Big Sur Bakery Cookbook - Michelle Wojtowicz [36]
The tough part about busy nights is that we’ve got a small kitchen and only three stations, and any time an order comes in it can hit any one of us—salads and appetizers, pizza, or the entree station. We do some of our meats in the wood-fired oven as well, so one second our pizza guy is making a pie, and the next minute Phil’s shouting out for him to throw in a chicken. It’s crazy to begin with, and then we’ll get an “order fire”—an entree without an appetizer—and Phil has to figure out a way to make it work. Can we push their order up higher? Do we need to get a waiter to send out some olives? It’s like the adrenaline icing on a cake—the masochistic thrill that you can experience only in a kitchen. You either hate it or you love it.
Since we don’t use heat lamps, we try to keep plates on the “runway”—the stainless steel table where we put finished dishes—for as short a time as possible. The runway itself stays mostly clear: salt and pepper, a wet cloth to wipe the dishes, and another cloth so that waiters don’t burn their hands. Before each entree goes out, we “green-light” it, which means drizzling it with some sort of infused oil, usually basil, as a fresh, bright green signal that the food’s ready. A ring of the cowbell tells servers in the dining room to drop what they’re doing and pick it up.
When we first started putting together menus for the Bakery, they were traditionally composed—we matched each entree with a specific side dish. But we broke away from that model and now let customers do the choosing. Any one of our entrees can come with any one of our side dishes, so you could come to the Bakery and have tuna five nights in a row with five different sides. Who knows if our customers really notice the difference, but to us, it’s something that makes us special.
Photographs by Sara Remington
Depending on the night, Phil could be working any of the stations, but his favorite place to be is by the stove, his back facing west. It makes him feel like he’s at the very edge of the country, and it also lets him look out over the kitchen, through the doors, and see a bit of what’s going on in the front of the house. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy going out on the floor and interacting with the customers. But Phil’s job and goal is to cook things as perfectly as he can, which means, as he puts it, that he has a better relationship with the chicken than he does with the people.
Running a kitchen—any kitchen—is like rock and roll. It’s anarchy and pure excitement. Every night is a performance. People come in, they give you money, and they expect a good show. It’s up to us to deliver it. If you ask Phil what it’s like, he’ll say he feels like he’s going a hundred miles an hour, down on sleep and high on coffee, and there are fifty things going on during the day and fifty things at night and it just never ends. Any cook who has run a kitchen will have the same story: the adrenaline is going nonstop. But that’s what Phil loves about it: the pressure of being put through a test every evening and going to sleep feeling that he’s done a hard day’s work. And no matter what happens, by the end of the night, the evening’s stress has already been forgotten. After cleaning up the kitchen and putting in some food orders, he treats himself to a glass of wine and a game of chess, and heads home to bed. Before you know it, it’s another day.
Photographs by Sara Remington
July Fourth
Considering the fact that most tourists come to Big Sur to relax, it’s surprising how many people show up totally stressed out. Maybe it’s from driving on Highway 1 (it’s beautiful, but it’s also windy, narrow, and has a sheer drop to the ocean on one side). Maybe it’s being trapped in a car for too many hours, or the result of too much quality “family time.” Whatever the reason, we get some pretty frazzled people in the Bakery, and it’s nice to watch the effect that good food, good music, and a break from the road usually have on their moods.
The key word there is “usually,” and it excludes certain days. Like, for