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.
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