Sous Chef. Michael Gibney J.
extra side-towels, latex gloves, fish tweezers, and a plastic container of water into which you will discard any pin bones. Above your board is a stack of empty stainless-steel half hotel pans of various depths, into which you will load the fabricated fish when you finish portioning it. Beside the pans is a gram-sensitive digital scale, which you will use to check your cuts for consistency and accuracy. To the left you’ve reserved a spot for the trays of fish that you will bring out from refrigeration successively as you are ready to work on them. Nearby are a roll of plastic wrap, a container of ice, and a slim-jim trash bin.
The knives you have brought out from your kit are your specialty fish knives: the Yo-Deba, the Petty, and the Sujihiki. Like any diligent chef, you’ll take them to a stone before even thinking of cutting fish. But you sharpen your knives daily, so all they need is a few passes on eight-thousand grit to buff the edge to a shiny finish. The process is sensuous. They are obedient as you glide them across the smooth, wet surface of the stone. They’re lined with a slim glister in no time—keen as razors. You fell a few scraps of paper to loosen any burr. The paper flutters to bits at the blades’ touch. They are like katana. You are ready to cut the fish.
The first fish you retrieve from the box is the fluke, a flat whitefish native to the Atlantic waters just off the Long Island coast. Its flesh is a shady pearl color, moist and delicate. Its average weight is two or three pounds, but it can reach ten. It is sturdier than most fish its size, and it stands up to many cooking techniques. It is flaky and meaty at the same time. Its flavor welcomes bold combinations but stands as well on its own. It is versatile and delicious. Fluke is your favorite fish.
The spinal cord of the fluke runs directly down its middle. Whereas round fish are broken up bilaterally into a left and a right side, flatfish such as halibut and fluke can be seen as having four separate quadrants: top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right. Unfortunately, this type of fish allows the careless butcher to carve out four fillets without betraying a lack of ability to the untrained eye. You know, however, that a true craftsman with careful knife work maintains the connection between the two sides of the top half and the two sides of the bottom half. You know to trace the tip of your blade carefully along the spine of the fish at the center, so as to preserve the membrane of skin between the cuts, allowing the fillets to retain their complete cellular integrity and yielding the amplest, supplest harvest of flesh. You try very hard every time you butcher fluke to achieve that. It’s almost a competition you have with yourself. Which is why you’ll cut fish before rolling pasta any day.
Your station is fully set, and the first fluke is on your cutting board. You take a deep breath and start in.
The first stroke of your knife glides hilt deep into the flesh of the fish. You can feel bone on your tip. You begin to trace the spine.
But a clattering at the back door interrupts your work.
“What’s up, bitches!” booms a familiar voice from the entryway.
You glance up from the cutting board. It’s the executive chef. Stefan materializes from the back prep area in a flash.
“What’s up, Chef,” you say, in unison.
“Good news,” says Chef, tinkering on his BlackBerry. “We got a twelve-top at nine o’clock, followed by the Times at nine-thirty. We’re at two fifty and climbing.”
Your knife wavers in your hand. You nick the flesh of the fish inadvertently—a letdown. Chef’s lips peel back like the Cheshire cat’s.
“You boys ready to get your shit pushed in?”
A KITCHEN’S IDENTITY IS SHAPED MAINLY BY TWO THINGS: cuisine and technique—what you cook and how you cook it. They are the obvious differences from one place to the next—Japanese or Italian, say, four-star or greasy spoon. But there are other, less obvious differences as well. The layout, for example, is always unique. The storage spaces, the walk-in boxes, the prep area, the line—they’re positioned differently everywhere you go. Some kitchens have several floors and several rooms devoted to different tasks (pastry shops, sous vide labs, banquet lines, butcheries); other kitchens cram all the tasks into one space. The size and shape of things vary as well. Some spaces are big enough to hold eighty cooks at once; in other places you might cook through an entire night of service without leaving a four-by-four-foot space. In the big places, you use double-stacked combis—computerized super ovens—to make huge batches of things; in the small places you might do everything to order on one six-burner range. Some restaurants are all about volume, turn-and-burn operations where all that matters is the Z report—the financial breakdown at the end of the day; other restaurants focus on the food and the ambiance, exchanging high cover counts for the quality of the experience. Some places can do both simultaneously; such places tend to do well.
Our restaurant is on the finer end of the spectrum. It’s a “Modern American” eatery, tucked into the first floor of an old apartment building on a quiet street in the West Village. We have ninety seats in the dining room and about a dozen more at the bar. We have a small à la carte menu and we do half a dozen plats du jour. Our check average is around $75.00 per person (appetizer, entrée, dessert), plus drinks. We do a turn and a half most weeknights—about a hundred fifty covers, on average—and double that on Friday and Saturday. Monday through Friday we’re dinner only, but we open up for brunch on the weekends.
We don’t quite have the budget to be the finest of the fine, but we do what we can to approximate it. Of the three owners, one is a former chef, so a large chunk of the start-up capital went to outfitting our roughly two-thousand-square-foot kitchen with everything we need. All our equipment is kept in peak working condition, bought new, and well maintained. We don’t fight with finicky pilot lights, our pipes don’t clog, and our refrigerators’ compressors don’t ice over. When a lightbulb goes out, we change it, and if one of the tiles on the wall gets chipped, we have it fixed. We keep the inside of our ovens as clean as the day we got them, and we sweep and mop the floor constantly. Suffice it to say we have our heads on straight.
It’s not uncommon in kitchens like this to find guideposts hanging here and there—“Make It Nice,” for example, or “fi·nesse (fǝ-'nès) noun: Refinement and delicacy of performance, execution, or artisanship,” or some inspirational verse from this or that esteemed culinarian—which remind hardworking cooks to stay focused on what they came here to do. On the tiled wall above the entrance to our kitchen hangs a placard done up in bold print that reads:
FOCUS DISCIPLINE EFFORT CARE
Under this banner marches a group of cooks who resemble the cliché: defiant types with tattoos and chin stubble, carved faces and bags under the eyes; muscle-backed bruisers with dancers’ feet and calloused hands, arms burned hairless and shiny fingernails bitten to the quick. They are what anyone who’s watched a cooking program or read a chef memoir would expect of a kitchen staff. But behind the common façade lies an array of unique personalities.
Bryan, our executive chef, is a thirty-eight-year-old Brooklyn native with chin-length hair and a taste for Glen Garioch. He’s at least half a foot taller than most of the people you know—a lofty six foot five—and his arms and legs are tight with muscles from more than twenty years of service. But two decades of rich food have left his egg-shaped torso appropriately soft to the touch.
A precocious youngster, he dropped out of school at sixteen and moved to Paris. He studied at Le Cordon Bleu and did a four-year tour of apprenticeships at three-star restaurants in France, England, and Italy. That was the way young cooks used to do it: go to Europe, work eighteen hours a day, come back a better person. His was the generation that learned to cook by getting yelled at and pushed around by bulldog chefs in exchange for room and board and a glass or two of wine.
When he got back to America, he didn’t waste any time. Within weeks he fixed himself a position on the line at an au courant French house specializing in fish cookery. They had three stars in the Michelin Guide and four in the Times. By twenty-three, he was chef de