Life, on the Line (11 page)

She simply nodded when I told her the name of the reservation and without so much as a glance toward a reservation book said, “Right this way.” We were led to a downstairs table and seated.

I had observed service twice and even tasted the food, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. My dad, however, had never eaten like this before.

A food runner came over immediately, holding a clear triangle tray with what appeared to be miniature ice-cream cones. These, however, were filled with salmon tartar.

Next, a tapioca pudding with a heaping spoonful of caviar and two tiny rouget fillets stacked neatly on top of each other. They were cooked perfectly and without a single pin bone or scale.

“I thought for sure there would be bones in those fish,” my dad whispered at me, although he was really talking out loud to himself.

I leaned toward him. “I watched them take the bones out with tweezers when I was here.”

The meal stretched on—a chop of Atlantic salmon arrived on a ragout of lentils with truffles and lardoons; lobster came on a bed of creamy lobster-scented orzo.

Then the foie gras course came. A rosy-colored, puck-shaped torchon with pear relish and toasted brioche was placed in front of me, while my father received the sautéed version with abalone and Meyer lemon that I had eaten during my tryout. The captain, Kevin, approached our table, looked at me with a smile, and said, “Chef thought you might want to try a different preparation.”

I thought to myself, “He remembered! He freaking remembered that I tried that. This is crazy.”

I was in a stupor. To say that the food was delicious would be stating the obvious, but it would also be understating so much more. If it wasn't perfect, it was damn well close. But it was also so
smart.
It was clever without being cloying. And the service hit just the right mark. This flat-out blew away the meals I had at the restaurants in Europe. It wasn't even close.

“Grant,” my dad said, snapping me back to reality, “if the chef comes out you should stand up and shake his hand. Don't stay sitting.”

“Oh, I will, Dad. But I doubt he'll come out. I think he stays in the kitchen.”

As we made our way into desserts Kevin came back around and asked if we would like coffee or an after-dinner drink. My dad showed interest in a glass of port; I ordered an espresso. As Kevin moved away I saw my dad start to rise out of his chair. I looked up slack-jawed to see chef Keller towering over our table. I pushed back my chair quickly and stood.

Chef Keller greeted my dad first, giving him a firm handshake and a warm smile. Then he turned to me and did the same. He had a modest way about him, and he seemed a bit uncomfortable in the dining room, as if he didn't belong. We heaped praise and thanks on him for a few minutes before he disappeared back into the kitchen.

I was in awe. I felt like a little kid again—like I knew nothing about cuisine, cooking, or food and was starting from scratch. It was a truly exciting night.

Kevin came back with the port, espresso, and some
mignardise
. “Well,” he said, “I have never seen Chef in the dining room before. I guess he likes you guys.”

We nibbled on the chocolates and cookies, recounting the meal play by play. To both of us, it was obvious why I should work here. And it was one of the best nights I ever spent with my dad.

“Can I get anything else for you gentlemen?” Kevin asked.

“No, thank you. Just the check,” my dad said.

“Ah. There is no check. Thomas took care of it.”

I
f you ask a French Laundry cook the date he started at the restaurant, he'll be able to tell you without hesitation. The date is burned into his mind like an anniversary or his mother's birthday. October 16, 1996, was my first day.

Also starting that day was Mark Hopper. But on our first day we didn't work in the restaurant at all. Instead, chef Keller took us to a charity event at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone.

Mark and I served hundreds of salmon cornets that evening while listening to chef Jean-Louis Palladin—who was in town promoting the opening of his Las Vegas restaurant Napa—tell chef Keller stories of the food he cooked at Jean-Louis at the Watergate Hotel. Thomas mentioned to Mark and me that the meals he had there were among the best of his life.

Being a commis, or prep cook, at the Laundry was not unlike the work at any other restaurant, even a diner. The commis' responsibilities ranged from rudimentary to advanced, depending on their level of experience. Starting out, I was slow on the uptake. There is a period of acclimation that every cook must go through in a new kitchen, and I was no different.

“This is shit!” Jeffrey yelled as he took the strainer full of poorly cooked green beans and threw them into the sink, beans flying everywhere. “If Thomas saw that, he would fire you right now.”

He was right. Not about Chef firing me on the spot, but that the beans were indeed overcooked. I knew it and wasn't planning on using them, but I got caught before I could start again. I had lost track of time while kneading pasta dough, and the beans started to discolor. It was my second day there and I had yet to find my legs. A few of the cooks were not afraid to point that out. “They might do it that way in Chicago, but here we do things right. Do it nice, or do it twice.”

Embarrassed, I gathered the beans from the sink, counter, and floor and threw them away. Mark swung around and whispered, “Don't let 'em get inside your head. Everyone is gunning for everyone right now. They all want that sous title.”

It struck me for the first time that I had never been introduced to the sous chef. It was clear that a few of the guys had seniority and seemed to carry themselves like they were in charge. Chefs like Josh, Jeff, and pastry chef Stephen Durfee had authority but lacked the official title. Unlike most kitchens that had several layers of management to make sure standards are upheld, The French Laundry had chef Keller, and that was it.

The first few weeks were brutally tough. The cooks weren't interested in helping me out or making friends. They weren't vicious, they just lived by the standard set by chef Keller and everything else was meaningless and superfluous.

I continued to be trained by Kevin and DJ while most of the other cooks prowled, waiting for me to make a mistake.

 

DJ and I grew on each other slowly but surely.

We spent weeks of dragging ourselves out of bed at 5:00 A.M. to bang out a long list of menial and petty prep tasks that were passed down to us from the
chefs de partie
. It felt cruel and a result of their own laziness, but that is the kind of thing you can bond over: common misery.

DJ called me “Spanky,” after the character from
The Little Rascals,
knowing that I hated it. I teased him constantly about being slow to the point of moving in reverse. He would counter that I was so aggressive that I would crash and burn, turning into an ember by the time I was thirty.

DJ was a purist and a dreamer. He would go mushroom foraging on his days off, have a batch of homebrew beer working in his apartment, and help his local farmer friends harvest or till their fields in exchange for some vegetables. He drove a beat-up VW bus, which summed up his personality pretty well.

One very busy morning we both entered panic mode. The lists left for us were enormous. On top of that it was a Saturday, which meant that we had lunch service to deal with and everything that came with it: extra
mise en place
to cover the extra service and a whole host of extra cooks in the kitchen taking up space earlier in the day. Every day, once the PM cooks came in, we would end up balancing our cutting boards on stacked-up milk crates. After all, we were just commis, and the
chefs de partie
needed the prime real estate in the kitchen.

DJ was watching me bounce off the counters and I heard him chuckle from the other side of the kitchen. “Spanky, you're going to kill yourself. When you move that fast, quality suffers.”

In the French Laundry kitchen those were fighting words. To insinuate that another cook was compromising the quality of the food was the ultimate insult. As busy as I was, I took the time to stop and walk up to DJ and look him in the eye. “No chance, Gerber. I am on fire today. Untouchable!”

I dumped a batch of olives that I'd recently pitted into the Robot Coupe and just as I was about to fire it DJ put his hand on the lid and said, “I will bet you, Spanky. I'll bet you that there's a pit in there.”

“No chance,” I replied with supreme confidence. “I'll bet you anything you want.”

“Okay. Here's the deal. When you turn that on I guarantee we will hear a pit hitting the blade. When we do, you have to fish it out and put it in your wallet. That pit has to stay there until I ask to see it. If at any time you cannot produce the pit when I ask, you owe me ten dollars. And it keeps going on and on.”

“And if there is no pit?” I asked.

“I'll give you ten dollars right now.”

“Deal!”

I cranked the lid closed and hit the green button. We both froze, listening carefully. The blades whipped around for about thirty seconds, breaking down the olives into a black paste. All seemed fine. But then it freed a single pit from its jacket of flesh.

DJ reached over and pushed the red stop button with a huge smile on his face.

I emptied the contents of the bowl onto a sheet of parchment and searched for the culprit. I found it, washed it off, and pulled out my wallet. I held the pit up in the air between two fingers and held my wallet up in the other hand. In slow motion I lowered the pit into the wallet like a mom pretending a spoonful of food is an airplane while feeding her baby.

We both laughed. I knew I had been beat.

DJ has never asked to see the pit. It sits, waiting for him, in my wallet.

 

I worked as a prep cook for months. I was patient. But I was anxious to move up, or to at least know that I would move up eventually.

I approached chef Keller and expressed my concerns of being passed over or left behind as an eternal prep cook. A soft smile spread over his face and I imagined that he must have been thinking how I was very young, presumptuous, and naive. I was only twenty-two years old, and he basically told me as much. “Be patient,” he said. “You don't realize it yet, but you are learning so much right now.”

I nodded my head in agreement, but I didn't agree.

I wanted a life on the line.

I wanted to burn my forearms on the oven door and dig myself out of a giant black hole of tickets every night at seven. I wanted to feel the adrenaline. I wanted to be great.

“Eventually, Grant, we'll move you into a
chef de partie
position.”

I was a commis at The French Laundry for eleven months. It was the most important period of my culinary development. I was surrounded by products that I had never seen before, let alone worked with on a daily basis. I learned how to cook pig ears and trotters, duck tongues, cockscombs, sea urchin, and veal brains. I was exposed to traditional techniques as basic as making veal stock and kneading the perfect pasta dough to more advanced preparations like cleaning foie gras for torchons or properly macerating short ribs in red wine, clarifying the marinade, and flaming it before the cooking process. I spent months making the innovative, savory oyster-flavored tapioca sabayon for the “Oysters and Pearls” caviar dish.

Chef Keller would take time out of his day to personally demonstrate techniques required to complete preparations. Many of these would be the more traditional or obscure techniques for preparing offal. Ingredients such as hearts, brains, sweetbreads, liver, trotters, cheeks, gizzards, tripe, and tongue typically require numerous preparatory steps and long cooking times over several days. These are projects, not simply cooking, and it was necessary to start early in the morning before the
chefs de partie
would fill the stoves with other elements of the daily
mise en place
.

Chef Keller was passionate about these preparations and loved teaching us how to cook them.

One December morning Chef came into the French Laundry kitchen carrying a beautiful antique copper
brassier
. He hefted it onto the counter, glanced at me with squinted eyes that had seen only three hours of sleep, and said, “Morning, Chef. Do you have the
mise
for the tripe ready?”

Three days earlier we had received a delivery of tripe. Chef Keller told me he would show me how to process it in the coming days, and he started me that day by giving me specific instructions, which I wrote in a notebook, on soaking and rinsing the tripe. This series of purging required pounds of salt, gallons of fresh water, several large containers, and about three days. When he brought in the
brassier
I thought we were ready to go with the final step. Little did I know that we were only halfway to the finish.

The task is not enchanting—the goal is to clean the lining of a bovine stomach. Despite the unglamorous work, or perhaps because of it, I could see the care and determination of his effort. Chef Keller understood something about the end result that I could not at this point in my career. Maybe he really liked tripe. But I think the point of all of this tedious work was to transform something that by definition is poor, worthless, or offensive.

And so we kept at it: repeatedly soaking the tripe and changing the water, scrubbing it with salt, scraping the lining, blanching repeatedly, and trimming after each step. Finally, after days of work, we had something that looked appealing. The pure-white honeycombed texture that was revealed was a satisfying conclusion to the effort. It was like waxing a car by hand. And we hadn't even cooked it yet.