Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [113]
I'd been hearing about this guy for years - significantly, from other chefs and cooks.
'Scott says this . . .' and 'Scott says that. . .' and 'Scott doesn't make veal stock; he's roasting chicken bones! Buys fresh killed . . . in, like, Chinatown!
Someone would mention his name in passing, and other chefs would get this curious expression on their faces, like the runner of Satchel Paige's admonition: 'Don't look back someone might be gaining on you.' They'd look worried, as if, examining their own hearts and souls and abilities, they were aware that not only couldn't they do what Scott does, but they wouldn't.
He was a cult figure, it seemed, among cooks of my acquaintance. Over time, I developed an idea of him as some sort of hair-shirt ascetic, a mad monk, a publicity-shy perfectionist who'd rather do no business at all - die in obscurity - than ever serve a bad meal.
The whole world of cooking is not my world, contrary to what impression I might have given you in the preceding pages. Truth be told, I bring a lot of it with me. Hang out in the Veritas kitchen, take a hard look at Scott Bryan's operation, and you will find that everything I've told you so far is wrong, that all my sweeping generalities, rules of thumb, preconceptions and general principles are utter bullshit.
In my kitchens, I'm in charge, it's always my ship, and the tenor, tone and hierarchy - even the background music - are largely my doing. A chef who plays old Sex Pistols songs while he breaks down chickens for coq au vin is sending a message to his crew, regardless of his adherence to any Escoffier era merit system.
A guy who employs, year after year, a sous-chef like Steven Tempel is clearly not Robuchon - or likely to emulate his successes. It is no coincidence that all my kitchens over time come to resemble one another and are reminiscent of the kitchens I grew up in: noisy, debauched and overloaded with faux testosterone - an effective kitchen, but a family affair, and a dysfunctional one, at that. I coddle my hooligans when I'm not bullying them. I'm visibly charmed by their extra-curricular excesses and their anti-social tendencies. My love for chaos, conspiracy and the dark side of human nature colors the behavior of my charges, most of whom are already living near the fringes of acceptable conduct.
So, there are different kinds of kitchens than the kinds I run. Not all kitchens are the press-gang-crewed pressure cookers I'm used to. There are islands of reason and calm, where the pace is steady, where quality always takes precedence over the demands of volume, and where it's not always about dick dick dick.
As we close in on hotel-motel time, let's compare and contrast. Let's take a look at a three-star chef who runs a very different kind of kitchen than mine, who makes food at a higher level, has had a nearly unblemished track record of working with the best in the business, a guy who has always kept his eye on the ball which is to say, the food. If I suffer by comparison, so be it. I think I said earlier that I was going to tell you the truth. This is part of it.
Scott Bryan, like me, happily refers to himself as a 'marginal' character. When he says 'marginal', you can hear his hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, in his voice, the same accent you hear in body shops and Irish bars in 'Woostah', 'New Bedfahd,' 'Glahsta,' and Framingham. Scott uses the term 'dude' a lot, though, which leads one to believe there might be surf in Boston. When I dropped by to see him recently, passing first through his stylishly sparse sixty-five-seat dining room, past his four sommeliers - count them, four - through a kitchen staffed by serious-looking young Americans in buttoned-up Bragard jackets with the Veritas logo stitched on their breasts and chef wear MC Hammer pants, down a flight of stairs, I found him wrapping a howitzer-sized log of foiegras in cheesecloth. He was wearing a short-sleeved dishwasher shirt, snaps done up to the collar, Alice In Chains blaring in the background. I took inordinate comfort from this,