The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  Melissa works with the sheep’s milk and whey early in the day when the kitchen stove is not in use except for simmering a large pot of pork stock, and it’s just her and Doug, the young prep cook, in this part of the kitchen. The whey she has is the watery rich-rich liquid separated out of the sheep’s milk during the cheese-making process at nearby Apple Hill Farm. When the proteins that compose whey are heated they clump together, they curdle, into what is called ricotta. She begins this process now in a large heavy aluminum pot. The recipe she uses is from the cheese maker at Old Chatham Sheepherding Company. To cook there was a luxury. Funds (originally deriving from owner Tom Clark’s leveraged-buyout firm) were virtually unlimited. In a way, cooking this sheep’s-milk ricotta returns her to those productive but difficult years. Tom and his wife, Nancy, oversaw—and continue to run—one of the largest sheep dairies in the United States, with more than a thousand sheep. In addition to the lambs they raised for the kitchen, they also raised hogs. Melissa had all the sheep’s-milk cheese and sheep’s whey she could ever dream of. The farm-raised lamb and hogs yielded meat of extraordinary flavor. You couldn’t buy better quality anywhere on earth, and it grew right there outside her kitchen window. It was here that she determined how she wanted to cook—in a small kitchen with a big garden, working the line every night with a couple of other cooks, making the food she cared most about.

  “We had pigs,” she says. “We had the lambs there. We had sheep’s milk every day—it was an incredible place to cook…. We worked really hard there for four years. Same as we do here.”

  Ultimately, however, a cook’s dream though it might seem, she grew disenchanted by the owners and the boggling sums of money that were spent. “They didn’t get what was really happening there,” she says. “After a while I couldn’t work for them. ‘Do you see what you have here? Do you understand what’s going on here—that we’re working and you’re just in the way right now?’ They had no concept.

  “A lot of people don’t know,” she continues. “Most people don’t know, even as a cook you don’t know half the stuff that needs to happen in a day or a week or a year [for a restaurant to run smoothly], and to understand that, it gives you a different perspective.”

  Melissa removes her instant-read thermometer, slips it through the metal clip perpendicular to the sheath so she can hold it comfortably above the heating liquid. When she sees it hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit, she adds salt for flavor. She continues to stir, and when the whey reaches 140 degrees, she adds the milk, about two gallons. As the temperature begins to rise again, small clots of curdled whey float to the surface. Melissa measures the temperature again, and at 194 degrees she adds about a cup of white vinegar, which curdles the milk proteins. She continues stirring as gently as she would an incipient consommé raft. Some of the curds stick to the bottom and caramelize just slightly, but she determines they don’t taste scorched. When it is as curdled as it will get, she dumps the contents of the pot into a cloth-lined strainer. I taste some of the curd, true ricotta. It has a delicate, neutral flavor. A cup of vinegar into four gallons of whey and milk seems like a lot, but the taste is not acidic.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I ask.

  She pauses thoughtfully, then says, “I’m not sure yet, I was thinking of an appetizer to feature it. We’ll see how it turns out.” She scoops the drained moist curd into a deep one-third pan. “I wish the bread were made,” she says, smiling seductively at the thought of it, “so we could put some of this on warm baguette and drizzle it with olive oil.”

  Later in the day, after the bread has baked, she sets beside my cutting board a small piece of toasted baguette with the warm ricotta on it. The fresh cheese is snowy white and streaked with the yellow of extra-virgin olive oil. It’s got a light, milky, sheepy flavor, faintly sweet, and a firm, curdy texture—a delight. I can see why she misses having abundant whey—what a luxury that must have been.

  There are few luxuries here. Only lots of work—satisfying work. And a good thing, too, because for all of Melissa’s successes—for her struggle to rise to sous-chef at An American Place in Manhattan, then taking over the Beekman 1766 Tavern and the trials in Miami and California and Denver, for the Chez Panisse struggles and for the splash of arrival at Old Chatham, and for the ensuing and endless press she continues to receive, and now, Primo, five years old and booked solid all summer long every day except barbecue holidays—for working, as Price puts it without too much exaggeration, “probably a hundred twenty-five hours a week for fifteen years”—for all this, she and Price will scarcely make a dime.

  Melissa’s mom, JoAnn, knows—she’s Primo’s accountant. She does the books.

  “They’ll be lucky if they break even this year,” she tells me, without a smile. Price acknowledges this. “Everything we have is in this restaurant,” he says, “and everything we make goes back into it.” They’d make money if they were this busy year-round but they’re in Maine—February and March, needless to say, are not thronged with tourists, or even residents for that matter. Nevertheless, they’re making ends meet, and this year they’ll have worked through most of the debt they took on in 1999 when they bought and rehabbed the place. “And I know that’s when things are going to start breaking down,” Price says with an ironic grin. “I just know it. Like we’ve got to put a new roof on, and that’s expensive, especially in an old house like this.”

  The day’s routine almost never varies. Morning prep is followed by the menu meeting with Rob, followed by about four more hours of prep—all afternoon and up until service the kitchen is a hive of activity, and work space becomes territorial, especially when service arrives and begins the sidework, wiping down silver and glasses and stacking plates, folding napkins. At 4:15, Melissa writes the day’s specials, the verbals, on the dry-erase board.

  At 4:30, the servers, usually about ten of them during the summer, gather in a wallpapered Victorian dining room hung with old black-and-white photographs of Melissa’s family. They busily scribble the contents of the board into their pads. Melissa waits quietly, apparently relaxing, taking advantage of this time off her feet. No hurry. If you work in the kitchen, the pre-service meeting, a ritual in virtually all good restaurants, is a time of strange calm.

  When Melissa senses the servers are nearly finished, she begins: “The first turn looks hellish on paper, the second turn looks spread out. We have a hundred and nine.” The night before, they did 131 covers—served 131 customers—which is almost exactly two turns in this 65-seat restaurant. They’re likely to do the same tonight, with walk-ins and people eating at the bar.

  She then begins at the top of the two-by-three-foot board. “Duck-sausage pie”—each day there’s a “chef’s whim” pizza, this one using duck confit and figs, same as yesterday.

  “How much is that?” a server asks.

  “Fifteen,” Melissa says. “The antipasti is a fried-squid salad. Quail is wrapped in serrano and wood-roasted, served on a salad with red onion, a quail egg, and mustard vinaigrette…. The beet salad has our roasted beets with an orange-pistachio vinaigrette…. The duck confit is served on the bone with an arugula salad, a champagne vinaigrette. The duck is cooked with allspice, cloves, bay, thyme, garlic, and white pepper…. The salmon is wrapped in fresh grape leaves, not the brined ones we’ve been buying. They’ve been blanched and it’s grilled, so they get a little charred and crisp. That’s served with fresh beans…. The bass tonight is served with a ratatouille of summer squash and eggplant—that’s from our garden…. The duck is served with potato gnocchi…. We have seven orders of the leg of lamb with couscous, mint, peas, and Thai basil.”

  There is no real order of events here—it’s a general group meeting. Price, sitting to the side, says, “Everyone did a great job with the verbals yesterday.” Price, age thirty-three, is an energetic presence. His five-foot-six frame is compact and athletic. He’s got dark hair that hangs in curls, and he’s got a bright and ready smile. He’s an easygoing guy, happiest when h
e’s out on the lake in a flat-bottomed skiff with his huge Newfoundland, Otis, on his way to a little island at low tide to pick sea beans for one of tonight’s seafood dishes. “People really change—it’s August,” he says to the servers. Everyone knows that August crowds tend to spend less, are more demanding, and are generally less savvy than off-season patrons. “So do your best to maintain your composure.”

  A server says, “The green zebras were a little hard yesterday, and I noticed some people were leaving them.”

  “Do you think that was because they were green?” Melissa says. “Sometimes people think the green zebras just aren’t ripe.”

  “No,” the server says. “They were a little hard.”

  Melissa nods OK.

  Melissa scans the board, set on a table beside her, propped against the wall. “There are two changes on aps tonight. The oysters tonight are Pemaquid; they’re roasted with a tomato-fennel glaçage, which is kind of like a hollandaise, but not really—it’s whipped egg yolks, with a reduction of Pernod, shallot, dry vermouth, and tomato. We’re folding some whipped cream into that, and that’s spooned over the oyster. We’ll have a little fennel sauce on there as well. The glaçage will get a little brown on top when it comes out of the oven. It’ll get toasted bread crumbs with toasted fennel seeds ground into them.”

  “What’s the best way to describe that to the customers,” a server asks, “kinda like a hollandaise?”

  “No,” she says, “it’s more like a gratiné with fennel and tomato.”

  “And it’s called glaçage?”

  “Glaçage—it’s a classic preparation. And we also have a house-made sheep’s-milk ricotta. The sheep’s milk came from Perry Ells’s farm and we got whey from Apple Hill Farm. They’re making a sheep’s-milk cheese as well. We used the whey and milk to make the ricotta here this morning. So it’s house-made, served warm on a lightly toasted baguette, with a little arugula, Black Mission figs, and extra-virgin olive oil. Very simple.”

  The servers are eager to know how Melissa worked the magic on the whey. Melissa describes the process and also notes the difference between this ricotta and ricotta salata, which is salted, pressed, and baked. The nature of the curds that define ricotta is that they don’t fall apart under heat—they don’t melt. Instead, they simply dry out. Melissa likes to use ricotta salata, in strips using a vegetable peeler, grated, or in chunks on pizzas and pastas. The servers listen intently, many taking notes, presumably for their own use.

  The easy discussion goes on in this manner until all the servers have asked everything they need to know, or addressed any issues, for the night ahead. Then Melissa at last stands slowly and returns to the kitchen, finishing prep, then cleaning up for service.

  Unless she hears someone whistling. Once, while seated in this dining room toward the end of the pre-service meeting, she heard whistling and was out of her seat like lightning. “Who’s whistling?!” she shouted, the only time I heard her raise her voice. “Jesse?!” She bolted for the dish station where the new dishwasher was merrily hosing down plates. Melissa is superstitious: Whistling in a kitchen means death to the chef, she said. Jesse agreed to refrain.

  Service at Primo, action on the hot line, is classic American restaurant cooking—two line cooks, a guy on wood-oven station, a garde manger doing salads and aps, someone on desserts, and Melissa expediting on the other side of the line, wiping plates as they’re set on the hot shelf above the two line cooks, handing them to the servers and calling out orders and fires. It doesn’t really look like much unless you know what to look for—and then it’s like watching a cross between a sporting event and a soap opera. It’s an incredibly intense world that you can’t possibly know completely until you’re in it yourself. It’s like being in the OR except here, the only person who might die is you.

  Lindsey was on garde manger, her normal post, night before last. Lindsey is a young cook, twenty-three, who’s recently graduated from culinary school. This is her first real cook’s job. She’s beautiful in her fairness—pale lips, fair skin, loose curly blond hair pulled back, blond lashes and eyebrows. If you saw her outside a kitchen in street clothes, you’d never suspect she was a line cook. Even her voice and movements have a sweet delicacy about them.

  “I don’t even consider myself a cook yet—I’m still learning,” she told me, speaking like a true cook. She continued to roll pistachio–goat cheese balls that go with the orange-and-beet salad. “Melissa works so hard. She’s such a great mentor.”

  It was the beet salad that got her two days ago—but not in the predictable way. She was getting hammered, but Melissa had kept an eye on her and she was holding her own. The orders for beet salad kept raining down on her. In that situation, you keep thinking to yourself, It’s gotta slow down or even out, and then the orders for that one dish come even faster. About three and a half hours into service, she was making what seemed like her fortieth beet salad—baby beets from the garden are roasted and sliced, served with red lettuce from the garden, segmented orange, and the pistachio–goat cheese “truffles,” Melissa calls them on the menu, finished with a pistachio vinaigrette. She reached for vinaigrette to dress the greens. As she lifted the glass pitcher out of her mise tray, it slipped from her fingers, spilled all over her mise, and broke the salt ramekin.

  When service is busy like this, and it was peaking, it’s all you can do to stay on top of things when everything is going well. When you are a young cook and you lose your dressing and foul your mise for the one dish that seemingly everyone in the entire dining room is ordering, it’s as if someone drives a stick between your spokes as you’re cruising downhill on a bicycle. You go flying. You sit up and shake your head clear and find yourself so deep in the weeds you can’t even see where you are.

  Lindsey collapsed. She couldn’t work. Melissa had to run back and help her. There was just enough vinaigrette left in the container to make the salads ordered, but what if more came in? She’d never be able to do it—she wouldn’t have time to remake the vinaigrette. But she’d have to—but she couldn’t—but she’d have to—what would she do? All she can hear in her head is Melissa’s voice, “Ordering, beet salad. Beet salad. Four beet salad. Beet salad.” The thought paralyzes her; she can’t get past it. Melissa says, “Don’t worry—if you run out we’ll make more.” But Lindsey never surmounted the mental block and staggered through to the end of service, on the verge of tears.

  The thing is, no more beet salads were ordered. She had exactly enough vinaigrette. There was never anything to worry about.

  “You can’t let that stuff run you over,” Melissa said afterward.

  The next day I asked Lindsey about it. She was still beating herself up. “I should let it go; I shouldn’t be so sensitive,” she said, peeling more oranges for that beet salad.

  Those kinds of events stay with you forever. They’re trauma scars; they never go away. One year after I’d been to Trio, I was in the kitchen where Jeffrey Pikus worked. I’d been at Trio the night he ran out of dehydrated bacon. The guests at the chef’s table would never have known a thing was not as it should be. One of the commis quickly got some bacon roasted off, and all Grant said was a quiet, “It’s no use lying to yourself.” That was it. One year later I bumped into Pikus, who was busy getting ready for service, and I was curious about this trauma phenomenon. I said, “Jeffrey, you remember running out of bacon?”

  Pikus paused for a fraction of a moment—for the nausea to come and go—then nodded once at me and said, “Yeah.”

  As if he could ever forget! You never forget! I guarantee you, had it been ten years from now and I’d run into Pikus and asked, “You remember running out of bacon that night at Trio?” he’d shake his head and sigh, the memory as vivid now as it was at the time. It’s a powerful business, line cooking. It does things to your head.

  But with Lindsey, it had happened before. Last time, it was with the chicory salad. “I’ve never seen anyone drop so much dressing,” Melissa confides. “I te
ll her not to pick it up.”

  Lindsey tosses the salad with her hands—so she’s got oil on her hands, she gets oil on the glass container—it’s slippery!

  Last time she dropped the dressing she did need more vinaigrette. Alissa was on desserts and had time to help, so she made more dressing while Lindsey worked to keep up with the orders, constructing the salad, which included a soft-boiled egg cooked to order—and it’s either a good egg night or a bad egg night, when the shells stick and the eggs keep breaking on you as more and more customers in the dining room keep ordering the chicory salad!

  Now Joe, on wood oven, sees what’s going on as he’s making his pies and putting up his aps. He sees that Alissa is making the vinaigrette wrong, and he had to get pissed at her—because it was a night when Melissa wasn’t there (a rarity, but it happens)—and Rob, supposedly the sous, wasn’t doing a thing about it, was just working through service as expediter. Joe was furious.

  Joe is tall and lean, with a sensitive demeanor. He came in on his day off to address the issue with Melissa. He remained furious that there was no leadership when Melissa was gone. So Melissa now had to go talk with Rob, and Rob’s response was I’d have helped if I’d known. This in turn made Melissa furious. “It’s your job to know,” she told him. “You have to be aware.” In this way it is a family soap opera—a chain of emotional events—from Alissa to Joe to Rob to Melissa, eliciting significant issues of leadership and responsibility set off because Lindsey dropped her dressing in the middle of service.

  Then there’s Art, small, slender, bespectacled, and absolutely unflappable on the line. Nothing fazes him. He’s stonefaced on the line, never changes expression, and never stops moving. He’s a great line cook.

  Melissa can throw a dozen order-fires at him while he’s picking up an eight-top and he just plows through it. She doesn’t take it for granted. Yesterday when the twelve-top ordered and she read the ticket, she paused, stepped to the left side of the service shelf, Art’s side, and caught his eye for the briefest moment, saying gently, “I’ve got a big one for you.” She paused while he turned to grab a sauté pan behind him to plate a saltimbocca. “Three bass, four halibut, one scallop, one pappardelle, no shrimp on one of those halibuts.” There’s scarcely room on his station for all the plates on this ticket, let alone the time to cook them so they are all finished at the same time. Art doesn’t flinch, working on a second saltimbocca, doesn’t even call it back, just gives a barely perceptible nod. This allows Melissa to run back to pastry to help Alissa, who is all alone back there and getting her first rush of the night.