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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Adios New York



This year, I’ve plated more pastas than there are days in a decade, I’ve clocked less hours of sleep in a week than just the time I’ve spent butchering fish. I’ve moved stations 4 times, learned more lessons than I can possibly pack into this already dense summation, and written so many recipes I actually have to ship the box of moleskins home separately.

On top of gaining uncountable cooking skills, I’ve gained mentors and friends that I would just as easily call family and so to say I’ll never put on my stupid blue hat in that kitchen again is far more painful than I can admit- but New York isn’t my thing. It never has been.
I just want to lay in grass and not wonder who slept, and most likely pissed there. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed breathing in the New York City air injected with the smell of the metro-subway, subway sandwiches, Chinese food, dog shit, and cigarette smoke. It’s all at once appetizing and nauseating. It’s just that playing frogger on the sidewalk between trash heaps and homeless people doesn’t make me feel totally in touch with food, but some of the greatest minds in food are here.
Knowing that, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t leave until what I got what I wanted, and an opposing promise that once I achieved that goal, I wouldn’t sacrifice much longer. With that in mind, I found myself in this incredibly talented kitchen with some of the best chefs in the city, definitely the best mentors in the city, and food that is unforgettable for the cooks and the diners that have experienced it.
I started on what was called the “oyster station,” a made up name for “you’re still in school and we can’t really depend on you to do anything- station." The night my stage ended, Jimmy, now at our sister restaurant in Hong Kong, let me know there just wasn’t a space for me at the time, they’d give me a call when one opened up. Two days later, I got a call and was offered the position on “oyster station.” A station that no longer exists and frankly, I'm not sure it ever did. I didn’t know that, and I didn’t care- I would have taken the job as a professional thumb-twidler is they asked me back.
I was interning at Blue Hill and working with our schools awesomely-mad scienetist at the time, but immediately put in my notice with both when I got the offer. I was working 3 days a week at Blue Hill and 2 with Dave Arnold on top of the 5 I was in school. I was barely managing to make it to class on time and due to lack of sleep- I was constantly battling my resident cold. Then Chef, to be known as Kelis, asked me to work 4 days a week, 1 day less than the full time workers there while I was going to school full time as well. I was exhausted, I couldn’t fathom adding another day to my already absurd schedule. But as if he could read my disheartened face said, “I went to FCI too, I worked 4 days a week while I was there. I slept sitting up on milk crates during all of our breaks…..” Alright. I’m too competitive not to take that bait. If he could do it, so could I. Sure Chef, sign me up. And from that moment on, Chef Kelis continued to push me in that same way- putting bait out in front of me and waiting for me to snatch it up.


A week before school was going to end, I planned to ask Chef Kelis for a full time position on garde manger. Really, I just planned to tell him- I thought I was a shoe in. So when he looked at me in the office and told me he hadn’t seen enough out of me to want to hire me full time- I stopped breathing. What did I miss? I don’t remember missing a beat, anywhere.
My friends insisted it was because I was tired, there’s just no way I could have shown him half of what I was capable of while I was being stretched so thin. But the less sleep I got, the harder I worked. I was always the last one out of the kitchen, regardless of my roll call a mere 6 hours from clocking out. He critiqued my apparently sharpened social skills- which could probably use less fine tuning than my knife skills. He saw that I kept busy, but I wasn’t putting forth the leadership skills to actually motivate any projects into motion. None of this was pleasant to hear- but he was right.
Sarah and I were going out quite a bit, and my ability to function on literally zero sleep was scary and must have been blurring the lines between being focused and just being. The lax attitude of the kitchen allowed me to socialize at work far more than what I was accustomed to in the kitchen, and I didn’t hesitate to run with it.
I thought about what Kelis said- Nothing mattered more than this job. Soooo.. I stopped talking. Literally, for one month, I didn't talk- if it wasn’t directly related to prep work, or a ticket that just came in- I didn’t discuss it. On top of that, I put into affect a personal prohibition until I could call myself a full-time employee.
But less socializing wasn’t his only concern about hiring me. He wanted to see a leader- so I set out to prove that I could pull a lot more weight on that station. I had to find a way to get more footing on that station. The prep lists, or lack there of, were written on the back of old tickets, and had to be the most incomprehensive, ineffecicent, fail-sure way to ever inform your fellow cooks what they had to prep. It was more of a “I think you might need this, and if you forget something you wont find out until you go to set up your station and you don’t have it”- list. Easy- wrangle up this massively-prep heavy station with a prep list that could be located on the computer, reprinted, edited to changes, and stored on the station. From then on we had a system- and it’s the same system they use today- it’s still my prep list.
I was hired and...five months passed before I saw another station.


The station was a beast- It picked up some passed starters and most of the apps. It was changing constantly- the soup seemed to change by the month... I'd never thought to grind prosciutto scraps and use it for a soup, but we did- and that soup was un-fucking-believable. Paired with fregola, and charred razor clams (better known as lazer clams- and since I was the only non-Korean on the station, it was almost always labeled as such).

But then it was a white asparagus soup with cured trout... that was such a pretty plate. I also got my hands on some of the most unusual products I'd ever seen. Chef asked me for 1 thing I wanted to learn to work with..."Abalone!"
Uh...why? I don't know. I just never worked with them before, so I wanted to figure out how! We marinated them in two kinds of seaweed, grilled them, and sliced them super thin. The dish was far more complicated than that- it had beef tendon that first had to be pressure cooked, which most of the time blew up since Chef Fish decided to buy a cheap one in China town and scattered tendon all over the hot line, then de-fatted, pressed, sliced, some dehydrated and fried, and others cut into ribbons and dressed. Godddddd how I hated that dish. But other people, like Rob Levitt, loved it- were actually inspired by it. Read his article here. But five months can drag on any station, no matter how interesting it is.

Motivation wavered and then I had a conversation with Chef that made sure I’d never forget who I was working for- myself.
One day after talking to him about wanting more direction, more push, and more attention he told me I’d have to start taking that responsibility on my own shoulders. What? Was he too busy to teach me, to correct my when I was wrong and point me in the right direction? I recalled my trial and error at the Little Nell where my sous chef asked me to demonstrate self- discipline by turning only left for just one service. I lasted five minutes before throwing in the towel. And now my chef was asking me to harness the self-discipline I didn’t have.
He asked, “Do you really want someone looking over your shoulder at every knife cut, yelling at you to go prep faster?”
"Umm…no."
“So then who has to hold that responsibility?”
"Me." And he asked me who I thought was pushing the Sous-Chefs. I didn’t really know…
"I guess themselves," I said.
I don’t think he needed to say much more. I knew he was right- at some point, I’d have to start leading my own growth. This wasn’t their responsibility to get me to grow, I had to motivate myself, and they’d give me the tools to get there. It wasn’t their job to watch over my shoulder and nit-pick the little imperfections- I had to be judge of what I thought was acceptable- out of myself.
A lesson like that…is priceless.

So when I found myself dwindling, I’d time how long it took me to break down lobsters-shaving down minutes every day and picked up family meal for someone on the hot line if I got ansy enough.
Then, I had a brilliant idea. I should start a garden outside the window of garde manger. I nurtured them for a while indoors- encountering a few problems along the way. The porters were a little confused by a hotel pan filled with dirt hiding out under the prep tables, and threw my pea-bodies out. But I started another batch. Once they got big enough, I transferred them into a little wooden planter that would bask in the sun outside my station. This required me to squirm through a window every afternoon in order to water the little shoots.

My plan was to grow peas to eventually garnish my assagino with pea shoots.
Alright…that was kind of unreasonable since we serve upwards of 300 of them every night, my windowsill pea shoots wouldn’t make the cut for the volume we saw. Not to mention that after I moved them to shade under the tree only accessible by scaling the wall and coming back down by landing two five foot drops- I rarely tended garden and they were scorched during one of New York’s heat waves this summer.

I wanted to move stations, but I didn’t know how- I was still just another goon in the never-ending pool of garde manger. I asked Omar, now in Hong Kong as well, to give me a little advice.
“How much of Garde Manger do you know?” he said.
I looked a little confused and asked him what he was talking about.
“The only way they’ll ever let you leave this station station is after you master it, you have to know how to do absolutely everything on this station before you leave it- so what don’t you know?” And that day, I took his notebook and wrote down all of his recipes for the remaining items I hadn’t made yet and every day, asked to prep each item remaining on my “to-be-mastered” list.

And as it turns out, he was right.
I was put on risotto not much further down the road- granted a few people had to quit in my way to the line, but either way, I was one step closer to pasta. It was my first time on the hot line there- I had a lot of adjusting to do. John was am counterpart- he worked risotto in the morning, but it was a much harder station in the morning. He was responsible for all the stocks and jus in the restaurant, the brodetto, all the while, working tickets, and in the small gaps of downtime, prepped out a lot of my station. When I first got on the station- he liked to pick at everything he saw me do wrong from the way I folded my towels, to the labels I left on the quart containers and because of that I attribute many good lessons learned- to him.
When there were very busy nights on risotto, I’d go through the entire quart of bass, shrimp and scallop I’d cut for the mare risotto- leaving John with absolutely nothing to start the next day- even though he’d spend the rest of the morning cooking my rice, my eggplant, potatoes and beets and I couldn’t have left him a pint of my prep for him? He said something. And every day beyond that, I prepped fish for myself, but I also prepped a quart for John, and left it downstairs for him, untouched. If I ran out of what I brought upstairs, I’d cut more- but I’d never dip into the stash I set aside for John.
Risotto taught me how to multitask- quickly. In a perfect world, tickets would come in, you could start cooking the risotto, never stop stirring it, finish seasoning it perfectly, adjust the consistency, plate it, then start the next one and do it perfectly all over again.
But this is was a restaurant, not a perfect world. And risotto station also picks up the brodetto, a pick up that requires a ripping hot pan to sear two different pieces of seafood, another to gently cook shrimp, and a pot to open clams, mussels. Risotto also drops the whole fish and picks up the 5 sides. All of that while picking up somewhere between one and three of the different risotto’s on the menu. It’s rare you find yourself stirring just one risotto. You’re stirring with both hands, feet, and if you can rope in someone else’s arms to keep one going- you're using that too.
It was a delicious station- we at one point we had a carbonara risotto- bound with egg yolks at the end. And our mare risotto was so insanely good...lobster and fish scraps from all over the restaurant found their way into the risotto- and on top of that, it was finished with a santa barbara uni puree. I loveeeeddd the risottos, until I served hundreds in a night and was literally forcing myself to taste them before plating them. I learned how the quality of the risotto rice drastically changes the final product as well. We use Acquerello- unless, in the unfortunate event ordering went wrong somewhere and we've run out over the weekend. That's when I learned I didn't want to serve anything but Acquerello. The next best might as well have been the worst. I couldn't even figure out how to make the risotto taste good when the rice wasn't great. I had a new appreciation for the wonderful Acquerello.
And right as I thought- maybe I had risotto station figured out- Leila was leaving pasta- and I was walking up to Chef Fish asking for her job.
When I finally got to pasta station, I had nightmares every night for a month. I woke up yelling, “I don’t even have table 58 Chef!” and sweating profusely over the small gargenelli that I just put on the pass that was supposed to be a large. No matter what, I felt like I wasn’t moving fast enough, I wasn’t prepping hard enough, my knives weren’t sharp enough, I couldn’t never catch up.
And then Chef Fish put me on the Sunday-solo schedule where you take over the responsibility of the morning guy and do Sunday brunch and lunch as the sole person on pasta...Why would he do that? I don't know- he believed in me for some undeserved reason and wanted me to learn. The first day, I burnt three cases of tomatoes in my first round of pomodoro sauce. The same day, an entire table of truffle tagliatelle came back- too salty. The most expensive pasta on the menu- 7 sent back. And they didn’t want anything else. My water was absurdly salty. It had been reducing through lunch service, and I’d salted the other side of the well, constantly adding it to my reducing sea water. Imagine having to pour that information to the guy in the restaurant who believes in you most when he asks you in dry storage the next day- "So! Tell me how your first Sunday went!!" Since then, no pastas been sent back my water is always floating in the “sea water” range of salty and my pomodoro always smells sweet, not burnt like the two inch crust I formed on the bottom of the first sauce. Pasta station was all about making mistakes, big and small, and quickly fixing them.

It was by far the most fun I’ve ever had cooking professionally.
There’s nothing like working with a great pasta partner when the ticket board is so full that in order to make room for new, at least 20 tickets need to be fired to fit the new ones in. And a night like that with Lou on drop and me on sauce are nights I’ll miss ten years from now. I’d start the sauces, skimming across the row of tickets for any similar names as one was already in my hand sweating out garlic…”two small spag…three large fussili…fuck an ango” and before geting halfway through the tickets Lou would have a pan in his hand, picking up where I left off, and I’d start filling in the sauce blanks- crab in the spaghetti!, calamari tentacles!, and then we’d be 11 sauces deep, pans stacked on pans making pyramids of sauce, waiting for the hearty pastas to cook
. He’d start sliding bowls down towards the pass and yelling at risotto to spread the bowls- once all the pastas were droppedd into the sauces, we’d start finishing- herbs, buerre fondue for a quick shine, pasta water- hurry up and plate it! And while we’d be sprinting to the pass with pastas in hand, Chef would already be calling the next pick. Yea, I’ll miss that, a lot. It’ll be hard to find a restaurant that pushes that hard with such beautiful food. During the holiday season, we’d just about crack 400 covers in a night. 66 people in an hour, we put out more pastas in one hour than there are minutes- consistently.


I learned how to make sauces faster than it took chef to realize a pasta was missing on the pass, I picked up tricks to reduce a sauce in the time it takes to pull a bowl, and cook the missing calamari in the pasta on the pass before the food runner grabbed it to walk out the door with it. If you’re not sprinting, your behind and if your sprinting, you’ll just be above water- and you’re mind needs to be racing at the same rate as your hands, or it’ll get a little sloppy.
When I finally got to work drop, I learned to drop the tagliolini seconds before we would plate, so that the noodles kept their texture and didn't turn into a starchy goo-ball...If I really went into the amount of things I learned about pasta on that station, I'd have to write a book, so I'll leave it at- it was an incredible knowledge-packed experience.

I got to make pasta for who I consider to be the final word on the subject- that was pretty damn cool.


For 15 months, I’ve spent somewhere around 70 hours of my week there with a good portion of my days off working with the butcher or Chef Fish on getting familiar with the array of spectacular seafood that walks in our door. It's hard to find someone willing to go out of their way to teach you, especially someone as talented as the Chef I had teaching me about butchering.


But he did more than go out of his way- he made sure there would be a hefty amount of fish for me to practice with Saturday mornings. One Friday night I got a text that said, "I told Tony to leave us in the weeds tomorrow, you better be ready." He made sure other people went out of their way as well- just so that I could fuck up a few of his super expensive products. It'll be a long time before I find another Chef who cares that much about my improving...anything of mine. I'll probably miss Saturday's in the fish room more than anything else at the restaurant.

In the last few months there, I learned a lot about what makes that restaurant run so well, particularly the kitchen. It really was a family- almost everyone on that line would have done anything for each other. Not only did it show during service and far beyond the walls of the restaurant as well.
When I put in my notice, I cried. It’s the only time I’ve managed to find tears in the kitchen. I didn’t just cry, I bawled in front of the Chef who calls me the Honeybadger- I’m supposed to be sort of tough. And I cried harder when Chef Fish showed up with a box of tissues. Outside of it being a classroom for me- that kitchen was more like a home filled with all my best friends and family every day.
But we all enter, at least the driven, to test our boundaries and see what we are capabale of- so at some point, you recognize that, pack up your knives, and seek out some new knowledge.
And while my time there was cut a little shorter than I’d like, my time in New York surely was not. Greener pastures are ahead. But I’ve really, truly never been so proud to show someone my resume- I can only hope that the next place I work at has half the talent as the people that came in and out of that kitchen every day.