Table Talk
Thank you for a deeefrightful evening!
Love Chris’ blog—so fun to taste the source for his inspiration!
Cheers,
Shweta
Thank you for a deeefrightful evening!
Love Chris’ blog—so fun to taste the source for his inspiration!
Cheers,
Shweta
Eating Vincent Price has been a non advertising, members only, word of mouth kind of thing so far and I have no plans to change it.
I will be using Mail Chimp to announce tickets, so please use the link below to join the news letter. I encourage you to invite your friends, family, ex-lovers, various circus freaks, that one tranny from Edinburgh with the hair, your 8th grade science teacher, your mom, your fake mom, or even your arch enemy.
All the cool kids are doing it.
“Lovely Evening—such a fun concept.
FABU:
—rosemary in blintzes!
—non-slimy okra
—gumbo yummy/spicy/not overly “riced”
Thanks!”
I won’t pretend like there’s not a little sniffle behind the clack of keys as I type this: Monday night’s dinner at Clandestino was my last under the immediate mentoring of Chef Efrain Cuevas, Chef Lauren Parton, and the rest of the Clandestino staff.
Normally, I would shed a tear at the dinner but I was too busy glad handing and exhibiting the suave, debonair traits of an experienced, indefatigable, attention whore.
I really hadn’t thought about that until after this dinner was over and I was “cleaning” and “working” in the kitchen and my feet hurt so bad I just wanted to cut them off and I was bitching about something or other and one of my teen bosses carefully explained to me that I hadn’t actually worked as much as I thought I had that day. I had, in fact, been seriously enjoying myself and yakking away and keeping my fat fingers as far away from the pot handles as possible. As I stood there absorbing this lesson, Chef Parton chimed in, explaining, in her perfunctory way, that I was an “attention whore”.
{big sigh}
Merde.
They’re right. I am an attention whore. I love attention. Love. It.
The thing is, this project, as cool as it is, falls squarely in the realm of wish fulfillment and ego pimping. I’m no different from any other couch sous watching Top Chef thinking, shit, man, I could do that. I’m just lucky someone liked my idea and put up with me for six months.
Amazingly lucky.
It’s actual hens in actual clay. Here’s what you do. You clean the hen. You rub it with paprika and a little salt. You fill it with wild rice and pancetta. You wrap it in parchment. You wrap it in clay and make sure the clay is perfectly sealed.
Here’s the reality of it. You have to portion the terra cotta carefully so all the birds have the same clay and cook at the same speed. You have to beat the living crap out of the clay with a big fat rolling pin until you can roll it out into a giant tortilla. Then you lay the birds face down, the parchment seal running up their back, which you’re staring at, then you fold the clay up around them and smooth it all together so it’s a big fat vaguely avian football.
Then you cook them at about 400 for an hour.
Then you serve them on a bed of fresh thyme and mint.
Then your guests bust them open with their butter knife, slice through the parchment, and a little cloud of delicious bird flavored steam wafts up into their beaming, amazed faces.
You have to shave the asparagus into ribbons, then submerge them in cold water until they curl. Make that vinaigrette with capers, dill pickles, dijon, salt, sugar, parsely, onion, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Mix it all up together. Serve it. Watch people swoon.
It’s an apple crumble bread pudding kind of thing. You bake granny smiths down to mash, stir in some zest, some cinnamon, some sugar. You fry up some bread crumbs in butter. You get some rhubarb jelly. You make some whip cream. In the cake pans: crumbs, rhubarb, apple, crumbs, rhubarb, apple, crumbs; bake it at 150 degrees until one of your chefs realizes you’re an idiot.
Kitchen Bitch: “This cake just doesn’t seem to be browning.”
Parton: “What temperature is the oven at?”
Kitchen Bitch: “I am moon.”
What’s the first and foremost rule of cooking? Turn on the fire. We’d made a clay stamp of birds for the hens and baked it at 150 degrees. I never thought about the temperature and ASSUMED Chef had left the oven exactly as I required it because I am moon.
Here’s the critical lesson of timing. The clock doesn’t wait for you. As Don Henley taught us, time keeps on slipping away. By the time we’d discovered the oven was cold enough to make cheese, we were already 40 minutes behind. There is no catching up. You can’t make things cook faster. You will be tempted to crank your oven up to 500 and pray.
So I stalled. I admitted it all to the delight of the staff. I told a story. I wished my friend, Sgt. David Haynes, a happy 70th birthday. I still had 35 minutes left. So I just said: talk amongst yourselves, and went to the kitchen to work on my cake.
The birds came out. Everyone was suitably impressed. I pulled my cakes, inverted them over the plates, and . . . nothing. I had forgotten to butter the sides. So I had to pry my cake from it’s aluminum pan, carefully, which didn’t matter because it collapsed into a . . . not a pile, exactly but a . . . a slump. It was an Ablekage slump. Well, it tasted great and what can you do except pour the glaze and
The glaze.
So, gladhanding takes up a lot of time. While I was out in the dining room toting the book table to table and ruminating and expounded, my food was not being cooked. By me. Fortunately, Parton and Marielly knew exactly what I was doing wrong, cooked everything for me (including the genius idea to glaze the carrots with champagne–droolicious). Then they hid them from me and waited until I needed them, then asked me, three nanoseconds before I thought about it: hey Chris, where’s your glaze? Where’s your whipped cream? What are you going to do?
I am going into cardiac arrest is what I’m going to do.
But, like always, Parton and Marielly, or the Merciless Evil Queens of Utter Terror, as their friends call them, basically pulled these two rabbits out of a hat and the food was on track. I ladled the glaze over the cake, inhaling the delicious perfume of drunken rhubarb, then attempted to quenelle the cream but I don’t know how to quenelle cream. My slumps looked like they’d been murdered in a powdered wig. Parton came over, stared in mute horror, and DID NOT BUST MY BALLS at all, which is the very worst. It means the result was so bad you couldn’t even make a wry crack about it. You just had to smile and hope everyone survived.
Of course, here’s the truth in Kitchens: the table doesn’t know. To them, this dessert is supposed to look like a dead English barrister muppet. Hell, it tasted awesome. No one complained.
After it was all over, some guests lingered, some shook my hand, some gave me great big bear hugs, and one person exhibited the kind of gracious aplomb you rarely see when service at a dinner goes south, as mine did, during the toast.
Manny Martinez, you sir are a mensch. So is your delightful arm candy, Sara. When I poured the champagne for the toast, I was missing a bottle. I opened the fridge and ganked what I thought was a bottle of champagne. It was not a bottle of champagne. It was an award winning rare Riesling with a champagne cork. I didn’t even read the label. I poured it and kept going. Thought it was one of mine.
When Martinez came asking about his wine which we had been chilling in the fridge, I realized what I’d done, apologized, and begged him not to hit me. To my surprise, he thought it was funny. He thought it was hilarious. He didn’t pitch a fit. He didn’t complain. He wouldn’t even accept repayment. Total gentleman. I’m raising a glass to you, Mr. Martinez: you are the man.
And so here we are at the end of another verbose post, sad that it’s over—but it’s not over. This was my last dinner with Clandestino. Hell, you think an attention whore like me is going to quit this gig? I’m looking for the perfect place. I’m working on it. Stay tuned. The dinners will continue.
{from the Treasury of Great Recipes, pp. 256; Sardi’s, 1963}
Serves 6
“This is an excellent cold vegetable to use instead of a salad. It is also an interesting way to serve leftover asparagus, than which there is nothing limper and sadder looking when you open your refrigerator door. The vinaigrette sauce perks it right up, and does well by cold boiled artichokes and salads, too.”
—Vincent Price
This will be one of our vegetables Monday night. We may not be serving it cold from the fridge, but we will be serving it with this vinaigrette sauce.
In the book, many recipes call for canned ingredients, but here is an exception. Though Mr. Price insists you cook Asparagus Milanese then chill it especially for this dish, the jury is still out on that.
Ingredients:
cooked asparagus
dill pickle
onion
capers
olive oil
dry mustard (optional)
parsley
pimiento
egg
salt
wine vinegar
lemon (optional)
We’ll be throwing another dinner, Monday, March 26th. This will be a graduation banquet, as it will be my final dinner with the good people of Clandestino Dining, and under the tutelage of Chef Efrain Cuevas. The dinners will continue. I’m looking at venues on the North West Side, where I live. There’s a beautiful old clubhouse in the woods that it completely under used. Beams. Stone. Fireplace. Hopefully, it will work. If not, we eat in my yard.
In the meantime, you may enjoy these teases of dishes from the upcoming dinner.
First, our starter comes from Sobrin de Botin, feeding bullfighters of Madrid since 1725, arguably the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the known world (though Tour d’Argent, in Paris, thinks otherwise). The Tortilla con Escabeche.
We first served this starter back in July, for the Spanish dinner. It was a hit and people have been asking for its return. Normally, we wouldn’t repeat, but this dinner marks a new beginning and eggs are the perfect symbol.
I am told by Chef de Cuisine, Lauren Parton, that this is an easy dish. My attempts to recreate it make me think she’s messing with me. Where Parton had delivered what I took as a vegetarian faux gras, I plated what appeared to be the naked, convulsing corpse of Sponge Bob Square Pants.
I will try again, on March 26. In the meantime, I beseech thee to Google Spanish Tortilla con Escabeche and marvel how NONE of them are anything like the magnificent huevosity we obtained in July.
Toast: Absinthe cocktail
Starter: La Terrine de ris d’Agneau
Soup: Potage Tour d’Argent
Main: Carnard a l’Orange Entier avec Pommes grille
Dessert: Gateau Grand Marnier
This was a valentines menu but some people had trouble seeing the hearts and cupids embedded in the dishes. That’s because I took a different approach to love. My idea was about resonance and luxury.
Love is luxurious—not in the sense of something arch and unnecessary, but in the sense that it is rich and overwhelming. We fall in love, we swoon, we die into it. These are dramatic, luxurious emotions wherein joy and fear elide into something indefinable. In every case, it is about a union, even if only briefly, that saturates our senses: Sweetbreads and pork cheeks are joined in a terrine; duck confit is married to a citrine glaze; cake is infused with brandy. It is the rich and the mundane; the solid and the volatile; the fruit and the bird.
However, those dishes are all just heavy petting. True love is unconditional, simple, and timeless. For true love in this menu, we look to the soup, Potage Tour d’Argent, the chef soup from a restaurant that’s been serving it since Henry IV sat at their table in 1582 (the year William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway—and he knew something about love). This soup, so plain, so normal, nearly unculinary in its simplicity, was surely the first thing the chef ever loved. I imagine his grandmother made it for him when he was a boy. She used just a miripoix and two kinds of beans in a pot. But it tastes so good, so unchallenging, so embracing, how could it not be his favorite? Prepared with love, received the same way, a lasting symbol of care in its highest form: to feed someone something delicious because they matter to you more than the whole world. That soup was true love.
So many little things went wrong with our most recent dinner I thought I was being pranked. I briefly wondered if Chef E was secretly testing my ability to deal with minor inconveniences and the ever-present Murphy’s Law of cooking.
The first inconvenience: Chef P was in the process of dying and could not prep or make it day of. She lived, thank God, but was not there for the critical part of cookingat an EVP event wherein Chef E wants to do something wildly unconventional, something ungodly and against the laws of Escoffier and Chef P has to wrestle him into at least nodding toward the classic techniques. In the midst of this quiet riot, yours truly trying to figure out to learn.
This left Chef E and I on our own, like two mischievous nine-year-olds left at home when mom’s away. We promptly had beer and glazed pork belly for our kitchen lunch and dressed like this:
Chef Efrain chopping onions.
More things cropped up at every step.
But, like always, we blew through it all like we were on fire, falling off a cliff. Once 40 people have paid their ticket and are en route, you can’t stop and regroup. You just make shit up.
The absence of sweetbreads turned out to be a non-problem as Chef E knew a guy. The mechanic was at the chop on a Sunday so, no problem. Willy would have been redundant as we cooked with such alarming precision, we didn’t need him. The squash was resolved on the fly by blanching it in the duck stock then tossing it back in the over under the duck, which turned out to be a better idea than what the recipe called for. The guy as table one was not sick, he was actually having a great time and, perhaps, I had miscounted his trips to the lou.
As it turned out, this was one of the easiest dinners. The Sweetbread Terrine was done ahead; duck l’orange is way easier than it sounds; we blanched the haricots vert in the duck stock which was brilliant and gave them just a little more flavor; the absinthe cocktail was well received. We had shitloads of help from Maryelly, Daphne, the Acupuncturist, and Chef E’s cousin, [....] who is a line cook so his prep was blister quick. We actually may have been overstaffed and I got to walk around and practice my front of the house persona, Mr. Smooth, who gave away Mandaquats and answered questions about Absinthe.
As this was a French dinner, I was a little nervous about the authenticity. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. There was a French teacher (she’s a teacher, from France, not a teacher of French) who raved about the dinner, saying it was the most authentic French fare she’d had in Chicago since her arrival. I think that’s what she said. Honestly, she was beautiful and had a French accent and I couldn’t pay attention.
Those of you in the know out there, you restauranteurs and cooks and pop-up aficionados who already know about the glorious paradise that is Jetro, just shut up and let me rant. Holy crap am I in food geek love! Jetro is like Costco for Chefs. They have everything. Boxes of duck, giant bags of asparagus, buckets of spleen, chef’s jackets—everything. I staggered around like a kid visiting Toys-R-US for the first time. I wanted everything. Chef E had to cuff me to the cart. I was just roundhousing shit onto our cart, drooling, shouting OH MY GOD! Fortunately, there were a lot of cooks there, and a lot of Chinese takeout store owners, who were audibly rolling their eyes or clipping me in the knees, respectively.
Our dinner in March will mark a milestone for Kitchen Bitch, as I will graduate from Kitchen Bitch to Kitchen Bitch-all-on-your-own. When Chefs E & P and I charted this thing back in June 2011, it had an end date. Somewhere in the geek joy overload of working with actual chefs and actual food and knives and shit, I forgot all about that and thought I was going to be working with them for the rest of my life. Uh . . . not so much. Yes, with all the emotion of a door knob[1 not at all true. Efrain cried and Lauren made me brownies], they’re kicking me out on my own. Beginning April something something, 2012, Kitchen Bitch steps out as a big league pop-up restauranteur with Eating Vincent Price.
It will be smaller. Maybe. I don’t know. There are conflicting confidences on this. Chef d’l'Rebel says I’m ready to do this. Chef d’l'classique just keeps laughing.
I know, in terms of skill, mine are lacking considerably. Watching chefs and doing a little prep work under their tutelage is not the same as learning in class or working a line. I am slightly better than your below-average home chef. I’m constantly learning technique—but also constantly learning how much I don’t know. Worse, I’m 47 with the body and endurance of a dead clown. 13 hour days make me tired. And by tired, I mean call 911. The question is not just can I hack the technique, but can I hack the labor? Can I endure the hours? Am I, in the words of every anti-hero in every Hollywood action movie, getting to old for this shit?
In my journey from dishwasher to senior dishwasher, a couple of chefs and stages have noticed I have talent, an iron-horse work ethic—and I’m cheap. So, so cheap. Thus, I’ve been whored out on occasion, one of them being the launch of Chef Lauren Parton’s incredible speakeasy, Sub Rosa.
I am prone to hyperbole. I have a hair trigger flatter tendency. I have been known to write with the kind of open gonzo enthusiasm and lack of objectivity that makes real journalists sneer and throw things at me. Although I have responded to their criticism with my monkey parts en flagrante, I have to admit there’s some truth in it. I am not easily impressed but when I am impressed, I’m all in.
So as I’ve been charting my rise to busboy, it may appear I’ve been neglecting the nasty parts. Some people have asked “Where’s all the yelling and the throwing shit and people crying like we see on TV?” Where, they wonder, are the fuck-ups?
Well, there just aren’t any. I know, it seems unlikely that in 7 months of cooking and whoring out and being behind enemy lines, I’d see something on fire, find someone screaming in childish rage, or at least witness a fist fight or two. But it just hasn’t happened. Either I’ve lucked into a group of cooks reared by Miss Manners, or all that TV shit is bogus.
I say this to prepare you for some extreme joy ranting: I recently whored-out at Sub Rosa and it was way, WAY, cool.
It was one of those moments I’ll remember for years: my first commercial kitchen. Parton leases a kitchen in a church in one of those super hip Chicago neighborhoods where people walking down the sidewalk are often indistinguishable from people staring at you from the covers of magazines. It is pro-Starbuckian with a declining tattoo-&-ear-gauge inclination. Walking down the street made me feel like I needed a better haircut. Maybe some boots.
Stepping into Parton’s kitchen was one of those slow-motion scenes where I do a chick-flick slow turn to Vesti la Guibba.
Act! While in delirium,
I no longer know what I say,
or what I do!
And yet it’s necessary… make an effort!
Bah! Are you not a man?
You are such a hipster!
Followed by a record-skip snap back into reality when Parton hands me a bag of pears and a recipe sheet and tells me to make the Pear & Tillagio Gelato.
Haven’t I been here before: standing before the beckoning flames of a large professional stove, unsplenetic and discomposed? Nearly 50 and having survived Regeanomics, the rise of alt-rock, and two highly intelligent children, I can tell you: this mode is not a novelty. The kitchen, however, is.
Unlike the shoebox galley at the world famous barbeque joint where I cooked in November, the Church Kitchen was a model of order and cleanliness. Gordon Ramsey would not be puking in their bathroom. More importantly, it all seemed to make sense to me. More or less. It felt good. Comfortable. Serene. Gleaming; delightfully unfucknacular.
I could work in a joint like this.
We got down to business. To my untrained eye, there were seventy-four bazillion things happening at once. Parton was making the following three dishes and a cocktail:
Each one of those has at least 5 parts and each part has about 5 steps. That’s 125 things to do. That’s about 125 more than I’m used to. I was not nervous. I was not overwhelmed. I was ready for it. Actually, I couldn’t wait.
Chef Parton swears to me she was nervous about this launch and about to pass out. From an observer’s viewpoint, she may have been talking slightly faster on her cell. That’s about it. No cussin. No throwin. No bullshit. It was all work and order. And all this while she knows she’s not only launching this brand new kick ass thing, she’s doing it in front of the ever present cameras of 190 North.
No pressure.
The password is 'George Clooney'
Normally I rock a suit. I’m a big guy so there’s lots of cloth. Jowly. Shatneresque. I am the quintessential doorman. I started my night at the top of the stairs of the back entrance to the TOTALLY SECRET KILLER PRIVATE ROOM as people ascended from the alleyway, bringing me the password. The first ten people all whisper in my ear or giggle the password. I’m loving my job as doorman. I’m wearing my Freemason’s black suit with a bright crimson Vegas tie and silver cufflinks you could sink a ship with. I’m trying out various responses for when someone doesn’t have the password (soft open=lots of comps), trying to find that wiggle between hilarious and menacing. I’m thinking I’m there when a delightful, attractive woman with a sharp platinum haircut and expensive glasses shows up.
“Password.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have the password.”
“Well, we may have a problem.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I will probably have to throw you down the stairs.”
Now, up to here it’s been all chuckle chuckle. And I’ve been led to believe I am tolerable, if not outright suave. But this point of view is atomized by this woman’s next four words:
“But, I’m Lauren’s Mom.”
Bingo. I’m a douche bag. Engage faux pas recovery charm:
“You . . . are so beautiful!”
Allow me to introduce Herpa and his brother Derpa.
Everyone is in. I unsuit and apron up. I get to plating the amuse. Marshmallows. Parton hands them to me, says:
“Ok, cut these into bite size squares, all of them exactly the same size, dredge them through the powdered sugar, add the jam, place the leaf on top. Do it like this.” I look at Parton’s hands, which blur through a sleight of hand routine producing a gorgeously cut, powdered, jammed and leafed amuse bouche the way a magician ends up with a dove. I actually looked at my hands as if I couldn’t believe such snausage-like appendages could produce such a tea-cup of a dish.
And marshamallows. Avacado marshmallows.
“Got it? Great, I have to go out and do T.V.,” she turns at the door. “And Chris—don’t fuck up.”
Jesus. No pressure. Mom is in the house. 190 North’s Klieg’s come on like jet engines in slow mo. First night of a brand new big city Speakeasy. Unique dishes cooked by a fat guy in cufflinks.
No prob.
I zoom into it. I roll up my sleeves. I plate like crazy. Tyler Core keeps popping into the room bouncing bon mots of the roofbeams and giving me booze. Parton’s friends and family hustle in and out wanting to cook, wanting to plate, wanting to help, introducing themselves. I am appalled—appalled—at how good looking they are. The cooking, plating, frying, mixing, and not-fucking-upping I’m handling with some kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it aplomb, but the good looking people need to back off. Suddenly, a tray is ready—but Parton is mid interview and Danamite Chen is already serving and Tyler Core is mid witticism. There are hungry people out there and these sliders I just finished need to get in them.
I grab the tray. I’m surfing a wave of accomplishment. I did this shit. I cooked the fuck out of those sliders. I grab a tray and mosey out into a room so perfectly decorated I almost tripped, filled to the rafters with extras from Entourage. I leaned over a bevy of clearly brilliant professionals as sweat exploded off my upper torso and I realized I had no rap. I did not know you’re supposed to say something about the food. I herpped and derpped as a penumbra of perspiration orbited my head like a fog. There was a nanosecond as the cluster of gorgeous took in my crazed manic countenance then, before fear could set in, noticed the food and it was like I didn’t exist.
Seriously. That’s it.
This project started out as a way to get a book deal. I think there’s a good book in this and I felt that cooking with pros would push me to do a better job than doing it only at home. I suspected that adding the potential for public failure would add exactly enough pressure to give the work tension. And it has.
What I did not expect, what did not occur to me when I started this, was that I was not just manifesting a good idea for a book. What I didn’t know is how learning to cook is such an emotional journey. I know, hokey as shit. I know. I know. But it’s real.
The range of emotions I’ve gone through while working the Eating Vincent Price dinners is simply more than I normally entertain in my regular life as a writer. My standard level hovers somewhere between mildly curious and slightly miffed. I don’t do fear. I don’t get mad. I don’t feel intense joy. But in the kitchen, I’ve felt all of them.
Feeding people is intimate. I didn’t know that when I started. It’s not erotic, though many might make that argument. It is about feeling and taste. I am doing something that gives someone else pleasure. There are lips. Tongues.
But no, that’s a cheap petition. It is sensual, not erotic. They are related, not identical.
But sensuality is important. All great art makes an effort to reach some kind of perfect marriage of the senses. You might argue this is achieved in a great film, a cinematic triumph of intellectual rigor, photographic genius, and music.
I would argue for a great dinner.
This is what I’m learning, as I burn myself and cut myself over the stove, that, like great art, food communicates beyond language. It is a story without words. A spell. An enchantment.
These people I’m learning from, they think in food. They see the world as a vast, delectable pantry. They’re wizards and I am the bumbling apprentice who makes one wrong move and the whole lab goes up in a colorful flash. Cue the trombone.
In our November dinner, I was given the incredible opportunity to cook in a restaurant kitchen instead of using camp stoves. I found myself standing in the cramped quarters of a world class barbeque joint doing a slow motion spin as a single cromagnificent thought derpped through my mind: Look at all those pans.
But not for long. I had lessons to learn.
I needed to throw a big assed pan on the fire and sear me some meat. But I couldn’t figure out which pan. Do I grab the big assed iron pan or the even bigger big assed iron pan; or do I use the double handled gigantor pan you could sear a rhino with? Oh, and what’s this thing for and oh my god look at all the knives! And is that a 5 gallon bucket of sea salt? Holy shit! Is that a stock pot? I could fucking sleep in that thing! Jesus Mary and—
“Chris!”
“What!”
“Sear that fucking lamb!”
I don’t know how to sear a lamb. I don’t know how to sear a piece of baloney. I’m a writer, not a chef. But Efrain and Lauren threw me on the stove because they believe in the sink or swim school of learning how to sear. Naturally, I had questions.
“Chef, how hot do I get the pan?”
Naturally, Chef P had answers. In her usual way, she delineated in precise detail the method and best practices for bringing a pan up to the exact degree required to sear fresh lamb:
“I want that pan hot as shit!”
“Chef! How do I know when it’s done? is there a therm—”
Chef P grabs my tongs, slams a piece of lamb onto the pan, where it sizzles and pops. A few minutes later she picks it up and looks and shows it to me.
“You see that?”
“Yeah?”
“Do that.”
So I’m herpa derping at the panoply of gadgets, pans, knives, bains, fridges, the Hobart, the prep station, the fire—
“Hey!”
“Yes, chef!”
“Don’t you burn my fucking lamb!”
Back to work. Sear the lamb. Saute mushrooms. Braise the vegetables.
Before the dinner, I asked if I could make a special cocktail for the toast. The dinner was on my wife’s birthday; I thought it would be nice to toast her with our wedding drink, a Kir Royale—champagne with creme d’ cassis.
Our dinner was for 34 people and I was supposed to get the cups, the champagne, and the cassis. On the day of, I was hitting the liquor store looking for proseco (like champagne, but more squirrely). I put everything on a table went to the kitchen and went to work.
When it came time for the toast, Chef E asked me where the glasses were. I didn’t have them. I asked if we could yank champagne flutes from the bar. Efrain reminded me we were guests and gave me the very gentlest, bare hint of a stern look which for Chef E is going pretty far. I didn’t want it in plastic glasses. E was kind of letting me know there wasn’t a lot of options.
I went into the room and starting passing drinks down the table. It was a cluster fuck. It was silly. I was losing my cool.
Enter Lorenzo.
Lorenzo is a Chicago photographer who, like many great artists, works a day job in an upscale restaurant. He’s a professional server, the kind of talented front of the house guy who helps open new places and train a team. He’s tops. He can spot stupid from a mile off and he had no trouble seeing me step on my own tongue in front of God and everybody. Lorenzo was out photog that night but he set his lenses down, hip checked me into a jukebox, and took over. He put all the drinks on trays like in a real restaurant and the toast was saved.
This may not sound like much, but it was vital to the smoothocity of the evening. Everything in a dinner comes down to a moment: The moment you bite through a perfectly prepared amuse; the moment you taste a fisty red. Or, the moment you find a hair in your bernaise, the moment you taste burnt broccoli. A great dinner is a house of cards juggled by a madman—everything can come crashing down in a moment. Or be saved in one.
Thanks to Lorenzo, I avoided looking like a dick.
Lorenzo also has the same no bullshit attitude I’m learning is part and parcel in the industry and will tell you flat out if you’re becoming especially cro-mag which he did (with a grin) directly after he saved my toast.
All that stuff I said upfront about cooking for people being an act of magic and flowers and hippies and fluffy bunnies? Total bullshit without craft.
Craft is not skill. Craft is using skills exactly the same way every time you use them. Craft is searing a lamb in any pan in any kitchen for any meal exactly the same way. Without craft, your skills and talent are exactly diddly squat. What I’m learning right now is not skills, and I certainly am not ready to claim any talent. What I am doing is developing craft. Technique. Vocabulary. Everything from remembering to yell BEHIND when you’re lugging a vat of boiling oil just millimeters from someone’s ass, to knowing exactly how hot the pan should be from how the oil looks in it. It’s all craft.
Knowing how to chiffonade is a skill. Doing it exactly the same size every single time you do it is craft.
I’m not ready to cook for 30 people who paid good money for it yet. Not because I lack confidence, not because I lack skills, but because I haven’t put in my time. I haven’t developed my craft.
No one has said this to me. In fact, Parton and Cuevas are perfectly willing to throw me on the stove. But as I learn more, I realize how far I am from that coveted title, that address I’m fighting for here: Chef.
I’m miles away.