The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [33]
I spent one Friday evening perched on a stool in Rialto’s long and narrow kitchen amid the bustle, the shouting, the grill flaming on one side, the deep fryer sizzling on another. Adams and her staff served 150 people in five hours. That night, they made a roasted tomato soap with sweated onions and garlic; squid ink ravioli filled with a salt cod brandade on a bed of squash blossoms and lobster sauce; grilled bluefish with corn relish, heirloom tomatoes, and pickled peppers; slow-roasted duck marinated in soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, mustard, rosemary, and garlic; and three dozen other mouthwatering dishes.
Sitting there, I saw remarkable expertise. Half of Adams’s staff had been to culinary school. Few had less than a decade of experience. They each had a kitchen specialty. There was a pastry chef, baker, grill chef, fry cook, dessert chef, sous chef, sommelier—you get the picture. Through the years, they had perfected their technique. I couldn’t fathom the subtleties of most of what they did. Though I am a surgeon, they wouldn’t let me anywhere near their knives. Jay, the pasta chef, showed me how to heat butter properly and tell by sight when gnocchi were perfectly boiled. Adams showed me how much a pinch of salt really was.
People celebrate the technique and creativity of cooking. Chefs are personalities today, and their daring culinary exploits are what make the television cooking shows so popular. But as I saw at Rialto, it’s discipline—uncelebrated and untelevised—that keeps the kitchen clicking. And sure enough, checklists were at the center of that discipline.
First there was the recipe—the most basic checklist of all. Every dish had one. The recipes were typed out, put in clear plastic sleeves, and placed at each station. Adams was religious about her staff ’s using them. Even for her, she said, “following the recipe is essential to making food of consistent quality over time.”
Tacked to a bulletin board beside the dessert station was what Adams called her Kitchen Notes—e-mails to the staff of her brief observations about the food. The most recent was from 12:50 the previous night. “Fritters—more herbs, more garlic … more punch,” it said. “Corn silk in corn! Creamed corn side on oval plates—not square! Mushrooms—more shallots, garlic, and marsala. USE THE RECIPES!”
The staff didn’t always love following the recipes. You make the creamed corn a few hundred times and you believe you have it down. But that’s when things begin to slip, Adams said.
The recipes themselves were not necessarily static. All the ones I saw had scribbled modifications in the margins—many of them improvements provided by staff. Sometimes there would be a wholesale revamp.
One new dish they were serving was a split whole lobster in a cognac and fish broth reduction with littleneck clams and chorizo. The dish is Adams’s take on a famous Julia Child recipe. Before putting a dish on the menu, however, she always has the kitchen staff make a few test runs, and some problems emerged. Her recipe called for splitting a lobster and then sautéing it in olive oil. But the results proved too variable. Too often the lobster meat was either overcooked or undercooked. The sauce was also made to order, but it took too long for the eight-to-ten-minute turnaround that customers expect.
So she and two of her chefs reengineered the dish. They decided to make the sauce in advance and parboil the lobster ahead of time, as well. On repeated test runs, the lobster came out perfectly. The recipe was rewritten.
There was also a checklist for every customer. When an order was placed up front, it was printed out on a slip back in the kitchen. The ticket specified the dishes ordered,