Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  “How am I doing with three sets of burger condiments, Jill?” shouted Tony.

  “On it, Chef,” Jill said.

  “Am I in the way?” I asked.

  “No, it’s cool,” she said, elbowing me out of the way, swiveling in place, and lining up three tiny white ceramic trays onto three longer white ceramic trays. “I can talk and do this at the same time.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I mean that Tony’s cooking is all about skills,” Jill said. “Modern techniques of bringing out the essence of how something should or can taste. He doesn’t add something to a dish to alter its essence. I’m learning so much every day!”

  Jill spooned house-made ketchup into three trays; then the sliced pickles; then tiny, pickled onions. She wiped surfaces clean and carried the trays gingerly to the pass. She had a forceful presence and, while not petite like her co-worker Mary, she moved with the grace of a dancer.

  “I guess food was always important to our family. I come from a big family!” She began dicing Armenian cucumbers into cubes smaller than Jujubes. Each one was perfect and identical. Anticipating my question, moving with speed and dexterity, ignoring the commotion created by Danny and Matt who were yelling at Bobby and Kyle who had fallen behind, trying to get them into shape again, she said, “There are six of us, brothers and sisters.”

  She interrupted herself to call Danny over to look at the cucumbers.

  Danny scampered over in a mad hurry, approved, and turned around to find poor, hapless James, looking downcast, with a bowl of ramp kimchee for him to taste. “This isn’t how we do things at Craigie, James! C’mon, get your head out of your ass! Even slices, small pieces!”

  James nodded like Eeyore and made a move as if to toss the ramps into the trash, when Danny started screaming at him, ordering him to never throw anything away without talking to him first. James returned to his station.

  Jill continued, “I always wanted a professional career in restaurants, and growing up in Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn, I had great opportunities to work in the city. From about ninth grade on, it was lots of places. I even got a gig working for David Chang at Momofuku Ssam. That was a trip!”

  Jill mopped her hands on a small white towel and started the next task: making candied lemon mignonette for the raw oysters. “Chang would sneak into the kitchen sometimes, a cap pulled down, pretending we didn’t know he was the chef. I mean, we’re talking about David Chang, for goodness’ sakes! He was always clowning around. I loved working for him.”

  She said, stirring, “I wanted to go to culinary school. So I got into Johnson and Wales and found new places in other parts of the country were pretty interesting, too. I mean, check it out: Just before I came here, I did a four-and-a-half-month internship with Corey Lee at Benu in San Francisco.”

  Lee had run the kitchen at The French Laundry and was, by far, one of the country’s leading chefs in his generation.

  Mignonette done, she handed it off to Timmy, who was working on the oysters.

  “Corey had me do everything,” she said proudly. “I did all the prep stuff, stocks, staff meals, I cleaned everything. I did whatever I was asked to do!”

  Jill could have stayed in New York or San Francisco, or gone to Chicago, L.A., or Las Vegas, all places that attracted talented cooks. But she decided on Boston after one of her brothers had moved to Charlestown, which was about an hour’s drive from Johnson & Wales.

  As Jill worked on making the beds for the eel platings, she said that California would be too far from home and New York too close. “I thought I’d look around here and see if maybe Boston was a decent place to cook. I tried out places owned by Boston’s so-called great chefs. I had a shitty meal at Clio. I had a crappy meal at Menton. L’Espalier was okay. I even did a stage at L’Espalier. On my fourth day, the chef offered me a job cooking. But I didn’t like the food enough to stay.”

  Behind us Danny yelled out: “PUT THE FUCKING BURGERS IN NOW, BOBBY!”

  Eel setups done and handed to Tony at the pass, Jill was on to the next task, which was to plate small versions of terrines for a duo of tastings.

  “I ate here once before I applied for a job,” Jill said. “There’s no avant-garde shit here.”

  I could see what Tony saw: commitment, knowledge, big heart, passion to learn, doing whatever needs to be done, a no-nonsense way of talking. That was Jill: Take her or leave her. She was not as interested in what people thought of her as what they thought of her cooking. I loved that about her. It spoke to her maturity.

  Then she was on to the arugula for the ragoût, the pickled peanuts, the hearts of palm, and the preserved watermelon.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing to pale pink discs wrapped in sealed sheets of plastic.

  “Compressed watermelon,” Jill said.

  “How do you do it?”

  “It’s a fifteen-minute process.”

  “Sous vide?”

  “You bet,” she said. “I Cryovac the melon with white balsamic, essential oils of lime and ginger, salt, and chili water. Here, have a taste.”

  It was, of course, delicious.

  “Nice salt in that,” she said.

  I watched her make little cubes out of it.

  “Beautiful,” I said, admiring her finesse.

  “I have this urge to kind of baby things. But cooks aren’t leaders. It’s not just a matter of skills that divides them from chefs, although obviously they’re necessary. Chefs know exactly what tastes good and why, and can lead cooks to create what they’re after. It comes down to leadership. Chefs lead, cooks follow.”

  Tony hired Jill after a one-week trial.

  “You were right,” I said to Tony, when I left Jill’s side and returned to the pass.

  “About what?” Tony asked.

  He was drawing red lines through tickets that had been completed but stopped and looked up.

  “Jess and Jill,” I said. “Rock stars.”

  “I told you,” Tony said.

  Meredith strolled up.

  “Four out on eleven,” she said.

  “Got it,” said Tony.

  Danny was yelling at Bobby again: “It’s chess, not checkers, Bobby!”

  Matt smiled and said, “That’s what I always say!”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if Jill opens her own place,” I said to Tony. “Right next door. A good, home-style restaurant serving beautiful food.”

  “I hope so,” Tony said, “because if she does, I’ll be one of the first to invest!”

  TEN

  Chef’s Night Out

  I HAD MET HIS ROCK STARS AND I HAD MET HIS MOM, AND NOW IT WAS time to meet Tony in a place where he was not defined by his work. I wanted to see how he behaved and spoke outside the restaurant. To talk to him in the world of black and white where he was an ordinary person, a civilian like the rest of us, and no longer a chef.

  I had been at Craigie ten months. It had become my focal point: the place I spent the most hours outside my home.

  I don’t get out much. Unless I am traveling, which is usually work related, I prefer to be at home with my wife and dogs, writing, reading, running, or cooking. Listening to hospitalized psychiatric patients or the painful narratives of outpatients in distress fulfills my strongest needs for intimacy outside family.

  That had all changed with Craigie. The narrowing of contact with the world at large helped me appreciate and understand Tony with greater vigor than if I had been a person with a wide array of social relationships.

  The world of his restaurant had become deeply appealing, a place I wanted to be in as much as I wanted to analyze it. That phenomenon of seeking to belong was familiar to me; it is how I try to be of help to my patients: through affiliation. Namely, I had to at the very least imagine what it is like—how it feels, how it shapes thinking—to live in their world. Without empathy, trust is impossible, of course, and without trust we do not live outside ourselves.

  I had a sense of who Tony was as a chef. Who was he
as a person?

  Danny was at the pass at ten P.M. the night I decided to get the chef out of the kitchen.

  “Yo, Doctah Haas,” Danny said. It was his usual greeting, which was invariably followed by a high five or a fist bump. “What is shakin’?”

  I had been to dinner with my wife and afterward seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes on opening night. When Danny learned this, he stopped cold. I had never seen him with a more serious expression. He had been putting in final tickets for the night and crossing off what had been done. Tony was in the dining room, stopping by VIP tables and thanking guests for coming in to eat his food.

  “How was it? Was it any good? I mean, that remake in the eighties? That sucked compared to the original. Sucked! I only saw the original as a rental; you probably saw it at the movies. Was what you saw, what I’m asking is, was what you saw as good as the original? As good as Charlton Heston?”

  Dakota, working on some burgers, overheard us.

  “Dude,” Dakota said, “you saw the ape movie?” He flipped the burgers onto a metal tray to cool. “How was it?”

  Soon the kitchen was abuzz with my news.

  All the cooks wanted to know: “How was it? How was the new Planet of the Apes?”

  “Did the apes look real?” asked Dakota.

  It was not just the movie that interested the cooks. Friday night, and I had had the freedom to go out with my wife, to a restaurant, and see a movie. Any movie. These were galley slaves, in comparison, with one or two nights off a week and then too exhausted to go out and enjoy what nearly everyone outside the restaurant world usually took for granted: Dinner and a movie with someone you love.

  I was about to answer Danny’s original question when he was presented a plate that held ragoût of brisket and pastrami, chanterelles, and a farm-fresh egg. Danny shifted the egg yolk with his fingers and handed the dish off to a runner.

  “This walks,” Danny said. “This walks. My ragoût walks.”

  Then he turned to me, as if there had been no interruption, “Well, was it as good as Heston or not?”

  “Not as good,” I said. Having seen the original as a young adolescent may have colored my sentiment about the first movie. Memory has a funny way of distorting perception. “But lots of fun. Better than the remake.”

  “I love ape movies,” Danny said, before turning and saying to Bobby, who, standing behind him, was moving a thick slice of pork belly on the grill as if he had all night, “Cook, Bobby, cook! Don’t just fucking stand there!”

  Just then Tony returned to the pass. “Hey, bro, give me another hour to finish up and I’ll be ready to roll.”

  Tony looked over the tickets, patrolled the stations, and got a couple of cooks back into gear. He helped Timmy finish cooking an item for the tasting menu that night: guanciale-wrapped sweetbreads pan seared and served in a beer jus.

  I tasted the jus and was slammed by its deep flavors: crazy delicious, nuts.

  Danny turned to Bobby and said: “Hey, Mr. Erroneous, downstairs! Get more stock!”

  AN HOUR LATER, TONY, AS CALM AS COULD BE, DESPITE THE FRENETIC pace of the kitchen, asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not my neighborhood.”

  “Not his neighborhood,” Tony said to Danny with a sneer.

  “Not his neighborhood?” said Danny with a fake sneer.

  They both laughed. It was a big deal: going out with the chef. Tony did not pal around with the cooks. Like many chefs, he felt that he would lose authority by doing so.

  “Green Street Grill?” I suggested.

  It was within walking distance from the restaurant; I had read a web review that described it as kind of a bar first and a restaurant on second thought, lively, and with a decent scene attractive to people in their twenties and up to their fifties.

  Tony pursed his lips, looking thoughtful, and nodded his head.

  “Excellent choice,” Tony said.

  “That’s a good choice,” agreed Danny.

  Word had gotten out for days that I was going to interview Tony away from his kitchen.

  “Let me change and we’ll get out of here.” Tony went downstairs and returned about five minutes later in his usual outfit. He dressed like a kid and made me think of Gramps in a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He had been cool at school and was cool now, too, unlike many men his age. He had never stopped being cool, never wore a suit to work; cooking kept him young.

  During our short walk over, the street came alive. Pressed together on sidewalks were groups of white, Indian, and Chinese college kids dressed up to go clubbing, and the locals, most of them black, perhaps from the housing projects a block away, eyeing it all with pleasure or dull resignation for now. The fire station was brightly lit; the entrance to the Salvation Army shelter next to it was crowded with homeless men. We made small talk about baseball as we passed by an ice cream shop, a cheap Chinese restaurant, an Indian restaurant, a McDonald’s, a Cambodian restaurant, an Irish pub, and a hole-in-the-wall serving Tibetan food.

  “You hungry?” asked Tony, when we were seated at the Green Street Grill and handed laminated menus.

  The place was jammed and we had been given one of the last tables, way in the back, by the swinging kitchen doors and the women’s restroom.

  “No, I’m good,” I said.

  The waitress came over, very cheery, and we ordered a couple of drafts.

  “I’ll have an order of the chicken wings and a small salad,” Tony said.

  Then he handed back the menu.

  “Chicken wings and a salad?” I asked.

  “Hey, I’m hungry,” Tony said. “Don’t knock it!”

  “I didn’t say anything negative.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I saw that look.”

  “Probably tastes pretty good.”

  “You got that right.”

  “So what’s going on?” I asked. “What’s new?”

  “What’s new? What’s new is I’m down a cook and Meredith just gave one month’s notice today, which sucks.”

  “Is that unusual? One month’s notice?”

  The beers arrived. Cheers, glasses clinked, sips.

  “My mother is apeshit about it,” Tony said. “After two fucking years, she quits. With one month’s notice. She’s a fucking GM, for fuck’s sake. How about three months’ notice?”

  I knew better than to interrupt.

  “What happened is that Meredith wanted a raise. We offered her a raise. We offered her a big raise! We’re coming out of a recession and we offered her a big, big raise, but she said no, she wants more. More! Fuck that. I am so pissed.”

  “Then if it’s not the money, if the money’s good, then it must be something else.”

  The food arrived. Crispy wings stacked on a big white plate with a little cup of hot sauce in the middle. Salad of iceberg lettuce and tomatoes drenched in oily dressing. Tony dived in. The way he ate—as if it were his first decent meal in days—made the food look appetizing.

  He held a wing in the air and nodded his chin.

  I shook my head no.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing here,” he said.

  “Maybe the something else is Ted,” I said. “Having a boyfriend in the restaurant may complicate things.”

  “You think?” Tony said, ironically.

  He had worked his way through half of the wings. Clothespin-shaped bones lay on his plate. Dutifully, he raised forkfuls of salad.

  “Ever since Meredith got a new boyfriend,” Tony said, “she’s stopped taking feedback.”

  He was down to his last two wings. He waved one at me. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “She stopped looking up to me,” he said, pushing the empty plate away. “When I tell her to do something, she gives me this look of indifference. It wasn’t always like that. I’m not getting her respect.”

  “Maybe she’s worth a better offer that you could make her.”

  “We made her a gr
eat offer,” Tony said. “I’m sure she’s run this all by her ex-boyfriend. He’s a restaurant GM, too. He knows numbers. But the difference between what he makes and Meredith makes is that she’s, what, twenty-four or twenty-five, and he’s in his late thirties—he knows what he’s doing, I know him. He tells her she’s worth the money. But I don’t think so. I mean, I’m the one who figured out how to sell the more expensive wine, not her! I’m the one who raised menu prices, not her! I’m doing her job.”

  I nodded my head and kept writing.

  “Part of the problem for Meredith is that she sees the prices going up and thinks: ‘Oh, the restaurant’s making more money, so I should make more money!’ But we’re not making more money: Food prices this year have shot up! The price of quality fish has skyrocketed. I won’t compromise on food. The money isn’t going into my pockets—it’s going to meet food costs.”

  I looked up from my notes.

  “Look, it’s not just Meredith—it’s the business,” he said. “It’s the business, the business, the business. It’s hard to keep good people.”

  It was the business. I knew that by now. Tony had spoken of “the business” before, making it clear that no matter what he did, no matter what proactive steps he took, no matter whom he appeased, and no matter what he did to change working conditions, the restaurant business remained attractive to many people who could not fit in anywhere else.

  Only Santos had been with Tony from the start. Several people lasted a couple of years or more. Others had stayed weeks or months.

  “Danny’s cutting back to four days a week in September,” Tony said.

  The waitress returned to clear the plate and our empty glasses, and we ordered two more beers.

  “Yeah, it’s time,” said Tony sadly. “He’s been with me four and a half years. He misses his wife. It was fine when Danny’s wife had a schedule like his, but now they never see each other.”

  “How about you and Karolyn?” I asked.

  “It’s a little better,” he said. “Back when we first opened, she worked for me in the front of the house. That had its ups and downs, but at least I got to see her. These days I see her on Sundays, sometimes in the afternoons when she brings Charlie by, and before she goes to work in the morning.”