER both on the same day if I could help it. Blanching vegetables came after the big stuff was done, and the pre-work like cleaning oxtail or trimming lamb shanks was left for the end of the shift when service wound down and we had a few spare minutes. I started my day at 2 PM and service began at 5:30, which meant that each quarter-hour block of time had to be accounted for in advance so that come gametime I had my sauces strained, my mis iced down, and time for a quick cigarette before the orders started rolling in.
Any break in the routine, at any point, is the cook's greatest source of angst. Room service order for Osso Bucco half an hour before the restaurant opens and nobody says "no" ? All of a sudden you're cooking rissoto when you should be peeling asparagus. Fish delivery is screwed up so your thirty-pound whole halibut shows up ten minutes before service when you should be lovingly straining your sauces through cheesecloth? Agony. Your favorrite stockpot is half-buried in the dishpit, requiring ten minutes of excavation and wheedling to get it cleaned before you can start your veal demi? There goes the afternoon. And these are all things that can happen BEFORE service.
What most restaurant patrons fail to grasp is that great cooking is, above all else, the result of repetitive motion. Every time I get my hair cut, I watch the practiced pass with which my stylist exchanges scissors for comb in the same hand, and I see the essence of a line cook. It is a gesture honed by endless repetition over the course of a thousand haircuts, so ingrained in muscle memory as to be autimatic. I think of guitarists (Jerry Garcia in particular) who have mastered the art of tucking a plectrum quickly between their knuckles in order to switch smoothly between flatpicking and fingerstyle. No different than the three-card-monte dealer in the subway.
Cooking is no differenet. There are the foundations of technique, the innovation, the continual adjustment of seasoning and texture, but the execution of a restaurant dish relies more than anything on having done it so many times before that the basic steps pass without thought. You know when the pan is hot enough without really looking at it, you turn the delicately browned filet of trout or sole in a single fluid motion of your spatula, you execute a single pirouette between the stovetop and the window during which four or five items seamlessly shift position. When the chef calls for an order of scallops, the steps to initiate the dish are automatic -- first the braised leek with a splash of cream to warm up gently, then two sautee pans on the hot spot while you lay out and season five scallops and four slices of yellowfin potato, then the carefully timed sequence of searing, turning, deglazing, tossing the pan juices with chopped truffles and bacon lardons and beurre blanc, and asembling the finished dish in the window, all in seven minutes flat while simultaneously working six or eight or ten other dishes at the same time.
People have likened it to ballet, but in all honesty it's more like a choreographed mosh pit with the addition of sharp knives, fire, and boiling liquids. Trust me.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
This One's For the Foodies
As I return to my occasional indulgence in shows like "Hell's Kichen" and "Worst Kitchen Nightmares" in the wake of the Beijing games, it occurs to me that cooking deserves a standardized, internationally recognized scoring system, like so many other skill-based activities which lack the fundamental metric of goals, touchdowns, and the like. It is easy to tell who wins a basketball game or a soccer match, but how about a platform-diving or balance beam competition? Scoring in those cases hinges on parameters which are agreed on ahead of time: The more difficult the attempted feat, the higher the potential score.
Cooking, in short, needs a standardized scale of difficulty. Although I could digress for pages on the technique involved in perfectly scrambled eggs, it is plainly obvious that scrambling eggs is easier than turning them into Hollandaise sauce, while Hollandaise sauce is still far easier than turning the same handful of eggs into a souffle.
So, for those of you who cook with any kind of frequency, dig deep and ask yourself the following: what are the big kahunas? What are the triple-axels of the culinary world? Which dishes present the highest degree of difficulty to attempt, and the greatest collective intake of breath when successfully landed?
The souffle, of course, is a given. Consommes, with their crystalline transparency and overwhelming purity of flavor, are akin to a black art in their execution. Any dish that involves a warm and a cold element paired on the same plate, as simple as a scoop of ice cream on a slice of apple pie or as intricate as a delicate herb salad garnishing grilled fish presents a challenge. And without question, anything wrapped in pastry -- beef Wellingtons, foie gras en brioche, squab wrapped in phyllo dough. Wrapping an item in dough deprives cooks of our ability to prod and probe the finished product; we must rely instead on pure instinct, trickery, and a flawless sense of timing to walk the balance beam between burned pastry and raw meat.
With this preface, imagine a dinner for 350 people commencing with a lobster consomme en croute, resplendent beneath a glistening golden dome of puff-pastry, followed by a salad course of delicate arugula sprouts garnished with warm mushroom and brie croquettes, and concluding (after a relatively simple entree of tenderloin and white asparagus) with raspberry souffles baked al la minute and delivered to the guests three at a time by a phalanx of nearly breathless waiters.
There goes another Saturday night in the Big Machine.
A dinner like this doesn't just happen, of course. It begins with a tasting weeks in advance, when the dishes are sampled, tweaaked, massaged, and photographed before presentation to the prospective client. Prep begins five or six days out, with the hundred pounds of lobster bodies crushed in an 80-quart Hobart mixer, to be cooked down with six or eight bottles of brandy and a host of other aromatics to form the foundation of the soup. There are thousands of tiny pearl vegetables to scoop by hand, prawns to encase in wonton wrappers for garnish, and of course the delicate wrapping of three hundred ceramic soup cups with puff pastry. There are the six casess of massive prawns to be skewered, poached, peeled, and layered with citrus aspic in a terrine mold to be frozen solid, then shaved paper thin on a meat slicer to make an ethereal carpaccio of shellfish beneath the salad. There are hors d'oeuvres by the hundred, there are steaks to sear, fennel to braise, two hundred pounds of potatoes to peel. And somewhere, in an air-traffic-controller's booth above it all, is me.
Don't get me wrong. I have not reached a position so rarified that I no longer pick up a knife, and I can still sling a saute pan with the best of them. More often than not, however, my role resembles that of the chief mate on a supertanker. My boss, the Executive Chef, sets the course: I am the poor schmuck whose job it is to get us there on time and in one piece. When my banquet chef and his lead cook come dangerously close to trading blows at the end of another 14-hour day, I'm the one who has to step in and smooth things over. After all, I need them both intact for the function. When two thousand dollars worth of tenderloin steaks come in cut to the wrong size, I'm the one on the phone with our meat purveyor explaining the meaning of the words "non-negotiable". When my veteran chef garde-manger inexplicably overcooks eight cases of asparagus and tries to pass off the end product as acceptable, I'm the one who has to simultaneously rake her over the coals, find more asparagus, and figure out what to do with the army-green crap she was trying to slide past me. And when push comes to shove and the whole operation is deep in the weeds and my cooks and sous chefs alike are starting to get that ragged look like they might at any further provocation climb to the top of Smith Tower and start shooting, I'm the guy who has to maintain his composure, roll up my sleeves, and rally the troops until the job is done.
When all six convection ovens, pegged at 500 degrees, begin billowing flames from the overflowing Yorkshire puddings cramming every rack, I'm the guy who first rescues the puddings and THEN runs for the baking soda. When my pissed-off grill man hurls a wire basket back into the deep-fryer and I watch the perfect parabolic splashback of hot oil onto the exposed flesh of his forearm, guess who makes the midnight walk to the hospital to help him fill out the L&I paperwork, after the ER nurse peels back the skin from his wrist to his elbow like she is stripping the membrane from a rack of pork ribs.
And when people at parties, or Cub Scout meetings, or on the school playground comment "Oh, you're a chef? I just LOVE to cook" I smile and nod and don't say a damn thing.
Cooking, in short, needs a standardized scale of difficulty. Although I could digress for pages on the technique involved in perfectly scrambled eggs, it is plainly obvious that scrambling eggs is easier than turning them into Hollandaise sauce, while Hollandaise sauce is still far easier than turning the same handful of eggs into a souffle.
So, for those of you who cook with any kind of frequency, dig deep and ask yourself the following: what are the big kahunas? What are the triple-axels of the culinary world? Which dishes present the highest degree of difficulty to attempt, and the greatest collective intake of breath when successfully landed?
The souffle, of course, is a given. Consommes, with their crystalline transparency and overwhelming purity of flavor, are akin to a black art in their execution. Any dish that involves a warm and a cold element paired on the same plate, as simple as a scoop of ice cream on a slice of apple pie or as intricate as a delicate herb salad garnishing grilled fish presents a challenge. And without question, anything wrapped in pastry -- beef Wellingtons, foie gras en brioche, squab wrapped in phyllo dough. Wrapping an item in dough deprives cooks of our ability to prod and probe the finished product; we must rely instead on pure instinct, trickery, and a flawless sense of timing to walk the balance beam between burned pastry and raw meat.
With this preface, imagine a dinner for 350 people commencing with a lobster consomme en croute, resplendent beneath a glistening golden dome of puff-pastry, followed by a salad course of delicate arugula sprouts garnished with warm mushroom and brie croquettes, and concluding (after a relatively simple entree of tenderloin and white asparagus) with raspberry souffles baked al la minute and delivered to the guests three at a time by a phalanx of nearly breathless waiters.
There goes another Saturday night in the Big Machine.
A dinner like this doesn't just happen, of course. It begins with a tasting weeks in advance, when the dishes are sampled, tweaaked, massaged, and photographed before presentation to the prospective client. Prep begins five or six days out, with the hundred pounds of lobster bodies crushed in an 80-quart Hobart mixer, to be cooked down with six or eight bottles of brandy and a host of other aromatics to form the foundation of the soup. There are thousands of tiny pearl vegetables to scoop by hand, prawns to encase in wonton wrappers for garnish, and of course the delicate wrapping of three hundred ceramic soup cups with puff pastry. There are the six casess of massive prawns to be skewered, poached, peeled, and layered with citrus aspic in a terrine mold to be frozen solid, then shaved paper thin on a meat slicer to make an ethereal carpaccio of shellfish beneath the salad. There are hors d'oeuvres by the hundred, there are steaks to sear, fennel to braise, two hundred pounds of potatoes to peel. And somewhere, in an air-traffic-controller's booth above it all, is me.
Don't get me wrong. I have not reached a position so rarified that I no longer pick up a knife, and I can still sling a saute pan with the best of them. More often than not, however, my role resembles that of the chief mate on a supertanker. My boss, the Executive Chef, sets the course: I am the poor schmuck whose job it is to get us there on time and in one piece. When my banquet chef and his lead cook come dangerously close to trading blows at the end of another 14-hour day, I'm the one who has to step in and smooth things over. After all, I need them both intact for the function. When two thousand dollars worth of tenderloin steaks come in cut to the wrong size, I'm the one on the phone with our meat purveyor explaining the meaning of the words "non-negotiable". When my veteran chef garde-manger inexplicably overcooks eight cases of asparagus and tries to pass off the end product as acceptable, I'm the one who has to simultaneously rake her over the coals, find more asparagus, and figure out what to do with the army-green crap she was trying to slide past me. And when push comes to shove and the whole operation is deep in the weeds and my cooks and sous chefs alike are starting to get that ragged look like they might at any further provocation climb to the top of Smith Tower and start shooting, I'm the guy who has to maintain his composure, roll up my sleeves, and rally the troops until the job is done.
When all six convection ovens, pegged at 500 degrees, begin billowing flames from the overflowing Yorkshire puddings cramming every rack, I'm the guy who first rescues the puddings and THEN runs for the baking soda. When my pissed-off grill man hurls a wire basket back into the deep-fryer and I watch the perfect parabolic splashback of hot oil onto the exposed flesh of his forearm, guess who makes the midnight walk to the hospital to help him fill out the L&I paperwork, after the ER nurse peels back the skin from his wrist to his elbow like she is stripping the membrane from a rack of pork ribs.
And when people at parties, or Cub Scout meetings, or on the school playground comment "Oh, you're a chef? I just LOVE to cook" I smile and nod and don't say a damn thing.
A Day in the Life part I
Five AM comes way too early especially considering that the warm body curled up next to me won't even think about stirring for another two hours, but routine is a powerful driver and I am awake in time to kill the alarm before it even goes off and fumble for my glasses on the nightstand like I've done every morning since I was eight years old, excepting a few ignominious occasions in college when I woke up with my contacts still in and glued to my corneas with the opacity of three-day-old fish eyes.
The coffeemaker burbles reasurringly as I grab a quick shower, and I manage to slug down half a cup while shaving and retrieving the holy trinity of wallet-watch-cellphone from the kitchen table. Careful pause to sort out my meds (thirty-seven years old ans I'm taking eight pills before I even start my day) and then it's out to the garage to gear up.
The sight of my bike gleaming black under the shoplights never fails to cheer me even well before a cold and rainy October dawn. It looks far better than an unrestored 1976 BMW has any right to -- immaculate paint, decent chrome, and that inscrutable look of having been both ridden hard and coddled in the same lifetime. As I work through the litany of zippers-- heavy cordura pants, Aerostich jacket, boots-- I think back on the brutal November commutes in Vermont with a bad charging system and no money to fix it so that I began each day before first light by bump-starting the bike down State Street hill in Montpelier... of riding through puddles my first year in Seattle that threatened to backflood the exhaust, of pushing the beast three miles through an ice storm last winter until I at last had to abandon ship in a motel parking lot off Aurora and walk the last twelve blocks home lugging my saddlebags and helmet like a pack mule.
Reflection aside, I chug the last half-cup of coffee and leave the mug on the workbench, open the garage door, and roll the bike fifty yards down the street before starting it so as not to wake the boys. The engine fires on a touch and with two quick rights and a left I am barreling down I-5 at a steady 70 in the pre-rush traffic.
---------------------------------------------
After ten years in the same hotel I can get a sense of what the day holds before I even enter the building. Rolling to a stop outside the soaring Palladian windows of the dining room as I wait for the light to change, I make a quick scan of the interior... how full does it look? How fast are the servers moving? Is the continental buffet set right? Are there tour busses double-stacked at the Seneca Street door? I take my next set of cues from the activity on A level, deep in the bowels of the ship. What does the overnight security guy have to say about his shift? How quickly are people hustling in the locker room? Is my graveyard cook still there at 6:45 changing out of his spattered whites and able to give me a rundown of the overnight business? And finally, the elevator.
From A level to the kitchen is a four-level ascent, and as the car rises so does the ambient volume of familiar sounds; the clatter of china and silver, the metal on metal of pans on a stovetop, the occasional punctuation of broken glass and the clamor of voices.
On a quiet morning, the doors slide open to a subdued undercurrent of sound and activity. My breakfast cook is poaching eggs two flats at a time and talking football with one of the night cleaners. The garde-manger ladies are slicing fruit, layering berries in parfait glasses, and drinking espresso laced with condensed milk from highball glasses. The servers are making a pretense at their sidework, polishing silver and glassware, filling sugar boats. These are the mornings when I take a perfuntory spin through the breakfast line and dining room, check that the oatmeal isn't lumpy and the berries aren't moldy, and then line my crew up for a quick preshift briefing before turning to my own hydra-headed workload of paperwork and projects.
That is the definition of a good morning.
More often than not however the elevator doors open to a scene more remeniscent of Guernica than Dejuner sur L'herbe. At 6:30 the breakfast line is already fifteen tickets deep and going down fast, the servers are screaming because there's no Devonshire cream or seven-grain bread, and the AM steward is chunking up watermelons into a five-gallon bucket to puree with a stick blender because the PM garde-manger forgot to make watermelon-mint juice AGAIN. I am scarcely two steps onto the floor before a banquet manager is assaulting me with the information that there were no bagels delivered for the two hundred people in the ballroom who will be flooding the buffet in fifteen minutes. When I finally make it into the kitchen itself, I discover that my overnight cook has turned ten gallons of pasteurized liquid egg product into a near-solid mass of sickly green curds meant to pass for scrambled. And this, inevitably, is the point when my lunch cook calls in sick, Room Service runs out of croissants, and I am informed that somebody lost the breakfast pre-order for the ambassador from France so his omlette is half an hour late.
And all I can wonder is what will happen AFTER 7:00 when things really get going?
The coffeemaker burbles reasurringly as I grab a quick shower, and I manage to slug down half a cup while shaving and retrieving the holy trinity of wallet-watch-cellphone from the kitchen table. Careful pause to sort out my meds (thirty-seven years old ans I'm taking eight pills before I even start my day) and then it's out to the garage to gear up.
The sight of my bike gleaming black under the shoplights never fails to cheer me even well before a cold and rainy October dawn. It looks far better than an unrestored 1976 BMW has any right to -- immaculate paint, decent chrome, and that inscrutable look of having been both ridden hard and coddled in the same lifetime. As I work through the litany of zippers-- heavy cordura pants, Aerostich jacket, boots-- I think back on the brutal November commutes in Vermont with a bad charging system and no money to fix it so that I began each day before first light by bump-starting the bike down State Street hill in Montpelier... of riding through puddles my first year in Seattle that threatened to backflood the exhaust, of pushing the beast three miles through an ice storm last winter until I at last had to abandon ship in a motel parking lot off Aurora and walk the last twelve blocks home lugging my saddlebags and helmet like a pack mule.
Reflection aside, I chug the last half-cup of coffee and leave the mug on the workbench, open the garage door, and roll the bike fifty yards down the street before starting it so as not to wake the boys. The engine fires on a touch and with two quick rights and a left I am barreling down I-5 at a steady 70 in the pre-rush traffic.
---------------------------------------------
After ten years in the same hotel I can get a sense of what the day holds before I even enter the building. Rolling to a stop outside the soaring Palladian windows of the dining room as I wait for the light to change, I make a quick scan of the interior... how full does it look? How fast are the servers moving? Is the continental buffet set right? Are there tour busses double-stacked at the Seneca Street door? I take my next set of cues from the activity on A level, deep in the bowels of the ship. What does the overnight security guy have to say about his shift? How quickly are people hustling in the locker room? Is my graveyard cook still there at 6:45 changing out of his spattered whites and able to give me a rundown of the overnight business? And finally, the elevator.
From A level to the kitchen is a four-level ascent, and as the car rises so does the ambient volume of familiar sounds; the clatter of china and silver, the metal on metal of pans on a stovetop, the occasional punctuation of broken glass and the clamor of voices.
On a quiet morning, the doors slide open to a subdued undercurrent of sound and activity. My breakfast cook is poaching eggs two flats at a time and talking football with one of the night cleaners. The garde-manger ladies are slicing fruit, layering berries in parfait glasses, and drinking espresso laced with condensed milk from highball glasses. The servers are making a pretense at their sidework, polishing silver and glassware, filling sugar boats. These are the mornings when I take a perfuntory spin through the breakfast line and dining room, check that the oatmeal isn't lumpy and the berries aren't moldy, and then line my crew up for a quick preshift briefing before turning to my own hydra-headed workload of paperwork and projects.
That is the definition of a good morning.
More often than not however the elevator doors open to a scene more remeniscent of Guernica than Dejuner sur L'herbe. At 6:30 the breakfast line is already fifteen tickets deep and going down fast, the servers are screaming because there's no Devonshire cream or seven-grain bread, and the AM steward is chunking up watermelons into a five-gallon bucket to puree with a stick blender because the PM garde-manger forgot to make watermelon-mint juice AGAIN. I am scarcely two steps onto the floor before a banquet manager is assaulting me with the information that there were no bagels delivered for the two hundred people in the ballroom who will be flooding the buffet in fifteen minutes. When I finally make it into the kitchen itself, I discover that my overnight cook has turned ten gallons of pasteurized liquid egg product into a near-solid mass of sickly green curds meant to pass for scrambled. And this, inevitably, is the point when my lunch cook calls in sick, Room Service runs out of croissants, and I am informed that somebody lost the breakfast pre-order for the ambassador from France so his omlette is half an hour late.
And all I can wonder is what will happen AFTER 7:00 when things really get going?
Friday, October 3, 2008
The half-remembered Bly poem exemplifies to me one of life's inevitable recurring tragedies -- the thing, or place, or person encountered once in passing only to prove irrecoverable after the fact. We vainly wander the streets of once-familiar towns seeking out a place that is no longer; we comb the recesses of Google and Facebook in search of people long since absent from our lives.
One summer night some years back my friend Alex and I embarked on a longitudinal Manhattan pub crawl which commenced before noon at an Irish bar on the Upper West Side and concluded well after two AM in the Village. After fourteen hours of biker joints and discount sushi and calypso at SOB's, we stumbled into a shoebox of a place somewhere down off Houston street which was oddly subdued amidst the clamor of downtown on a Saturday night. The bar was scarred but polished wood with a handfull of stools and a good rail of drafts, and a crew of regulars were devouring plates of steamed mussels and fish chowder. The bartender was without question the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh.
Her name was Shoshanna, she was (of course) trying to make it as an actress, she was entranced by my descriptions of the Maine Coast and professed a lifelong desire to see the leaves turn in autumn. I had another beer. We talked about small towns which we both came from, about the lonliness of cities, about the granite cliffs of Acadia with the colors of September ascending in variegated layers up the hillside like redrock sandstone. I gave her my number, she swore she was coming to Maine in September, and Alex and I stumbled off to Fez where I drank black coffee with Myer's rum until closing time when we went for breakfast.
Needless to say I never heard from her, otherwise there wouldn't be a story in it. Moreover, on subsequent trips to the city I couldn't find the bar, or even pin down its location. It was near a corner, it was near a subway stop, it was across from the club... Brigadoon. Nor have I recovered my passage from Bly, despite my best efforts. With time I have come to doubt the existence of either one.
Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities of the crossroads bazaar city of Euphemia, where men come not only to trade silks and spices but memories as well, such that you depart the next morning with somebody else's recollections as vivid in your mind as if you had lived them, such that "your wolf will have become another wolf, your battle another battle, your sister another sister..." What he captures is the fungible nature of our own memories, our ability to believe in things that never were be they lines of verse or polished glasses on a barback.
The best bars, the most resonant poetry, the prettiest girls. They are never there when you go back to find them again.
One summer night some years back my friend Alex and I embarked on a longitudinal Manhattan pub crawl which commenced before noon at an Irish bar on the Upper West Side and concluded well after two AM in the Village. After fourteen hours of biker joints and discount sushi and calypso at SOB's, we stumbled into a shoebox of a place somewhere down off Houston street which was oddly subdued amidst the clamor of downtown on a Saturday night. The bar was scarred but polished wood with a handfull of stools and a good rail of drafts, and a crew of regulars were devouring plates of steamed mussels and fish chowder. The bartender was without question the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh.
Her name was Shoshanna, she was (of course) trying to make it as an actress, she was entranced by my descriptions of the Maine Coast and professed a lifelong desire to see the leaves turn in autumn. I had another beer. We talked about small towns which we both came from, about the lonliness of cities, about the granite cliffs of Acadia with the colors of September ascending in variegated layers up the hillside like redrock sandstone. I gave her my number, she swore she was coming to Maine in September, and Alex and I stumbled off to Fez where I drank black coffee with Myer's rum until closing time when we went for breakfast.
Needless to say I never heard from her, otherwise there wouldn't be a story in it. Moreover, on subsequent trips to the city I couldn't find the bar, or even pin down its location. It was near a corner, it was near a subway stop, it was across from the club... Brigadoon. Nor have I recovered my passage from Bly, despite my best efforts. With time I have come to doubt the existence of either one.
Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities of the crossroads bazaar city of Euphemia, where men come not only to trade silks and spices but memories as well, such that you depart the next morning with somebody else's recollections as vivid in your mind as if you had lived them, such that "your wolf will have become another wolf, your battle another battle, your sister another sister..." What he captures is the fungible nature of our own memories, our ability to believe in things that never were be they lines of verse or polished glasses on a barback.
The best bars, the most resonant poetry, the prettiest girls. They are never there when you go back to find them again.
The soup, by the way, was an unqualified success. While the tomatoes smoked slowly I sweated off a generous double handfull of celery and onions and a few crushed cloves of garlic from our CSA farm box. I threw in a some odd bits of freezer-burned slab bacon, a few basil stems from the withering plant in the dooryard, and a pint of orange cherry tomatoes that were languishing in the fridge. Then I went out and ran four miles in the gentle rain while the soup cooked out.
The run was just what I needed. It's been six months now on the Wellbutrin and more than three since my last cigarette, but the running is a more recent and sporadic endeavor born from the same need for fundamental change. Nearly twenty years have elapsed between my tenure as a cross-country runner in high school and my renewed interest in the sport, and I am reminded once more why I was drawn to the sport initially.
I was never very fast, despite a 36" inseam and a distance runner's borderline anorexic physique. My attraction came more from the pleasure of moving through the lansdscape at my own pace, of traversing routes and distances more often reserved for motorized transport. I love the simple act of covering ground.
I have been reading Robert Bly again after much the same interval of years, and came across this short one called "In a Train" in his first collection:
"There has been a light snow
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust
I have awakened in Missoula, Montana, utterly happy"
For Bly, it is all about covering a huge swath of the country in the night and the unexpected awakening in a new and unknown place, the sense of distance covered, the knowledge that steady and directed movement has brought him somewhere. And so with running -- the movement is an end unto itself, the destination a secondary benefit.
In truth, I have been reading Bly in the hopes of finding once more a poem that I encountered late one night in college while swapping verses out loud with friends, a torrent of drunken recitation which ended when the campus police showed and broke it up. There was Whitman, I remember, and Rilke's "Tombs of the Hetaerae", and a single brief passage of Bly describing the image of fenceposts as seen through the window of a moving car such that perspective lent unto them a revolving motion like the the spokes of a wheel rotating slowly against yet another snowy Minnesota stubble-field backdrop.
The run was just what I needed. It's been six months now on the Wellbutrin and more than three since my last cigarette, but the running is a more recent and sporadic endeavor born from the same need for fundamental change. Nearly twenty years have elapsed between my tenure as a cross-country runner in high school and my renewed interest in the sport, and I am reminded once more why I was drawn to the sport initially.
I was never very fast, despite a 36" inseam and a distance runner's borderline anorexic physique. My attraction came more from the pleasure of moving through the lansdscape at my own pace, of traversing routes and distances more often reserved for motorized transport. I love the simple act of covering ground.
I have been reading Robert Bly again after much the same interval of years, and came across this short one called "In a Train" in his first collection:
"There has been a light snow
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust
I have awakened in Missoula, Montana, utterly happy"
For Bly, it is all about covering a huge swath of the country in the night and the unexpected awakening in a new and unknown place, the sense of distance covered, the knowledge that steady and directed movement has brought him somewhere. And so with running -- the movement is an end unto itself, the destination a secondary benefit.
In truth, I have been reading Bly in the hopes of finding once more a poem that I encountered late one night in college while swapping verses out loud with friends, a torrent of drunken recitation which ended when the campus police showed and broke it up. There was Whitman, I remember, and Rilke's "Tombs of the Hetaerae", and a single brief passage of Bly describing the image of fenceposts as seen through the window of a moving car such that perspective lent unto them a revolving motion like the the spokes of a wheel rotating slowly against yet another snowy Minnesota stubble-field backdrop.
Why Blog?
The easy answer is that everybody else is doing it, so why can't I (to cop a phrase from The Cranberies, which dates me immediately).
My best buddy David, obsessed as he is with the current electoral debacle, has parlayed his early righteous indignation into a well-received regular slot on the Huffington Post, where he manages to both vent his frustration and disbelief while simultaneously offering up well researched and articulate analysis.
My wife, a knitter of epic proportions, has a blog of her own (check out Rocketboyknits) in concert with her nascent business designing cool knitted kids clothing and toys.
Even my 8-year old son has his own iGoogle page, allowing him to chat in real time with grandparents on the other coast.
Blogging it seems has evolved quickly from a narcissistic construct of the fringes to a mainstream pastime, with no need for pretense or pretext. We no longer journal, we blog -- and thus throw our thoughts out there in real time without submitting ourselves to the arduous vetting process of annointed editors and publishers. The online world is our editorial committee, and our hit count the indicator of success or failure
Blog it, and they will come.
Which is why, on a rainy Seattle afternoon, I am sitting at the kitchen table. I can just pick up the slightly acrid aroma of the five pounds of tomatoes I am smoking outside over hickory chips, destined for soup tonight. The tomatoes came primarily from a plant named "Bob", lovingly hand-raised in our tiny front yard by my elder son. The woodsmoke and the damp air comingle and remind me of autumn back in Maine, from whence I moved nearly ten years ago to pursue a chef's career in the region's finest hotel kitchen. I think upon my favorite food writers over the years -- John Thorne, A.J. Liebling, Anthony Bourdain -- and wonder what they would make of all this. Would Liebling have blogged, given the chance? We can only imagine, wistfully, that he had.
So be forewarned -- this is not a straight-up food blog. You will find precious little in the way of recipes (I don't generally use them), not much in the way of restaurant reviews (We don't have the time or spare cash to eat out), and maybe the occasional consideration of a seasonal highlight or a great meal cooked for the family. You are just as likely to encounter a treatise on rebuilding the starter on a 1976 BMW motorcycle, or a description of the organized chaos that defines a top-flight luxury hotel kitchen firing on all cylinders. This is my attempt to connect the various dots in my life, to find the correspondances as Baudelaire would have it, that somehow make it all a whole.
So you have been duly cautioned. I will knowingly make too many literary and historical references -- such is the fate of a liberal arts major too long strayed from the fold. I will rhapsodize about my children and my motorcycle, not necessarily in that order. I will bemoan the sixteen-hour days in the kitchen which seem to be status quo for me right now, contemplate carreer changes, and try very hard not to incriminate myself in any way.
On the flip side, I can promise regular infusions of the outright absurdity which characterizes the daily operations of a five-star hotel, some potentially useful technical information with regards to gastronomy, and the perspective born of ten years slugging it out in the culinary trenches. And along the way, you might just learn how to rebuild a carburetor, so read on
The easy answer is that everybody else is doing it, so why can't I (to cop a phrase from The Cranberies, which dates me immediately).
My best buddy David, obsessed as he is with the current electoral debacle, has parlayed his early righteous indignation into a well-received regular slot on the Huffington Post, where he manages to both vent his frustration and disbelief while simultaneously offering up well researched and articulate analysis.
My wife, a knitter of epic proportions, has a blog of her own (check out Rocketboyknits) in concert with her nascent business designing cool knitted kids clothing and toys.
Even my 8-year old son has his own iGoogle page, allowing him to chat in real time with grandparents on the other coast.
Blogging it seems has evolved quickly from a narcissistic construct of the fringes to a mainstream pastime, with no need for pretense or pretext. We no longer journal, we blog -- and thus throw our thoughts out there in real time without submitting ourselves to the arduous vetting process of annointed editors and publishers. The online world is our editorial committee, and our hit count the indicator of success or failure
Blog it, and they will come.
Which is why, on a rainy Seattle afternoon, I am sitting at the kitchen table. I can just pick up the slightly acrid aroma of the five pounds of tomatoes I am smoking outside over hickory chips, destined for soup tonight. The tomatoes came primarily from a plant named "Bob", lovingly hand-raised in our tiny front yard by my elder son. The woodsmoke and the damp air comingle and remind me of autumn back in Maine, from whence I moved nearly ten years ago to pursue a chef's career in the region's finest hotel kitchen. I think upon my favorite food writers over the years -- John Thorne, A.J. Liebling, Anthony Bourdain -- and wonder what they would make of all this. Would Liebling have blogged, given the chance? We can only imagine, wistfully, that he had.
So be forewarned -- this is not a straight-up food blog. You will find precious little in the way of recipes (I don't generally use them), not much in the way of restaurant reviews (We don't have the time or spare cash to eat out), and maybe the occasional consideration of a seasonal highlight or a great meal cooked for the family. You are just as likely to encounter a treatise on rebuilding the starter on a 1976 BMW motorcycle, or a description of the organized chaos that defines a top-flight luxury hotel kitchen firing on all cylinders. This is my attempt to connect the various dots in my life, to find the correspondances as Baudelaire would have it, that somehow make it all a whole.
So you have been duly cautioned. I will knowingly make too many literary and historical references -- such is the fate of a liberal arts major too long strayed from the fold. I will rhapsodize about my children and my motorcycle, not necessarily in that order. I will bemoan the sixteen-hour days in the kitchen which seem to be status quo for me right now, contemplate carreer changes, and try very hard not to incriminate myself in any way.
On the flip side, I can promise regular infusions of the outright absurdity which characterizes the daily operations of a five-star hotel, some potentially useful technical information with regards to gastronomy, and the perspective born of ten years slugging it out in the culinary trenches. And along the way, you might just learn how to rebuild a carburetor, so read on
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)