On Friday morning, I wake up at five-fifty-five. While I brush my teeth, and take my first aspirins of the day, I’m thinking about weekend specials. The grill station will be too busy for elaborate presentations, so I need things that are quick, simple, and easily plated. The people who will be coming tonight and tomorrow night to Les Halles, a restaurant on Park Avenue South where I work as the chef, aren’t like the people who come during the week. For the weekenders, a saddle of wild hare stuffed with foie gras is not a good special. Nor is any kind of fish with an exotic name.
Climbing into a taxi on Broadway, I decide that the fish special will be grilled tuna livornaise with roasted potatoes and grilled asparagus. It’s a layup. My overworked grill man can heat the already cooked spuds and the blanched asparagus on a sizzle platter; the tuna will get a quick walk across the grill; and all he’ll have to do is heat up the sauce at the last minute. For the appetizer special, I’m thinking cockles steamed with chorizo, leeks, tomatoes, and white wine—a one-pan wonder. The meat special is more problematic. The tuna will be taking up most of the grill’s time, so the meat will have to be prepared at the sauté station. Not easy. Les Halles features classic French bistro food, and at any one time the sauté station has to be ready to turn out moules à la marinière, boudin noir with caramelized apples, filet au poivre, steak au poivre, steak tartare, calf’s liver persillé, cassoulet Toulousain, magret de moulard with quince and sauce miel, the ridiculously popular mignon of pork, pieds de cochon, and a navarin of lamb that comes with baby carrots, pearl onions, niçoise olives, garlic confit, tomato concassée, fava beans, and chopped fresh herbs. But I’ve got a leg of venison and twelve pheasants coming in. I decide on the pheasant. I can par-roast it ahead of time, so that all my sous-chef will have to do is take it off the bone and sling it into the oven to finish, then heat up the sauce and the garnishes before serving.
Published in the print edition of the April 9, 2000, issue.
As usual when I arrive, Jaimé, the night porter, has his boom box blasting salsa from behind the bar. I check the reservation book—eighty for tonight. I flip through the manager’s log—the notebook in which the night guy tells the day guy about customer complaints, repair requirements, employee misbehavior, and important phone calls. I learn that last night my grill man called one of the waiters a cocksucker and pounded his fist on his cutting board in a “menacing way” when five diners came into the restaurant at three minutes before the midnight closing hour and ordered five côtes de bœuf, medium-well (cooking time: forty-five minutes). Jaimé grins at me from the stairs. He’s covered with grime as a result of hauling hundreds of pounds of garbage out onto the street.
I go down into the cellar to my office, and change into chef’s jacket, apron, and kitchen clogs, which are the preferred footwear for chefs because they “breathe” well and give good back support. I find my knife kit, stuff a thick stack of hand towels into it, and clip a pen into my jacket—sidewise, so it doesn’t fall out when I bend over. Taking a ring of keys from my desk, I open the locks on the drygoods-storage room, the walk-in refrigerator, the reach-in coolers, the pastry box, and the freezers. I push back the plastic curtains to the refrigerated boucherie—a cool room where the butchers do their cutting—and take the assistant butcher’s boom box from the worktable. Then I go back up to the kitchen. While I take cheese, garnishes, mussels, and sauces out of the reach-in at my sauté station, I’m listening to the Dead Boys playing “Sonic Reducer.”
Carlos, my daytime grill man, comes in. He has a pierced eyebrow and a body by Michelangelo, and he considers himself a master soupmaker. He asks if I’ve got any red-snapper bones on the way. Yes. Carlos loves any soup he can jack with Ricard or Pernod, and today’s soupe de poisson with rouille is one of his favorites. Omar, who works the cold station for appetizers and salads, and has a thick barbed-wire tattoo on one upper arm, is the next to arrive, and he’s followed by the rest of the day team: Segundo, the prep centurion; Ramòn, the dishwasher; Janine, the pastry chef; and Camélia, the general manager. (Some of their names have been changed.)
Before noon, I cut and pepper pavées and filets; skin and slice calf’s liver; caramelize apples; blanch baby carrots; make garlic confit; produce a livornaise sauce for the tuna and start a currant sauce for the pheasant; and assemble the navarin. Then I write up the specials so that Camélia can enter them into the computer and set the prices. At eight-thirty, my butcher, Hubert, arrives, looking as if he’s woken up under a bridge. He unloads the meat order—côtes de bœuf, entrecôtes, rump steaks, racks of lamb, lamb-stew meat, merguez sausages, saucisson de Toulouse, rosette, pork belly, onglets, scraps, meat for steak tartare, pork tenderloins larded with bacon and garlic, pâtés, rillettes, galantines, and chickens.
Every few minutes, I hear the bell ring, as more stuff arrives. Segundo, the prep man, is downstairs checking off the orders as they leave the delivery ramp. Segundo’s a mean-looking guy. He’s from Mexico, and the other Mexicans at the restaurant claim that he carries a gun and sniffs paint thinner, and that he’s done time. But he’s the greatest prep cook I’ve ever had; he uses a full-sized butcher’s scimitar to chop parsley, filament-fine.
The last cook to show up is Miguel, our French-fry master. This is a full-time job at Les Halles, where we are justifiably famous for our frites. Miguel, who looks like the descendant of an Aztec king, spends his day peeling potatoes, cutting potatoes, blanching potatoes, and then dropping them into three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree peanut oil, tossing them with salt, and stacking the sizzling-hot fries on plates with his bare hands. I’ve had to do this a few times, and it requires serious calluses.
I work on a six-burner Garland. There’s another range next to it, which is taken up with a bain-marie for sauces, with onion soup, and with stocks—veal, chicken, lamb, and pork—that have been reducing at a slow simmer during the previous day and night. When we’re serving meals, one of my burners will be occupied by a pot of boiling water for Omar to dunk ravioli in. On another burner he’ll sauté lardons for frisée salads, sear tidbits of hanger steak for onglet salad, or sauté diced potatoes in duck fat for the confit de canard. This leaves me with just four burners on which to prepare most of the orders.
While I’m reducing gastrite—sugar and vinegar—for the currant sauce, I make room next to me for Janine, the pastry chef, so she can melt chocolate over the simmering pasta water. Janine is an ex-waitress from Queens, and although she’s right out of cooking school, she’s tough. Already, she’s had to endure the unwanted attentions of a leering French sous-chef and the usual chick-friendly Mexicans. I admire strong women in busy kitchens. They have a lot to put up with in our high-testosterone locker-room environment.
At eleven-thirty, I convene a meeting of the day waiters and run through the specials, speaking as slowly as I can, so that none of them describes my beautiful pheasant special as tasting “kind of like chicken.” Today’s lineup is not too bad: there’s Morgan, the part-time underwear model; Rick, who’s everyone’s first choice for Waiter Most Likely to Shave His Head, Climb a Tower, and Start Shooting Strangers; and a new waiter, who doesn’t know what prosciutto is, and who won’t be around very long, I suspect. There are also two busboys—a taciturn workaholic from Portugal and a moody Bengali. My runner, whose job is to shout out the orders and shuttle food to the dining room, is the awesome Mohammed, who is capable of carrying five plates without a tray.
It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.
The key to staying on top of a busy station is to move on a dish as soon as Mohammed yells its name—set up the pan, do the pre-searing, get it into the oven quickly—so that later, when the whole order board is fluttering with dupes, I can tell which dishes I have working and which ones I have waiting, without having to read the actual tickets again.
“Ready on Table Twelve!” says Carlos, who’s got a load of steaks and chops and a few tunas coming up. He wants to know if I’m close on my end. “Let’s go on Twelve!” I say. Miguel starts dunking spuds. I call for mashed potatoes for the boudins from Omar; give the apples a few tosses over the flame; heat and swirl butter into the liver’s shallot sauce; pull the pork mignons from the oven; heat potatoes and vegetables for the pheasant; squeeze the sauce for the pheasant between pots onto a back burner; move the mussels off the heat and into a bowl; then spin and bend to check on how my duck is doing.
The intercom buzzes. “Line One for the chef,” says the hostess, who’s out front. It’s a salesman, wanting to sell me some smoked fish. I start off all sweetness and light, and he goes into his pitch. He’s halfway through it when I cut him off: “So what the fuck are you doing calling me in the middle of the lunch rush?” I hang up before I can hear his reply.
I catch the duck just in time, roll it over, skin side down, and pull it out of the oven. Mohammed yells out another pasta order. I pour extra-virgin into a pan and sauté some paper-thin garlic slices with crushed red pepper, add artichoke hearts, roasted vegetables, some olives. Whenever I do pasta, I start humming Tony Bennett or Dino (today it’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?”). I really love doing that final squirt of emulsifying extra-virgin, just after the basil goes in.
“Chef,” Omar says, “no hay más tomates.” Wait a minute—I ordered tomatoes, didn’t I? I call Segundo on the intercom. “What the fuck is going on?” I say, as Omar slouches in the doorway like a convict in the exercise yard. “No Baldor,” he says. Although Baldor is a superb produce purveyor, this is the second time in recent weeks it’s failed me. I call Baldor, and say, “What kind of glue-sniffing, crackhead mesomorphs you got working for you? You don’t have an order for me? What?” I hang up, pull a few pans off the flame, load up some more mussels, sauce another duck, arrange a few pheasants, and check my orders clipboard. I’m in the middle of telling Mohammed to run across the street and ask the chef at Park Bistro if we can borrow some of his tomatoes when I see, from the columns of checked-off items on my clipboard, that I did order tomatoes—not from Baldor but from a different company. After screaming at the blameless Baldor, my anger is used up, so when I call the guilty company I can barely summon a serious tone. It turns out that my order has been routed to another restaurant—Layla, instead of Les Halles. I call Philippe, the chef at Park Bistro, to ask for a few tomatoes to get me through until my order arrives.
The guys from D’Artagnan, my specialty purveyor, arrive bearing foie gras, duck legs, and an entire two-hundred-pound free-range pig, which my boss, José, one of the owners of Les Halles, has ordered to be used in pâtés and tête de porc. The butcher, the charcutier, the dishwasher, and I wrestle the beast down the stairs to the boucherie in the cellar. My knees are hurting and a familiar pain in my feet is getting worse.
José stops by after lunch—he wants to take me to the Greenmarket in Union Square. We walk to the market, about eleven blocks south, where we sniff and squeeze a hundred different fruits and vegetables. We return to the restaurant with pears, lemon verbena, baby fennel, baby turnips with greens, and fingerling potatoes—the kind of expensive exotica that José likes to surprise me with, for new specials.
Dinner tasting for the floor staff is at five-thirty, which is when the veteran waiters—the lifers—arrive. This ritual is conducted in the kitchen, since there are usually a few lunch customers who insist on exercising squatters’ rights straight into the dinner hour. Watching waiters eat is never pretty. They tear at the specials like starving refugees, ripping apart the pheasant with their bare hands, nearly spearing one another with forks as they go after the tuna, dragging the cockles off their shells with their fingers. After fifteen minutes, everything is devoured, and the waiters perch on milk crates, folding napkins, as they smoke and talk: Who got drunk last night? Who got thrown out of a Mob-run after-hours club, then woke up on the sidewalk outside their apartment? Who thinks the new maître d’ is going to lose it when the room fills up and the customers start screaming for their tables? Who’s going to win the World Cup?
As usual, dinner is oversubscribed, and two tables for twelve have been booked for prime time. I stay in the kitchen to expedite, hoping that maybe things will slow down enough by ten so that I can have a couple of cocktails and get home by eleven. But I know that the two big tables will hold up seatings by at least an hour, and that I probably won’t get out of here until midnight, at the earliest.
By eight-thirty, the order board is full. To my right, plates of appetizers are lined up, waiting to be delivered; the counter is full of sauté pans; the worktable near the fry station, with its pile of raw steaks, looks like the floor of a slaughterhouse. Mohammed ferries the plates out by hand, four or five at a time. The hot food is getting cold, and I’m losing my voice as a result of calling out orders over the dishwasher, the hum of the exhaust, and the roar from the dining room. I make a hand gesture to a friendly waiter, who knows what I want, and he returns with an Industrial—a beer stein filled with a Margarita. The tequila takes the edge off my adrenaline, and goes down surprisingly nicely after three double espressos, two beers, three cranberry juices, eight aspirins, and a hastily gobbled hunk of merguez sausage, squeezed into a heel of bread, that I’ve consumed since lunchtime.
Angel, my night man at the cold station, whose chest is tattooed with a skull impaled by a dagger wrapped in barbed wire, is falling behind; he’s got three raviolis, two duck confits, five green salads, two escargots, two Belgian-endive-and-Stilton salads, two cockles, a smoked salmon and blini, two foie gras, and a pâté working—and the sauté and grill stations are calling urgently for vegetable sides and mashed potatoes. A steak order comes back for refiring, and Isidoro, the night grill man, is not happy; as far as he’s concerned, the steak was cooked to perfection the first time around. He throws it back on the grill. Then a whole roasted fish comes back. “The customer wants it deboned,” the waiter says. Anticipating decapitation, he whines, “I told them it comes on the bone.’’
The orders are arriving non-stop. My left hand grabs tickets, separates white ones for the grill man, yellow ones for the sauté man, and pink master copies, which I use to time and generally oversee the production. My right hand wipes plates, inserts rosemary sprigs into mashed potatoes. I’m yelling full time, trying to hold it all together. If there is an unforeseeable mishap—say, one of the big tables’ orders was prematurely sent out, only to be returned—the whole process could come to a full stop. “Where’s that fucking confit?” I yell at Angel, who’s struggling to make blinis for smoked salmon, to brown ravioli under the salamander, to lay out plates of pâté, and to do five endive salads, all more or less at once. A hot escargot explodes in front of me, spattering me with boiling garlic butter and snail guts.
“Platos! ” Isidoro screams at the guy who’s washing dishes. He’s buried up to his shoulders in the pot sink, and his prewash area is stacked with plates of unscraped leftovers and haphazardly dumped silver. I grab the Bengali busboy, Dinesh, by an arm.“Scrape!” I hiss, pointing to the mess of plates heaped with gnawed bones and half-eaten vegetables.
Directly behind me, the Portuguese busboy, David, is making espressos and cappuccinos. He’s extremely graceful, and by now we know each other’s every move in the narrow space—when to move laterally, when to make way for incoming dishes, outgoing food, or the fry guy returning from downstairs with a hundred pounds of freshly cut spuds. I feel only an occasional light tap on the shoulder as David squeezes through with another tray of coffee and petits fours, whispering “Cuidado”—“watch out.”
Finally, the orders start slowing down, and I can see by the thinning crowd at the bar that the last seating is under way. I go to the cellar, where I check the stocks cooling in iced plastic buckets outside the walk-in, the gauze-wrapped pigs’ feet, which will have to be painstakingly deboned tomorrow, the soaking tarbais beans, which will have to be blanched, the salt-rubbed duck legs, which will have to be conserved in duck fat. I make a final check of the drygoods room and note that I’ll soon be needing more peanut oil, more peppercorns, more sherry-wine vinegar. I look at a list for tomorrow: I’ve already called for the striped bass, but I mustn’t forget about the baby octopus. José loves black mission figs—he saw some at the market this afternoon—so I’ll tell Janine to start thinking about figs for a dessert special. Tomorrow is Saturday, which means that I’ll have to do the weekly inventory: weigh every scrap of meat and fish and cheese that’s in storage; tally up every can, bottle, case, and box. I peel off my whites and struggle into my jeans. I’m on my way out the door when I’m stopped by Isidoro: he wants a raise. I tell him, “Mañana.” Outside, the fresh air is a jolt. I look at my watch—12:25 a.m.—and wave for a taxi.
At Fiftieth and Broadway, I head into a subway entrance. Downstairs, in the arcade, I enter the Siberia Bar. It’s a grungy little underground rumpus room where the drinks are served in plastic cups. Seated at the bar are a few cooks from the Hilton and a couple of strippers from a nearby club. I spot Tracy, the Siberia’s owner: tonight I won’t be paying for drinks. From the jukebox, the Velvets are singing “Pale Blue Eyes.” That first rush of beer tastes good. I’m not going anywhere. ♦
