Sous Chef. Michael Gibney J.
suspect, his cook’s chops are nonpareil. That he owes his skill-set entirely to Chef’s mentoring is undoubted, but that he is able to survive in this environment speaks to his own adaptability and to that of the kitchen as well.
Below Warren and VinDog is Catalina, our garde manger. Garde mangers are the salad cooks, the appetizer specialists. They are usually entry-level line cooks, working out of a satellite station alongside pastry on the cold side. They prepare mostly small cold items such as hors d’oeuvres, amuse-bouches, and salads, with occasional responsibility for desserts. They have less seniority than the cooks on the hot side, but they almost always outrank the guys back in prep. They do work the line, as it were, which is always a source of pride and some variety of authority in the kitchen hierarchy.
Five-two, thirteen stone, gold-toothed, and bangle-wristed, Catalina assumes all the authority she can muster. She epitomizes the hard-nosed constitution for which Mexican women are famous. She has come to be a sort of matriarch in our operation and, as is to be expected, she tackles her motherly duties vigorously. After her day off, she’ll return to work with a stack of tortillas, a wheel of queso fresco, and a bushel of tomatillos and prepare flautas con salsa verde for the entire kitchen team. When someone burns or cuts himself, she is the first to arrive on the scene with ground pepper and tomato, to stop the bleeding, disinfect, and numb the pain. And on the unlikely occasion that a rodent should venture into the kitchen, she’ll make quick work of taking it down—often grabbing it with her bare hands, muffling it up in a to-go bag, dispatching it with a whack or two on the ground, and pitching it into the dumpster out back of the loading dock.
Catalina is esposa to the A.M. prep cook, Rogelio; tía to the P.M. prep cook, Brianne; and madre to our favorite dishwasher, Kiko. They make a nice little family, the four of them, and they contribute a significant amount to our operation’s skeletal system.
Rogelio, or Don Rojas, as we often refer to him, is indispensable. In addition to his duties receiving and unpacking deliveries, he’s also responsible for the bulk of our production work. He takes care of the daily basics such as sliced garlic, peeled vegetables, and snipped herbs, which need to be ready by the time the cooks arrive. But his main area of focus is the large-format projects. We have him doing all our pickling and preserving, making all our stocks and bouillons, and, probably most important, maintaining many of our sous vide systems. He is responsible for most of the ROP and HACCP logging, for monitoring the pars on our compression and infusion projects, and for executing all our multiday braises. Without him, our sous vide output would be a fraction of what it is. Suffice it to say, we get to cook the way we do in large part because of the work that Rogelio does.
Brianne is equally vital. She arrives in the afternoon and carries us through to the bitter end. Her strength is batch work—the foodstuffs that get made every couple of days: aiolis, sofritos, vinaigrettes, etcetera—and she devotes most of her time to working on projects of this sort. She’s possessed by a certain spirit of inquiry, so working with recipes and learning to perfect them is a main goal of hers. She is also ambitious to ascend the ranks, and it shows in her performance. Tireless, punctual (if not early), determined, eager, curious, never failing to lend a hand—these are only a few of the ways that Brie could be described. And it comes in handy, this work ethic of hers, especially on busy nights when the linesmen need to re-up on mise en place throughout service. Brie is the queen of ancillary prep work. She is always there to fill the gaps.
And then there is Kiko—our chef plongeur. The word “exhaustion” doesn’t appear to be part of this man’s lexicon. This is not uncommon among dishwashers—a steadfast devotion to hard, mindless labor, an appetite for constant activity. Kiko works basically around the clock washing dishes, putting in doubles most of the week. On top of that, he never turns down overtime. As a result, his paychecks are huge, which is probably why he is generally pleasant with everybody (except Raffy, whose insouciance toward the dish team seems to boil Kiko’s blood). He’s also the acting ambassador for the rest of the dish crew, which consists of an overnight steward, a weekend pot washer, and a pair of P.M. dish men, all of whom are seldom seen and even less frequently heard from.
Outside this core group of cooks and dishwashers, a few others join our team intermittently. We have the part-time pastry faction, consisting of a consulting pastry chef and baker, who come in extremely early on Mondays and Thursdays to set up the batters, doughs, and sauces for our dessert program; we have the stagiaire set, a regular rotation of cooking school externs who come in for a day or two at a time to study our technique; and we have the back waiters, a trio of low-ranking floor staffers led by Hussein, our Bengali chef de rang.
Back waiters are the unhailed linchpins of the dining experience. They are the people who run the food to the dining room and the people who bring back the empty plates. They are the ones who set the tables and the ones who clear them as well. They deliver glassware, light candles, refresh waters, and fetch sides of ketchup. And when a group of guests has left a table, they move quickly and efficiently to ready it for the next set. Simply put, they perform all the unobserved graces that diners have come to expect from restaurants. And whereas servers and bartenders and managers and maître d’s represent the face of the restaurant—taking orders, fielding questions, explaining things to guests—the back waiters do their jobs in relative anonymity.
But the most important role the back waiters play is informant to the kitchen. They are our eyes and ears out front. They tell us which tables are ready for their next courses and which ones we should slow down on. They let us know what sections and servers are slammed and whom we can expect big tickets from soon. They notify us when important guests arrive and they remind us where they are sitting. They have the presence of mind to alert us when the dining room is filling up so we can be ready, and the kindness of heart to inform us when it is emptying out so we can begin breaking down. And, unlike most other FOH staff, who can sometimes get caught up coddling customers, back waiters always have time throughout service (and usually make it a point) to update us on how people seem to be enjoying their meals. Which is why, even though they are technically a constituent of the waitstaff, we often regard the back waiters as members of the kitchen team—an affiliation they readily accept. They are back here with us most of the night, working out of the limelight, so their allegiance lies with us.
With all these individuals scampering around during service, much can go wrong very quickly. It’s a plate-spinning act, which could topple over in pieces at any moment. A chef’s goal during any given meal period is to prevent this from happening—to sustain a fusion of all the moving parts, to keep the team together, to keep the bus driving straight. There will always be the clatter of pots and pans, the din of voices—professional cooking is a loud racket—but when service is performed fluidly, artfully, all the noise can be mistaken for silence. There’s a certain harmony to the sound, and it’s almost as though you don’t even hear it.
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