by Scott Haas
Advance praise for
BACK OF THE HOUSE
“Forgive the unappetizing metaphor, but Scott Haas is a fly on the wall at Craigie on Main. He sees all, hears all, tells all. Did the wonderful chef Tony Maws know he revealed so much?”
—Alan Richman, GQ Food and Wine Critic
“Haas is that rare breed of writer: part investigative reporter, part father confessor, wrapped up in the poetry of culinary genius and served with a twist of humor.”
—Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana
“Scott Haas provides an insider’s perspective that truly takes you into the belly of the restaurant-industry beast.”
—Drew Nieporent, restaurateur (Tribeca Grill, Nobu, Corton)
“Reading Back of the House is like reading my own autobiography about my life in the kitchen. Scott brings out an uncensored, unbiased reality to the restaurant industry. Every young cook should sink their teeth into it.”
—Marc Vetri, chef and restaurant owner
“I look to Scott for digging deep to uncover what really motivates and inspires us. He is one of those rare food writers who brings an intelligence and understanding from beyond the kitchen to his culinary reporting.”
—Daniel Boulud, chef and owner of award-winning restaurants
“I have been waiting to read Scott Haas’s next book as his insights about restaurant kitchens are always informative as well as entertaining. His views on chefs surprise and delight.”
—Thomas Keller, chef and restaurateur
BACK OF THE HOUSE
THE SECRET LIFE OF A RESTAURANT
Scott Haas
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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BACK OF THE HOUSE
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2013 by Scott Haas.
Cover design by Jason Gill.
Cover photos (top) Hussenot / Corbis; (bottom) IStockPhoto / Thinkstock.
Book design by Kristin del Rosario.
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PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / February 2013
ISBN: 978-1-101-61927-8
An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
For Madeline and Nicholas
Like my mother used to tell me—if you’re good at something, never do it for free.
HEATH LEDGER, AS THE JOKER, IN THE DARK KNIGHT
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE: Not His Father’s Food
We’ll Head Them Off at the Pass
Baba Hannah
Show Some Emotion
The Chef Leaves Town
Dinner Without Tony
The Chef Returns Home
Some Words About the Food
The Son, the Chef
Rock Stars
Chef’s Night Out
Taking Ownership
Theory versus Practice
PART TWO: The Savior’s Butcher and Other Tails
Shadows
Attacked, Detoxed, Let Go
Destroy All Robots
A Chef in the Making
PART THREE: Families
Family Holidays
Bite the Big Apple
Stars in Their Eyes
PART FOUR: Cut
The Year-End Party
The First Thing You See, the Last Thing You See
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
UNLIKE MOST OF THEIR COLLEAGUES IN OTHER CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES throughout the world, the chefs of Boston and Cambridge, inspired in part by the great Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, are more celebrated for creativity than their devotion to or refinement of a specific cuisine, and Tony Maws, at Craigie on Main, is the most imaginative of them all. When the restaurant first opened in West Cambridge, the name had been Craigie Street Bistrot (Tony had insisted on what he viewed as the French spelling), and although it was within walking distance from my home, I had never eaten there.
The restaurant had been located in the basement of an apartment building in a posh neighborhood of West Cambridge, with views from its tables of shrubs and car bumpers, and it was unlike bistros in France, which typically serve moderately priced and simple, classic dishes.
Craigie Street Bistrot had a clientele with extremely deep pockets and served long, expensive dinners. Too rich for my blood, I thought; and, why would I eat in a basement?
The establishment also seemed to be limited by an ever-changing daily menu, posted outside its entrance, that when I read it, which I often did when walking my dogs, suggested a lack of focus and an inability to use a few ingredients to create flavor. I could not see a culinary tradition that might provide structure to what was being served.
The critics, local and national, however, were unvarying in their praise for Tony’s inventiveness and appreciation of both the food and financial markets. He shopped locally and altered his menu based on what he found from farmers and purveyors. Although he refused to carry any American wines—all his wines are still from Europe, predominantly France—his food was inspired by the New England region, by what was available locally.
I was intrigued when the restaurant relocated to Main Street in Central Square. The neighborhood is one of Cambridge’s liveliest. Increasingly, it combines the city’s tradition of political radicalism with very cool, crazy-hip restaurants, cafés, and bars. Across the street from the new Craigie you find a Pentecostal church, a cookie factory, and a fire station. Down the street is a huge public housing project. Around the corner: another Pentecostal church and a Puerto Rican restaurant called Izzy’s. Young and old, white folks and people of color, student and suburban, local and foreign, straight and gay and transgender can mingle without being hassled. It is a vibe I embrace. So I stopped in one night with my wife.
The restaurant was at street level; had a full bar, compared to just wine and beer at the old place; and, with its big, open kitchen and capacious dining room, seemed to be an effort to shift gears and be part of a happening area rat
her than exclusive. I figured that the food cooked and served at the new Craigie might reflect its setting, that the strain of purely upscale dining would be lessened. Open to the influences of passersby, no longer on a street of mansions, as the old Craigie had been, the new restaurant might be just the sort of place where people could stop by and eat good food without pretense or fuss. I was curious, too: After all these years that I had been avoiding it, what was Tony Maws cooking at Craigie? It was one thing to read about it. How did his food taste?
“I can’t eat anything here,” I said to Laura after looking over the menu that had been handed us by the amiable waiter. “I don’t recognize half the food that’s here, and what is familiar seems goofy.”
My wife suggested I have a salad, but I wondered if it might not be better to have drinks, go home, order a pizza, and watch a rental.
Something resembling a discussion followed, and then, just as I shifted in my seat and got up to leave, Tony stopped by to say hello. We had not met before, but I had interviewed him by phone for a piece I had done for Gastronomica on sous vide cooking. He had seen my name on the night’s guest list. I had been impressed during our phone interview by his wit, knowledge, intelligence, and honesty.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he said.
We shook hands. He has small, delicate hands.
“Good, good, great,” I said.
“Decided?” he asked.
“I’m having the oysters and then the swordfish,” said Laura, with a barely noticeable so-there glance in my direction.
“Excellent choices,” said Tony. He took her menu and cocked his head to look at me with a grin.
“Ah, I don’t know,” I said. “Pig’s tails?”
“Got to have the tails,” said Tony. “And for your main course?”
It was early in the restaurant’s evolution, only a few months since its move to Central Square, and there were no burgers or pasta on the menu yet. The menu seemed to be a hodgepodge of surefire hits like beef and weird courses like a ragu of pork hearts and uni. Tony did not seem sure of what he wanted the new place to be. This indecision was reflected by what was on the page, I felt, and being there was unlike being in a good Italian, French, Chinese, or Japanese restaurant where the personality or character of the chef, how he or she felt and thought, mattered far less or not at all in comparison to what was on the plate. The menu here seemed more ego-driven than many places where I had dined, but unlike the egoistic restaurants of Keller, Boulud, Ripert, Pasternack, Batali, or Carmellini, here I saw a lack of focus and a cry for help.
“Why don’t you decide?” I said pleasantly, handing the menu back to him.
Tony took the menus, smiled broadly, and bounded back to the kitchen.
“This is ridiculous,” I said to Laura. “This place is ridiculous.”
We were seated in the bar area, which had filled up with happy, healthy-looking people, well dressed, drinking cocktails, untroubled by what I believed to be a troublesome menu. By their relaxed postures and the spontaneity of the thundering laughter, it was evident that I was the problem here.
“You need to relax,” said Laura, taking my hand, pretending as usual to be unaware of the gravity with which I regard food and dining.
“I am relaxed,” I said. “This is relaxed.”
I thought about it: Why be incurious?
Laura was right, of course, as usual. I needed to absorb what was happening rather than distance myself from it by being analytical, which was a feature of my day job. I have worked as a clinical psychologist, chiefly in communities of color and locked, inpatient units of mental hospitals, for decades. Besides, what was there to analyze? I had not eaten anything!
I have to admit that I don’t like people to cook for me. I don’t like most restaurants; they usually seem fussy and overpriced and, like most artists, 95 percent of chefs are not good at creating memorable experiences. Dining out seems to me to be a colossal waste of time and money, unless it’s done right, a righteous distraction from more pressing needs.
Which is why, when I meet a great chef, it is transcendent. Many others feel that way, too, of course: Great food for the very lucky is the new privilege, almost a religious prerogative, a way to position ourselves in relationship to nature.
As I started to unwind, the first course arrived.
“Ah,” I said.
The tails.
The tails came on an egg-shaped plate in a thick, dark sauce topped with little ringlets of fried onions, and to say that they were delicious does not do them justice. I am sure that the same effect could have been achieved with oxtails, but I respected the chef for wanting to put his stamp on the food. They were extraordinary.
Raw oysters, swordfish, and striped bass: Each had a depth of surprising flavor, unanticipated due to an inability to place the dishes in a geography or a style. Not European, Asian, South American, or North American per se, not presented with some recognizable plating, just flat-out terrific.
When the evening wound down, I thought of Lupa, on Thompson Street in the West Village: gutsy flavors, and here at Craigie unencumbered by the need to conform to a rigid set of traditions or guidelines that apply to Italian cooking and are even mandated in some instances by the European Union.
“Wow,” I said to my wife.
“See?” Laura said.
What struck me that night, and on subsequent visits, was the freedom of the cooking. Principled food, driven by technique and informed by a global pantry; I saw in Tony’s dishes a kind of personal statement that relied on strains of the world’s flavors but did not muddy them or try to dazzle.
Tony had been to Asia once to cook for a week at an event in Singapore. Twenty years ago, he had been to Italy for a total of seven days, traveling by train from the northwest border with France down to the heel. He had traveled to London and Paris (multiple times), Mexico (three times), and Spain (four times). During his adolescence and twenties, he had once visited Morocco, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Greece, and Israel. His direct experience with French gastronomy came solely from living with a family more than two decades ago for two weeks in Champagne, working for six months in a restaurant near Lyon, and cooking with a French chef who had moved to San Francisco. He did not have a culinary tradition. Rather what Tony cooked was, gloriously, Mawsian.
The best restaurants are, in addition to the food being cooked and served, the ones in which the chef tells you his or her story. The emotions that inspire their cooking are felt in the dining room and on the plate, and it was obvious to me that night that Tony’s story was unique.
While the story of each restaurant varies, there are three common ones:
First, there is the restaurant where the chef tries to re-create the joy and sensuality of a childhood kitchen. Safe, warm, fun, spontaneous, and nurturing, these restaurants—Daniel and Jean-Georges are good examples—convey the love of a childhood spent with mothers and grannies while the men were outside working in the fields or conducting business. These restaurants are about pleasure and sexuality.
Second, there is the restaurant that conveys the child’s fantasy—The French Laundry, Robuchon, The Inn at Little Washington, and Le Bernardin come to mind—of rooms where finesse, anticipatory service, and calm define the experience. Here the chef tries to create the type of kitchen he wished he had known as a child. It is an idealized view that has little to do with the reality of the chef’s upbringing.
Finally, there is the restaurant that is extremely personal, such as Momofuku Ko or Craigie on Main. At these idiosyncratic places, the food and presentation are usually unfamiliar to customers. Unless you tell the kitchen you have an allergy to what is served on the tasting menus, the chef expects you to trust him, eat what is on your plate, and love the food. If you do not like it, go somewhere else. The defiance of early failure—letting down their families—is evident in this third type of restaurant.
At Craigie on Main, the food has no definable roots in a recognizable cu
isine, nor in techniques, flavors, or ingredients specific to a region or tradition. This is cooking with refinement, but without many rules. It is an ironic reversal of what customers experience in most high-end restaurants, which is why Chef Maws’s story is so compelling. The food is him.
“My food, my way of doing things, my menus,” Tony would tell me later.
The danger here is goofy cuisine, which is an extension of fusion cuisine, in which lots of ingredients from all over the world are piled onto a plate. Tony’s food required restraint. If you do not know when to stop, you should not attempt his type of cooking. Better to learn to make a good tomato sauce, where there is a clear beginning, middle, and end. With Tony’s cooking, he stopped when he achieved what he believed to be just the right taste.
What sets Tony apart, along with the few others like him, is his unwillingness to compromise on his creativity to conform to the paternalistic tradition of a specific cuisine. Like David Chang, another chef from the upper middle class with an extremely complicated relationship with his dad, Tony refused to cook a certain way because the rules of a culinary tradition demanded it. These men do not want to cook the food of their fathers.
It takes enormous nerve to cook with creativity, lead teams, and satisfy the hunger of strangers. As a result, chefs suffer terrible doubts about themselves and their work. I am at once drawn to chefs’ spellbinding mix of nerve and despair and moved by the sacrifices they make to take care of others. That predicament—feeling powerful and yet dependent on others for validation—makes them artists: creative, no matter what, but in need of an audience. The bad-boy mentality, being outlaws, the histrionic nature of their work? These are also very appealing to me.
Chefs are ecstatic when a night of service goes well, and devastated and humiliated when things have gone wrong. Their highs and lows are extreme. The restaurant slang for falling behind and risking failure says it all: in the weeds. Feeling lost, adrift, unable to reach solid ground, overwhelmed, but somehow embracing the struggle to restore order.
