An old friend who was a good shot had descended on King's with a brace of pheasants for me to roast. This was not only free food, it was the kind of food befitting the kind of banquet I intended giving. I had never cooked game before, let alone plucked it or gutted it, but I can't remember, thinking back, that I was unduly fazed by the prospect. I was planning on the traditional English ritual that accompanies a brace of roast pheasants: bread sauce, roast potatoes and parsnips, carrots Vichy, dark onion gravy made with the giblets and a slug of red wine. My boyfriend could make the creme caramel, one of the cheapest puddings in the book; I would buy some cheese in the market, and the King's cellar would do the rest. It was, and still is, a marvelous tradition at King's that any undergraduate can order wine from the college butler, and the buying of good wine and laying it down over the years is reason alone to become a Kingsman, not that I would have known that when I applied for a place at the college.
My friend had arrived with the brace of birds, and, having not been brought up as au fait as he to the world of hunting, shooting, and fishing, I didn't even ask him what to do with them. I was wholly unaware of the extent of my ignorance. At least I wasn't squeamish like many of my friends about livers and gizzards and paunching and gutting. I hung the beautiful brace from the gyp-room ceiling and believed that was all there was to it.
So there I was, transforming my study into a dining room with a borrowed table and the stiffest college linen. The kitchens had agreed to lend me a few serving dishes and I was going to beg, borrow, or steal the cutlery and plates from the pantry. I went downstairs to the gyp room to get started. I switched on the tiny Baby Belling stove that would just about contain the roasting pan with the pheasants and vegetables. Other than that, there was an electric ring on top of the stove and a gas ring on the worktop. The small fridge the eight of us shared was frequently raided at night by teams of stoned, marauding students who probably knew well that if anyone was likely to have rashers and eggs and scrumptious leftovers it would be U Staircase. The vegetables were still there. I peeled and prepared them all and put them in my battered, secondhand pans. Time to get to work on the birds.
I remember opening a large black bin bag and pulling the pheasants' feathers in clumps down into it. As I got closer to skin and flesh, it all seemed rather peculiar. The normal pink goosebumpy look of the skin wasn't quite as it should be. In fact it was a rather livid shade of green. The worst horror was yet to come. The side of one of the birds was actually moving. Moving as in covered with maggots. Alive!
It is one of those bad jokes told in English aristocratic circles that a pheasant isn't hung enough until you can scrape the maggots from the flesh. Here it was for real. How come I hadn't realized that, cold as the gyp room was, the ambient temperature was not at preservation level? I remember dropping the hideous brace of birds into the bin and shrieking. The game was up. I mean, the game was off. We had nothing for dinner. What to do? The guests were arriving in a couple of hours and this was before the days of late-night or all-night shopping; Cambridge shut down firmly at 5:30 p.m., the market even earlier.
As is the way with selective memory, I have no recollection as to where we found a chicken to roast (although I know we didn't wring its neck or pluck it ourselves). It seemed like the only thing to do; after all, the trimmings that you make for a pheasant, right down to the bread sauce, are the same as you make for roast chicken. Roast chicken, that culinary first, that nursery slope of cuisine that it is, is for many of us the first thing we attempt after the early struggles with baking cakes and biscuits when we decide to leave the sweet world of childhood for the savory world of adulthood.
And can you feast, indeed banquet, on the everyday common or garden bird? Of course you can and of course we did. The bird's interior succulence offset by its startlingly crisped, salted, bronzed skin, the bread sauce creamy with its scent of clove and nutmeg, the sweet parsnips caramelized in the bird's juices, the potatoes as crunchy as you could wish for. The disaster was all mine. The guests need never have been made aware of it, but that would have been cheating.
The story of the pheasant dinner has gone down in the annals, in the pages of one's memory where one coped with the unexpected, most gruesome disaster and dined out on it afterward. The more experienced one becomes in the kitchen, the less one is inclined to show off, anyway. I would as soon invite people to eat a plain risotto or bowl of pasta as I would a roast woodcock or wild salmon en croute. Simple food cooked well with good ingredients cannot diminish the occasion of bringing friends to the table, good wine, good conversation, and the fact that you have gone to all that effort in the first place. Besides, I never learned anything from the successes except that I would still always wonder afterward, couldn't I have crisped that skin a bit more, taken that tart out two minutes sooner, upped the spicing, gone easier on the lemon juice or the cream?
Such is the nature of the passionate cook, even at the fledgling stage. And, as Samuel Beckett so succinctly put it, forbidding us to dwell on our disasters or give up, "Try again, fail again, fail again better."
Hope for Snow
TOM DOUGLAS
Tom Douglas, along with his wife and business partner, Jackie Cross, owns four of Seattle's most exciting restaurants: Dahlia Lounge, Etta's Seafood, Palace Kitchen, and Lola. For more than twenty-five years, Tom's creativity with local ingredients and his respect for Seattle's ethnic traditions have helped define the Northwest Style. Tom's love of food continues to evolve beyond the restaurant scene. He is the author of two cookbooks, Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen, which won a James Beard award, and Tom's Big Dinners. In addition, Tom runs a specialty food line of spice rubs and barbecue and teriyaki sauces and he hosts his own weekly talk radio show.
THIS is NOT a story about a recipe disaster, but a story about a disastrous night where a recipe was invented and a business was eventually turned around. It's a story about a lesson learned the hard way.
I can't count how many times I've been asked: "What's your secret? What do you do that others don't? Everything you do turns to gold! You must be rich! You can't lose!"
What a bunch of crap! Not that I don't appreciate everyone's good thoughts and well wishes. I truly, truly do. But behind any "great success" there is usually a huge collection of difficulties, mistakes, and unexpected challenges; nothing is easy—or foolproof—even if it looks like it is.
Twenty-five years ago, I was hired as the chef and eventually the general manager of Cafe Sport in downtown Seattle. Of course I had been cooking for a while, but Cafe Sport was the first time I got to pull the strings, so to speak. Cafe Sport was a big operation, bigger than it seemed from the outside: open seven days a week, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a satellite cafe in the athletic club next door, and a full-scale on-and-off-site catering arm. It was also blessed with one of the busiest and grandest locations in Seattle—the venerable Pike Place Market. But the truly unique thing, for me, was being both the GM and the chef; it's a combo that I routinely tell young chefs is essential to one day running your own place.
Our first year in business, I will politely call lumpy: fits and starts, ruts and bumps, tears and a few cheers. Despite the slow start, Cafe Sport was a big hit, and after a couple of years it was humming along on all cylinders. I'd even become a minor celebrity in town. At the time, regional chefs around the country were being asked to step out of the kitchen for a few minutes and be guest experts on local TV and radio shows. I was also teaching classes to curious home cooks in gleaming kitchen-supply stores, and presenting my thoughts on Northwest cuisine to throngs of foodies belonging to foodie clubs like AIWF and IACP. Hell, I was getting famous!
It was time for my wife, Jackie, and me to reap the rewards and open our own joint. The owners of Cafe Sport were fabulous employers and paid me extremely well, but my feet were itchy and after seven years I was ready to walk the talk of owning my own business.
First stop, the banks. Whoops! Bad idea. Every one of them turned us down fo
r a business loan. They didn't seem very interested in my carefully scripted business plan, my immaculate letters of recommendation from business associates, or the inch-thick scrapbook of Cafe Sport reviews carefully cut from the esteemed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Food and Wine Magazine, blah, blah, blah. . . . No, they wanted collateral, and that, unfortunately, was the thinnest part of my portfolio. Zero, to be exact.
I was stumped. I had worked for seven years at what many called the best restaurant in the city—and I couldn't get a loan from anyone except Jackie's uncle, Clarence Cross. So, with no recourse, and contradicting my "no family money" policy, we borrowed $100,000 from Clarence to open Dahlia. Neither Jackie nor I had been employed for months by now, and we had a staggering pile of debts. (Jackie somehow became pregnant . . . hmmm . . . unemployment equals pregnancy. Another life lesson.) Before we even signed papers to buy the business, our 100K was melting away.
To save money, Jackie and I did much of the design and some of the construction ourselves, anything to squeak by. We demo'd and cleaned up. We traded with the drywall people: their labor in exchange for us catering their staff Christmas party. We sold the glass blocks that had decorated the previous restaurant for any cash we could get. The small restaurant staff we had hired came in and cleaned and painted the kitchen. To paint the soaring 25-foot-high walls of the dining room, however, we were forced to hire professionals. After watching them spray the walls and ceiling of the whole restaurant fire engine red, we looked around and, to our horror, felt as if we were in a National Geographic special on what it's like to be a baby in the womb. The painters laughed and asked if we were sure we didn't want them to come back and repaint. We held our breaths while tearing away clumps of plastic masking—the painters were costing us a fortune—but it worked. When the place was finished, the color was gorgeous.
Jackie and I opened the doors November 15, 1989. Having spent all of our money and then some, we were already $150,000 in debt. No problem. I had a great reputation and many of the fabulous people that made Cafe Sport the highest-rated restaurant in Seattle were by my side. We'll get through this, I reasoned, and then start putting money away to pay for the new baby and the home remodel that we sorely needed. What did Kevin Costner say in Field of Dreams} "If you build it, they will come."
After six weeks, we were left wondering where the diners were. Reviews had been fair, location turned out to be terrible, parking nonexistent, and the economy was in the tank.
Our friends tried to help us out. Harry Yoshimura of Mutual Fish kindly supplied us a fish order worth hundreds of dollars every week, and never sent me a bill for four months. I was too busy and stressed to even realize it at the time. (My friend and co-worker Steven Steinbock joked that we would have to rename the restaurant Harry's Dahlia Lounge.) My good friend Kenny Raider, who had opened his own restaurant, Al Bocca-lino, an Italian joint, just a few months before us, let me borrow enough money to make payroll every two weeks. Brian, at Fairway Plumbing, was kind enough to let our debt slide for many months. All our suppliers were holding paper on us, but not pressing.
We had plenty of time on our hands to think up the reasons why we weren't busy. When a restaurant is slow, it's amazing the excuses you can come up with. Blame it on the weather. It's either too hot or too cold. We're slow because it's raining. On a beautiful sunny day, the deck restaurants are taking all the business. We're dead because there's a football game today. But, if it snowed—that was the worst of all—complete and utter disaster! So we fretted over the numbers and became a bit more frantic every week.
If you don't live in Seattle, it's probably hard to imagine how just a few inches of snow can cause mass panic and shut down the city. But Seattle is a city built on hills; the city owns only a couple of snowplows and few people have snow tires or experience driving in the snow. If there's even the hint of a flake, the ratings-hungry TV and radio announcers go crazy, chanting: "Stay home, stay home, don't drive," and killing everyone's business in downtown Seattle.
So as we approached our first New Year's Eve, preparing for a blow-out, elegant, celebration, I started restlessly fretting about the weather. Every few hours I checked the weather report, living in terror of snow. I should mention that Jackie is a snow bunny who always prays for snow. This does not contribute to a harmonious family atmosphere when our business is teetering on every night's receipts. (Jackie was six months pregnant with our daughter, Loretta. She couldn't go skiing. What good was snow for her? I think she was just torturing me.)
New Year's Eve is a big night for restaurants, and we needed a big night more than anything. To be fair, our numbers weren't as atrocious as it sounds. Friday and Saturday nights were great. Lunch was decent. But weeknights were just that—weak. The numbers were far below my projections, and being undercapitalized, every seating counted. New Year's, luckily, did not disappoint. (If you can't sell out New Year's Eve, you might as well get out of the business.) We had been booked solid since Christmas, and my mouth—or my wallet—was watering.
From the start, Dahlia's concept was "comfort food"; we liked to play around with retro dishes like shrimp Newburg, macaroni and cheese, and slow-roasted pork (an homage to my friend Peter Cipra's incredible roast pork with caraway onion gravy from his unforgettable Czech-inspired restaurant Labuz-nik). As a consequence, we decided that the centerpiece of this important, special dinner would be lobster thermidor, similar to a dish I had cooked at Hotel Dupont in Delaware. Lobster thermidor is a classic retro dish of lobster with a bubbling creamy sauce and buttered bread crumbs passed under the broiler. Because this is Dungeness crab country, lobster is a special treat in Seattle—we have to fly in our lobster from the East Coast. Jackie and I went a little deeper into debt to order $500 worth of lobsters for the big night. Of course we had plenty of other expensive foods packed into our walk-in: sevruga caviar, dozens of silky Kumomoto oysters, and cases of tender butter lettuce for the Waldorf salads. One of my chefs, Shelley Lance, had spent several days making tray after tray of puff pastry pear tarts, creme caramels, and coconut cream pies. Meanwhile, the reefer shelves were stacked with short-lived, i.e. perishable, goods.
As if on cue, to satisfy the nay-saying bankers and the I've-never-been-right-before weathermen, around noon on December 31, it started to snow. It snowed and snowed and then snowed some more. Soon, the phone started to ring: "Sorry, can't come." "Sorry, no snow tires on my car." Sorry, sorry, sorry. Our very own "Big Night," with 250 reservations, started dropping faster than the stock market in '29. Before the night had even started, it was clear that it was already over. Extra staff. Extra fancy food. Extra disaster! To make things worse, we'd be closed for business the next day, New Year's Day. What would we do with all this food?
We food-banked what we could: house bread, pear tarts, anything that wouldn't last past the holiday. But my lobsters—what was I going to do with all those lively, briny, "orphaned" lobsters?
After the anger toward my pregnant wife subsided for "making it snow," I had a lemons-into-lemonade moment. Saigon Restaurant in the Pike Place Market, one of my favorite little holes in the wall, makes a delicious bowl of pork wonton soup. That must have been my inspiration, because somewhere during the first hour of service it occurred to me to make a lobster sausage with raw lobster meat and to fill wonton wrappers—which we happened to have a case of in the refrigerator. Instead of the 250 covers we had on the books, we did forty-five dinners that night. Idle cooks got busy shucking the fifty extra lobsters.
I worked on an aromatic mixture of roasted shiitakes, shredded carrots, toasted sesame seeds, and a little spicy hit of "rooster sauce," or fresh chile paste, to blend with the coarsely ground lobster meat. A couple of sprigs of fresh cilantro finished off what, if I do say so myself, was a damn tasty filling for the thin, wheat-flour wonton skins. Here we were on the busiest restaurant night of the year, standing around filling and sealing hundreds of lobster potstickers.
We played with the folds
and taught ourselves how to shape them nicely. Then we boiled one—delicious! We debated how to serve them: In a ginger sauce? Sauteed with garlic oil? Our favorite was panfried in peanut oil with a sake dipping sauce. Adding sake to a dipping sauce of soy, chile, and garlic made it a little lighter; it went with the delicate flavor of the lobster better. With our fifty lobsters we made 450 potstickers, or 150 orders. We trayed them up on sheet pans and popped them in the freezer; most important of all, they froze beautifully. At least I had saved my lobster investment from this disastrous night.
The snow had melted by our next business day, and I was optimistic that we could sell all of those delicious potstickers in a couple of weeks. To my surprise, we sold out in three days! And we had to order more lobsters to satisfy the customer demand. The lobster potstickers instantly became the most popular appetizer on our menu. A week later, Dahlia was reviewed in the local paper and the reviewer's favorite dish, of course, was the lobster potstickers.
"What an innovation! Simply delicious!" he raved.
What do you know? A four-star review!
Customers started filling up my restaurant and, gradually, we worked ourselves out of debt. Over the years, we played around with the potstickers, trying them as wontons floating in a lobster broth made from the shells, in lobster wonton stir-fries, and as steamed dumplings in chive and red chile oil. But we always went back to our panfried lobster potstickers with sake sauce.
Every time I eat these potstickers (which are still on our menu and still selling like crazy), I think about how they saved my ass on that first snowy New Year's Eve. I haven't quite forgiven my wife for wishing for snow, but sometimes a near disaster is good for coming up with a great idea. For all those moments when you fear things are teetering on the brink, keep your chin up and hope for snow, because Jackie and I now have ten businesses, a beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, and a twenty-two-year marriage. So, when life hands you lemons, make potstickers!
Don't Try This at Home Page 11
