Work Clean (24 page)

In this work, the expediter draws on her sense of the restaurant's rhythms. She employs reconnaissance from the dining room to make decisions. She will use all her senses: mostly sight, but also sound, touch, smell, and taste.

“I taste food all night when I'm expediting,” Telepan says. His cooks do, too: spooning sauce into their mouths, tasting vegetables and starches. The tasting began hours and days
before
service, while they made the sauces and stews and other preparations with longer lead times. Telepan was experimenting with a new salad for the menu when he took some beets from a cook's mise-en-place. Telepan put one in his mouth. He could tell they had been in the cook's mise-en-place for longer than a day. Tamping down his anger, he found the cook, handing him a piece of freshly cut beet. “Taste that,” he said. And then he offered a piece of beet from the cook's mise-en-place. “Try that one. Now tell me if there's a difference.” Telepan teaches how to taste, but he still prowls the line hours before service to do his own tasting.

The expediter is not just an observer, but a coach. She must not only inspect, but correct. Sometimes problems come from improper technique: an ingredient thrown in a pan that's not hot enough, a piece of raw fish that hasn't been patted dry, inconsistent cuts of vegetable or protein. But more often mishaps arise from compromising one or more of the principles of mise-en-place.

“I tell my cooks, ‘Don't try to get over,'” Telepan says. “Don't do something half-assed. Don't try to hide it. Because I'm gonna find out. I know that [dish] takes 4 minutes and it's only been 2; don't even put it up. I'd rather you take an extra minute [and] slow up service to get it right. But don't put it out, because that 1 minute you save in putting it out is going to become 6 minutes behind because you're going to have to redo the plate.”

Cooks must internalize what they've been taught and learn how to evaluate their work in the way their chefs do.

“I tell new cooks, ‘Look at your station as if it's your restaurant and everybody is coming in to critique
your restaurant,
'” Telepan says. “‘You have to keep it organized and clean in the way you want your restaurant to be when you grow up to be a chef. So how you treat your station now is how your restaurant is gonna run. Now is the time to learn those habits.'”

Cooks cut corners because of laziness, or forgetfulness, or fatigue, or sometimes embarrassment at having discovered their own mistake. “I always say to them that it's worse for them to have me find out than to say, ‘Chef, I fucked up, I missed this, I gotta make it again.' I
love
that. Because it happens. In the kitchen, the machines are
human.
”

Chefs transform failure into success by incorporating mistakes into their workflow—or rather, incorporating the solutions to prevent those mistakes. Thus cooks learn that failure is always an opportunity.

Thomas Keller of The French Laundry invited a four-star former chef from New York to demonstrate some classic French preparations for the chefs of his Bouchon restaurants. But surrounded by a crowd of young chefs, this great chef grew nervous
while cooking one of the most fundamental of all French preparations: the omelet.

“He totally screwed it up,” Keller remembers. “I had to do something.”

So Keller transformed the situation by having all the chefs make their own omelets. Now the lecture became a laboratory.

“It was extraordinary,” Keller remembers. What came out of the next 30 minutes was a technique to precook omelets for his Las Vegas restaurant, where they serve 600 breakfasts every morning. “The chef tasted it, I tasted it, and all the chefs tasted it, and we go,
Wow!
It looks beautiful. It's perfect. Out of somebody's mistake and somebody's embarrassment comes a technique that none of us thought about.”

Chefs' standards can sometimes seem more for flourish than function. The value of a clean, white chef's jacket has little if any direct bearing on the presentation or taste of food. Yet wearing “clean whites” is a common standard. Why and when do cooks compromise? Thomas Keller explains by asking a rhetorical question.

“Are you willing to wear a T-shirt with a hole in it even when no one sees the hole?” he asks. “Yeah, maybe it's okay. Maybe it's the last day before I can wash my clothes. I've got six T-shirts and it's my sixth day and that seventh T-shirt has a hole in it. Am I going to get a new T-shirt or wash the other one? It's a compromise. We have to be available to and open to negotiating that compromise whether it's with ourselves or with each other. But the result of that compromise cannot affect in any negative way the result that we're searching for.”

Because chefs know that compromise sits on a slippery slope to chaos, they're cautious and calculating about the compromises they make.

If perfectionism is the quest for quality at the expense of delivery, then settling for less is the quest for delivery at the expense of
quality. Excellence itself is a compromise between the two: quality delivered.

Chefs and cooks live in this difficult dynamic from dish to dish. Every single plate must embody that balance. The greatest gem of their hard-won experience is the ability to discern that tipping point. They know when they're “phoning it in,” and they can tighten things up. They know when they're being too precious and can let things go.

Most corporations evaluate their work on a large scale—whether on the factory assembly line or in the quality assurance process at a technology business.

The kind of evaluation we speak of here, however, is small-scale, personal inspection—not the insipid, impersonal self-evaluation questionnaires distributed by many human resources departments—but personal examination of our own individual product or service, whether as small as an e-mail or as big as a book.

Outside the kitchen we ostensibly value coaching, but we don't take its implications seriously. Most corporate or creative professionals don't have the equivalent of a chef who cares about their education or their growth. For example, it is one of the central tenets of the professional kitchen that, after an apprentice gives a chef several years of hard work, the chef himself will make calls and send that apprentice off to work for another respected chef to continue to learn and build her résumé. It's hard to imagine such a thing in the corporate world. Nor do we have the counterpart of the expediter. An assistant or secretary can act as a traffic cop for scheduling, but few in the working world have such a luxury; and, anyway, an assistant is not a mentor. Managers can function as expediters for their staff, but in the corporate world many managers perform only half of the expediter's function: They're good at critiquing work but horrible at timing the workload so that their crew doesn't get overwhelmed. In academia, teachers are sometimes
observed by colleagues, administrators, and students to provide feedback; mostly, they are measured by test scores, a dubious determination of the
quality
of their instruction. Hitting a numerical target for any profession may be no better indicator of quality than an athlete who wins a point despite bad form. Those who work with words lack editors. The classic newsroom, with its layers of oversight, is disappearing. For most of us, spell-checker is as good as it's ever going to get.

We need in our world of work the means to evaluate our own work and that of others. We need the means to refine our methods and product, and to incorporate the knowledge gained from our failures. If we don't have mentors, the responsibility falls on us to create a personal culture of checks and balances, of inspection and correction, so we can
work clean
with feedback.

The best kitchens are schools, the best chefs are teachers, and the best cooks are students.