THENASTYBITS (7 page)

making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with
sauce vierge,
the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and
sauce madere . . .
We
know,
to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you
don't
see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House.

What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him?

If you're like me, probably not.

The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best
people
are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man
...
or the Keys
...
I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a
stage
with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing . . . He
rocks . . .
My uncle has a friend who says he can hook me up . . .")?

Or do you want somebody who's come up the hard way? A guy who has started at the bottom, worked his way up, educated himself, step by step, station by station in the intricacies of
your
particular operation—who knows where everything is, in every corner of your restaurant, who has been shown, again and again until it's implanted in his cell structure, the way
you
want it cooked? He may not know what a
soubise
is, but he can sure make one! He may not know the term
monter au beurre,
or know who Vatel was—but who cares? Vatel punked out over a late fish delivery and offed himself like a bad poet. Somebody had to cover
his
station the next day. Manuel would have shrugged and soldiered on. No shrieking and wailing and rending of garments for Manuel. He's a professional, not some flighty "artist" who can't handle a little pressure.

No disrespect to my alma mater. The CIA is, without question, the finest professional culinary school in the country, maybe the world. It has, in my lifetime, raised the level of performance, the expectation of excellence, to previously unseen heights. To graduate from the CIA—or any other major culinary school—ensures basic, standardized knowledge of history, terminology, and procedures of our trade. A CIA diploma should, and does, mean a lot to potential employers; it represents an accumulation of valuable classroom experience and impeccable standards. But it is no guarantee of character. It speaks nothing of one's heart and soul and willingness to work, to learn, to grow—or one's ability to
endure.

The Mexican ex-dishwashers usually come from a culture where cooking and family are important. They have, more often than not, a family to provide for, and are used to being responsible for others. They are, more than likely, inured to regimes despotic, ludicrous, and hostile. They've known hardship—
real
hardship. The incongruities, contradictions, and petty injustices of kitchen life are nothing new compared to
la mor-dida,
wherein every policeman is a potential extortionist, and what was, until recently, a one-party system. You see an expression on the faces of veteran American cooks who've been around the block a few times, had their butts kicked, a look that says, "I expect the worst—and I'm ready for it." The Mexican ex-dishwasher has that look from the get-go.

As I've said many times, I can teach people to cook. I can't teach character. And my comrades from Mexico and Ecuador have been some of the finest characters I've known in twentyeight years as a cook and as a chef. I am privileged, made better, by having known and worked with many of them. I am honored by their hard work, their toil, and their loyalty. I am enriched by their sense of humor, their music, their food, their not-so-nice names for me behind my back, their kindness, and their strength. They have shown me what real character is. They have made this business—the "Hospitality Industry"—what it is, and they keep its wheels grinding forward.

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry . . . your oppressed . . . give me pretty much everybody"—that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell
is
America if not everybody else? We are—and
should
be—a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones. Like our kitchens. We need
more
Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

Lately, things have changed
...
a little. The off-the-books, below-minimum-wage illegal has to some extent disappeared from view, at least in the good restaurants I worked in. The strata of Latino labor has enlarged to include saute, grill, and even sous-chef positions. But you don't see too many chefs of French or Italian or even "New American" restaurants with a last name like Hernandez or Perez or Garcia. Owners, it seems, still shrink from having a mestizo-looking chef swanning about the dining room of their two- or three-star French eatery—even if the candidate richly deserves the job. Language skills are not the issue. Chances are, Mexicans or Ecuadorans speak English a hell of a lot better than most Americans speak Spanish (or French for that matter). It's . . . well
...
we
know
what it is, don't we?

It's racism, pure and simple.

I'd go on, more than happy to open the
next
can of worms— the How come I don't see many African Americans in good restaurant kitchens? question—but I'll leave that to another,

more reasoned advocate, hopefully one with better answers than I have.

What's the number-one complaint from chefs and managers in our industry? I can tell you what I hear in every major city I visit, and I've been visiting a
lot
of them lately: "I'm having a hard time finding good help!"

Solution? Simple: I suggest immediately opening up our borders to unrestricted immigration for all Central and South American countries. If the CIA grads don't want to squat in a cellar prep kitchen for the first couple of years of their career, or are too delicate or high-strung or too locked into a self-image that precludes the real work of kitchens and restaurants, then they should just stand back and watch their competition from south of the border take those jobs away for good. Everyone will end up getting what they deserve. It'll be a wake-up call for the home-team cooks and a boon to our industry—and the right thing to do. Perhaps the CIA should start a farm team in Mexico or Panama, like the Yankee organization. And every Mexican and Ecuadoran line cook in New York should get an immediate raise, amnesty from any immigration charges, a real green card—and the thanks of a grateful nation.

COUNTER CULTURE

for a while, i
thought it was just me. After years of eating well, in great restaurants, four hours at Alain Ducasse New York now felt like a year with an ugly mob. Sitting there in my high-backed chair, choking in my tie, oppressed by the dark dining room, the relentlessly hushed formality of it all . . . by the time my waiter pushed over the little cart and invited me to choose from a selection of freaking bottled
waters,
unironically describing the sources and attributes of each while I squirmed in agony, I felt ready for my head to explode with frustration. At Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, asking simply where I could find a bathroom, I had my napkin whisked away and was escorted to the bathroom with humiliating ceremony (all the way into the stall—where, as I recall with unease, I was also advised how I might find paper and operate a toilet). By the time the waiter had dutifully replaced the refolded napkin on my lap, surely no one in the dining room was left uninformed as to exactly where I'd been and what I'd had to do. There might as well have been a flourish of trumpets announcing "the customer at table seven has an urgent need for a piss!" While it's okay for Ferran Adria to tell me exactly how he wants me to eat each dish ("One bite! All at once!"—he is Ferran Adria, after all), some foam- and agar-agar-crazed wannabe in London or Chicago who tries to tell me how to chew my food is gonna get a pepper mill upside his head—if he even allows pepper near the table anymore. I've had it with the pomposity of it all. Restaurants are supposed to be about the food, aren't they? They're supposed to be . . . well . . . fun.

Call it a collective yearning, a simultaneous rush of welt-schmerz, a sense of general exhaustion with the rigors of traditional fine-dining-style service, or simply a growing realization that the previously de rigeur features of the high-end dining room are too damned expensive to be practical; but thankfully, more and more culinary gurus appear to harbor similar instincts and are moving away from the idea that good food has to be served in hushed temples of gastronomy. Some of the world's best chefs, if not always entirely abandoning the churchlike atmosphere of the Michelin-starred dining room are, at the very least, successfully exploring other options. I think it's a long overdue development.

Opening up more accessible, less formal, fashionably down-scale outlets than their signature mothership operations(s) is, of course, nothing new. Alain Ducasse spawned his Spoons for a presumably less moneyed, more on-the-go crowd looking to suck up a little reflected glory with their ben to boxes. Charlie Trotter's Trotter To Go enabled those who felt they weren't paying enough for a potato to fulfill their dreams of haute takeout. And Wolfgang Puck famously embraced the Beast entirely, opening a vast empire of airport pizza joints. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, while maintaining the impeccable Jean-Georges mothership, has frenetically (and usually successfully) flirted with a variety of dining styles and themes—everything from family-style Chinese eaten at communal tables to Singaporean street food—without noticeably diminishing the "brand." Even Thomas Keller has opened a (nonetheless Keller-ized) bistro in the heart of ugly-shorts capitalist darkness, Las Vegas.

But the most radical moves have been taken by chefs as far apart geographically as Paris, New York, Chicago, and Montreal, chef-operators as different in temperament and training as any could be. What seems to unite them is their willingness— nay, eagerness—to dispense almost entirely with all they deem

COUNTER
CULTURE

unnecessary to the service of highest-quality food: the extensive glassware, the tablecloths, the expensive silver and floral arrangements, even the
table itself.
In this bold new vision of the way it could—and perhaps should—be, the finest ingredients, prepared by the very best chefs and cooks, are served over a counter, diner style.

It's a revolutionary shift, or more accurately, a reactionary one. Not so much about what chefs want to do as much as about all the things they don't want to do anymore. And the change from black-and-white-penguin-suited tableside service to counter service looks to be an almost entirely chef-led trend, reflective of what chefs themselves like to eat in their few hours away from their own kitchens and, as significantly, where they are eating.

I spend a lot of time in my nearly never-ending bounce around the world eating and drinking with chefs. It seems that in every city I visit, everywhere in the world, whether on a book-flogging tour, while making television shows, or just traveling for fun, I end up too late at night with the local hotshots and their crew, talking shop, talking food, talking about what we all really like to eat—and what we secretly consider to be bullshit. And I listen to what people tell me. I notice what they eat. When we play the "Death Row Game," naming those single dishes or ingredients that we'd choose if given only a few hours to live, as the last taste to ever cross our palates, I take note. Most chefs' choices for last meal are invariably simple. No one
ever
expresses a desire to experience a fourteen course degustation menu (or even any part of one) in an as-yet-unvisited three-star Michelin. Instead, the word
Mom
usually comes up. Bread and butter, steak frites, duck confit, and a bowl of pasta are popular answers. As frequently, the words
Spain
and
sushi
will be heard. More often than not, we're eating sushi or Spanish-style tapas while having this discussion.

It is no coincidence that so many chefs have been visiting Spain lately, only to return with an altered worldview. While most chefs first head off to Spain so that they can experience Ferran