Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  The surprise party was a smash, with Wylie’s mentor, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in attendance; but it also turned out to be the prelude to a long goodbye. In June, Dufresne announced that he would fight no more: wd-50 would close in November. What happened in those intervening 5 months astonished Sam Henderson.

  “Instead of the crew donning their life vests and jumping ship,” Henderson recalled, “everybody stayed put and did their job better than ever.” Alumni like Mike Sheerin, Simone Tong, and J.J. Basil returned to cook, and Dufresne’s chef friends came to dine. “The last two nights were some of the best services we’ve ever had.”

  On the last night, the cooks hugged, cried, cleaned, and drank. Many of them returned in the days that followed to help Dufresne tear the kitchen apart, and attended the auction where the plates they wiped with care were sold for 50 cents apiece and the appliances they scrubbed until gleaming were dragged out by gloved laborers. It broke Henderson’s heart to watch.

  But being a former writer, she knew that an ending gives a story its meaning. The way wd-50 ended—in its prime, surrounded by family—earned it an indelible spot in the history of global cuisine. Sad but not defeated, Henderson saw the ending was a new beginning. The restaurant would remain with her in more ways than one. Former sous-chef J.J. Basil was now her fiancé, and they planned to open up a place of their own.

  She cleaned up, moved on, left nothing behind.

  Recipe for Success

  Commit to maintaining your system. Always be cleaning.

  THE FOURTH INGREDIENT

  MAKING FIRST MOVES

  A chef’s story: The pan handler

  Driving back to New York City after a Thanksgiving dinner upstate, Chef Josh “Shorty” Eden took a detour. He pulled off the Palisades Parkway in New Jersey and headed toward the home of his buddy Kamaal—the name that the rapper Q-Tip’s closest friends now called him. Eden dropped off a tray of leftovers, some roasted root vegetables. He left with a new employee.

  Eden didn’t think twice about offering Jarobi White a job. The chef needed bodies for his kitchen at August, the restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village where he himself had just been hired. Eden liked helping friends. He met Q-Tip at his previous restaurant, Shorty’s 32, and he had gotten to know Tip’s erstwhile bandmate soon thereafter. They had all haunted the same downtown clubs in the 1980s and ’90s, and they shared mutual friends, including Michael Rapaport, the actor who would soon direct the documentary on Q-Tip and Jarobi’s group, A Tribe Called Quest. Eden wanted to help Jarobi go legit.

  “If you’re going around New York telling people you’re a chef, don’t just say you are. Do it,” Eden told him.

  Hiring Jarobi meant breaking him down, forcing him to unlearn all the bad habits he had accumulated in the course of his career. Wear an apron, Jarobi. Make sure your braids are up, Jarobi. Don’t eat breakfast at your station, Jarobi.

  In the heat of service, cooks pursue the quickest route between taking an order and putting a plate in the window. Like all cooks, Jarobi took shortcuts. Eden tried to show him what shortcuts he could and couldn’t take. Eden went for as many corny analogies to the music world as possible: How many times did you cut that song before you put that record out? Slow down. Or: Learn how to fix things. When the show starts and you forget a line, do you stop and start over? No, you find your way through it. Eden didn’t care about Jarobi’s semi-celebrity. When Jarobi messed up, Eden yelled at him just like he would anyone else. You’re supposed to be making my job easier, not harder. Then he taught Jarobi the right way to do it.

  Eden invested months training Jarobi, but the hours expended early on started to pay off. Eden put him on lunch service. The apprentice improved. Jarobi climbed through the stations. Then came the morning that Eden decided he could sleep late. Why? Because Jarobi was in the kitchen, handling things.

  Jarobi worked for Eden for 3 years, until August closed. He left a bona fide New York cook. More than that, Jarobi had joined a noble family of chefs, a direct lineage that Eden could trace for him all the way back to France, beginning with Fernand Point, viewed by many as the successor to Escoffier in the evolution of French cuisine. Point trained Louis Outhier and Paul Bocuse. And a student of Outhier and Bocuse—a young Alsatian chef named Jean-Georges Vongerichten—brought that training with him to America, where in 1993 he met a hustling 23-year-old cook just out of the French Culinary Institute named Josh Eden. Now Eden had passed that training on to Jarobi White.

  Eden mentored White in the same way that Vongerichten had mentored him. Jarobi called Eden his “Yoda”; Eden worshipped Jean-Georges: At the age of 29, Vongerichten earned four stars from the New York Times for his cooking at the Drake Hotel’s restaurant, Lafayette. Then he took that food out of the hotel and into his first restaurant, JoJo, leaving the stuffiness and the high price behind. After Eden secured a spot low on the totem pole in JoJo’s kitchen, he convinced Vongerichten that he could be useful by scouring the farmers’ markets of New York every day for the freshest produce. Vongerichten bought a van for Eden’s errands. Eden drove that van until he totaled it.

  Eden hadn’t ripened yet and still required more energy than he generated. In Vongerichten’s kitchen, chef de cuisine Didier Virot dubbed the stocky, compact cook “Shorty.” The nickname stuck. Vongerichten relentlessly criticized Eden’s skills and moves. On fish station, Eden overcooked a piece of salmon, and the chef was all over him for the rest of the week. But Vongerichten always followed a slap with a caress. On Friday night, Eden cooked an end-of-service meal for Vongerichten, Virot, and the sous-chefs. The chef came down the line and threw his arm around Eden.

  “I’ve been screaming at you every day. You’re doing a good job. I just want you to learn.”

  “Chef, you never need to apologize to me,” Eden replied. “I’m here to learn.”

  Vongerichten produced a bowl of mousseron mushrooms. “Let me show you how to cook these like my chef taught me,” he said. Thus Josh Eden inherited the knowledge of another culinary legend and Bocuse contemporary, Chef Paul Haeberlin.

  Above all his lessons, Vongerichten taught Eden the value of time. Rather than the simplistic notion that “every moment counts,” Vongerichten implied a more esoteric concept: The first moments count more than later ones.

  On a busy night when the kitchen got pounded and the orders flew in, Vongerichten repeated a mantra: “Guys, pans on!” Before you do anything else, make the first move: Get some damn pans on the stove, turn on the heat, and get them hot.

  The first reason for Vongerichten’s admonition was mental: Working at such a fast pace, cooks need reminders. Each pan, in effect, becomes a placeholder for an order. A cook can look at the stove and see, at a glance, a proxy for the work that needs to be accomplished. The second reason was physical: To properly brown vegetables and proteins—to get that wonderful, crisp, and delicious external texture—the pan and the oil in it need to be hot before the food goes in. It takes a certain amount of time to heat a pan, a minute or two. There are no shortcuts when it comes to that process. So if a cook puts a pan down the moment an order comes in, he can get it hot while preparing or seasoning the ingredients that will go inside of it. But if he doesn’t get that pan on, and preps the ingredients first, he’ll still have to wait around for a minute after seasoning, like a jerk, for the pan to get hot. Those 2 seconds just cost him a minute later on. The first moments count more than later ones.

  It took a while for Eden to catch on, even after he had graduated from JoJo to become saucier at Jean-Georges. One evening Eden was getting crushed on his station. Working his way through a backlog of orders, he wasn’t getting the food out fast enough, and tables were waiting for their meals. Upstairs came Jean-Georges’s recently promoted sous-chef, Wylie Dufresne.

  “Shorty,” Dufresne said, “when you’re getting beat like that, you’ve got to throw a couple of extras in the pan. If you lose one at the end of the night, you lose one. Would you rather get screamed at or would you
rather have the food ready to go?”

  Dufresne was telling Eden that if the orders were coming in faster than he could manage, and he couldn’t even manage to get new pans on the range, then at the very least throw some extra portions in the pans he did have cooking. It was a shortcut, yes. “Sandbagging,” crowding the pan and thereby reducing the heat, might change the texture and flavor of the dish. Cooking off too much protein in advance might waste food and money. Dufresne was counseling Eden that it was better to get screamed at by Vongerichten at the end of the night for raising his food cost than to enrage the staff and the customers by not having the food ready when it needed to be.

  To be ready, you have to make first moves.

  WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW

  Chefs move now

  How do we start? The principle of making first moves is the chef’s answer to that question, but it’s universal wisdom about how to begin any project that involves a series of tasks.

  My own chef—the master from whom I learned to practice and teach yoga 20 years ago—had a saying: When the time is on you, start, and the pressure will be off. I thought he was talking about momentum—like writing the first sentence, making the first phone call, or rising up out of my chair to have a difficult conversation. I didn’t grasp what my teacher was truly saying until years later when I started spending hours in professional kitchens. He was trying to teach me a more subtle and profound notion about the nature of time: The present has incalculably more value than the future. An action taken now has immeasurably more impact than a step taken later because the reactions to that action have more time to perpetuate. Furthermore, because our mind state has a huge effect on how we perceive time, acting in the present releases psychological pressure and opens up more time. Starting is, in effect, a shortcut. To mash metaphors: A stitch in time causes a wrinkle in time.

  “We’re in the weeds all day long,” Eden says. “But when service begins, service is easier, because we’ve done all our hard work already.”

  The first few moments of your day or minutes of your project are crucial. They matter more than any others. A minute spent now may save 10 minutes, 20 minutes later on. The seasoned chef or cook—with an unquenchable thirst to shorten the distance between “here” and “beer”—seizes those first moments for everything they’re worth.

  Chefs move by marking

  In the kitchen, orders don’t arrive in a nice, steady stream. The work comes in waves, often at a pace that is too much for the mind to handle. At some point during a busy service, orders will flood in faster than a cook’s ability to process them. Cooks in the weeds barely have time to reference the printed orders, on little curls of paper called dupes. Nor can they remember all the chef’s or expediter’s verbal commands. So cooks make first moves by setting reminders of the things that need to be done, especially when the things that need to be done arrive all at the same time.

  To do this, cooks place a marker object in their visual field for each item to be accomplished. Getting a pan onto the stove is one way to make that first move. Placing raw ingredients on a platter or plate or cutting board is another.

  Chefs move in dual time

  Many of us live by the anti-procrastination aphorism, “Do the worst first.” Organization guru Stephen Covey gave us a related mantra, “First things first.” The thought behind both of these phrases is do the thing that’s the hardest or most important early, while you have the time and energy. It’s in this spirit that new culinary students rush into the kitchen thinking about executing the most difficult tasks—intricate knife cuts and complex preparations that need extra time and attention. Then, having done the “worst” first, their stomachs drop when they realize they should have done something else first, something rather quick and easy: Turn the oven on.

  We hold a linear, one-dimensional concept of time. Along this timeline, we order our tasks: First we do this, then we do that. Much of the literature about productivity focuses on how we do this ordering. Do we put the most urgent items first, or the most important? Do we do first what can be completed quickly, or do we give our first moments to things that need quality time?

  In contrast, chefs and cooks cultivate a two-dimensional concept of time. A chef thinks this way: In the foreground are the projects that need my presence: my hands, my mind, my body. But in the background are the projects that don’t need my continued presence, but need me to start or maintain them.

  I call “hands-on” time immersive time, because the projects that happen in it are wholly executed by me and happen largely independent of external processes and other people. The vegetables won’t chop themselves. Hands-on, immersive time aligns with creative work—activity with which we engage fully. I call “hands-off” time process time, because the tasks and projects therein are dependent on and linked to external processes. Some of those processes are impersonal: The rice needs a certain amount of time to simmer; other processes are interpersonal: Joe needs the chicken stock from me so he can prepare the sauce. Hands-off, process time aligns with management work—engaging with external objects, processes, or people.

  Immersive time is worth its face value. Five minutes of my energy now equals 5 minutes of my energy later. I can chop the vegetables for garnish now, or I can chop them 5 minutes before service. Process time, however, can be worth much more than it seems. Consider the consequences of not jump-starting a physical process: The 2 minutes I save now by not preparing the rice is not just 2 minutes I must still spend later on, but also the 15 minutes I will have to wait for the rice to cook if I wait until I need it, plus the cost in minutes, energy, and resources of all the other delays in the kitchen arising from that absent pot of rice. When a task in the present unlocks a cascade of work that other people do on our behalf, the worth of process time increases and becomes harder to measure. If I don’t take 5 minutes now to show Joe how to work the equipment, and instead show him 5 hours from now, he will spend 5 hours not doing that work. And, in 5 hours, my 5 minutes will be worthless because there is no more time for Joe to do the work. The delayed 5 minutes cost me 5 hours.

  Great chefs maintain a constant if often unconscious awareness of the dual nature of work time: hands-on and hands-off. Immersive time and process time. Creative work and management work. Chefs know the importance of making time to immerse themselves in creative work. But they also understand that some small and tedious tasks have the potential to launch powerful processes—unleashing huge amounts of energy, time, and resources—as long as they start those tasks first. Chefs perpetually make first moves on those two levels.

  Some tasks, however, can be done too soon. “You have to know what to prep first,” says Jean-Georges Vongerichten. “You start by butchering—deboning, filleting, making your portions. All that has to be done first thing in the morning. Then you peel the vegetables, make sauces with bone and vegetable stocks. Then the last thing you do is chop your fragrances: the lemongrass, mushrooms, and fresh herbs.” Sometimes Vongerichten sees young cooks working in reverse. “They’ll fill up a container with chopped parsley at 8:00 a.m., and by dinner service the parsley is dry.” The handling of fragile, fragrant herbs can make the difference between four stars and no stars, and speaks to the power of even a small dose of mental mise-en-place. Everything has its right place and its right time.

  OUT OF THE KITCHEN

  Who hasn’t felt the sting of a forgotten e-mail—one that would have taken us a few seconds to answer when we received it but now because of our delayed reply has cost us an opportunity or created extra work? Or realized we could have that thing we need right now if we had only made a simple phone call earlier? Or delayed giving our quick feedback on a project only to realize later that the whole thing stagnated for days, with everyone waiting for us to act, while we worked on something supposedly more important?

  Even if we haven’t articulated the concept for ourselves, we’ve all experienced the dual nature of immersive and process time and its repercussions. Making first m
oves engages the power of time in three ways and helps us work clean with priorities.

  First, a first move can serve as a placeholder or a mark. When we don’t have time to execute in the moment, a mark put in the right physical or digital place ensures that we won’t forget an action and can subtly tilt us toward the task to be done.

  Second, making first moves creates momentum. The first move compares to a beachhead, a military term signifying the most difficult first step of an invasion by sea. In our case, making the first move creates an initial staging area for a project, a foundation necessary for further progress. If you can’t act in full now, make one small move toward completion.

  On the highest level, making first moves results in multiplication. Investing the present moment with action can save multiple moments in the future. Mastering the art of compounding time requires a fluency in time’s dual nature. Making first moves, cultivating a sense of immersive and process time, means acting immediately to set processes in motion and multiply your power and productivity.

  EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN

  DISCERNING IMMERSIVE TIME FROM PROCESS TIME

  How do you know if a task needs immersive or process time?

  In principle, any task that requires you to be “hands-on” is immersive; any task that you can briefly start or maintain and then be “hands-off” is process.