Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  Danny started laughing.

  “Hey, Dakota,” he said, “hang in there, Dakota! Counting on you, buddy!”

  “What’s up with him?” I asked.

  Danny grinned.

  “Dakota,” Danny said, “has to go to the bathroom. In the middle of service. But Dakota knows that if he walks away from his station, we will fall behind and I will kill him.”

  “Danny, please!” shouted Dakota.

  “Shut the fuck up, Dakota, and keep cooking!” said Danny. He began to laugh. “Cook, Dakota, cook!”

  Dakota, now also laughing at his discomfort and predicament, flew into action. It is rare to see anyone move so fast and with such finesse. He kind of looked like Harold Lloyd covered in tattoos.

  “Okay, Danny? Okay?” he yelled.

  “Okay, Dakota,” said Danny. “Go, Dakota! Go and get your ass back here pronto!”

  Dakota tore off his apron and, shouting, “Behind you, behind you,” he ran downstairs and past the cooks.

  “Matt, cover for Dakota, please,” said Danny.

  “Sure thing,” said Matt.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” said Danny. “Getting the fucking job done. Is that too much to fucking ask?”

  “No,” I said. “It is not.”

  I nodded my head in the direction of the two Southerners at the chef’s counter and explained to Danny why they had been seated there.

  “Think they’ll have a good time?” I asked. “This doesn’t look like their kind of restaurant.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” said Danny. “Not formal. Not predictable. Unfamiliar menu. But I bet they have a great time! I’m gonna make sure of that. That is my challenge tonight!”

  No ties, but buttoned up, the pair kept looking around the room and fidgeting. Having been moved from a table, not receiving the attention they had felt they had deserved, and now only a few feet away from a dancing cook and a swearing sous chef, they needed a sign that they mattered to the restaurant.

  Older and stiff-jointed, one man was large and the other long-limbed. The stools were designed to provide “foodies” with a ringside view of the kitchen. These men looked as if they could not care less about food. It was hard for them to find a comfortable position, and it seemed that in a few minutes they might chuck it all and leave in search of a good steak or lobster.

  A waiter brought them menus and filled their water glasses, but I could see the frowns from where I stood twenty feet away.

  Meredith came over and said, “E.C.,” to Danny.

  “Understood,” he said. He crossed off a couple of recently completed tickets.

  “E.C.?” I asked.

  “Extra care,” he said. “Got to make these guys extra happy.”

  “When we first opened here, we called them D.B.s,” said Timmy.

  “Douchebags,” explained Danny. “But that isn’t nice.”

  “And we wouldn’t want a customer to hear a waitress say someone’s a D.B., and then have to explain what D.B. meant,” said Timmy.

  “Although maybe they shouldn’t have been D.B.s to begin with,” Danny said. He added, ironically, “We want to make people happy. That’s our job!”

  “We’re in the hospitality industry,” said Matt with a big grin.

  “It’s what we do,” said Danny.

  “That’s the challenge,” Dakota chimed in, “of the E.C.”

  “We like a challenge,” said Matt.

  The E.C. men had ordered a bottle of expensive French wine. It was poured, the tall man tasted and approved, and now he and his companion were swirling red wine in big glasses, sniffing the aroma, and savoring the taste.

  “Wow,” I said to Danny, “they look like they know their way around wine. I had thought from their conservative clothing and hairstyles that they’d order cocktails.”

  “They’re gonna love it here,” Danny said. “Love it! Wait and see.”

  A few minutes passed by and then the men’s tickets came in. Danny grabbed the orders and turned to the cooks to shout: “Two clams, a halibut, and pork three ways!”

  Bobby nodded his head to show he had heard, but that wasn’t enough.

  “Bobby, what’d I say?”

  Bobby strolled over to Danny.

  “Two clams, a halibut, pork three ways,” Bobby said.

  “Good, Bobby, good,” said Danny. He shook his head again. “Cook, Bobby, cook!”

  “Yes?” said Bobby. He looked puzzled.

  “Why the fuck are you still here?!” said Danny. “Go and start the fucking orders!”

  “These guys,” said Danny, stretching out his arms, cracking his knuckles, scowling at Bobby, and then laughing, “are going to leave happy. Or else.”

  Later that night, when the plates of the two men had been brought to the back of the kitchen, I saw that they had eaten everything.

  “See?” said Danny. He nodded in the direction of the cooks and then the front of the house. “We did it.”

  I had been at Craigie for four months, and that was the first time I saw Danny behave like a chef.

  FIVE

  Dinner Without Tony

  I’LL BE A CUSTOMER,” I SAID.

  Tony had been away a couple of days.

  “We don’t say customer at Craigie,” said Danny. “We say guest. It’s more consistent with the idea of hospitality. Tony and Meredith like the word guest.”

  It is a unique word choice nonetheless, since people eating out are paying customers. A guest does not pay.

  Danny smiled and put his face back into the bowl of stewed leftovers that was staff or family meal. He had gotten a crewcut and kept a slight beard. In his white uniform, hunched over the long plank of the bar, he looked like a man serving time.

  I had booked a table for Friday, a few days ahead, and asked to be seated in the bar area rather than the dining room. The bar is darker, noisier, and livelier than the restaurant’s dining room. Perfect for someone who prefers to observe people rather than join in.

  My wife, Laura, and I had been to Craigie a few times since our initial visit. But I had mostly tasted the food in the kitchen with the cooks. Laura was out of town, so it seemed opportune to take our adult daughter. Madeline has a generous appreciation of food, a good palate, and limited economic resources, so a meal in an expensive restaurant is more of a treat for her than it is for me.

  Madeline was tentative. “Are you sure you want to do this? It might be expensive.”

  “Hey, I’m working,” I said. “It’s work.” From the outset, I had told Tony to charge me, but he laughed. He said that he would not charge me for my food, but that he might charge me for the food that people I brought in would be eating.

  “Does Mom know you’re taking me to Craigie?” she asked.

  “She might know.”

  Friday afternoon I arrived to continue to observe staff and conduct interviews. It was my fourth month in the restaurant. Some familiar faces were gone, new crew in the kitchen and on the floor, and still the mainstays.

  Except for one waiter, Chuck, who looked like he was in his late forties, everyone was in their twenties or very early thirties. Chuck, who used to run a travel agency, had a clear sense of his skills.

  “When the agency closed,” Chuck said, “I realized I had one great talent that would be perfect for being a waiter. Can you guess what that was?”

  “A great palate?” I said.

  “Nope,” he said. “I can sell. I’m great at selling!”

  That made sense. A waiter is a salesperson. It might as well be bicycles, computers, or cars. In a restaurant, the waitstaff’s goal is to increase the bill. Sell the tasting menus! Sell the sides! Sell the pricier wine! Sell the after-dinner drinks!

  “I often win the weekly contests,” Chuck said, “to sell the most expensive wines.”

  Chuck had gray hair, a small gap between his two top front teeth, and a ready smile. He looked like a second cousin in the Kennedy clan, but instead of being a risk-taking, bungee-jumping downh
ill skier like the famous men he so closely resembled, Chuck had become a waiter to pay for his daughter’s college tuition. Working at Craigie could be that lucrative, because it was so good and the experience of dining there so distinct. The menu had Flintstone-sized bones, sliced in half, roasted to allow access to thick troughs of marrow that could be spread onto toasted baguette. Other than cheeseburgers, pig’s heads, and pig’s tails, it had refined dishes, too, like assiette of house-made terrines and côte du boeuf. Everything I had eaten there was, without exception, delicious, and when I sent friends and colleagues, who dined anonymously, they reported having great experiences.

  That most of the dishes could not readily be found elsewhere, that it was a pure expression of Tony’s palate, added to the allure. People came to Craigie to eat Tony’s food. This was no different from the way many other chefs operated: The Daniel Boulud Show, The Mario Batali Show, The Emeril Lagasse Show.

  At Craigie on Main, it was The Tony Maws Show, and when customers or guests came into the restaurant, they often looked into the open kitchen: Was Tony there? Where was he? Would he return later that evening? If not, they expressed disappointment. (Too bad about that open kitchen! Transparency has its drawbacks.)

  Like all so-called celebrity chefs, Tony encouraged the fascination. He signed birthday and anniversary cards nightly, stopped by the tables of regulars and VIPs, and made clear through interviews with media that his food did not conform to any cuisine, but that it was his food, a highly personal expression of his taste, his training, and his growing up with a grandmother whose kitchen boasted of big flavors created by chicken or beef fat, bones, and organs.

  No wonder Tony felt that he had to be in the restaurant every night. It was not that the food was not delicious in his absence. It was. It was not just the missteps of cooks who were often lost without his leadership. It was that Tony was as defined by the food as the food was defined by him. He needed the restaurant to make him who he was. When he was away from Craigie, he suffered a loss of identity. He was most aware of being Tony Maws when he stood at the pass.

  Being synonymous with his food deeply complicated the efforts of his cooks. They could never quite create his identity through the food without him there to tell them exactly how to do it. They also lacked the confidence to cook his food because they knew he did not trust them completely to do it without his being in the restaurant.

  In conversations with Tony, he sometimes compared being a chef to being a musician: He refused to do covers of other people’s songs, and his work did not represent any specific genre—meaning that he had little interest in perfecting classics through technique or the use of rare ingredients, and no desire to serve as an interpreter of a specific tradition or cuisine. His approach to food was comparable to Louis Armstrong’s wonderful quote: “There is two kinds of music. The good and bad. I play the good kind.”

  Tony felt that the dishes he created must express his personality. He cared more, too, about being prolific—coming up with new dishes—than consistency.

  What concerned me was what might be diminished by replacing repetition with a highly personal and inventive style of cooking.

  Without a tradition, cooks create an immediacy that can destroy flavor combinations that have worked for centuries. It is harder to roast a chicken perfectly or make a perfect omelet than it is to cook something that has no comparison.

  Of all the dishes Tony served, how many would last? And what about all the other chefs who went about inventing?

  The talk of signature dishes, in many restaurants, is smoke and mirrors and has next to nothing to do with what the food of great chefs is about. I thought of what Chef Gary Danko had said to me in an interview. I had asked him: “Of all the signature dishes throughout the world, how many will last more than ten years? I’d guess five percent, but what do you think?” Danko replied, “I think you’re being generous.”

  Tony agreed with Danko when I brought the opinion to his attention, but what was he doing about it? And what did he gain from improvisation?

  “We might stumble on a great dish,” Tony had said. “You never know what you’ll find. You can’t keep doing the same thing.”

  He had paused and reflected.

  “It also keeps the cooks sharp,” Tony had said. “It helps them discover what they are capable of doing.”

  But this would work only if the cooks understood what he wanted them to do and were given the same rules each night, and when the new dishes being created had deeper, more soulful, and better flavors than what had preceded them.

  “My crew works harder here than in most restaurants,” Tony had said. “We don’t do things the easy way. At Craigie we don’t have a simple roast chicken, as much as I respect that dish, or bluefish fillet, or whatever. The cooks who will succeed at Craigie are willing to learn what I have to teach them. I had a guy here who had worked at Daniel.”

  He was referring to Chef Daniel Boulud, who is one of the five best French born chefs with restaurants in the United States; his eponymously named restaurant is a top-rated three-star Michelin and has a top rating of four stars from the New York Times.

  “He kept insisting on doing things his way. ‘This is how we were taught at Daniel.’ Didn’t work out.”

  “What if what he was doing was technically correct?” I had asked.

  “I think that guy simply didn’t want to do things my way,” Tony had said. “If he really had something to offer, something original, I’d have been thrilled. Thing is: He was lazy. He didn’t want to learn. He was here to learn to cook my food my way.”

  A strong and confident cook, ironically, might fail in a restaurant while someone who agrees to be shaped by the chef will succeed. To cook Tony’s food, you had to think like him.

  His approach was the same as that of other chefs in that he was the boss; it was different in that these were his rules, and they did not reflect a canon or a tradition like what is found in Alsace, Bangkok, Burgundy, Hokkaido, Lyons, Mumbai, New Orleans, New England, Paris, Provence, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, or Tuscany.

  The biggest difference, though, between how Tony did things and how other top chefs worked had to do with the extreme changeability of Tony’s kitchen: The rules kept changing; his desire for change was what he thought of as the pursuit of perfection, which meant that he was the only fleet-footed one and that his cooks had to keep up with him.

  My daughter arrived at eight. I was in the kitchen, at the pass, finishing an interview with Matt. After I introduced Madeline to the cooks, we were shown to a wide corner table near the bar.

  “Wow,” Madeline said, “thanks for inviting me!”

  The room was filling up. From behind the bar, outlandishly mustachioed Ted Gallagher, laughing and looking a lot like a guy in an old barbershop quartet, poured and mixed drinks and made sure his two sidekicks, Sally and John, kept pace.

  Miles going strong on muted trumpet, Ray Garland melodic on the piano, Paul Chambers playing sturdily on bass: old school and extremely mellow. Music was everywhere in Craigie; it was all about finding a rhythm, which was the soundtrack for the dining experience. Everyone who came into the restaurant caught the vibe.

  Our waiter, Dan, brought over menus. He had a dull smile, no oomph to it, but seemed reliable and capable of focus—tall, slightly bearded, and moving like a man with time on his hands. I had interviewed him only days before: A recent graduate of Boston University, which placed him or his family in the hole for $200,000, Dan had studied film and majored in screenwriting.

  Dan was not the only artist among the group; there was Holly, who had also studied film, and Chuck, a painter. Being an extremely young person who idealizes what it means to be a true artist—unlike T. S. Eliot, who worked in a bank, or Chekov, who labored as a doctor, their day jobs seeping wonderfully into their art—Dan had found work that would not interfere with what he thought of preciously as art but what was really a desire to hold on to what remained of his youthful potential. “I’m not
selling my soul,” Dan had said. “I’m not stuck in a nine-to-five job. I can still stay true to my art and count on getting paid.”

  “Bottled water or tap?” Dan asked Madeline and me.

  “Tap’s fine,” I said.

  We ordered cocktails, and when they arrived we puzzled over the menus while sipping our drinks. The list, with the silly name Libations, was, like the food menu at Craigie, filled with deeply inventive flavor combinations. The Ardoise was described as: “Rain, sage, juniper, lime.” I wondered what they would do during a drought. The Improved Whisky Cocktail? Rittenhouse, maraschino, Angostura, gomme syrup, absinthe. Like so much at Craigie, the drinks were a way to tell guests to shake things up.

  And yet it all felt so grown up, which is what restaurants do, make people feel grown up, which is fine if you are but not fine if you still have unresolved issues about being grown up. My daughter and I, having grown up together, felt good about it.

  “What’s good?” Madeline asked. “Everything looks good.”

  “Everything is good,” I said. “No kidding. That’s one reason why I decided to write about this restaurant. It just depends on what you’re in the mood for.”

  She mulled over the salad of bluefin tuna sashimi and the Vermont pork three ways but was unsure about leaving out the crispy fried clams and the stuffed chicken. So I suggested we order six-course tasting menus.

  I love watching my daughter eat.

  “Oh, what the heck,” I said, when she worried about the cost.

  “Besides, you’re working,” she said. “Right? That’s what you’ll tell Mom.”

  My notebook was on the table, and I had been writing since walking in the door hours earlier.

  “Excellent choices,” Dan said when we put in the orders, which included specific items we wanted in the tasting menus.

  I had told Dan during our earlier interview how I was not a fan of that expression. Dan had shrugged, and then explained that Tony liked to congratulate guests on their choices.

  While we waited for our food, I observed the room. Drew was patrolling the floor, positioning himself in a corner, crossing his arms, eyeing tables and front-of-the-house staff, making certain that the room kept up its rhythm. The manager directs the traffic, helps establish the pace, and reports back to the chef in the kitchen. It is the perfect job for a good social observer.