Don't Try This at Home (5 page)

New Year's Meltdown

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Anthony Bourdain has been a chef or a cook for nearly three
decades, and in 2000 he chronicled that experience in
Kitchen Confidential,
which has been translated into twenty-four
languages,
leading Mr. Bourdain to the conclusion that "chefs are
the same everywhere." He is the executive chef at Brasserie Fes
Halles in New York City.

I
N MY LONG and checkered career I have been witness to, party to, and even singularly responsible for any number of
screwups, missteps, and overreaches. I am not Alain Ducasse. The focus of my career has not always been a relentless drive
toward excellence. As a mostly journeyman chef, knocking around the restaurant business for twenty-eight years, I've witnessed
some pretty ugly episodes of culinary disaster. I have seen an accidentally glass-laden breaded veal cutlet cause a customer
to rise up in the middle of a crowded dining room and begin keening and screaming with pain as blood dribbled from his mouth.
I've watched restaurants endure mid-dinner rush fires, floods, and rodent infiltration—as well as the more innocuous annoyances
of used Band-Aids, tufts of hair, and industrial staples showing up in the ni^oise salad. Busboy stabbing busboy, customer
beating up customer, waiters duking it out on the dining room floor—I've seen it all. But never have I seen such a shameful
synergy of Truly Awful Things happen, and in such spectacular fashion, as on New Years Eve 1991, a date that surely deserves
to live in New York restaurant infamy. It was the all-time, a ward-winning, jumbo-sized restaurant train wreck, a night where
absolutely everything went wrong that could go wrong, where the greatest number of people got hurt, and an entire kitchen
bowed its head in shame and fear—while outside the kitchen doors, waiters trembled at the slaughterhouse their once hushed
and elegant dining room had become.

Like Operation "Market Garden" (the ill-fated Allied invasion of the Netherlands) or Stalingrad—or the musicals of Andrew
Lloyd Webber—responsibility for the disaster that followed rests, ultimately, with one man. In this case it was a talented
and resourceful chef we'll call Bobby Thomas. Bobby had the idea that he could create an ambitious menu—as good as his always
excellent a la carte menus—and serve it to the 350 people who would be filling the nightclub/restaurant we'll call NiteKlub.
He also felt confident enough in his abilities that he could pretty much wait until the last minute to put the whole thing
together: little details like telling his staff what the fuck they were going to be serving, and how. In his visionary wisdom,
Bobby did not share his thinking or his plans with others. Like the strategic braniacs who thought invading Russia to be a
good idea, he was undisturbed by useful details ("Mein Fuhrer? Are you aware winter is coming?"). Those who might have pointed
out the obvious warning signs were not included in Bobby's conceptualizing of what could well have been a spec tacular success—for
a dinner party of twenty. Bobby was, after all, a kind of a genius. And it's often the geniuses who put us in a world of pain.

I arrived at NiteKlub at about a half hour before the shift, the other cooks trickling in after me. We pulled on our whites,
cranked up the radio, and, as usual, stood around waiting for someone to tell us what to do. Our leader had characteristically
neglected to entrust us with a prep list. So we did what cooks left unbriefed and unsupervised tend to do, which was stand
around gossiping.

The lobsters arrived first. There were cases of them, so many that they reached to the ceiling, 125 of the things, skittering
around under wet newspaper and heaps of crushed ice. Since I was de facto quartermaster, and the guy who signed for such things,
the cooks—Frankie Five Angels, Matt, Orlando, Steven, Dougie, Adam Real Last Name Unknown, and Dog Boy—all stood there expectantly,
looking at me, waiting for instructions as a puddle of water grew larger and larger from the rapidly melting ice. What do
we do with them? Who knows? Bobby hadn't left a prep list. Do we blanche them? Cook them all the way? Whack 'em into wriggling
chunks? Shuck them, split them, or turn the damn things into bisque? We don't know. 'Cause Bobby hasn't left a menu.

The game arrived next. Boned-out
poussin,
duck breasts, bones, a case of foie gras. We cleaned up the duck breasts nicely, put on stock with the bones (that didn't
take much to surmise), and laid out the
poussins
on sheet pans and got everything in the walk-in for when Bobby showed. We wanted to start in on the case of foie gras—whole
loaves of the stuff!— but were we making terrine, which would require us to open them up and start yanking out veins, or were
we leaving them whole for pan-searing? We didn't know. And once you tear open a liver, you can't untear it. So we left those
alone. When the meat order arrived, we cleaned up the tenderloins, but left them whole, not having any idea of portion size,
whether we were making filet mignon or tournedos or chateaubriand or beef fucking Wellington for that matter.

Oysters! There was a collective moan from the team, as not even a madman would want to put oysters on a menu for over three
hundred. Perhaps we could crack them open ahead of time. But should we? What if . . . what //"Bobby had planned oysters on
the half shell? In which case I'd be cracking oysters to order all night, since the customers, for the $275 per person they
were paying, would prefer them moist and fresh. It was too horrible to contemplate. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Steven
peel off out the back door—which meant he was probably going to score—and from the way Frankie was working his jaw muscles,
half the cooks were well into the coke already and likely looking for a re-up.

When the produce order came in, it was getting toward panic time. Two cases of oranges, a case of lemons, ten cases of mache
(lamb's lettuce)—which, at least, we could clean—Belgian endive, fennel, wild mushrooms, the ubiquitous baby zucchinis, yellow
squashes, and pattypan squash and baby carrots that Bobby so loved. Dry goods followed, an impenetrable heap of long-haul
purchases: fryer oil, salad oil, vinegar, flour, canned goods. There was no way of knowing what was for today and what was
for next week.

We peeled the carrots. It was two o'clock now, cocaine and indecision grinding the heart right out of the afternoon. And still
no Bobby.

Truffles arrived. Nice. Then the fish. Not so nice because it was Dover sole—a bitch to clean and an even bigger bitch to
cook in large numbers. Orlando, Frankie, and I got down on the sole with rubber gloves and kitchen shears, trimming off the
spines. Matt and Dougie cut chive sticks and plucked chervil tops and basil flowers and made gaufrette potatoes for garnish,
because we knew—if we knew anything—that we'd be using a lot of those. Dog Boy was relegated to fiddling with the dial on
the radio. A new hire, Dog Boy was a skateboarder with a recently pierced tongue and absolutely useless for anything—he could
fuck up a wet dream—so it was best that he was kept safely out of the way. Adam, at least, knew we'd need bread, so he stayed
reasonably busy balling dough and putting loaves in the oven—which was ironic, really, as Adam was usually the last person
to know what was going on about anything, and here he was, currently the best informed person in the kitchen.

By four o'clock, with still no evidence of Bobby and no word, the mood was turning ugly. Dougie's neck and cheeks were red,
which meant he'd been hitting the sauce somewhere. Frankie was retelling, for the umpteenth time, the story of how he had
communicated the plot to
Cliffhanger
to Sylvester Stallone during a three-second near-telepathic encounter by the men's room of Planet Hollywood, his previous
employer. He'd as good as written that movie!—despite the fact that he couldn't even pronounce it, calling it
"
Clifthangah"
—and one of these days, he'd get paid for it. That's if Sly's "people" didn't "get to him first." Frankie, while high on blow,
was often under the impression that various "agents of Stallone" were "watching him" as he clearly "knew too much." When we
all started laughing (and how could we not?), the by now manically high, dangerously paranoid Frankie began to tweak. This
was not good. As Frankie was taller and bigger and stronger than all of us (over six foot six) and a vicious hockey player
sensitive to criticism, things could get really crazy.

"Fucking Bobby," muttered Dougie again. Dougie, at least, wouldn't get violent. He was more of a sulker. But he might very
well just disappear if discouraged. He'd done it before—just walked out the door and disappeared for a few days.

I nervously looked at the clock and debated doing exactly that myself. Happily, when I looked back, Matt was doing his pitch-perfect
Frankie Pentangeli imitation from
The Godfather II:
"Oh . . . sure, senator . . . sure . . . that Michael Corleone . . . Michael Corleone did this . . . Michael Corleone did
that," which always gave Frankie the giggles. Violence, for now anyway, seemed to have been averted.

Time passed. We continued to set up as best we could. At five thirty, Bobby finally rolled in. I say rolled in because he
was (not unusually) on Rollerblades, wearing a new
Blues Traveler
tour jacket he'd scored off a private client and that charming little-boy smile that had so successfully helped convince a
legion of hostesses and floor staff to come into close contact with Bobby's genitals. We, however, were not so charmed.

"Uh . . . Bobby? What's the menu?" I said. "We'd really kind of like to know."

Bobby just smiled, gave us the Ronnie James Dio "devil horn" hand sign, skated back to his office, and emerged a few moments
later in his whites, bearing the fatal document:

The NiteKlub New Year's Eve Menu 1992

Oysters Baked in Champagne Sauce with Beluga Caviar

or

Pan-Seared Foie Gras with Apricot Chutney,

Port Wine Sauce, and Toasted Brioche

or

Beggar's Purses of Diver Scallops and Wild Mushrooms

or

Truffle Soup

followed by

Dover Sole with Citrus Beurre

Lobster in a Shellfish Nage with Fennel

Chestnut and Truffle Stuffed
Poussin
with Foie Gras Sauce
Chateaubriand "Rossini" with Baby Vegetables and Chive Mashed Potatoes

followed by

Harlequin Souffle

New Year's Parfait

Lemon Tart

Profiteroles

To be honest, my memory is not perfect on the exact menu choices. I approximate. What
is
burned permanently into my brain, however, is the simple fact that this was a killer menu to do "a la minute" and seemed heavily
skewed toward the saute station. Which was not, tactically or strategically, our strongest point. The hot app station appeared
overladen with dishes as well, and as Frankie Five Angels was already, at this early hour, quietly having an amusing conversation
with himself, the prospects of a smooth night in that area seemed . . . unlikely. Our fearless leader, though, brimmed with
insouciance that we took for confidence. My muttered concerns were dismissed—understandably, given my pessimistic nature,
and my kitchen nickname of the time: "Dr. Doom."

Bobby curtly gave us our prep assignments and a brief rundown of how he expected us to prepare and present his creations.
To our credit, we quickly put our stations together, set up our
mise en place^
dug in, and by seven we were loaded and ready for the first orders.

It should be pointed out that I had, basically, nothing to do but crack oysters—which I sensibly did in advance (given they
were to be baked)—and help Adam plate desserts. Everything else was coming off hot appetizer (Frankie and Dougie), grill (Matt),
or saute (Steven and Orlando). Dog Boy was sent home after a less-than-grueling half day.

Half an hour later, there were still no tickets. The little printer hooked up to the waiters' computer order systems lay silent.
Our two runners, Manuel and Ed, informed us that the guests were arriving, the dining room filling, and all of us hoped that
they'd start getting the orders in fast, in comfortably staggered fashion, so we could set a nice pace without getting swamped
all at once.

"Tell them to get those orders in," snarled Bobby. "Let's knock down some early tables! C'mon!"

But nothing happened. A half hour passed, then an hour, as our now-full house of New Year's revelers sat at their tables,
admired each others' clothes, drank Veuve Clicquot, and presumably pondered their menus. It would be a long night.

The first order came in at eight thirty.
Clack clack clack . . .
dit dit dit.
. . "Ordering! . . . One oysters, two foie gras . . . a scallop . . . followed by three sole . . . a lobster . . . one chateau
and a
poussin\"
crowed our chef.
Clack clack clack . . . dit dit
dit.
The sound of paper being torn off. "Two more oysters . . . two more foie . . . followed by three Dover sole! One lobster!"
Clack clack clack . .
.
dit dit dit . . .
and already I'm getting worried because they seemed to be hitting the sole hard. Each order took up a whole pan—a whole burner—meaning
we could cook only four of the things at once. And saute was also plating oysters because the lone salamander was on that
station; so while I'd popped the hinges on three sheet pans of the things, the saute guys still had to set them on rock salt,
nape each oyster with sauce, brown them under the salamander, plate them, carefully top each one with an oh-so-delicate little
heap of caviar (of which there was a limited amount), then garnish before putting them up in the window. The beggar's purses
were inexplicably coming off that station too, with only the soup and the foie gras coming off Frankie's area.

The machine was printing full-bore now, paper spitting out end over end, and Bobby calling it all out and stuffing copies
in the slide. So far we were keeping up, racing to drill out what we could before it really hit the fan.