As I walk up to Broadway and climb into a taxi, I'm thinking grilled tuna livornaise with roasted potatoes and grilled asparagus for fish special. My overworked grill man can heat the already cooked-off spuds and the pre-blanched asparagus on a sizzle-platter during service, the tuna will get a quick walk across the grill, so all he has to do is heat the sauce to order. That takes care of fish special. Appetizer special will be cockles steamed with chorizo, leek, tomato and white wine - a one-pan wonder; my garde-manger man can plate salads, rillettes, ravioli, confits de canard while the cockle special steams happily away on a back burner. Meat special is problematic. I ran the ever-popular T-bone last week - two weeks in row would threaten the French theme, and I run about a 50 percent food cost on the massive hunks of expensive beef. Tuna is already coming off the grill, so the meat special has got to go to the saute station. My sous-chef, who's working saute tonight, will already have an enormous amount of mise-en-place to contend with, struggling to retrieve all the garnishes and prep from an already crowded low-boy reach-in - just to keep up with the requirements of the regular menu. At any one time, he has to expect and be ready for orders for moules marinieres, boudin noir with caramelized apples, navarin of lamb (with an appalling array of garnishes: baby carrots, pearled onions, nicoise olives, garlic confit, tomato concassee, fava beans and chopped fresh herbs), filet au poivre, steak au poivre, steak tartare, calves' liver persille, cassoulet toulousaine, magret de moulard with quince and sauce miel, the ridiculously popular mignon de pore, pieds du cochon - and tonight's special, whatever that's going to be.
I've got some play here: both leg of venison and some whole pheasants are coming in, so I opt for the pheasant. It's a roasted dish, meaning I can par-roast it ahead of time, requiring my sous-chef simply to take it off the bone and sling it into the oven to finish, then heat the garnishes and sauce before serving, easy special. A lay-up. That should help matters somewhat.
By the time I arrive at Les Halles, I have my ducks pretty much in a row.
I'm the first to arrive, as usual - though sometimes my pastry chef surprises me with an early appearance - and the restaurant is dark. Salsa music is playing loudly over the stereo behind the bar, for the night porter. I check the reservation book for tonight, see that we already have eighty or so res on the book, then check the previous night's numbers (the maitre d' has already totaled up reservations and walk-ins) and see that we did a very respectable 280 meals - a good portent for my food cost. The more steak-frites I sell, the better the numbers will be. I flip through the manager's log, the notebook where the night manager communicates with the day management, noting customer complaints, repair requirements, employee misbehavior, important phone calls. I see from the log that 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 waddled into the restaurant at three minutes of midnight closing and ordered five cotes du boeuf, medium-well (cooking time forty-five minutes). I sip my cardboard-tasting take-out coffee from the deli next door and walk through the kitchen, taking notice of the clean-up job the night porter has done. It looks good. Jaime grins at me from the stairwell. He's dragging down a bag full of sodden linen, says, 'Hola, chef.' He's covered with grime, his whites almost black from handling dirty, food-smeared kitchen floor mats, and hauling hundreds of pounds of garbage out to the street. I follow him down, walk through the still wet cellar to the office, plop down at my desk and light my tenth cigarette of the day while I rummage around in my drawer for a meat inventory sheet/order form. First thing to do is find out exactly how much cut, fabricated meat I have on hand. If I'm low, I'll need to get the butcher on it early. If I have enough stuff on hand to make it through tonight, I'll still have to get tomorrow's order in soon. The boucherie is very busy at Les Halles, cutting meat not just for the Park Avenue store, but for our outposts in DC, Miami and Tokyo.
I kick off my shoes and change into checks, chef's jacket, clogs and apron. I find my knife kit, jam a thick stack of side-towels into it, clip a pen into my jacket sideways (so it doesn't fall out when I bend over) and, taking a ring of keys from my desk, pop the locks on the dry-goods room, walk-in, reach-ins, pastry box and freezers. I push back the plastic curtains to the refrigerated boucherie, a cool room where the butchers do their cutting, and grab the assistant butcher's boom-box from the work-table. Knives, towels, radio, clipboards and keys in hand, I climb the Stairmaster back up to the kitchen.
I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Heart breakers, Ramones, Television and so on, which my Mexican grill man enjoys as well (he's a young head banger fond of Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Rage Against the Machine, so my musical selections don't offend him). I'm emptying the saute station reach-in when he arrives. Carlos has got a pierced eyebrow, a body by Michelangelo, and considers himself a master soup-maker. The first thing he asks me is if I've got snapper bones coming in. I nod. Carlos dearly loves any soup he can jack with Ricard or Pernod, so today's soupe de poisson with rouille is a favorite of his. Omar, the garde-manger man, who sports a thick, barbed-wire tattoo around his upper arm, arrives next, followed quickly by the rest of the Queens residents;Segundo the vato loco prep centurion, Ramón the dish washer, and Janine the pastry chef. Camelia, the general manager, is last - she walks to work - and we exchange 'Bonjour!' and 'Comment ç va?'
Soon everyone is working: Carlos roasting bones for stock, me heating sauces and portioning pavees, filet mignons, pore mignons, duck breasts and liver. Before twelve, I've got to cut and pepper pavees and filets, skin and slice the calves' liver, lug up cassoulet, caramelize apples, blanch baby carrots, make garlic confit, reload grated cheese, onion soup, sea salt, crushed pepper, breadcrumbs, oils. I've got to come up with a pasta special using what's on hand, make livornaise sauce for Carlos, make a sauce for the pheasant - and, most annoying, make a new batch of navarin, which will monopolize most of my range-top for much of the morning. Somewhere in the middle of this, I have to write up the specials for Camelia to input into the computer and set the prices (at nine-thirty sharp, she's going to start buzzing me on the intercom, asking me in her thick French accent if I have 'le muh-NEW').
Delivery guys keep interrupting me for signatures, and I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like to check over the stuff. As much as I'd like to push my snout into every fish gill and fondle every vegetable that comes in the door, I can't - there's just not enough time. Fortunately, my purveyors know me as a dangerously unstable and profane rat-bastard, so if I don't like what I receive, they know I'll be on the phone later, screaming at them to come and 'pick this shit up!' Generally, I get very good product. It's in my purveyors' interests to make me happy. Produce, however, is unusually late. I look at the kitchen clock nervously - not much time left. I have a tasting to conduct at eleven-thirty, a sampler of the day's specials for the floor staff, accompanied by detailed explanation, so they won't describe the pheasant as 'kinda like chicken'.
The butcher arrives, looking like he woke up under a bridge. I rush downstairs, hot on his heels, to pick up my meat order: a towering stack of milk crates, loaded with plastic-wrapped cotes du boeuf, entrecotes, rump steaks, racks of lamb, lamb stew meat, merguez, saucisson de Toulouse, rosette, pork belly, onglets, scraps, meat for tartare, pork tenderloins larded with bacon and garlic, pates, rillettes, galantines and chickens. I sign for it and push the stack around the corner for Segundo to rotate into my stock. Still downstairs, I start loading up milk crates of my own. I try to get everything I need for the day into as few loads as possible, limiting my trips up and down the Stairmaster as much as I can. I have a feeling I'm going to get hit on lunch today and I'll be up and down those stairs like a jack-in-the-box tonight, so those extra trips make a difference. Into my crates go the pork, the liver, the pavees, filets, some duck breasts, a bag of fava beans, herbs and vinegar for sauce. I give Ramón, the dishwasher, a list of additional supplies for hi
m to haul up - the sauces to be reduced, the grated cheese - easily recognizable stuff he won't need a translator or a search party to locate.
On my station (saute), I've got only a six-burner Garland to work with. There's another range next to it which is taken up with a bain-marie for sauces and onion soup, the rest of it with stocks - veal, chicken, lamb; and pork - which will be reducing at a slow simmer all day and into the night. One of my burners during service will be occupied permanently by a pot of water for Omar to dunk ravioli in, leaving me five with which to work. Another burner, my front right, will be used mostly by him as well, to saute lardons for frisee salads, to sear tidbits of hanger steak for onglet salad, for sauteing diced potatoes in duck fat for the confit de canard, and the cockles - which will leave me, most likely, with three full-time burners with which to prepare a wide range of dishes, any one of which alone could require two burners for a single plate. Soon, there'll be a choochoo train of saute pans lined up waiting for heat, requiring constant prioritizing. If I get a six-top, for instance, with an order for, say, two orders of magret de moulard, a pore mignon, a cassoulet, a boudin noir and a pasta, that's nine saute pans needed for that table alone.
Reducing gastrite (sugar and vinegar) for duck sauce while the Dead Boys play 'Sonic Reducer' on the boom-box, I have to squeeze over for Janine, who melts chocolate over the simmering pasta water. I'm not annoyed much, as she's pretty good about staying out of my way, and I like her. She's an ex-waitress from Queens, and though right out of school, she's hung tough. Already she's endured a leering, pricky French sous-chef before my arrival, the usual women-friendly Mexicans, and a manager who seems to take personal delight in making her life miserable. She's never called in sick, never been late, and is learning on the job very nicely. She inventories her own supplies on Saturdays, and as I hate sticky, goopy, sweet-tasting, fruity stuff, this is a great help to me. As I've said before, I greatly admire tough women in busy kitchens. They have, as you might imagine from accounts in this book, a lot to put up with in our deliberately dumb little corner of Hell's Locker-room, and women who can survive and prosper in such a high-testosterone universe are all too rare. Janine has dug in well. She's already managed to infuriate the whole floor staff by claiming she inventories the free madeleines we give away with coffee. I'm pleased with her work, making an exception in my usual dim view of pâtissiers.
Next to me, Omar, my garde-manger man, is on automatic. I don't even have to look over at his station because I know exactly what he's doing: loading crocks, making dressing, rubbing down duck legs with sea salt for confit, slowly braising pork bellies for cassoulet, whipping mushroom sabayon for the ravioli de royan. I rarely have any worries about his end. I smell Pernod, so I know without looking what Carlos is up to: soupe de poisson.
Segundo is downstairs receiving orders from the front delivery ramp. I hear the bell every few minutes, as a few more tons of stuff arrive. He'll have my walk-in opened up like a cardiac patient by now, rotating in the new, winnowing out the old, the ugly and the 'science experiments' that sometimes lurk, forgotten and fuzzy, in dark corners, tucked behind the sauces and stocks. He's a mean-looking bastard. The other Mexicans claim he carries a gun, insist that he sniffs 'thinner' and 'pintura', that he's done a lot of prison time. I don't care if he killed Kennedy, the man is the greatest prep cook I've ever had. How he finds the time and the strength to keep up with deliveries, the nuts and bolts of deep prep, like cleaning squid, washing mussels and spinach, dicing tomato, julienning leek, filleting fish, wrapping and deboning pigs' feet, crushing peppercorns and so on, and yet still finds time to make me beautiful, filament-thin chiffonaded parsley (which he cuts with a full-sized butcher's scimitar) is beyond me.
The last cook to arrive is our French fry guy. This is a full-time job at Les Halles, where we are justifiably famous for our frites. Miguel, who looks like a direct descendant of some Aztec king, spends his entire day doing nothing but peeling potatoes, cutting potatoes, blanching potatoes, and then, during service, dropping them into 375-degree peanut oil, tossing them with salt, and stacking the sizzling hot spuds onto plates with his bare hands. I've had to do this a few times, and it requires serious calluses.
I hold the waiters' meeting and tasting at eleven-thirty. The new waiter doesn't know what prosciutto is, and my heart sinks. I run down the specials, speaking slowly and enunciating each syllable as best I can for the slower, stupider ones. The soup is soupe de poisson with rouille - that's a garlic pepper mayonnaise garnish, for the newbies. Pasta is linguine with roasted vegetables,garlic, baby artichokes, basil and extra virgin olive oil. The whole roasted fish of the day is black sea bass - that's not striped bass, for our slower students - and crusted with sel de Bretagne. The fish of the day is grilled tuna livornaise, asparagus and roasted potatoes. Does anyone need 'livornaise' explained . . . again? The meat special is roast pheasant with port wine sauce and braised red cabbage. There are faux filets for two available (that's the big, hip-end piece off the sirloin, strip-carved tableside for fifty bucks). Dessert special is tarte Tatin. It's not too bad a line-up on the floor today: Doogie Howser, 'Morgan the part-time underwear model,' Ken the veteran (who has a maniacal laugh you can hear out on the street; he's everyone's first choice for Waiter Most Likely to Snap, Shave His Head, Climb a Tower and Start Shooting Strangers); and some new waiter, the one who doesn't know what prosciutto is. I haven't bothered to learn his name, as I suspect he will not remain with us for long. There are two busboys, a taciturn workaholic from Portugal and a lazy-ass Bengali; they should balance out, as usual.
My runner today is the awesome Mohammed, nicknamed Cachundo by the kitchen - the best we have. I'm lucky to have him, as it looks like it's going to be busy, and the other runner, let's call him Osman, tends to lose it when things get hectic and has an annoyingly sibilant way of pronouncing the letter 's', making his calls for 'musssselss' 'meat sspesssiall' and 'Calvesss' leever particularly painful to hear when you're under fire. Cachundo immediately begins picking chervil tops, arranging garnishes, filling small crocks with grated Parmesan, harissa sauce, rosemary and thyme, gaufrette potato chips, and picking out my favorite saucing spoons from the silver bins.
At various times during my labors, I manage to conduct two clandestine meetings out on the street: agent reports on the activities of the previous night (after my departure). I'm investigating the grill man incident from the manager's log. Nothing earth-shaking. I have another brief encounter near the liquor room with someone who gives me the latest gossip from our Miami store and a rundown of latest developments at Le Marais, our sister restaurant on 47th Street, as well as some speculation about imminent moves by upper management and ownership. Again, nothing I don't know or assume already. I like my bosses - and think they like me - so it's really only curiosity, not paranoia, that keeps me collecting and analyzing information from our distant outposts and conference rooms. Also, I like to hear different accounts of the same incident from different sources. It adds perspective and reveals, sometimes, what a particular source is leaving out, or skewing to leave a particular impression, making me wonder: Why? I like to tell selected people things in supposed confidence a few times a week, for fun. Later, when it comes back to me it provides an interesting road map of data transfer, a barium meal, revealing who squeals and to whom. There are a number of interesting variations on this practice - feeding false information to a known loudmouth, for instance, with a particular target in mind. A lot of what I hear is utterly useless, untrue and uninteresting. But I like to keep myself informed. You never know what might prove useful later.
Twelve noon and already customers are pouring in. I get a quick kick in the crotch right away: an order for pore mignon, two boudins, a liver and a pheasant all on one table. The boudins take the longest, so they have to go in the oven right away. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so they don't explode, grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them in a saute pan with some whole butter for finishing later
. I heat a pan with butter and oil for the pork, fling a thick slab of calves' liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, heat another saute pan with butter and oil for that. While the pans are heating, I take half a pheasant off the bone and lay it on a sizzle-platter for the oven, spinning around to fill a small saucepan with the port sauce to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, saute the liver - the pork goes straight into the oven on another sizzler - the hot pan I degrease, deglaze with wine and stock, add pork sauce, a few garlic confit, then put aside to finish reducing and mounting later. The liver half-cooked, I put aside on another sizzler. I saute some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red wine vinegar, give it a shot of demi-glace, season it and put that aside too. An order for mussels comes in, with a breast of duck order right after. I throw on another pan for the duck, load a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine and seasoning. The mussels will get cooked a la minute and finished with butter and parsley.
More orders come in. It's getting to be full-tilt boogie time: another pheasant, more pork, another liver, and ouch! a navarin - a one-pot wonder but requiring a lot of digging around in my low-boy for all the garnishes. The key to staying ahead on a busy station is moving on a dish as soon as its name is out of Cachundo's mouth - setting up the pan, doing the pre-searing, getting it into the oven quickly, making the initial moves - so that later, when the whole board is fluttering with dupes, I can still tell what I have working and what I have waiting without having to read the actual tickets again.
'Ready on twelve!' says Carlos, who's already 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 flame, heat and mount my liver sauce, pull the pork mignons from the oven and clip off the strings that hold them together, heat potatoes and veg for the pheasant, squeeze the sauce for the pheasant between pots on to a back burner, move the mussels off the heat and into a ready bowl, calling, 'Papas fritas para conchas negras' to Miguel as I spin and bend to check my duck breasts. Sauce pot with duck sauce and quince, I'll heat those right in the sauce, no room now, the orders are really coming in, the printer chattering away nonstop. I'm sneaking peeks at the dupes while they're still coming off the printer, trying to pick out what I'll be needing, like a base runner stealing signals. The intercom buzzes and I pick up, annoyed.