Don't Try This at Home (6 page)

Two big tables—a ten-top, and a twelve, one after the other—and still no main courses had been fired yet; I looked over and
saw that saute was already in the weeds, that Frankie was spazzing out on all the foie gras orders, and that the truffle soup—which
was supposed to be a layup—was not cooking as quickly as anticipated. Sure, the heating-the-soup part was a breeze, but the
part where Frankie stretched precut squares of puff pastry dough over the ovenproof crocks was taking a lot longer than hoped.
Frankie was fumbling with the dough, which either broke because it was too cold from the refrigerator, or tore because it
had been out of the refrigerator too long, or tore because Frankie was so high he was shaking—and Frankie wasn't so good at
keeping a lot of orders in his head anyway, so the combination of minor frustrations and all those foie gras and the fact
that the little crustless pieces of brioche that were supposed to accompany it kept burning in the toaster was taking its
toll, pulling down the pace . . . already the oysters were stacking up on one end, getting cold waiting for the foie gras
orders that were supposed to go with them, and Bobby (highest standards
only,
please) was sending them back for reheats and replates, which was causing some confusion as good became commingled with bad.
And the printer kept clicking and the stack of orders that Bobby had yet to even call out while he waited for saute and hot-app
stations to catch up kept getting bigger and bigger (getting mixed up with the orders that he'd already called out and had
yet to post in the slide), and it was clear, a half hour in, with not a single main course served—or even fired—that we were
headed for collision.

Bobby's reaction to the ensuing crisis was to urge on Frankie. Forcefully. Some might say, considering Frankie's known pathologies,
too forcefully: "Where's that FOIE, you idiot?! What the FUCK is up with that fucking FOIE!? What's WRONG with you, Frank?
FRANK? Where's that fucking FOIE GRAS?"

Poor Frankie. He was spinning in place, trying to do ten things at once, and succeeding at none, eyes banging around in his
skull, sweat pouring down his face, a dervish of confusion, the little four-burner stove full of melting foie gras and over-reducing
sauce.

The runners' faces were starting to take on worried expressions as more time passed without anything coming up. A lone four-top
went out—and was quickly returned as cold, causing Bobby to scream even more. Bobby tended to blame others in times of extremis.
"You
idiotsl"
he'd yowl at the runners when yet another order of oysters was sent back, making our already-stressed-out runners even more
jumpy. And the printer, all the while still clicking and clacking and going
dit dit dit . . .

The first of the front waiters appeared, inquiring fearfully about app orders, which made Bobby even crazier. There were easily
fifty tables' worth of orders up on the board, God knows how many in Bobby's hand, and a long white strip of them curling
onto the floor that Bobby had yet to even acknowledge—and nothing was coming out of the kitchen. Nothing. Bobby finally managed
to slap cloches onto a few orders of oysters and foie and send them on their way; and when he finally began to take stock
of what he had in his hand, and what was still coming in, and how, by now, the saute station had come to a complete standstill,
I think his brain shut down. The next waiters who came in asking about food got shrieked at.

"Just GET OUT! GET OUT OF THE FUCKING KITCHEN!!" The constant clicking from the computer, the background grumbling and swearing
and cursing from the cooks, the back-and-forth questions necessary between line cooks working together like "Ready on Table
Seven? Ready on those oysters and that scallop?" and the occasional whispered request from a runner combined was too much
noise for the chef. He shouted: "SHUT UP! EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP! NOT A SINGLE FUCKING WORD! I WANT TOTAL SILENCE!"

He then issued orders for Matt to move some of the foie orders over to saute, put Dougie in exclusive charge of the toaster,
told Orlando and Steven both to get out of the way, and took over the saute responsibilities himself, while abandoning expediting
responsibility to me.

The pile of intermingled dupes I inherited was discouraging. The board itself—meaning the orders that had already been begun,
or fired—was a mess, with orders already dispatched mixed up with stuff still to come. I had no idea what had been called
and what had yet to be called. Fortunately, the printer had calmed down. There was silence,
real
silence, as Bobby stepped into saute and began putting together orders, running back and forth between hot-app station and
his own to personally make sure tables were complete before putting them in the window.

We managed to get some apps out, and some more, and even a few more—before runners started whispering in my ear that they
needed entrees, like
now.
The printer was strangely silent still, and I was thankful for it, figuring they were backed up at the terminals downstairs,
or that maybe, just maybe, between all the orders in my hand and the ones that I was slowly feeding onto the board and the
pile I was getting ready to call out, maybe we'd actually got the whole dining room in. I called out a few fire orders for
mains but Bobby just screamed: "SHUT UP! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT!" He was cooking foie gras orders now, in addition to doing
the oysters, and the beggar's purses, and dealing with the sole, and though a very fine line cook, he was biting off way more
than he, or any cook alive, could chew. Alone in his head, out there on the edge all by himself, ignoring me, ignoring the
waiters, ignoring the other cooks, he was slinging pans at high speed, just trying, as best he could, to knock down some of
those hanging tickets, to get the food out. So I just kept my mouth closed and clutched my stack of dupes and held my breath.

The printer. Something was wrong with it. I knew it. It was too quiet. It had been too long. Not a click or a clack for twenty
minutes, not a single fire code or dessert order. I checked the roll of paper. No jam. The machine seemed plugged in. Jumping
on the intercom, I called Joe, the deejay and techie who knew about such things, and asked him discreetly to check and see
if there was a problem.

Apparently there was. Suddenly the machine came alive, clacking away like nobody's business, spitting out orders in a terrifying,
unending stream, one after the other after the other, faster than I could tear them off: twenty-five minutes of backed-up
orders we hadn't even heard about. Worried front waiters entered the kitchen, took one look at what was going on, and retreated
silently. Nothing to be done here.

It was clear to all of us by now—except maybe Bobby, who was still in his own ninth circle of personal restaurant hell, cursing
and spitting and doing his best to cook, plate, and assemble orders, elbowing us out of the way as he ran heroically back
and forth between stations—that we were now involved in a complete disaster. The situation was beyond saving. We could dig
out . . . eventually. At some time, yes, we might feed these people. But we would not bring honor to our clan tonight. We
would not go home proud. There would be no celebratory drinks at the end of this night (if it ever ended), only shame and
recriminations.

Then I looked over at the kitchen doors and saw a particularly dismaying sight: three or four waiters clustered silently in
the hallway. I hurried over to confer, away from Bobby's hearing. When waiters stop complaining, it is an unnatural thing.
What were they doing out there? Things were bad in the dining room, I knew, but shouldn't they be down on the floor, putting
out fires? Comping champagne? Reassuring their tables with self-deprecating apologies and offers of free cognac and port?

"What's up?" I inquired of the most reasonable of the lot, an aspiring playwright with many years of table service experience.

"Dude . . . they're drunk out there," he replied. "They've been sitting out there without food for an hour and a half. Drinking
champagne. They've got nothing in their bellies but alcohol—and they're getting belligerent."

Veronica, a chubby waitress with (we had heard) a rose tattoo on her ass, was red faced and shaking. "A customer choked me,"
she cried, eyes filling with tears. "He stood up and put his hands around my neck and fucking
choked
me, screaming 'WHERE'S MY FUCKING FOOD?!' . . . It's out of control, Tony! I'm afraid to go out there. We all are!"

I rushed back to the kitchen, where Bobby was successfully putting out a few tables of appetizers. But orders were still coming
back. There was more stuff coming back than going out, and with all the replates and refires, the caviar supply was running
low.

"Bobby," I said, carefully. "I think we should 86 the oysters."

"We are
not
86ing the fucking oysters," snarled Bobby.

The kitchen doors swung open. It was Larry the waiter with tears running down his face. Now this was about as bad a sign as
you could see, as Larry only moonlighted as a waiter. His day job was as a cop in the South Bronx. What, on the floor of a
restaurant, could be so bad, so frightful, so monstrous as to cause a ten-year veteran of the force, a guy who'd been shot
twice in the line of duty, to become so traumatized?

"They're beating the customers," Larry wailed. "People are getting up and trying to leave—and security is beating them! They're
going fucking nuts!"

"It's out of control," moaned Ed, the runner. "It's a nightmare."

NiteKlub, it should be pointed out, usually operated as exactly that once the dinner shift was over. Consequently, we employed
a security staff of twenty-three heavily muscled gorillas. These folks, though quite nice when not frog-marching you out the
front door or dragging you down the steps, were employed to deal with the more rigorous demands of keeping order in a busy
dance club: organized posses of gate-crashers, out-of-control drunks, belligerent ex-boyfriends—many of them potentially armed.
They were frequently injured, often for giving a momentary benefit of doubt, for instance, to some barely-out-of-adolescence
knucklehead half their weight denied entry to the VIP area, who promptly sucker-punched them or cold-cocked them with a beer
bottle. This kind of thing gave our average security guy a rather shorter fuse than most ordinary restaurant floor staff.
That this was a tonier crowd was a distinction security could hardly be expected to make. Especially as the customers were
drunk and outraged at having spent hundreds of dollars for nothing, and heading for the doors in droves. Though they were
said to be dealing out beat-downs to middle-aged couples from the suburbs who'd only wanted a nice New Year's Eve and some
swing music, they could hardly be blamed for following the same orders they had been given every other night.

"I'm not going back out there. For anything," said Larry.

We tried. We did the best we could that awful night. To his credit, Bobby cooked as hard and as fast as he could until the
very end, pretty much doing everything himself, unwilling or unable to trust anyone to help him out of the hole he'd put us
all in. It was probably the wisest thing to do. Between my calling and his cooking, there was a nice, direct simplicity, less
chance of confusion. We served—eventually—a lot of cold baked oysters (many without caviar) and undercooked foie gras, leathery
Dover sole and overcooked lobster, lukewarm birds and roasted beef.

1991 slipped into 1992 without notice or mention in the kitchen. No one dared speak. The word "Happy" in relation to anything
would not have occurred to any of us. At twelve forty-five, in what was perhaps the perfect coda to the evening, a lone, bespectacled
customer in a rumpled tuxedo entered the kitchen, wandered up to the saute end (where Bobby was still doing his best to get
out entrees), and, peering back at the stove, asked, in a disconcertingly bemused voice: "Pardon me . . . but is that my appetizer
order?"

He'd been waiting for it since eight forty-five.

I thought he'd showed remarkable patience.

At the end of the night, as it turned out, management had to comp (meaning return money) for $7,500 worth of meals. A few
overzealous security goons had (allegedly) incited a few of our guests to file lawsuits claiming varying degrees of violent
assault. And the effect on the kitchen staff was palpable.

Dougie and Steven quit. Adam became a titanic discipline problem, his respect for his chef declining to the point that it
would, much later, lead to fisticuffs. Morale sank to the point that cooks arrived high—rather than waiting until later. And
I got the chef's job after Bobby, wisely, went elsewhere.

And I learned. Nobody likes a "learning experience"—translating as it does to "a total ass-fucking"—but I learned. When the
next year's New Year's Eve event loomed, I planned. I planned that mother like Ike planned Normandy. My menu was circulated
(to management, floor, and every cook), discussed, tested, and retested. Each and every menu choice was an indestructible
ocean liner classic—preseared or half-cooked hours before the first guest arrived. There wasn't an oyster in sight, or on
any of the many New Year's menus I've done since. Just slice and serve terrine of foie gras. Slap-and-serve salads.
My
truffle soup the next year (it had been a good idea, actually) sat prebowled and precovered in a hot bain, ready to toss in
the oven. I spread dishes around evenly between stations, imagining always the worst-case scenario. As, of course, I'd lived
through it. My tournedos were preseared and required only a pop in the oven, some reheated spuds, a quickly tossed medley
of veg, and a ready-to-pour sauce. My lobsters took a swift pop under the salamander. I'd be proud of the fact that
my
New Year's went flawlessly, that
my
full dining room of customers went home happy and content, and that I, unlike the vastly-more-talented-but-less-organized
Bobby, brought honor and profit to my masters.

But the fact is, I could have served the following year's menu with a line crew of chimps. The food was nowhere as good as
it could have been. My food arrived fast. It arrived hot. It arrived at the same time as the other orders on the table. But
it was no better (or worse) than what a bunch of overdressed drunks dumb enough to eat at our club expected. Having tasted
total defeat the previous year, when my last entree went out at eleven thirty, leaving only the mopping-up operations (aka
desserts), I was ebullient. Not a single order had come back. I jumped up on the stainless-steel table we'd used to stack
assembled dishes and beat my chest and congratulated one and all. We turned up the music, peeled off our reeking whites, changed
into our street clothes, and I ordered us up a few pitchers of Long Island Iced Teas and beer. We drank like champions. And
felt like champions. We went home exhausted but proud.