Service Included

by Phoebe Damrosch

  So, when the management decided to offer only five-course menus on our second night of service, we knew we were going down. Even though we thought we had everything planned out, we discovered many an unaddressed issue even before the service began. Where were the butter knives? Could we leave the butter out or did it need to remain in the refrigerator? Wouldn’t it be too cold? How much water needed to be stocked for us to get through the night? Was it against health regulations to keep the ice scoop in the ice bin?

  By the second course, our training had gone out the window; this service was about survival, not finesse. I kept my cheat sheet with all the markings in my silverware drawer, but was still confused when I reached the table. Was it soup, soup, salad, pasta or salad, soup, pasta, soup? Meanwhile, we were out of forks and had to run to the dish station and polish more as our tables went without bread and water and made a mental note to report this oversight to whomever had invited them.

  In the restaurant business, we have a term for being so busy that professionalism, patience, and grace turns to hysterical, humorless chaos. We call it being in the weeds. The night of five-course hell was my first experience with being truly in the weeds at Per Se. I had just caught up with my marking and was about to offer more bread to some guests who had asked for it about two courses before, when my captain cut his eyes over to a table that needed to be cleared. I put down the breadbasket, cursing him under my breath. When we rounded the corner, out of view of the dining room, he piled his plates on mine, saying he needed to be in the station at all times. To what? Go butter up the general manager’s wife or top off full glasses of wine? I stormed into the dish room, slammed the plates down, and began to hurl each piece of silverware into its designated soapy bin.

  “Slow down, Chef,” said a quiet voice to my right.

  It was Chef Keller. Apparently, he had stepped in to relieve the dishwasher, who had also found himself in the weeds. I had just enough time to be mortified before sprinting back to my station to assess the damage. Chef Keller subsequently flew the head dishwasher from the French Laundry to New York to train the new team.

  For the most part, the excitement of the opening distracted me from how exhausted and anxious I was. I barely noticed sweating in my boxy suit, the noose around my neck, or the fact that I hadn’t had a chance to go to the bathroom in about six hours. On some weeks, I had two days off, one for school and one for sleep. But just as often, my school day was my one day off. Luckily, we had a night of pampering built into the pandemonium.

  Each of us had what many New Yorkers would kill for: a reservation at Per Se. Over the course of two evenings, the managers assigned each employee a party and time and instructed him to show up in proper attire. The staff was divided in two; while one half dined, the other half worked. I was on the floor for the first service and had Paul Roberts in my section, meaning that the pressure was off and we all had a good time. The following night, I lucked out again. In my party of six sat one of the maître d’s, and we were given VIP treatment. Thankfully, I took notes during and after the meal, because, with a wine per course, I never would have remembered anything after the first six canapés. I put stars next to the dishes that I loved: the Oysters and Pearls (a sentiment shared by most of the guests in my future), the lobster with English pea coulis and morels, and the degustation of lamb, featuring the braised shoulder and roasted saddle, fava beans, and chanterelles. On a separate page, I recorded my observations with many an exclamation point.

  Repetition! The fish knife doesn’t cut!! (It seemed my exclamation points increased with my wine intake.) André rocks!!!

  After the parties, the friends-and-family dinners, and the staff-on-staff meals, we were ready to get to work. It would be a relief to serve the kind of guest willing to listen to the reservation recording loop for hours. And it was. I loved their questions about the preparations of dishes, the ingredients, our staff, the fireplace—all of which I was relieved to be able to answer. No one asked the square footage of Central Park. As the first real week drew to an end, I genuinely looked forward to my future with the restaurant.

  ON OUR FIRST Saturday night, chefs hurriedly finished their mise en place for the busy service; captains, having ironed the linen and set the tables, debated wine pairings; kitchen servers practiced “spieling” the foie gras course. I entered a heated discussion with Patrick regarding what silverware to use for the potage parmentier. Technically it was a soup and should require only a spoon, but Patrick thought the crisp Princess La Ratte potato slices called for a knife, which, for the sake of symmetry, we agreed would mean a fork as well.

  “Is it smoky in here?” someone asked casually. This sent a few elbows into the ribs of Michael, the ex-cook and current captain whose six years with the company had earned him the privilege of tending the fireplace in the dining room. He shared the duty with the male maître d’s and managers who competed silently among themselves to see whose fire was the biggest. After one added a log, another went by to prod it.

  “Now that’s a fire,” I heard muttered on more than one occasion.

  I gathered during training that Per Se’s fireplace had required intense lobbying, being the first to have been allowed in a Manhattan commercial space in years. The extensive politicking must have been worth it to Chef Keller, who wanted to bring the homey touch of the French Laundry to the city. He had already traded an herb garden for Central Park and a small wooden house for thirteen thousand square feet in the Time Warner Building; his share alone was rumored to have cost twelve million dollars. Per Se housed other elements from the French Laundry, namely the blue front doors, accents of Australian oak, similar menus, and much of his California staff, but the fireplace was the heart of the dining room.

  Michael told me later that when he began to smell smoke, he walked to the offices in the back where the managers were having a meeting. “Thomas, there’s a bunch of smoke in the restaurant,” he remembers saying. For the moment, their attention was focused on that night’s service. After the week of fashionistas came a wave of gossip-prone foodies and press ravenous for a review. It was no wonder that management was distracted from the smoke now pouring into the restaurant. Only after another employee rushed in to deliver the same news did they follow Michael toward the dining room.

  There was no need to see the dining room, however, because one look made it clear that the smoke was not coming from the fireplace, but rather from the wall behind the fish butcher’s station. Someone called the fire department, and the managers turned their attention to getting everyone out. They first ushered us into the hallway connecting the back of the restaurant to the fourth floor of the Time Warner shops. Ignorant of the source of the fire, we suspected fireplace complications or a burned loaf of brioche, and resumed testing one another on the tea list and rehearsed spieling “torchon of foie gras with spiced winter fruits” and “tentation au chocolat, noisette, et lait.”

  “What are the winter fruits again?” asked one of the runners.

  “Apricots, dates, apples, figs.”

  “And, Julio. Don’t forget that fruit!”

  “Very funny,” said Julio.

  After a few minutes in the hall, one of the managers came through the doors and announced that we should proceed calmly down to the first floor. Chefs, in their royal blue aprons, and waiters, in their black suits, filled all three escalators, but only a few pairs of eyes looked up through the bookstore window. Quite a number of well-clad shoppers stopped to inquire about reservations, but on the whole, New Yorkers did what they do to anything out of the ordinary: they walked right by. There’s a reason the naked cowboy spends his days in tourist-filled Times Square—he would be ignored anywhere else in the city. As there was no alarm and the fire engines had yet to arrive, the collection of culinary professionals gathered in front of Williams-Sonoma looked more like participants in a massive cooking demo than victims of a fire. Only when the fire department pulled up did reality hit us.

  “Do you think I have time
to get a smoothie?”

  “There is no way we will open tonight.”

  “Shit, I left my stuff in coat check.”

  “I bet you T.K. will want to go down with the ship,” joked one of the captains brought in from the French Laundry. “This whole building will go up in flames and he’ll have to be dragged from the kitchen.”

  That caused a few laughs and nods, but the group was growing more serious. People began looking around to make sure everyone was there.

  “Where’s Michael?”

  As it turned out, Michael, who had been worried that his overenthusiastic use of kindling had indeed been the cause of the fire, stayed in the restaurant to see what he could do. The French Laundry captain had been right: Chef Keller refused to leave the kitchen. As the air filled with smoke, he stood at the heavy stainless-steel table in the center of the kitchen, known as the pass. In service, this is where the commanding chef and his sous chefs called out the orders and plated the food. The pass was the front line; on one side was an army of cooks, on the other an army of servers. If something went wrong on either side, this is where things turned ugly. At this moment, however, things had truly turned ugly. “Per Se’s on fire,” Chef Keller supposedly reported over and over into his cell phone, pausing only to swear and redial. He only put away the phone when a fireman climbed up on his $250,000 stove and raised an ax over his head.

  “That moment will be frozen in my mind forever,” Chef Keller later recalled in an all-staff meeting. The fireman had stood there, waiting for the sign from the chief, the chef explained. When the ax came down on the wall and flames leaped out, he knew that this wasn’t going to be a minor setback.

  For those of us who had been waiting downstairs, the news of the evening’s closure was like the phone call on a snow day. We headed back up the escalator to retrieve our belongings, which were safe in the locker room on the second floor. Not knowing the extent of the damage or what it would mean to our lives and our paychecks, it was agreed that the best thing for everyone would be to head across the street for a beer.

  At the staff meeting days later, we were instructed not to leave town because the restaurant could open any day. So for ten weeks, those who paid any attention to that commandment puttered around the city. Some of the chefs spent time in other restaurants’ kitchens, refining their techniques. The reservationists found guests reservations at other restaurants or rescheduled their Per Se reservations. The dining room staff underwent a correspondence course of sorts, involving daily testing. But this required only so much time, so most of us took on other challenges. Some found temporary jobs, others took classes. I skipped town for a long weekend and then embarked on a series of disastrous affairs.

  MY BROTHER, SAM, and my sister-in-law had just delivered their first baby, and I doubted that a chance to meet her would present itself again once the restaurant reopened, so I called my family in Vermont and announced that I would be there in a few days. When my mother picked me up at the airport, she seemed distracted, but I chalked it up to being a new grandmother. When she dropped me off at the bottom of my brother’s snowy driveway, I began to get suspicious. My father was waiting for me inside the house. After a quick introduction to the tiny and perfect Sophie, my father announced that, after thirty years, he and my mother were splitting up. Was there someone else? I wanted to know. There was. As soon as my father left, my mother came back, making it to the top of the driveway this time. She cried; my brother, Sam, cried; Sophie cried in solidarity; and I did what I always do in a crisis: I looked into dinner.

  “I feel like one family is beginning and another is ending,” Sam confided later that night as we cleaned up the kitchen. He made us Whiskey Sours, which are among his greatest gifts to the world, after genius photographs and peerless eggs Benedict.

  “At least you have a family,” I responded bitterly.

  My memory of that whole weekend is blurry, most likely because I didn’t let the reality of my parents’ divorce sink in until I was safe at home. I had been feeling less and less like their home was my own, but this confirmed it. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York. At least there I could count on tenant rights and the fact that no one could take my sunny studio away from me. This was the first time I had truly lived alone, and I was fiercely attached to my apartment. I was the one who monitored the thermostat and let the dishes stack up and left the screens open. For some reason, just knowing that my name was in the phone book in Brooklyn made me feel like I had an official place in the universe.

  When I returned to the city, I resumed my life with a new level of attention, as if I were observing it before crawling into my own skin. I savored my morning coffee ritual, grinding the beans, heating and steaming the milk, and prewarming my wide blue mug before settling in to the corner of my couch. Mornings were my own, the only sounds being the temperamental toilet whose handle liked to be just so, and the window that rattled, no matter how many novels I stuck between the panes. I rarely answered my phone in the hours between waking and stepping out of my door. Even when there was a lover in the picture, I preferred to have my mornings to myself. In fact, I had always liked the idea of living with someone in two separate, adjacent apartments, like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with the little bridge between their two houses.

  When I first moved to the apartment, I could see the Twin Towers if I leaned out the window. Now I saw sky for most of the year, until the tree outside thickened with leaves. From the roof, where I wasn’t allowed, I had a view that sparkled in the sun, sparkled in the dark, and glowed in the magic hours between. I loved the irony of Manhattan’s famous skyline and its billions of tiny lights; it is a view best enjoyed from the outside.

  My neighborhood in Williamsburg had none of the cobblestoned good looks of the West Village or even Brooklyn Heights. But there was a kind of stark beauty in defiant grass growing in sidewalk cracks, the contrast of flower boxes in warehouse windows, breathtaking murals on unclaimed walls. As spring eased itself into the city, I wandered, stopping every few hours for coffee and a chapter. Cafés overflowed anytime but early mornings, for there were few commuters in the neighborhood at that time. After noon, the self-employed, or unemployed, hipsters set up their laptops, soy milk lattes by their side, and proceeded to create ironic and subversive works of art, pausing every so often to brood.

  While waiting for Per Se to reopen, I completed my schoolwork for the rest of the semester and spent whole days reading entire books. Often, stocked with a bag of my own snacks, I saw two or three movies in a row. Edamame worked well, but garlicky steamed dumplings elicited stares. Sometimes I picked an unfamiliar neighborhood to explore and spent a few hours shopping for chocolate-chip cookies and town houses I was a few million dollars short of buying. One day, after spending hours wandering the city without speaking to a single person and feeling a little invisible, I decided to make a conscious effort toward that very state. I dressed all in black and sat quietly on a bench on Bedford Avenue for a while, watching waves of people emerge from the subway and the occasional pigeon landing. Eventually a man asked if he could sit down, thereby rendering me visible again and relieving me from my little experiment so I could go back to my apartment and my post at the window. This is how I spent my days.

  I told few people about my parents’ divorce but spent not a few evenings drowning my sorrows with my vacationing coworkers. I didn’t need this drama. I didn’t need a family. And I certainly didn’t ever need a man who was sure to leave me when I was least expecting it. When it came to men, I decided they were good for one thing. Any woman who thought otherwise was kidding herself and needed a wake-up call.

  With a new resolve to live life as a single-but-fabulous woman, I went ahead and kept dating. What did it matter anyway? It wasn’t like I was planning on getting married anytime soon. Or ever.

  THE FIRST GENTLEMAN had been in and out of town during our training, working on a project for the restaurant about which he had been vague. We saw a few movies and had a few
drinks and when he came to the end of his hotel stay, I did the hospitable thing and welcomed him into my home for a few days until he flew back to California. This was where it went wrong. When I think about that weekend, I picture an intersection. (I don’t drive a car, but I ride in one often.) I envision the kind of intersection without a light, where drivers take turns and politely wave one another through. In the case of this gentleman and myself, we alternated between staring at each other, drumming the pads of our fingers on the steering wheel (something I notice drivers often do when waiting their turn), and accelerating into head-on collisions. When he finally left, I went over to my bed to groan and pity myself for a while and then saw that he had tucked a piece of notepaper under the frame of my mirror with a simple sketch of an optimistic-looking daisy. “Flowers are best left to themselves,” it read. “Unsupervised, they flourish.” I agreed. But reading the note made me lonely in that kind of way one is lonely in a city of eight million people, when an empty connection is worse than being alone. I have few fond memories of that weekend, but I kept that note on my mirror until I moved two years later.

  I entered false start number two with a new coworker, knowing that this whole single-but-happy act was a sham. I still thought good relationships were improbable and marriage was a lie, but dating couldn’t hurt. This was a serious crush, which involved a lot of eyelash-batting and real dates. I even let him pick the restaurants. I was more used to dates that began with “I have this thing on Friday night” or “Do you want to share this cab?” The first time he kissed me, he paused a few inches from my lips to whisper, “May I?”