The Reach of a Chef (25 page)

With a flurry, Natalie, a hostess tonight, bolts past the line and up the backstairs to the office, looking for Price. A six-top without a reservation has walked in and she knows she can’t make that call. Price trots down the stairs and heads to the dining room, checks the books, the tables, and makes his decision. He could have seated the walk-in six-top by asking one couple to move and putting a different table combination together in one of the rooms, but he can’t justify that for a walk-in. If they’d had a reservation he’d have been forced to do it.

It proves to be a good decision because not long after they leave, the Porters, a four-top, arrive without a reservation. The Porters are regulars almost every Saturday night—they’d thought they had a standing reservation, and Price figured a way to squeeze them in. This would have been a problem had they taken the six-top, and a restaurant likes to take care of its regulars.

Price will go to great lengths to accommodate guests. Once in the middle of service, he went out back in his nice shirt and slacks, found a sheet of plywood, plugged in his circular saw, and cut a round tabletop big enough to seat a large group.

“Order mushroom pie, first course, order popover, crostada, tartlets.
Amuse
up.”

It’s 6:50 and twelve tickets representing between thirty and forty diners are impaled on a spike on the expediter’s shelf, meaning entrées have gone out and eight more tickets flutter from the shelf.

She walks to Aaron, who’s cooking in Art’s spot tonight, and tells him she’s eighty-sixing the scallops, which he’s relieved to hear. There was so much water in them, they’d stick to the pan. To prevent the sticking, Aaron got the pan smoking hot, but this burned the scallops. It was an impossible situation. Melissa tells Bill, who will tell the servers no more scallops, then punches the eighty-six code into the computer. “Something’s wrong,” she says. “There was so much liquid in those scallops. The product’s not good, it doesn’t look good, it’s not cooking right, it was driving me
crazy
to see it go out.”

During the lull that follows the first push, she talks with Joe about his station, since Aaron, who has less experience on wood oven, will take it tomorrow, and she wants to get a jump on prep. But since he’s hardly sold anything off his station during the first turn, the station’s mise is still in pretty good shape. A few oysters, a couple of pies, a tuna, a couple of octopus salads, done with an orange nage, which is simply OJ, butter, and salt, with orange-marinated grilled octopus reheated in the wood oven, served with shaved fennel and mint.

The Pemaquid oysters are roasted with fennel-parsley sauce, the glaçage, and an excellent concoction of bread crumbs and toasted fennel seeds. Melissa almost always has a roasted-oyster dish on the menu. She serves them with shallot butter and fried shallot on top, or other flavored butters, puts a variation of James Beard’s deviled crab on top, and has even done an oysters Rockefeller, but with the spinach-béchamel on the bottom and a fried oyster on top, because she doesn’t like the traditional dish. When I’d eaten there two summers earlier, I’d been served oysters three ways—fried, roasted, and raw—and she always has available raw oysters at the bar.

Chris is cleaning and straightening his station after the first push and preparing for the second.

“How did your first turn go?” I ask.

“I got my ass kicked,” he says. Melissa calls two fields, and he pulls some endive to slice. “I’m getting better though.”

Price enters the kitchen and says to Melissa, “It’s so quiet in the dining room.”

Melissa counts the tickets. “We just did fifty-seven,” she responds, “and we’ve already sent out a lot of desserts.”

The printer chatters.

“Ordering three oysters, antipasti, four soup”—she steps to the other side of the line, combining each station—“order six saltimbocca, two rouget, one sword.”

At 8:00, the kitchen is still quiet, no orders are in, and Melissa, standing around nervously, says, “Where is everybody?”

I head out to the dining room to have a look. Is the place empty? I have no idea.

No. It’s full. I see Price at the bar. He says, “
Whammo.
I just sat five fours, two sixes, and another five. And that table’s about to get up. I’m not going back in
that
kitchen.” Then he rethinks. “I better go tell Melissa to tighten up.” He takes the back hall and staircase down to the kitchen.

With a big crunch coming, I’ll only be in the way back there. Furthermore, I owe it to my craft to eat some of this food and wash it down with some good wine. It’s one thing to be a cook and put out all that food—the last thing you want to do when you’re working the line is eat—it’s quite another to be standing still for hours watching and taking notes about the great food going out. You can eat with your eyes for only so long, then it drives you mad.

I’d been wanting to try Primo’s saltimbocca, the one dish that never leaves the menu in honor of Melissa’s granddad. Sautéed pork loin on mashed potatoes with a Madeira sauce, shiitakes, and some Parma ham on top. It’s simple and delicious, do-at-home food, Primo’s personal favorite.

Later, I say good night to Price and descend the staircase, exiting through the front door of the house. My footsteps on the wood porch floor echo softly in the quiet night, nothing now but crickets and muted sounds of a lot of people inside eating and drinking, like a great dinner party is going on in there. A lovely, starry, summer night. From the parking lot I can see the silhouette of the lush garden. The pigs will be asleep in their shelter. I turn back to look at the house. The back door to the kitchen is open and through the screen door I can hear the sounds of cooking.

Melissa had told me she’d never really intended to get into cooking. “When I was a kid I wanted to be a vet,” she said. “This just kind of happened. I don’t know how it happened.”

“I think she’s obsessive,” Melissa’s mom told me. Melissa’s mom is shorter and rounder than Melissa but seems to have the same steady energy. “But this is her life, she loves what she does.” She shook her head. “To cook every day for all these people! Why would anybody want to do that?”

On the other hand, she’s not surprised by what Melissa’s doing and the restaurant itself. “The way she is with this place is the way I was a mother. That was my passion.” What she does here, her mom said proudly, is simply a reflection of the way Melissa was raised. Melissa is transferring who she is immediately to this place, to the food, of course, but more, she’s putting the whole sense of family as she knows it into every part of the business.

Me, I saw the epitome of Melissa Kelly in the sheep’s-milk ricotta, or rather in how she served it. The way she smiled and said exactly how she most wanted to eat it herself—it was seductive the way she said it. She was conveying with her every cell, her love of this fresh sheep’s-milk cheese. I could see it and feel it. And later she served it to me, and after that, she decided to give the exact same thing to anyone who wanted it, garnished with a little arugula from the garden and a ripe Mission fig. But the importance of this to me, the lesson of it, was that she wanted to serve this perfect, fresh cheese to her customers in exactly the way she’d most want to eat it herself. Nothing fancy. No elaborate sauce or garnish. She didn’t put it on a pedestal; she didn’t dress it up or try to show off with it. She put it with some good olive oil on a bit of baguette that Michael Florence had baked that day. How could she fail to make people happy?

In a chef world increasingly giving itself over to branding and multiple restaurants and TV shows, chefs trying to cash in on their fame, I had been completely happy and at ease to be hanging out at this uniquely American restaurant with the garden, with all the cooks and their many advanced degrees abandoned for cooking, with Price and Melissa, who run a little restaurant in an old house on the coast of Maine.

When I wasn’t on the road, or hanging out in other people’s kitchens, or watching the continuing evolution of Keller or the trajectory of two driven but very different CIA graduates or the CIA itself, I was at home in Cleveland, writing. Happily, the booming interest in chefs and cooking ensured steady work, an indication of how fertile the food territory was. There seemed to be an endlessly expanding interest in food and cooking and chefs and restaurants.

Lives were changing rapidly for everyone inside this business, not just for Keller, though his life had changed dramatically since his days as French Laundry chef. At his least busiest he was, to choose one example, glazing vegetables for me for the Bouchon cookbook I was writing with him and his staff (glazing was badly misunderstood, he thought, a lost craft); the book work was the result of the popularity of
The French Laundry Cookbook,
and his being able to open a second very different restaurant, a bistro, the result of his general fame; earlier in the day, before the glazing demo, he’d been discussing chlorophyll molecules with Harold McGee, the food science expert and author of the 1984 classic
On Food and Cooking,
who also happened to be hanging out in the French Laundry kitchen when I was there; Keller was many months away from opening the Vegas Bouchon, the Bouchon bakery in New York, and the Inn in Yountville, and, of course, his then-unnamed Manhattan restaurant. (He’d considered “Point” as a possible name, a reference to his favorite chef, Fernand Point of La Pyramide, who died in 1955, the year Keller was born. He’d considered calling it “Aloysius,” his middle name, but he was afraid people requesting the number or address wouldn’t know how to spell it. In the end, it was Keller’s answer to the most frequent question asked while the restaurant was under construction that gave him the name he was looking for: “Well, it’s not going to be the French Laundry, per se.”) He’d still be running the pass at tonight’s service, and spoke hopefully of the time that he could return more permanently to just cooking.

Harold McGee, amazingly, was nearing the end of a massive rewrite of
On Food and Cooking.
Here was a book that most in the food industry considered a masterwork, the first comprehensive reference on why food behaves as it does, and McGee had chucked about 90 percent of it and was rewriting it. The revision would be published on the original’s twentieth anniversary and had been ten years in the making. When that was done, McGee planned to begin another book, somehow utilizing the abundant material he’d had no room for in this new edition of
On Food and Cooking.
He’d gotten into food more or less by accident. A trained scientist with a degree from Cal Tech and a doctorate in English literature from Yale, he had hoped to write more generally about the science of everyday life. That had not happened. He’d gotten caught in the pull of the food industry vortex. He was not likely to free himself and had now begun to accept that writing about the science of food was simply his lot, which was OK, he noted with a shrug, because he enjoyed it and he was good at it.

Brian Polcyn, the Michigan chef I’d written about in
The Soul of a Chef
and with whom I was working on a cookbook about charcuterie, had managed to achieve something that was almost unheard of in the life of a chef-owner: balance. He was the father of five kids, still coached soccer, had a fantastic wife he adored, and ran a thriving business called Five Lakes Grill. When a chef has good balance in his life, it’s typical that his MO will be to pursue more work. Brian took on a second job—full-time chef-instructor for nine months of the year at Schoolcraft College, his alma mater. And he also began taping a weekly cooking spot for the local ABC affiliate’s evening news, collaborated on our cookbook, and continued his self-imposed obligatory charity work with groups such as Taste of the NFL and Share Our Strength. In his few spare moments, he earned his pilot’s license.

“If you don’t keep growing and evolving, you die,” he said, speaking of both himself and his restaurant. He’d given his ten-year-old establishment a $250,000 renovation and the next year bought $25,000 worth of new china and glassware. “A restaurant is like a baby,” he said. “You gotta keep nurturing it.”

He still worked the line and freely admitted he wasn’t as fast as he used to be. The other night, while working sauté and expediting, he realized that it was taking him so long to read the tickets—he had to squint and lean in to make them out—that the younger cooks just read the tickets themselves from where they were on the line and cooked past him. As a surgeon once said to me, there inevitably comes a point at which experience can no longer compensate for diminishing speed. Cooking is no different from surgery in that physical way—it’s
physical
work, like professional sports. All chefs, if they continue to actually cook the food they serve, reach this point.

Another chef I’d written about in
The Soul of a Chef
was Michael Symon, in Cleveland. When I was home, I could head down to his neigh borhood, say hello to the staff I’d gotten to know years ago—Rebecca and Frankie behind the bar; Chatty and Frank Rogers behind the range; Doug, the suave server who now ran the front of the house, a remarkable circumstance in this itinerant business—and eat Michael’s excellent food. He not only remained a quintessential example of the working chef-owner, but his course was also emblematic of chefs taking advantage of the new opportunities available in the food industry, opportunities that now abounded not only for high-profile chef superstars and celebrities but for those who chose for whatever reasons to remain in smaller markets.

Business at Lola, his funky bistro that served high-end food in a casual environment, remained strong, so strong, in fact, that he was able to buy the second floor of his two-story building and turn it into a private dining area with two rooms and an open demo kitchen for cooking classes. He was asked to be on a Food Network show,
Melting Pot,
which paired ten chefs who would cook ethnic cuisine, a different duo cooking each day. The show was cancelled, but he liked TV, had been nominated for a Beard award for a show he did with Bobby Flay, and he was developing a cooking and lifestyle show that he described as “Martha Stewart gone bad.” He was so well known locally, he was able to hire a company to make, jar, and distribute a line of sauces he created. He did occasional special events and cooking demos for various organizations representing trade groups in the food industry, such as the National Pork Producers Council and the Wisconsin Dairy Council. A day with them could net him as much as ten grand. Admittedly, this kind of work was sporadic, but it was good money for a chef-owner who paid himself a salary of just five times that amount. And he did fifteen to twenty benefits a year, the bane of every well-known chef’s existence, which cost him money and time.

He was a spokesman for Calphalon, the cookware manufacturer an hour and a half west of Cleveland, which featured him in a splashy double-page ad that opened
Bon Appétit
and paid him for appearances. When the company brought out a line of pans, they might package it with Symon’s sauces, and Symon would sell thousands of units at a single pop. The sauce line earned him another ten grand a year, and this was sweet because it required no work on his part. He was also the spokesman for Vita-Mix blenders, the high-performance series designed for home use, for which he did an hour-long instructional DVD and made appearances, most recently four hours’ worth of cooking demos featuring the appliance at a convention in Las Vegas.

How
all this TV and national spokesman business got rolling from his relatively tiny outpost in a decrepit neighborhood in Cleveland is illustrative of the dynamics of chefs in the media. In 1998 he won a
Food & Wine
Best New Chefs award, given to ten chefs each year. That award, he says, was the catalyst. It led to the attention of the Food Network, which gave him a guest spot on Sara Moulton’s show, which led to a couple of appearances on
Ready Set Cook,
the deceased cooking game show (in fact, the place where Ming Tsai got his start on television). His lively personality on these shows brought the
Melting Pot
offer. These appearances led to the spokesman jobs for two high-profile companies and their nationally marketed products. An offer from restaurateurs to open a place in the heart of Manhattan was soon to come. One thing leads to another.

On April 30, 2005, I headed down to Lola to watch the restaurant’s last night of service. After more than eight years, Michael and his wife and partner, Liz, were closing Lola. For one month the space would be under redesign and reconstruction, including the installation of a huge wood-burning oven. In June it would reopen as Lolita, a restaurant serving more casual food than Lola. Michael and Liz would move Lola to Cleveland’s downtown on a redeveloped East Fourth Street. His Lola had been a major force in the rebirth of the once sketchy Tremont neighborhood. There was every reason Lola could be a big part of the uplifting of another downtrodden piece of the city. To support the growth, he and Liz partnered with his friend Doug Petkovic, who’d opened a competing restaurant across the street from Lola (one of many that had come to the area in the wake of Lola’s success) and who would now oversee general operations as Michael worked in all areas back of the house and Liz in all areas pertaining to front of the house for all three restaurants.

Symon was successful and busy, but for all the work, he wasn’t getting rich. He chuckled at the idea that he was raking in the dough—as many in town simply assumed, given his renown and packed restaurant. “I didn’t get into this business to make money, to get rich, but I do want to make a decent living,” he said. And perhaps the varied endeavors will bring that in, eventually. Till then, “I’m just a bald guy in Cleveland trying to make a buck!” he said, laughing.

Few outside the industry realize how little money chef-owners make. Michael and Liz, for instance, paid themselves fifty grand apiece out of profits. Additional profits went back into the business, toward everything from new purchases and repairs to renovating the entire upstairs into a demo kitchen, offices, and private dining rooms. Michael and Liz also bought health insurance, including dental, for their cooks, all of whom are salaried, and many servers, some of whom are—almost unheard of in small chef-owned restaurants. They sent sous-chef Matt “Chatty” Harlan to California for an eight-month stage at the French Laundry. Chatty will be one of the opening chefs at the new Lola. The additional revenue from spokesperson gigs and demos for the Pork Council, a total of about $75,000, came in handy: They bought their first house in 1998, and he occasionally splurged (bought himself a Harley, enjoyed his golf, got himself a really elaborate tattoo from back to shoulder to chest, an Asian-inspired representation of his family, and then, on a whim, had some flying pigs tattooed on the other side of his chest with the ebullient and emphatic words “Got Pork”). But he and Liz didn’t want for anything, and they wouldn’t have a lot of time to spend money even if they suddenly had a lot of it. The reason he was successful in the first place, the reason he got that
Food & Wine
award, was at least in part because he was at the restaurant
all
the time.

For Polcyn the situation was not dissimilar, though he paid himself more, 10 percent of sales, which were currently in the $1.5 million range (pretty standard as far as chef compensation goes, and hardly extravagant, especially considering the two college tuitions under way and an expected three more during the next ten years). The breakdown of business expenses at Five Lakes Grill was similar to that of most restaurants and was difficult to change.

Cost of goods, food, and wine at restaurants generally runs 30 to 35 percent of sales, labor is 35 percent, overhead (rent, utilities, linens, maintenance, et cetera) is 20 percent, which leaves a profit of about 10 percent. And that profit almost always has to go right back into the business. The chef-owner increases profit by keeping a tight control on overhead, and/or increasing sales without raising overhead and labor. The cost of goods would always be proportionate to sales. Labor costs fluctuate but only incrementally. And that, in a nutshell, is the restaurant’s profit-and-loss scenario. It varies according to type of restaurant. High-volume places with low food cost have a higher percentage of profits relative to sales. Low-volume places, with high food and overhead costs—the Manhattan four-star restaurant, for instance—can expect considerably less profit for higher sales. But generally, the basic model is difficult to change.

At Lola, Michael Symon had higher food costs than was normal for a restaurant, as much as 37 percent. This was because in his market, he could sell his food for only so much. This wasn’t Chicago. In Chicago, at Blackbird, for instance, a restaurant comparable to Lola, chef Paul Kahan charged up to $16 for an appetizer and $32 for an entrée. Symon’s highest prices were $13 and $28. But Symon paid the same prices for the products he used as Kahan did for his. What compensated for this higher food cost was a lower overhead—Cleveland was a lot cheaper to live in, so things like rent and utilities and services were less expensive.

In the last year it was open, Lola did nearly $2 million in sales, taking in an average of $55 per customer. Opening as Lolita, a much more casual place, he expected to average $35 per person, but he figured its more casual menu would allow for more covers, which would make revenue about the same. When he opened Lola in downtown Cleveland, he would face higher overhead than he’d had at the old Lola, but the restaurant was bigger and so could seat more people (105 seats rather than the current 65) than he could at the original location, which was typically booked six to eight weeks in advance. After eight years, he’d begun to grow the business. He and Liz could expect to double their revenue once the debts taken on for the restaurant had been paid.