Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  The men and women who choose to be chefs have transformed self-doubt into consistent hard work, dedication to service, and creativity. Chefs are the opposite of the mentally ill whose passivity and repetition of past failures dooms their relationships, productivity, and sense of well-being. Still, I see the roots of what drives chefs and where the restlessness lies in them. I am drawn to the turmoil of chefs and their narrative of feeling incomplete. They work hard to feel better about themselves, obviously, and when they succeed in that endeavor, they feel pride and satisfaction for a while.

  I feel protective of them, and I admire their resilience.

  WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE TRUEST ACCOUNT OF WHAT HAPPENED WITH TONY Maws after spending a year and a half in his restaurant to find out what motivates him and how he leads those in the back of the house and throughout the restaurant.

  I.

  NOT HIS FATHER’S FOOD

  ONE

  We’ll Head Them Off at the Pass

  FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” SAID TONY.

  Creative acts begin with anxiety. Scared or uneasy? Build a fire, write a ghost story like The Shining, compose a song like Coltrane’s “Alabama,” cook a nine-course meal to show love. One difference between the artist or performer and a person who suffers from anxiety and is disabled by it is that the creative individual manages more routinely to use the worrying to inspire action.

  I was thinking about anxiety and creativity as I watched Tony at the pass where the food is looked over, and corrected if necessary, before being brought to tables by servers. It was my first night of observation.

  I had e-mailed Tony a few weeks after my first visit to see if we could meet up in the restaurant. I asked him if I could shadow him and learn what inspired his remarkably personal culinary approach, and then in thirty minutes, with a handshake, he had agreed to let me in. I was stunned by the speed of his trust and confidence. He applied no rules or conditions to my visits or my writing: I could come and go as I liked, talk to whomever I liked, and he did not demand or ask to see what I had written until after it was published. That philosophy or outlook applied to his style of cooking: Spontaneous, sure of himself, implicitly asking the person he trusted to believe in him and show him comparable respect.

  As the chef-proprietor of Craigie on Main, widely regarded by national critics as one of the country’s best restaurants, Tony stood at the pass of his open kitchen looking like a bundle of energy, a vortex.

  “Ordering eight tastings! Five three-way porks! Two hiramasa! One pig’s head!” he said.

  Cooks recited back: “Ordering eight tastings! Five three-way porks! Two hiramasa! One pig’s head!”

  The ticker tape of fresh orders, known as tickets, came in. Tony glanced down.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he said.

  His face glowered. He looked as if he had been called a bad name. He was still as a statue, seething.

  He was looking at a fifth order for a burger, medium rare. Tony did not become a chef in order to fry burgers. When he opened Craigie on Main, he knew he would have to have a bar menu, so he created the burger. Like many upscale restaurants, from the lounge at Daniel to the bar at Harvest in Harvard Square, chefs cater to people on the go, dining solo, or eager to eat good food without fuss.

  As he explained the basics of what it took to make the burger, Drew Romanos, one of his three general managers, came closer to coax him into whispered, confidential communication. Drew was tall, lean, and so graceful in his movements that he inspired calm in those around him. Tony leaned in and Drew spoke into his ear.

  “Chef, VIP four-top, any suggestions on what to send out?”

  Tony looked at the guest list for the evening. Each name had to its right a brief description of the occasion being marked in the restaurant or some notes about preferences, such as: Hyun: Daughter’s birthday. Duerler: Wedding anniversary. Horton: Comes in weekly, no pork. Goldman: With State Department.

  “Look at this,” Tony said. “People used to go to L’Espalier for special occasions. Now they’re coming here!”

  Craigie on Main was more expensive than L’Espalier, one of Boston’s top restaurants, described on its website as serving “New England–French” food: The average tab for two at Craigie was well over $200 ($63 per person for three courses, exclusive of tax, cocktails, wine, and tip) and could easily be as much as $350 or more if the customers ordered tasting menus ($115 per person for eight courses; $95 for six courses, exclusive of tax, cocktails, wine, and tip)—but it was informal and inviting. High-end dining without the formality, with a waitstaff in jeans, aprons, and black shirts. Wooden floors, simple flatware. With the restaurant’s low-key atmosphere, the food was the emphasis.

  Which is why Tony was disappointed about the burger and decided that, as of Tuesday, he would serve them only in the bar. “No more burgers in the main dining room!”

  It would be a challenge to move burgers into the bar only. Especially following the burger’s debut on the cover of Bon Appetit in September 2010, customers were coming for the sole purpose of having a Craigie on Main burger.

  “We can move the guests to the bar area if they insist on having the burger,” he said. “It may be a problem at first.”

  “Chef?” said Drew.

  Drew’s bushy eyebrows went up and down. He had been waiting for Tony to tell him what to send out as a comped or free dish to the VIP customers.

  “Send them a terrine,” Tony said.

  Drew conferred with one of the sous chefs, and Tony returned to the tickets that by now were coming in fast. Meanwhile, behind him, the pace was picking up. He had two cooks, a man and a woman, both medium height and slender, at garde manger who were assembling sets for the burgers. Four cooks, all men with the bony bodies of runners, were on two sides of an enormous contraption that held a salamander oven, a long and rectangular griddle, and four burners. To his immediate left: a sous chef slicing fish, another cook getting chickens ready for extended roasting.

  Below us, in the basement, was the prep area where Tony’s second sous chef commandeered the prep crew: all hard-core, built like boxers with attitudes to match, most Spanish-speaking, most tat-covered. It was here that the restaurant’s engine was kept powered from four A.M. until one A.M.

  Back at the pass, Tony was the epitome of calm among all the commotion: guests being led to tables, servers dropping off orders, the GM handling a disputed bill, the line cooks moving like bees. At five feet, eight inches tall, in his early forties, with a slight beard that resembled Ben Affleck’s look in The Town, he has a canny grin, a looped gold earring, and a lean appearance.

  “How do you do it?”

  “I love it,” he said. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”

  “You always knew you wanted to be a chef?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Getting things accomplished. Feeding people, making them happy. The pace. The setting: staying up late and being in the restaurant world that is so different from the world others outside of it live in.”

  “From what age?”

  “Oh, since I was a child,” he said.

  I was skeptical.

  Tony grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish American household, in Newton, a well-off Boston suburb, with no ties to the restaurant industry. He was raised by two highly successful parents who believed in the power of education, and he attended Belmont Hill School, an exclusive, all-boys, private day school, and then he had gone to the University of Michigan, where he studied psychology. While his parents encouraged his interests, they certainly never intended to send him to elite schools in order for him to become a cook. A dream to be a chef rooted in childhood fantasy and experience was unlikely.

  I sensed that another narrative existed alongside it. Everyone has a public persona that is often utterly different from who he or she is once you acquire trust through intimacy. Generally, what we express to others, especially those we do not particularly know well, is part of that public narrative. Meanwhile, so obviously that it
may not be worth stating, there is what we keep to ourselves. That is a huge part of the pleasure of deep relationships, whether as a parent, a spouse, a child, a close friend, or even a shrink: getting to know the person who is overshadowed by the demands of reality.

  I knew there was something else that drove Tony to work in professional kitchens. And if I could discover his motivation for becoming a chef, I knew I might understand how he created the highly personal story of his restaurant and inspired his staff. Whatever motivated him was what he considered critical in leading others.

  “I’ve always thought about food,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “So you know what I’m talking about,” he said.

  He smiled. He has a remarkable smile, a memorable one; with his small teeth and thin lips, his mouth is wider than expected and seems, through its exposure, to inspire. It is one of those genuine smiles that the wearer can use to persuade others to be happy around him so that he might acquire some of that pleasure from outside himself, as there is not enough within. It is the smile of a shy person trying to be bold.

  “Yes, but thinking about food and running a restaurant are not the same thing. So, no, I don’t know. I don’t think about food 24/7 the way you do.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” he said.

  He spoke like a guy who had gotten a tat talking to another guy who was thinking of getting one.

  We were approaching eight o’ clock on a Thursday night, and the tickets were flying in even faster than before. Jazz played louder over the restaurant’s speakers: Bill Evans competed with the din and laughter of hungry customers. It felt like a scene, a sophisticated private party, a place to be, better than a quiet dinner at home or a romantic evening quelled by small talk.

  Waitstaff had a crisp look as they went to tables holding plates of food, but when they reached Tony at the pass, a few appeared to be discombobulated. Some were more professional or experienced, but others were scared. They were clearly the recent hires.

  “Chef, three people at my four-top finished their entrées,” said Billy, a gangly guy who looked like he played guitar when he wasn’t serving. It was an effort for him to stand up straight. He would last only a few months at the restaurant and then leave, like many others in the restaurant industry, to parts unknown. “Should I wait to bring out dessert menus?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” said Tony.

  The waiter looked as if he were going to burst into tears. Tony ignored this. He did not even look up. He crossed off orders that had been completed. He had a job to do; this was not the time or the place for the waiter to indulge in emotions. It was typical restaurant hierarchy: The chef was entitled to say whatever he liked, but those over whom he had authority had to do what they were told. It was not a discussion; it was about following the chef’s orders.

  Nor was it a TV food show where tantrums took place unrealistically in order to entertain viewers. It was unusual for guests to overhear anything coming out of the kitchen above the sizzling, the clanging of pots and pans, and the typical restaurant noise. Depending on where people sat and what night it was, one might hear blasts of profanity. Tonight, as with most nights, Tony spoke with firmness in his voice, rather than with pure, undiluted rage. He did not quite yell. He hardly raised his voice—most of the time. He would occasionally scream, and he never threw a physical tantrum. With floor staff, he might swear or at times speak with derision. With cooks, he literally got inches away from them periodically—“You have to get in their face,” he had told me—and with language familiar to a Marine drill sergeant, sometimes with the barking, he told them what the fuck they were doing wrong.

  For the job to get done, the staff had to tamp down emotions from their work and absorb the emotional blows—in some ways, it was in part what made the job deeply frustrating and stressful: What was pent up did not go away until after work, when everything that had been bottled up could lead to all kinds of trouble.

  TONY FINALLY LOOKED UP AND SAID TO BILLY, “OKAY, WAIT. WAIT UNTIL the fourth cover is done.”

  He shook his head and crossed off a completed order on a ticket.

  “This is my life. No one can make a simple fucking decision without coming to me,” Tony said. “They don’t take ownership. They don’t figure things out for themselves. Pisses me off! That’s why I have to be here all the time. No time off.”

  Tony had a sous chef, but he didn’t have an executive chef who could run things for him, which I did not understand. Most chefs at his level have someone to turn to routinely so that they can take time off.

  “Did you ever have someone? In the nine years since you opened your first place?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Hmm.”

  “ ‘Hmm?” he said with a big smile. “What’s that mean?”

  “It just makes me wonder what dynamic you’ve created here,” I said, writing to keep up with our conversation. “You’re in charge, you want at times to get away, but you can’t delegate your authority.”

  “It’s a real problem,” Tony said. “I’m not making this up.”

  The action swirled around him. He looked as if he had been caught up in the surf and that rather than worrying about whether he would topple over, he was thriving on the undertow. He seemed to love the stress.

  “Chef?”

  Danny, one of his sous chefs, was at his side. He was shorter than Tony, incapable of standing still, and wiry. He kept touching his face, flexing his arms, and moving his head from side to side. He showed Tony a small plate on which he had placed a fillet of sea bass.

  “Wrong,” said Tony. “All wrong. Fuck!”

  It was wrong, too. Even I could see that. The idea was to slice the rectangle of fish into paper-thin slices that would then be put on a bed of watermelon radish wafers after which a yuzu-infused oil would be sprinkled over everything. For crunch, little fried bits of shashito pepper. This was a perfect idea for a dish: plenty of umami, beautiful presentation, ingredient driven, with a relatively simple technique required to create and assemble it. There was only one catch.

  “Nobody knows how to cut fish in my kitchen,” said Tony.

  This was a surprising and honest admission, especially considering the high prices charged for the fish, but Tony explained as he went to the cutting board to show Danny how to do it right.

  “This is why,” Tony said, leaning in, putting the right amount of pressure on his knife so that it glided in, “I am”—moving with the blade—“here”—and now pulling back—“every night.”

  Danny stood by his side. It was clear that he knew what was required of him, equally clear that his efforts were inconsistent, and evident that this predicament was a source of tension between the two men.

  “C’mon, Danny,” said Tony. “C’mon. Got to stay focused, get your head out of your ass!”

  He spoke like a frustrated older brother to a younger sibling whom he loved, but who also kept dropping the easy pop fly. The anger in his voice was powerful, but again, he was motionless. The economy of movement that was needed to cook efficiently applied to nearly everything in the restaurant.

  I had to wonder how a fancy restaurant like Craigie could operate consistently when the cooks clearly did not have the skills needed to get the job done on a day-to-day basis.

  “Some of them have the skills,” Tony said, “but they just don’t use them without me teaching them constantly. Plan B: From now on, I cut all the fish. Nobody else will cut the fucking fish. Done!”

  “Why not just drop everything and do the burgers? That’s something your crew can do. They would fly out the door. You’d be able to spend more time with your wife and son. Less stress, more fun.”

  “Because we should aspire to do more,” Tony said. He had a steely look that made me think of Max Payne from the popular video game. Defined by the task, on a mission. It was flat-out inspiring to see and hear, especially when I knew that so many people go through life searching for an activit
y to bring meaning. Tony had found that and, though it may sound corny, I saw this in his face. “When my crew is on, we’re the best in the city. No compromise!” As I watched the cooks struggle to keep up with orders, their focus and speed had become more intense with every minute as the room was filling up. Watching these men and women, in the open kitchen, was fascinating as it provided a sense of the purpose that cooking brought to their lives.

  “When you’re working the line, you can feel rhythm and speed,” Tony said. “One reason it’s hard to relax after work. It takes discipline to establish focus, maintain it, and then find ways at the end of the night to let it go.”

  “Sex and drugs and rock and roll.”

  “Exactly. Back in the day,” said Tony. “Old school. Sure, that was the way it used to be.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “No, man,” he said. “Can’t.” Big smile. “Can’t. We’ve got work to do. We’re the best. Craigie is the best. We can’t play around with that.”

  Tony admitted that part of the attraction of becoming a chef, at the very beginning, was the sex, the drugs, and the rock and roll. But he also talked about how it was much, much, much more than that. “It was the feeling of getting something done. Even if it was just washing a sink full of dishes. When the job was done, the results were immediate.”

  Tony compared the high one gets from line cooking to the feeling of being in the zone that athletes talk about when the work takes over and they enter a transcendent consciousness that alters time. I knew what he was talking about. I had been a line cook and loved feeling that nothing mattered outside the dish I was working on. The sense of accomplishment from that immediacy was great. Little else yields results so quickly outside of sex or competitive sports.

  “I mean, look at Timmy,” Tony said.

  He pointed out a stocky, tattoo-covered cook with biceps as thick as a python. He was stirring a small pot of sauce, frying up baby brussels sprouts, and grilling buttered buns for the burgers. The delicate nature of his movements contrasted with his appearance. He looked like a roadie or biker. Cooking was clearly Timmy’s way of letting go and, whether he realized it or not, a way to stay true to being a tough guy while nurturing others.