I was working as a sauté cook in one of the celebrated hotel restaurants in San Francisco, Campton Place. By all outward appearances, my life was good and my career was progressing nicely. In fact, a couple of weeks earlier, I had been offered a promotion to sous-chef. I hadn’t yet accepted the offer, but I hadn’t turned it down, either. Among their many responsibilities, sous-chefs are the ones who do the daily food ordering, which requires that they know and manage the kitchen’s inventory of ingredients. I had visions of spending more time with clipboard in hand counting the portions of meats, poultry, fish, produce, and dairy in the walk-in refrigerator, then moving on to counting the groceries in the storeroom, than actually cooking the food.
By comparison, the image of life described in the magazine article was far more enticing, and I wondered if there was some way I might get to speak with Nathalie. The article mentioned that she was a good friend of Waters’s, and that she spent her winters across the bay in Berkeley hanging out at Alice’s respected restaurant, Chez Panisse. I thought Alice would remember me and take my call. She did, and when I asked if she knew how I could get in touch with Nathalie, she said, “Sure,” and passed the phone to her. By an amazing coincidence, Nathalie happened to be sitting next to Alice at that moment. I introduced myself, and we agreed to meet over coffee a few days later at Fanny, Alice’s small café also in Berkeley.
When I arrived for the meeting, Nathalie was already seated. Once the pleasantries had been exchanged, she went about describing the simple ways of Provence. We spoke about cooking, markets, and ingredients. It didn’t take long to realize this was a lifestyle that had to be seen firsthand. Without ever having planned to do so, I offered to be her assistant if she ever needed one.
A couple of months later, it came—an invitation from Nathalie. She suggested I spend a “spring-summer school term” with her. I would be getting room and board—no salary or stipend, but that didn’t matter. Her reputation as a devout practitioner of Provençal cooking was unquestioned, and I knew that working side by side with her would broaden my cooking palette. I accepted immediately, figuring I would work with her for a few months and then see if I could find another opportunity in France, extending my European stay to six months, nine at the most.
A number of my fellow cooks scoffed at the idea of leaving an established position to take an unpaid internship. However, Mark Franz, a friend and well-known chef who ran the popular and busy kitchen at Stars in San Francisco, had a different take.
“It won’t be a waste,” he told me. “Short detours can be good for a career. Even if she has you in the back of the kitchen doing nothing but dicing tomatoes. Forget your ego; forget what the others are saying; just concentrate on cutting those tomatoes and watch. This could turn out to be the most important trip you’ll ever take.”
My excursion from San Francisco to the south of France included a weeklong stopover in New York. It was early spring, a nice time of year to visit and see my parents, friends, and some of my cooking buddies. The trees were starting to bloom, and those pesky dandelions were all over my parents’ yard. Coming from the temperate climate of the San Francisco Bay Area, I realized how much I missed the change of seasons.
During my week in New York I received a message from Nathalie telling me that I would have to delay my arrival at the school for a couple of months. Something about her classes starting late that year. Sitting around and waiting has never been my best game, so I called around looking for something to fill the gap. Within a day Larry Forgione, my former boss at An American Place in Manhattan and one of the true pioneers of the American food revolution, came through for me. He knew of the perfect situation.
A friend of his had just sold the London edition of his restaurant, and the new owners needed an interim chef de cuisine to run the kitchen for a couple of months until their own chef could start. The irony that this job would entail much of the clipboard work I was running from didn’t elude me. But what the heck. It was a short-term job that filled the empty slot in my calendar, and then I’d be off to the south of France. I called Larry’s friend, who in turn put me in touch with one of the new owners, and we agreed to a two-month arrangement.
With Alice Waters in the reservation book, I quickly changed into my kitchen whites, and when I entered the kitchen, I was glad I had. Everywhere I looked things that should have been taken care of had been let go. The walk-in was a mess, dirty pots had built up into a huge pile at the dishwasher station, and the garbage bins were overflowing. Damn it, I thought. I had left the place in good shape only the night before. How fast things can go south in an unsupervised kitchen. Even more troubling was that after I informed the staff that we had one of the world’s preeminent chefs coming to dine that night, everybody from the dining room manager to the pastry chef went on with a “What, me worry?” routine, breezily going about business as usual.
At five-thirty that evening, the hostess poked her head into the kitchen to say that the Waters party had just been seated, half an hour before their reservation time. Their early arrival caught me in a pre-service scramble, not really ready for them. I looked at my line cooks, who held my fate in their hands but had so far evinced no interest in pleasing or protecting me. But hope springs eternal, and I thought maybe, if for no other reason than to impress a world-renowned culinary figure, they might somehow find it in themselves to put out a special effort to match the occasion.
I decided to send a plate of hors d’oeuvres to Alice’s table. I was late getting them out, but at least this gesture would let her know that I wasn’t oblivious to her visit. Just as the hors d’oeuvres left the kitchen, the computerized dupe machine began spitting out the kitchen copy of the Waters order. It showed that one of the dishes was the same as what I had just sent out.
As I look back on that night, and I have done so many times, I wonder if I should have sent the manager to their table to ask if they wanted to change their order. But that night, under pressure, unsure of myself, I thought I had no choice but to go forward. I called out the entire order, first to the salad and appetizer station and then to the line cooks. “Ordering: red pepper crab cakes, a bacon and Stilton salad, and a pasta followed by a salmon, a lamb medium-rare, and a chicken. Ordering a cheese plate after the entrées.” The order was in.
My first indication that the night would be a long one came early. The server, a hip East End fellow with a punk hairstyle, placed the scallops with angel-hair pasta on the counter next to the salad and the signature crab cakes. The pasta, I could see, looked limp and lifeless, a dead giveaway to anyone in the business that it was overcooked. The scallops around the pasta revealed another problem—they appeared milky, not caramelized, telling me they had not been placed on the grill’s hot spot. Too late now.
The salad had its own troubles, being overdressed. The surplus vinaigrette had smeared all over the rim of the plate.
“I need another salad right away,” I said.
The salad maker replied that he needed to leave his station and go to the walk-in refrigerator to get it.
“Why aren’t you ready for service?” I asked him. “It’s past six. Didn’t you think anyone would be having a salad tonight?”
He didn’t even bother to answer me. I had to settle for transferring the salad to another plate. Fortunately, the crab cakes were fine. I wiped the rims of the plates clean and sent the waiter out with them. After about ten minutes, I fired the entrées, hoping to dovetail the second course on the back of the first, all the while wondering if I could be lucky enough to have Alice miss the pasta and salad defects.
I didn’t have long to wait for the next piece of bad news. The salmon was put up on the shelf way before the lamb. As should have been anticipated, the plate was too hot, which made the citrus butter sauce—a delicate liaison of reduced orange and lemon juice with carefully melted butter—boil, creating a mesa of light and dark yellow around the fish. I transferred the salmon and garnishes to a warm plate and added some new sauce, a quick so
lution to the problem, even though there were remnants of the broken sauce near the edges of the sauce pools. When the lamb was finally out of the oven, I squeezed the rack from the sides between my thumb and my forefinger. My panic ratcheted up yet another notch. It was slightly firm, almost resisting the pressure from my fingers and bouncing right back from the indentation instead of being a little softer. It had been cooked to medium, not medium-rare as ordered. By the time we carved it, the lamb would be medium-well.
Through clenched teeth, I asked how a dupe with the word “medium-rare” on it could have produced an item that was not and could not ever again be medium-rare. No one answered. Of course no one answered. I was talking to myself.
The chicken was a needed bright moment. Except for some slight charring on the end of its wing bone, it looked fine nestled next to a cluster of watercress. But when I looked at the standard vegetable garnish on the plate, I failed to ask myself why I was serving winter vegetables in spring to the woman whose creed was that all good cookery should be in harmony with the land and its season.
I knew I should have refired the course, but by this point I was in a tailspin. When the entrées for the Waters table were out, the kitchen staff seemed to exhale as one, not because they particularly cared how well their work would be received, but because my tension level was off the chart and they hoped I would now ease up on them.
When the manager reported no complaints from our distinguished guest, I indulged myself in a prayer that I had dodged a bullet with my name on it. When it came time for the post-entrée cheese course, I thought, At least we can’t blow this. The pantry cook handed the cheese selection to me. I was wrong. We didn’t even get that right. The first rule of serving cheese is to have it at room temperature. The assortment of California cheeses specially brought in included a couple made by Alice’s friend Laura Chenel. They had all been left in the walk-in refrigerator. I had no choice but to transfer the cheese from the chilled plate they were on to one that was room temperature. I said to the hipster waiter, “Take it.”
Because I could not see Alice’s table from the line, the hostess signaled when she and her family had finished dessert and were sitting with their espresso. I walked out into the dining room, past the waiters’ marking station—the place where flatware, glasses, and table linens are stored—and saw Alice’s sweet but formidable face at a corner banquette. I walked over to greet her.
“Thanks for coming in, chef,” I said, happy to see her. Alice politely introduced me to her husband and daughter, mentioning they were on their way to France and Italy, but wasted no time.
“This was not very good tonight, David,” she said. She gave me the name of the hotel where she was staying and said, “Call me tomorrow.”
Her tone was not as unpleasant as her authoritative message, and I sensed that she understood and had taken into account all I had to deal with—temporarily running a kitchen past its heyday with an insubordinate staff over which I had little influence and no power.
The next morning I called her, thinking we would share a laugh over how impossible our profession can be at times. I went in that direction, trying to set a confident, relaxed tone. “Hi, Alice, it’s David. What a night!”
Alice’s voice held none of the pleasant friendliness of the previous evening; in fact, it was outright cold. “Don’t you ever let that happen when you are chef of a kitchen,” she admonished me. “The owner is a friend of mine. I was embarrassed for him, but mainly I was embarrassed for you.”
She didn’t leave it at that, going on to a meticulous critique of each part of the meal, missing nothing—not even the parts I had tried to fudge. She was indignant about the out-of-season vegetables, finishing on the cheese and the dessert.
“And the cheese was cold, David, COLD! That’s inexcusable. And I could taste food odors in the cake!”
Yes, I knew that keeping cake in the walk-in with the rest of the food was bad practice. It’s something any good kitchen knows not to do, but with a staff that needed watching at every step, I had let it go.
“You are responsible for everything that comes out of that kitchen,” she chided me, “and that has to be your first priority.”
She was right and I knew it. I had known it that night as I sent out dish after dish of substandard quality. She must have heard how totally deflated I was, all my cockiness knocked out of me. But she wasn’t finished. “Before you call yourself a chef,” she went on, “remember what the word means.” It means “chief,” and in the restaurant business it’s where the buck stops. My heart was pounding so hard that after a while I could no longer process her words. But no matter. Her tone of voice carried her message loud and clear. I had blown a huge opportunity, humiliating myself in front of a woman every cook in America studies and idolizes. And worst of all, I had stupidly tried to charm my way out of a dismal failure.
Of course she was right, about the bad meal and the cold cheese and the poorly stored cake and about the fact that I—not the line cooks, not the pastry chef, not the server—was responsible for everything that came out of the kitchen. From the moment the call was over, I tried to salvage something from the debacle, allowing my mind to take me back to an old expression: “A whipped dog is a wiser dog.” I vowed I’d never again come to the game unprepared. But I couldn’t help wondering about another possible fallout. Alice would no doubt be visiting Provence and might share with Nathalie her disenchantment with me. I had invested so much in the hope that in Nathalie’s school I would become more than a good cook. I wondered if I had blown my chance for success before even getting there. The thought of failure on my journey had never entered my mind until that Saturday night. And Alice’s implicit judgment was clear: I had a long way to go before I could call myself a chef.
Reflecting on what brought me into this demanding profession of cooking for the pleasure of others, I realize that it was not just my love of food. The restaurant business, at least back when I entered it by way of a first summer job as a dishwasher, abounds with opportunity for those hungry to get ahead. But the work also provides a hefty dose of pressure for those trying to get by. As with early television shows that aired live, what you serve your guests has to come off right the first time, and that requires top performances from all of the support staff.
Over a succession of summer jobs and part-time during school, I moved from dishwashing to plating the salads, but the night I remember most clearly was when I was assigned to my first post “on the line,” kitchen talk for stations under the exhaust hood, working on the hot appetizers. From “hot apps” to fish then meats, from sautéing and roasting to grilling, I still have fond memories of being exposed to some of the very best mentors in the business, a brigade of dedicated cooks at a beautiful restaurant at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge named the River Café.
It was there that I was also exposed to just how much time the chef, Larry Forgione, put into finding unique, fresh ingredients that were grown or raised in the States. I was endlessly intrigued, but at the end of each summer I went back to college. Later I learned that Forgione left to open An American Place in Manhattan, named by James Beard, the chef’s mentor and one of the foremost cookbook authors in America. College graduation brought me a job at a lighting and set design firm and I thought my kitchen days were over as I looked for a break into show business. But a few months later, Larry called and offered me a full-time position on the line at his new place. Unhappy with my job as a draftsman—where it seemed as if I would have to pay my dues in an office job for an eternity—I decided to cook and maybe one day become a chef.
For the menu at An American Place, Forgione was creating dishes with ingredients I had never heard of, things like nasturtium leaves, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. “Where did you find them?” I asked him. They came from California and northern Michigan, he told me, and added that in Europe all chefs learn to be foragers. Most of them, he said, regularly wander through markets and out-of-the-way places to find something intere
sting or unique, and then create a dish around it. As the cottage food business grew and foragers throughout the nation contacted Forgione, his repertoire continued to expand.
At the same time, the California cuisine trend hit Manhattan. Simple, robust food came out of open kitchens with mesquite grills and wood-burning ovens. Reduction sauces gave way to flavored mayonnaise, and sprigs of fresh herbs were the garnishes instead of fluted mushroom caps. The entertainment of watching cooks prepare food while wearing black baseball caps in lieu of a toque—the classic French chef’s hat—added to the signature of this new wave of cooking that brought the high-quality dining experience many steps closer to being casual. Larry would say that what I was witnessing in New York was only a part of the California food world.
The idea of heading west to check out firsthand the restaurant scene in San Francisco began to form in my head. When I told Larry, he urged me on.
Once in California, I quickly found work at the Campton Place hotel under Chef Bradley Ogden, a friend of Larry’s. But any conversation about California cuisine’s beginnings invariably came around to the schoolteacher-turned-chef Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, her influential restaurant across the bay in Berkeley, where she successfully compressed the time it took to get food from the ranch or farm to the tables in her dining room.
In the introduction to her first cookbook, Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, I read that her food was inspired by travels in France and by the cookbooks of Richard Olney and Elizabeth David. To that end, Chez Panisse was originally a French restaurant, modeled after the rustic dishes of the south of France, in particular the cooking of Provence. The influence showed in the dining room as well, where the walls were adorned with posters for films by Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker who had written stories based in Provence. I later learned that Waters was so inspired by these films and the lives of the characters that she named the restaurant after one of them, Panisse.
Mediterranean Summer Page 2
