The Reach of a Chef (24 page)

There is no real order of events here—it’s a general group meeting. Price, sitting to the side, says, “Everyone did a great job with the verbals yesterday.” Price, age thirty-three, is an energetic presence. His five-foot-six frame is compact and athletic. He’s got dark hair that hangs in curls, and he’s got a bright and ready smile. He’s an easygoing guy, happiest when he’s out on the lake in a flat-bottomed skiff with his huge Newfoundland, Otis, on his way to a little island at low tide to pick sea beans for one of tonight’s seafood dishes. “People really change—it’s August,” he says to the servers. Everyone knows that August crowds tend to spend less, are more demanding, and are generally less savvy than off-season patrons. “So do your best to maintain your composure.”

A server says, “The green zebras were a little hard yesterday, and I noticed some people were leaving them.”

“Do you think that was because they were green?” Melissa says. “Sometimes people think the green zebras just aren’t ripe.”

“No,” the server says. “They were a little hard.”

Melissa nods OK.

Melissa scans the board, set on a table beside her, propped against the wall. “There are two changes on aps tonight. The oysters tonight are Pemaquid; they’re roasted with a tomato-fennel glaçage, which is kind of like a hollandaise, but not really—it’s whipped egg yolks, with a reduction of Pernod, shallot, dry vermouth, and tomato. We’re folding some whipped cream into that, and that’s spooned over the oyster. We’ll have a little fennel sauce on there as well. The glaçage will get a little brown on top when it comes out of the oven. It’ll get toasted bread crumbs with toasted fennel seeds ground into them.”

“What’s the best way to describe that to the customers,” a server asks, “kinda like a hollandaise?”

“No,” she says, “it’s more like a gratiné with fennel and tomato.”

“And it’s called glaçage?”

“Glaçage—it’s a classic preparation. And we also have a house-made sheep’s-milk ricotta. The sheep’s milk came from Perry Ells’s farm and we got whey from Apple Hill Farm. They’re making a sheep’s-milk cheese as well. We used the whey and milk to make the ricotta here this morning. So it’s house-made, served warm on a lightly toasted baguette, with a little arugula, Black Mission figs, and extra-virgin olive oil. Very simple.”

The servers are eager to know how Melissa worked the magic on the whey. Melissa describes the process and also notes the difference between this ricotta and ricotta salata, which is salted, pressed, and baked. The nature of the curds that define ricotta is that they don’t fall apart under heat—they don’t melt. Instead, they simply dry out. Melissa likes to use ricotta salata, in strips using a vegetable peeler, grated, or in chunks on pizzas and pastas. The servers listen intently, many taking notes, presumably for their own use.

The easy discussion goes on in this manner until all the servers have asked everything they need to know, or addressed any issues, for the night ahead. Then Melissa at last stands slowly and returns to the kitchen, finishing prep, then cleaning up for service.

Unless she hears someone whistling. Once, while seated in this dining room toward the end of the pre-service meeting, she heard whistling and was out of her seat like lightning.
“Who’s whistling?!”
she shouted, the only time I heard her raise her voice.
“Jesse?!”
She bolted for the dish station where the new dishwasher was merrily hosing down plates. Melissa is superstitious: Whistling in a kitchen means death to the chef, she said. Jesse agreed to refrain.

Service at Primo, action on the hot line, is classic American restaurant cooking—two line cooks, a guy on wood-oven station, a garde manger doing salads and aps, someone on desserts, and Melissa expediting on the other side of the line, wiping plates as they’re set on the hot shelf above the two line cooks, handing them to the servers and calling out orders and fires. It doesn’t really look like much unless you know what to look for—and then it’s like watching a cross between a sporting event and a soap opera. It’s an incredibly intense world that you can’t possibly know completely until you’re in it yourself. It’s like being in the OR except here, the only person who might die is you.

Lindsey was on garde manger, her normal post, night before last. Lindsey is a young cook, twenty-three, who’s recently graduated from culinary school. This is her first real cook’s job. She’s beautiful in her fairness—pale lips, fair skin, loose curly blond hair pulled back, blond lashes and eyebrows. If you saw her outside a kitchen in street clothes, you’d never suspect she was a line cook. Even her voice and movements have a sweet delicacy about them.

“I don’t even consider myself a cook yet—I’m still learning,” she told me, speaking like a true cook. She continued to roll pistachio–goat cheese balls that go with the orange-and-beet salad. “Melissa works so hard. She’s such a great mentor.”

It was the beet salad that got her two days ago—but not in the predictable way. She was getting hammered, but Melissa had kept an eye on her and she was holding her own. The orders for beet salad kept raining down on her. In that situation, you keep thinking to yourself,
It’s gotta slow down or even out,
and then the orders for that one dish come even faster. About three and a half hours into service, she was making what seemed like her fortieth beet salad—baby beets from the garden are roasted and sliced, served with red lettuce from the garden, segmented orange, and the pistachio–goat cheese “truffles,” Melissa calls them on the menu, finished with a pistachio vinaigrette. She reached for vinaigrette to dress the greens. As she lifted the glass pitcher out of her mise tray, it slipped from her fingers, spilled all over her mise, and broke the salt ramekin.

When service is busy like this, and it was peaking, it’s all you can do to stay on top of things when everything is going well. When you are a young cook and you lose your dressing and foul your mise for the one dish that seemingly everyone in the entire dining room is ordering, it’s as if someone drives a stick between your spokes as you’re cruising downhill on a bicycle. You go flying. You sit up and shake your head clear and find yourself so deep in the weeds you can’t even see where you are.

Lindsey collapsed. She couldn’t work. Melissa had to run back and help her. There was just enough vinaigrette left in the container to make the salads ordered, but what if more came in? She’d never be able to do it—she wouldn’t have time to remake the vinaigrette. But she’d have to—but she couldn’t—but she’d have to—what would she do? All she can hear in her head is Melissa’s voice,
“Ordering, beet salad. Beet salad. Four beet salad. Beet salad.”
The thought paralyzes her; she can’t get past it. Melissa says, “Don’t
worry
—if you run out we’ll make more.” But Lindsey never surmounted the mental block and staggered through to the end of service, on the verge of tears.

The thing is, no more beet salads were ordered. She had exactly enough vinaigrette. There was never anything to worry about.

“You can’t let that stuff run you over,” Melissa said afterward.

The next day I asked Lindsey about it. She was still beating herself up. “I should let it go; I shouldn’t be so sensitive,” she said, peeling more oranges for that beet salad.

Those kinds of events stay with you forever. They’re trauma scars; they never go away. One year after I’d been to Trio, I was in the kitchen where Jeffrey Pikus worked. I’d been at Trio the night he ran out of dehydrated bacon. The guests at the chef’s table would never have known a thing was not as it should be. One of the commis quickly got some bacon roasted off, and all Grant said was a quiet, “It’s no use lying to yourself.” That was it. One year later I bumped into Pikus, who was busy getting ready for service, and I was curious about this trauma phenomenon. I said, “Jeffrey, you remember running out of bacon?”

Pikus paused for a fraction of a moment—for the nausea to come and go—then nodded once at me and said,
“Yeah.”

As if he could ever forget! You never forget! I guarantee you, had it been ten years from now and I’d run into Pikus and asked, “You remember running out of bacon that night at Trio?” he’d shake his head and sigh, the memory as vivid now as it was at the time. It’s a powerful business, line cooking. It does things to your head.

But with Lindsey, it had happened before. Last time, it was with the chicory salad. “I’ve never seen anyone drop so much dressing,” Melissa confides. “I tell her not to pick it up.”

Lindsey tosses the salad with her hands—so she’s got oil on her hands, she gets oil on the glass container—it’s slippery!

Last time she dropped the dressing she did need more vinaigrette. Alissa was on desserts and had time to help, so she made more dressing while Lindsey worked to keep up with the orders, constructing the salad, which included a soft-boiled egg cooked to order—and it’s either a good egg night or a bad egg night, when the shells stick and the eggs keep breaking on you as more and more customers in the dining room keep ordering the chicory salad!

Now Joe, on wood oven, sees what’s going on as he’s making his pies and putting up his aps. He sees that Alissa is making the vinaigrette wrong, and he had to get pissed at her—because it was a night when Melissa wasn’t there (a rarity, but it happens)—and Rob, supposedly the sous, wasn’t doing a thing about it, was just working through service as expediter. Joe was furious.

Joe is tall and lean, with a sensitive demeanor. He came in on his day off to address the issue with Melissa. He remained furious that there was no leadership when Melissa was gone. So Melissa now had to go talk with Rob, and Rob’s response was
I’d have helped if I’d known.
This in turn made Melissa furious. “It’s your job to know,” she told him. “You have to be aware.” In this way it is a family soap opera—a chain of emotional events—from Alissa to Joe to Rob to Melissa, eliciting significant issues of leadership and responsibility set off because Lindsey dropped her dressing in the middle of service.

Then there’s Art, small, slender, bespectacled, and absolutely unflappable on the line. Nothing fazes him. He’s stonefaced on the line, never changes expression, and never stops moving. He’s a great line cook.

Melissa can throw a dozen order-fires at him while he’s picking up an eight-top and he just plows through it. She doesn’t take it for granted. Yesterday when the twelve-top ordered and she read the ticket, she paused, stepped to the left side of the service shelf, Art’s side, and caught his eye for the briefest moment, saying gently, “I’ve got a big one for you.” She paused while he turned to grab a sauté pan behind him to plate a saltimbocca. “Three bass, four halibut, one scallop, one pappardelle, no shrimp on one of those halibuts.” There’s scarcely room on his station for all the plates on this ticket, let alone the time to cook them so they are all finished at the same time. Art doesn’t flinch, working on a second saltimbocca, doesn’t even call it back, just gives a barely perceptible nod. This allows Melissa to run back to pastry to help Alissa, who is all alone back there and getting her first rush of the night.

Unlike Art, Rob gets testy on big orders. “I’ll hear it on the call back,” Melissa says. “I’ve been managing people for thirteen years. I can see right through them. I know immediately what their strengths and weaknesses are.”

Melissa could, of course, step into any of their stations at any moment and work it better than they themselves do.
That
is not part of being a cook; that is part of being a
real
chef. Melissa is an uncommonly elegant cook. It’s not that she can handle ten pans at once, it’s the ease and grace with which she does it. While guy cooks who are good, like Grant, like Art, are more athletic in their grace, Melissa is more like a dancer; there’s a delicacy to the way she moves.

She’s a cook’s cook. She longs to be back on the line, but for now, as the expediter, the only tool she uses is a damp towel.

“Order: snapper, rouget,” she says. “Order one tuna, order one grape leaves, soup, foie.” Joe calls back “Tuna” and Chris says, “Grape leaves, soup, foie.”

Chris Michet is taking over garde manger on Lindsey’s day off. Chris is an extern from the CIA and has today recently returned from the emergency room. He put a boning knife deep into his left hand. Price got him fixed up, and now he’s beginning service, hand bandaged. He’s new to this station, and he says, “Chef, could you show me how you want these?”

Melissa strides around the line and demos the foie dish for him. She cuts poached peaches, mixes them with some greens, some spicy cress, and a little poaching liquid, sets them on the plate, sets down a piece of almond French toast topped by the foie, deglazing the foie pan with a little chicken jus, reducing it till it’s thick on a portable gas burner at the station, and drizzling it on the salad. He plates the next one but the foie keeps tipping off the bread, which is perched on the salad. He sends it to the pass.

“He’s all right,” Melissa says to me. Then she smiles slyly toward Chris and says, “He’s gonna get his ass kicked tonight.”

“
Amuse
for four,” Bill, front-of-the-house expediter, says, which means that a four-top has just been seated. Melissa pours cold melon soup into four shot glasses, adds a flower garnish for tonight’s
amuse-bouche,
the first taste for all guests tonight. She disappears to the walk-in for a moment, then returns with a fist full of thyme stems with thick purple flowers. She puts them in a cup on the mise en place tray on the wood-block surface that’s the center of the brick-oven station, along with fennel-bread crumbs and tomato concassé for the oyster, oils, and vivid yellow and orange flower petals, calendula, that will finish some of the plates.

“Order two snapper, scallop, no vinaigrette. Order one rouget,” Melissa calls, slipping the ticket into the top “ordered” section of the shelf.

She walks down to Chris’s station and tells him to keep the lettuces in his lowboy cooler and to take them out with each order—don’t leave them out. It’s easier, but they get warm. Then she says, “Order two soup, order scallop, sword. I need that foie.” Chris is already behind on his orders. He gets the foie up and Melissa carries it to a waiting server, this one tips as well. “We’re having foie trouble tonight,” she says. “Pick up one rouget. Order oyster, field. Pick up bolognese, saltimbocca, no potatoes, substitute beans, two scallops.”