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 a fairly common contradiction. Beneath the ragamuffin façade is an intelligent, curious, resourceful person, almost custom-made for the kitchen. He takes hard work like water off a duck’s back and he never stops asking questions until he gets the answers he needs. While his street clothes may be dirty, his work is always clean; while his appearance may be 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
