Bone in the Throat - Anthony Bourdain [10]
He went in the walk-in and hauled out a tall plastic bucket filled with veal stock, then poured the stock into a double-weight Crusader-Wear stockpot and started reducing it. He then went back to the walk-in and returned with a buspan of wriggling, one-clawed lobsters. He poured two quarts of white wine into a stockpot and added some bay leaves, some peppercorns, a bit of crushed red pepper, whole cloves, a sprig of raggedy fresh thyme. He found some vegetable trimmings in the sauté box, a drying half-onion, a few wrinkled carrots, some limp celery. He threw them in along with some leek tops and a head of garlic. He put a sheet pan over the pot and waited for the wine to cook down a bit and suck up the flavor from the spices and vegetables. He went back to the walk-in, wondering how much mileage he put in every day on his trips back and forth, then returned with a bucket of fish fumet and a bucket of peeled potatoes. The food-spattered radio cassette player was blaring an old Modern Lovers tune, "She Cracked," and Tommy bounced around in time to the music unembarrassed, as he was alone in the kitchen. "She cracked . . . I'm sad . . . But I won't. . ." he sang along. He rubbed a few red peppers with olive oil and put them on the grill for red pepper vinaigrette.
Tommy turned back to the frantic lobsters. He emptied them out of the buspan and into the boiling white wine. "Sorry guys," he said. "It'll all be over in a minute." He listened to them scraping their claws against the metal. After a few moments, the noise died down.
When the lobsters were cooked, he poured them into a colander in the pot sink and ran cold water over them.
He reduced some port wine for the mushroom sauce. Reaching into a cold bucket of shallots, he found there were dangerously few. His hand still wet, he started a night prep list on a piece of notepaper from the chef's clipboard, writing "Chop Shallots!!" He put some dried cepes in warm water to soak and, with a paring knife, trimmed away the gills and stems from a few handfuls of portobellos.
The old surf instrumental "Pipeline" by the Chantays came on the radio. Tommy smiled and decided it was an auspicious moment to begin the soup. He found his favorite pot in a corner under a work table where he had hidden it the day before and put it on the range. He poured some olive oil into the pot, minced some garlic and simmered it until transparent. He wanted to play air guitar along with the music, since no one was looking, but instead peeled the onions and chopped them into a fine dice. Remembering the red peppers on the grill, he spun around, grabbed them with the tongs, put them in a stainless steel bowl, and covered them with plastic wrap to free the skin. He tossed the diced onions into the soup pot with the garlic and sprinkled in some thyme and some bay leaves. He seeded some red and green peppers, cut them into a medium dice, and added them to the pot. He poured a healthy hit of ground cumin in after. Soon the kitchen began to fill with the smell of garlic, onions, and cumin. He added the cut squid, chasing it around with a large steel paddle. He rooted around in the grillman's reach-in for a few minutes, coming up with some swordfish trimmings, a little lobster meat, and, wonder of wonders, a full crock of cherrystone clams, already shucked. He strained the clam juice in with the fish fumet that was already heating on a back burner and added the clams to the squid, along with the lobster and swordfish. When the fumet was hot, he poured it into the soup pot, added two cans of crushed tomato, a couple spoons of paste, and a gallon of red wine. He cut ten of the peeled potatoes into large dice and threw them in the pot, too. He finished the whole dark, wonderful mess with some crushed red pepper and a little tabasco sauce, and left the pot to simmer.
He lit a cigarette and felt around under the station for the chef's ashtray from the night before. He couldn't find it at first. He