Don't Try This at Home (26 page)

Carl spun around to witness Anton coming up behind him, ready to avenge the downing of Ernest.

"Yaaaaaah!"

But Carl was already in full flow. He caught the charging Anton like he was a ballerina and flung him aside.
Those
shelves crashed next and buckets of stock—clear vegetable, blond chicken, dark veal—fell to the ground, bursting open on contact,
and splashing all over the ground.

It was an all-out food fight—the Fish Guys versus the Meat Guys—but instead of throwing food at each other, we were throwing
each other at the food.

Through all of this, Xavier and I were still struggling for dominance, spinning around and around, and each time we grazed
a shelf, something else would be knocked over. Finally, I twisted him too hard and we lost our balance; we crashed into an
overturned crate of herbs, collapsing on the floor.

"The Fish Guys win!" I shouted. "We still have one guy standing."

"No fair, you stupid American, there's three of you and only two of us."

We could've probably argued all day, but suddenly Carl's face froze. Anton and I turned around to see what he was looking
at.

Maurice, the chef de cuisine, Chapel's lieutenant, was standing in the doorway of the walk-in, shaking his head sadly from
side to side.

"Chapel's going to be here tonight," Maurice said, all business. "We have a lot of reservations. So you better get going and
clean this up."

Then he left. It was as merciful a response as I can imagine.

None of us took our lunch break that day. While the other cooks left to enjoy their afternoon break, we stayed to clean up
the walk-in, wiping down the walls and mopping the floor. And we busted our butts all afternoon to catch up, making quickie
stocks and slicing fruits and vegetables so fast that it's a miracle one of us didn't lose a finger.

As well as we did, we were still a little behind: a few things were unready for service that night. So when Chapel showed
up, Maurice was forced to tell him what had happened. The master was very cold to us that night—it was a quiet, harsh evening
in the kitchen.

I left Chapel after six months, when my money ran out and I needed to get back home to some paying work. I stayed in touch
with many of the other cooks, and for a long time. We wrote to each other for years, before we moved on to other friendships,
to families, to—dare I say it?—our adult lives.

I still hear about them once in a while. A few years ago, a couple I know returned from the Riviera and were telling me about
the restaurants. There was one they hadn't made it to, a little place in Provence run by a hot young Japanese chef they had
heard about named Mitzu.

"I know him!" I said, then started singing:
"His name was
Mitzu, oh Mitzu, O'Reilly:'

I broke off, lost in a memory of that kitchen, those guys, and our daily taunting and torments, our little playpen in the
back of a three-star Michelin restaurant.

When I came to, my friends were looking at me like I was nuts.

"Sorry," I said to them. "You were saying?"

Friends and Family

LAURENT TOURONDEL

Laurent Tourondel honed his craft in the world's great
cities
—
Paris, London, Moscow, and New
York
—
working for such
masters as the Troisgros family and Joel Robuchon. While
serving as executive chef at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, he
was named one of
Food & Wine Magazine's
Ten Best New
Chefs in 1998. His next stop was Cello in New York City, where
he was awarded three stars by the
New York Times
in 1999, the
same year
New York Magazine
named him one of ninty-nine
people to watch. In 2004, he opened BLT Steak, Bistro Laurent
Tourondel, and followed it in 2005 with BLT Fish. His first
cookbook,
Go Fish,
was published in 2004.

T
HERE'S AN ANAGRAM used in just about every kitchen in the English-speaking world: VIP. It stands—as it does outside
of the kitchen—for "very important person."

There are a number of reasons you might designate a customer VIP. He or she might be an affluent regular who comes in often
and spends a considerable amount on wine. He or she might be a celebrity who is accustomed to special treatment. Or he or
she might be a fellow chef whom you admire.

You do what you can for VIP customers, wanting them to feel well taken care of. You might give them one of the better tables
in the house, or maybe send them a little something extra, like a midcourse or some desserts. If they order foie gras, you
might have the waiter bring out a glass of Sauternes, the sweet dessert wine, as an accompaniment. That kind of thing.

The craziest gesture I ever made for a VIP customer was to open a new restaurant on a day when I should have stayed in bed.
But, of course, you don't know such things until it's too late.

As I tell this story, I've just opened BLT Fish, the second of three restaurants bearing my new brand, Bistro Laurent Tourondel.
The first was BLT Steak, which opened in March 2004 in midtown Manhattan and was an instant success.

Did I say "instant success"?

Better make that
"almost
instant success." Because our first night was an evening I'd like to forget.

At the beginning of 2004,1 hadn't cooked professionally in a year and a half. The owner of my last restaurant, a three-star
jewel box called Cello on the Upper East Side, had closed it unceremoniously—while I was away in Venezuela, no less—and I
had spent the past eighteen months recovering from the shock, distracting myself by writing a cookbook, traveling, and meeting
with a number of restaurateurs, investors, and potential partners who wanted to brainstorm concepts for my next place.

Though I was spending a lot of time in other cities and countries, there was never any doubt that I'd stay in New York. I
love being a New York City chef, and I wasn't planning to go anywhere.

The result of this lengthy period of professional blind-dating was that I ended up "married" to Jimmy Haber, a tall, slender,
perpetually youthful-looking New Yorker who owned two spaces that he periodically transformed into new restaurants. One was
in Chelsea; the other in Midtown.

Jimmy and I decided to open BLT Steak, in the Midtown location, which was to mark my return to the New York spotlight.

More casual than Cello, with a focus on beef, sides, and sauces, BLT Steak was a concept that seemed right in line with the
times, including an a la carte menu—one of the big trends of the early 2000s—that invited each diner to create his or her
own meal, drawing from lists of cuts of beef, a few fish, sides, and sauces.

At a time when most kitchens are geared to completing entire dishes—a protein, a starch, and a vegetable plated together—this
approach would be new to my team of five cooks. As a result, one of the biggest question marks was how well my team, most
of whom had just met that week, would coordinate themselves. I had a few young veterans, like Mark Forgione, son of the great
American chef Larry Forgione, whom I had hired as my meat man, the guy on the grill. But two of my cooks were new to the big
leagues, trying their hand on the hot line for the first time, having only worked
garde manger
(salads and cold appetizers) before.

The early signs, however, were positive. We had done well with the restaurant equivalent of dress rehearsals: two "friends
and family" nights in which VIP guests, personal friends, and relatives of the owners come in for a free meal in exchange
for acting as our guinea pigs, letting us work out any kinks in our system on their time.

Those evenings had gone off without a hitch. The friends and family members had loved the space—you entered past a small
277
lounge, shadowed a long bar, and emerged into an intimate dining room, with plush seats and lacquered wooden tables. On the
back wall was a bulletin board on which we posted the menu, the wine list, and nightly specials. And the staff had been crisp
and attentive from the start, consummate professionals who did a good job of shepherding customers through our potentially
confusing menu.

Our first "official" night was to be a Saturday. Jimmy and I decided to soft-pedal the opening, delaying the announcement
to the media so we could start slowly, get comfortable, and pick things up at our own pace. This kind of debut is known in
the industry as a "soft opening" and another good reason for it is to fly under the radar of the food critics, so they don't
show up on your first or second day, when you're still getting your bearings.

But when I walked into the restaurant on Saturday morning and checked the computer's reservation system, I saw that we were
expecting an even quieter evening than I would have liked. In fact, there were just two parties on the books.

I spoke to Jimmy about this.

"Should we close for the night and open on Monday?" he offered.

Unfortunately we couldn't wait until Monday, I explained, because one of the customers was a
super-VlP
from my old Cello days, an honest-to-goodness princess from a faraway country I'd rather not name, who was a loyal longtime
customer.

"Okay, then," Jimmy said, considering his options. "I'll invite a few friends."

What the hell, I thought. We'll open as planned, our VIP will come in as expected, and we'll have one more friends and family
night in the bag. A real win-win situation.

Or so I thought.

***

Our first few hours that night were silent, as you'd expect of a restaurant on East Fifty-seventh Street that nobody knew
was open on a winter Saturday. I was standing around the kitchen with my team of five cooks, just hanging out and talking.

This isn't such a bad night, I remember thinking. We're all getting a chance to know one another.

Not that we weren't ready to cook: our ingredients were prepped, our ovens were fired up, and we were eager to spring into
action. There just weren't any customers.

After a few hours of this, at about eight o'clock, Kelly, a normally unshakable manager, came running into the kitchen. She
was uncharacteristically pale, and short of breath. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead before our eyes. As she fanned
herself with her hand, she told us that
eighty-five
people had just walked in the door and were ordering drinks at the bar.

The friends and family had arrived.

I thought back to my conversation with Jimmy. Should I have mentioned that his guests should be spread out over four or five
hours? I guess I thought it was obvious.

It's true what they say:
never
assume anything.

Kelly was followed almost immediately by Keith, my dining room manager, who arrived with a detailed description of the scene:
although many of the guests had tables reserved in their names, they didn't want to sit yet, preferring to wait for Jimmy
to arrive, and then toast his new venture, wishing him well. The result was that the restaurant had turned into one big cocktail
party with the eighty-five guests mingling uproariously, with no idea of how much anxiety was being produced in the kitchen.

When Jimmy finally showed up, he made the rounds, cordially greeting his guests. Keith suggested that perhaps they should
get
a few
people seated and let the ordering commence, in an attempt to pace things.

Jimmy walked around, tapping guests on the shoulder and ushering them into the dining room. When they saw the trend, others
followed, and before long the entire eighty-five had made their way in to dinner.

But they didn't take their seats.

Instead, they continued to socialize and table-hop and say hi to Jimmy and so on. Tables reserved for four were pulling up
chairs and becoming tables for eight.

This would have been fine at a banquet function—a Bar Mitzvah, say, or a wedding—where you're served a salad, a choice of
salmon or steak, and a predetermined dessert. But in a restaurant like BLT Steak, with about fifty menu items, it was a recipe
for disaster.

In the kitchen, my team and I were waiting, bracing ourselves for the coming storm. All of our eyes were on the little machine
that spit out tickets as orders were punched into a computer by the waitstaff in the dining room.

Finally, the computer spit out one ticket.

I grabbed it and began calling out the first order ever at BLT Steak.

"Okay," I said, with a smile, not having done this in more than a year. "Let me have two rib eye-"

Before I could get the words out of my mouth, the machine printed another ticket.

And another.

And another.

Andanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanother . . .

A hot New York restaurant, packed to the gills with customers, on its busiest Saturday night of the year, will still find
a way to stagger the orders. The most tickets you'd ever see in a flurry would be about ten.

In the space of two minutes, we had received
thirty-five.

My team and I knew then and there that we were dead. The only question was how long we had to live.

Trying to put on my best face, I continued calling out that first order and one by one the guys got to work. The more seasoned
cooks, like Mark, got going with grim determination, the younger ones with visible anxiety, their hands shaking, their eyes
wide with fear. They had lost that swagger most kitchen guys have, that confidence that governs all actions, from the squirting
of oil into a hot pan to the last sprinkling of salt on a dish as it goes up in the window for pickup.

Keith tipped us off that Jimmy himself was seated at a table of thirteen people. We had our eye out for his ticket and somehow
managed to pull it out of the throng. He and his guests had ordered pretty much what you'd expect—an assortment of steaks
including four rib eyes, some fish, and a selection of sides. We got his order out, slightly relieved, and went on to the
rest.

But not two minutes later, Jimmy's four rib eyes came back, along with the two fish. He and his guests felt that these dishes
were undercooked. Just what we needed—a mistake on the owner's table. We dropped everything, redid those orders, then went
back to work hacking away at the others.

By now, we had all eighty-five tickets in the kitchen. Because of the unique structure of the menu, one table's order could
be 80 percent complete and still not go out. For example, if a table had ordered four steaks, creamed spinach, potatoes, and
mushrooms, everything but the mushrooms could be ready and the other components would have to wait.

Every time a waiter came into the kitchen, we'd have to take a survey of each station. So, if he came in and said "Is Table
Twenty-two ready?" we'd go around the room:

Meat guy: "Yes!"

Fish guy: "Yes!"

Veg guy: "No."

One single "no" on a table became an overall veto, meaning that the food for that table would have to stay in the kitchen
for the time being. So, the waiter would try a different table: "How about Table Thirty-seven?"

Meat guy: "Yes."

Fish guy: "No!"

It didn't matter what the veg guy said, because the fish guy had already thrown a wrench into things.

The result? Each station was hopelessly backed up with finished plates. Mark had a rack filled with sheet pans, the entire
tower loaded with plates of cooked steak.

I had never seen so many people working so hard and
getting
nothing done.
It was like cooking in quicksand.

I'm normally a pretty forceful presence in the kitchen. "Come on!" I'll shout, "We have to get this done!" Or something like
that. For emphasis, I'll maybe slam down a sheet pan.

But at a certain point that evening, I realized that I couldn't push these guys any harder. There was no point. I just rested
my hand against the rack and tried to smile it off.

Eventually, I refocused and came to the realization that the only way to bring this evening to a close was to concentrate
on one table at a time. With so much food ready, it occurred to me to start bargaining with each table to get them their dinner.
So, if a waiter came in looking for the food for Table Eighteen, I would say, "I don't have their hanger steak, but I do have
their fish and their sides. If they'll take a rib eye, they can have their dinner."

The waiter would think this over, nod, and say, "Okay. I can sell that. Lemme have it." Then we'd load him up, wish him well,
and push him back out into the increasingly hostile dining room.

It took more than three hours, but eventually everything made its way out of the kitchen.

And, in time, our guests began getting up and leaving for the night. I'm told that many of them left shaking their heads,
amazed that we were open for business. They looked concerned, I'm told, for their friend Jimmy and his new venture.

And the princess, our raison d'etre for coming to work that day? She canceled her reservation. Thank God. I can only imagine
what she would have thought if she
had
shown up.