Work Clean (10 page)

One student, Jarobi White, was neither novice nor slouch. He'd been working in restaurants since he was 14 years old. Stuck stuffing hot dogs into buns at an O'Charley's on Long Island, Jarobi muscled his way onto the hot line by convincing his boss to fire one of his coworkers because, Jarobi claimed, he could do both jobs at once.

Jarobi's problem was that he hustled too hard and moved too much. The chef watched Jarobi at his station, potato skins spilling over the table and onto his feet, potatoes rolling off his cutting board. The chef could see Jarobi's thoughts play out on his face:
Oh, shit, I need a bucket!
Jarobi crossed the kitchen to grab one. The potatoes now went into the bucket, graying as their moist insides came in contact with the air.
Shit, I forgot to fill it with water!
Jarobi crossed the kitchen again to fill the pail.

Finally the chef-instructor barked at him in German-accented French: “Mise-en-place!”

Jarobi turned around. He had no idea what the chef was saying.

“Mise-en-place! Mise-en-place!” The chef gestured to his own station:
tray, knife, pail of water, bowl for scraps.

Jarobi's face lit up. Jarobi said: “Oh, word!” He meant:
What a great idea.

The chef nodded: “Everything has its place,” he said. “I don't go anywhere.”

Jarobi White gathered his mise-en-place, resumed, and tried going nowhere, fast.

While Jarobi White tried to make smaller moves, thousands of people were asking why he wasn't making bigger ones. After all, Jarobi was the only person in that kitchen with a video on MTV. The year was 1991, and Jarobi was a member of a new rap crew named A Tribe Called Quest, along with three friends—Jonathan “Q-Tip” Davis, Malik “Phife” Taylor, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. The previous year the group released their first video, “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo,” and their debut album had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, making A Tribe Called Quest one of the most talked-about new acts in hip-hop. While the group worked on their second album, Jarobi had second thoughts. He'd been skeptical from the start. Jarobi hadn't signed the group's penurious management and production contract. Recording artists found it hard to make money even in the best of circumstances, and even with Tribe's success, they were still far from seeing real money to live on, not with four dudes in the group. With Q-Tip and Phife handling most of the vocals and Ali being the DJ, Jarobi was the unofficial member with the least-defined role and thus relegated himself to the margins. He had always been the silent one, with fans wondering aloud what he did. He soon became the invisible one—appearing, disappearing, and reappearing—fans wondering where he'd gone.

If they happened to stop into the Tacoma Station Tavern in Washington, DC, in the mid-1990s, they would have seen him running the small kitchen there, cooking soul food and burgers and wings. But if they caught Tribe on tour, or one of Phife's solo gigs,
Jarobi just might be on stage. You never knew. He kept moving. By the mid-2000s—married with a newborn son, and living in Charleston, South Carolina, where his wife was a teacher—Jarobi needed to plant some roots. He walked the town, handing his résumé to every restaurant on his path. The last one he visited, Pearlz Oyster Bar, was the only one with a black chef, Eric Boyd. Boyd took a chance on the boisterous quasi-famous rapper. “I want this guy in my kitchen,” the chef said.

Jarobi still treated cooking like a competitive sport, his goal being to drill out food faster than the chef or expediter could handle, to put them in the weeds, in the shit,
dans la merde
—meaning inundated with orders.
Take that, motherfucker.
Jarobi cooked at a furious pace. Fury, however, was not all Chef Eric wanted from Jarobi.

“Mise-en-place!” the chef said.

Jarobi compensated for his lack of preparation and order as he always had, with extra movement, speed, and muscle. But his adrenaline-fueled drive ran right over the subtlety of the chef's dishes, like a delicate tempura tuna roll—raw tuna brushed with tempura batter; then rolled in panko crumbs and black and white sesame seeds; then quickly, carefully deep-fried, so that the outside was crusty but the inside remained nice, succulent, and rare. The time difference between perfection and destruction of this dish was maybe 10 seconds, after which, according to Jarobi, it became “tuna in a can.” Jarobi kept destroying it. “What is this?” Chef said, smashing the plate to the ground. “Again!”

Jarobi repeated his failure, and the chef “plated” him once more. “Again!”

After his shift the chef asked Jarobi over to the bar and bought him a beer.

“So, you had kind of a rough day in there today, hunh?” the chef asked, as if he were the observer and not the administrator of that roughness. Jarobi had to laugh.

“I know it seems petty,” his chef continued. “But if you apply mise-en-place to how you cook, you can apply that to your life.”

Jarobi tightened his moves. He expended less energy and got more done. The chef began trusting him to run the kitchen in his
absence, and Jarobi showed a flair for the administrative duties—inventory, ordering, analyzing food cost. The firm that owned the restaurant, Homegrown Hospitality, gave Jarobi the kitchen of its flagship steakhouse, TBonz. Staying put was paying off.

Then, just as everything came together, it fell apart. His wife lost her job. They had to move to Atlanta. The marriage dissolved. Jarobi bounced from job to job, including a gig as private chef to Lee Najjar, a nouveau-riche real estate investor who threw dinner parties where guests from the rap world would do double-takes seeing the fourth member of A Tribe Called Quest sautéing vegetables and slicing meat. Jarobi made lots of money and was miserable. He moved again, back to New York.

Thanksgiving dinner at Q-Tip's house in 2010 changed Jarobi's fortune. One of Q-Tip's friends dropped by: Josh “Shorty” Eden, the Jean-Georges Vongerichten–trained chef of a new restaurant in Manhattan called August. “If you ever move back from Atlanta,” Eden said, “I could use your help.”

“Well,” Jarobi replied, “guess what?”

The next Monday, Jarobi White stepped into one of the most rarified kitchens in New York. He knew how much he
didn't
know, but he
did
know that the kind of career leap he had just made was impossible. He called Eden his “Yoda.” Eden taught Jarobi about molecular gastronomy: foams and other subtle arts associated with modernist cuisine. Jarobi's education on mise-en-place began anew, too. When Jarobi relied on speed and brute force, Eden encouraged sensitivity. Most of all, Eden forced Jarobi to bring order to his surroundings and restraint to his movements: Where and how to stand. How to set his station. How to move his hands and arms.

Jarobi began to see the space around him geometrically, a triangle into which he fit quite naturally. In front of him was his focus point, the stove. Extending his left arm behind him, he grabbed a pan. Extending his right arm behind him, he could touch his mise-en-place. Pivoting on his right foot, he brought his pan to his mise, where he had arranged his containers and bottles by menu item, each ingredient in the sequence that he used them. His fingers moved from left to right: butter, salt, garlic confit, pistachios, mussels, wine. Pivoting back, he cooked. Reaching back and to the left, he
grabbed a plate. In front of him, he plated the food. Pivoting right, he set the plate down and finished the dish from his mise. Turning right again, he placed the plate on the pass and grabbed another pan. A final turn and he found himself facing the range again. A circle within a triangle. No wasted motion. Going nowhere, fast.

The heart of mise-en-place is “place” itself: the cook's station.

In the professional kitchen, mise-en-place arises from the grim reality of cooking-on-demand for a lot of customers, each choosing her own dishes. A cook cannot prepare dozens, perhaps hundreds of dishes in the span of a few hours without her resources—her tools and ingredients—being within literal arm's reach. In a job where 60 seconds can be the difference between a satisfied or enraged customer and 10 seconds the difference between perfection and destruction of a dish, leaving one's station to grab something from the storage area can throw off a cook's rhythm; taking minutes to cut vegetables can disrupt the entire crew; and running out of a prepared ingredient like a sauce that takes hours to create can wreck an entire service period. The first task of organizing space is that the resources be in place, so that the cook himself can
stay
in place.

“Theoretically,” award-winning chef Wylie Dufresne says, “if you have enough mise-en-place, you can just cook forever.” As Dufresne speaks, he mimes the actions: feet planted, but arms swirling, fingers pinching ingredients, an upper-body ballet.

That upper-body ballet must be constrained, too, to preserve the seconds that matter for hungry customers. So a chef's tools and ingredients must be arranged in a precise, predictable, economical way to allow a cook's motions to be precise, predictable, and economical.

Chefs hold a few governing principles: Ingredients should be close by and close together. Ingredients for each dish should be arranged
in the order that they go into the pan or plate, and they should all be grouped together in “zones,” as Chef Dwayne LiPuma calls them. A cook can't root around for ingredients scattered all over the place. A cook's hand should move inches, not feet. And the arrangement of ingredients and tools needs to be constant from day to day, so that the cook can learn and internalize the movements in her space.

Arrangements should make sense both for the cook's body and for the ingredients and tools she uses. LiPuma's old chef, Charlie Palmer, tells cooks to put dry ingredients
behind
wet ones, so that water from, say, a container of sliced radishes won't cake a crock of salt in front of it. When Chef Alfred Portale checks the line at the Gotham Bar and Grill, he often rearranges the mise-en-place of his cooks to get more economy of space. “You'll see a cook and he'll have a bain-marie on his station with five spoons and three pairs of tongs,” Portale says. “And I walk by and take out everything except one spoon and one pair of tongs. Why do you need
five
spoons? You can only use one at a time!”

Cooks construct their mise-en-place in different ways, but the icon of modern mise-en-place is the
fractional pan.
To limit motion, cooks want the smallest containers possible, so they'll
often use what they call nine-pans—which means a steel pan that is one-ninth the size of a full steam table pan, into which nine nine-pans will fit snugly.

Mise-en-place arrangement also changes with time, because space around cooks is limited. There are phases of mise. A cook's setup for heavy prep changes for preservice cooking. Their setup for preservice changes again for service. Each phase of work requires a different mise-en-place, and the previous mise needs to be broken down before the station can accommodate the next.

Pretty as it might look, the point of arranging spaces is not beauty, but to allow movements to be free, small, rhythmic, and most important, automatic. Repeated often enough, a movement will train our brains in a process called automaticity that allows us to execute that movement without consciously thinking about it. Chefs sometimes call this phenomenon muscle memory, but muscles don't actually remember anything. What's actually happening is that the part of the brain that thinks about what we're doing, the prefrontal cortex, cedes control to the part of the brain that governs nonconscious reactions, the basal ganglia.

Movements in the kitchen run from simple procedures like cutting vegetables, to complex processes like multistep recipes, and then to the ballet of an entire service period. Each of these levels engenders its own choreography, as Michael Gibney calls it in his book,
Sous Chef.

(A) Left hand picks up pear

(B) Right hand peels pear

(C) Left hand places pear in acidulated water

. . . and repeat. The specificity of the choreography is important. You can't cut a pear a different way each time and expect a similar result, nor can you expect to ever gain speed.

The choreography of the entire workflow must support the choreography of the task. In many cases, the flow will move
across
the cutting board, the right-handed example being: Unprocessed ingredients move in from the left side of the cutting board, cutting happens in the center, and processed ingredients move to the right. Knife and towel go back to their original places when the task is done.

But depending on the size and nature of the ingredient, this workflow may change. “One's physical orientation during a given task is the product of the task itself,” Gibney says. “If I were sectioning lemons, I might have a tipped-over container of lemons to the north of my cutting board, the storage container to my left, and the refuse receptacle to my right.” In this case—similar to the pear example above—the nondominant left hand holding the fruit will also move the fruit, once processed, to the left instead of the right, to avoid another inefficient move that chefs abhor: hands crossing
over
the body's central axis.