Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [44]
The most important and lasting lessons I learned from Bigfoot were about personnel and personnel management - that I have to know everything, that I should never be surprised. He taught me the value of a good, solid and independently reporting intelligence network, providing regular and confirmable reports that can be verified and cross-checked with other sources. I need to know, you see. Not just what's happening in my kitchen, but across the street as well. Is my saucier unhappy? Is the chef across the street ready to make a pass, maybe take him away from me at an inopportune moment? I need to know! Is the saucier across the street unhappy? Maybe he's available. I need to know that, too. Is the cute waitress who works Saturday nights screwing my broiler man? Maybe they've got a scam running: food going out without dupes! I have to know everything, you see. What might happen, what could happen, what will happen. And I have to be prepared for it, whatever it is. Staff problems, delivery problems, technical difficulties with equipment, I have to anticipate and be ready, always with something up my sleeve, somebody in the pipeline. My penetration agent in the competition's kitchen is getting hinkey about ratting out his chef? I need another agent in development. Just in case.
Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army - and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot.
THIRD COURSE
I MAKE MY BONES
FRESH OUT OF CIA, I returned to the city for good.
I actually knew a few things by now. During the two-year culinary program, I'd been commuting to a weekend job at a busy West Village saloon where I'd toiled away in a smoky, cockpit-sized kitchen, knocking out brunches and dinners. There had been two summers in Provincetown, which meant I was no longer completely useless on the line. In fact, when the chips were down, and the window was filling up with dupes, I could actually keep my mouth shut and sling food. I had moves. My hands were getting nice and ugly, just like I'd wanted, and I was eager to rise in the world.
On the strength of my diploma - and my willingness to work for peanuts - I landed a job almost right away at the venerable New York institution, the Rainbow Room, high atop Rockefeller Center. It was my first experience of the real Big Time, one of the biggest, busiest and best-known restaurants in the country. I was willing to do anything to prove myself, and when I got in that elevator to the sixty-fourth floor kitchen for the first time I felt as if I was blasting off to the moon.
The Rainbow Room at that time sat a little over 200. The Rainbow Grill sat about another 150. Add to that two lounges where food was available, and an entire floor of banquet rooms - all of it serviced simultaneously by a single, central a la carte kitchen - and you had some major league volume, as well as some major league cooks to go along with it.
The crew at the Room was a rough bunch, a motley assortment of Puerto Ricans, Italians, Dominicans, Swiss, Americans and a Basque or two. They were mostly older guys who'd worked in the hangar-sized kitchen forever, their jobs secured by a union whose only discernible benefits were guaranteed job security and an assured mediocrity of cuisine. These were some hard-case, full-grown, eight-cylinder bastards, none of whom cared about anything outside of their station; the Room management worked them like rented mules.
A long hot line of glowing flat-tops ran along one wall, flames actually roaring back up into a fire wall behind them. A few feet across, separated by a narrow, trench-like work space, ran an equally long stainless-steel counter, much of which was taken up by a vast, open steam table which was kept at a constant, rolling boil. What the cooks had to contend with, then, was a long, uninterrupted slot, with no air circulation,