My mentor taught me the foundation - the mother sauces, knife skill and meat temps. Another taught food cost and labor cost. One taught me classic French. Another Lebanese. Another Creole. Educational approach, temperament, and moral code each differing greatly from one experience to the next. A few did not care so much about service so much as their pockets or ego. One had a backdoor catering business at the expense of the owner unbeknownst to anyone (for a time). The good ones had an underlying similarity: a focused plan on how to achieve the best service imaginable and never accepting less from those in their employ. Some had a softer hand than others, but they all honed me to be a pit bull on my staff - front and back alike.
It is my job to insure proper service, at least my opinion of that and am thus employed to carry out said task. In restaurants the chef, generally speaking, is the most highly trained and educated member of the staff - there are exceptions, but not every restaurant has sommeliers or true maitre d's. Chefs are the ones most cross trained in the various avenues of the business at large. All one need do is look at the brigade system laid out by Escoffier to see the evidence of this. Its not my ego but over a century of restaurant history displaying that the chef is the driving force behind cuisine and thereby restaurants. With great responsibility comes great stress. Great stress displays weaknesses and character flaws.
Chefs are - and always will be - emotional.
It may be cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason. The pan-tossing, busboy abusing, alcohol guzzling character of yore is still around. He comes out in all of us at times - usually around the holidays when craziness is at its yearly high-water mark. I have never worked for any chef I haven't seen crack at some point. I'm not talking about some half-assed lash out either. I'm talking full on, hair-pulling, plate smashing, forehead-vein-bursting meltdowns.
The cooks around him have to put up with his tantrums. Why do they do it? Hopefully the answer - other than the paycheck which alone isn't usually compensation enough to deal with most of these hotheads, myself included - is the food. You can win lifelong friends and career-long loyalty with a bowl of soup. One thing that may change a person's perspective on food can instill a trust unachievable through any other medium. We all, every one of us, eat and understand the gratification from soulful meals. That can and is used as a recruiting method. That's why most stages - the classic working interview system employed by French kitchens - are paid in food.
Whether they create a dish or copy from a book, they crafted the food. Carpenters use tools invented by other people a billion years ago, trees from the soil and other side of the globe that someone else cut down, and techniques established roughly before the time of Jesus. Yet the chairs they craft are their own creations. So is my roasted chicken and root vegetables, even if the hundredth time my sous chef stuffs, trusses, seasons, roasts, carves or plates it, it's his creation each time, each step. He crafted each plate. Though a line cook's role in regards to the chef may be more replication than invention, his role is creation.
The chef has a little part of himself out on the plate with every course and thereby the training of each line cook. If the people do not enjoy his cuisine, his culinary ideals, his lifetime of training it equates to the people not liking him. How can it not? The line cook experiences this, too, but in a second hand way and can simply write that insult off as problem with the chef. The line cook will not repeat the same error in the future when it's his kitchen. When a chef is running the risk of personal rejection by the dining public, it's no wonder he loses his shit when he sees things regularly practiced that are against his specifications - whether it be the garmo guy serving a wilted and bruised wad of what was at one time arugula because he was flirting with the hostess or the hostess herself flirting and distracting the garmo guy when everyone knows not to hang out in the kitchen.
It certainly doesn't help matters when the chef raises his voice, threatens both of their jobs in the middle of the dinner rush. The garmo kid gets pissed and the hostess hurries out of the kitchen, bumping a busboy who promptly drops a bus pan of dirty dishes, the contents shattering a couple hundred bucks of china and glassware onto the floor. Anger is a toppler of dominos.
Such is life. The world turns and everything changes while it stays the same.
I believe that this generation of cook has an understanding of how bad things can be working for tyrannical maniacs yet a fortitude to receive and dish out tough-but-fair responses. There is a grit in line cooks today, a pride in not only the strength of their back but their backbone. A bend-not-break. An ability to be self-deprecating and admit mistakes that those who brought us up never had. An ability to accept defeat when it comes, incorporate that and evolve into something better.
After a century and a half of Escoffier's "The Chef Is God" method, chefs have become a more self-aware group and are increasingly creating more hospitable workplaces with lots of avenues to influence the happenings of the day to day. Chefs and line cooks are interacting in ways that are allowing cooks to create a niche for them within kitchens as opposed to the more standardized 'insert line cook A into station B' model kitchen.
At the end of the day the chef still makes decision and runs the tight ship, but the passengers and sailors on these ships have a lot more say in the type of trip the ship is going to take than ever before and restaurants are a better places for it.
James Pawl Kane
Chef & First Among Equals
No comments:
Post a Comment