Work Clean

by Dan Charnas

  Encouraging and receiving feedback is difficult but crucial to becoming a better cook, a better professional, and a better person.

  HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT

  MAKE FIX-IT CHECKLISTS (OR FIX YOUR CHECKLISTS)

  Chefs transform failure into success by recognizing mistakes and fixing them. Chefs do this by adjusting their recipes, whether for a dish or a process.

  Outside the kitchen each of us keeps a mental, internalized recipe for the work we do. But in circumstances where we regularly make mistakes, sometimes we need a physical, external recipe to guide a course correction. We can respond most powerfully to error in our work by creating and fixing checklists.

  The next time you err at work in a way that makes you cringe, write it down just as you did in the “Counting Mistakes” exercise. Then during your Daily Meeze determine one or several steps you could take to avoid the mistake again. If you have an existing checklist for the procedure, incorporate the change. If you don’t, create a new one. Even if you only use the checklist temporarily—until you’ve incorporated the behavior—this tool can become a place into which you put your mistakes and also a productive channel for your emotions about those mistakes.

  USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM

  Wherever possible, grab a second set of eyes and ears for your important work. Cultivate relationships with people who can give you fresh perspective.

  Bosses. Many managers love to teach; a few have no real investment in coaching and just expect you to do the job they’re paying you to do. If you have a manager who appreciates when you ask for help, avail yourself of that opportunity.

  Mentors. Even champions like you need coaches. But too many people approach mentors as “role models” or “connections.” The kind of relationship we are encouraging you to cultivate is with someone who can truly evaluate your work from time to time and show you how to better evaluate your own progress.

  Colleagues. From critiquing and troubleshooting projects, to meeting regularly to discuss your progress toward perfecting old skills and learning new ones, a trusted colleague can be a vital ally in the workplace.

  Employees. You can train a good employee or assistant to be an extra set of eyes and ears to keep you on track and help you quality-check. Chefs are constantly teaching their skills to the people who work for them, and if you have an assistant, he will become better as you trust him more with this kind of work.

  SELF-EDITING TECHNIQUES

  When measuring our own product, we need to get a bit of distance from our work, in any way we can.

  In The Artful Edit, Susan Bell recommends a series of methods any writer can use to gain perspective on her own work. These methods, slightly modified, can be used as perspective-gaining tools for many different creative pursuits, to help you take off your creator’s cap and put on your editor’s hat.

  Change your environment. If you’re looking for different perspective on your work, change the place in which you review it. For folks who write on a computer, an example of this would be printing your work out.

  Bring different senses into the mix. If you create something to be read with your eyes, for example, evaluate it by listening with your ears. One example for a writer would be reading your work aloud, slowly, or in a foreign accent.

  Create an inner dialogue. Assume the identity of someone else who might lend some needed perspective to your work and have an inner dialogue with him. How might he evaluate your work?

  You can also avail yourself of software, apps, and services to check the quality of your work. Virtual assistants can also be helpful provided they have the right skills. For writers, Hemingway evaluates your work for clarity and brevity. Grammarly and Ginger are also powerful tools.

  A chef’s reprise: The review

  In April 2014 the New York Times reviewed Telepan Local.

  “Half-formed and unconvincing,” critic Pete Wells called it. He couldn’t get past the plates (too small), the tables (also too small), and the prices (too large). The scallops and mushrooms? Delicious, but not enough on the plate. The “wonderful little grilled cheese panini topped with a Spanish tomato-garlic-olive oil spread”? Not very shareable. Wells found the pigs in a blanket to be too much like, well, pigs in a blanket, and as for the shrimp poppers, Wells wrote that “Telepan Local seemed to be trying to imitate Red Lobster and not quite succeeding.” He loved one dessert and hated another. He gave it one star.

  Bill Telepan was at the uptown restaurant when the review hit the Internet. He rushed down to be with Javier and the dejected crew, and after service took them all out for drinks.

  Telepan didn’t think the review was unfair—he was already considering a move toward bigger plates and standard service. But he was stung by the insinuation that he was overcharging. He spent the next several months fixing the service and making the food taste as good as he thought it should. But in the summer of 2014—and summers are usually bad for restaurants in New York—Tribeca proved to be a ghost town. By November, he decided to close Telepan Local, just shy of its 1-year anniversary. The closing downtown “sucked,” Telepan said, but it gave him valuable information for the future. In his next place he planned to spend much more time working on “front of house.” He needed to find a neighborhood where he could build community like he had at Telepan. And he needed to stick with the food for which he had become famous.

  Bill Telepan came back to the Upper West Side, to his position at the pass, and resumed his watch. Here nothing much had changed. Telepan’s flagship was still thriving and had recently received its first Michelin star rating. The evening’s service was punctuated again and again by Telepan’s laughter.

  “This is far from a clipboard job,” he said.

  The smoked trout, prepared by Sam, was a huge favorite. His lobster Bolognese, made by Misel, his line cook since Gotham in 1991, was as bright and fresh as Telepan’s customers had come to expect. The chef didn’t have to return any plates to the cooks this evening.

  Bill Telepan’s cooks could cook. His coaching tasted really good.

  Recipe for Success

  Commit to coaching yourself, to being coached, and to coaching others. Evaluate yourself.

  THE TENTH INGREDIENT

  TOTAL UTILIZATION

  A chef’s story: The guts guy

  The wagon that ground its way through the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, had two doors. One side unlatched to reveal choice cuts of meat on ice—the big muscles, loins, ribs, rounds. The other side, opened in the poor neighborhoods of immigrant Italians and Portuguese, contained the organ meats of the animals—hearts, intestines, stomachs, livers, kidneys. These cuts were cheaper because the wealthier customers didn’t want them. The innards didn’t look or smell appetizing. To make them edible took time and technique.

  Rosalie Cosentino, who came from Naples to America with her family in the early 1900s, knew how to work with these ingredients because her family wouldn’t have had much to eat if she didn’t. For the Cosentino family, tripe was tradition. Rosalie began with the stomach of a cow, which she soaked and boiled for hours. As the meat cooked, it mellowed, in the process releasing a stench that filled the house. Then she cooked the tripe in red wine, tomato, and herbs until it became rich and tasty.

  Across the Narragansett Bay from Providence, James Thurston Easton—descended from one of the royal governors of colonial Rhode Island and from the founders of the city in which he lived, Newport—worked in the family business, the Easton Breakfast Sausage Company. The Eastons had been supplying the Eastern Seaboard with provisions made from intestines and meat scraps since before the Civil War.

  The Cosentinos and Eastons, however, were in the minority among Americans who had for most of the nation’s history been living “high on the hog.” Limitless land, plentiful livestock, and bountiful harvests made America the land of waste. Our cooking habits, too, mirrored that laziness. The ecologically holistic example provided to the colonists by the Native Americans was swept away with the nativ
es themselves. Subcultures of culinary thrift existed among immigrants, who brought their traditions with them from the Old Country; the poor; and the descendants of African slaves, who were traditionally given the provisions less valued by European slaveholders. From those ingredients considered inedible by many, African Americans created an entire cuisine, “soul food,” a specific term now used generically by other cultures to celebrate their own humble culinary origins. But for the majority of Americans, humble was humiliating, and the squandering of our bounty was actually the real American tradition.

  Only during World War II did middle-class Americans first taste real scarcity. Five months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, all sugar sales were halted. Thus began the first salvo of what became America’s first full-scale food rationing program, which included limits on coffee, canned foods, meat, cheese, milk, and fats. Families were encouraged to grow their own vegetables in “victory gardens” to reduce demand on the supply chain. Victory cookbooks—like The American Woman’s Cook Book compiled by Ruth Berolzheimer in 1942—offered strategies for wartime cookery, including soup making (because, Berolzheimer wrote, of “the returning necessity for using every bit of food that enters the kitchen”), saving fats and oils (desperately needed for the production of explosives), and shifting to cheaper, more plentiful foods like seafood (“There will probably be no shortage”) and the more perishable, less popular meats: liver, sweetbreads, kidneys, heart, and tripe.

  “This is no hardship,” Berolzheimer wrote, “but a distinct advantage, for these parts contain more vitamins than those that we are more accustomed to using and since there is no waste they cost less.”

  In this battle, Americans like Cosentino and Easton had tradition on their side. Ironically, food rationing during World War II forced the Easton company’s closure due to a wartime spice shortage. In the decades after the fighting ended—after Rosalie Cosentino’s grandson John married James Easton’s daughter Susan, and after John and Susan had a son named Christopher—the food economy of the United States transformed.

  Developments in farming, transportation, and marketing restored and redoubled our American bounty. Food became an industry. The processed food sector grew, and along with it the expectation that raw food should have a sameness as if it were manufactured: Apples should be uniform in shape and have no blemishes. Oranges should be big and seedless and easy to peel. Corn shouldn’t have different-colored kernels. Meat, too, became mass-produced, more plentiful, and cheaper than ever. It acquired packaging, antiseptic and as divorced from the animal as possible—no heads, no tails, no feet, no guts. The wagons in our cities carrying tripe and kidneys on melting ice vanished, supplanted by gleaming supermarkets with rows of choice cuts wrapped in shiny cellophane and white Styrofoam. Never mind that when the dirt came off our vegetables and the stink came off our meat, so too did much of the flavor and nutrition. Never mind that producing all this “perfect” food generated an unprecedented, obscene amount of waste. Never mind that a new generation of Americans didn’t know many of the things their grandparents knew: how to cook, how to grow, how to hunt and fish. Most didn’t care to know. John, Susan, and Christopher Cosentino wanted nothing to do with Rosalie’s tripe, tasting of poverty and an older, forgotten America.

  Growing up in Rhode Island in the 1970s, Chris Cosentino still found many things to love about his grandparents’ world. On weekends at his grandfather James’s home in Newport, his grandmother Helen put out pot roasts, roasted bird, or baked bluefish for dinner. Helen took Chris and his little brother fishing, clamming, and quahogging, and Chris developed a taste for raw, briny seafood. She made chowders, seafood salads, and lobster rolls. In the summer at their beach house, they hosted lobster and clam boils. And the nearby Portuguese American Club threw an annual festival where Chris tried clams and chorizo, chickpeas, and kale soup. On other weekends, Chris visited Rosalie at her three-story house on Mount Pleasant Avenue in Providence, where she grew basil in coffee cans on window ledges and San Marzano tomatoes in the back, jarring them in the basement along with her dandelion wine. Chris helped Rosalie cut and dry fresh pasta, roll pizza dough, fry soffrito, and bake tomato pie—even though the barnyard smell of her tripe during the first hours of cooking still sent Chris running for the door.

  Chris Cosentino’s first love was food, but the legacy, lore, and lure of lesser cuts were lost on him, as they were on the American culinary establishment. When 18-year-old Chris enrolled in the culinary program at Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales University, organ meats were absent. Butchery class brought him nowhere near a whole cow or pig. In garde-manger class, Chris learned to make classic French terrines, explained to him as a way of preserving and serving scraps and other leftover ingredients. “Cold meat loaf,” he thought. But the school didn’t teach the techniques at the heart of his familial legacy—charcuterie, the making of sausage.

  Cosentino had to leave school for that education, finding it instead in the kitchen of Red Sage in Washington, DC. Cosentino adored Chef Mark Miller, who pioneered haute Southwestern cuisine and took teaching seriously. He showed Chris the magic of sausage making; the difference between emulsified and nonemulsified, between fine ground and coarse ground. And when Cosentino left, Miller gave him all his recipes. Cosentino, a dyslexic, taught himself to butcher by buying an illustrated veterinarian’s guide. He moved to California in the late 1990s, staging at Alice Waters’s revered Chez Panisse. The chef, Christopher Lee, asked his charges whether any of them had ever broken down a whole Bellwether lamb. Chris raised his hand, lying. He went downstairs and made a decent job of it.

  Cosentino had worked in great restaurants across the country, but when restaurateur Mark Pastore hired him as chef of San Francisco’s Incanto, he returned to his roots. Pastore opened the small restaurant to serve rustic Italian food. Peasant food. Chris knew that food. The smell of his now late great-grandmother Rosalie’s tripe lingered in his nose still. But by 2003, Cosentino’s palate had grown sophisticated enough to appreciate a heritage still considered unsophisticated by most Americans. He put Rosalie’s trippa Neapolitana on Incanto’s menu. He knew purveyors who could give him good tripe, cleaner than his grandmother had gotten off the meat wagon. He added spice to cut the richness. And Chris Cosentino got a lot of well-to-do but not-so-adventurous San Franciscans to try tripe and love it. Cosentino added other lesser cuts to the menu—beef heart, served as a tartare, pig trotters, blood and blood sausage—cuts that customers and purveyors previously saw as garbage, the cuts that for years could be sold only to dog food manufacturers.

  Before Incanto, the only chef whom Cosentino saw serve organ meats as haute cuisine was Lydia Shire—a flamboyant cook with fire-red hair who, in her Boston restaurant Biba and in the pages of gourmet magazines, showcased dishes like sweetbread skewers, brains, and veal heart.

  Halfway around the world, another chef had been making a more pointed culinary and political point. Ten years earlier, Fergus Henderson, an untrained chef, opened a restaurant in London called St. John to feature meats from every part of the animals he served, a tribute to classic but forgotten English cooking. He enshrined those recipes and techniques in a 1999 book called Nose to Tail Eating, served with a simple ethos and a dash of British humor. “If you kill an animal,” Henderson was fond of saying, “you should eat all of it. It’s only polite.”

  Cosentino was hipped to Henderson by Anthony Bourdain, who proselytized for the British chef during a visit to San Francisco and in his groundbreaking book and television travelogue, A Cook’s Tour—an inspiration for Cosentino, who hadn’t yet seen the world.

  With the rise of Fergus Henderson’s visibility, lesser cuts acquired sophistication and acclaim in the food world. Chefs exhumed and redeemed some older, exotic-sounding designations to market them: offal, or “off fall,” which denoted those discarded cuts that would “fall off” the animal or cutting board when butchered; or umbles, likely from the French nombles; from which the English purportedly derived the phrase
“to eat humble pie,” equating base cuisine with humiliation. Humble no more, offal was loved by chefs in part because to cook it well was a mark of expertise. Anyone could broil a steak and roast a chicken. But to take a tough or gamey cut of an animal and make it tender and fragrant and tasty, that was the ultimate test of a cook’s abilities. Offal was better food, too: more nutritious. More flavorful. And it did have the added benefit of being economically and ecologically sound. Offal became the carnivore’s stake in a growing sustainability movement that had been dominated politically and philosophically by herbivores—vegetarians and vegans who had cast meat production and consumption in its entirety as the enemy. “If humans consumed all edible portions of the cow, rather than only the socially desirable cuts, we would need to raise and slaughter fewer cows to feed the same number of people,” Cosentino’s boss Pastore wrote in 2004. “This would unquestionably be better for the world’s environment.”

  Suddenly Cosentino found himself the spokesman of a movement. He became known as the guts guy. Cosentino, humble about umbles, said: “All I’m doing is riding on the coattails of thousands of grandmas before me.” But that wasn’t, actually, all he was doing. He was reckoning with more than just his family legacy. He was grappling for the first time with the sacrificed lives on his plate. We are animals who eat other animals. Chris wanted to return to them some measure of respect. Cosentino made a decision: He wanted three spring lambs to serve for Easter. If he were going to take their lives, he vowed that the blood should be on his hands.

  Cosentino drove to a friend’s farm near the Bay Area. He killed three sheep. It was difficult work physically, but harder emotionally. Now the ingredients in his kitchen took on a heightened value. Ingredients were not to be wasted. Energy was not to be wasted. Time was not to be wasted. Life was not to be wasted. Everything counted. Only a small percentage of his menu was offal, but it became important, as a principle, to show America how not to kill a living thing only to throw three-quarters of its body in the garbage can.