Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  “Welcome to American Bounty,” he says. “We are going into the whirlwind. Your anxiety level is off the chart. Everybody’s except for mine.”

  LiPuma is calm because he has his own mise-en-place. He’s done everything he can to ensure the success of his new charges. He ordered the previous class to prepare a few days’ worth of ingredients so the new class won’t have to do any physical mise-en-place except for arranging those ingredients. LiPuma tells them they can ease their fears by getting the lay of the land—a “plan” in the literal sense of the term, the French word for “map.” Make a mental diagram of where everything is and should be. Know the recipes. And come to class every day with your timeline. “No timeline means 20 percent off your daily grade,” he warns. He knows that when they get into the professional world, these students won’t write timelines. Instead they’ll internalize them.

  “I’m not going to teach you how to cut a carrot,” he tells them. “I’m going to teach you how to organize yourself.”

  It’s one thing to apply cooking techniques to a recipe and construct a plate. It is quite another thing to do that a dozen times with speed and consistency. LiPuma argues that organization is going to deliver the speed they’ll need. Speed will come from their brain’s basal ganglia memorizing repeated muscle movements, which—if they are to be quick—should be as small as possible. They will gain some of that speed by selecting their tools with care. “What kind of ladle do you need for the soup?” LiPuma asks. “An 8-ounce ladle. Why? Because that’s the portion size.” If students have a 2-ounce ladle, they will have to ladle four times instead of one. They will win additional speed by arranging their tools. “I should be able to blindfold you,” the chef says, “and when I say, ‘Pick up your tongs,’ you know that they’re always right there, that your ladle is right there, that your oil is right here.” They will accrue even more speed by properly arranging their ingredients. LiPuma wants all their ingredients “zoned out”: all the ingredients for one dish in one area. “The less your hand moves, the more efficient you are.”

  “You’ll see,” he continues. “By being organized, you will be more efficient. By being more efficient, you will have more time in your day. By having more time in your day, you will be more relaxed in your day; you will be able to accomplish the task at hand in a clear, concise, fluid motion.” LiPuma promises them that by the time they leave his kitchen, they’ll be smooth and calm, like him.

  “Like oil on glass,” he says.

  DAY ONE

  The students enter the kitchen at 9:00 a.m. They have 1 hour to produce “demo plates”—one sample dish of every menu item on their station. Each student is responsible for two or three menu items. On tougher stations students work in pairs. The demo plates give them a chance to practice before service and give LiPuma a peek at their skills: Can they actually do the cooking?

  At 10:00 a.m., once their demos are done, they take a break for “family meal,” prepared by a team of three students. Chef LiPuma kicks everyone out of the kitchen and doesn’t let them back in until 11:00 a.m. “They need to decompress,” LiPuma says. “They get so stressed out. And sometimes when you leave the scenario that’s stressing you out—Oh, God! I’ve got all this work!—and you step back, eat something, rethink it, and revisit it, it’s not so stressful. Plus, they need to eat, period. Because they’ll skip eating, leave here, and they’ll have nowhere to eat until dinner.”

  But while his students decompress in the dining room, LiPuma compresses their time in the kitchen. He doesn’t want them to work through lunch and thus encourage a lazy pace. With cuisine as it is with culinary students, no transformation happens without heat. LiPuma needs to cook his class, too.

  While they’re eating, LiPuma and his sous-chefs-in-training straighten students’ mise-en-place, writing reminders on the stainless steel tables with a black-ink Sharpie: “Your chervil is brown,” “Paper towel under parsley,” “Brush with olive oil.” At 11:00 a.m. the students return. They have 45 minutes before the first lunch orders start coming in.

  All morning, as the students work, Chef LiPuma prowls the “line”—the row of ovens, burners, and grills where most of his cooks stand and most of the kitchen’s food gets prepared.

  Some students use the wrong tools for the job: Zoe tries to cook potato pancakes in pans that are too big and use too much oil. Alex puts the butternut squash soup in a pot that’s too small. “It’s gonna burn,” LiPuma says. Later Alex blots extra-virgin olive oil onto bruschetta with a paper towel. “Don’t do that!” LiPuma moans. “Get a brush.” Caitlyn discovers that the smashed potatoes left for her by the previous class have been put in a narrow, plastic quart container and have thus disintegrated under their own weight. “Why don’t you make a necklace out of them?” LiPuma says. Caitlyn cooks replacement potatoes and puts them back in the same container, repeating the failure.

  Other students don’t check the ingredients prepared for them by the previous class: Rahmie places his own bruschetta in the oven to toast without noticing that there’s no olive oil on them at all. “It doesn’t matter that this is what they left you,” Chef says. “You gotta make it right!”

  With first day jitters, many students move too fast. “Juan!” Chef LiPuma says, seeing four cuts of steak on the grill. “What are you cooking all that beef for? When are you supposed to mark off that meat?”—meaning sear it so it acquires a nice crust and grill marks on the exterior before cooking to a finish in the oven. “When I come back from family meal,” Juan replies. LiPuma nods: “So finish marking one. Easy there, Slick.” When Juan and the others return from family meal, they continue to rush and confuse the proper order of things. They begin cooking side dishes well before the proteins are ready. “This is à la carte cooking, guys,” LiPuma booms over the class PA system. “You cook your vegetables and starches on pickup,” not when food is ordered. In other words, proteins get the heat when the order comes in, and when the chefs later call for pickup, that’s when they heat the starches and vegetables, as they take less time. They remove meat from the oven when it’s still raw. “Don’t take anything out of the oven until you clear it with me first,” LiPuma orders. The students bring warm plates down from the heat lamps well before their dishes are ready, letting them get cold. “If somebody plates on a cold plate again, zero for the day!” LiPuma bellows. “Are we clear?” “Yes, Chef!” the crew shouts.

  Other students move too slow. Because meat takes a certain amount of time to cook—as much as 20 minutes from raw to medium-well—many line cooks “pre-cook” their protein to rare, reducing the time it takes to heat it to the final temperature, or “doneness,” once an order comes in. The goal is to always stay one item ahead of the incoming orders. But almost all the students are having a hard time understanding how this process works. Once service starts, LiPuma must constantly remind the line cooks to move on orders as soon as they come in. “Drop a pan!” he yells as an order comes in for lamb. Ronald takes some lamb out and begins seasoning it. Here comes LiPuma, straight for him: If you don’t drop that pan before you season, then you’ll be twiddling your thumbs waiting for that pan to get hot. “Are you helping time or hurting time?” LiPuma asks. “Hurting time,” Ronald replies, slapping a pan down on the range.

  A pork order has come in for Zoe. Here comes LiPuma:

  “That pork’s in the oven?” he asks her.

  “Yes, Chef,” she replies.

  “Now you want to replace that one, right? You already seared off another one?”

  “I’m gonna sear off another one when that one’s done.”

  LiPuma scrunches his face: “Say what?!”

  Zoe stammers. She doesn’t understand that she can’t wait to get the next one started.

  “No, what you’re going to do right now is drop a pan and start getting it hot. And by the time you’re done seasoning it, the pan will be hot.”

  It’s not that Zoe isn’t prepared. She arrived in class with a perfect, color-coded timeline with every
ingredient and tool, with every task she needs to do and when she needs to do it. She has a plan for the day. But each of those tasks has an internal order, too, and she just doesn’t know the correct order. This is what LiPuma is teaching everyone: order in space, order in time.

  Some students move too much. Rahmie takes handfuls of garlic, onions, chorizo, and potatoes, brings them over to the stove, and drops them into a hot pan with oil and stock to make a broth for steamed mussels. “Do you think it might be easier to bring the pan to the mise-en-place than your mise-en-place to the pan? Maybe less moves?” LiPuma asks him. “Yes, Chef,” Rahmie replies. LiPuma will continue to bust the ever-smiling Rahmie’s chops about the dish. Now Rahmie jiggles the pan. “Don’t worry about shaking it,” LiPuma says. “Just get the rest of the ingredients in there and then you can do the little shaky-shaky thing that you guys like to do.”

  Other students don’t move enough. The family meal crew stands around a pot of rice, stirring occasionally. “How long are you going to mother that rice?” LiPuma calls to them. “Put a lid on it and go away, do something else.” They don’t understand, LiPuma says. Every time they stir it, they’re cooling it, and it’s taking longer to cook. They do it because they’re nervous, and it’s a comfort zone. But they’re wasting valuable time that they could be using to prep for the next few days of service. “What are you doing, man?” LiPuma asks Ronald. “Cooking the mushrooms,” Ronald replies. “They’re in the oven! You can’t even see them! Get outta here! Go do sumthin’! Go bag up the chilis!” LiPuma walks past Zoe. “Are you leaning, Zoe? Don’t lean. There’s a bunch of other stuff you can do!”

  Some students don’t communicate enough. An order comes in for lamb, and LiPuma yells to Ronald, “Take the lamb and put it in the oven.” He hears nothing. He yells again, with a bite: “Take the lamb and put it in the oven!” “Yes, Chef!” Ronald replies. “That’s a good answer,” LiPuma says. But LiPuma is having a problem with all the “Yes, Chef!” he’s getting. When he calls out a quantity of something, he wants them to tell him what they heard: Two fish! One pork!

  Other students communicate too much. The pastry chef calls twice for a food runner while the waiters talk among themselves. “Hey! Hey! Pickup pastry!” LiPuma screams. “Shut up now and pay attention!” The back waiters ought to know better; they were the last class of cooks in this kitchen before this one.

  Students put things on their cutting boards—hot pans that will scorch them and clean plates that will pick up liquid and scraps from them. They don’t know their meat temperatures, nor how to measure them. And nobody keeps a clean station. The whole service, LiPuma pushes pans aside, carries them to the dishwasher. In the middle of service, LiPuma gets on the microphone: “What we’re working on today is organization. Take a look: The fryer has leeks all over it. The stations are all dirty, things are greasy.” But LiPuma expects these issues, all attributable to nerves and inexperience.

  At 1:30 p.m. service is done. “I’m gonna show you how to break everything down,” LiPuma says. “Take all your proteins and bring them to the butchers. Take all your sauces, put them in the correct size container. Go put them in an ice bath, label it. Everything that’s dirty—pots, pans, everything—bring them to the dishwasher ever so nicely.” Within 15 minutes the spotless hot line gleams like no cooking happened at all.

  At 2:00 p.m. they gather to recap the day. “The barking is over, it’s all about the love now,” LiPuma says. “How was your day? Just okay, right? And that’s okay. Five days from now, it’s gonna be all automatic because you’re gonna be organized, you’re gonna know systems, you’re gonna have station management, you’re gonna be able to elevate your cuisine. As you become more organized, you’ll see that you’ll save time. It’s all about ergonomics, finding the right way of cooking, the sequence and order of cooking—pork in the oven, potato down, apples in, spinach going.” This is what LiPuma calls flow. “Once you find a system that works best for that dish, you just keep that wheel running. You do the same routine over and over again to get muscle memory and get faster and faster.” LiPuma points his students toward tomorrow, when they’ll work on communication and their “callbacks” to the chef.

  They’ll need these skills. Tomorrow they’ll triple their workload. By the end of this 3-week course, they’ll not only have mastered their own physical and mental mise-en-place, they’ll be giving the following class their first few days’ worth of prepared ingredients as well.

  MISE-EN-PLACE FOR LIFE

  Students spend 2 to 4 years at the CIA learning how to cook. But that’s only half of their education. Just as important is the CIA’s shadow curriculum in which students learn how to work. Without learning how to work, and work clean—meaning to do that work with economy of time, space, motion, and thought—they can’t cook professionally.

  Mise-en-place, by graduation day, becomes a motto for all. Valedictorian Eli Miranda compares it to the philosophy he learned while serving in the US Navy. “To succeed, you must set yourself up for success and be ready for anything that comes your way.” Some of Miranda’s fellow students have chosen to express their ardor for mise-en-place in a more personal way, beneath their dress whites, having inked those words permanently into their skin. And they will remember their days at the CIA when their alumni magazine, Mise-en-Place, finds them as they move around the culinary world.

  Wherever they go in that world, in whatever kitchens they work, mise-en-place will be the common language. Even in the places where the term itself isn’t spoken, the behaviors and mindset of mise-en-place are expected. In Japanese kitchens, they may not say “mise-en-place,” but Japanese chefs talk about concepts like jun-bi (to set up, prepare) and sei-ri (sorting, arranging) as part of the fundamental duties of the cook and cook’s apprentice, the oi-mawashi. Chef Masa Takayama, who runs the revered Japanese restaurant in New York City that bears his first name, begins his planning on paper—not by writing a list, but by drawing a plate and the food that will appear on it. Then Chef Masa literally makes that plate (he’s a potter as well as a chef) before he prepares the food, mise-en-place at its most esoteric. At small restaurants, mom-and-pop operations, food carts, and humble diners, practical mise-en-place enables one or two employees to feed dozens and sometimes hundreds of people per day. At national restaurant chains and huge catering operations, mise-en-place governs the movement of hundreds of men and women and millions of dollars’ worth of material and ingredients to serve diners by the thousands. Chef Ralph Scamardella oversees the top-grossing restaurant in America, TAO Las Vegas, as part of his job supervising the TAO Group’s nearly two dozen restaurant kitchens across the country; at TAO New York, he runs a 24-hour operation from two vast kitchens providing room service to two hotels and à la carte dining in two different restaurants—TAO and Bodega Negra. At TAO alone, he employs a brigade of specialized sushi chefs, barbecue masters, and dumpling makers, feeding 1,200 people in four shifts, or “table turns.” Michael Guerriero has a different challenge. A graduate of the CIA, he runs the massive kitchen at the United States Military Academy at West Point. At lunch the chef must feed 4,000 cadets in 15 minutes.

  Our culinarians will also encounter more than a few disorganized, dirty, inefficient kitchens in their careers. But most of them will strive to reach the top of the proverbial food chain. What they will encounter at the summit is the most refined version of what they learned in school. Cooks who have the opportunity to stage (pronounced “staahj” with French inflection, meaning a limited or trial job) in Yountville, California, at Chef Thomas Keller’s French Laundry—lauded by many critics as the best restaurant in the world—find a calm, clean kitchen whose atmosphere is, at the same time, one of the most intense of any workplace anywhere. Chef Keller posts a plaque beneath a clock in his kitchen that reads “Sense of Urgency.” He teaches his cooks how to tie and untie plastic bags and how to open and close refrigerator doors. He works toward a perfect method for everything. That level of control—one that workers
in another industry might resent and deride as micromanagement—is welcomed by the cooks at The French Laundry because they want to learn from Keller. The atmosphere of mutual striving delivers what they want: not only the ultimate manifestation of cuisine, their chosen vocation, but the ultimate manifestation of themselves as professionals and as people.

  KITCHEN GUIDES

  Long ago the chef and the priest were one.

  In Japanese Zen Buddhism, the head of the kitchen, or tenzo, held one of six high offices in the monastery. A Buddhist monk in Japan named Eihei Dogen in the year 1237 wrote about the sanctity of the cook in a treatise called Tenzo Kyokun. “Instructions to the Tenzo,” as the title translates, described the tasks of this priest/ chef—a post to which Dogen believed only the most masterful monks should be appointed—and the importance of order and cleanliness in the tenzo’s work. On a deeper level, Dogen displays how the work of the cook can instruct anyone outside the kitchen on how to approach all kinds of worldly work with reverence.

  Dogen writes of preparation—that tomorrow starts today, at noon, when the ingredients for the next day’s meals should be assembled—and of cleanliness (“Clean the chopsticks, ladles, and all other utensils . . . conscientiously wash the rice bowl and soup pot”). Dogen also details a process for everything: He decrees the careful conservation of space (“Put those things that naturally go on a high place onto a high place, and those that would be most stable on a low place onto a low place”), of movement (“Do not throw things around carelessly. . . . Handle ingredients as if they were your own eyes”), of ingredients (“Do not allow even one grain of rice to be lost”), and of time (“All day and all night, the tenzo has to make arrangements and prepare meals without wasting a moment”).