Am I a Good Cook?

You may have wondered while reading this blog,

"God, this asshole rants endlessly. Mr. Low-rent, Asian Bourdain-wannabe needs to stop using so many fucking adverbs and learn what a preposition is already. Can he even cook?"

And there it is.

Have you ever wondered, is Eric actually worth a damn in the kitchen?

Well, that's a good question, and unfortunately you have to sit through a wordy examination of it.

Firstly, what constitutes being a good cook?

Well I've gone through what it takes to work in a professional kitchen and excel many times over. But in terms of just food, and heat, and flavor, I guess it's a combination of things. Knowing people, knowing what they like to eat. Being able to hit seasonings on the money, not over or under. Being efficient, having a wide range of knowledge, knowing how to play to each ingredient's strengths or weaknesses. Just making something taste good, allowing someone to be happy, and then being able to reproduce that effect on command.

I don't really know what it means to be a "talented" cook. A talented musician is able produce a silken tone that sings to their audience's heartstrings. A talented athlete is seemingly able to adapt to any sport. Not just possessing raw physical prowess but an ability to affect the game and earn a victory for their team. But a talented cook?

I've only seen it as the "golden touch." I worked with Sergio, the long time prep cook at Va Pensiero here and there. He started working in kitchens when he was 17, and has worked every kind of restaurant and every kind of station. He often filled in to help on the line when the nights got crazy. The salads he made were somehow better than mine, even though we were using the exact same ingredients. We rolled out pasta the same amount of times, but his ravioli always ended up more delicate and thin. The grill marks on his ribeye steak were more pronounced and flavorful. So what's my conclusion? He had a golden touch. He was a talented cook, which really adds up to a collection of so many subtle effects that it is nothing less than mysterious.

So am I a talented cook? No. I'm going to have to learn things the hard way, nose to the grindstone style. You know how coaches in professional sports often weren't superstars in their youth? That's because they were the hard workers who earned some success anyway. They had to learn everything step by step, calculate every move, work their asses off and in the process learned every single thing about their sport. The superstars? The LeBron James', the Kobe Bryant's, the Derek Jeter's? I'm not saying they didn't work hard, but they just knew how to play the game naturally. It just came to them without ever having really known why. That's talent, and in terms of food, I'm not sure it works quite the same way, but regardless.. I don't got it.

Alright, next are we talking about in a professional sense or a recreational sense?

There are many great chefs who have analyzed the differences between home cooking and professional cooking, and they have expressed those differences far more eloquently than I could. But in my opinion the difference is very simple.

An amateur does something until they get it right. A professional does something until they can't get it wrong.

Whereas many home cooks go to the kitchen to relax (although I am very aware that figuring out something your kids will actually eat, while balancing the rest of your life is a nightmare in its own right ... I was an unusually picky eater for being a fat kid), or to enjoy it as a hobby, professional cooks are doggedly pursuing refinement in technique, efficiency and presentation.

Well, the good ones are...

So most importantly, we practice. Yes, we talkin' bout' practice.

Thomas Keller stresses this a lot, and it's strange how many people are surprised by this but, cooking requires practice just like anything else. Sports, music, any sort of craftsmanship, it's all about doing something until your body does it automatically. Muscle memory is a beautiful thing, and I have a lot of firsthand experience with its effects through music. Though that was when my brain was a lot more receptive to learning, and while it was relatively simple for me to learn to play the cello, earning proper knife skills has proven far more difficult.

Regardless of current cerebral prowess, I probably crammed in enough pressured professional cooking in the past one and a half years to surpass the average home cook.

But then again I almost never cook at home, as my roommates have disappointingly realized. They occasionally talk about their aspiring chef roommate, and people reflexively ask "Oh, does he cook you awesome things all the time?" and the answer is a resentful, "No."

So yeah, sorry to all my old roommates for failing to live up to expectations, but I'd like to think yes, I am more proficient than the average home cook. Not because I've stacked up a lot of theoretical knowledge, not because I've burned myself with saute pans and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with ice-cold Mexican line cooks, but because I know how to use salt better than most of you do.

Most home cooks are afraid to push it with the salt, either for health reasons, or simply out of fear of overseasoning. When I watch you cook I can sense timidness. Though under or over seasoning something in a professional kitchen are equally criminal, I agree with you that when you over-salt something, there is no going back. You get a haircut you can always cut more off, but you can't grow it back on the spot. So I get it, better to fix it later and gradually adjust. But even then I don't think you go far enough. You will learn as you experiment with your palate, and cook more, but just know that it's almost impossible to over-salt a steak, and it's very educational to constantly taste your own food as you cook it. If you make soup or sauce, take a taste every time you add a pinch of salt. You will very quickly learn the evolution of flavor, and how big a difference salt can make.

Okay, so now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's assume we're talking about me as a professional cook.

Well ... I'm not sure how much my former employers appreciated me. Chef Mark was a perpetually cheerful kind of dude, who only offered occasional instruction. And I was mostly playing as dishwasher in his kitchen anyway. And Chef Jeff? Well, he hired me full-time from a stage position, but then again he liked to reiterate how much I sucked on a daily basis. Not in a harsh way, but when I think I'm working at full speed and keeping on top of everything, he would swoop in to say "Not fast enough" or "How about you try being first in the window?"

But in general, I think he liked me. He liked the Asian jokes I made at my race's expense and, being a cheap bastard, liked that he was getting an enthusiastic, English-speaking line cook at $9 an hour. The one time he gave performance reviews he sat me down and said "You underseason the tagliatelle. Stop that." (Funny, right? After I spent a whole paragraph telling you how I use salt well) And that was it.

I got better evaluations from Chuy. Ever the big brother figure, when Sergio or Jeff would yell at me to hurry the fuck up he would quietly help me plate and say, "You're doing very well, Eric, don't worry I help you with the scallops." I don't know if he was being nice, or if he was being honest, but it made being in the weeds less painful. Especially when Chef Jeff turned me in to a chef-de-tournant, and had me filling in on every station throughout the week. As Va P started to struggle with business, it would often just be me and Chuy in the kitchen, working all four stations with a dishwasher, the other cooks getting cut and sent home early. It was just busy enough to be crazy for two people, and proved to be a bizarre line cook experience. Cooks usually just focus on one station, one kind of cooking technique, but during these times I was doing everything. One minute you're roasting a whole sea bass, the next you're torching a creme brulee, and then back to check on your raviolis boiling away in the drink after you make that endive salad.

But let's put aside other people's evaluations, and consider my own.

Critical self-analysis and evaluation were skills I learned at Juilliard. That hyper-competitive environment forces one to constantly be humbled and learn from each humbling experience. Every time you become very proud of yourself, some eleven-year old Korean robot gets accepted and starts showing you how to really play your instrument. The practice rooms on the fourth floor had curtains to isolate your sound from one another, but I like to think they were just thin enough for you to hear your neighbor, so as to foster a cutthroat, hateful environment where classical musicians fight over scraps in a highly cultured, but ruthless dog-eat-dog world.

There was nothing worse than being singled out by a conductor during rehearsal to play your part in front of 70 of your classmates, be publicly excoriated and expelled from the room. Though your classmates' eyes seemed to plead sympathy, inside I think there was a feeling of sadistic pleasure in your humiliation.

I might be a little scarred.

So, all those past nightmares aside, I've learned how to analyze myself pretty closely. Not just to avoid embarrassment, but also because I've been roughed up to be competitive.

I think I'm ... decent. I'm good farm system material. Put me in the minor leagues for a year, let me work hard and one day I think I can be your starter. I don't think I'm exceptionally gifted, whatever being a talented cook means, but I have enthusiasm, no lingering lower body injuries and a decent noggin that is resistant to substance abuse. What I lack in experience, I make up for in determination, and what I lack in practical skill, I somewhat compensate for with theoretical knowledge.

I was never blessed with a lot of natural athleticism. I learned how to be an effective ultimate player through technique, field awareness and game intelligence. I think that is much the same for cooking. I don't know if I can just visualize and create an eyes-roll-back-into-head, orgasm-inducing dish on the spot, but I can realize how you did it and execute accordingly.

I may not be able to saute six orders of skate wing, baste with butter, blanch haricot verts and emulsify a beurre rouge at the same time, perfectly and on cue during a Saturday night crush. But I can tell you exactly how a saute pan affects fish, why basting is important, why wet heat is very beneficial to certain vegetables like green beans, and why the more RPMs you put in to whisking the better your emulsification turns out.

I may not be able to beautifully cut up a case of chickens, debone and butterfly them in under a half hour. But I can tell you why white meat is white, why dark meat is dark, and why they react differently to heat. And I definitely respect a well butchered chicken, and the whole process of presentation. Frenching a wing in to a supreme may be a pain in the ass, but it makes a difference to your customer.

I may not be able to plan my mise en place well enough so I have time to strain a light chicken stock ten times before service, but I can tell you why straining through a cheesecoth-lined chinois is crucial, and why perfect stock makes perfect sauce.

I may not be able to tell you how I plan on respectfully and tactfully blending various food cultures together, to represent my own personal style, but I can assure you I will try my damnedest to figure it out over the next decade. I may be way behind, there may be kids younger than me working in three Michelin star kitchens, so what I may "lack" in youth I will have to make up for with maturity (HAHA) and determination.

My goal is to first be a great cook, then a great chef, and then a great restaurateur. What makes a great cook is relatively simple. An ability to reproduce dishes consistently, quickly and in dogmatic dedication to the chef. What makes a great chef could fill endless blog posts. An ability to command and lead people to carry out your vision is probably the most significant distinction. And what makes a great restaurateur, well that still remains mysterious. There is no one way to do it, there are many paths to success, and there is an expansive skill set one must master. But being able to read people, the current restaurant climate, and express oneself in an attractive manner through food are among them.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. In the words of Bourdain, "There's a gulf the size of an ocean between adequate and finesse." Though I've worked in some decent restaurants, pressed my ability to learn, I haven't even gotten a canoe out to traverse that gulf. Maybe by the end of this year, we'll make it a speedboat. Maybe by the end of culinary school it'll be a cruiser. Let's just hope it never becomes a Titanic. Though I have faith that the chefs I work under will make sure to keep my ego in check. If not, I'll always have horrifying memories of Juilliard to remind me that there's no such thing as being the best.

EP6

People

I've come to realize that in lieu of having 50 or so posts in this stupid thing I've probably accrued enough pages to write a book. I'm not sure exactly, I don't use Microsoft Word anymore because it causes post-traumatic flashbacks of panic-writing history papers at the crack of dawn. Not to mention I stole that bitch, and am afraid Bill Gates is cinching in the net around me. But if I had to guess this blog full of long-winded profanities, and nonsensical culinary rantings is getting pretty hefty in the metaphysical sense.

So continuing on nonsensical rantings I'm going to put that last paragraph aside and just say...

Thank you. Thanks for reading. I know there are about 40-50 of you dedicated to reading each post and I really appreciate it. This began on a whim at 4 AM one sleepless night, and continues to be written largely in the twilight hours when my brain is at its peak operating speed and coherency. I didn't really think anyone would care, I think one of the douchiest statements a human being can make is "Well I have this blog..." but you've made it fun. And you've certainly helped maintain my sanity because most of these posts are the product of existential frustration, released via intellectual masturbation and consequently, grammatically messy money shots.

Ahem...

I've mentioned the importance of employees before. The golden rule to restaurants, if such a thing exists, being that before you fill it with high thread-count linens and Limoges porcelain you must fill it with good employees.

And once you get those good employees, you hold on tight.

The employer-employee relationship is like any animal relationship. You give me something, I give you something, we come to an understanding about what and how much, and hopefully we both gain from it. Guy buys dinner, he's at least expecting a handy, depending on which number date we're talking . Girl cooks dinner, maybe expects ... what do they call it? Cunning linguist? I forget exactly, but that never made sense to me...

For anything to work in the long run it's got to be mutually symbiotic. Work is a fact of life and I think a great gift you can give someone is an intellectually stimulating environment to work in, while being surrounded by like-minded and talented individuals.

I'm not going to be an employer anytime soon. But seeing as my mother has been an employer for the past 30-odd years, she's seen some shit. She's seen hundreds of employees come and go, and learned a great deal about people and how they treat work. And working alongside her, I am beginning to learn a little bit more about management. I don't think I can make any effective judgments, but perhaps some observations.

Firstly, let me establish that what has limited my mother the most is the employees she hires. She is an immensely talented woman, with a strong work ethic and charisma, but she is self-admittedly frustrated with her inability to expand beyond one restaurant. This is a shared fault between her and her worker bees. At her peak, she was running three restaurants, but after my father passed away, the infrastructure proved too unstable to be held up by one person.

To create a restaurant empire, which by no means is something I ever want to accomplish, you need to be very, very picky about the people you hire, and how you develop them. I know my mother wishes she didn't have to be at the helm seven days a week, but at this point it is unavoidable. Her customers depend on her to have a good restaurant experience, and my mother in turn depends on them for a livelihood. She wishes she were more like some of her peers, who are hands-off restaurant hegemons running multiple establishments, and putting away gold like Scrooge McDuck. But I think it is the kind of hiring decisions she made years ago, that make that unlikely.

To make just one restaurant run well, and to do so consistently while growing in to the future, requires talent, dedication, good work ethic and integrity from every employee ranging from dishwasher to floor manager. But to get such desirable employees and to hold on to them is difficult. Is it going to be the pay, the environment or the prestige that draws them in? Or all the above?

Whatever causes the initial interest is irrelevant. You're going to get a certain kind of person who is motivated by different things. The key is for you as an employer to be selective about who you choose. They have to fit your model, your philosophy for hospitality and business. And you can never compromise on that vision.

I was watching Tony Hsieh give a speech about his innovative company, Zappos.com, and he went to great lengths to describe the unique work culture. During the interview and training process he offers $2000 to anyone who wants to quit right there and then, and he makes this process long and scrutinizing to gather as much information as possible about a potential employee. The idea of offering a "quitting" incentive is to really separate the people just looking for work, from the people who really want to be here. Once he has those people, he takes a long, hard look at them and hires based on an unwavering set of standards. The idea there is that if you make just one minor compromise on hiring an employee, then you're going to set off a chain reaction of future compromises, until one day you have a company that is unrecognizable to your original vision and philosophy.

If you hire someone, you ideally want them to hang around. I think Emeril (gasp I know, I can't believe I'm quoting the Fozzie Bear of the food world) once called it the deadly "revolving door." If you take in talent, talent is going to want to grow because it has ambition and drive. You had better give that talent a place to grow to because if not, they are coming through, getting trained at a great investment from you, and then going right out the door.

So being that you want someone to hang around near indefinitely, you probably want them to match your vision for business to a T. If you make just one compromise, like "Oh, she's really sweet to customers, but can be rude to her coworkers" or "Well, he works hard, but his personal life is a mess, and keeps interfering with his ability to perform" then you're going to run in to some problems down the line. I'm not saying it's easy to spot these things in a relatively short hiring process. Nor am I saying it is impossible to train a person to excellence, and bring them round to eliminate their own personal demons. But that's what firing people is for, and generally it's very difficult to teach an old dog new tricks if they don't want to learn them.

My mother considers employees in a few different lights; their capability, their work ethic and their motivation. First are the skills, can they handle the volume we do? Do they have good fundamentals? Can you describe a dish, carry a tray, serve a plate and pour a glass of wine? Can you cook a fucking fried rice or not?

Second is the integrity. Will customers notice that your apron is wrinkled? 99% will not, but the fact that you have not taken note and care of this detail speaks volumes about your character. If you're the kind of person who cares about your own presentation, which I don't care what you say is very important to restaurant work, then you're most likely going to be the kind of person who's going to notice a lipstick-stained wine glass, or a chipped tea cup, or that a customer isn't loving their dish. It just means you fucking care, and you're willing to work hard to do something right. Not because you want to suck up to the boss, or get a good tip, but because doing something wrong is heresy to your personal religion of labor.

And finally, why are you here? Is this just a sinecure to you? Do you like this work, or are you simply at the end of a very long rope of poor decisions?

Most of the employees we have gotten have been through an agency. A liaison in Flushing who helps connect restaurant employees and employers. They have a very ancient and tradition-bound system like that in Europe, especially Paris, and I believe Jacques Pepin simply called it "La Societe." He was dumbstruck that America didn't have something similar.

Anyhow, when you're getting employees through someone else's (read: nonexistent) screening system, you're going to get a lot of questionable people showing up at your restaurant. Most of these hopefuls show up for one day of work, and are sent home by my mother at the end of the night with some cash and a "thanks but no thanks." Sometimes people stick around. Dishwashers and cooks see the most turnover. The floor staff, managers and waiters, have been the same for years.

My mom keeps a mental All-Star team of employees she's had in the past that she really cared about, and really valued. They had talent, charm and skill but they also had ambition, and almost all of them have gone on to do their own thing.

There was Georgette, a Malaysian woman who spoke many dialects of Chinese and near-perfect English. She not only could handle all the mundane duties of taking phone calls, booking parties and reservations, and gauging customer satisfaction, she could manage. For an Asian woman to command a restaurant full of lightly misogynist, Confucian ideologues and to crack the whip is no small task. She essentially ran one of the three restaurants during the Minor Golden Age of Huang, with my mother and father running the other two respectively.

There was Freddie, the old, wizened waiter. He was from an era where Chinese waiters were expected to wear tuxedos to work. Every morning, a crisp and starched uniform with a hand-tied bow tie, and silver hair parted at a razor's edge. He was what you would imagine a kung fu master would look like if he decided to try his hand at restaurants; disciplined, kind, sagacious, and fiercely loyal. He was unfortunately diagnosed with Alzheimer's years later, and in a mishap of memory showed up to Lily Pond in full garb, years after we had closed the restaurant. My mother greatly appreciated this gesture of loyalty, reasoning be damned, and in true Huang fashion sent his family a truckload of food.

And then there was mysterious, unnamed Sichuan chef who she worked with when she was in her late twenties. I never got his name, but to this day she remembers his cooking. She calls what we do now "peasant food," even our elaborate banquets are nothing she says, compared to this chef. Chinese cuisine of such elegance and exquisite preparation that thirty years after the fact, she still remembers his Goldfish Soup with Watercress (not actually goldfish, more like fishballs and dumplings shaped into goldfish). She also notes his meticulous management and orderliness. If you asked him on the spot, in the middle of dinner rush how many cases of red bell peppers were left, he'd rattle it right back to you with militaristic precision.

So she knows talent when she sees it, it's just very hard to hold on to. It's up to you as an employer to make that happen. Now she is generally unsatisfied with her staff as a whole. Her kitchen is run by a chef she has worked with for nearly two decades. She admits he is a fantastic cook, with a sharp palate and ability to create, but messy management habits. Food waste is very costly, and his negative influences trickle down through the whole kitchen.

And her floor staff comprises of multi-year veterans, and certain managers that are less than stellar. They all have their good's and their bad's, and sometimes they shine, and sometimes they falter. But they are disappointingly human, in her eyes. They are like that warm body you start texting on a Saturday night after you've had a few drinks. Ladies, don't pretend like you don't know. They aren't exactly going to rock your world, but you can depend on them to be there and at least give it some effort. At the very least you'll get a big spoon out of it (Who doesn't like little spoon, honestly?).

But sometimes you have to accept people's faults. When you're running a ship out in Long Island, you have to come to grips with the fact that you're not going to draw the best talent. Hell, even LeBron left Cleveland. Maybe you should learn to work with people's weaknesses, accommodate for them, and play their strengths. Try your best, keep your head down, count your blessings.

Or maybe if you're a control freak, stricken with neuroses and an abusive relationship with perfection, you start fresh and you do it the only way you know how; the right way.

EP6

Walk With Me

The infrared glow of your standard college alarm clock is something I never got used to. Though it has no incandescence to speak of, the red glow seems blinding in this windowless room.

9:45. I have some time before work. I've learned that a short commute is essential to my happiness, so I can fart around before driving in. Maybe a cup of bad instant coffee, maybe a steamed bun, there's always a lot of food offered by the Grandma. The battle against the burgeoning waistline begins early in the morning.

Drive, drive, drive. Long Island is a strange place to drive through. Though the hills and lack of strip malls make it seem nice, the bitterly stubborn "Historical Society" that preserves much of the colonial architecture, make it seem internally confused rather than cutely quaint. And traffic lights. Jesus, when are they going to figure out how to make those work properly on this damned island.

Park against the side of the building, it's getting close to 11:00 AM. The employee van lumbers up. It's our big passenger van, and it serves as a bus driving most of the employees to the restaurant from Flushing every morning. But thanks to the beauty of American car manufacturing (Shut it, Jiwon, I don't wanna hear it), it clunks and wheezes and limps through the parking lot. I try to get here after them, but sometimes I don't time it well. I don't like for them to see me in my car, and for it to suggest that I'm some spoiled brat. One, the car doesn't actually cost all that much, two, as far as I'm concerned I don't own this place. I am an employee, a grunt, another cog in the machine just like them.

Doors open. Well, technically, we're open. We don't really start doing business until noon. But we get the same two regulars at 11:30, every morning. One woman, sadly stricken with some kind of mental illness, sits at D1 and orders roast pork lo mein and diet coke. The other, an out-of-work hairdresser who has taken up temporary residence at the hotel next door, sits at the bar and likes to watch HGTV. The word "temporary" is beginning to lose its meaning. An egg roll, wonton soup with tea, $6.29, every weekday. These creatures of habit, they really are fascinating. They don't mind as the waiters and bus boys roll through with the vacuum cleaner, brooms and Windex.

Prop open the kitchen double doors, turn on the fans. The kitchen slowly dumps its exhaust heat throughout the night, and even during the winter it remains frightfully steamy. There are some dirty dishes, and the soup bain-maries are left out at night. Chinese soups are made fresh daily, so we wash and refresh in the morning. The cooks change in to their whites, not having the luxury of going home like I do, and they slowly set up their stations. I make sure to attack the floor with a broom.

I sweep and sweep. Partly because I want to show the employees that I am willing to do the dirtiest and most thankless jobs. And secondly, I in fact love sweeping. Ever since I became a cook, wiping down tabletops, cutting boards, sweeping floors gets me off. Okay, maybe that's a bit hyperbolic and disturbingly sexual, but my obsessive-compulsive tendencies have fully bloomed as I've continued to work in restaurants.

Floor seems clean, put on the whites. Trusty Yankees hat, dishwasher's snap-on, and a full-body apron. My favorite culinary uniform. Chef's jackets were always too thick for me, and waist-high aprons didn't offer enough coverage for my clumsy ass. Time to work.

I follow around Luo Shi-fu, the dim sum chef, like a rather annoyingly obedient dog. We have so many cooks that he is literally the only chef who has space for me. The prep table, the line, and the dishwasher seem to be constantly abuzz and occupied. But having worked as a solo specialist for years, Luo Shi-fu has just enough room for me to park alongside him and learn.

What kind of dim sum do we make today? Well, first we figure out the filling and then the dough to wrap it in. Sometimes we make wheat starch dough, sometimes we make flour dough, sometimes we make leavened bao zi dough. The wheat starch dough is the trickiest. You've probably had wheat starch dim sum before. When they're well-made, they're pellucid and gossamer little bundles, just barely hinting at their contents, and giving in to your mouth with ease and smoothness. Yes, that kinky. It's just wheat starch, refined corn starch, a little salt, and boiling hot water. You mix it all together, pour on the water, and knead immediately. The dough has to remain hot, and then warm for however long you are making dumplings. Once it gets cold, it is dead and useless. Luo Shi-fu can resuscitate a cold dough, but the results are less than optimal. So the key is to work fast. Only thing is, kneading boiling hot water in to dough is rather painful. My bitch hands never fail me. A lubrication of pork fat should serve as a protective condom against the heat, but it does little to stave off the burn. Luo Shi-fu's leathery craftsman hands are often required to finish the job in time.

Twelve o' clock, noon. Brunch time. It's always the same. Noodle soup, mian tiao. A mixture of leftover noodles from the night before with any vegetables or meat nearing their time thrown in. The various cooks take turns making it, and I've learned to identify their personal styles. I like Pei Shi-fu's mian tiao the best. It is often made with tomato, water spinach, garlic, pork, cabbage, and onion, with dashi and miso stock as the base. He adds just the lightest touch of cornstarch to give the broth some thickness. We line up, fill our bowls, and me and the Mexican guys immediately dump in heaping tablespoons of chili paste. The Chinese dudes think we're crazy. The broth turns violently red. I love it. You sip the broth near the end, it burns. It makes you sweat, it makes your nose run, but it lights your body on fire for a brisk autumn day. Makes you feel alive and most certainly awake. I try to hide it from my mom though, because she thinks a cankerous ulcer is in store for me. I add the crunchy, fried chow mein noodles at the end like croutons. I draw looks from the cooks that say, "::sigh:: ... American."

The morning drones on. Making dumplings, sweeping the floor, wiping the table. Luo Shi-fu's work space consists of your standard 3x6 steel table topped with a 4-inch thick slab of wood. The hardwood top has seen a lot of abuse and work, but the near-constant use of pork fat has left it smooth. Behind us is another steel prep table that is often shared by as many as five cooks at once. Sometimes one manning the meat slicer, while the other four julienne a mountainous pile of carrots with chipped cleavers. I should have been grateful for all the space I was afforded at Va P. When the chickens come in, they all team up on the effort to run through the cases upon cases of poultry we get. But that's not today, today is Rib Day.

"Dia de Costillas!" Miguel exclaims. The ribs come down the back stair case on a dangerously stacked dolly. The grill chef is a bad ass. His heart is failing him, he takes dozens of pills every morning. But he is ice cold on the line. He makes sure one of our top selling items is always at its best; our spare ribs. We sell close to a thousand pounds a week. They are marinated in a concoction of ketchup, garlic, powdered onion, soy bean paste, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, palm sugar, tomato paste, the list goes on and on. But first they are trimmed to size. The riblets are cut off, the bottom chain is cut off, and then you have one perfect rectangle of ribs. Going through a thousand pounds of that, you can imagine how much trim we have. We eat a lot of pork riblets through employee meals. I couldn't be happier.

His morning will consist of prepping the ribs. All the other cooks go through their motions as well. Due to sheer volume, there isn't much time to waste. We don't have to hurry, there is a lot of time in a twelve hour day. But we certainly can't stop and lounge around. I like the pace. It is more relaxed than Va P, despite ending up being more work.

Damn, 3 PM already? Time to go. Oh, Jenny the bag packing girl has an extra doughnut from the Chinese bakery. Won't I please have one? Oh, Luo Shi-fu figured he'd steam a few less-than-beautiful dumplings (i.e. mine), won't I please have some? Oh, employee lunch is up, you sure you're not hungry? Damn, the path to fat-assery is a slippery one. If I'm not careful, the day my heart clogs up with LDLs, I will have died to the sound of a burst artery, and the sugary rush of a Chinese raisin bread.

Back home, a little time to decompress, shower, change, suit up. Sometimes I play cello, oftentimes I waste time on the internet, occasionally I go running. Very occasionally.

What will it be today? Oh, the black Joseph A. Bank button-down and the Boss suit pants? You mean what I've been wearing as uniform for over a year? These poor guys have seen a lot of action from Blu, to Futami to Pearl. The pants ripped completely as I bent to take out some soy sauce one day. Some poor customer nearly caught the eclipse of my sack. A double wrap of black aprons saved her from further exposure to my goodies. I've bolstered the ranks of all-black uniforms since I've been home, but these go-to's will always have a soft spot in my heart. Green tie today. Damn, I make this look good. Single, divorced, or widowed Jewish women of Long Island; prepare thyself.

One more commute through Long Island. Goddamn it, the sun beams right in my eyes from the west at 5:00 PM. I would wear sunglasses, but if I get pulled over I don't want to be racially-profiled as "wannabe Asian mafia." My boy Greg, the valet sees me pull in and drags away the cone from the spot he saves me. I tell him it's not necessary, but he does it anyway. What a nice guy.

Apron on, walk in, relative calm at 5:10 PM. The shit will hit the fan at 6:15. The old folks eat early, 6:00 PM is optimal feeding time. Check the reservations, maybe that half-Asian model girl will come back. I've deluded myself in to thinking she was eye-fucking me, and I hold a faint hope that her name pops up in the list. Hmmm, the Aquino's are coming, rolling deep with nine today. Love that family. Their grandma, fifty years ago, I'm in there without a doubt. Step in to the back, lint roll myself to satiate more OCD ticks, wipe down the glass desk to eradicate any smudges, more OCD ticks, patrol the dining room, keep an ear out for phone calls...

Working the phones requires mise en place of its own. Pads, reliable pens, stapler, well-organized desk with accessories fixed at right angles, and waiting take-out orders laid out sequentially. We have four active lines, and on a busy night (i.e. Monday night football ... or worse, rainy Monday night football) they will not stop for two hours. We only have one computer, so you either hand-write some of the orders or you learn to push customers along fast. Do me a favor; whenever you order take-out, have your order ready beforehand, have any pressing questions ready, speak clearly, i.e. NOT while you're driving with the window down, ask for a quick repeat of the order, and hang up. It'll make everybody's life easier, I promise.

Ah, this fucking guy wants the Ginger-Scallion Barbecued Jumbo Shrimp, but he wants the tails cut off. Why? Why, god, why are the tails such a big problem? There is no built-in modifier for "remove tails" in the software, so I have to tap out a note in English which the expediter can not read. What it really means is I have to leave my station to run to the kitchen and explain what they want in my broken Chinese. The din is deafening and I yell out "Ticket 43! Shrimp to chop tail away!" The expediter squints at me, looks back at the ticket, nods, and I pray for the best.

8:00 PM, the rush is over. On the weekends it will continue to rock, but on the weekdays the old folks are tucking in early. The Yankees are done with, my mother has no interest as to what's on the TV. I put on ESPN as I run through the tickets. Adjusting the tips in the computer, lining them up by invoice number, and keeping the cash drawer in check, making sure the numbers line up. Top Ten Highlights, as always, require my undivided attention. Even you, half-Asian model girl, do not hold precedence over Top Ten.

9:00 PM, the dining room is emptying out. Caught up on paperwork, patrol the dining room. We have a couple regulars who know better than to try and eat during the rush. They prefer the calm effort of a later dinner. Plus they get the pleasure of having more of my mom's attention, and to see the return of the prodigal son. Last time most of them saw me, I was plus 60 pounds and in full bloom of teenage awkwardness. They seem genuinely shocked to see me now.

"My, how handsome you are!"
"Aw shucks, stop it, you flatter me, Mrs. So-and-so..."

"You look like a movie star!"
"Well, I mean... I did take Basic Acting..."

"So tall! And no girlfriend? We should find you one! I know this nice girl..."
"Oh! (nervous laugh) Please, you're embarrassing me, that's very nice of you but you don't have to do that... I mean ... well, I guess, you know, maybe bring her by some time..."

I love these people so much. Get me through my exorbitantly expensive Northwestern education, and then constantly try to hook it up. The Jewish people, you are good to me.

Dining room is done. Waiters and cooks start to pack it in. Tonight, they pool tips, it's a team effort. We collect and divvy out, they all leave together after changing in to their streets. The cooks clean up, pack up the last meal, which is usually some random food my mom takes home, and they clean the floors. Buckets of neon green, soapy water sloughed through out, and mopped up by Cristobal, the five-foot tall Guatemalan kid.

Tonight I will stay and close with my mom. Check all the lights, and fridges, and close the credit card system. Print the final readout, make sure the totals add up right, a tedious task of reading micro-print and double checking numbers, and closing up shop. All employees leave through the front door, no matter who you are. I wipe the glass table and bar one more time because at this point, fingerprints and smudges make me physically ill. And then I check the kitchen to see if everything is closed and off; gas, low-boy doors, pilot lights on, exhaust fans and ceiling lights off, everything out is meant to be and lidded. No matter what my mom triple-checks everything right after me. One kitchen fire twenty years ago will scar you for life.

Turn off all the lights, hit the alarm system, finally time to go. Front door is locked, last two cars out of the lot are the Huang's; the surprisingly affordable Acura, and the giant Mercedes that runs technology more advanced than its Asian operator can manage (she just figured out how to change the time). I let her go first while I fumble around my car, "cleaning." She has accepted that I am a creature stricken with OCD nervosa. I wait three minutes, often spent wiping the cigarette ash out of the black interior. Enough time has passed, I'll hit the road and not catch up to her at this rate. Get on Northern Boulevard and sneak one last cigarette on the way home.

Such is the life.

EP6

The Difference

Hey, does anybody else hear frogs?

Once in a long while, we at Pearl East will get a special party of Chinese guests. This is actually a noteworthy occasion because 99.9% of our guests are older, white people from Long Island. After all, though we are a Chinese restaurant, we all know that restaurants outside of Chinatown are actually Chinese-American restaurants.

So while you have been sucking down egg rolls and sweet & sour chicken your whole lives and calling it Chinese, I'm sorry to inform you that it is a very far deviation from authentic Chinese food.

Most of you know this already, but for those who do not, the difference is quite substantial and it would do you some good to learn about both. Especially since you white dudes seem to love Asian girls so much. You can't hurt your chances of winning over an overly strict Asian father by knowing a bit about our food culture.

When we do get parties for Chinese people, you can imagine they are not ordering from our dinner menu. They are calling ahead and arranging a banquet with my mother, who then sends her chef in to Flushing, the most epic concentration of Asian immigrants on the East Coast, to get the real ingredients.

Now Pearl East markets itself as a (hopefully) paradigmatic Chinese-American restaurant. We give you the more familiar style of Chinese food, and we try to do it as well as we can, while trying to throw in some authenticity here and there. It's a gentle gradient between the domesticated stuff and the foreign stuff. And while chicken chow mein and sesame chicken are huge sellers, we are very capable of doing the mainland Chinese cuisine. I mean, after all our chefs are not PF Chang automatons, they are cooks from Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.

In fact, all of them have no appetite whatsoever for the American stuff. At Va P, when mistakes were made or dishes sent back 99% intact, we'd often taste them to see why the customer didn't like it, or if nothing tangible was wrong with it we'd give it to the dishwashers (they have the hardest and shittiest job in the kitchen, it's important to treat them well). Often I'd kind of welcome the error as long as it wasn't from my station. What? They thought this lamb tastes "funny?" Shit, I don't get to eat baby lamb chops every day, hook it up, son!

The same deal at Pearl. Dishes get sent back here and there, and I'm like, "What? Free rice paper shrimp rolls? Score!" And of course, I offer to share, but no one wants any. And they're not just being polite, they honestly don't like Chinese-American food. They always say "Na shi lao wai xi huan chi de.." meaning "that's what foreigners like to eat."

Well fine, this foreigner is going to get his grub on.

So as you can see, Chinese-American food is apparently so repulsive to Mainlanders that they won't eat it. There exists a book on this phenomenon, Chop Suey by Andrew Coe, that examines the cultural history of Chinese food in America. This shit has been going on since day one, when we were building y'all's railroads (and now flooding your higher education with incalculable numbers ... taste it, bitches). Though we started off cooking this kind of food so as to appeal to Westerners, apparently we never really ate it.

So what does real Chinese food look like? Well, I've never been to China. I've had the authentic food in the states though. Basically, Chinese-American food sits on the flavor spectrum towards the sweet side. Sweet & sour is a very prevalent flavor profile. Real Chinese food is much more heavily spiced and on the savory, salty side. Of course, China is a ginormous country, and millennia old, and its regional cuisines are almost unrecognizable to each other. But if I had to put a blanket over it, that's what I would say.

And of course there's the whole thing about exotic ingredients.

Americans walk through a Chinatown market and if they aren't a little horrified, they're definitely confused. Most of the animals are still very much alive (and being killed indiscriminately), they are of an origin that is completely unfamiliar, and things ... smell funny. It's that funky herbal smell that pervades through all Chinese supermarkets. I get the feeling it's the tea and rhino penis.

A bit jarring for an obese little American kid who thinks chickens naturally come in nugget form.

I poke fun, but in reality, it's very foreign to me as well. That's why I need to watch this banquet go down.

Chinese banquets often involve very intricate fruit and vegetable carvings. Presentation is just as important in Asian food, but we take it a bit more literally. Whereas European cuisine has the edible garnish, and beautifully sauced plate philosophy, Asian food has towering structures of carrot and turnip that form craggy mountaintops with swans made out of dough and potatoes. And while these presentations are technically "edible," no one is going to start munching on an uncooked yam turned in to a basket or something. It's pretty amazing to watch a skilled carver at work though, using little knives and scalpels to turn an ordinary root vegetable in to an extraordinary sculpture.

And then the tasty bits are put alongside. Maybe a stir fry under a large "tree", or maybe dumplings beautifully arranged on a gelatin "lake" with "lily pads" made from lotus roots. But ah, the tasty bits? What are they?

Well frankly, as I'm watching Ah Gau and our dim sum chef, Luo Shi-fu do prep, I am at a loss. I've never seen ANY of these things before. What are those yellow, chive looking things?

My mom explains, "Jiu-huang, yellow chives. They're garlic chives grown in darkness, so they never turn green." Oh, like white asparagus and Jason Schenkel. They smell funky delicious!

Then a plate of conch shells. I figure just for decoration. Nope. "Stewed conch meat with Eight Treasure Sticky Rice." Gotta love the way Chinese people name things.

Then giant ass shrimp, the likes of which I've only seen on the West coast, bigger than a gerbil. They sit in ice water with a strange red herb. What are those?

"Gou-ji. Uh, there's not an English word." Oh... they smell ... strange. They might be flower buds, but they look and smell like red raisins. Some kind of aromatic herb.

So how's this all going together? Oh, they're making tian ji. I'm not sure what tian ji is, but my rudimentary Chinese thinks "Oh, sweet chicken. So maybe like a shorthand for sweet-and-sour chicken, which would be tian suan ji." Though it seems awfully strange that a Chinese banquet would be having sweet-and-sour chicken. Is this like an ironic thing?

Short aside: Here's the problem with the Chinese language, and why the State department says it's one of the four hardest languages for non-natives to learn.

It's very tonal and dependent on context and inflection to determine meaning. The word tian can actually be pronounced four different ways, with various tones. But there aren't only four definitions for the word, there are probably more than fifteen. You have to use context to figure out which word you're using. Off the top of my head it could mean heaven, or sweet, or field, or to fill out (an application), etc.

So tian ji does not necessarily mean "sweet chicken." It's just the first thing that comes to my mind because my vocabulary is on par with most Chinese 6-year olds.

Seriously, does anyone hear frogs?!?!

Oh...

...

...

Oh no...

...

Oh sweet mother of God...

As if on cue, a jiggling plastic bag is produced.

Oh no.

FROGS!?!? How the hell does "sweet chicken" become frogs!??!

Apparently tian in this case refers to a small divot in a rice paddy, where water collects and forms a very habitable environment for amphibians. So tian ji means "field water hole chicken," a very cute colloquial name for frogs. Why can't we use the word I know!?

Listen, I got nothing against frogs. I think they're delicious French bistro style, i.e. marinated in garlic, parsley, salt and fried. It's fucking delicious. But why LIVE frogs?!

I mean a live fish I get. It's not meant to survive on land, if you lose grip on that thing it's going to harmlessly flop on the ground until you chop its face off. But that flimsy knot on that shopping grade plastic bag is containing creatures that could easily run away from you, and hide somewhere in your kitchen so that even eleven Chinese dudes with cleavers can't round them up. Plus, they are tiny, slippery little bastards. Why live frogs??!

As if to silence my dreading questions, Ah Gau pulls out a frog, somehow without letting the rest of the fuckers out, and neatly bops it on the head with the back of his cleaver. GG frog.

Oh.

That's why, live frogs.

And then the gruesome ordeal is nearly over. A rhythmic motion of bop, chop head off, rip guts out, cut feet/hands/toes/appendages off, chop frog in half (at the balls I might add) and then quarter. It makes me wonder if Ah Gau spent time in some kind of slaughterhouse just killing various animals for four years. He is dangerously efficient at taking apart critters.

I get little tastes of everything here and there, and real Chinese food is definitely ... exotic.

I grew up eating Chinese-American food and I loved it. Sesame chicken and pan-fried noodles almost every night (hence the fat kid thing). It's like McDonald's for me. Chicken McNuggets is not a far departure from sesame chicken, double-fried nuggets of white meat (let's remember that that is a recent thing for McDonald's) slathered in sweet-and-sour sauce. Hand me a diabetes-inducing Coca-Cola, my good man.

But as my palate has refined and grown more adventurous (in a "expanding my cultural borders" way, not a "drunk college freshman girl making out with her hot friend, because ya know .. it's college" kind of way), I've really come to appreciate this kind of food.

This is ancient history. This is food connecting me to my primordial roots. I most definitely had an ancestor who waded in a rice paddy and ate frogs like it was his business. It's delicious and even spiritual. At least as spiritual as food can be.

It only strengthens my desire to learn more about my culture. Not only has Chinese-American food been bastardized, but the supposedly more refined "fusion" cuisine is not much better. There is no more overused, trite and poorly executed concept than fusion. I've heard of Thai restaurants serving pasta carbonara, I've heard of a restaurant in Chicago called Italiasia.

FUCK YOU.

Stop raping two beautiful culinary histories and philosophies by hatefucking them together in a glitzy, kitschy, tacky restaurant concept. It's irresponsible. It's like in Underworld when Bill Nighy realizes that they're trying to make a Lycan/vampire hybrid. Abomination, he says! (Okay the first one wasn't that bad, and Kate Beckinsale in leather is always worth it)

And if you are going to do it? You better do it right. Subtly, with deep understanding and respect for all culinary technique, history and tradition you are pulling from. Beautifully, mixing two things so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And tactfully, which means no throwing soy sauce in your salsa pomodoro and calling it fusion. Italiasia, you've got to be kidding me.

I don't wanna call it fusion, what I wanna do. David Chang of Momofuku glory, or Gray Kunz at the Lespinasse of yesteryear are probably more like it. Chang likes to call it "pseudo fucked up bad fusion." Some of the combinations are "fuck you" offensive in their concept, others are more refined. It's all about personal style, and since I don't have one yet, I won't name it.

All I know is I have such a deep curiosity and passion for Asian food, and am considering bearing the mantle of redeeming Chinese-American food in the states. And all I know is I have such a hard-on for French classical technique, and the European school of cooking that I can't possibly ignore its importance in the whole spectrum of culinary history.

How those are going to mingle together to create some evil demon spawn brain child of mine is yet to be seen. I just hope you're as excited as I am.

EP6

The Front Lines

They say that restaurants are a tripod. Balance and success depend on three things; back of the house, front of the house, and accounting. Some people may think one is more important than the other, and you may be successful because of one more than the other, but no restaurant can stand if one of these legs falls.

Back of the house seems obvious enough. The ability to deliver a product in a certain package, within a reasonable time frame for a volume large enough to make a living. I've discussed this in-depth across the entirety of this blog, and it's not something I want to focus on right now. Cook with love, cook it fast, cook it right, and people will want to eat what you have to offer.

Accounting also seems pretty straightforward. Keeping a well-organized eye on your expenses, managing your purveyor relationships, paying your bills on time, and fighting the eternal enemy of the restaurant; waste. Seeing as how my math proficiency stops at 10th grade algebra (seriously...), this may be a bit tricky for me, but I have faith my genetic disposition towards math will come through for me at some point.

Now, front of the house. That's a whole 'nother beast.

As almost everyone has eaten in restaurants, everybody knows the difference between good and bad service. But it's harder to tell good from exceptional service. It's almost intangible and it's very hard to quantify. Too lax and you risk losing technical proficiency and austerity. Too on point and you risk seeming robotic and soulless. Everybody will want something different, and it will be impossible to please everyone. But being on the receiving end of exceptional service, well .. it's actually so enlightening that I was amazed it even existed at such a level.

I note the front of house staff at Le Bernardin. A polished crew of more than thirty that performs like a unit. Friendly, but with authenticity. They weren't sucking your dick for money and telling you they loved every minute of it. They honestly gave off an aura of well-being and happiness, something that can only be produced, I think, by a genuine feeling of well-being and happiness. They were busy, constantly roaming the floor like a bustling hive of oenophilic bees, but you never felt like you were in the middle of a rush. They floated noiselessly by, and if you happened to need something, they ever so gracefully stopped their work to attend to you.

Plates were cleared without notice, the back waiter with the bread basket seemed to magically appear whenever we wanted bread, and wine was recommended sensibly (for us being general wine novices), and poured delicately. But yet it was casual, and friendly. It didn't feel like a temple of haute cuisine (even though it is), or a religious experience (which it might have been). It was fun and chill, and the customers ran the gamut from high rollers to recent college grads looking to get laid (I mean if he's picking up the bill at $135 prix-fixe menu, you gotta do better than an HJ).

It was an experience that I can't tie to any specific actions, but left me with a feeling of nourishment. I had an incredible meal, the staff honestly seemed pleased to have me, and I watched the highly choreographed dance between kitchen and dining room played out at a level I was woefully envious of.

(To top it all off, the manager had heard wind of my culinary aspirations, gave me a card [I'm not sure why actually ...], and gave me a tour of the kitchen. The little Asian girl on saute station was maybe two years my senior, was definitely a hundred pounds lighter and a foot shorter, but she was working it like an ice-cold boss. I would SO get in there.)

So how do you win front of the house every day?

I recently got a sage bit of advice from my dentist, of all places. He said, "The best restaurant in the world ... is the one that knows you."

And that's exactly it. Every diner is different. They might fall within a broad category, but they are made happy and satisfied by different things. Myself? I'm a very simple diner. I order off the menu, I don't ask for substitutions, I don't really like holding up the staff in conversation, and I don't send back food (even though sometimes I should). When I go to dinner it is to enjoy the company of my company, and I only ask the staff allow that experience with perfunctory and friendly service, rather than enhance it with anything else they might want to add.

But that's just me. A lifetime of being an awkward child has probably made me non-confrontational and surprisingly introverted at times. And I probably help the restaurant the least, because I never let them really know how they're doing. I walk out the door, I say "thank you" and either I come back, or I never do so again.

Clearly, I am but one type of myriad kinds of diners. You have those who are apologetic for their noisy children. You have those who are aggressive about their food allergies. You have those who are just blissfully unaware of how a restaurant works, and seem to do everything to make your life harder. You have those who are just downright pleasant, and you have those who are downright mean.

Treating every customer as an individual, as a special case requiring specific kinds of attention, is the first step towards winning the front. Knowing your customer, by building a rapport, or realizing that they want to be left alone, is the only way, and honoring their requests and making them feel cared for will always go appreciated.

Easy enough, right? Be a nice guy, care, show up, be friendly, remember faces and preferences.

Now do it with two hundred people in your dining room at once.

Not so easy.

I can cook you a perfect order of Sauteed Sea Scallops with Brandied Lobster Sauce, Israeli Couscous, Navel Orange Supremes and Red Bell Pepper-Mache Salad on command. Can I do it over thirty times in a night, in a few minutes, while balancing the rest of my orders? History has proven that I needed my sous chef to bail me out.

I can be an excellent waiter, I can get 20% every time on a night at Blu/Futami where having 30 covers a night is considered a lot. Can I make sure everyone is happy on a Saturday night at Pearl, where we just did 250 covers in 4 hours? I'm not so sure.

Quantity is a vicious counterpoint to quality. To achieve both requires mastery, plain and simple. On your best days, everything will seem to have gone right. But the fact remains that you can't please everyone, you just have to try your best.

It's very easy to be nice to a nice customer. I used to have nothing to say to these older, Korean War-era New Yorkers. But I've found over the past month, a surprising number of engaging conversations and pleasant exchanges, as opposed to forced smiles and polite laughter. I guess I've changed a lot since high school. I mean I still get touted around the dining room by my mother, that hasn't changed. But whereas I used to run and hide from an encounter with one of her customers, now I welcome the opportunity to make a meaningful connection with a loyal patron. Anyhow, it's the only way I'll ever remember the different Schwartz's, and Rosenberg's, and Rosenfeld's, and Klein's, and Grossberg's, and Grossman's, and Markowitz's and Feldman's.

But it is an epic test of my patience to be nice to an angry or nasty customer.

Let me preface; for every nasty customer we have, we have ten customers who are pleasant diners, and five customers who are dear regulars. But the nasty ones really stick out in your memory. They are curmudgeonly stubborn thorns that embed themselves in your state of mind. Every single one makes you feel as if you're doing a terrible job. Every single one makes you angry and tired, irritable and disbelieving.

I recount these anecdotes for the sake of entertainment, but in all reality my sometimes utter lack of faith in humanity feels justified.

Story #1

(Phone rings)

Me: "Pearl East, how may I help you?"
Woman: "Yeah I just picked up my take out, and you remember how I specifically asked for the low-sodium, Japanese soy sauce? Well you forgot it. You fucking forgot it and that is fucking rude. What are you going to do for me? I'm sick of you people doing this, and messing up such a simple request. How am I supposed to eat my sushi now, huh? Are you a manager? Are you going to fix this?"
Me: "Uh, ma'am ... I ..."
Woman: "You know what, let me speak to Cathy, okay?" (Customers try to pull this bullshit on me, not knowing I will pull the "mommy" card so fast in their faces)
Me: "Uh, ma'am, are you sure? I definitely put them in the bag, maybe you ..."
Woman: "Do you think I'm blind? Do you think I'm stupid? What is this you're trying to ... (rummage, rummage) ... oh."
Me: "Yes?"
Woman: "I found them."
Me: "What did you find, ma'am?"
Woman: "I found the soy sauce."
Me: "Oh ... okay."
Woman: "Alright ... I was wrong, good bye."

(Click)

Story #2

(A larger woman walks in, without a reservation, wanting a table for two. It's Tuesday, and even on a "dead" weekday we recommend reservations. The wait will be about 15 minutes. She sees a deuce get up, and the table is being bussed, she assumes that it is hers. As I'm coming back from the kitchen, the woman looks at me and signals to the table, and I nod telling her to please come and sit. Joanne, our hostess/manager doesn't realize and sits someone else down just as I'm getting to her. Hell breaks loose.)

Woman: "What the hell was that?!"
Me: "I'm sorry, it was an accident, we have another table coming up shortly, let me buy you a round of drinks."
Woman: "I don't want any drinks! What the hell was that all about!? That table was mine, was it not? Did you not just skip me? Who the hell is he, that he's so special!?"

(I give Joanne a pained look that screams 'You are killing me, woman')

Joanne: "I'm very sorry, Eric and I had a miscommunication, and I didn't see you there."
Woman: "What!? You didn't see me!? What, because I'm so skinny!? What are you trying to say!?"

(What?!?!)

Woman: "I've been coming here for twenty years! I can't believe this kind of treatment! Akd;jf;akjsdpJ#Ijlkadjaodij;ajg)(*$)(*#$!!!!"

Story #3

(A man walks in with his young daughter on a Sunday night, our second busiest night of the week. Nobody recognizes him, so we can only assume he is a newish customer. He does not have a reservation. His wife is in the car, they're asking how long the wait is, then deciding if they want to stay or not. Admittedly, our valet situation is kind of a mess. Too many old people driving slowly, and nonsensically coupled with a narrow parking lot, and the frequent traffic on Northern Blvd causes a lot of jams. There are about fifteen people crowded in to the bar area waiting for tables, and he goes unnoticed by Joanne a few times. Eventually she gets to him, and she goes to scan the dining room one more time to see how long the wait will be.)

Man: "What is wrong with the service here?"
Me: "Uh, is there something I can help you with?"
Man: "She keeps bypassing me, I just want to know how long the damn wait is!"
Me: "Oh I know, I'm very sorry about that, sir. It's just very busy, and she's trying, but unfortunately I don't know what the table situation is like."
Man: (to Joanne) "Can you just tell me how long the goddamned wait is!?"
Joanne: "Okay, it'll be a few minutes, they're getting up, is everybody here?"
Man: "Yes."

(Few minutes later...)

Joanne: "Okay, your table is ready, is everybody here?"
Man: "Hold on." (Dials on his cell phone) "Okay honey, you can come in now."
Joanne: "I thought you told me everyone was here."
Man: (rage level one appears in his eyes, looks at me) "You know she is really nasty."
Me: "I'm sorry... ?"
Joanne: "I can only seat full parties" (She moves on to another customer for a second...)
Man: "Are you fucking kidding me?! Alright, that's it, we're leaving."
Me: "Sir, sir, I'm really sorry, there's no need to yell, we're getting a table ready for you..."
Man: (yelling for everyone to hear) "NO! I'm not staying, and I'm telling ALL of my friends that this place has TERRIBLE service!"
Joanne: "Okay, I'm sorry you feel that way, sir, have a great night."
Man: "You have been incredibly rude to me tonight! You bumped in to my knee, I just got knee surgery, you know?? And then all I wanted to know was how long the fucking wait was!"
Me: (At this point he is trying to physically intimidate Joanne, a very tiny white woman, and I get from behind the desk to put myself between them) "Sir, please..."
Man: "This place is awful, and I'm telling everyone! What kind of business this?"
Me: "Apparently one that requires you to make a reservation on a Sunday night. I'm sorry, I can't give you a table on a whim."
(The man's eyes go bloodshot, rage level two has been reached, and he is considering attacking me. But Mr. Knee Surgery knows better, and that I would drop his ass like a bad habit if he tried it. Plus, I look sweet in black and my candy pink tie screams "WAR!")
Man: "Who the fuck do you think you are?"
Me: "Someone who thinks you are setting a poor example for your daughter. Have a good night, dear!"
(I turn around and take a phone call, the man leaves, turns back in for a second as he is leaving, gets inches from Joanne's face and smolders, and curses "Fuck you." and leaves.)

Innocent Bystander to Me and Joanne: "It's okay, I'd still like to stay for dinner..."

All in one month! Quite an interesting petri dish of the human condition we have here, don't we?

Now, we are at fault for many of the incidents above. The mistake with seating the woman was avoidable, I just missed Joanne by a second before I could tell her I was saving that table. But her reaction seems unjustified. Really, why get so upset about this? I'm trying to make it right for you, I apologized, is it worth getting hot and bothered?

And the gentleman who got really mad, well ... I definitely should not have taunted him. But my "smile and take your bullshit" persona has limits. I can be saccharine sweet if need be, and I think I'm a pretty nice guy by nature, and I, like most nerds, try to avoid violent confrontations. But if I see an opportunity to be a snarky asshole with a good comeback, and I have a few inches on a guy... I'll go for it. (I know, really manly, eh?)

Some people are just miserable. These are just three snippets from a month of dealing with nasty customers every day. Like I said before, the pleasant ones far outnumber these uncouth diners, but they just don't affect your outlook the same way.

We are at fault often, as no one is infallible. But we try to fix it. In the words of Danny Meyer, words I will never, ever forget "The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled."

The restaurant business is a fickle creature. You try to cut it in New York, the biggest and baddest city there is, you're going to get some rude customers, and lousy people who just want you to be as miserable and unhappy as they are. You can't let it get to you. It's out of your control. All you can do is end the story the way you want to. My mom gave me this pearl of wisdom years before I read it from Danny Meyer, "You never let a customer walk out angry. You have to end the dinner on your terms. If you lose one customer, you lose ten customers."

They may be unhappy, but only after you have tried your best to make it up to them. If they leave angry, all they will remember is that bitter taste of resentment, and it will keep them from ever returning, or ever speaking well about your restaurant. You have your staff put up the red flag, and you go personally, as the owner, as someone with the absolute power in the place, to make it right. At the very least, the customer will leave knowing you have tried your damnedest to earn their patronage back. You have to put aside your pride, no matter how much you want to tell these oft-difficult bastards to fuck off and don't come back.

Focus on what makes a dinner experience great. People will never look at Pearl East the same way they look at Le Bernardin, but they are perceptive and able to sense passion, generosity, and sincerity when it is there.

I don't know how to perfectly decant a bottle of red wine (well, I kind of do, but I don't do it very gracefully). I am not proficient at carrying a full tray over my shoulder through a crowded dining room. I can't wrap Peking Duck pancakes with spoons. I can't line up plates by the tens up and down my arms and still make it to the dishwasher in one piece.

But I know how to be genuine. I know how to be real. I know how to try hard. And I know how to work for the love, not for the money.

EP6

Bourdain's So-Called "Ranks of the Damned"

This right here, is a very, very important chapter in a book otherwise devoid of advice. Advice, real and brutally honest, that a whole bunch of people sorely need and won't get anywhere else.

It's a phenomenon I've been slowly observing for three years, since the day I realized I wanted to be a cook. At first, I was only focused on myself, slowly learning how I could make this a real career. I was learning day by day that my initial expectations were being shattered at an alarming rate. But even as my preconceptions evaporated around me, I still felt compelled and driven, only further enticed by "The Life." So I kept going.

Then I began to notice those around me a bit more.

The phenomenon is growing, gaining mass, snowballing to dangerous sizes and it not only concerns me, but straight up pisses me off.

It seems like everyone and their fucking mother wants to be a chef.

Everyone I know has a friend somewhere either attending culinary school, or is working as a kitchen grunt, or has desires to be a cook, or (god forbid) watches a lot of Food Network and has been inspired. When I hear about what they're doing, I can assess immediately how serious they are in relation to me, and what kind of threat they represent.

Yes, assessing threats, assessing competition. "Hold your fire, there's no life forms on that escape pod." Well one mistake can cost you a lot apparently, as Grand Moff Tarkin learned the hard way.

Alright, to be honest, I'm not sure why it bothers me so much. It's not like the idea belongs to me. I'm not the only college grad allowed to veer off the beaten path to become a cook. And I didn't do this to be original anyway, I did this because I think it's the only way I won't end up drinking a bottle of bleach 20 years from now as I futilely pump the fumes from my 2030 hybrid through the driver's side window. Maybe it's just that, in some future retrospect, I don't want to be seen as part of a few hipster, free thinking years that saw a huge increase in culinary school enrollment. I don't wanna be seen as a reactionary statistic to the cultural impact of Food Network. I don't want to be lumped in with these tatted up, pierced up young guns who got in to cooking for the wrong reasons.

Granted, it's not that you can't be a serious cook if you happen to be an independent, "free-spirit" or whatever the fuck that means. If you "think outside the box, man" or if conforming to society is unacceptable to you (even though most of you "rebels" are directly conforming to a subculture, hence making you tiptoe a line between authenticity and hypocrisy), but you can still rock a Saturday night service like a boss, then fine. Your presence won't irritate me much. And if you're a cool person to boot, then yes we can get along.

But the problem is, there's another thin line. A thin line between just happening to be someone who is a bit quirkier than the majority of society (and consequently someone very fit for the life of a restaurant professional), and someone using this career as an outlet for their societal angst.

Here's what I expect to see.

Many years from now, some sociology major is going to write a thesis on the growing popularity of Food Network and how it has affected Millenials. They are going to find that four hours of Bobby Flay programming a day can brainwash any young boy in to thinking professional cooking is where it's at! Iron Chef and the adrenaline bomb it is, is what I gonna get to do every night!

No.

One hour of lightning fast prep, and a race to the finish to plate your hermaphroditic salmon, or whatever they like to use as main ingredients on that show, is not what professional cooking is about.

It's about slaving over a cantaloupe with a #12 melon baller, trying to extract a perfect sphere of fruit for a customer paying $25 a head in your party room.

It's about butchering forty chickens and treating every single one with respect. It's about carefully cleaning their bones, blanching them, roasting and simmering them ever so slowly for perfect stock, something ninety percent of this world couldn't identify anyway.

It's about looking at your food cost sheet and wondering if your chef of 18 years is worth the 3% increase in waste, because this recession hurts. Because things are getting tight, and though you've known him forever, he's been incapable of changing his habits.

It's about wondering where your kids are going to be safe because school is closed due to a freak tornado hitting Queens last weekend, and deciding between watching your kids and risking your job is an impossible choice to make.

It's not a pretty life. It's not over-saturated with colors, with smiling perfect mothers and witty male chefs like Food Network would have you believe. The previous generation of restaurant professionals did it mainly because they had no choice. They didn't have the education or skills to cut it in the 9-5 world.

But now that we can do this by choice, we run the risk of making a very poor one.

If you decided you wanted to do this because you love to cook at home, Warning: Professional cooking is absolutely nothing like home cooking. Be very wary. I would say you are more welcome in a restaurant kitchen if you like hauling garbage and sweeping floors (like me).

I think I already made my case for food on TV, but if you decided you wanted to do this because of anything you saw on TV, Warning: Big. Fucking. Warning sign. Really stop to reevaluate where you are with your life, and make sure it's not the lack of a dog or girlfriend that's making you bored or something. As legitimate as Top Chef is, don't let the glamor fool you. They are only 18 chefs out of hundreds of thousands, and they are just as much selected for their TV faces and propensity to yell at each other, as for their culinary prowess.

If you decided you wanted to do this because Bourdain made it sound like you can do drugs, drink whenever you want, get laid, be tatted up and nonconforming to all the suit-and-tie stiffs around the world, Warning: You may just be a 17-year-old who doesn't like learning anything in high school and can't get girls. You know, something really uncommon. In the words of Ruhlman, "I can't think of a worse role model for young cooks."

If you are doing it anyway, and you are working at a restaurant like Bottega, or Jean-Georges, or you're just slaving away at two stages while getting a business degree, then mad props. I'll see you on the battlefield.

If you decided you wanted to do this for any reason other than passion, passion so strong that it doesn't bother you you're never going to be rich or have a 401k, or any reason other than the fact that nowhere else in society would have you, then maybe you're on the money. But know that it's going to be a long, merciless path to the top, and the price of failure is greater than most industries. For every chef with an eponymous cookbook at Barnes & Noble, there are ten who lost their fortunes and dreams putting everything in to one restaurant that failed. That number will only increase as the competition grows. And having closed the doors on a few restaurants in my life, I know how devastating that can be.

I speak so menacingly about being a cook, and where you draw your influences from, because I myself have a deep, dark secret. I am most likely, a Food Network baby.

Yes, I admit it. It hurts my soul to admit it, but it's true.

Months of watching Giada and her freakishly large head, and lavishly accentuated cleavage slice parsley, entranced me. Tyler Florence and his "Ultimate" renditions of dishes had me watching and recording every day. Alton Brown and his quirky food science helps me to understand how we cook more and more even now.

I no longer watch, and I don't deserve a perch above you to judge, but I do give words of caution.

So when I say I'm angry, and I deter you, I'm being honest, but only because I know how dangerous it is.

My first few weeks at Oceanique were hard. I wasn't expecting to have to communicate with my remedial Spanish, clean organic dandelion greens one by one, and vaccum pack cobia filets all day in a basement. I had this image of a smiling, fat, white chef (which Mark kind of is) standing over my shoulder and instructing me on how to properly clean a roasted beet.

Not the case. And the entirety of this blog will show you how long it's taken me to get here, and frankly, I'm still nowhere. I've learned a lot, and it's only because I grew up in restaurants that I didn't fall off the wagon. I had a childhood molded by the industry to ground me in a sense of reality when TV and celebrity threatened to pull me off course.

So I welcome the competition.

I imagine it will soon become much like any professional sport. Millions of passionate, hard-working people vying for very few spots to rise to the top. Some, of undeniable talent and genius will get there almost regardless, few as they are. And most others will have to fight, claw and work their asses off to reach the higher echelons of professional cookery. You may have to suck a few dicks and lose a few girlfriends in the process (funny how those go together), and you'll definitely need a healthy dosage of luck.

But not quite yet. I'm still suspecting many of these Food Network babies will wash out. Someone who didn't grow up knowing the sacrifice and complete fuck-job restaurants do to your personal life may not be able to handle it. The idea of 80 hour weeks, no weekends to get together with your friends to watch Eat.Pray.Love (or some bullshit like that), and living at your restaurant while the whole world ticks away without you is not appealing to most.

So for those of you thinking this is a good idea, well best of luck to you. If you find out cleaning grease traps isn't your cup of tea, then alright, see ya. We don't want you here anyway, amongst Bourdain's so called "ranks of the damned," if you're not willing to get a little dirty. And as for the rest of you, like me, who are going to doggedly pursue greatness, well... I'll need a sous chef at some point.

EP6








KIDDING! Remembering my own rules, #4: be humble, and don't be that guy.

Oh and PS - I'll take a hipster over a bro, any day.

The Chinese Kitchen

So I'm sorry I've been absent, but frankly ... I've been busy as all hell.

It feels good to be back in the kitchen though, after a long hiatus from professional cooking. It's good once again to be getting my hands dirty, hearing the familiar clang of a dishwasher slamming shut, rediscovering my lost knife callous (painfully, I might add), and thinking about restaurants, food and pleasing customers for most of my waking day. Exhausting though it is, it is a comforting reaffirmation that I have chosen the right path in life.

Thankfully the highs have been much more numerable than the lows. The exciting developments of a foreign kitchen and a busy, busy restaurant are giving me welcome obstacles to surmount. There are oh so many things I wish to tell you, and I can only hope my schedule and my quickly-loosening grip on the English language will allow me to relate them to you.

But let's discuss the most important thing dear to my heart already. The new kitchen.

For my loyal readers (of whom I am eternally thankful ... and yes you can point out if I used "whom" incorrectly there, because I'm quite sure that's likely) who can remember, I moved back to New York with a sense of trepidation. What would this kitchen be like? What strange things will I find, and how will they upend my expectations of a good kitchen?

Well, I was relieved to find that a Chinese kitchen is very similar to a Western kitchen. I'm not sure if that's the case in China, but here in Ah-murr-ica our kitchen feels very familiar to the old French brigade based systems I worked through in Chicago. There are subtle differences but they are more curiosities than actual exotics serving to redefine my conceptions of a kitchen. Things are just a ... bit different.

In Western kitchens, we use the traditional chef's knife. A typically 6"-8" blade, curved with the weight centered just above the hilt. It is very adept at slicing, precision cuts and damned near anything quite frankly. It relies on the presence of a solid cutting board; hard and resilient enough to allow for speed and efficiency, but soft enough so as to not dull the blade, as the primary cutting motion requires the blade to be in contact with the board at all times.

This is not the case with the Chinese cleaver. Whereas a Western chef's knife can run you hundreds of dollars for the finest high carbon steel, to ensure durability and sharpness for a lifetime, the Chinese cleaver is a rough hewn instrument, expecting replacement often at a cost of maybe $20 a knife. The best kind of cleaver is heaviest along the tang, has a slight curve to the blade, is wide and is just heavy all around. You know how Boris the Blade says a good gun feels heavy? Well a good cleaver just feels heavy, like it was cast out of recycled carburetors or something. It can be deftly used to make precision cuts and even vegetable carving, but it requires quite a bit of experience to master it. But stir-fry does not require precision cuts (the Certified Master Chef's exam even docks you points for vegetables that are cut "too precisely" in the Asian cuisine part of the test), and a skilled cook can run through prep really quickly with a cleaver. It can smash garlic cloves in to a paste, it makes a huge shovel for scooping diced onions in to a bowl, and really where it shines over a chef's knife is in butchering (as you could imagine). No more careful deboning around a chicken thigh, just slam straight through that fucker. It is a bit unnerving how high a cleaver hangs in the air, before delivering a thunderous, guillotine-esque chop. If you slip up with a chef's knife, at worst we're probably talking stitches. If you slip with a cleaver, we're probably talking "put those fingers on ice, and call 9-1-1." Even if we did listen to music in the Chinese kitchen, the tunes would be drowned out by the constant whamming of steel hitting wood.

I used to use a whip-like filet knife to break down chickens at Va P. The flexibility of the blade helped it to snake around rib cages and wishbones. A good butcher can clean almost all the meat off a carcass and leave a boneless chicken half for service. I didn't think it was possible to do that with a cleaver. We get cases upon cases of chickens at Pearl, from the waist up (I think white people don't like dark meat or something). I would actually kind of hate to see the Doomsday Machine that relieves these chickens of their lower halves. But we get the top half and butterfly off the breast meat just like anybody else. How do you do that with a thick, rectangular blade? You use the bottom corner to create the first incision, you then insert the wide blade in to the cut and bluntly.. you rip it off. The whole chicken tit.

I thought it was a rather gruesome and imprecise way to butcher a chicken, but I found it's actually quite graceful. It leaves the meat very intact and clean so as long as you have some skills. Then you separate the chicken tenderloin, and save that for certain dishes. A cleaver is the Bowser of the kitchen Mario Kart world; deadly in the hands of a skilled player (I know I use Mario Kart analogies a lot, but seriously they work for ultimate and cooking if you're a nerd like me).

So that was a rather long treatise on knives. But the subtle differences are what I notice and appreciate. The wok system is beautifully efficient. Instead of using multiple pans and having to clean them after every dish like you would on a 6-burner range, you use one cast-iron wok set over a jet burner (a hole the size of a basketball hoop that burps fire at ludicrous temperatures, the only way to stop the flames from searing your face is by plugging the hole with the wok... or turning it off, but that's for pussies). You let the wok go supernova and then you immediately douse it with a handy water faucet that hangs over the range. The intense heat and the sudden introduction of water, and a little elbow grease from a steel wool pad, cleans the wok faster and better than any dishwasher I've seen. How cast-iron can go through thousands of degrees of temperature change, hundreds of times a night, and still retain it's non-stick qualities without degrading is nothing short of a miracle. Get yourselves cast-iron skillets.

And there's a whole 'nother thing. The speed. Most Western kitchens use the "order-fire" system, especially fine dining restaurants that serve complex dishes. When something is "ordered" the cooks start cooking the time-intensive parts of the dish, like a thick steak, a braise, a duck breast, etc. And then when it's "fired," meaning the diner is ready for their entree, we finish it by cooking it to temperature, heating up sauces, garnishes, sides, plating, etc. The pace is a bit more complex, it feels slower and requires strategic planning, and often finds a cook deep in pots and pans, sorting out orders for different timings. In a Chinese kitchen, it's balls to the wall, full-tilt boogie-woogie as soon as service begins, and you finish dishes one at a time at light speed. Every cook gets two woks, one for keeping frying oil at a stable temperature, one for everything else, so you have no choice but to do one thing at a time as fast as humanly possible.

I wondered how we did it. A very busy weekend at Va P saw us doing at most 400-500 covers, and that taxed the kitchen to the limit. A very busy weekend at Pearl has us doing 800-1000 covers. Granted, the complexity of prep is far less and we also serve lunch at Pearl, but I realized it is the brilliant efficiency of stir-fry and the Chinese wok that allows us to crank out so many meals at an average time of one hour per table. Oh and by the way that 800-1000 number doesn't include the 100-150 takeouts and deliveries we do, which feed anywhere from 200-400 people. I realized after all this rudimentary math that my mother has fed well over a million people in her career.

And there are all sorts of other strange little differences. Ways to say that Westerners and Chinese people both recognize the path to ultimate efficiency in cooking, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. (Is that the saying? I'm pretty sure I effed that one up...)

Both kitchens use mise-en-place, much to my relief. There simply isn't a better way to cook professionally. But whereas Westerners put ingredients in restaurant-grade plastic boxes of varying sizes, well organized in a big walk-in refrigerator, Chinese people use good ole' clear plastic bags. There are merits to both. An expensive but efficient plastic box can be stacked, you can put hot liquid in it, it can be labeled, and it can't be punctured. But it has to be cleaned and takes up a lot of space. A plastic bag serves most of these purposes, and they use less space and can be simply thrown out. Instead of rows of boxes, you can load up fat bags of diced onions and cram them in to a cardboard box, and label that instead. Much like general Chinese strategy towards everything, we focus on a just acceptable but cheaper means of doing things.

In Western kitchens you often use big rectangular cutting boards made of hardwood or some kind of weird wood-plastic hybrid that I've never been able to identify. In Chinese kitchens we use circular bamboo cutting boards. Again, they are cheaper.

In Western kitchens you use grills and convection ovens, in Chinese kitchens we use dual-purpose smoker/rotisserie ovens.

In Western kitchens you use butter and flour to make a roux for thickening, in Chinese kitchens we use cornstarch (for damn near everything, I might add).

In Western kitchens you use lids, in Chinese kitchens ... I don't think we've used a lid for anything yet, except the lids on our industrial size rice cookers.

In Western kitchens you have a plethora of stock-based sauces, made often and scrupulously maintained. In Chinese kitchens, you make a redonculous amount of sauce every few weeks and keep it in old soy-sauce buckets in the fridge. Chinese sauces are damn near timeless as they often rely on fermentation to achieve that exotic flavor.

In Western kitchens, you often have a kitchen towel in one hand and either tongs or a spoon in the other. In Chinese kitchens, you have a thick linen towel to grasp the edges of rocket-hot woks, and a long, bowl-shaped spoon in the other which is far more necessary than your hand. If you were a pirate cook who lost his right hand, you may not be able to work in a Western kitchen, but if you put a big Chinese cooking spoon on your nub you'd be just fine with us.

Oh yeah, and in Western kitchens you have handles. I don't know what Chinese people have against handles, but they are few and far between.

So it's little things. Some changes are whimsical, others take a bit adjusting to. I guess our cultures just view things differently. We see gunpowder, we say "Hey! Fireworks!" White people see gunpowder, they say "Hey! An incredibly efficient means to murder and dominate the known world!"

Kidding. Sort of. Don't think I forgot about the Opium Wars. I was an East Asian History major. No big deal. I know some shit ... kind of.

Ah, there's so much to tell. I'm learning so much that my brain, riddled with holes from alcohol abuse, feels like it's leaking. Front and back of the house. Stir-fry, Chinese prep, and DIM SUM. Jesus Christ, I spend most of my waking hours making dim sum rather than actually cooking, and by gorsh there is a lot to be said about my struggles with the delicacy required of dim sum. But that's for another time.

I'll end my little post with an anecdote. We do whole Maine lobsters at Pearl. We do 'em live and we do 'em right. To be honest it's my favorite lobster that I've ever had. Chopped up, lightly floured, fried and quickly wok'ed (it's a verb) in different styles; Szechuan, Hunan, Cantonese, etc. I've been thinking a lot about sustainability, organic vs. non-organic, the merits of slow food and family farms vs. industrial farm factories, about PETA and their whole whack-job operation. And obviously the disposal of lobsters is an important nugget of discussion to the animal lovers. Do they feel pain? What is the most humane way to kill a lobster?

I've killed my share of lobsters. Not a lot over an extended career of cooking, but I did murder like 150 of those sons of bitches in one sitting for New Year's at Va P. And I popped my lobster slaying cherry at Oceanique when I coyly threw one in to the court bouillion steam pot. I don't love it, I do agree that it's rather unpleasant, but it's not the war crime PETA makes it out to be. No one's going to be fucking talking about it at a Geneva Convention or anything. Anyhow, these exact thoughts were running through my head as our executive chef, Ah Gau pulled out a big 3-pound lobster to be cooked to order.

I'm thinking, oh he'll probably parboil the guy and then take the flesh out for frying; quick and clean. Or he might do it the most "humane" way and put a knife through it's brain, ending the crustacean and any "consciousness" it might possess in one fell swoop. So he puts it on the stainless steel prep table and grabs it by the back of the head, where the head shell meets the thorax I guess (I'm not a lobster anatomy expert, okay? What's important to cooks is claw, tail, knuckle meat, roe and et cetera meat). He then RIPS the head off.

Yes, caps is completely necessary there. What I'm talking about is ripping the shell off and leaving the organs underneath intact, and jiggling with life. That's like ripping the top of someone's skull and their face off in one vicious movement, and watching their brains pulsate. I was shocked and awed.

And then he takes a cleaver, one that I was using not five minutes before to cut scallions and having a hard time of it because it's so old, chipped and blunt, and he dispatches and cuts up this lobster in less than ten cuts in less than fifteen seconds. Perfectly, cleanly, no bits of errant shell flying anywhere.

He cuts the lobster in half at the "waist," where the tail meets the body. Cuts off all the legs in two quick hacks, then quarters the body in two chops. Scrapes off the guts and brains in to the garbage. Then he flips the cleaver, uses the blunt side to hammer off the claws and rip them off, then hammer the claws in to smaller, manageable pieces. Then he takes the tail, sets it on the cutting board and watches it for a second as it writhes and curls and jumps. Yes, the lobster is done but it's nervous system is still kicking (it's closely related to cockroaches actually, the primitive nervous system can stay rather lively for a long while after execution). The tail kind of inches and worms around the cutting board, and Ah Gau lifts the cleaver as high as his head and brings it down in a final, and absolute blow that cleaves the tail perfectly in half. The aim, the skill, nothing short of remarkable.

He scoops the good bits in to a bowl, sprinkles a little flour/corn starch/salt over them as he tosses the pieces, and then fashions the ornamental parts of the lobster (the fan of the tail, and the head) so that they'll sit prettily on a plate.

Suck that PETA. I couldn't do anything short of smile. It was a very succinct reminder of how much there is to learn, and how much of it can't be from books, or blogs, or eating at fancy restaurants.

It's from being back in the grind.

EP6