Don't Try This at Home (8 page)

Fernando and I looked at each other in bewilderment, then down at the paper. Staring back at us was the "Help Wanted" section,
opened to the page featuring Restaurants and Bars.

"Are we fired?" I asked Fernando.

"I don't know."

We left the office and found Delores parked at her desk.

"Hey, Delores, are we fired?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry, boys. Frankie just told me on the way out. He said to have you escorted out of the building, and to tell
you that he'd like to never see either of you again."

I've been in the restaurant business for close to twenty years. That was the first time I was fired, and—since I own my own
places now—probably the last.

Fernando doesn't own his own restaurants, but the two of us found work just two days later in another fine restaurant about
five miles away from Frankie's joint, and Fernando's still working there to this day. So even though we haven't spoken in
years, I like to think that he looks back on that night with humor and some measure of pride, for giving us one hell of an
evening to look back on . . . even if we can't remember many of the details.

If You Can't Stand the Heat

SCOTT BRYAN

Scott Bryan is the executive chef of Veritas in New York City. He
began his career working for his mentor, Bob Kinkead of the
Harvest restaurant in Boston (currently the chef-owner of
Kinkead's
in Washington, D.C.), whom he also worked for at 21
Federal on Nantucket. Bryan went on to learn at many of the
best restaurants in New York, including Gotham Bar and Grill,
Restaurant Bouley, Le Bernardin, Lespinasse, and Mondrian, as
well as Square One in San Francisco. In 1994, he became
executive chef of Soleil, then of Alison on Dominick Street, after
which he entered into a partnership with Gino Diaferia that
spawned a series of restaurants including Luma, Indigo, and
ultimately Veritas. In 1996, Bryan was named one of the Best
New Chefs in the United States by
Food & Wine Magazine.

T
HIS is A story about practicality, or rather about the highs and lows that impracticality can visit upon you.

When I was a cook, I worked for a number of great chefs, more than most guys have. I took from each of them what I could.
Alfred Portale was the best
garde manger
I'd ever seen; he did beautiful, graceful things with herbs and greens, dressing and seasoning them better than anyone I had
worked with before, or have since. David Bouley was the most artistic; he could pull stuff out of his hat that nobody else
would have thought of—
and
make it work. He also taught me how to plate food from the center out, a valuable technique that has stayed with me to this
day.

But, in many ways, the man who had the biggest influence on me was one of the least famous chefs who ever hired me, Robert
Kinkead, whom I worked for at a restaurant called the Harvest way back when I was just getting started.

I think of Kinkead as my mentor because he taught me about
both
parts of being a chef: technique and management. While less recognized, the second is just as important, because if you can't
manage a kitchen, you can't get the food done the way you want it and you
will
fail.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't respect Kinkead only for his ability to marshal the troops. He was a great chef. I include him
in my personal pantheon of masters because he was the best
saucier
I ever worked with.

But of the many impressive things I learned from Kinkead, perhaps the most invaluable was to let your staff express an idea.
If you had a thought for a new dish, or even a way to improve an existing one, he'd listen. If he didn't like it, he would
tell you why. But if he
did,
he'd implement it.

You can call it being modest, or humble, or just open-minded. Whatever it is, it's practical. If you see a better way, why
wouldn't
you go with it?

Unfortunately, it isn't like that in every kitchen. I remember trying to offer my two cents on a dish at Square One restaurant
in San Francisco, and being quietly reprimanded with the house catchphrase: "We don't do that here."

Kinkead's lack of pretension and ego, his reverence for the practical, stuck with me so much that it would become the reason
I left one of the most famous kitchens in the United States after just six months.

But it's amazing that it took that long.

I did things in the opposite order of a lot of guys. I had worked for a bunch of American chefs before I ever spent time in
a French kitchen. My impression was that I had probably learned to do everything fast and half-assed, and I always wondered
what it would be like to cook in a more formal kitchen organized after the French model.

This impulse reached critical mass the night I had an extraordinary dinner at Bouley in 1987. Restaurant Bouley was one of
the few four-star restaurants in New York, and I came away from the meal having finally made up my mind to go for it and see
how I fared in a place like that.

I spent the next few years working in some of the best restaurants in town, including Bouley itself, as well as Mondrian and
Le Bernardin. But, without a doubt, the most memorable time I spent in a four-star kitchen, for mostly the wrong reasons,
was at Lespinasse.

Lespinasse, if you don't know, was situated in the St. Regis Hotel, which had just undergone a renovation that cost something
like $100 million. The new dining room was the most opulent one in town, so extravagant and old fashioned that you could have
worn a powdered wig and Restoration-era costume in to dinner and looked right at home.

Gray Kunz, who now presides over Cafe Gray in the Time Warner Center, had made a name for himself at the Peninsula Hotel.
Gray is a soft-spoken Swiss guy, a true gentleman, who was raised partially in Singapore and had worked under the legendary
Fredy Girardet. He had also cooked in Hong Kong for years, so he brought all kinds of Asian ingredients to his menu, which
was far less common in those days.

Lespinasse was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, and it was widely expected that it would receive four stars, which it did.
After a series of interviews with Gray, I was hired as one of two
poissonniers
(fish cooks), starting work just two weeks after the restaurant opened.

There were two kitchens at Lespinasse: one for the restaurant, and another kitchen around a corner that handled room service
for the hotel, which we had nothing to do with. As you might expect, the restaurant kitchen was an intense and serious place.
Each cook kept his head down and was focused on the job at hand. When I started, I jumped right in, preparing the dishes that
had been described to me in the morning, and cooking them for lunch service that day.

After only a few hours, however, I began to notice problems that seemed odd, especially for such a well-funded enterprise.
The kitchen was big and roomy, with state-of-the-art equipment, but it was oppressively hot. The extreme heat was only aggravated
by the fact that Gray, a classicist, insisted we wear hats and neckerchiefs at all times. (Eventually, I stopped wearing underwear
to lower my body temperature a few degrees, but it didn't help much.)

Additionally, at the end of my first night, I discovered another, even more bizzare oddity: there wasn't enough staff. There
were plenty of cooks, sure, but there weren't any porters, not a single one, and no cleaning crew, either. Which meant that
after putting in a full day in a sweltering hot kitchen, you had to clean all your utensils, lay them out according to Gray's
precise instructions on your prep table, and then mop the floor at your station.

Since we all started our day at about seven thirty in the morning, these late nights, which typically ran to one thirty or
two a.m., cost the restaurant a small fortune, as we were each paid time-and-a-half after our first eight hours.

Impractical? To say the least.

But impracticality can also create some memorable by-products, and Lespinasse's food was stunningly, gloriously impractical.
I'll tell you right now that I will never again see anything like the food we did there.

Most restaurants at the level of a Lespinasse strive to keep their food costs (the ratio of expense to menu price) anywhere
from 30 to 40 percent. Ours, however, easily ran to 60. For example, one item on the tasting menu was a sweetbread dish that
featured a perfectly turned, cooked artichoke bottom topped with a spoonful of wild-mushroom risotto and a nugget of sauteed
sweetbread, all surrounded by a shallow moat of black truffle sauce. It easily cost thirty-five dollars to make, and it was
just one of the
five
tasting menu dishes—a meal that sold for the whopping grand total of eighty-five dollars.

Chefs dream about those kinds of dishes, and it was something to behold so many of them under one roof.

I'll say it one more time: I'll never see that kind of thing again.

Every day at Lespinasse was crazed. We were all working ridiculous hours, eighteen to twenty per day, with just thirty minutes
off after lunch service, and sometimes seven days a week. During my busiest week, I logged 126 hours.

Within a couple months, the nonstop hours and the pressure began to take their toll. Cooks were still able to perform their
work, but they were often in a semiconscious state. Guys would get careless, cut their fingers, be too tired or distracted
to keep the wound clean, and end up out for a week with an infection. One guy let an ingrown toenail go for so long that he
had to take a leave of absence. I started to understand how soldiers did desperate things, like shooting themselves in the
foot, to get discharged and sent home.

One Saturday morning, I was informed by the manager that Cristophe, the French cook who was the other
poissonnier,
had called in sick. I was going to have to run the station on my own.

"Did he give any details?" I asked.

The manager shook his head. "Just sick."

That's weird, I thought, because Cristophe had gone home the night before—which in that kitchen meant just a few hours earlier—looking
fine. And Cristophe was a seasoned professional, with great credentials, having worked at such restaurants as Taillevent,
one of the best places in Paris.

The next day, Cristophe called in sick again. And the next. In fact, he continued to make a morning phone call every day for
the rest of the week, all of them with the same message: I'm sick and I won't be coming in.

The following Saturday, Cristophe returned to the kitchen, looking fresh and pink cheeked. I pulled him into the walk-in and
confronted him.

"What the fuck? You don't seem sick. You sure as hell weren't sick when you went home last Friday night. What happened?"

Cristophe looked off into the distance, which in the walk-in meant up into a plastic bin full of arugula on the highest rack.

"Man," he said, in his thick French accent, the word full of wistful weariness. "I went home last Friday night and went to
bed. I woke up Saturday. I was so depressed. So I call in sick. I woke up Sunday, I was still depressed. I went out to lunch.
It was so great to go to lunch. So I don't come in Monday . . ." I stayed at Lespinasse for six months. I might have stayed
longer, but something happened that had nothing to do with how crazy the kitchen was, and everything to do with how impractical
it was—and also with the lasting impression that Kinkead made on me.

At my station, there were two salamanders, long broiling machines that are open on both sides with a heating element under
the lid. They were both to be kept on at all times.

But one quiet Sunday night, with few customers in the restaurant, I turned off one of the salamanders. We used them for only
a single dish, a braised snapper that was flashed under the heat for a quick second before being served. I could get four
servings in one salamander at a time, or eight if I turned the plates in a certain direction. And we
never,
not even on our busiest night, got hit with four orders simultaneously.

One of the sous-chefs, a guy about my age, came up to me and informed me that Gray wanted both salamanders on at all times.

"Yeah, I know, but it's wicked hot in here and we never get more than four orders at once."

"Sorry, Scott, that's the way Gray wants it."

"That's ridiculous. Tell him I'll take responsibility. If there's a fuckup, you can fire me."

"Scott . . ."

Give me a break!, I thought. Sweat was soaking through my uniform and they wanted me to sit there in my own little private
tanning salon? I pointed up in the general direction of the office, one flight up from the kitchen: "Go tell Gray I'm not
doing it."

The sous-chef walked off toward Gray's office. A few minutes later, he returned and told me Gray wanted to see me upstairs.

I climbed the stairs to Gray's office. He was sitting behind a large desk, dressed immaculately. He waved me in and, dispensing
with the formalities, politely laid down the law.

"You have to have two salamanders on at all times. You can't say no to the chef."

"Gray, you and I both know it's not that busy, and it's not gonna get that busy. I can fit eight dishes in that thing."

He remained cool, utterly impassive: "Scott, you can't say no to the chef."

Fuck that, I thought, this isn't Hong Kong, where you can exploit your workers. This is America.

"You have to do it," he said. "Or leave."

We looked at each other for a long moment, neither one of us speaking. Gray crossed his arms, waiting. And I'll tell you truthfully,
even if it hadn't been such a strange and exhausting six months, I would have done what I did next.

"Okay. Then I guess I'm giving you my two-week notice."

Gray shook his head. "No. If you're not going to obey the chef, you have to leave now."

"Then I'll get my stuff."

We shook hands, I collected my things, and left.

And that was how my time at Lespinasse came to a close.

Neither Gray nor I hold a grudge about the day I quit. Gray even sends me some foie gras and kugel (noodle pudding) every
Christmas. We don't hold a grudge because it's a small world in our business, and we're both good guys at the end of the day.
And on top of all that, it just wouldn't be practical.