Back of the House

by Scott Haas

  “That’s not a lot of time.”

  “In September Karolyn’s quitting her job,” Tony said. “That’s gonna cause financial stress, but it’s time, she says.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  The beers arrived.

  I had also seen on Craigslist that Tony needed a hostess.

  “So you’re down a GM, a cook, a hostess, and your sous chef is going to work four nights instead of six.”

  “Look,” Tony said, “longevity really is a problem. Money is one issue. I can be a pain in the ass is another. The work at Craigie is harder than it is at other restaurants. The hostesses are divas. I don’t have multiple revenues—different restaurants, say, where I can move staff if they get bored or want more responsibility or more income. I’m not complaining, I’m just telling you what it is!”

  He also had no one he could depend on other than Jess to help him make changes. But it didn’t seem that Tony, as a mentor, encouraged his crew to come up with ideas.

  Many chefs, as leaders, recognize that their work gets easier and that it is often more enjoyable in the kitchen when sous chefs can begin to create rather than just follow orders, and when line cooks ask more questions. Tony insisted that he did ask them to be more inquisitive and use their imagination, that he would be thrilled if that ever happened, but I did not see much evidence of that. I knew, too, that if the cooks felt that their ideas mattered, they would stick around.

  “Last call!”

  It had been years and years since I had been in a bar at closing time.

  “SO, TONY, I’VE GOT TO ASK YOU: WHAT’S THE STORY WITH YOUR FATHER?”

  “My father?” he said. He laughed. “We’re gonna talk about my father?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not? Unless you don’t want to.”

  “Sure,” he said, grinning. “I’m happy to talk about my father. What do you want to know?”

  “For one thing,” I said, “you never mention him. So I figure there’s got to be a story here. I see your mother all the time. I see Karolyn and Charlie. I’ve even met your in-laws! But your father? Not a word.”

  “No mystery,” Tony said. He laughed again. “You know, he was in the restaurant tonight.”

  “He was?” I asked. I was struck by the fact that he had not mentioned this to me when I had been there.

  “Yeah, you missed him,” he said. “He was in with his best friend, Mike. He comes in about once a month. It’s fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, “but it’s always the same bullshit: He turns to the waiter and says to his friend, ‘See all this? Without me, there wouldn’t be a restaurant!’ ”

  “There’s a story about Philip Roth’s father, Herman, how he went to a synagogue in Miami and that someone there asked him for a signed copy of one of his son’s books. So the next week, he brings in a book by Philip Roth and it’s signed, ‘Best wishes, Herman Roth.’ ”

  “It’s complicated,” Tony said. “After my parents split up, my father remarried. My father changed. He’s different the last ten years. Stranger. More self-involved. He used to be funny. I don’t know. Different.”

  None of this accounted for the anger in Tony’s face and voice.

  Then he paused.

  “I’ll tell you one thing that really pisses me off,” he said. “He’s got a son, Matthew. He spends more time with Matthew than he does with Charlie. I’ll call him up: ‘Dad! When was the last time you saw Charlie? It’s been, what? Weeks?’ Matthew has Little League, soccer practice, some school event. He’s busy. He’s too busy to see his own grandson!”

  “How old is Matthew?” I asked.

  “Fourteen,” Tony said. He laughed. “Can you fucking believe I have a fourteen-year-old brother?”

  We paid the check, the room cleared out, and the staff switched on the lights.

  “Well, Tony,” I said on the sidewalk, “I have a theory.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My theory is that a lot of your anger toward the cooks stems from anger toward your father,” I said. “I also think that your cuisine is an effort to establish your own identity—a sense of self that owes nothing to your father.”

  He laughed so hard he had to steady himself against the wall of the restaurant.

  “Oh, shut up,” he said, finally.

  I laughed, too. Tony was right, and I knew it. There were limits to what I understood about him, his food, and Craigie on Main. To get beyond those limits, I had to take the next step.

  ELEVEN

  Taking Ownership

  TASTE THIS,” TONY SAID.

  On the plate was half a head. The color was caramel, nearly, and hazelnut. Eye closed, blond eyelash still. I could see a neat, little, even row of teeth.

  “You tear it off with your fingers,” he said, “and dip the skin and fat, fleshy meat attached to the jaw into the boudin noir–hoisin sauce.”

  For the life of me, I had not understood why he was roasting a pig’s head to achieve the same effect that roasting a duck, Peking style, would have achieved just as easily. Nor why he had the need to do away with the traditional sugary-sour plum sauce and substitute for it a thick concoction of blood sausage.

  Until I tasted it.

  The fat from the pig’s cheeks was fattier than what is found in a duck. The skin was crispier. The sauce sent ribbons of flavor in my direction rather than the one big taste found in traditional hoisin.

  “Good, huh?” said Tony.

  “It is,” I said, “and once you get past the face on the plate…”

  “No, man,” Danny piped in, rushing over, wiping his hands on the towel he always kept tucked into his waistband. “Mister Pig is part of it. Got to be piggy!”

  We were always tasting things, trying out food that might make it to the menu, enjoying the usual items, Tony making certain that dishes had been cooked correctly.

  Everything tasted deeply flavorful. Paying top dollar for first-rate ingredients helped. One afternoon Tony showed me a tray of twelve pint-sized containers of raspberries.

  “Forty-eight dollars,” he said.

  “That seems like a lot,” I said.

  “It is a lot,” he said.

  Tony had introduced all sorts of high-tech equipment into his kitchen and was not the only chef who understood that technology belonged alongside slow braising, making stock from scratch, and any number of traditional cooking techniques, but he was among the very few who used it in widespread and effective ways. Ironically, having access to expensive ingredients and technology also introduced an element of unintended detachment from the work. Some cooks came to believe that they were assembly-line workers using technology with nearly perfect ingredients rather than men and women whose ideas and efforts mattered in the cooking process.

  A few days later, at the routine, preservice meeting for cooks, Tony brought this problem to everyone’s attention. As usual, we were seated outside, under the locust and sumac trees, Tony with a new, short haircut, same slight beard. He got his hair cut very often, as he was on display. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. He had a way of making a calm look seem like an angry one because of his intensity.

  “Yesterday,” Tony said, “we talked about a challenge.” He paused. “What was that challenge? Jill?”

  “Better communication as a team,” Jill said.

  “Right,” Tony said. “Collectively, as a team, there’s a level of communication that’s needed that doesn’t exist now.”

  The cooks looked down; a few closed their eyes.

  “It can be something as basic as making certain that by two forty-five each day the kitchen has been swept and mopped,” Tony said. “Or, more broadly, having discipline. Not just about cooking the food, but about everything we do. Not being afraid. Working as part of a system.”

  The group’s silence made me think of a driver who has been pulled over by the police.

  Danny spoke: “I th
ink people need to take more ownership of their own station.”

  Tony glanced up at him.

  “Making sure at the start of the day,” Danny continued, “that you have everything you need. Making sure your surfaces are spotless. Cleaning up quickly at the end of the night.”

  “These are not things we should need to be telling you at this point,” said Tony.

  Timmy, seated next to me, clutched his cooking notes tighter. On his right arm: a duck, a pig, a scaly fish. He opened his eyes but then closed them again and pouted.

  “It’s baffling to me how one side of the kitchen doesn’t know what the other side of the kitchen is doing,” said Tony. He seethed with impatience. “Again, basics. If you go into the walk-in and you need basil, you need to ask yourself: ‘Is anyone else using this?’ What if you use up basil that someone else needs? Or what if one of you goes into the walk-in, doesn’t see basil, and asks Danny or Matt to order some, not realizing that someone upstairs has plenty?”

  Tony paused again to suck in air.

  “It’s not just a waste of money,” Tony said, “it’s the fact that you all aren’t working efficiently. This is very troubling to me.”

  His emotional range became constricted, his voice deepened, he spoke even slower, and then almost in a whisper so that you had to lean in to hear him, he said, “Patrick, what do you think?”

  “I’m still learning where things go,” Patrick said. He had been at the restaurant less than a month. “I need to ask people more questions when I don’t know.”

  Tony went around the circle, asking each of the silent cooks what they thought of what he had said.

  “Kyle, what are your thoughts?” Tony asked.

  “I try to make sure that my station is good to go,” Kyle said. “As perfect as I can make it. I try to work independently. I’m not saying that I don’t communicate with the other cooks—I do. But at a certain point, I just have to focus on what I’m doing and make sure that, to the best of my ability, it’s right.”

  Matt jumped in. With Danny cutting back in a couple of months, Matt’s role in the restaurant might become more important—if he could be more assertive, if he could do the work. Matt’s style was certainly more low-key than either that of Tony or Danny. As a big guy, he had a more imposing physical presence than either man, maybe that was it. Both Tony and Danny were easily lost in a crowd. Or it could just be that he had a different perspective.

  “We need better organization,” said Matt. “Even if you go into the walk-in and see things in a row—you need to ask, ‘Is that everything? Are products upstairs?’ We need to develop systems. Systems of where and how we put things away.”

  A huge tractor-trailer emblazoned with the red-and-white Coca-Cola logo roared by and drowned out all other sounds. About twenty seconds later, we could hear again.

  “As I said,” Tony said, “it’s not just a waste of money—it’s too much work, it’s a wasted effort. I’m talking about ownership, keeping clean, and increased efficiency.”

  Michael, another new cook, small and uneasy, ginger-colored hair, so many tattoos on his arms as almost to be sleeves, spoke up. He had been hired on a trial basis just that week and said, “We need to know: This is where the herbs live. This is where the pickles live.”

  As Tony continued talking about being disappointed in the cooks, a slow transformation could be seen in their faces. Yes, they were being chewed out, but it was because Tony had expectations of them! He saw their potential. If Tony did not care, if he did not believe in them, he would not have said anything. It was difficult to be told that they had failed, but if they worked harder, they could do it.

  To lighten the mood, which was vacillating between abject shame and pride, Dakota spoke up: “If there’s stuff in the walk-in five or six days, it can go staff. We can use the elderly stuff for staff.”

  “Fair enough, D,” said Danny. “Staff eats elderly.”

  He and Dakota started laughing.

  “It’s not just about waste,” said Tony.

  Dakota and Danny stopped laughing, but Tony was no longer angry.

  “It’s about growth,” Tony said. “Growing as a team, growing as a restaurant.”

  Then, in what seemed to be a response to our conversation at the Green Street Grill only a few nights ago, Tony began to talk pleasantly of encouraging his cooks to express their ideas.

  His mood shifted. His posture shifted. He even smiled invitingly.

  “You can all have as much say as you want,” Tony said.

  This statement seemed tantamount to a revolutionary, liberating force. As much say as they wanted? The cooks? The same cooks who, night after night, had heard drummed into their heads: “My way or your way?” The same cooks whose taste buds were derided when they presented something for Tony to taste? “More salt!” “But, Chef…” “More salt, more salt, more salt!” Now suddenly, because to my ears it sounded sudden, he was telling them they could speak up?

  “I am waiting for people to say that I am wrong on such-and-such project,” Tony said. “That they have another idea. A different idea.”

  If the cooks were surprised, they did not show it. They barely moved. Up to that moment Tony had run a kitchen where his word was law, where contradicting him was seen as wrong, without merit, and if repeated a possible case of insubordination.

  Maybe Tony’s change of heart came about because he realized that his strategies of control and motivation were ineffective. He had created a work environment where people did not progress as an act of rebellion against his authority!

  “Regardless of where you are on the food chain of cooking,” Tony continued, “you will need to think about the food.”

  He paused, put his palms together, and looked up.

  “And in doing that,” Tony said, eyeing each cook until the look became a gaze, “you will be accomplishing more than just doing what you’re told. At some point, should you one day become chefs, in charge of your own kitchens, you will have to design a menu.”

  The cooks nodded in agreement.

  “Look,” Tony said, “a menu doesn’t have to be that inventive. I’m talking about your future here, not just Craigie. But even if your menu has tournedos Rossini…”

  The cooks began to giggle: How old school and corny! Especially compared to Craigie! The food at Craigie was cool! They were cool!

  “…even if it’s tournedos Rossini,” Tony continued, “you’ll have to know what’s in the dish and how to order what you need to make it.”

  “How do you spell Rossini?” asked Dakota.

  “I’m serious,” Tony said. “I want people to think creatively—to take ownership of what they’re doing, and to plan their lives for the day when it comes time to move on.”

  Now the cooks looked sad and scared. They dreamed of opening their own restaurants, but it was one thing to feel oppressed by the system that Tony had imposed on them and another to take responsibility for their work and plan their future.

  Other than Matt and Danny, who were higher up the so-called food chain, and besides Jess and Jill, who were burgeoning rock stars, only Bobby—Bobby?!—seemed to be absorbing the message. He was nodding his head vigorously in response to everything Tony said. Maybe all along he had been taking the heat because he believed that one day he would become a chef.

  “We have five or six conversations sometimes when we’re chopping,” continued Tony. “Think about it: five or six conversations about what it is we’re doing!”

  “Like,” said Danny, “ ‘We have a lot of beets, what the fuck are we gonna do with all these extra beets? I mean, what the fuck?’ Then there’s this conversation: ‘We have a lot of beets. What else should we do with these beets?’ ”

  “Google beets,” said Tony. “Come up with an amuse bouche.”

  “The first conversation is not as good as the second,” said Danny. “The first is: ‘What the fuck? Rotten beets!’ The second is: ‘What can we do with the beets?’ ”

  This
amounted to a revelation for the cooks. They were inexperienced and insecure about what they could and could not do. So it was not just great ingredients, amazing technology, and Tony’s intelligence and skill that accounted for the food? It was them. They had a stake in it! To hear this from the chef felt very good, and I could, at last, see satisfaction in their faces. They began to limber up—moving like athletes before the big game, stretching, moving their heads from side to side, flexing.

  “Are we good?” asked Tony.

  “We’re good,” said Matt.

  But did Tony, with all his talk of wanting the chefs to contribute, mean it? Or was he co-opting the revolution?

  “Chef,” said Danny, “one other thing.”

  Danny had put up his hand. Tony nodded in his direction and raised his eyebrows: Go on.

  “We have some veal left over,” said Danny. “I was thinking: Why don’t we grind it up and add it to the burger grind?”

  “No,” said Tony immediately. “All wrong! Not enough fat in veal. It won’t add anything to the burger to put in expensive meat!”

  So for all his talk about wanting his crew to participate, he had gone ahead and put down his sous chef in front of the cooks. He could have said, I’ll think about it. Or, why do you think that will work? But instead he had belittled the idea with near urgency. For sure that would stifle any other proposals.

  Danny took it in stride, nodding back, moving restlessly. As usual, he scratched his wrists.

  “That it?” said Tony.

  “Rabbits,” said Matt.

  “What about wabbits?” asked Tony.

  “What do you want me to do about ordering rabbits?” asked Matt.

  “Order wabbits,” said Tony.

  The meeting was breaking up. Dinner in an hour.

  Tony stood up and said, “Work on thinking about the food. You are not robots.”

  Dakota stood up, too.

  “Hey, Tony! Tony,” he said.

  The cooks had gathered their notes and were about to make a run for the kitchen.

  “Yes, Dakota?” said Tony.