by Scott Haas
“My cooks have to keep up with the orders,” said Tony. “It’s my job to make the guests happy.”
The great chefs are capable of responding to and anticipating the hunger and expectations of their customers. It is hardly a secret that they have a heightened sense of the same feelings as the people who come to eat their food. I have dined with chefs outside their restaurants, and they ordered just about everything on the menu until the table teemed with plates. Chefs are hungry all the time. Their insight into the emotions created by cooking and good food is deeper than that of most people they serve in their restaurants.
I looked back at Timmy, who was focused as he moved his stubby fingers like a watchmaker. I remember losing track of what I was doing when I line cooked and how I couldn’t keep up with the orders.
“That’s a skill,” said Tony. “Everything we do here involves learning new skills. Here. Watch this. Timmy, what are you working on?”
“Sauce for the veal, sprouts on the chicken, buns on burgers,” said Timmy, without looking up. “Waiting on the order to fire the onion rings for the pig’s tails.”
“Psychologically, I think that many people who enter the profession of cooking have trouble paying attention. ADHD, whatever,” said Tony. He still retained an interest in his college major. “You’re the shrink, I don’t know what to call it. Michigan was psychoanalytic and I didn’t get past the DSM-III.”
The DSM, developed by psychiatrists, is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by mental health clinicians. There are even more disorders now in the DSM-IV than in its predecessor and more still in the latest edition in 2013. A new disorder for every day. It’s like adding holidays.
“How about ADHD?” Tony asked. “Have you seen it?”
“Sure, I’ve seen it. It exists in nature. Overdiagnosed, but sure, it’s there, and I can see why you feel that your cooks are inattentive and how line cooking suits them.”
“Working in a kitchen gives them the structure they need to get focused,” he said.
“Do they take that strength and apply it to other parts of their life?”
“I do,” he said.
WITHIN THE PAST SIX MONTHS, TONY HAD BEEN WRITTEN UP IN GQ, THE New York Times, and Bon Appetit and had been named a James Beard finalist for Best Chef in the Northeast. People were coming in these days with higher expectations. He was no longer the chef at the cozy basement bistro he had opened nine years ago with two cooks. The Craigie on Main that customers had come to know about now had ten cooks, twelve waitstaff, and three general managers. On weeknights it averaged about 115 covers, and on weekends it averaged 130 to 140. They were seeing walk-ins at the bar area and at least two seatings.
“I was always ambitious,” Tony said, looking over another set of tickets that had just come in. Scratching off dishes completed, looking over his shoulder at the cooks, plating a beautiful-looking dish of veal three ways that his crew had cooked and handed to him. Watching Tony was like viewing an athlete who can adroitly perform many tasks at the same time. At one point I hung back, near Danny’s station, so that our conversation would not interfere with Tony’s efforts to expedite orders. He motioned me back.
“You don’t mind?”
“No,” Tony said. He laughed. “I like talking. I mean, you see what goes on here. Nobody talks to me! Not a rock star among them.”
“No one?”
“No one,” he said. “Not yet. Maybe Jess. We’ll see.”
Jess was Tony’s pastry chef. A bio major at Stanford, she decided against applying to medical school and chose instead to pursue a passion for baking. Hair pulled back, pale blue eyes, a ready smile, agile, and moving like a person who chose to respond or not, she had great social confidence. She fit in, but she also conveyed a mature perspective that made others around her try to gain her favor and respect.
Until Jess arrived at Craigie, Tony concocted all the dessert recipes, keeping the list small, and had his cooks execute them. Jess stood apart from Danny, who, like James Brown, was the Hardest Working Man in the Business but lacked a desire to invent, and from Lydia, another sous chef who wanted to pursue her own interests. Jess understood Tony’s outlook—creativity over tradition.
Watching the cooks at the five stations of the open kitchen, I could see how their exuberance trumped their finesse. Tony needed to step in often to correct their mistakes. He shook his head frequently in exasperation.
“Can’t you hire cooks with greater ability? Or teach them what they need to know?”
“It’s complicated,” Tony said. “The short answer? No.”
Craigie was unlike any other high-end kitchen I had been in. At other renowned establishments where I had spent time in the kitchens, the cooks worked with consistent, high-level abilities, and there was usually an executive chef in charge. The executive chef does not primarily create, but rather orchestrates the menu of the chef. It is like the difference between being a composer and being a conductor.
Craigie, it seemed, was a work in progress. Did that mean that Tony was a work in progress, too? Perhaps, despite his complaints, did he enjoy feeling indispensable?
“So what’s your plan?”
“I’m trying to get Danny to do what I do so that once a week I can get a night off,” Tony said.
Danny heard us and looked over. He smiled and then bent in, shoulders caved, to season the huge, beautiful Vermont chicken that had been cooking, sous vide, for hours and was now ready for final, high-temperature roasting. The aroma of the bird was so intense that I closed my eyes and could readily imagine how good it would taste.
“Danny,” said Tony. “Take over.”
Danny stopped what he was doing, wiped his hands on his apron, and took Tony’s place at the pass. Danny always had on a game face: wildly impressive energy that benefited most from a coach telling him which play to make rather than to decide what to do on his own.
“Let me show you around,” Tony said.
As we walked through the open kitchen to the narrow staircase leading to the Civil War–era stone-and-dirt basement, Lydia brought Tony a plate of Portuguese sardines to see if they had the right texture.
Tony took a bite. She stood before him, plate in her palm, expressionless.
“Fucking awesome,” he said.
“Thanks, Chef,” Lydia said. She said it with diffidence, not needing his praise to feel better about herself but pleased to have done the job properly. It meant that she now had time to do the next thing on her long list of tasks.
Little in the restaurant was intended to have emotion attached to it, which is really what made it functional. The focus was on the food, not on the person making it. Emotion had no part in the execution of the dishes by the cooks. The only person allowed to express feelings was Tony.
He led us through the commotion of the basement prep area, where a half-dozen prep cooks and line cooks were grinding meat, making stock, breaking down fish and pork and chicken, cutting up squid, and stirring sauces. The vibe was outlaw, as it often is in restaurants, with beards, tats, profanity, dark comedy, and threats. I had to wonder if the copping of the identities came from well-thumbed copies of Tony Bourdain’s classic, Kitchen Confidential, or if the bad-boy and bad-girl mentality was a true reflection of the cooks around me.
Watching them in action, I realized it was both. For sure, most of these cooks were incapable of fitting into a nine-to-five setting where they had to act normal. Their poor eye contact, limited social skills, unique verbal styles, and general unwillingness to take it easy meant that this crew, like so many restaurant workers, saw life very differently from most people. Their intensity set them apart.
On top of that, they embraced their isolation, the love and commitment that kept them up day and night cooking, cutting meat, making stocks, and so on. If they were banned from the straight world, well then: Good-bye, straight world!
Beyond the prep area was Tony’s office, which resembled a cave. It had a low ceiling. The only light came from
a small lamp on a long wooden worktable. Then we reached a tiny room that was next to the wine cellar. Here a recent culinary school graduate handed Tony a plate of uncooked pasta made in-house.
The kid was only a few years out of high school. He tried to look Tony in the eye but was intimidated by him. Tony was about twice his age, a well-known chef, a man that the boy dreamed of becoming one day. Maybe, maybe not.
The pasta was to be a new dish for the bar and an item, if Tony felt like it worked, on the tasting menu.
Tony had bought a sleek pasta machine from Italy and placed it in this back room. He rolled a tubular item between his thumb and index finger.
“What do we call it, Chef?” asked the cook.
“I don’t know,” said Tony. “Penne? Pennette? Rigatoni?”
“Garganelli?” I asked.
“Maybe,” said Tony.
This restaurant, it was becoming apparent, was based on spontaneity. The chef made up many things as he went along.
“At our first location,” Tony explained, “when I first opened, I changed the menu literally every day. No limits!”
This made no sense to me based on what I had observed for decades in other restaurants with other chefs whose aim was consistency. Most chefs I knew wanted their crews to cook food with precision and repetition. I did not understand why anyone would not want to learn to cook a dozen or even fewer dishes perfectly and would rather indulge in experimentation.
Unlike a French, Italian, or Japanese restaurant, where what is served is driven by the rules of the cuisine, family kitchens, and regions or terroir, where the chef is the interpreter or intermediary, Craigie on Main is a restaurant where the chef decides everything. There was a menu at Craigie with items that stayed the same for weeks and even months, but a huge part of the restaurant was the chef’s six- or eight-course tasting menus, which often changed nightly, even hourly, and were called, accurately, “Chef’s whim.” For example, a pork heart sausage panino? Why not? Swordfish wrapped in guanciale? Sure! Slow-cooked Spanish sea eel? Of course!
I could see where this would lead to problems with cooks who did not share Tony’s vision, could not execute his ambitious designs, and were unable to keep up with his drive. I wondered why he would invite these problems. Tony had said that he did not have a crew with the prerequisite skills. But he refused to create a menu that matched the skills of his cooks; the cooks had to match his demands of the menu.
It made me think of something Duke Ellington had said: that he wrote tunes based on the talents of his bands. Long sax solos for Johnny Hodges, percussive triumphs for Sonny Greer.
Likewise, wouldn’t it be simpler and less stressful to serve food that a crew was capable of cooking? Or was running Craigie an outlet for Tony’s anger and frustration that would be completely out of place in a nine-to-five job?
“How do you explain this to your cooks?” I asked.
“Explain what?” he asked.
“Each new dish.”
“Part of my job.”
“Frustrating.”
“True dat,” he said.
“You know, Tony, one reason why many chefs focus on creating a well-defined, relatively unchanging menu is because that’s what their cooks are capable of doing.”
“Right,” he said. “Of course. But I believe we can take it to the next level at Craigie.”
“Have you come close to reaching that level? In the nine years since you’ve been a chef-owner?”
“No,” he said.
“You keep trying.”
“I do.”
“Maybe you enjoy being angry and frustrated.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He positioned the fingers of his right hand onto his chin, narrowed his eyes, and grinned. The appealing pose was just like a PR shot he had on the restaurant’s website!
“What I’d love to do is have a restaurant without menus. You sit down, you eat what I cook,” he said.
This was not the first time I had heard this—I knew many other chefs who felt exactly the same way: Thomas Keller and Daniel Humm ran restaurants based on that principle.
“Yeah,” said Tony. “If people would just let us do what we do best, they would have a better overall dining experience.”
“Many people feel that deciding what to eat for themselves is part of the dining experience.”
“You don’t drill your own teeth, do you?” he said. “You don’t repair your car engine. Why should eating in a restaurant be any different?”
“Many people feel it’s a control issue. They struggle with the kitchen. They fight with the chef.” I laughed. “That’s part of the fun of dining out for them.”
He made a thumbs-up for the still-unnamed pasta and took me back to the prep area. The culinary kid nodded and scurried away. I heard, “Whew,” as he took a deep breath.
At prep, vision met chore. We were knee deep among plastic trays holding squid, peeled potatoes no bigger than casino dice, and the nightmarish, residual, unidentifiable by-products of creatures that, not too long ago, had probably been given organic feed while roaming free range until the moment they were separated from their sustainable herd or school and slaughtered humanely.
“You got the burger rolls under control?” Tony asked Dakota, one of his cooks.
Dakota had a mischievous look; he seemed almost feral, as if he were a fox come to life. Long hair, sometimes up in a samurai bun, other times on the sides and parted, cultivating a Depp look. Always grinning, always looking as if he might let you in on a private joke if he thought you were cool enough. He made people around him want to act cool.
“Yes, Chef,” said Dakota.
“The burger is driving me fucking nuts,” said Tony.
“Why not take it off the menu?” I asked.
“Too late,” he said. “It’s too popular. Look, it’s a start by taking it out of the dining room. Soon I’ll make it so that I only have enough burgers to sell eighteen a night. When the eighteen are sold, the burger will be gone for the night, eighty-sixed.”
It was ironic that a chef devoted to improvisation had wound up with a cheeseburger. Here was a man who had trained in high-end kitchens, including Clio (Boston) and Coyote Cafe (Santa Fe), whose oeuvre was the multiple-course, tiny-portioned cuisine synonymous with upscale dining. Yet the dish that many knew him for was a burger the size of a Buick with a side of French fries.
“I want to talk to you about that burger later,” I said, turning a page in my notebook. I thought of an artist who wanted to paint in oils but whose claim to fame was a clever and humorous Hallmark card. “I’m curious to know how it reflects your personality.”
Tony shrugged. “My personality?” he said. “There’s more to what we do at Craigie than the burger. That’s the point.”
I realized later that Tony was absolutely right: The burger had nothing to do with his personality. Sometimes a burger is just a burger. It was a delicious part of a smart business plan. At $21 (with bacon), each one was making him great money. His inclusion of the burger was no different than the sides sold with beef at steak houses. Ben Benson, owner of the eponymous restaurant in New York City, told me that years ago: The profit does not come from the steak, but from the double-digit-priced sides of baked potatoes, vegetables, and salads. The burger was Tony’s version of a side to his “real” menu. It was not his fault that critics and 30 percent of Craigie’s covers fell for the burger when the source of his pride in being a chef was in his far pricier and elaborate tasting menus.
“BEAUTIFUL TAOTOG,” SAID MATT, WHO WAS ONE OF THE PREP COOKS.
“Blackfish,” Tony explained to me.
Matt, a tall, bearded man with a loopy grin, had on a pillbox hat that kept his long hair from falling into the food. Using a pair of tweezers to extract tiny bones from the fish, while supervised by Tony, he was not having an easy time of it.
“Here, look, let me show you again,” said Tony. He sighed, running low on patience, as he held the fillet in place and s
wiftly pulled out tiny bones that were as thin as dental floss. “See?”
“I got it, Chef,” said Matt.
“I’ve got to work with Matt on this fish,” said Tony. “It’s an ongoing problem.”
Matt worked on the fish. After a few minutes, he presented the finished product again to Tony. Matt’s brow furrowed. He stood back with his hands bent in at his hips.
“For every bone I find,” Tony said to Matt, “you give me ten push-ups. Okay?”
“I nearly got it last time,” Matt pleaded with him. “Just one bone.”
“One bone is one bone too many,” said Tony. Anger turned his face red. “Fuck!”
“Yes, Chef,” said Matt. He sighed and returned to the task. Tony watched him intently and then examined the fish, which Matt said he had finished deboning: tiny bones still apparent.
“I’m…going…to show you…again,” said Tony. He shook his head and pursed his lips, then stepped up to where Matt had been and began the extractions. Swiftly, within moments, little bones were lined up alongside the fish. “That’s how you do it, Matt. Okay?”
I could not get over this: We were in the middle of dinner service and the fish needed upstairs still was not ready. No wonder Tony was upset. Why didn’t his cook know what to do? Was it a combination of Tony’s difficulty in teaching him properly and Matt’s inability to absorb his lessons?
“Yes, Chef,” said Matt.
Danny had come downstairs. “Chef?” He had a spoonful of stock for Tony to taste.
Tony tasted the stock. Danny stared at the spoon and rubbed his chin.
“It’s missing something,” said Tony. “I’ll give you two guesses. You have to guess; I’m not going to tell you.”
Not a word from Danny. This went on for longer than Tony thought to be necessary. The frustration showed on his face. He rolled his eyes. I thought: How could he subject himself to this every night? Unless he found it appealing.
