Adjustments

When I arrived at 6:05 one of my Sous-chefs met me at the door with a look of utter panic on her face. Uh-oh.

 

"Chef, Chef, we have a major problem", she spat out, barely able to contain herself.

Ten years of conditioning already had my mind in overdrive damage-control mode. What was it? Overnight fire that tripped the ansul system and trashed the kitchen? Seen that. Flood from a broken pipe in the ceiling that left the entire place three inches deep in dirty water? Seen that. Two of the AM cooks in a fistfight, such that neither one of them would be present for his shift today? Seen that. Walk-in cooler went down sometime last night, propelling every scrap of product straight into the danger zone for an indeterminate length of time? Seen that one too. And here I was at a brand-new place, with a whole new realm of potential crises to face before my second cup of coffee.

"Calm down. What's going on?" I couldn't smell smoke or hear the slosh of standing water, so I proceeded to unlock my office, stow my backpack, and change into my work shoes as Kim followed me like an anxious shadow.

 

"They ran out of soap for the dish machine last night, so they couldn't finish washing the dishes, and all the stuff for the salad bar and the espresso counter is still dirty, and we need it to open".

 

Full stop.

 

That was the extent of the problem. Somehow, through some superhuman effort, we had to find a way to hand-wash half-a-dozen thermal carafes and blender tops and a few silver buffet pans before we opened in an hour. I paused long enough to send out a group email to the twenty-five other chefs within a two-mile radius who use the same detergent, then rolled up my sleeves for a quick twenty minutes of old-fashioned sudbusting. By the time we had the necessary stuff clean and run through the soapless machine for a sanitizing rinse, I had three separate emails from colleagues who could lend me a case of detergent until my Sysco order showed up later in the morning. I knocked back a quick doppio from the now-open espresso counter, shuffled back into my riding gear, and cruised on down to Café 112 to pick up some soap. Crisis averted.

 

Crisis, after all, is a matter of perspective. At my old job, the potential for disaster was unceasing and awesome in its magnitude. The wheels never stopped turning -- I could walk in at 6 to face a plated breakfast for 300, or the entire Washington Redskins offensive unit waking up hungry before a morning game. If a single person called out sick, the entire operation could go sideways, prompting a frantic round of phone calls to hungover cooks in an attempt to find coverage. Product went missing or showed up late or incorrect or not at all, meeting planners threw fits because of spots on their bananas or runny scrambled eggs, John Travolta's personal assistant is looking for a steak quesadilla made from hand-cut tenderloin and he needs it now. And this is just the everyday stuff. This doesn't even factor in the presence of the Saudi Royal Family, or the Rolling Stones, or any of the other one-off situations that stretch your resources even further. Those are stories for a different time.

Imagine two motorcycles. One of them is a full-race MotoGP machine, built with the sole purpose of going faster and handling better than anything else on the track for exactly as long as it takes to win a race. Pneumatic valvetrain, massively oversquare cylinders, compression ratio through the roof and every scrap of metal from the crankshaft to the fasteners lovingly machined and massaged to the end of minimum weight and maximum performance. When everything is working right – when the ignition map is dialed in spot on and the rings have seated properly on the break-in, when the engineers have settled on the ideal valve-timing and injector size, when the tires are warm and the track is dry and the suspension settings tweaked just right – when all of these stars are in alignment, you have a machine that will take you from zero to a buck eighty-five in about two heartbeats and keep you there for the better part of two hours.

The flip side of course is that one slight mishap or misadjustment and the whole thing blows up on you, sometimes literally. Valvestems snap, pistons seize, bearings spin, hoses burst and spew coolant all over the tires and the track. Or maybe the thing just runs like crap, surging and shuddering and hesitating, fighting you through the corners and trying its damndest to throw you into the haybales. And even if it does run properly, the engine has about three hours of life in it before it needs a rebuild or better yet a replacement. This is why factory teams travel with entire replacement engines ready to swap out at an hour's notice if need be.

What, then, of the second bike?

The second bike is more like my R60. Carbureted. Points ignition. Compression in the range of 10:1 and a combustion chamber shape that in no way resembles a Frank Gehry building. Everything is overbuilt and heavier than it needs to be, and pretty much anything that goes wrong can be addressed with a set of wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers. Keep the oil changed and the valves adjusted, the thing will go forever. It won't go real fast, but it gets you where you're going fast enough and you still have fun getting there, without the sense of straddling a time bomb at one-eighty plus. There are plenty of thrills to be had but at the end of the day you can put the bike to bed knowing that when you hit the starter tomorrow it will fire up compliantly and do it all again, even if the timing is half a degree off and the plugs are partway fouled. Anything that goes wrong you can probably fix with a set of wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers, but most likely nothing will go wrong in the first place.

 

The hotel kitchen was a MotoGP caliber machine, but it had to run unceasingly without the luxury of a shutdown for repair and rebuilding. Parts were changed on the fly and if a crucial piece let go at crunch time then the wreckage was spectacular. My new gig at Redwest is more akin to the second, more workaday machine. Not as flashy, not as glamorous, and without the adrenaline-soaked thrill incurred by simply keeping both wheels on the ground. Overbuilt, with inherent redundancy such that two or three people can call out sick and the place keeps on running. More forgiving, with lower expectations, but with plenty of room to push the envelope if you're so inclined. When something does break down, it is generally a pretty easy fix. I can change a menu item at the last minute, substitute one dish for another, pull a barista to help serve food when a cook doesn't show. Dissatisfied guests are bought off easily with a comped lunch, neighboring cafes are close at hand to swap product with, and the clientele and management alike are easily impressed with even a modest effort to raise the bar. Yesterday I made prosciutto-wrapped salmon as one of the entree choices and my new team looked at me like I had just invented fire. It felt good.

 

As a much wiser man than I once said:

 

"It's more fun to ride a slow bike fast than it is to ride a fast bike slow".

 

Agreed.