by Dan Charnas
Telepan chose a space in the upscale Tribeca neighborhood, where the food scene was hotter. Bill Telepan wanted to do an American version of a Spanish tapas restaurant with small dishes inspired by the comfort foods of his Jersey youth—haute versions of pizza, Buffalo wings, pigs in a blanket, shrimp poppers, grilled cheese, even gourmet Cheez-Its—along with plates of short ribs, sweetbreads, pork belly, and escargots. He called it Telepan Local.
The restaurant launched only for friends and family in January of 2014. Then Telepan decided that Local should stay open, quietly, and at least have some kind of income stream while they worked the kinks out. There were a lot of kinks. The restaurant hadn’t yet installed enough natural gas capacity to run all the appliances, so many of the stoves and ovens remained inoperative. The kitchen didn’t have heat lamps either, so plates went out as they were ready, and the kitchen and waitstaff had trouble nailing the timing. The waitstaff needed continual training.
Bill Telepan now spent more time downtown, nurturing his newborn. Telepan promoted his uptown sous-chef Joel Javier to run Local as chef de cuisine. Telepan coached him while Javier in turn trained a kitchen of new recruits on almost 30 recipes and techniques. On an icy evening in February, Telepan stood at the pass next to Javier, who called out orders to the line and received the plates, inspecting them and giving each a sprinkle of coarse sea salt and olive oil before handing them to a food runner.
Javier talked about the difficulty of getting consistency while also maintaining finesse or soigné (French for “made with great care”)—the lesson that Telepan learned with Portale. “It’s why fast food is so successful,” Javier said. “They’ve found a way that you can get the same hamburger and same fries anywhere, anytime. Of course, it’s not very good.” One thing you couldn’t do was automate soigné. That’s why Javier and Telepan watched.
They both eyed a new extern, Diana, a Russian Studies graduate of Columbia University who had pivoted to become a culinary student at the nearby International Culinary Center. On her third day at Telepan Local, she still struggled with several of the six dishes for which she was responsible.
Telepan caught a glimpse of an order of mushrooms in parchment that Diana had just pulled from the oven and split open to plate. He saw that the food inside it wasn’t cooked completely. There was no putting it back.
“Just start a new one,” he told her.
Diana continued to rush things. Diana put an order of Telepan’s pan con tamate on the small grill at her station to toast before brushing with garlic and topping with a spread of chopped tomato and garlic. A minute later, Telepan caught her pulling it off the grill prematurely.
“That’s not done,” Telepan barked. “Fire another one. Be patient. It’s grilled cheese, right?”
“Right,” Diana replied. “Can’t rush the chemistry.”
Javier counseled her. It should toast to a good golden brown, he said, or the garlic wouldn’t release its essence when she rubbed it into the bread. And if she didn’t toast it enough, the bread would get soggy faster when she spread the tomato on it. Telepan worried that the grill itself might not be getting hot enough. Another equipment problem, perhaps. “I know it’s just a grilled cheese sandwich,” he told Diana. “But it’s got to be a great fucking grilled cheese sandwich.”
“I’m Bill Telepan,” he said later. “I can’t fuck up a grilled cheese!”
Telepan heard himself and exploded with laughter.
WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW
Chefs remain vigilant
The restaurant business is hard.
A study published in 2005 found that 60 percent of new restaurants fail during their first 3 years. The challenge of feeding demanding customers meals prepared by hand from expensive, perishable ingredients is insurmountable for most entrepreneurs who try it. In fine dining the stakes rise: costlier ingredients, equipment, rent, and talent.
Failure can happen at any time. It can come as slowly as a season of half-empty dining rooms or as suddenly as a bad review. It can be sparked by a mistake in one dish, or caused by hundreds of mediocre plates. Failure may not arise from the food at all, but from the manner in which it is served.
A good restaurant requires constant vigilance. That watchfulness ensues not from a clichéd quest for excellence that one might see on a motivational poster, but from a fundamental, endemic, unending fear of failure.
Because the kitchen is the beating heart of a tough business that demands finesse from people who may not have much experience or many standards, the professional kitchen must always train and coach its staff.
Ergo the best kitchens are schools, the best chefs are teachers, and the best cooks are students.
Chefs approach perfection
Inspect and correct is how the chef approaches perfection, “approach” being the operative word in that phrase, because perfection is never achieved. At most, what the great chef can accomplish is meticulous execution, a phrase that kitchen designer Jimi Yui borrowed from Chef Gray Kunz. Meticulous execution encompasses the ambition of a chef, but also a bit of her stoicism: You can only do what you can do.
Chefs submit to critique
As a system of ongoing education dedicated to becoming better at one’s craft, inspect and correct requires humility, a commitment to submission. The chef submits to her responsibility to teach the cook. The cook submits to the wisdom and guidance of the chef. The cook submits to her own discipline and to honing her own processes. The chef submits to maintaining a balance between her own instincts and the wisdom and guidance of the customers and critics. And both the chef and cook submit to the fact that this submission never ends.
Chefs prowl
Inspect and correct happens primarily at a place called the pass, or pass-through, a checkpoint between the kitchen and the dining room. Think of it as the narrowest point in an hourglass, through which all orders from the customers pass through to the cooks, and all dishes pass from the cooks on their way back to the customers.
The person who runs this checkpoint is called the expediter. Many times it is the chef herself who stands here, but you may find a sous-chef or an experienced food runner expediting as well. The expediter acts in several capacities, first as a defender of the cooks—evaluating and pacing the incoming orders so that the kitchen doesn’t get overwhelmed; second as a monitor of practices, processes, and habits as the food is being cooked; and third as the defender of the customer and the restaurant, evaluating each dish before it goes out.
In this work, the expediter draws on her sense of the restaurant’s rhythms. She employs reconnaissance from the dining room to make decisions. She will use all her senses: mostly sight, but also sound, touch, smell, and taste.
“I taste food all night when I’m expediting,” Telepan says. His cooks do, too: spooning sauce into their mouths, tasting vegetables and starches. The tasting began hours and days before service, while they made the sauces and stews and other preparations with longer lead times. Telepan was experimenting with a new salad for the menu when he took some beets from a cook’s mise-en-place. Telepan put one in his mouth. He could tell they had been in the cook’s mise-en-place for longer than a day. Tamping down his anger, he found the cook, handing him a piece of freshly cut beet. “Taste that,” he said. And then he offered a piece of beet from the cook’s mise-en-place. “Try that one. Now tell me if there’s a difference.” Telepan teaches how to taste, but he still prowls the line hours before service to do his own tasting.
The expediter is not just an observer, but a coach. She must not only inspect, but correct. Sometimes problems come from improper technique: an ingredient thrown in a pan that’s not hot enough, a piece of raw fish that hasn’t been patted dry, inconsistent cuts of vegetable or protein. But more often mishaps arise from compromising one or more of the principles of mise-en-place.
QUALITY CHECKPOINTS OF THE KITCHEN
“I tell my cooks, ‘Don’t try to get over,’” Telepan says. “Don’t do something half-a
ssed. Don’t try to hide it. Because I’m gonna find out. I know that [dish] takes 4 minutes and it’s only been 2; don’t even put it up. I’d rather you take an extra minute [and] slow up service to get it right. But don’t put it out, because that 1 minute you save in putting it out is going to become 6 minutes behind because you’re going to have to redo the plate.”
Chefs teach self-critique
Cooks must internalize what they’ve been taught and learn how to evaluate their work in the way their chefs do.
“I tell new cooks, ‘Look at your station as if it’s your restaurant and everybody is coming in to critique your restaurant,’” Telepan says. “‘You have to keep it organized and clean in the way you want your restaurant to be when you grow up to be a chef. So how you treat your station now is how your restaurant is gonna run. Now is the time to learn those habits.’”
Cooks cut corners because of laziness, or forgetfulness, or fatigue, or sometimes embarrassment at having discovered their own mistake. “I always say to them that it’s worse for them to have me find out than to say, ‘Chef, I fucked up, I missed this, I gotta make it again.’ I love that. Because it happens. In the kitchen, the machines are human.”
Chefs fix and use mistakes
Chefs transform failure into success by incorporating mistakes into their workflow—or rather, incorporating the solutions to prevent those mistakes. Thus cooks learn that failure is always an opportunity.
Thomas Keller of The French Laundry invited a four-star former chef from New York to demonstrate some classic French preparations for the chefs of his Bouchon restaurants. But surrounded by a crowd of young chefs, this great chef grew nervous while cooking one of the most fundamental of all French preparations: the omelet.
“He totally screwed it up,” Keller remembers. “I had to do something.”
So Keller transformed the situation by having all the chefs make their own omelets. Now the lecture became a laboratory.
“It was extraordinary,” Keller remembers. What came out of the next 30 minutes was a technique to precook omelets for his Las Vegas restaurant, where they serve 600 breakfasts every morning. “The chef tasted it, I tasted it, and all the chefs tasted it, and we go, Wow! It looks beautiful. It’s perfect. Out of somebody’s mistake and somebody’s embarrassment comes a technique that none of us thought about.”
Chefs calculate the cost of compromise
Chefs’ standards can sometimes seem more for flourish than function. The value of a clean, white chef’s jacket has little if any direct bearing on the presentation or taste of food. Yet wearing “clean whites” is a common standard. Why and when do cooks compromise? Thomas Keller explains by asking a rhetorical question.
“Are you willing to wear a T-shirt with a hole in it even when no one sees the hole?” he asks. “Yeah, maybe it’s okay. Maybe it’s the last day before I can wash my clothes. I’ve got six T-shirts and it’s my sixth day and that seventh T-shirt has a hole in it. Am I going to get a new T-shirt or wash the other one? It’s a compromise. We have to be available to and open to negotiating that compromise whether it’s with ourselves or with each other. But the result of that compromise cannot affect in any negative way the result that we’re searching for.”
Because chefs know that compromise sits on a slippery slope to chaos, they’re cautious and calculating about the compromises they make.
If perfectionism is the quest for quality at the expense of delivery, then settling for less is the quest for delivery at the expense of quality. Excellence itself is a compromise between the two: quality delivered.
Chefs and cooks live in this difficult dynamic from dish to dish. Every single plate must embody that balance. The greatest gem of their hard-won experience is the ability to discern that tipping point. They know when they’re “phoning it in,” and they can tighten things up. They know when they’re being too precious and can let things go.
OUT OF THE KITCHEN
Most corporations evaluate their work on a large scale—whether on the factory assembly line or in the quality assurance process at a technology business.
The kind of evaluation we speak of here, however, is small-scale, personal inspection—not the insipid, impersonal self-evaluation questionnaires distributed by many human resources departments—but personal examination of our own individual product or service, whether as small as an e-mail or as big as a book.
Outside the kitchen we ostensibly value coaching, but we don’t take its implications seriously. Most corporate or creative professionals don’t have the equivalent of a chef who cares about their education or their growth. For example, it is one of the central tenets of the professional kitchen that, after an apprentice gives a chef several years of hard work, the chef himself will make calls and send that apprentice off to work for another respected chef to continue to learn and build her résumé. It’s hard to imagine such a thing in the corporate world. Nor do we have the counterpart of the expediter. An assistant or secretary can act as a traffic cop for scheduling, but few in the working world have such a luxury; and, anyway, an assistant is not a mentor. Managers can function as expediters for their staff, but in the corporate world many managers perform only half of the expediter’s function: They’re good at critiquing work but horrible at timing the workload so that their crew doesn’t get overwhelmed. In academia, teachers are sometimes observed by colleagues, administrators, and students to provide feedback; mostly, they are measured by test scores, a dubious determination of the quality of their instruction. Hitting a numerical target for any profession may be no better indicator of quality than an athlete who wins a point despite bad form. Those who work with words lack editors. The classic newsroom, with its layers of oversight, is disappearing. For most of us, spell-checker is as good as it’s ever going to get.
We need in our world of work the means to evaluate our own work and that of others. We need the means to refine our methods and product, and to incorporate the knowledge gained from our failures. If we don’t have mentors, the responsibility falls on us to create a personal culture of checks and balances, of inspection and correction, so we can work clean with feedback.
The best kitchens are schools, the best chefs are teachers, and the best cooks are students.
EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN
SET STANDARDS
Chef Thomas Keller asks: What are your standards?
We must answer this question before evaluating our work because our inspection will only be as accurate and effective as our vision of excellence is clear. A vague vision will yield a nebulous result.
To shape your own idea of mastery, address the following questions:
1.Who is your model or mentor for the work you do? What is it about her work, process, or demeanor that compels you?
2.What is an example of an ideal product or service for the kind of work you do? What are the qualities that make it so?
3.What are the habits that help you achieve your standards?
4.What are the habits that hinder your progress toward those standards?
5.What are the environments that assist you? What are the environments that impede you?
6.What are the external rewards or consequences you desire or expect from the impact of your work?
7.In what aspects and under what circumstances are you willing to compromise your standards? What aspects are you not willing to compromise under any circumstances? What trade-offs are you willing to make?
Grappling with these questions will equip you for the next exercise.
MAKE A QUALITY CONTROL CHECKLIST
Based on what you’ve discovered about your standards above, use the checklist technique you learned in The Second Ingredient: Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements to evaluate a work product you create or a service you do. This checklist should not simply measure results. For example, if you are a salesperson, you may indeed feel that the only box that’s important to check is the one beside the question “Did I make the sale?” Your checklist shou
ld reflect only the factors you can control. A checklist measures your actions, not that of others. A checklist measures meticulous execution, not perfection.
The items on your checklist should:
■Be actionable
■Measure quantity or quality
■Fit on one page
COUNTING MISTAKES
For 1 day, keep a tally of all the errors you make, whether great or small, whether personal or work-related. And for each of the errors, write the consequence or result beside it.
Your entries could be as mundane as “Mistake: Forgot umbrella. Result: Had to run back home to get it” or as significant as “Mistake: Misjudged distance to car in front of me. Result: Hit car.”
At the end of the day, for each item, write one action you could have taken before the mistake to prevent it or make that error less likely.
The point of this log is not guilt or embarrassment! Quite the opposite, the process of logging mistakes empowers us by cultivating the following:
■An awareness of how common error is
■A habit of linking error and consequence
■An understanding of how we can reduce or prevent mistakes
KITCHEN PRACTICE: TASTE TEST
The next time you serve a meal to one or more friends or family members, ask them to write down their feedback on a piece of paper. Tell them that you are looking specifically for things to improve and that they shouldn’t be afraid to be honest! Then, later that evening, read the feedback. Note how it makes you feel. Then translate that feedback into an Action list for the next time you prepare those dishes.
