Kitchen Chaos

This is something of a repost, I first told this story on the world wide intranets on my Wife’s blog. It is one of my favorite kitchen stories to tell, partly because it is the worst dinner service I’ve ever worked, a night where the entire kitchen completely ceased to function and fell into a sweaty, smoke-tinged, screaming chaos, from which none of us believed we would ever emerge. Mostly I tell the story as penance because, as you’ll see, it was completely my fault.

The French restaurant I was working in was run by a slightly mad and absolutely brilliant English chef, Matt, who’s cockney wit encompasses such an astounding range of insults and profanities – in at least four languages – it’s impossible not to admire, regardless his insinuation you prefer sex with animals to the company of your girlfriend (and he knows this, he tells you, because he’s intimate with your girlfriend). We all told ourselves we put up with it because he was teaching us so much, and is so well-respected in the Sydney restaurant scene that merely having his name on your resume will open doors for you. These things are true. Closer to the bone, however, is that we all loved it, lived for it, were fired up by the sort of personal, honest cruelty normally reserved for blood relatives. These were not the trials you endured with coworkers, they were emotional trauma that make people family.

Matt’s Sous Chef, Steve, a six-foot-something Canadian from the cultural no-man’s-land of Saskatchewan, had, in addition to helping run the kitchen, three primary roles: First was food cost/wastage control. God save you if you ordered more of any one food item than you were going to use that day. “What do you mean you need a box of fennel? I’ll get a half box. DON’T run out.” Not even God could save you if Steve caught you wasting food.

His second role, equally important, was quality control. Steve has this supernatural ability to know when you’ve not done something properly. He’d be on the other side of the kitchen plating food yelling for more duck jus, clattering hot plates, calling dockets, while, in a rush, you start cooking scallops in a pan that isn’t quite up to temperature – and he’d know it. It must have been the pitch of the sizzle or the smell of something not caramelizing at exactly the right rate, and he’d turn, point and shout “NOOOO! GET IT OUT OF THE PAN!” (though with his accent he said “oot”) “OOT! IT’S NOT HOT ENOUGH, and you know that.”

Third, Steve’s simplest (and I suspect favourite) responsibility, was to dispense verbal abuse in the rare moments when Matt had nothing to say or paused for breath. Any normal dinner service, therefore, consisted of the two of them calling dockets, directing waiters, plating food, and taking turns ensuring that you’ve absolutely no doubt your work is neither fast enough nor good enough.

On this night, our problems emerged almost immediately after the start of service. It was the new dish on the hot entrée section, my section, and everyone was ordering it. “ORDER IN! One gazpacho, one rouget, and one gnocchi! ORDER IN! Oysters and a gnocchi!” The menu shorthand necessary during service belies the true nature of Matt’s style of cooking. When Matt shouts “rouget” he wants a pan fried fillet of the little red fish atop a warm saffron pickle of baby carrots, pencil leeks, shallots, and white asparagus, garnished with marinated and slow roasted whole cherry tomatoes, basil purée, deep-fried parsley, and a shellfish jus. My new dish was even more complicated.

I’d been a bit worried about the dish since my day began at 8:00 a.m.. By adding the dish to my section Matt had effectively doubled the amount of work I had to do in a day. For the gnocchi dish I had to joint, brown, render, and then slowly braise ox tail, cool it, pick the meat, and reduce the braising liquid to a jus. I had to poach, peel, and then slice beef tongue, purge snails, mix up café de Paris butter (a herb butter with no less than twenty ingredients), portion and pound out wagyu neck minute stakes, and make an onion cream sauce reduction, which then went into a CO2 powered whipped cream gun. Then, of course, there were the herb and parmesan gnocchi (roast potatoes, pass through a fine sieve, mix, pipe through a pastry bag, blanch, shock in ice water, dry, and portion). And there were the sweetbreads.

Sweetbread is the culinary term for the pancreas or thymus gland of a young cow and I can only surmise that they must have such an attractive name to help one forget what is actually being served. I’d never cooked sweetbreads before, and when I opened the butcher’s bag I was greeted by a mass of pinkish-grey, mucous-covered, gelatinous, opaque, segmented flesh, which seethed and slid in such a convincingly alien-egg-sack-like manner I didn’t know whether to drop the bag and flee or clamp it shut to prevent the sweetbreads from doing the same.

My fears aside, the sweetbreads needed to be poached in a court bouillon – a vegetable stock, heavy on aromatic herbs – then they were to be pressed, cooled, their fatty and sinewy membranes peeled away, trimmed, and portioned for service. Later they will be pan-fried until they are crispy on the outside and decadently creamy on the inside. Prepared in this manner they are a true delight.

By 6:00, ten hours after I started, I was “boxed” as we say – section set up, standing at my stove with no further prep to do. Technically, I was ready for anything. “ORDER IN!” Matt absolutely bellows out dockets. “Beets and a Gnocchi! Ok Yank,” I’m the only American in the kitchen. “You’re on.”

“Gnocchi” meant this: Heat a pan until it is smoking hot. Season the steak, oil the pan, quickly sear the steak, thirty seconds on one side, ten on the reverse, and leave it to rest in warm place. In another pan on medium-high heat, pan-roast the sweetbreads which you have first patted dry and dusted with flour, when they have good color, throw a knob of butter, a sprig of thyme, and a crushed clove a garlic into the pan and flip the sweetbreads, foaming in butter until the entire surface has an even, dark golden crust, careful not to burn the thyme. Now is a good time to make sure the onion cream gun is still hot. Meanwhile in a small pot, warm some jus and picked bits of ox tail. At the same time, in yet another pan, on medium heat sauté the gnocchi until lightly colored, flip, add butter and the sliced tongue, toss till warm through and drain off the excess butter. In another small pot, warm some clarified garlic butter and gently poach the snails.

Now assemble the plate: steak down first, then a seemingly random but always identical arrangement of snails, gnocchi, tongue, tail, and sweetbreads on top. Finish with a sprinkle of parmesan, crispy sprig of thyme, oxtail jus, a slice of café de Paris butter, and a few squirts of onion cream foam. Easy.

Easy except that the dish required five pans and I only had a four-burner stove. Ok. I’d just have to rotate through the components. What about the other dishes on my section, some of them two- or three-pan dishes? Rotate faster. Right, here we go, steak is on, snails in, sweetbreads on, steak flipped, steak out, gnocchi on, no color on the sweetbreads yet, gnocchi flipped, tongue in, jus hot, tiniest bit of color on the sweetbreads, tail in jus, gnocchi and tongue out, still not enough color on the sweetbreads, come on, jus off, snails out, steak on plate, why won’t they color, tail, tongue, gnocchi, jus, foam, and parma, all plated, strategic spaces waiting for the soggy, pale-brown sweetbreads. Crank the heat, wipe the rim of the plate to look busy, flip the sweetbreads. Shit. Burnt.

“YANK!” Matt’s spotted my mistake. “What are you DOING? Even heat, you worthless knob. They’ve got water in them. They FUCKING PISS OUT WATER. That’s what sweetbreads DO! They won’t caramelize until you cook out the water. It’s going to take a while, get them on first thing.” New pan on, sweetbreads in, wait, wait, wait, finally colored, flip, foam in butter, re-warm the rest of the dish, re-plate and send. “ORDER IN! TWO GNOCCHI! ORDER IN! ONE OYSTERS, ONE GNOCCHI! That’s three gnocchi, cocksucker, and this time without the carbon.”

Pans on, sweetbreads in, slowly, slowly browning, still manage to cook and plate all the other components before the sweetbreads are ready, but the timing is a bit better; at least nothing is burnt. I wasn’t able to reflect on this minor success because in the time it took me to cook and plate three orders, six more gnocchi orders came in. Each time I got a group out, a greater number of orders have backed up, my timing was still off, and I, as well as everyone else in the kitchen, knew I was falling dangerously behind.

“YANK! You are well in the shit now. Give me two gnocchi and three Rouget. PRESSÉ” The starter section was divided into hot (me) and cold (William) starters, and I could sense, though I didn’t have time to look, that Will was ready and waiting on my plates to finish several tables. I, in turn, was waiting on sweetbreads to finish my plates. “WHAT’S GOING ON OVER THERE, STARTERS?” Now Steve was yelling too. “GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER! LET’S GO!”

More orders in. More gnocchi. A group of four, then a group of two, then six. All the while, each group of tables was taking too long, holding up each successive wave more and more, until eventually orders were coming in nearly a quarter of an hour before I had a chance to even start cooking them. In desperation I threw eight or nine serves of sweetbreads in a pan and watched in horror as the flour from the sweetbreads and oil instantly transformed into a rolling sea of bubbling paste. “GET FIVE GNOCCHI ON THE PASS NOW!” Matt, roaring now, face red, hadn’t seen my pan of splattering glue. Steve had.

“Throw it out,” Steve said. The man who served roast potato skins for staff lunch so that nothing is wasted wants me to throw out nine serves of sweetbreads. That’s strange. What was even stranger, and what had me most worried was that Steve was no longer yelling. This was a completely new development. He’d gone past screaming, or he’d decided that what I needed was some help instead of more yelling (this in strict contradiction to conventional kitchen wisdom which states more yelling fixes everything). “Start again,” he was almost whispering now, “and don’t put so many in a pan at once.”

It continued like this for another hour and a half. I just couldn’t get my timing right and nearly every table in the restaurant waited too long for their food. At some point I looked up (god help me why did I waste the time it took to look up?), and the entire kitchen had stopped. I was taking so long to get starters out that there were long gaps when no tables were ready for mains. In a kitchen, to stop is to die. No one, not even the dish hands, would look at me. I knew it was my fault, but what I desperately wanted was a sympathetic glance, one reassuring smile, from anyone.

Finally, one of the pastry chefs, Al, came to help me. I cooked, he plated. Clawingly, achingly, screamingly, we started to pull service out of my nose dive when Matt shouted “WHERE ARE THE TWO GNOCCHI FOR TABLE 31?”

“Uh…? Two gno…”

“WHAT THE FUCK! I SENT THE REST OF THE TABLE! THEY’VE ALREADY GOT THEIR FOOD! WHERE IS IT?”

“It’s in the pan chef!” A small lie, as I was just putting the various components in the pans as I spoke. I waited for it. Waited for the yelling, waited for Steve to come crashing down on my section, waited for the inevitable shouted insults and public humiliation, but it didn’t come. What followed was the most terrifying silence I have ever experienced. The only sounds in the kitchen were the gentle roar of my four burners on high, hiss splatter of water coming out of sweetbreads, and the heavy, metallic scrapping of my pans as I tried hopelessly to speed-cook all the components of a gnocchi dish.

And then, sweating draining off my nose into the cluster of white-hot pans on my suddenly tiny-looking stove, praying I didn’t burn anything, I could sense him standing behind me, towering over me in that deafening silence, inflated by his rage. I could hear him, his English teeth clenched together, drawing in a great breath, and I braced myself for the onslaught. When he leaned in close I could feel the heat of his angry breath on my ear and he whispered, almost a sigh that was somehow clearly audible to the rest of the kitchen: “If you don’t get those gnocchi on the pass in two minuets,” and here he grabbed my kitchen timer, set it for two minuets and hit start, “I’m going to fire you, and the guy next to you,” jerking his thumb angrily at Al who’d come to bail me out.

Those two minuets boiled away so quickly. By the time Matt walked away and Al and I had exchanged terrified glances, we’d lost half a minute. 1:30. 1:20. Plates down, steaks finished. 1:10. 1:00. Shit! Get the oxtail in the jus! :55. :50. Flip the gnocchi. :45. Steak plated. :40. :35. Gnocchi out, snails out. :30. Gnocchi, tongue, tail, snails, plated. :25. :20. Jus. :15. Onion foam. :10. Butter, thyme sprig, parmesan sprinkle. :05. Sweetbreads. Oh god the sweetbreads. Please let the sweetbreads be cooked enough. Please. Turn them out of the pan and… they’re perfect. Holy shit they are utterly perfectly golden crisp. Look at that! Perfect!

“TIME’S UP! WHERE THE FUCK ARE…”

“On the pass chef!” I thrust the plates at him; he barely glanced at them.

“Good. Now give me three gnocchi and two rouget.” And like that it was over. Well, the yelling was over, but the night wasn’t. I still had to fight, with Al’s help, to drag us all out of the pit I thrust everyone into. The entire kitchen, in fact, had to fight, since I’d so ruined any semblance of rhythm for the night’s service. We’d continue fighting until sometime after midnight.

When I finally lay down in bed, Kell woke enough to murmur “How was your day?” Though I’d never admit this to any of my coworkers, there in the dark, well after 2:00 a.m., replaying the evening behind my closed eyes, I allowed my self one self-pitying sob and responded “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” And then I went to sleep; I was due back in the kitchen at 8:00 a.m..

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As a bit of an epilogue, I have to point out that at the end of the terrible night Matt pulled me aside for what I assumed was to be another berating. “There is a locker upstairs in the change room that is empty. Be sure to put your name on it.” Then he walked away. He wasn’t telling me I had passed some kind of test, or that he wasn’t angry, because he was angry and I had failed, but he wanted to remind me, and I want to remind you, readers, that the kitchen is a tiny, volatile, super heated, universe, always on the verge of self destruction. Whatever happens inside that universe between the time you enter and the time you leave isn’t real; it stays behind when you go home and, mercifully, has magically dissipated when you return. It has to be like this, or none of us would ever go back.

Anyway, here is a simple recipe for an accompaniment to most any meal. It’s particularly good with anything from the barbeque. Try not to fuck it up.



Warm Salad of Roasted Vegetables with a Chive and Seeded Mustard Vinaigrette

1 green zucchini
6 baby yellow squash
4 kipfler potatoes (or other waxy small potatoes) boiled
6 swiss brown mushrooms
12 cherry tomatoes
1 bunch parsley

Heat oven to 180ºC (350ºF). Cut the zucchini, squash, potatoes, and mushrooms into bite-sized pieces, toss each with a bit of oil, salt, and pepper, and arrange in groups on one or two baking paper-lined trays. Do not mix the different vegetables, as they will roast at different rates. Cook the vegetables, including the whole cherry tomatoes, until they are soft and delicious, removing each from the tray when they are done cooking. When they have all finished, toss together with a handful of picked parsley. The tomatoes will burst and become part of the dressing. Serve warm.

Chive and Seeded Mustard Vinaigrette
1 bunch chives, chopped
1 tsp seeded mustard
1 tbsp tarragon vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil

Mix all ingredients, season, and adjust the amount of oil or vinegar to your taste.