Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

by Gibney, Michael

  Fortunately, each of you serves a distinct function for Chef. Like knives in a tool kit, he’s selected you individually based on certain character traits that satisfy specific needs of his. You each help complete the kitchen’s picture with specialized contributions.

  At the most basic level, you are the opener and Stefan is the closer. You come in earlier; Stefan stays later. What this means is that Chef trusts you to arrive on time in the morning and get everything set for dinner service. He expects you to handle the detail-oriented matters of purchasing and receiving, inventory and organization. He expects you to turn the kitchen’s lights on. Because of you, he can wake up in the morning without worrying that some emergency requires his presence at the restaurant. He knows that you are here and so he can take his time getting in because, it’s assumed, you have everything under control.

  He also has you opening because he knows your penchant for creativity, your gastronomical curiosity. Being the opener affords you the opportunity to help with the specials. Since you take the morning inventory and do all the purchasing, you are the one most fully aware of what we have in-house, you know what needs to be used up and burned out. And so, typically, when Chef comes in, he sits you down in the office and ruminates with you about what to do for service. The two of you brainstorm, philosophize, think about what’s possible in cooking.

  The last, and likely most important, reason he has you opening is purely administrative. Since you have extra time during the day as the opener, and since your attention to detail has proved unflinching, he entrusts you with the payroll and the making of the schedule. Not only does this charge acquaint you with the logistical matters associated with operating a restaurant, but also it puts you in unique contact with the cooks. You are responsible for their schedules, so they come to you with requests and conflicts. You are also responsible for their paychecks, so they come to you with gripes. If they want overtime, they ask you; if they need an advance to cover rent, they ask you. You hold the key to their livelihood, and so you act as a sounding board for their financial woes.

  Stefan’s position is different. He is the enforcer, the wiry disciplinarian. He has hewn closely to the gold standard of the modern high-order professional kitchen: go hard or go home. He has gone hard since the outset.

  By the time he was sixteen, Stefan, a zealous Virginian, had already beaten a path up Hyde Park way. There was no career he was willing to entertain other than cooking and, in his mind, there was no better place to begin pursuing that career than the Culinary Institute of America. When externship season came rolling around, he shot straight for the top, and he hasn’t looked back. He cut his teeth at all the city’s best restaurants and continues to maintain a dogged resistance to dipping below three stars. He’s always checking the listings to see who is opening what and where; he’s always looking for the next hot spot, the next great opportunity. And he’ll take it, too, if it seems like a step forward in his career. He is a soldier of fortune, a survivor, and every success he’s enjoyed thus far he’s achieved by dint of pure tenacity.

  His attraction to fine dining makes him the perfect disciplinarian. The only environment he knows is one of utmost intensity. He holds himself and those around him to the highest standard of performance imaginable, and Chef trusts him to preserve that standard at every turn. Although he may look a bit loose at the seams—perpetually scruffy, routinely hungover—he is incapable of doing things inelegantly on the line. He’s a prodigy on the stove, an ace on the pass. And he simply does not know how to conceal his disdain for poor technique. When a cook mishandles a situation, Stefan is usually the first to point it out, loudly and churlishly. He is cutthroat in this respect, and most of the cooks have grown to fear encounters with him.

  Right beneath the sous chefs are the lead cooks, the big guns. They tend not to respond to Stefan’s antagonism. These are the people who cook the meat to the right temperature and handle the fish properly—the rôtisseurs and poissonniers. They are the cream of the cooks and they know it, one short step away from management. As such, their jobs require the most skill and trust, and more often than not, the most experience. They are typically older, more graceful, more powerful cooks with booming voices and a due sense of self-worth.

  Julio, our rôtisseur, is a forty-year-old Dominican who speaks perfect English and takes insolence from nobody. You never have to worry about him. He is the first to the pass on every pick. His temperatures are always perfect. He eighty-sixes nothing. He gets the job done. And the poise and pride with which he comports himself, combined with his preternatural skills in meat cookery, amount to the perfect recipe for upward mobility, should he ever decide to take the next step in his career.

  But Julio is one of those cooks who are content to remain on the line rather than move up the chain. Professional cooking is just something he has always done for work. It is a trade to him, an occupation more than a vision quest. His priorities are elsewhere. He is married, he has children, he owns a home. It seems that his life is full in the outside world, that he’s happy with it the way it is. And the gold wedding ring he wears while he works serves as a perpetual reminder of that.

  Raffy, our poissonnier, is of a similar mold. Like Julio, he is phenomenal at what he does. Hailing from Basque country, he, like Chef, has European training, mostly French and Spanish. He is accustomed to long hours and high expectations. His ability with fish is surpassed perhaps only by Chef’s, and his sweeping knowledge of archaic technique (how to flute a mushroom, for example) is enough to incite jealousy.

  Unlike Julio, though, Raffy seems fundamentally attracted to professional ascension. He is a sprightly twenty-something anxious to move up the ranks. He really wants to be a chef. And, based on ability alone, he should be. He should have nabbed at least a sous chef position by now. As it stands, however, he remains cloistered on fish roast. It’s his attitude that’s the problem. He’s been known to leave his station a mess at the end of the night; he shows up late from time to time; he tends to petulance when it gets busy; he gravitates toward alcohol after service perhaps a bit too frequently. Simply put, he is immature. So, while he might want to be a chef some day, he’s going to need to button a few things up if he ever hopes to actually get there.

  Below the lead cooks are a group that do tend to respond to Stefan’s derisive approach. They are the vegetable cooks—the entremetiers. They are responsible for the “middle work,” which can be very intense. Most of the components on a given plate are prepared by the entremets. For every steak Julio broils or every fish Raffy sears, his respective entremet prepares anywhere from two to twelve garnishes—vegetables, starches, sauces, salads, etcetera. Leaving off the actual proteins, anything in a dish that needs to be sautéed, wilted, steamed, stirred, toasted, folded, roasted, tossed, shaved, pressed, grated, dressed, salted, seasoned, or otherwise treated before it reaches Chef’s hands is the duty of the entremetier.

  This can be a special challenge in a restaurant where everything is prepared to order—à la minute. Your average entremet is accustomed to managing fifteen or twenty separate pans of food at once. As a result, usually only the most motivated cooks can work the entremetier station. They are typically young, exuberant cooks with a few years of experience, in the early stages of their development.

  Warren and Vinny do this work for us. While their titles are basically the same, they as people could not be more dissimilar.

  Warren, an early-thirties curly blond, is our entremet on fish side. He is one of these late bloomers who come to cooking by vocation after an unsuccessful attempt at another career. He studied entomology at Cornell and worked for years in the profession before first taking to the stove. But since his arrival here about six months ago, he’s shown an incredible amount of development. He truly wants to be here, almost needs to be here, and he tries very hard to be as good a cook as he can be. His manner is decorous, his station is spotless, he strives to impress, he is diametrically opposed to sloth, and he hates failure. The c
ooks call him Juan. Chef Juan, Don Juan, Juanita, Juan Gabriel, etcetera. It started with a general unfamiliarity with the name Warren—Kiko just thought the guy’s name was Juan. But now, though the misunderstanding has long been ironed out, everyone continues to call him that, even the white guys. They’re just razzing him, of course, but Warren’s really bugged by it.

  Unlike Warren, Vinny or VinDog, our meat entremet, could not care less what people think of him. A brick shit-house with beefy arms and a bad attitude, VinDog is animated always by some urgent, unquenched irreverence. His neck is tattooed, his face is pierced, and something resembling a Mohawk has been sawn into his head. At first glance, he’s not what you’d expect to find lurking in the wings of a star-rated restaurant.

  Nor does he appear to be here because he needs to be. He doesn’t need a restaurant to line his pockets or fill his spirit—he’s happy to get his share by hook or crook. But apparently he prefers cooking to, say, working construction or collecting trash. So about a year ago, when Chef offered to extricate him from a bar-backing gig in Alphabet City, VinDog saw fit to seize the opportunity. Had things gone differently, you’d probably find him slapping up Sheetrock in Chinatown or circling the drain somewhere in Bushwick. It’s questionable, actually, if his real name is even Vinny.

  But VinDog exemplifies a fairly common contradiction. Beneath the ragamuffin façade is an intelligent, curious, resourceful person, almost custom-made for the kitchen. He takes hard work like water off a duck’s back and he never stops asking questions until he gets the answers he needs. While his street clothes may be dirty, his work is always clean; while his appearance may be suspect, his cook’s chops are nonpareil. That he owes his skill-set entirely to Chef’s mentoring is undoubted, but that he is able to survive in this environment speaks to his own adaptability and to that of the kitchen as well.

  Below Warren and VinDog is Catalina, our garde manger. Garde mangers are the salad cooks, the appetizer specialists. They are usually entry-level line cooks, working out of a satellite station alongside pastry on the cold side. They prepare mostly small cold items such as hors d’oeuvres, amuse-bouches, and salads, with occasional responsibility for desserts. They have less seniority than the cooks on the hot side, but they almost always outrank the guys back in prep. They do work the line, as it were, which is always a source of pride and some variety of authority in the kitchen hierarchy.

  Five-two, buck-eighty, gold-toothed, and bangle-wristed, Catalina assumes all the authority she can muster. She epitomizes the hard-nosed constitution for which Mexican women are famous. She has come to be a sort of matriarch in our operation and, as is to be expected, she tackles her motherly duties vigorously. After her day off, she’ll return to work with a stack of tortillas, a wheel of queso fresco, and a bushel of tomatillos and prepare flautas con salsa verde for the entire kitchen team. When someone burns or cuts himself, she is the first to arrive on the scene with ground pepper and tomato, to stop the bleeding, disinfect, and numb the pain. And on the unlikely occasion that a rodent should venture into the kitchen, she’ll make quick work of taking it down—often grabbing it with her bare hands, muffling it up in a to-go bag, dispatching it with a whack or two on the ground, and pitching it into the dumpster out back of the loading dock.

  Catalina is esposa to the A.M. prep cook, Rogelio; tía to the P.M. prep cook, Brianne; and madre to our favorite dishwasher, Kiko. They make a nice little family, the four of them, and they contribute a significant amount to our operation’s skeletal system.

  Rogelio, or Don Rojas, as we often refer to him, is indispensable. In addition to his duties receiving and unpacking deliveries, he’s also responsible for the bulk of our production work. He takes care of the daily basics such as sliced garlic, peeled vegetables, and snipped herbs, which need to be ready by the time the cooks arrive. But his main area of focus is the large-format projects. We have him doing all our pickling and preserving, making all our stocks and bouillons, and, probably most important, maintaining many of our sous vide systems. He is responsible for most of the ROP and HACCP logging, for monitoring the pars on our compression and infusion projects, and for executing all our multiday braises. Without him, our sous vide output would be a fraction of what it is. Suffice it to say, we get to cook the way we do in large part because of the work that Rogelio does.

  Brianne is equally vital. She arrives in the afternoon and carries us through to the bitter end. Her strength is batch work—the foodstuffs that get made every couple of days: aiolis, sofritos, vinaigrettes, etcetera—and she devotes most of her time to working on projects of this sort. She’s possessed by a certain spirit of inquiry, so working with recipes and learning to perfect them is a main goal of hers. She is also ambitious to ascend the ranks, and it shows in her performance. Tireless, punctual (if not early), determined, eager, curious, never failing to lend a hand—these are only a few of the ways that Brie could be described. And it comes in handy, this work ethic of hers, especially on busy nights when the linesmen need to re-up on mise en place throughout service. Brie is the queen of ancillary prep work. She is always there to fill the gaps.

  And then there is Kiko—our chef plongeur. The word “exhaustion” doesn’t appear to be part of this man’s lexicon. This is not uncommon among dishwashers—a steadfast devotion to hard, mindless labor, an appetite for constant activity. Kiko works basically around the clock washing dishes, putting in doubles most of the week. On top of that, he never turns down overtime. As a result, his paychecks are huge, which is probably why he is generally pleasant with everybody (except Raffy, whose insouciance toward the dish team seems to boil Kiko’s blood). He’s also the acting ambassador for the rest of the dish crew, which consists of an overnight steward, a weekend pot washer, and a pair of P.M. dish men, all of whom are seldom seen and even less frequently heard from.

  Outside this core group of cooks and dishwashers, a few others join our team intermittently. We have the part-time pastry faction, consisting of a consulting pastry chef and baker, who come in extremely early on Mondays and Thursdays to set up the batters, doughs, and sauces for our dessert program; we have the stagiaire set, a regular rotation of cooking school externs who come in for a day or two at a time to study our technique; and we have the back waiters, a trio of low-ranking floor staffers led by Hussein, our Bengali chef de rang.

  Back waiters are the unhailed linchpins of the dining experience. They are the people who run the food to the dining room and the people who bring back the empty plates. They are the ones who set the tables and the ones who clear them as well. They deliver glassware, light candles, refresh waters, and fetch sides of ketchup. And when a group of guests has left a table, they move quickly and efficiently to ready it for the next set. Simply put, they perform all the unobserved graces that diners have come to expect from restaurants. And whereas servers and bartenders and managers and maître d’s represent the face of the restaurant—taking orders, fielding questions, explaining things to guests—the back waiters do their jobs in relative anonymity.

  But the most important role the back waiters play is informant to the kitchen. They are our eyes and ears out front. They tell us which tables are ready for their next courses and which ones we should slow down on. They let us know what sections and servers are slammed and whom we can expect big tickets from soon. They notify us when important guests arrive and they remind us where they are sitting. They have the presence of mind to alert us when the dining room is filling up so we can be ready, and the kindness of heart to inform us when it is emptying out so we can begin breaking down. And, unlike most other FOH staff, who can sometimes get caught up coddling customers, back waiters always have time throughout service (and usually make it a point) to update us on how people seem to be enjoying their meals. Which is why, even though they are technically a constituent of the waitstaff, we often regard the back waiters as members of the kitchen team—an affiliation they readily accept. They are back here with us most of the night, working out of the lim
elight, so their allegiance lies with us.

  With all these individuals scampering around during service, much can go wrong very quickly. It’s a plate-spinning act, which could topple over in pieces at any moment. A chef’s goal during any given meal period is to prevent this from happening—to sustain a fusion of all the moving parts, to keep the team together, to keep the bus driving straight. There will always be the clatter of pots and pans, the din of voices—professional cooking is a loud racket—but when service is performed fluidly, artfully, all the noise can be mistaken for silence. There’s a certain harmony to the sound, and it’s almost as though you don’t even hear it.

  PLATS DU JOUR

  OF ALL THE CONDITIONS THAT CAN DISRUPT A KITCHEN’S harmony, anger is probably the most dangerous. There are many different types of anger in the kitchen, and each one manifests itself in a different way. Mistakes during service, for example, will always arouse immediate attack. If you break a plate, you will be called an idiot; if you drag on a pickup, you will be called a tortuga; if you overcook a piece of meat, you will be called a shoemaker. An especially charged service might aggravate the situation. When the dining room is full, say, or when a food critic is in the house, the stakes are high, and everyone tries very hard to make service perfect. At such moments, an error on your part might create an unnecessary emergency for someone else, and tempers may flare to even violent dimensions. Chef might throw a plate at you or trash your mise en place. He might drag you from the line by the scruff of your neck and throw you outside on the street. A line cook might shove past you in a huff, perhaps grazing your arm with a sizzle platter. A dishwasher might threaten to kill you. When the heat is on, everyone is at each other’s throat.