Kitchen Confidential (20 page)

Back from the market, night crew suiting up in the locker-room, I have just enough time to assemble the orders for Saturday. This is something I enjoy doing. My young gangster friend Segundo and I take a full tour of my walk-in and reach-ins. I've got two clipboards under my arm: one to assemble my orders (one page for Saturday, another to begin the Monday list) and a second for prep lists-my Things To Do Tomorrow list.

I break it down by company as I go along. De Bragga gets the Monday meat order; Schaller and Webber, the bacon. Riviera and Ridge get the produce-I'm too embarrassed to talk to Baldor right now. I see I need 40 pounds of whitewater mussels, 30 pounds of squid, eight whole fish, and a new fish of the day for Saturday and Sunday. I call Wild Edibles and talk to Chris Gerage, who was also a chef for Pino at one point, and we discuss what's good for tomorrow. I go for some wild striped bass, some king salmon, and some baby octopus for appetizer special. Dry goods, I'm locked in for the weekend-no Saturday deliveries-but I start building a Monday list anyway. From D'Artagnan, I'll need some more foie gras by Monday, some duck bones, maybe some magret, and maybe I'll splurge on some fresh black trumpets and some chanterelles for a special-Jose will be thrilled-and since wild boar has been a big moneymaker for me lately, maybe I'll make up on the boar what I lose on the 'shrooms. I add two boar legs to my D'Artagnan list. Segundo knows exactly what I'm going to ask him and in what order-he's ready for me.

We go through the familiar list of items, in my inept, but still useful Spanish: 'Mesclun?' 'V einte,' he replies.

'Cebolla blanca' 'Una' 'Shallot?' 'Tres. '

And so on Dairy has to be in early or they'll call me which I hate. So I call the Monday dairy in right away: two poly milks, four 55-pound blocks of sweet butter, one case of heavy cream ultra, a case of large eggs. Gourmand, another specialty purveyor, needs lead time-they ship out of Washington, DC, so I get that order together as quickly as possible: haricots de Tarbe, the expensive white beans we use for cassoulet (perfect absorption), feuille de brik for pastry, Provence honey for the duck sauce, white anchovies in olive oil for niyoise salad, escargots, flageolets. I'm already thinking about pot-au-feu for next week and will need plenty of the expensive grey sea salt for condiment.

Ramon, the day dishwasher, tells me he'll need the day off tomorrow to visit a relative in the hospital, but he's replaced himself with Jaime II, the night dishwasher who'll double for him. I'm grateful, as nothing causes me more grief than last-minute emergency scheduling, and I'm always pleased when my crew takes care of things internally. Phoning my Mafia at home is a near impossibility. Most of them claim not to own phones. For those who do, their phones are answered by people suspicious of strange Norteamericanos asking questions, and are not likely to acknowledge that, yes, Mr Perez, Rodriguez, Garcia, Sanchez, Rivera is actually in residence at said address.

Dinner-tasting for the floor staff is at five-thirty, when the heavy-hitting veteran waiters have arrived. They fallon the family gruel and the tasting plates like rabid jackals. It's never pretty watching waiters eat; you'd think they had no money the way they dive into any available trough. Dinner-tasting is conducted in the kitchen, as there are customers in the dining room straight through lunch into dinner. It looks like a crowded subway car as I describe the evening's specials and present each plate. They tear at the four plates of food, ripping apart the pheasant with their hands, nearly spearing each other with forks as they gouge at the tuna, drag cockles to their greasy maws with bare hands, and quickly turn Janine's lovely tarte Tatin into a dark smear. I swallow some more aspirins.

At five forty-five, the downstairs is clogged with the night-time lifer waiter crew, sitting on milk crates, folding napkins, smoking and talking about each other. Who got drunk last night, who got thrown out of a mob-run after-hours club then woke up in the bushes outside their house, who thinks the new maitre d' is going to lose it tonight when the room fills up and the customers stacked up at the bar start screaming for their tables, who's going to win the World Cup, who thinks Heather Graham is a babe, who probably takes it in the ass this week, and how about the time the Bengali busboys got into a fight in the middle of the dining room and one stuck a steak knife into the other?

Dinner service. Overbooked as usual-with two whopping twelve-tops booked for prime time. I remain in the kitchen to expedite, hoping that maybe, just maybe, things'll slow down enough by ten for me to have a couple of cocktails and get home by eleven. But I know full well that the two big tables will hold up seatings by at least an hour; more than likely, I'll be here for the full tour. By eight-thirty, the board is full. Entree tickets flutter in the pull from the exhaust fans. To my right, below the window, plated appetizers are lined up, waiting to get delivered to the tables, the window is full of saute dishes, the work table in front of the fry station a panorama of steaks of different donenesses. It's still Cachundo-he's working a double too-and he ferries the plates out by hand, four or five at a time. Still, I have to press-gang the occasional busboy or empty-handed waiter, separating them out from the herd at the coffee and bread stations and returning dirty plates and glasses, into delivering desserts. I don't want ice cream melting over the clafoutis, or the whipped cream on the chocolate mousse to start falling. Food's getting cold, and my voice is already blown out from calling out orders over the noise from the dishwasher, the hum of the exhaust, the whine of the Paco-Jet machine and the growing roar from the dining room. I make a hand gesture to a friendly waiter, who knows what I want, and he soon arrives with an 'Industrial', a beer stein filled with margarita, for me. The drink manages to take the edge off my raging adrenaline buzz and goes down nicely after the three double espressos, two beers, three cranberry juices, eight aspirins, two ephedrine drinks, and a hastily gobbled hunk of merguez, which I managed to squeeze into a heel of bread before swallowing in two bites. By now, my stomach is a roiling hell broth of suppressed frustration, nervous energy, caffeine and alcohol. The night garde-manger man, Angel, who looks like he's twelve but sports a tattoo of a skull impaled with a dagger on his chest (future wife-beater, I think) is falling behind; he's got three raviolis, two duck confits, five green salads, two escargots, two Belgian endive and Stilton salads, two cockles, a smoked salmon and blini, two foie gras and a pate working-and the saute and grill stations are calling for urgent vegetable sides and mashed potatoes. I swing the pastry commis over to Angel's station to help out, but there's so little room, they just bump into each, getting in each other's way.

Tim, a veteran waiter, is dry-humping Cachundo-to Cachundo's apparent displeasure. He's blocking the lane and impeding traffic in the narrow kitchen with his thrusting. I have to ask Tim nicely not to sexually harass my runners during service . after work, please. An order comes back for refire and Isidoro is not happy about it; it's cooked perfectly. I peer out into the dark dining room and see nothing except the dark silhouettes of customers waiting for tables at the bar, hear, even over the noise in the kitchen, the ambient chatter, the constant roar of diners as they shout over the music, the waiters describing specials over that noise, then fighting each other to get at the limited number of computer terminals to place orders, print out checks. 'Fire table fourteen! Catorsayy! That's six, seven, fourteen and one on fire!' I shout 'Isidoro! You time it!' 'I ready fourteen,' says Isidoro, the grill man, as he slaps the refire back on a plate. Cachundo reaches around me and loads up with food, picking out plates seemingly at random, as if he's plucking daisies. I dry-swallow some more aspirins, and duck back into the stairwell for a few puffs of a cigarette.

A whole roasted fish comes back. 'The customer wants it deboned,' says an apologetic waiter. 'I told them it comes on the bone,' he whines, anticipating decapitation himself. Isidoro growls and works on the returned fish, slipping off the fillets by hand and then replating it. The printer is going non-stop now. My left hand grabs tickets, separates out white copy for grill, yellow copy for saute, pink copy for me, coffee orders for the busboys. My right hand wipes plates, jams gaufrette potatoes and rosemary springs into mashed potatoes, moves tickets from the order to the fire positions, appetizers on order to appetizers out, I'm yelling full-time now, trying to hold it together, keep an even pace. My radar screen is filled with incoming bogeys and I'm shooting them down as fast as I can. One mistake, where a whole table comes back because of a prematurely fired dupe, or a bad combination of special requests ties up a station for a few critical seconds, or a whole roasted fish or a cote du boeuf has been forgotten? The whole line could come grinding to a dead stop, like someone dropping a wrench into a GM assembly line-utter meltdown, what every chef fears most. If something like that happens it could blow the whole pace of the evening, screw up everybody's heads, and create a deep, dark hole that could be very hard to climb out of.

'I gotta hot nut for table six!' I yell. There's a rapidly cooling boudin in the window, waiting for a tuna special to join it.

'Two minutes,' says Isidoro. 'Where's that fucking confit?' I hiss at poor Angel, who's struggling valiantly to make blini for smoked salmon, brown ravioli under the salamander, layout pates and do five endive salads at once. A hot escargot explodes in the window, spattering me with boiling garlic butter and snail guts. 'Shit!' I say, dabbing my eye with a side-towel. 'Peenchayy escargots!'

Frank's doing well, very well, keeping up. He did his apprenticeship with Robuchon, making food somewhat more elegant and delicately arranged than our Les HaIles' humble workingman's fare, so it's a nice surprise that he's turned out to be such a line stud, cheerfully cranking out simple brasserie chow with speed and efficiency. He doesn't over-rely on the salamander, which I like (a lot of his French predecessors insist on cooking everything stone-rare, slicing and then coloring the slices under the salamander-something I hate to see); he makes minimal use of the microwave, which the cholo contingent has come to refer to contemptuously as 'cooking French-style', and I've only seen him throw one steak in the fry-o-lator. All-in-all, he's worked out well so far.

'Platos!' screams Isidoro. The dishwasher is buried up to his shoulders in the pot sink, his pre-wash area stacked with plates of unscraped leftovers and haphazardly dumped silver. I snarl and grab a Bengali busboy, shove his snout into a plate heaped with gnawed bones and half-eaten vegetables. 'Scrape!' I hiss menacingly, referring to the mess of unscraped plates. 'Busy, chef,' complains the busboy who, from what I've seen, has been wandering around with his thumb up his ass, taking out the occasional coffee, for hours. 'I don't give a fuck if you're saving the world,' I say. 'Scrape the plates now, or I'll tear your booga off and hurl it across the street at Park Bistro!'

David the Portuguese busboy is making espressos and cappuccinos behind me, but he moves pretty gracefully back there, not bumping me or spilling. We're used to each other's movements in the narrow space we share, knowing when to move laterally, when to make way for incoming dishes, outgoing food, the fry guy returning from downstairs with another 100-pound load of freshly cut spuds. I feel only the occasional light tap on the shoulder as he squeezes through with another tray of coffee and petit-fours, maybe a whispered, 'Behind you' or 'Bajando.' Fred and Ginger time.

Finally the printer starts slowing down, and I can see by the thinning crowd at the bar that the last seating is under way: white spaces opening up in the dining room, stripped tables waiting for customers. We've got 280 dinners under our belts already. I turn the expediting over to Cachundo, drag my ass down the Stairmaster for a final walk-through. I check the stocks cooling in plastic buckets outside the walk-in, the gauze-wrapped pigs' feet which will have to be painstakingly deboned tomorrow, the soaking tarbais beans which have to be blanched, the salt-rubbed duck legs which will have to be confited in duck fat and herb, and I notice the produce that Jose and I bought earlier at the market. I make a final swing through the dry-goods room, note that I'll be needing more peanut oil soon, more peppercorns, more sherry wine vinegar. I'm already working on an early draft of tomorrow's Things To Do list, tomorrow's order list. I've got striped bass already ordered, and baby octopus, I remind myself. Jose's got a boner for black mission figs-he saw some at the market-so I'll have to tell Janine to start thinking about figs for a special. I have weekly inventory tomorrow morning, which means I'll have to weigh every scrap of meat and fish and cheese in the store and record it, count every can, bottle, case and box. There will be payroll tomorrow, making sense of the punch-ins and punch-outs of my not very computer-wise cooks and porters and dishwashers, all fourteen of them-and there's that extra shift for Carlos who worked extra for me last week, and the extra half for Isidoro the night he covered Omar and Omar doubled twice to cover the vacationing Angel-and shit!-there's the overtime for that event at Beard House, and a promo party for what was it? A Taste of NoHo? Burgundy Night? A benefit for prickly heat? I have to record all the transfers of food from my stores to our outposts: the smoked salmon I shipped off to Washington, the flageolets I sent to Miami, the rosette and jambon de Paris I sent to Tokyo. I have to record all the stuff I gave to the butcher counter up front, and Philippe, my other boss, wants a list of suggestions for specials for the Tokyo chef. I peel off my fetid whites, groaning like 2,OOO-year-old man as I struggle into my jeans and pullover.

I'm on the way out the door but Isidoro wants to talk to me. My blood runs cold. When a cook wants to talk to you, it's seldom good news: problem with another cook, minor feud, paycheck problem, request for time off. In Isidoro's case, he wants a raise. I gave Carlos a raise last week so I'll have a rash of greedy line cooks jumping me for money for the next few weeks. Another note to self: Frank needs the 16th off so I have to call Steven. I'm still buzzed with adrenaline when I finally push through the last waiting customers by the hostess stand and out the door, and wave for a taxi.