by Dan Charnas
For Wendy & Isaac.
My right place is where you are.
My sincerest desire is that you exhaust all the strength and the effort of your lives . . . and every moment of every day into your practice.
—DOGEN
CONTENTS
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
FIRST COURSE:
THE POWER OF WORKING CLEAN
Focus: How Mise-en-Place Works
Chaos: How We Work without Mise-en-Place
SECOND COURSE:
THE INGREDIENTS OF WORKING CLEAN
Planning Is Prime
Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements
Cleaning As You Go
Making First Moves
Finishing Actions
Slowing Down to Speed Up
Open Eyes and Ears
Call and Callback
Inspect and Correct
Total Utilization
THIRD COURSE:
WORKING CLEAN AS A WAY OF LIFE
The Commitments of Working Clean
The Work Clean System
A Day of Working Clean
CONCLUSION
EPILOGUE
INTERVIEWS
GRATITUDE
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Imagine if, early in our schooling or career, we learned a system to organize ourselves and manage our work. We could carry this system with us no matter where we worked or what we did for a living—be we contractor or teacher, salesperson or doctor. And with this system we would have a code to guide our conduct; techniques to help us channel our energies, thoughts, and emotions productively; and the means to get through a tough workload and deliver with excellence.
Bits of that philosophy live in many professions and corporate cultures. Pieces of that system exist in any number of organizational methods.
But only one profession has developed a refined philosophy and comprehensive system of how to work. That profession is the culinary arts, and that philosophy and system is called mise-en-place.
It’s a French phrase translating as “put in place.” In the kitchen mise-en-place means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking. But for many culinary professionals, the phrase connotes something deeper. Mise-en-place is a tradition of focus and discipline, a method of working and being. Many cooks call it a way of life.
What makes the professional kitchen’s system so special? Over the past 2 centuries, chefs and cooks all over the world developed an informal regimen of values and behaviors in response to the unique demands and constraints of those kitchens. Because of those singular circumstances, chefs and cooks created an approach to work that has no equivalent.
What makes that approach applicable outside the kitchen? What wisdom could a chef impart, for example, to a lawyer, when those two jobs are so different? The simple answer is that lawyers weren’t forced to create that system. Chefs were. And the values and behaviors that spring from that chefly system aren’t about cooking, but about achieving excellence. So many of us have convinced ourselves that because we are busy, we are working to the fullest extent of our abilities. But chefs know that there is a big difference between working hard and working clean.
That mise-en-place might be useful outside the kitchen, and that the chef’s philosophy of working might be as nourishing to our minds as the chef’s food is to our bodies—those ideas are why this book exists.
This book teaches the lessons of mise-en-place in three courses. The first section, The Power of Working Clean, takes us straight to an exceptional kitchen where we’ll spend a day discovering how mise-en-place works and how it helps its practitioners focus amid chaos. Then we’ll spend a very different kind of day in an office, showing how we work without mise-en-place and how we often suffer for it. We’ll see that mise-en-place applies to the office despite its differences from the kitchen. And we’ll learn the three universal values of working clean: preparation, process, and presence.
The second course, The Ingredients of Working Clean, breaks mise-en-place into 10 distinct behaviors, each its own chapter. Each of the 10 chapters begins with a story, taking us into the life of a chef and how he or she learned that behavior. We then look at what chefs do and know that we might not. Then we suggest exercises and habits to integrate that behavior into our work lives outside the kitchen.
The third course, Working Clean as a Way of Life, converts those ingredients into a recipe for regular use. First, we reshape the values and behaviors of mise-en-place to fit our lives outside the kitchen and lay out the Work Clean system for organizing our workflow. Then we’ll walk together through an ideal day of working clean, which weaves all the values and behaviors we’ve learned into an average workday and includes the book’s most important recommendation: developing a regular practice of planning, a 30-minute Daily Meeze.
Working clean can transform your life, and this book gives you many useful ways to do just that.
As the global economy changes, our personal career trajectories become more like those of culinarians—nonlinear, itinerant, with plenty of false starts and surprises, successes and failures. Restaurants open and restaurants close, but because of mise-en-place, chefs and cooks bend where we might tend to break. A personal mise-en-place imparts a kind of learned resiliency that, if you practice it, can travel with you from workplace to workplace, from opportunity to opportunity. Mise-en-place can provide comfort as we move through those spaces because we understand that the responsibility for our success lies in our self-direction. Any door we walk through, we carry our own mise-en-place with us.
Some additional notes about the writing of Work Clean:
■I am a journalist, not a chef. I have never worked in a professional kitchen. I became intrigued by mise-en-place not because I was interested in cooking, but because, as an outsider, I saw in that system something beautiful and elegant that transcended kitchen work. Thus I approached this project in three ways. First, as a reporter, I have used the tools of my profession, interviewing more than 100 people from the culinary world, including chefs, line cooks, students, instructors, and restaurateurs, spending many months observing the kitchens in which they work. Second, as an executive and manager, I bring a career of experiences working in corporate, academic, and start-up environments; and I carry a professional history of both successes and instructive failures. Third, as a college professor and as a 2-decade-long teacher of a spiritual discipline, yoga, I recognize in the chef a kindred mission to educate, and I see many commonalities between the chef’s philosophy, mise-en-place, and other spiritual traditions.
■I worked to represent my sources accurately and to honor them, their aspirations, experience, and expertise. The stories, thoughts, feelings, or words of chefs and cooks come from reporting, not invention. For dialogue I use quotation marks to denote replication and italics to signify approximation.
■I refer to mise-en-place above as a philosophy (what chefs believe) and a system (what chefs do). Later in this book I refer to it as an ethical code. Mise-en-place is all those things. Chefs themselves use the term to denote the array of ingredients at their station, their setup (e.g., “That idiot dropped sauce all over my mise-en-place!”), but also the practice of preparing that setup for themselves or other cooks (e.g., “If you can come in on time and get your mise-en-place done every day, then I’ll let you cook.”), and the mind state of someone who knows exactly how to think, plan, and move (e.g., “She has good mise-en-place.”). Mise-en-place is all those things, too.
■I do not use the words chef and cook interchangeably, even though some people do—and even though some chefs humbly call themselves “cooks” and some cooks proudly call themselves “chefs.” In this book a “chef” leads a staff of cooks, and “cooks” work for a chef. For si
mplicity, “chef” and “cook” include “baker.”
■I wrote this book for the layman, but I hope that it will also be useful for current and future culinarians. My suggestions are mostly for the workplace, but they can also be used at home. And though I aim those suggestions at people who work in offices, mise-en-place applies to classrooms, hospitals, and other work settings.
■To deconstruct mise-en-place, I drew from sources in the world of fine dining—not because mise-en-place doesn’t exist in diners and chain restaurants, but because the philosophy is more exacting, evolved, explicit, and articulated in fine-dining kitchens.
■I have interviewed chefs all over North America, but most of the chefs I’ve selected to profile are based in New York. I’ve done this in part to weave together the narratives of chefs who share the same teachers. In particular, the students of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Alfred Portale, and Charlie Palmer figure prominently in this book.
■Lastly, I wrote this book on mise-en-place because I couldn’t find one to read. But I would be remiss if I did not credit two people, Michael Ruhlman and Anthony Bourdain, for introducing the concept into public consciousness. The Making of a Chef, Ruhlman’s magnificent account of his journey to learn about becoming a chef by embedding himself as a student at the Culinary Institute of America, was published in 1997 and has to be one of the first contemporary accounts of mise-en-place as a personal and professional culture. Reading Anthony Bourdain’s notions about mise-en-place in the midst of his rollicking memoir Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000, was like reaching an eye of reverence in a hurricane of irreverence. Bourdain has at times called mise-en-place his religion. When you deconstruct the principles and regard the faithfulness with which chefs practice them, mise-en-place approaches that. Bourdain is observing the world’s mise-en-place now: As a chef he’s a better journalist than many journalists are; as a journalist, more influential on a generation of young cooks than he ever could have been as a chef. I’ve only spoken to Ruhlman by phone and only shaken Bourdain’s hand once, long ago as a customer at his restaurant, but I don’t think this book would have been possible without them, and I have endeavored to honor their work.
It may seem odd to advance mise-en-place as a spiritual practice, with spirituality’s implications of balance, especially when so many chefs and cooks do not live balanced lives at all. But mise-en-place is a philosophy of how to start things and how to complete things, how to speed up and how to slow down, how to say “yes” to things and “no” to others, and as such, when practiced consciously, mise-en-place can be helpful in creating balance.
I cannot promise you, nor would I want to, that working clean is easy. It is not. Chefs and cooks spend their entire careers perfecting these principles. But I do promise that whenever you work clean, you will be the best that you can be.
FIRST COURSE
THE POWER OF WORKING CLEAN
FOCUS
How mise-en-place works
Chef Dwayne Lipuma’s entire kitchen staff just quit. He’s looking at reservations for 40 people for lunch, then another 140 for a banquet tomorrow. To make all those meals, LiPuma’s bosses have provided him with 19 recruits, some of whom have never cooked in a fine-dining restaurant. Aside from LiPuma’s assistant and a pastry chef, not one of the staff has ever seen the menu, much less prepared the items on it, all gourmet dishes with elaborate presentations.
But by the end of the day, the diners will leave satisfied. In fact, the customers—some of whom have waited months for a reservation at LiPuma’s restaurant, American Bounty—will scarcely notice that their entire meal was made by neophyte cooks.
A miracle perhaps? Nope. It’s a regular day for Chef LiPuma. In 3 weeks, when LiPuma has his crew trained and confident, they will leave and a new group of inexperienced cooks will replace them. He will repeat this process every 3 weeks, thus providing the penultimate course for students who will soon graduate from the Culinary Institute of America.
What makes this impossible rhythm possible is not a miracle. It’s a system called mise-en-place.
LEARNING TO COOK, LEARNING TO WORK
The Culinary Institute of America, called the CIA without irony by people who think more about the epicurean than they do espionage, sits like a citadel on the banks of the Hudson River almost 100 miles north of New York City. Its grand campus in Hyde Park, New York, centered around a former seminary—housing an average of 2,400 students, 140 full-time faculty, 49 kitchens, and four student-staffed restaurants—the CIA is among the world’s most renowned culinary schools, with branches in Texas, northern California, and Singapore.
From the first day of classes to the last, CIA students will hear the term mise-en-place, pronounced like “me’s on plahhs.” It’s on the lips of Tim Ryan, the president of the college, as he greets new enrollees. A few of the students may have heard the term before they arrived, perhaps in a kitchen for which they worked during high school or thereafter. Some will refer to their textbook, The Professional Chef, which provides the English translation of the term, “put in place,” and a definition: “the preparation and assembly of ingredients, pans, utensils, and plates or serving pieces needed for a particular dish or service period.” At first, mise-en-place blends into the dozens of French words and phrases they must remember as they make their way through their introductory class, Culinary Fundamentals, like mirepoix, brunoise, tourner, arroser, fond de veau, roux, consommé. But as students learn the basic techniques they’ll need to succeed in all the courses that follow—knife cuts, making stock, making sauce, cooking vegetables and meat—they learn that mise-en-place encompasses an entirely different set of vital skills, and that putting their ingredients and tools in place is just the first level of a deceptively simple concept that keeps unfolding.
Instructors invoke mise-en-place when they tell students to keep their cutting boards and workstations clean and when they tell them to arrange their tools in a certain order and return them to that order after they use them; when they move too slow and also when they move too fast; when they move too much and when they move too little; when they start tasks too early and when they finish them too late; when they talk too much and when they don’t say enough; when they don’t use their five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, sound; and when they fail to use their sixth sense: common. As the days go by, the chef-instructors begin to talk about a deeper notion: mental mise-en-place, the idea that students can’t master physical organization without first organizing their minds. It starts with the CIA timeline, a paper form that chefs expect students to use every day and master. In preparation for each class, students must list their needed tools, ingredients, and tasks for the day. They must arrange those tasks in time, plotting precisely when each thing is supposed to happen. When students find themselves running behind in class or skipping steps, the chefs refer to the student’s timeline; usually the chefs can point to the error in thinking that resulted in the error in behavior. Students commit these timelines to memory. Then they begin to tackle planning on-the-fly, the mental work that allows them to move smoothly from one task to the next. Over time, mise-en-place begins to reveal itself as a set of values: Apprenticing oneself. Getting to class early, not just on time. Working with intensity. Cultivating a sense of urgency. Remaining alert. Aiming for perfection.
This idea of mise-en-place, a curriculum unto itself, begins to migrate outside the kitchen. Students load their backpacks and lay their clothes out at night before bed, iron their chef’s whites and shine their shoes. They use timelines and prep lists to study for their academic courses, not just their cooking classes. They organize their desks, their closets, their rooms. They even begin “mise-en-placing” their social activities to maximize their time off.
Then the students go home for their first holiday and wonder how the rest of the world changed so much since they were last in it.
Maybe, like Alexandra Tibbats, they watch their parents scurry around the house for car keys that should, of c
ourse, have been put back where they belonged, or wait hours for high school friends who can’t seem to show up on time. Or maybe they’re like Kaitlin Ngo, whose mother watches in stunned silence as Kaitlin—for whom the opening of a suitcase had always been comparable to the uncorking of a geyser—now demurs on a quick shopping excursion to stay home and methodically unpack.
The students return to the CIA and learn to cook à la carte breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for their classmates. At the end of their first year, they go on their “externship”—18 weeks working in a restaurant in the real world. Some will cook; others will do the kinds of jobs that kitchen trainees are expected to do: working in the prep kitchen, cutting vegetables and cleaning. They will marvel at how fast and smooth everyone around them seems to move, confirming how much they still don’t know. As their second year draws to a close, they will be assigned to one of the CIA’s four first-class restaurants, and the training wheels come off. Some of them will enter the kitchen of American Bounty and be greeted by a smiling Chef Dwayne LiPuma.
But LiPuma is not here to assess their cooking skills because they’ve learned and been evaluated on all their techniques already. What LiPuma will be teaching and testing here is their physical, mental, and ethical mise-en-place, without which they will never be able to use any of those techniques in a professional setting.
WELCOME TO AMERICAN BOUNTY
Nineteen students dressed in clean chef whites gather in a wood-paneled private dining room next to the lobby-bar of American Bounty. It’s 7:45 a.m. when Chef Dwayne LiPuma walks in for the first day of class. For the next 75 minutes he’ll lecture them on the daily work schedule and the rules of the kitchen, review the menu dish-by-dish, and describe how he’ll grade them. LiPuma is 5 feet 6 inches of compacted power, with spiky brown hair and metal-rimmed glasses. He talks fast, very fast, Martin Scorcese-on-a-double-espresso fast.
