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By Root 721 0

special and have time only to describe sole grenobloise as ‘filet sauté . . . with capers, lemon, vin blanc, shallot, butter,’ you know where to go. Where do you tap into the source for the best French and Italian cooks? Not France. Certainly not Italy. If you’re looking for a line cook who’s professional in his work habits, responsible with your food, dependable, a guy with a sense of humor, reasonably good character, and a repertoire of French and Italian standards, and who can drill out 250 meals without going mental or cutting corners too egregiously, chances are you go to Carlos, your grill man, and say, ‘Carlos, mi carnale . . . I need a cucinero. You know somebody for sauté?’ In every likelihood, Carlos will think for a moment and say, ‘Yeah . . . sure . . . I have a cousin.’ Or ‘Yeah . . . sure . . . I got a friend.’ And a few days later, someone will show up at your kitchen door with features similar to Carlos’s – or the now-incarcerated Hector’s – and he’ll step right into old Hector’s station like it’s a comfortable shoe. Hector, of course, was from the Mexican state of Puebla. As is Carlos. And just about every other cook and dishwasher in America. If there was a mandatory day of rest – or a public holiday for all Poblanos – a lot of restaurants in America would have to close their doors. As it is, the day after the fifth of May (Cinco de Mayo), half the cooks in America are hungover. Keep that in mind.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, we’d have been talking about cheap labor. You know, the old ‘wetback’ story: exploited, unskilled immigrant labor, toiling away for inhuman hours in menial jobs, paid cash under the table at minimum wage or less. Things have changed somewhat for the better. While we have yet to see as many mestizo-looking chefs with Spanish-sounding last names running high-end French kitchens as we should, all those dishwashers and porters didn’t simply settle for spending the rest of their lives cleaning up after the rest of us. They watched, they learned, they trained on garde-manger and grill and prep and sauté – usually on their own time – and when some flighty white kid decided he wanted the winter off to go skiing in Colorado, they were ready to step in. When the French sous-chef appeared to be unable to work without a long, lingering two-hour lunch with his socialist comrades in the front of the house and the chef had finally had enough of his clock-punching, lazy prima donna act, the Poblanos were ready. Now, many areas of Puebla are like a talent pool of free-agent or draft picks in professional sports – pursued, protected, sought after by chefs who’d rather snip off a pinkie finger than lose them to the other team. They’ve been trained by a procession of French, American, and Italian chefs – most of whom come and go, turning over quickly, but who each leave behind a little knowledge, a new technique, a few more nuggets of information, some new ideas. So now, ask Carlos to do something with the soft-shell crabs and with that old asparagus and you can have a reasonable expectation that he will whip right into a salad of soft-shell crabs with asparagus and citrus vinaigrette in classic French nouvelle style. Stuck for a monkfish special or a soup? Don’t worry, Carlos is all over it, remembering some long-gone French chef’s preparation. (Old Henri-Pierre may have been a lazy Communist ratbag, but he could cook like an angel.) A lot of times, I’ll walk into an unfamiliar kitchen to say hello to the cooks – or to thank the chef for a freebie – and I’ll see the familiar posse of white-clad Mexicans listening to the Spanish station down by the dishwashing area, and of course I’ll say hello, then casually inquire where, exactly, they hail from.

‘¿ Poblanos?’ I’ll ask, pretty sure of the answer.

‘¡ Viva la rasa!’ will come the reply.

My cooks are almost all from Puebla, and not just from Puebla but from the same small area around the towns of Izúcar de Matamoros, Atlixco, and Tlapanala, situated downwind from the famous volcanoes of Under the Volcano fame. If there’s an epicenter of fine French