Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  “Okay,” said Tony angrily. “We need something to cut the bitterness. Maybe a little honey. What do you think?”

  “Honey, Chef,” said Danny. “Right away!”

  “See what I mean?” said Tony. “They can’t figure out these things on their own.”

  I nodded.

  “They need you,” I said.

  “Right,” said Tony. “My job is to motivate my crew. Keep them focused. Help them understand that I’m not going to praise them just for showing up. These millennials! This whole Generation Y, man, it’s like they think everyone loves them. It’s all they heard at home and in school. You can’t be critical because it hurts their self-esteem. What a fucking pain in the ass!”

  “You do love them,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “Oh, I love them,” he said, “but I also want to see them working without their heads up their butts. That’s why I have a daily kaizen for them.”

  Tony sounded like a teacher frustrated with students who need to have the same lessons repeated to them, but who has difficulty in seeing how his teaching style had contributed to that problem.

  “What do you need to work on today?” Tony said. “What needs improvement? What’s your kaizen right now?”

  He went from one prep area to the next.

  “James, what’s your kaizen today?”

  James, one of the line cooks, looked startled. Like most of the other cooks, he was in his twenties. Lanky, a man of few words, and clean shaven, he moved with an intentionality that suggested it was best to steer clear of him. He looked like a fragile, angry man who moved rigidly in order to keep from exploding. It was apparent that James had been elsewhere in his thoughts.

  “My kaizen?” he said.

  “James!” shouted Tony.

  James did not look sad or upset, not even preoccupied or distracted, just lost. He had the sort of look that likely worried others around him but was of no concern to him. He looked blank.

  “Right proportions for the pig face, better Peking pancakes, work on the texture for the boudin noir–hoisin sauce,” James said, finally. His voice was robotic.

  What James and Tony were referring to was the confit and roasted milk-fed pig’s head (for two) with Peking pancakes, spicy cucumber sambal, and boudin noir–hoisin sauce, for $60.

  “We sell about four or five of these every night,” Tony said, pointing to the pink half-face of what had once been a pig. “It’s delicious.”

  Who ordered the pig, I wondered. I imagined frat boys doing it on a dare, bored people who thought of themselves as adventurous eaters, or IT engineers.

  “No, man,” Tony said, “we get repeat orders.”

  “Some people,” said Matt, joining us happily, “got to have their pig’s head, man.”

  He and Tony laughed, and then Tony told me to follow him while Matt went back to the taotog. He led me to a stocky man, short in stature, with thick black hair, a pocked face, and a thin mustache, who was working at a meat grinder, not saying a word.

  “I want you to meet Santos,” Tony said. Santos had been with Tony from the beginning, which is how he introduced him. He came from El Salvador, where he served in the army and where he had been shot in combat, Tony thought, though he wasn’t sure. One day, Santos walked into the old Craigie looking for a job. “Started out as a dishwasher and now he does all our butchering. Dude’s chill.”

  Santos was grinding meat for the notorious burger: deboned short ribs, hanger steak, brisket, and beef cheeks. To which he then added kidney fat and powdered miso the color of clay. He took chunks of meat from a rectangular metal tray and dropped them into the spout of a tall, churning, silver-colored grinder. The meat came out in long strands from a filter with many holes and then fell into a large stainless-steel bowl.

  “How long does this take?” I asked him.

  “Hours,” Santos said.

  He spoke with a slight accent and stutter, averted his eyes, and showed little emotion.

  “You do this every day?” I asked.

  “Except Monday,” Santos said. Then he smiled. “Monday we’re closed.”

  “Hard work,” I said.

  “Good that everything has to be perfect,” he said.

  We left Santos with the meat and walked upstairs.

  Tony’s parting words for the night were, “I’d like a sidekick. Someone I could bounce ideas off of, someone who is at my level in cooking. There’s no one like that at the moment here.”

  He returned to the pass, where he would stand alone.

  On the way out, I waved good night to Tony. He had open, on the huge cutting board that stood at the pass, a book called Encyclopedia of Pasta, by Oretta Zanini de Vita. Like an expectant parent, he was leafing through it to find a name for his pasta.

  The second seating had started. Tickets were streaming in, but Tony did not looked stressed. I could see it now, even at the outset of our relationship, that forgetting, each night, his own troubles and focusing on the needs of others was a grand distraction for him.

  “We’ll talk about taking care of people the next time you’re in,” Tony said without looking up, scratching off a ticket that had been completed, tasting a spoonful of jus from Danny, ordering two chickens and four more burgers (with a wince). “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow, Chef,” I said, and then I left him at the pass to reckon with the hungry crowd who needed more answers than I did.

  TWO

  Baba Hannah

  MORE COFFEE?” ASKED TONY.

  It was early afternoon. Lights blazing before service, soon to be dimmed to seductive level when the doors opened. Hip-hop keeping everyone energetic. That would change at night, when jazz played.

  Tony was in the outfit he wore each day when he was not on display at the pass during service: Cargo shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. A few staff in the front of the house were polishing glasses, vacuuming, and setting tables. Prep was going on downstairs; the upstairs kitchen was gleaming, empty, and quiet.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. I slid my cup toward Tony. It was an ordinary white ceramic cup, nothing fancy. All of the flatware and crockery were plain white. Tony poured. “Thanks.”

  Chefs occupy a celebrated position in our culture. We admire them for many reasons, chiefly because of the unique flavors they create. Their food alters our moods. Ultimately, they stir up feelings we had when we were younger and ate meals prepared for us by our parents and grandparents. As a result, people develop an unconscious relationship with them. We expect chefs to take care of us emotionally, which is a powerful anticipation.

  The best chefs recognize the unconscious relationship that their customers have with them and use it to ensure a steady, trusting clientele. When we are satisfied with what they feed us, we regard chefs with feelings of intimacy. When they disappoint us, the letdown can be intensified as it is displaced emotion from earlier relationships, and distrust is then the consequence.

  Some people avoid restaurants for that reason.

  My grandmother hated eating outside her home. A joke my mother told me when I was a child summed it up: An old woman walks into a drugstore with a lunch counter and asks: “Do you do urinalysis here?” The counter man says, “Of course we do!” The woman replies, “Well, then go wash your hands and make me a malted!”

  “I thought it would be a good idea for you to come to Craigie during the day,” Tony said. “That way I can show you what’s involved in the early prep.”

  It was my second week at the restaurant. My routine was to be in the kitchen and on the floor two to three afternoons or nights each week, before and during service, attending front-of-the-house meetings and meetings with the cooks, interviewing anyone I chose at almost any time. There were times when I talked to wait staff when they were about to pick up an order. Times when I stood next to a cook working at his or her station. As he had promised, Tony allowed me complete access to everyone.

  We were seated at the corner table of the empty dining room: white tab
lecloths, sparkling glassware; a few shadowy staff cleaning the plate glass, doorknobs, and counter spaces.

  “What’s your earliest memory of food?” I asked him.

  “My grandmother Hannah,” he said without hesitating. Her photograph was high up on the wall, just to the left of the pass.

  “My mother’s mother. Baba Hannah loved to cook. My mother? She’s a good cook, but being in the kitchen wasn’t central to her life. She started a consulting business. She was outside the house as much as she was in it. Not so for Baba Hannah. If you look at my menu, you can see that my ideas and recipes are shared by about ninety percent of the world’s grandmothers.”

  I had both the dining room and bar menus out before me. Hiramasa sashimi? Monkfish cheeks? What did these dishes have to do with grandmothers? And what did it have to do with his grandmother?

  As is the case for many grandmothers, having grown up before globalization and refrigeration helped define how we live and what we eat, Tony’s Baba Hannah always cooked what was in season. She went to local farms and family-owned butcher shops. And she made gutsy, filling, fatty peasant dishes and used ingredients that reflected historical impoverishment: flanken, schmaltz, kreplach, kasha, tongue, and livers. Her kitchen was driven by the legacy of social exclusion, no access to markets more than a few miles from the rural areas of her ancestors, and the need to feed big families. Few people from the tradition of her class background ate in restaurants or knew the first thing about how food tasted outside their culture or religion.

  “ ‘Nothing should be wasted!’ ” Tony quoted his grandmother. “We’re talking ‘nose to tail’ cooking before the hype.”

  Talking about his grandmother’s cooking lifted Tony’s spirits as her food must have when he was a child.

  “Baba’s food created memories,” said Tony. “That’s what I’m after in my restaurant, too.”

  Cooks were arriving through the open door in the bar area. They waved and went downstairs to change out of street clothes. A few remained in the prep area below. Others came back up to the main floor and began cooking sauces and placing chickens in the low-heat oven in the open kitchen.

  “Baba Hannah was more than a cook,” Tony said. “She was the person that brought people together with her food. Her food got conversation going: strong views, loud voices, fabulous energy.”

  As Tony recalled memories of his grandmother, I noticed the blue diamond-pattern tribal tattoo that rounded his right bicep. I could picture him with his earring, slight beard, and attitude along with his edgy crew as young boys and girls in her kitchen.

  “You may cook like Baba Hannah, but you don’t act like her. How did you go from being innocent to being tough?”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you met Baba Hannah,” said Tony. “Tough? She wrote the book.”

  Maybe, I thought. More so, I realized that when Tony spoke of his grandmother being tough, he meant she was tough enough to protect him. It was the love she brought to his life that kept him going, and it was her love that gave him permission to be as offbeat as he liked. Tony was obviously offbeat: his decision to serve pig’s head and other odd ingredients like lamb’s tongue and pig’s tail, his choice to become a cook instead of pursuing psychology, his quirky sense of humor, his desire to make everything from scratch (except his breads). All of this demonstrated a guy who was bushwhacking his way through life.

  “Who loves you more than your grandmother?” he said.

  Tony’s grandmother loved him no matter what he did and no matter what anyone said about him. No wonder Tony wanted to cook like Baba Hannah.

  “I have to see what my cooks are up to.”

  We got up and went from station to station. The aroma of leeks sautéing in butter hit us. We smelled pork belly frying. We were hit by the scents of cumin, anise, and sesame seeds. We watched Matt make venison sausages. I held the menu and took notes while Tony tasted sauces, stocks, and butters.

  On the menu, I found tzimmes, barley, couscous, grilled tongue, and a brunch item of a bagel with salmon and smoked bluefish, house-brined corned beef, and horseradish cream that went with a potato galette.

  “It goes beyond the ingredients, too,” said Tony when he returned. “I try to think like Baba Hannah. What would she do when cooking or tasting a dish?” Baba Hannah would taste and taste a dish until she felt it achieved perfection. Tony had learned how to tell when something was done by watching her cook without recipes. These days when Tony seasons a dish, the right amount is enough.

  He sipped a spoonful of pistou-dashi broth brought to him by Dakota, who was a tall, very thin cook who worked garde manger but was learning to be a saucier.

  “Delicious, man,” said Tony.

  “Needs more salt,” said Dakota. He was bouncing up and down on his heels.

  “No, it’s good,” said Tony. He grinned. “The miso we’re adding later will take care of that.”

  “Thanks, Chef,” said Dakota. He spun off.

  I wondered whether if Tony had his grandmother’s food today, it would taste as good as he remembers. Other chefs have told me how they idolized their grandmothers, just like Tony, but admitted that when they returned as adults to these kitchens, the food did not taste as good as they remembered.

  The best example? André Soltner craving his mom’s noodles and cheese and returning home to Alsace only to discover it was very ordinary.

  Let’s face it: There is no reality to the taste of food that we ate decades ago. It is the memory of whom we were with and who we were that matters more than the recollected supposed taste of the food; the taste restores to us the narratives. The food is the MacGuffin.

  As we headed downstairs to see what the prep cooks had been up to all morning, Tony made it clear that he does not cook memories.

  How could he? Tony took a foundation of memories of the food—the ingredients—and combined flavors in ways that were startlingly original.

  Downstairs, in the hubbub, Matt, Timmy, Danny, Lydia, James, and a couple of others were working hard. In their aprons and caps, sleeves rolled up, they resembled people in the service. As with men and women in the military, the cooks’ individual personalities are flattened by their identical outfits, extremely limited opportunity to improvise behavior, and the virtual impossibility of being able to show spontaneity, emotion, or behavior in reaction to the environment they are in.

  Here beneath the earth’s surface, illuminated by bulbs suspended on long, narrow wires, their look was one of fatigue tempered by devotion to a task that took them outside the turmoil of everyday life.

  Tony went from one to the next.

  “You ready to go?”

  “I have to finish the dressing and taste it,” said Matt.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Working on the miso and the greens,” said James.

  “No way,” said Tony. “What do you miss every day?”

  “What do I miss?” asked James.

  “What do you miss?” said Tony.

  James stopped stirring the broth. The other cooks stayed on task. Danny ran over to answer for him: “Razors, clams, crabs.”

  “Right,” said James.

  “C’mon, man,” said Tony. “Get it fucking right!”

  I took Tony aside. I wondered if he was worried about James, who usually seemed off-kilter.

  “You mean, will he work out at Craigie?” Tony said. “I’m not worried, I’m pissed off! He’s been here two months and he still doesn’t get it.”

  James was in his own world, so limited in his responses to what people said that often directives had to be spoken to him twice, which was deeply irritating to the chef as well as grossly inefficient. He kept making the same silly mistakes.

  “He can be offbeat, I don’t care. A lot of my guys are offbeat, but they cook. James isn’t cooking.”

  Danny brought Tony a long list of dishes that would be served that night: skirt steak, swordfish, pork, chicken, tongue, sweetbreads, salmon tail, and boudin noir.

>   “This is good,” said Tony. “Are you on it?”

  “I’m on it, Chef,” said Danny. “I’m very excited!”

  “Are we all good to go?” Tony asked the assembly of cooks, who, without looking up, shouted back: “Yes, Chef!”

  We headed back upstairs to look over the reservations, to see who was VIP, what special occasions needed to be acknowledged by the kitchen and waitstaff.

  “I couldn’t do this in Boston,” said Tony.

  “Tony, that’s less than a mile away, just across the bridge,” I said, “C’mon.”

  “It’s different here,” he said. “Cambridge isn’t Boston.”

  Cambridge, with its students, biotech industry, global consultants, and left-wing legacy, has an aura that does not quite match its reality. Tony, like many people, still thought of Cambridge as kind of a cool place when, in fact, its racial and economic diversity had nearly vanished with the end of rent control decades ago. It was now more of an enclave for well-off (median income $69,000) white people (62 percent).

  The real reason why Cambridge was the perfect setting for Craigie had nothing to do with food. The real reason was that the city had plenty of rich people with time to kill; 40 percent of the residents were single, and you did not have to walk more than ten feet before bumping into a trust fund recipient or hedge fund manager.

  “You don’t think you could cook like Baba Hannah in Boston?” I asked.

  “This setting is more intimate,” he said.

  “More like a home.”

  Tony lived down the street in a small, simple house with his wife, Karolyn, and young son, Charlie. All his money had gone into the restaurant. Karolyn had met Tony when he was cooking at Clio and she was tending bar. They had been together ten years and married for seven; Karolyn had worked the floor at the old Craigie and done whatever was needed. On special occasions, she continued to help out, though her day job now was as a kindergarten teacher at Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a fancy private day school. It was the perfect job for the wife of a chef who runs an upscale restaurant; both Tony and Karolyn were in the business of taking care of people who felt entitled to the best. Only Karolyn had to be calm and patient about it, which was a skill I imagined she brought to her relationship with Tony. Karolyn sometimes brought Charlie in before service. While Charlie sat on the expediting table, Tony fed his toddler son food such as bits of pickled mushrooms and pig tails.