The Truth Is Here

Over the course of my life most of my important decisions have been made rather whimsically and without consideration. I rarely took precautions to think more than a few moves ahead, I followed my heart and by some miracle, I'm not dead and I have a college education (whatever that's worth nowadays).

I chose to play the cello. Why? Because my mom put me through a few torturous violin lessons, and standing while playing required much more energy than my chubby boy-frame could handle. Admittedly, my large stature is much better-suited to the cello than the violin. And it remains true that being a cellist is far less competitive than being a violinist, there are just too many mass-produced Korean violin-robots, especially at Juilliard, and even an exceptionally talented child would have a hard time getting in. So as much as I hated that place it was the catalyst for any success I might enjoy now.

I chose Northwestern. Why? Because I liked the uniqueness of the color purple, the northwesterly direction seemed to connote a sense of adventure, and frankly it was the best school I could apply to that didn't require SAT II's (no longer the case). And most importantly it was approximately 760 miles away from home. Something felt right about applying there, I had a feeling I was going to get in, I couldn't tell you why. But I ended up in a great dorm where I met some great people who helped shape me in to a decent and somewhat responsible adult. Without Northwestern, without Willard, without ultimate, I shudder to think of the kind of person I would be today.

There have been plenty of other missteps and lucky escapes from ill-fated disaster, but the big decisions, huge life-changing moments have worked out in my favor. I should consider myself blessed. Though of course the last major decision has yet to fully play itself out...

The night I had an epiphany to cook was unlike all the other pivotal decisions I had made in my life. I was a very different person then, I had grown up, in short. I was much more cautious, more reserved, more aware of consequences and logical expectations. Whereas I would once leap before looking with both feet, I now knew to take a tentative look over the edge. It was conflicting, I felt so impassioned and convinced that this was the one true path for my life, but yet I felt it necessary to yank on the reins, knowing in the past that I had come uncomfortably close to ruin. I stayed up all night wanting to rush off to culinary school, say good-bye to Northwestern, but I knew there were many things to consider and I played it slow.

I gave myself the hard truth. I had to have realistic expectations of what such a life-changing decision would mean. I had to honestly embrace the realities of those decisions, and if a worst-case scenario still didn't frighten me, I would forge on ahead.

Life as a cook is not and would not be easy. You are going to be poor. Very poor, more poor than you've ever been in your life. If you're doing it right, you're most likely going to be paying to be a cook, working in some top European kitchen for beans and having exchange rates give it to you harder than Billy Bob gave it to Halle Berry in Monster's Ball (never watch that movie with your mom). Even if you land a good job in the States, you'll be working long, long hours with no 401k or health insurance to speak of. This could continue for 7-10 years. You sure you like it that much?

There is a very high rate of failure. Should you ever attain your dream of opening a restaurant, there are statistics (albeit inflated and largely out-of-context statistics) floating around that say 70-80% of restaurants fail within three years. You have personally experienced what can happen when a restaurant closes. There is little-to-no recouping. When it's over you file Chapter 11, and you hope your resume isn't so tarnished, and your family not so desperate that you can pull the pieces back together. Not scared yet?

It is a very difficult lifestyle in and of itself. There are no holidays, when the rest of society gets a long weekend you will be getting a longer work week. Personal relationships will be quite difficult to maintain as the rest of the world follows the beat of a different drummer. There are few women willing to stick around with someone who spends most of their life in a kitchen making $12/hour. You'll miss parties, weddings, movies and important dinners with only the pirate crew-like bond of your kitchen crew as solace. I hope you thoroughly enjoy the company of cats.

You are old for the game. The best, the famous, the rich, they all started out young. They not only grew up in the restaurant business, they embraced it from Day One. They found their passion early and were lucky enough to have a place to fulfill it. You were not so lucky, you figured it out pretty late, and compared to your competition, you are rather inexperienced. It's going to be a tough and endless game of catch-up; can you handle always being at a disadvantage?

These were the sorts of questions I asked myself. They were harsh questions, yes, but I felt that that was necessary. To strip bare any optimism or naivety and lay the raw flesh of the material before me. If every question was met with stubborn hope and bated excitement, I knew I was doing the right thing. And I was.

So here we stand. Exactly two weeks away from culinary school in the wake of a long year at home. I worked seven days a week, every week. Some weeks would see me working hellishly long hours, upwards of 80-90 with no day off, what with kitchen time and holidays. But even still I feel I could have worked harder. I could have learned more. But what's done is done and I must evaluate again. It's been about three years since you decided to embark on the path of food and service, how far have you come?

My pessimistic nature and generally hard-on-myself attitude would say ... not very far.

I really tried but learning Chinese food has eluded me. I spent 10 solid months going in to that kitchen six days a week, but cooking doesn't work like that. You can't just stop in for a lunch shift, cook a little here, cook a little there, wrap a few dumplings, slice a few onions. You don't get terribly far doing that. You have to really be thrown in the shit. It's like training for the Olympics, you do it as a job. Ten hours everyday, living it, breathing it, that's what makes you a real cook. Not just prepping thirty racks of lamb to perfection everyday, but then plating it for service in the middle of dinner rush, tickets bleeding out of the printer like an angry wound, a chef telling you to go faster when you've already hit the wall and only your wits and your reflexes there to save you. I miss that. The crush, the weeds, the very raw and physical nature of restaurants.

But it hasn't all been for naught. While I resentfully stood my post at the front I certainly can't say I didn't learn anything. I spent a solid six hours everyday just talking to people; taking their orders, making small talk, making sure they were happy, mollifying them when they were on the verge of hitting me and succoring them when they were having a good experience. I cleared tables, folded tablecloths, smiled and nodded and though I was far from perfect, I feel that my mother and I together made a good front-of-house team. Considering that by nature I am a shy and introverted person, this was a big step for me. I know my normal speaking voice is at an uncomfortably high volume and a few beers will have me clamoring for the center of attention like an oft-ignored only child, and these things may suggest that I am an extroverted individual. But that isn't actually the case and whenever I know I'm about to have a tough or awkward conversation with a customer I often have to tell myself, "Be brave."

I never picture myself at the front-of-the-house permanently. I can confidently say I want to spend most of my life in a kitchen (even though I know I look fucking awesome in a suit... yes, ladies). But it certainly can't hurt to have a deep understanding of what it's like to be out there. See, when you're crushed in the kitchen there is always something to do, tangible means to fix things, you feel at least somewhat empowered to remedy your situation. But when it's fucked out front, you can't do anything except tell people your sorry, offer them something so they don't walk out furious and cry on the inside. Some people love that kind of work; fixing the wrongs, using their charm to the utmost advantage, but I can't do it. Not for long at least. Seeing people upset destroys me inside. It makes me want to hide in the kitchen, too cowardly to go outside and face the sound & the fury. Cooks sometimes don't get that and see special requests or anything that makes their job harder as bullshit. But I will forever understand what it's like to be out there, the bulls-eye for everyone's frustration. So while I never plan to be out there again in a suit, I feel confident that I can empathize with the front staff when I'm wearing a chef's jacket.

Still, skin-toughening aside, perhaps the most important thing I learned was being at the helm and seeing the big picture. When you're a cook or a waiter, and I've been both for quite some time now, you are focused on just doing your job. Getting that plate to the window now, getting that plate to a customer now, giving that customer attention now. There's not much philosophizing and speculating you can do when you're in that role, you're a worker bee. But when you're at the top looking down, you realize it's a complex picture and pieces have to be moved carefully. As much as you want to deliver quality experiences to everyone, you have to realize you literally can not make everybody happy, and every restaurant has its limitations. Some will only do as good as 75%, and the best will be 99.9%. But no matter how "perfect" you may seem, some people will just never like your restaurant and will leave to vilify you on the Internet. Don't take it home with you, don't let it get you down, always strive for a 110% but know that it won't ever be perfect. Not for long anyway.

There are practical things to consider. Things break down, no restaurant flows perfectly, you have to go with it. It is often the busiest Tuesday of your life when your dishwasher decides to not show. Your ice machine picks the hottest day of the summer to stop working, your power goes out just as you're about to lay down a 200-cover Friday. These are all things that have happened to me, and while they were catastrophic-level disasters we are still here. Things go on, restaurants are Murphy's Law embodied, what's important, despite any artistic ideals you might hold dear, is that you continue to make money and make people happy without losing your integrity or your sanity.

Being in command of a restaurant has no set book of rules. Everything is situational and you need to have the awareness to meet the ever-changing flow of service. Shit will and does happen, you need to have the emotional fortitude to react with grace and assertiveness. I feel I've rambled for a year and more, 10-page diatribes about what it's like to be out there doing the same thing everyday and yet having it be different every night, but it still can't be broken down in to a neat list. You just have to know and if your heart is in it, you'll succeed. A life in restaurants certainly has its downsides, but if it is the life for you, you couldn't possibly see it any other way. You feel alive in the chaos and become fulfilled through taming it.

That's optimistic-Eric talking, a rarely seen creature. But truly, I feel it really becomes a matter of can you survive the downs long enough to enjoy the highs...

The rational side of me knows that I am quite prepared for school, especially in comparison to the armies of 18-year old Food Network zombies enrolling in culinary school, but in reality I feel a bit... divided. On the one hand, I am about to embark on a journey that is has been in the works for over three years. I have a pretty good idea of what's about to come, I'm excited. But on the other ... I am exhausted.

Working seven days a week didn't amount to a lot more hours than most people's workweeks, but it just drains on you. The boss/my mom said I could take a day off if I wanted to, but deep-seeded notions of filial piety and duty to one's parents left me too guilt-ridden to relax at home while my mother was out working. I haven't had a terrible amount of time to regain composure, it was one Saturday night crush immediately followed by an even worse Sunday night crush only to return to the battlefront on Monday, day after day after day.

I've come to duly respect the regenerative properties of a day off. Without any sense of guilt you have the freedom to spend 24 hours however you will. I miss that more than you can know, and a daily grind without respite leaves me in dark corners of thought that I fear to go back to.

When I get depressed, I get depressed. Misery seems to endlessly accelerate and ignore terminal velocity until I am left in a corner wondering for the fourth time why I am doing this.. this life. I usually snap out of it pretty quickly, but for the time I spend down there in my self-made dungeon of despondency, there is a sense I'm not going to climb back out. Everything comes crashing down and a real mishap in a restaurant suddenly seems beyond the scope of my control.

I admit I can be a bit ... emotional at times. Perhaps this blog is finally resembling more of a blog in that I am giving everyone an open avenue into my personal thoughts and feelings, but here I am to lay it bare. If my personality at its worst warranted a description, I might describe it as an "engine of self-hate and negativity that feeds on the souls of happy people everywhere" but that may be the School of Eric's Over-complicated and Ranting Writing's way of saying that I can be a severely angry and miserable human being sometimes. And it is, as with all matters of the heart, completely irrational in its judgment.

When I hear some girl order take-out over the phone asking me if we use MSG in that awful Long Island accent, I twinge and am overcome by bloodlust. I have to defeatedly admit "yes" even though there is absolutely no scientific evidence of "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" or negative effects from MSG consumption (source), and then get an audible scoff over the phone to have her say "I don't wuant any MSG in anything, okay?" Listen, bitch... those Apple-tinis you drink every weekend have a better chance of giving you heart failure than this steamed chicken and mixed vegetables, no sauce, no MSG dish you're ordering from me. How about you worry a little less about your waistline and a little more about giving a contribution to society that isn't your quickly-fading beauty? And here I've ranted again, but internally, and you can see the blood pressure rising, and my eyes go red and I'm physically restraining myself from slamming the phone in to the table, the urge to kill is ever rising...

Ugh and then more shit...

The worst habit our waiters have is serving soup without spoons. We run out of spoons quicker than anything because waiters use them to wrap Peking Duck, serve dishes, etc. So the busboy has to wait on them to get washed, and there may be a 10 minute window where the restaurant is simply out of clean spoons. But there's a very simple solution, you pluck a few spoons out of the soak, and you wash it by hand real quick. Then you serve it with the soup, it's that simple. But no, they drop down the soup without checking if there are spoons, and run to some other task and the customer has to helplessly watch as their soup grows tepid. And I hate soup that isn't at the proper temperature, that being hot with italics. I try to catch this as often as possible but something within stops me from berating and demanding discipline from the staff. I am no boss yet, it is not my place, I feel awkward telling grown men, fathers that they're making a cock-up of their job, so I must suffer inwardly as people do slipshod and careless work. It's preventable, it's lazy bullshit and it's a very quick way to make me hate you...

And then more things go wrong...

Cooking is a bit like athletics in the sense that there are good days when you're in the zone, and bad days when nothing is going for you. Man, all these sauces are breaking .. is it the heat? Ugh, this dough looks like shit, it's so tacky I can barely escape from it long enough to put it in a bag, what the hell? Fuck, I cut myself... fuck, these dumplings look like abused orphans, they're falling apart at the seams. It is those days I am left wondering... why am I even doing this? I'm never going to be any good, the cooks I want to be competing against have been doing this for years, they don't even think about dicing carrots, it just happens. And even if I can catch up with my mechanics apparently I'm such a headcase that I'll never make it past year five in this game... I should just give up...

And so that nagging voice continues. A voice of defeat strengthened by feelings of hopelessness in the face of hard times and trials... One voice says to give up already, and yet somewhere inside there is a beacon of hope and it waves a small flag that says "Carry on!"

It is mind-numbing and at the very least a bit psychotic to be seemingly talking to myself with two different voices. Rather than a unified whole, I am a man divided and at times it feels the balance between two entities is threatening to decide which Eric shows up today. And it is that exact quality that I seem to share with my father.

Not to creep too dangerously close to sob story territory, but I didn't know my father very well. What I do know, as my mother reminds me, is that we are quite similar. Passionate, volatile, unpredictable, loving at times, ferocious at others. I haven't seen myself in him in well over 13 years but in memory, I know it is true. My mother is the rock, my father the ocean. As I walk the floor of a dinner service in a bad mood she notices immediately, but won't confront me about it until we're closing. I get the same lecture,

"The whole dining room can tell you're in a bad mood. You can't show it, it makes us all look bad, it affects peoples' moods, most importantly, mine!" The same song and dance every time, how my sullen tendencies stress her out and affects the whole atmosphere of the restaurant, yada yada yada... Some customer was probably being a pain in the ass and I reacted most unprofessionally, my face was immediately a visage twisted by hate and a fish could sense the negative emotion, I get it, I messed up, I'm sorry...

But this time it hit me as we're getting to the part of the lecture how I'm just like my father. I am suddenly eleven again and thinking of the day I said goodbye for the last time. The school said I can take as much time as I like before coming back, it wasn't a problem, but the day after services my mom put me on the bus and sent me to school. I wouldn't have said I was in so much grief as to not be able to function, I was just ... confused, as most eleven-year old's are and would be when they are dealing with their father's death. I didn't really want to go because my head was in all sorts of different places. One moment I felt fine, the other I felt sad, then angry, then guilty, then nervous, then ahhh, get me the fuck outta here! Too bad, kiddo, your education is what's important.

The point never hit me, I just figured my mom was being unnecessarily stringent, acting tough to be tough, but now it made sense.

No matter how we feel we all have certain duties to uphold. Despite all notions of Western stoicism or Eastern filial responsibility, this is a fact. To succeed requires performing even when we want to do anything but. There are and will be many times when we are faced with difficult tasks, or tasks we feel unprepared for or just feel unwilling to commit to. But we must perform admirably all the same, because no matter what modern conceptions of child-rearing and coddling will tell you, there is very much such a thing as winning and losing in this life.

There have been a lot of rough patches through the past year. At times it felt I was running a nursing home rather than a restaurant, the vivacity and energy killed by the elderly slowly pushing their walkers and struggling in to their chairs. This may sound like an unfair and silly thing to upset me, but when reminded of my own mortality every day, seeing someone's wife die and yet have the widower return to eat alone... it is difficult. Perhaps my sense of empathy is too sensitive, but seeing, knowing that could be me every day ... it was tough.

There wasn't much in terms of a personal life. I'd run in to the city every Saturday to see my friends, but otherwise every day was more of isolation. I don't speak enough Chinese to converse in anything other than niceties, and I don't have a lot to talk about with a middle-aged mothers who grew up poor in China, didn't even graduate high school. And I hate the small talk between customers and restaurant staff, it's the same conversation every time, often literally as some old folk can't remember what they've discussed with you and what they haven't. I am left repeating conversations with parrot-like obediency, frustrated by a lack of any meaningful connections with anyone for days.

I struggled to learn a cuisine I couldn't master, left to be more useful sweeping floors and organizing dry goods than on the line. Instead I was left out front in my most uncomfortable and undesirable of positions, struggling to gain mastery over my own tempestuous emotions.

But I showed. I fucking showed up every day, no weekends, no holidays, every fucking day rain or shine. In over 400 days, I wasn't at the restaurant for maybe 15, and even when I hated it, really was wanting to quit, tired of my daily grind ... I went. I showed because I knew there was work to be done. I wasn't going to let down my mom who had worked so hard, supporting the restaurant by herself to put me through school. I wasn't going to quit because I want the dream to be alive even when it can seem so dim, and I still have love for the restaurant even during the times it felt like it was poisoning me.

I showed up.

Maybe I didn't learn all that I could have this year. Maybe I often let my emotions get the best of me, maybe I lost a few customers, maybe I could have tried harder. Kitchen work, especially good kitchen work, requires a hell of a lot more than just being there, it requires focus, dedication and aggressiveness for sure. But at the very least I was there every day, doing my job.

I showed up.

And I plan to continue to show up for the rest of my life.

EP6

Size Matters

I probably talk about penises at an alarming frequency for a heterosexual male, but the title is actually pertinent to restaurants as opposed to dongs.

For those of you who have experienced a real Chinatown dim sum restaurant, you probably already know what I'm talking about. Dim sum houses are typically mammoth enterprises, staffed by a veritable army of Chinese people making dumplings, pushing carts, yelling out orders and serving tea to feed a dining room pushing upwards of 120-150 tables. And big tables at that, often seating 10-12 people per.

Compare that to your typical sit-down Italian bistro and you are pretty much looking at two different creatures altogether.

But that doesn't mean they don't warrant comparison. They are, at their core, still restaurants. There are cooks, there are servers, there is food to be eaten and paid for. Fundamentally they are the same. But the operations and logistics require two separate states of mind, and in many cases two separate sets of skills.

If it isn't already apparent from my borderline-pathological need to control everything, I could never run a huge restaurant. There are more reasons than that I am a basket case of neuroses and compulsions but what it boils down to is that the actual management of a mega-restaurant, even just its kitchen, would probably have me in a corner, dissolving Xanax in a double of Jameson while chain-smoking 100s within 3 weeks. It is a nightmare of logistics, and I would only wish that sort of pain on my most dire of enemies.

That is, unless you don't really care.

Supplying, menu design, hiring, kitchen layout, those are all details that differ greatly between restaurants of various sizes. But the key factor that separates a small restaurant from a huge restaurant is details. There is simply no way to control details in a huge restaurant serving thousands of people a day. You hit a limit and you send food out or perform service that is less than perfect, not just because you accepted mediocrity, but because you are at the limits of human capacity.

If you're the kind of person who can accept that you are never striving for perfection, just okay. If you're the kind of person who likes to control details but only up to a certain degree, then fine. You can probably be at the helm of a mega-restaurant and not be on a steady diet of antidepressants and mood-stablizers within a year. But if you're anything like me, it's just never going to happen.

It is perhaps unfair to lambast a dim sum house. They are making no aspirations to be perfect just hoping for good. And if you can serve 2000 people a day "good" food, then that's more than an impressive accomplishment on its own. And me, of all people should empathize for the human element to restaurants in that there are mistakes and there are things out of one's control. And a dim sum house is on the far end of the extreme, a hyperbolic example. But I'm going to do it anyway just because I be sippin' on that haterade and it will be a useful mechanic for me to detail how I personally would envision running a restaurant.

I will detail the last trip I had to a dim sum house that was run by a chef who used to work at Pearl. He is a talented guy for sure, his carving and artistry are very impressive, anything from a block of ice to a butternut squash can be made in to beautiful sculptures. He even seems well-organized and motivated, something we rarely find in the cooks that come through Pearl, much to our dismay. But even still, having him influence the food in a positive way at such a large restaurant is like trying to shove a glacier off its route. It seems to have a mind of its own, and if its direction is not clearly set from the get-go it will continue on an implacable course towards mediocrity, or even doom.

We ride an escalator to the top floor of a Flushing mall. The whole top level is dedicated to this restaurant. I am not one to estimate square-footage, but I would put it somewhere between a metric fuck-ton and a number comparable to the population of Beijing. It is a big fucking restaurant and is designed, ever in Chinese fashion, in a clumsy merger of trite Western notions of classy decor and efficient methods of interior design. Think laced tablecloths and seat covers on a linoleum floor, mahogany pillars with gold trim and flashing neon lights, and a grand piano acting as throne on a marble and pink granite stage. Too many ideas, overstimulation, an architectural bout of epilepsy waiting to happen.

Two young, passably attractive girls dressed in qipaos lead us to a table. There are floor managers acting more like pit bosses dressed in cheap suits. They wander the floor with scowls on their faces and the kind of prepubescent five o'clock shadow that most Asian men suffer from. A huge cadre of Hispanic busboys and older Chinese women expedite the flow of service, and customers line up by the hundreds, huddled masses of hungry personified. It is a scene of utter chaos seemingly just held together by a constant rush of adrenaline and decisive action.

As soon as we sit down I notice the breakdown in details. The tablecloth isn't set so we sit there as a busboy lays a fresh one over the table cover, which is stained and seems to have gone without change for at least a few days. The teapot is covered in stray tea leaves and is too full, spilling out hot water at the merest tilt of an angle. And as we await the first few carts a stain left for us by the previous diners begins to seep through the new linens. Not a great start.

The gamble with dim sum is, did you get a fresh cart? Or has this one been milling around the dining room peddling the end of its wares before a refuel? It's basically a mobile steam table so as you reach the last few dishes in the cart, it begins to lose heat rapidly. (Much like the way a full cup of coffee will stay hot for quite a long time, but when you leave the last third of it for a few minutes it suddenly becomes uncomfortably cold. Such is my understanding of thermodynamics). There's no way to get hot and ready dim sum with every single cart, unless you come first thing in the morning. Most of it is just right, set on the table with steam wafting out in aromatic tendrils, but there are definitely a few items served under temp, and while they were in theory at one point very tasty, they now just sit there in tepid disappointment.

This is a problem for any cuisine. Timing hot food out of the window is a very difficult thing, but it is especially important in Chinese food. Why? Because we use so much goddamned corn starch to thicken sauces and corn starch does not do well once it goes under its optimal temperature.

A hot emulsified sauce like Hollandaise will become a bit gloopy before breaking. A butter-mounted sauce, like most pan-sauces, will begin to break and become grainy. And a roux-thickened sauce like bechamel will begin to seize up in to a cold, lumpy... thing. But corn starch-thickened sauces, like the ones Chinese people seem to be so fond of, will seem to combine all the worst attributes of under-temp sauces. They often require a last minute addition of hot fat in the pan to achieve a smooth mouth feel, or they can become tacky. They start to break almost immediately, the fat escaping from its brief and tenuous bonds with water, thus leading to greasiness. And then they go from tastefully sticky to regaining its original glue-like properties. It is not unlike what I imagine to have a horse jizz in your face. Unpleasant all around.

So while dumplings, steamed buns and vegetable cakes may not suffer terribly from getting to close to room temp, anything that has a sauce on it in a dim sum house (which is a lot of shit) will suffer tremendously. Thus I am left, this particular afternoon, prodding at a few dead clams sitting in a goo of ejaculate-like black bean sauce. It makes me sound horrifically pretentious (and not to mention raises a few question, what with all this talk of cumming on peoples' faces), but it was just ... inedible.

We order too much, as what always happens when going out to eat with my mom. It's not that we're severe gluttons it's just that we like to try everything and see what a restaurant has to offer. But even I am unable to channel my inner fat-boy long enough to eat everything before us. The mini bamboo steamers are piling up, the table becomes a cluttered mess and it's time to pack this shit up and go.

There isn't much to speak of in terms of service at a dim sum house. You flag down carts and maybe ask for some tea or chili oil, and that's the extent of your interactions with the floor staff. But still there are moments where they can rise to the occasion and here they stumble, as most Chinese people do when it comes to hospitality (more on that ... at some point, there is a thesis waiting to be written on Western concepts of hospitality and why Asian people can not embrace it).

We beckon over three different floor managers who all vanish trying to delegate packing our food up to some busboy. An older Chinese man, who must be some sort of backwaiter finally brings some boxes to start packing our things, but he is suddenly pulled away by a manager and we are left to pack our own food. No big deal. We leave a card out on the bill for someone to take it to be charged. No dice, no one shows. We don't want to leave cash out on a table in such a busy restaurant so we go wandering about until someone finally directs us to the cashier, which is located in a forgotten corner by the live fish tanks.

Now just from an experience stand point, the dim sum was decent and all the little details I ragged on aren't serial crimes, just things I notice because I'm a detail-oriented person and I have a deep understanding of how restaurants go about service. It certainly wasn't the best dim sum experience I've had, it ranks in the bottom 50% for sure, but for the price, which was about $20 a person and the cost-efficiency .. it is what it is. Dim sum is often more about the experience than the food, and it is one of the rare kinds of eating out scenarios where you can compile a whole big group of people and get in on a fast-paced lunch with incredible variety. It's generally fun, not a huge investment on the diners' part with regards to time or money, and hopefully good and plentiful eats.

So the details from a diner's perspective are obviously a bit lacking, but since we had a friend in a high place, we got a good look at the kitchen as well.

We greet the chef and he leads us back to the kitchen. We pass the obligatory live fish tanks because Chinese people love their live fish. I agree that freshness is integral to good fish, but when the fish has spent the last few days of its life essentially imprisoned, crammed in stressful quarters with a hundred bunk-mates... let's just say I prefer the fish that's dead and on ice for a day or two out of the ocean. Push-carts blast out of the gates, there is little sign that front and back staff recognize one another, and then we push through the doors to find the biggest kitchen I have ever seen.

The ceilings are vaulted, skyscraping really. On the right is a kitchen solely dedicated to the production of dim sum; a 4'x12' stainless steel table floured and prepped for maximum efficiency with looming combine steamers lining the walls. To the left is a long line of burners with 8-9 cooks manning just as many woks and there are a few empty spots (for reference we have 3 when running at max speed). One of them is clearly making an employee meal as he uses long-handled spoons to stir-fry a 40" pan's worth of vegetables. Opposite the hot line is a steel table with portable butane burners, the kind you make hot pot with, each worked by one cook preparing one specific dish be it braised snow pea leaves, or a ba-wan pancake or steamed cockles. And behind that is a massive convection oven and two menial prep boys making dan-ta, or egg custards in pastry by the hundreds. They serve each table a complimentary plate of these and they're quite tasty, but you have to be sort of in awe that this kitchen requires two people full-time to just make freebies for all its customers. Finally the kitchen snakes towards the back past the production side to reveal a colossal dry-goods and refrigeration area to store all their produce.

Besides the physical impressiveness of the kitchen what also strikes me is the amount of people, the hustle and bustle. There are so many cooks and staff one of them could not show up one day and I don't know how you'd notice. It's getting near 3 PM, that midday lull, and the kitchen is taking its time to receive shipments from their purveyors. The service elevator door is opening and closing at every available opportunity, and huge shipments of vegetables, frozen meat, and canned goods are stacked on dollies and wheeled about. There's no time and no persons available to check the quality of the deliveries, the chef trusts in his suppliers and signs off on invoices after a brief once-over as he continues a conversation with my mom.

My understanding of dim sum is is that it isn't a great moneymaker. The ingredients are cheap but you need a whole lot of staff, and this particular dim sum house makes things fresh every morning before they're sent out in carts. It's possible that this is a quality measure by the head chef, always fresh never frozen, like In-N-Out. But what is also possible is that it is impractical to freeze and store that much dim sum because space isn't free and they still have a whole dining room and banquet menu to wrestle with. It may just be easier and more cost-efficient to meet dim sum demands as they occur in real-time every morning. There's a decent amount of waste but it probably isn't outweighed by the manpower and physical space cost of storing and freezing dim sum all the time.

Hence they rely on dinner service and banquets to make money. Talking about banquets and the sheer amount of private rooms they have would take up several more paragraphs and I think there already is a sense of just how ambitious an endeavor this restaurant is. Surely it isn't run by just one owner or by just one chef, but even as a collaborative effort this restaurant is reaching an incredible scale. Though things fall through the cracks often and that is at least well-acknowledged, they are content on being B- students, just slightly better than average and raking in the cash.

This is what happens when you get some smart and motivated people together with the strict intention of making money. You get a group of investors, you pay a talented chef whole wheelbarrows of money to let him exercise his passion, and you market and advertise and market and advertise. The amount of cash that flows through that place is enough to launder the income of a whole drug cartel. And while there is respect to be had in such an endeavor, and they are certainly successful serving decent dim sum, it's just not something I could ever do.

If I've learned anything over my career it's that a restaurant experience can only hope to achieve greatness through an amalgamation of seemingly inane details. That's why chefs go nuclear when one little thing is botched or forgotten on a dish. Each diner represents a chain of service, actions, food and drink that is hundreds of links long. One weak or broken link can make all that work on everyone elses' part for naught because the diner is only ever going to remember that one mistake. No matter how gracious, understanding or appreciative that diner is they're always going to remember it as "It was great but..."

These details simply cannot all be attended to in a big restaurant. The chain spanning from just 20 diners can leave a house staff in a tangled mess of weeds so thick you can't see out of them. There are simply limits to human performance and you just have to make a decision. Did you get in to this to make a buttload of money? Or did you get in to this because you care about how your name becomes associated with quality? There is money to be had in both mindsets, but the latter ... well, it comes slower and more difficultly.

It starts at the reception desk. The person taking your reservation is the agent, not the gatekeeper. They don't rudely bar your way, they work with you to find the best way in and they do it with a fucking smile. Don't tell me you can't hear a genuine smile over the phone because you most certainly can.

Then when a diner shows up, the door is opened for them, there are a team of smiling but relaxed faces awaiting them. Diners are smart now, they can tell when professionalism and sycophancy are becoming uncomfortably close, they can sense sincerity. Uniforms are clean and crisp but not to such starched perfection as to become intimidating. Straight edges and hard corners are harsh, unwelcoming ... think rounded corners, warmth, open arms. They are lead to their table, but shouldn't be felt as if a dog being lead on a leash. The hostess walks at their pace even though she walks ahead, and she pulls an old-school maneuver in pulling out your table or your chair and making you feel comfortable with it even though most people aren't accustomed to that act of hospitality anymore.

From there it's touch and go, reliant upon a floor manager's ability to read the customer. Do they want to settle in, order a drink first before rushing to a menu? Are they scanning the dining room wanting some attention? Are they famished and would love nothing more than some bread and butter? Is this a first date? Is this a special occasion? Is this just an opportunity to eat something new, hopefully something exciting?

Tables are cleared nigh silently. Plates are never brought to a diner's eye level. As a server you are a ghost; invisible yet omnipresent when needed. But this is also variable. Some diners want a waiter who will take the time to talk to them, engage in a little bit of small talk, go through the whole menu with you to really figure out what you want to eat. Others want to be left alone and prefer you to be the shadow that you are trying to become. Some of them require a mixture of both, they want you never and yet they want you always. Be attentive, a minute to a busy backwaiter is less than heartbeat, but during an awkward lull at a table it can feel like an eternity. You have to know how to see it.

When you pour wine, you never splash it on itself. Wine is up there on the list of things that perhaps are too sacred, too pretentious, but you still must treat it as such. It is gentle, it is a woman, you pour it slowly and you never let it froth. Red wine is almost sanguinary, it should coat and drip down a glass at a noticeably slower pace than water. White wine varies greatly but it always connotes a sense of crispness to me, it should almost shine and "bounce" in to a glass.

And then comes food...

As I've detailed in my unnecessarily long ramble of thoughts, service cannot be broken down in to a to-do list of actions. It is an attitude that is unique to each restaurant. But when you're rockin' with the best it is at its core stringently professional. That's the only thing that doesn't change from customer to customer, you treat every single one with the execution that is expected of being the best. Otherwise it's highly variable, unique to every situation, always excruciatingly aware of details and choosing when and where to press the advantage. Food, though ... there's quite a bit more science to that and in my opinion that science is best executed in a small restaurant.

The way I see it there are three crucial ways in which a small kitchen outperforms a large one; ingredients, staff and timing.

There are many analogies I could use here, but what I'm going to go with is textiles and clothing. You can have two outfits that look identical but differ radically in composition. The stitching and seam-work can be poorly executed, and that will mean the clothing's durability and fit is compromised. And if you use inferior fabrics it just will never feel the same way as something cut from more luxurious cloth. They look the same, but perform completely differently. To some people it doesn't matter, if it looks good it looks good. But to others who care beyond superficial details, you only use the best.

Much the same can be said about chefs and ingredients. A chef is only as good as the ingredients he uses. This is a great part of the reason you're never going to have a fantastic steak at home. You don't have any equipment hot enough to give it a good fucking sear, and you don't have the beef that was raised on premium feed in humane quarters and slaughtered properly, and you don't have the means to dry-age it properly. You buying that discount T-bone from Kroger and trying to hold that up to the light of a 48-day, dry-aged porterhouse from Snake Farms is like trying to compare an on-sale suit from Men's Wearhouse to a real Armani, tailor fit. It's just not in the same ballpark and once you compare them side-by-side the differences becoming glaring.

Why a small restaurant excels in this manner is simply a matter of supply. Vegetables and fruit that are grown well simply cannot be grown in massive quantity. It goes against the whole point of raising them well. Relatively small plots of produce, tenderly cared for is what elevates a humble beet to something superlative. Even if it is organically grown and labeled (which is dubious I might add), if it originated on a massive plantation-like lot ... it just isn't going to be the same. I am reluctant to use the word "artisanal" but the word makes sense. It is especially noticeable in livestock. You could, and many have, written volumes on the subject but what it comes down to is happy, well-fed animals in an environment as close to their natural one as possible, living stress-free lives and slaughtered humanely taste better. I care less about the animal's happiness and more about the fact that it tastes good, and when you work with a product that incredible, it's just exciting.

When you roll back and think of the dollies of frozen industrialized meats being carted in by the caseload at the dim sum restaurant, you realize how impossible it is for them to source and cook quality ingredients. The budget can't handle it and neither can the purveyors.

The other issue is staffing. If a chef is only as good as his ingredients, a kitchen is only as good as its staff. When I was standing in that massive kitchen, clean and organized as it seemed, there was no sense of chemistry or teamwork. Maybe I'm amped up on too many feel-good, inspirational sports movies but I believe there is a definite quality of teamwork to having a good night of service day in and day out. When you have a kitchen requiring upwards of 30-40 hands on deck, how are you going to find that many quality cooks? Yeah sure, if you're Daniel Boulud there are an endless number of hopefuls waiting to be conscripted in to your army, but if you start out big as a no-name I think the best you can hope for is fresh culinary school graduates or washed-up veterans. Maybe one day you can play big, and maybe even if you're an exceptional leader of men you can make good out of a staff of mediocrity... but I don't put that much faith in myself. When the time comes, much as with my personal relationships, I plan to count on a handful of some really trustworthy motherfuckers who I can rely on in the shit.

The final factor that it really comes down to is service. You can have the best ingredients, the best cooks but if you can't make it happen on a Saturday night dinner rush then why the fuck are you here? Danny Meyer, in somewhat troll-like fashion, used to patrol the Union Square area restaurants on Saturday nights. Any place that wasn't busy he noted it as a property that was likely going up for sale soon enough. Saturday night is where you must thrive, it is the division playoffs every fucking weekend (the holiday season is the Super Bowl). Surviving that crush not only depends on a well-oiled front-of-house staff to put butts in seats at a reasonable pace, but rides on the backbone of the kitchen that must fight through the weeds.

Prepping lamb shanks for braise and pick-up is difficult enough. Doing that in a quantity for a hundred table restaurant, even with three minions on constant knife duty, is going to mean some inconsistent dishes. I believe in doing prep the way the best restaurants do it. One station, one cook. This gives the cook a sense of ownership and not an insignificant amount of pressure. You're prepping salad greens, mache and rocket for a salad ... if a customer sends back a wilted leaf ... the chef knows it's you. You got to take pride in your work and ensure that everything coming off your station is four-star quality.

And then there's timing. It's amazing how many steps go in to getting a roast chicken from cold and dead, to on your plate within 30 minutes of you ordering it. Big restaurants that do this kind of food, the clock-face plating (meat at 6 o'clock, veg at 2 o'clock, starch at 10 o'clock) at high volume are often called "turn and burn" joints. You don't think, there's very little finesse you just rock out at maximum speed and hope for the best. Sure, you don't want dishes sent back because that seriously fucks your rhythm, but for the most part... you just get it out there. If it's 93%, an A- dish ... that's good enough.

To me, unacceptable. They say at The French Laundry if a diner gets up to go to the bathroom while a plate is being finished, the dish is thrown out and the whole process starts over again (by thrown out they probably mean fed to some thankful staff member). It has to be sent out at optimal temperature, at the perfect time with perfect seasoning and flavor, a 100% every time, summa cum laude. If you're the chef, that's your name on every dish. Are you willing to stake your name on it? Are you willing to bet your reputation on that sauce that is beginning to break, or that green bean that is beginning to discolor? That's a question you'll have to ask yourself and many if not most cooks are going to be too stressed during service to care about the difference between a 97 and a 100.

But if you're ever going to be great, not just good, you go for nothin' but net every time.

EP6