Sous Chef. Michael Gibney J.
the opportunity to help with the specials. Since you take the morning inventory and do all the purchasing, you are the one most fully aware of what we have in-house, you know what needs to be used up and burned out. And so, typically, when Chef comes in, he sits you down in the office and ruminates with you about what to do for service. The two of you brainstorm, philosophize, think about what’s possible in cooking.
The last, and likely most important, reason he has you opening is purely administrative. Since you have extra time during the day as the opener, and since your attention to detail has proved unflinching, he entrusts you with the payroll and the making of the schedule. Not only does this charge acquaint you with the logistical matters associated with operating a restaurant, but also it puts you in unique contact with the cooks. You are responsible for their schedules, so they come to you with requests and conflicts. You are also responsible for their paychecks, so they come to you with gripes. If they want overtime, they ask you; if they need an advance to cover rent, they ask you. You hold the key to their livelihood, and so you act as a sounding board for their financial woes.
Stefan’s position is different. He is the enforcer, the wiry disciplinarian. He has hewn closely to the gold standard of the modern high-order professional kitchen: go hard or go home. He has gone hard since the outset.
By the time he was sixteen, Stefan, a zealous Virginian, had already beaten a path up Hyde Park way. There was no career he was willing to entertain other than cooking and, in his mind, there was no better place to begin pursuing that career than the Culinary Institute of America. When externship season came rolling around, he shot straight for the top, and he hasn’t looked back. He cut his teeth at all the city’s best restaurants and continues to maintain a dogged resistance to dipping below three stars. He’s always checking the listings to see who is opening what and where; he’s always looking for the next hot spot, the next great opportunity. And he’ll take it, too, if it seems like a step forward in his career. He is a soldier of fortune, a survivor, and every success he’s enjoyed thus far he’s achieved by dint of pure tenacity.
His attraction to fine dining makes him the perfect disciplinarian. The only environment he knows is one of utmost intensity. He holds himself and those around him to the highest standard of performance imaginable, and Chef trusts him to preserve that standard at every turn. Although he may look a bit loose at the seams—perpetually scruffy, routinely hungover—he is incapable of doing things inelegantly on the line. He’s a prodigy on the stove, an ace on the pass. And he simply does not know how to conceal his disdain for poor technique. When a cook mishandles a situation, Stefan is usually the first to point it out, loudly and churlishly. He is cutthroat in this respect, and most of the cooks have grown to fear encounters with him.
Right beneath the sous chefs are the lead cooks, the big guns. They tend not to respond to Stefan’s antagonism. These are the people who cook the meat to the right temperature and handle the fish properly—the rôtisseurs and poissonniers. They are the cream of the cooks and they know it, one short step away from management. As such, their jobs require the most skill and trust, and more often than not, the most experience. They are typically older, more graceful, more powerful cooks with booming voices and a due sense of self-worth.
Julio, our rôtisseur, is a forty-year-old Dominican who speaks perfect English and takes insolence from nobody. You never have to worry about him. He is the first to the pass on every pick. His temperatures are always perfect. He eighty-sixes nothing. He gets the job done. And the poise and pride with which he comports himself, combined with his preternatural skills in meat cookery, amount to the perfect recipe for upward mobility, should he ever decide to take the next step in his career.
But Julio is one of those cooks who are content to remain on the line rather than move up the chain. Professional cooking is just something he has always done for work. It is a trade to him, an occupation more than a vision quest. His priorities are elsewhere. He is married, he has children, he owns a home. It seems that his life is full in the outside world, that he’s happy with it the way it is. And the gold wedding ring he wears while he works serves as a perpetual reminder of that.
Raffy, our poissonnier, is of a similar mold. Like Julio, he is phenomenal at what he does. Hailing from Basque country, he, like Chef, has European training, mostly French and Spanish. He is accustomed to long hours and high expectations. His ability with fish is surpassed perhaps only by Chef’s, and his sweeping knowledge of archaic technique (how to flute a mushroom, for example) is enough to incite jealousy.
Unlike Julio, though, Raffy seems fundamentally attracted to professional ascension. He is a sprightly twenty-something anxious to move up the ranks. He really wants to be a chef. And, based on ability alone, he should be. He should have nabbed at least a sous chef position by now. As it stands, however, he remains cloistered on fish roast. It’s his attitude that’s the problem. He’s been known to leave his station a mess at the end of the night; he shows up late from time to time; he tends to petulance when it gets busy; he gravitates toward alcohol after service perhaps a bit too frequently. Simply put, he is immature. So, while he might want to be a chef some day, he’s going to need to button a few things up if he ever hopes to actually get there.
Below the lead cooks are a group that do tend to respond to Stefan’s derisive approach. They are the vegetable cooks—the entremetiers. They are responsible for the “middle work,” which can be very intense. Most of the components on a given plate are prepared by the entremets. For every steak Julio broils or every fish Raffy sears, his respective entremet prepares anywhere from two to twelve garnishes—vegetables, starches, sauces, salads, etcetera. Leaving off the actual proteins, anything in a dish that needs to be sautéed, wilted, steamed, stirred, toasted, folded, roasted, tossed, shaved, pressed, grated, dressed, salted, seasoned, or otherwise treated before it reaches Chef’s hands is the duty of the entremetier.
This can be a special challenge in a restaurant where everything is prepared to order—à la minute. Your average entremet is accustomed to managing fifteen or twenty separate pans of food at once. As a result, usually only the most motivated cooks can work the entremetier station. They are typically young, exuberant cooks with a few years of experience, in the early stages of their development.
Warren and Vinny do this work for us. While their titles are basically the same, they as people could not be more dissimilar.
Warren, an early-thirties curly blond, is our entremet on fish side. He is one of these late bloomers who come to cooking by vocation after an unsuccessful attempt at another career. He studied entomology at Cornell and worked for years in the profession before first taking to the stove. But since his arrival here about six months ago, he’s shown an incredible amount of development. He truly wants to be here, almost needs to be here, and he tries very hard to be as good a cook as he can be. His manner is decorous, his station is spotless, he strives to impress, he is diametrically opposed to sloth, and he hates failure. The cooks call him Juan. Chef Juan, Don Juan, Juanita, Juan Gabriel, etcetera. It started with a general unfamiliarity with the name Warren—Kiko just thought the guy’s name was Juan. But now, though the misunderstanding has long been ironed out, everyone continues to call him that, even the white guys. They’re just razzing him, of course, but Warren’s really bugged by it.
Unlike Warren, Vinny or VinDog, our meat entremet, could not care less what people think of him. A brick shithouse with beefy arms and a bad attitude, VinDog is animated always by some urgent, unquenched irreverence. His neck is tattooed, his face is pierced, and something resembling a Mohawk has been sawn into his head. At first glance, he’s not what you’d expect to find lurking in the wings of a star-rated restaurant.
Nor does he appear to be here because he needs to be. He doesn’t need a restaurant to line his pockets or fill his spirit—he’s happy to get his share by hook or crook. But apparently he prefers cooking to, say, working construction or collecting trash. So about a year ago, when Chef offered to extricate him from a bar-backing gig in Alphabet City, VinDog saw fit to seize the opportunity. Had things gone differently, you’d probably find him slapping up Sheetrock in Chinatown or circling the drain somewhere in Bushwick. It’s questionable, actually, if his real name is even Vinny.
But VinDog exemplifies