Guest Blogger - Jerad
Recently, at the Italian seafood restaurant where I work, one of our regulars - a radio personality and something of a local Australian celebrity, we’ll call him Mr. L - came in with his wife and two friends for lunch. Mr. L invariably orders the grilled ciabatta with cherry tomato and basil salsa, despite the fact the dish has been missing from our menu for a little less than six months now. He’s that kind of customer. I’m not sure whether he doesn’t know or doesn’t care that it is no longer served in the restaurant. I suspect both. Whatever his excuse, we expect to have to cook outside the menu when Mr. and Mrs. L rock up. And most of the time, that’s ok.
Our kitchen is divided into four sections: cold starters/salads, the least technical and easiest section in the kitchen, hot starters/pasta, a demanding, speed-essential section with lots of intricate pan-work, desserts, prep-intensive but plop-and-serve plating for a breezy service, and of course mains, my section. All of the fish and meat as well as the accompanying sauces and garnishes come from the mains section. On any given day, with specials, lobsters from the tank and special lunch menus, mains may be looking after nine or ten dishes, twice that of any other section. In addition, the chef on mains calls in orders, organizes the timing for the entire kitchen, and ensures that waiters take the right food to the right tables.
To be fair, when the restaurant is busy, two people work the station, one cooking, the other plating and directing traffic, dividing the load, allowing more focus on both sets of tasks and many fewer mistakes. This wasn’t a particularly busy day, however, and I was alone for Sunday lunch service, and should have had no trouble cooking for the eighty or so diners we had booked. We started out all right, the first dockets coming in early, customers ordering well - oysters followed by entrées followed by mains, giving me plenty of time to seal and rest steaks, allow fish portions to come to room temperature so they cook evenly, ever so slowly render duck breasts for perfectly crisp skin and verging-on-rare flesh.
If you plot the number of dockets over time during any three hour service, the distribution would form a classic bell curve, the highest point being about 1:30 p.m. for a typical lunch service. Sometimes though, as happened during this service, all the customers sit down and order at roughly the same time, forming a spike on paper and what we call a “shit-fight” in the kitchen. At 1:15 we’d served about twelve customers and nearly cleared our docket rail. By 1:40 the entire entrée docket rail was full and our docket printer wasn’t slowing up.
Between them, the cold and hot entrée sections kept up admirably well. They grouped tables together, sent out twelve or fifteen plates at a time; the waiters only just able to run the food and get back before the next group came up. All the while I’m calling out dockets and sending food: “ORDER IN! Two carpaccio, one calamari, two tagliatelle, FOLLOWED BY, one ocean trout, one snapper, a t-bone medium rare, and a duck. Table 611 on the pass! Starters, get that asparagus plate up! ORDER IN! Three linguini, two no entrée, FOLLOWED BY, two kingfish, one well done, a flounder, a t-bone medium, and a sirloin blue. ORDER IN! One vongole…”
As meat comes on order, I start to cook it immediately, so that while the customers are eating their first course, their steak is cooking and resting in a warm place. When they are “called away,” that is, ready for their mains, the meat has become perfectly tender and moist, and no one has to wait too long for their meal. Subsequently, on top of calling dockets, plating hot entrées, and directing the waiters, I was now trying to keep track of a dozen or so steaks on my grill.
Table by table the food went out and, suddenly, or what seemed like suddenly, there was nothing. The printer had stopped, we had all the entrées out, and all the steaks were resting. And not a single table had been called away. For the time being no one had anything to cook. It was nearly silent; a stretched-out instant not unlike those agonizingly long seconds between the moments, say, when you hit a pothole on your bike and when you grind face-first into the ground.
I had that mid-air, slow-motion, floating feeling looking at the dockets flapping in the hot kitchen breeze, and, in a curiously detached manner that so often characterizes these moments, thought that, waving there, somehow they reminded me of Buddhist prayer flags. In what can only be attributed to a combination of the heat, my rising panic, and my thoughts of eastern philosophy, I unexpectedly recalled a passage I read once in the Tao Te Ching, a traditional Chinese Taoist text:
“Ruling a kingdom is like cooking a small fish.”
Admittedly, I remember the quote mostly because of my confusion upon first encountering it. What my philosophy teacher had to explain to me, and what is probably obvious to you, is that when you cook a small fish, the less you poke it and flip it and shake it the more it will stay intact. Therefore, a good ruler will meddle as little as possible, intervening only when the fish needs to be turned, and no more. Given that I never planned on ruling a kingdom, I didn’t see how the advice applied to me.
As I moved up in the hierarchy of the kitchen, I began to understand how the passage was relevant to me. Any sort of management is almost universally better when minimalist, and I make a conscience effort to supervise accordingly.
More recently, as I am asked to lead the kitchen more and more often, I realize the line is also about the degree of difficulty of ruling. To sauté a small fish properly, so that the skin is crisp and brown, but not scorched, and the flesh is just cooked, but never dry, takes practice, skill and finesse. So too running a kitchen. Too much or too little involvement and the whole thing might fall apart.
These, at any rate, were the thoughts firing around in my brain in those free-fall seconds before it all began to happen. Tick, tick-tick, tick, tick. “MAINS AWAY 616! MAINS AWAY 201! MAINS AWAY 314!” One after the other the printer spewed them out. I was firing garnishes as quickly as I could heat pans. Sautéed chestnut mushrooms with white truffle butter in one, warming crushed potatoes and sweet-and-sour eschallots in another, grilling asparagus, all the while firing group after group of fish, skin side down, on my beautiful, chrome plated fish flat-plate.
I must have had a dozen tables on the go at once. My grill was full, ocean trout and snapper and kingfish and swordfish all tucked in neat, space-efficient rows. Counting the flounder in the oven, the resting steaks and duck breasts, I had about forty meals cooking. It actually looked like I was going to pull it together, I was working so quickly, completely focused, keeping it all in my head “First two trout, one king, and a medium rare, then one snapper, one swordie, then a duck, three flounder, one trout, and a king….” I felt good, really good.
Then HE ordered.
“Chef?” Jack, one of our waiters was holding a docket I didn’t hear come in. “Chef? This is a VIP, Mr. L. He’s in a hurry, and its mains only.” I grabbed (maybe “seized” is a better word) the docket. Mains only gives me no time to remove the fridge-chill from the fish, to rest meat properly, I was praying no one on Mr. L.’s table ordered a t-bone well done. Two flounder, one ocean trout, and a snapper (see waiter). “What’s this ‘see waiter’ shit?” “The snapper,” Jack said, “is skin off, grilled, and no mushrooms, he’d like a bit of undressed lettuce on the side. Diet. Please, it’s a rush.” Of course, special order, I’m buried here, and he’s in a rush. Brilliant.
When I turned, grumbling, back to my fish grill, I froze. It was gone. I had it all in my head and now I’d lost it. What order was it coming up in? More importantly: in what order did I fire it? It was like some nightmare version of the card game memory, rows and rows of fish, each with different cooking times and I’d forgotten what was where.
I started flipping fish, taking them off the grill, checking for done-ness, putting them back on, flipping again. I shouted at everyone in the kitchen. “Cold starters, give me three mixed salads and two radicchio salads! Hot starters two sides of beans! Pastry! I don’t care what you are doing; get your ass up here and plate! “Shaun! Stop washing dishes and get me some more leeks, and a tray of ocean trout!”
I didn’t know what I was plating. I just started to put food and dockets on the pass and told the wait staff to figure it out. Somehow I found a spare few seconds to cut the skin from a piece of snapper and slap in on the grill.
Snapper is such a beautiful fish. The skin roasts to a brittle, deep-honey brown and the flesh is cream white, sweet and flakes off in large, moist chunks. I started Mr L.’s naked little fillet on what would have been the skin side, and left it to plate a few other tables. I must have rushed, or not been concentrating, because when I flipped it, the fish flaked, as snapper does, right in half. In a panic I tried to push it together, was a bit too forceful and broke the end off one of the halves.
That’s when things really started to go wrong. I lost my, what should I call it, my touch? My timing? I burnt an entire pan of sautéed cavalo nero, let my duck jus boil over and carbonize on my flat top, splattered scalding olive oil up my right forearm, tore half the skin off a flounder as I was plating it. Standing there, steaks waiting for sauce, blisters forming, pans smoking, I couldn’t think of anything I hated more than that little, skinless, piece of fish.
We, of course, eventually made it through. You always make it, sometimes as a champion more often not. I did get something out of the whole miserable situation. In the middle of it all, waiters asking “How long on 514?” and “Where’s the kingfish for 103?” garnish burning, food going to the wrong tables, fish over cooking, undercooking, Mr. L.’s snapper nearly disintegrating, food going cold, plates too hot, it occurred to me with a painful clarity that I’ve had it all wrong. The excerpt from the Tao Te Ching is not about the difficulty of, or the manner in which one should rule a kingdom. No. The passage, obviously written by a frustrated cook, means this: ruling a kingdom, caring for a nation of people, governing international affairs, national budgets, politics, and all the rest is as easy as cooking a tiny piece of fish. That is, it isn’t.