long after the stoves are turned off and the aprons are hung up. While other cooks are apprenticed to the kitchen, the sous is apprenticed directly to Chef. He is not there to learn how to cook properly or how to organize a restaurant—he is expected to have these skills already. Instead, the sous works with Chef on developing leadership, moxie, brio—the subtler elements of the craft. He’s not just learning how to be a cook, he’s learning how to become a chef. And at this point in his career he is one rung away from that achievement.
The position can be difficult. It requires a peculiar disposition that is foreign to most. Not only does it entail a uniquely large amount of physical labor—twelve to fifteen hours per day, six or seven days per week—but also it engenders a certain kind of ambivalence. That limbo between cook and chef, where the taste of clout is tempered yet by the burden of compliance, is no easy place to dwell, especially for the veteran sous. The gratitude and pride intrinsic to the appointment are not without some tinge of bitterness; the excitement of power is not without a trace of fear. To wit, you want to be Chef. You want your name on the menu. You’re tired of doing all the work and getting none of the recognition. Yet deep down you wonder if you’re really ready to assume all the responsibility that comes with authority, to take all the blame that goes along with credit. It’s a charge replete with dualities, and at the end of the day you’re left straddling the fulcrum, made to decide for yourself whether the student in you has what it takes to become the master.
In our kitchen, as in many others like it, there are two sous chefs: you and Stefan. To those unfamiliar with it, a setup like this might seem dangerous. Having a pair of lieutenants could be fertile earth for competition—who outranks whom, for example, who is the real right-hand man. But you know there is no room for rivalry in this part of the kitchen. The two of you represent the upper echelon and you must work in concert with each other, and with Chef as well, to form a unified corps of governance. Your cohesion as a group is crucial to the fluid operation of the restaurant. Dissension among you will undoubtedly lead to ruin: recipes get garbled, techniques and attitudes begin to vary among the cooks, consistency diminishes, and ultimately the restaurant goes bust. So you do well as members of the sous chef team to reserve your competitive zeal for the outside world.
Fortunately, each of you serves a distinct function for Chef. Like knives in a tool kit, he’s selected you individually based on certain character traits that satisfy specific needs of his. You each help complete the kitchen’s picture with specialized contributions.
At the most basic level, you are the opener and Stefan is the closer. You come in earlier; Stefan stays later. What this means is that Chef trusts you to arrive on time in the morning and get everything set for dinner service. He expects you to handle the detail-oriented matters of purchasing and receiving, inventory and organization. He expects you to turn the kitchen’s lights on. Because of you, he can wake up in the morning without worrying that some emergency requires his presence at the restaurant. He knows that you are here and so he can take his time getting in because, it’s assumed, you have everything under control.
He also has you opening because he knows your penchant for creativity, your gastronomical curiosity. Being the opener affords you 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.
