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 cuisine there, second in command, leaving a trail of dejected strivers in his wake. Fluency in the language, European training, and a sadistic approach to competition helped him more than just a bit. A native misanthropy made it easy for him to stop caring about the throats he had to cut on the way to the top. Since then, he’s never looked back, helming several of his own places ranging from dives in Williamsburg to posh spots uptown. He’s traveled the country consulting on everything from restaurant openings to commercial mustard production.
With such a pedigree, it’s easy to wonder why he’s here now, at this midsize restaurant in the West Village that’s lucky to clear a couple million a year, when he could be making well into six figures in an easygoing position in corporate consulting or as a television personality. Here he works seventy-five-hour weeks, brings in about eighty grand, and deals every day with the incessant budgetary constraints, the half-baked floor staff, and the nettlesome hipster critics common to any midrange star-rated restaurant. For your average forward-looking cooks and chefs, these are simply the conditions of development, burrs under the saddle to be shed with growth in the industry. We fantasize about what great space and equipment and freedom we’ll have in our future fine-dining restaurants. We grin and bear the daily struggle with the conviction that there is something better a few years down the road. But Bryan, whose foot-long résumé shames all of ours, grapples with the difficulties still. And he seems to do so by choice.
You could say that he does so because a place of this size allows him to realize a vision—a luxury that the big paycheck of a larger operation might not afford him. In a corporate restaurant, the food he’d make wouldn’t be his, it’d be the company’s. To even get a dish on the menu at such a place requires an elaborate process of hoop jumping. Tastings with the director of food and beverage, with the corporate chef, with the national director of restaurants—it’s bureaucracy at its messiest. By the time a new dish arrives on the menu, it’s lost all traces of spontaneity and freshness. It’s gone stale. So you could say that Bryan is here because he has a special vision of how food is supposed to be made and he likes getting to do it that way every day.
You could also say that he does it because he is a chef of the kitchen, a chef who cooks, too. That is to say, he’s here because he wants to be here, in the flames, in the heat, on the line. He is captivated by the act of cooking, by the warmth that comes off the stove, by the sweat that comes with a full day of work. He likes having his hands on everything, his fingers in all the pies. And he knows that here, unlike the corporate kitchen (where the majority of one’s days are spent in the office analyzing invoices and managing food cost), here he actually gets to cook things.
Or perhaps you could say it’s something else. He is getting old in chef years, after all; perhaps he’s burning out. Perhaps it’s his only option. This happens sometimes in restaurants: a decade goes by and business dwindles. Ten years in this industry is like two dozen in another. The food one makes might still be great (a chef’s instincts stay with him always), but after so many years, customers inevitably grow tired of his fare. They want what’s cutting-edge, not the dusty old names of decades past. And with each passing year, staying ahead of the curve becomes harder and harder. So the chef gives the restaurant up, jumps ship. But what awaits him? His cook’s pittance is nothing to retire on; he has to keep working. All he knows is cooking, so he stays in the business. But since his name no longer attracts the avant-garde food enthusiasts, he does his cooking at a lower volume in smaller places—trattorias, bistros, ateliers—where he can engage the act of cooking and explore his curiosities without the same level of pressure intrinsic to high-budget establishments. He retires out of fine dining proper and into the small, privately owned house.
With Bryan, it’s hard to say which of these conditions apply. He’s still full of piss and vinegar over cooking; you can tell that he loves the process. And he certainly doesn’t lack energy in the kitchen, or creative ebullience. But the gray hairs nested around his ponytail, his ruddy skin, the distant look in his eyes when he slaps you up and says “See you in the morning”—these tell a different story. Like most people in his position, he’s difficult to read.
Whatever the case may be, he’s here now and he is Chef. And when he’s in the kitchen and the whites are on, it is embarrassing to think of addressing him any other way. There is no “Bryan” in the kitchen—no “Bry,” no “man” nor “dude” nor “buddy”—only Chef. He is the lodestar, the person everyone looks up to. He commands respect and exudes authority. His coats are crisp and clean, his pants are pressed, his hair is tied back neatly. He has more experience than anyone else in the kitchen; he knows more about food than anyone else in the kitchen; he can cook better than anyone else in the kitchen. He is the best butcher; he is the best baker. He’s the sheriff, the chief, the maestro. He choreographs. He directs. He makes the difficult look easy. His finesse is ubiquitous.
And then, what would any great leader be without his second in command? In a chef’s case, this is his sous chef. The sous chef (from the French meaning “under chef”) is the lieutenant, the executor of Chef’s wishes. He is at Chef’s side seventy hours a week or more, for good or for bad, a perpetual Mark Antony to Chef’s Julius Caesar. Out of this devotion grows a lasting bond. A chef always looks out for his sous chef; a sous
