Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [88]
Ramón, the day dishwasher, tells me he'll need the day off tomorrow to visit a relative in the hospital, but he's replaced himself with Jaime II, the night dishwasher who'll double for him. I'm grateful, as nothing causes me more grief than last-minute emergency scheduling, and I'm always pleased when my crew takes care of things internally. Phoning my Mafia at home is a near impossibility. Most of them claim not to own phones. For those who do, their phones are answered by people suspicious of strange Norteamericanos asking questions, and are not likely to acknowledge that, yes, Mr Pérez, Rodriguez, García, Sanchez, Rivera is actually in residence at said address.
Dinner-tasting for the floor staff is at five-thirty, when the heavy-hitting veteran waiters have arrived. They fall on the family gruel and the tasting plates like rabid jackals. It's never pretty watching waiters eat; you'd think they had no money the way they dive into any available trough. Dinner-tasting is conducted in the kitchen, as there are customers in the dining room straight through lunch into dinner. It looks like a crowded subway car as I describe the evening's specials and present each plate. They tear at the four plates of food, ripping apart the pheasant with their hands, nearly spearing each other with forks as they gouge at the tuna, drag cockles to their greasy maws with bare hands, and quickly turn Janine's lovely tarte Tatin into a dark smear. I swallow some more aspirins.
At five forty-five, the downstairs is clogged with the night-time lifer waiter crew, sitting on milk crates, folding napkins, smokingand talking about each other. Who got drunk last night, who got thrown out of a mob-run after-hours club then woke up in the bushes outside their house, who thinks the new maitre d' is going to lose it tonight when the room fills up and the customers stacked up at the bar start screaming for their tables, who's going to win the World Cup, who thinks Heather Graham is a babe, who probably takes it in the ass this week, and how about the time the Bengali busboys got into a fight in the middle of the dining room and one stuck a steak knife into the other?
Dinner service. Overbooked as usual - with two whopping twelve-tops booked for prime time. I remain in the kitchen to expedite, hoping that maybe, just maybe, things'll slow down enough by ten for me to have a couple of cocktails and get home by eleven. But I know full well that the two big tables will hold up seatings by at least an hour; more than likely, I'll be here for the full tour.
By eight-thirty, the board is full. Entree tickets flutter in the pull from the exhaust fans. To my right, below the window, plated appetizers are lined up, waiting to get delivered to the tables, the window is full of saute dishes, the work table in front of the fry station a panorama of steaks of different donenesses. It's still Cachundo - he's working a double too - and he ferries the plates out by hand, four or five at a time. Still, I have to press-gang the occasional busboy or empty-handed waiter, separating them out from the herd at the coffee and bread stations and returning dirty plates and glasses, into delivering desserts. I don't want ice cream melting over the clafoutis, or the whipped cream on the chocolate mousse to start falling. Food's getting cold, and my voice is already blown out from calling out orders over the noise from the dishwasher, the hum of the exhaust, the whine of the Paco-Jet machine and the growing roar from the dining room. I make a hand gesture to a friendly waiter, who knows what I want, and he soon arrives with an