The kitchen is best in the morning. All stainless steel glimmer, pots and pans placed in their proper places even between stations. Smallwares are filled away in Bain-Marie and bus tubs, stacked on racks in families - pepper mills with pepper mills, ring molds with ring molds and so forth. Columns of buffed white marble run the length of the pass on shelves under the shiny tabletop. The floors are mopped and dry, carpet runners are washed and realigned at right angles. Most equipment turned off, most significantly the intake hoods. Without the clamor of the hoods, quietude swathes the place. The only sounds are the hum of refrigeration, the purr of proofing boxes, the occasional burble of a thermal immersion circulator. The lowboys and fridge-tops are spotless, sterile, rid of the remnants of their tenants. The rubbish bins are empty. There is not a crumb anywhere. The kitchen smells of nothing.
The kitchen might even seem abandoned if it weren't for today's prep lists dangling from the ticket clips above each station - scrawled agendas on strip of paper and duplicate-pads chits, which the cooks put together at the end of every dinner service. They are relics of mayhem, wraiths of the heat. In presenting us how much everyone requires to get done today, they give us a sense of what happened in here last night. The lists are long; it was busy. The handwriting was rushed, angry and tired.
But now, everything is still, calm and quiet.
On Fridays you get in at about 9 o'clock in the morning. As you make your way into the service entrance, a cool bit of sunlight shines in from the loading dock, lighting your way down the dark corridor leading you to the kitchen, where all the finesse and skill is put on the plate before it's passed to the customer. Deliveries of fresh vegetables, seafood, meat, condiments and exotics ingredients start to arrive. Wooden crates of the produce placed in heaps around the entryway. A film of soil still coats the vegetables. They smell of earth. Bags of granulated sugar and flour balance precariously on milk crates. Vacuum-packed slabs of fresh meats bulge out of the busted cardboard. You smell around in search of a specific box. In it you find exotic desires: Sicilian pistachios, argon oil, Pedro Ximenez vinegar, truffles and Brinata cheese. These are the samples you ordered from the dry goods purveyor. You take hold of the special box, tiptoe past the other deliveries, and head into the office.
The office is a place of refuge, a nest. The lights are always dim. It is small, but it's never stiflingly hot like the rest of the kitchen. A computer, it's companion printer, and a telephone occupy most of the narrow desk space, while office supplies, sticky notes, and crusty sheaves of paper take the rest. Under the desk is a small refrigerator designated FOR CHEF USE ONLY. It holds safe the chef's supply of expensive perishables; rare cheese, white truffles, osetra caviar, bottarga, fine wine, sparkling water, snacks. Sometimes, there'll be bottles of beer in there, in such cases, there'll also be a cold cache of Gatorade for re-upping electrolytes. One of the clipboards - the one with your name on it, holds a near infinity of papers, of lists of things to do, things to order, things to burn out, people the call, emails to send, menus to study, menus to try, menus to invent.... You try not to look at your clipboard first thing in the morning.
As the opening sous chef, the first thing you do is to check for call outs. In top notch fine dining restaurants, call outs are pretty rare. A real cook never misses a shift. He takes ownership of his work; he takes pride in it. He understands how important he is to the group and he will avoid disappointing his co-workers at any cost. Regardless of runny noses, stiff necks, swollen feet or of how little sleep he got the night before. A good cook will always show up for work in the morning. But of course, things happen and even the most high-minded cooks must call out, and when they do it's up to you to find someone to cover for them. With the limited number of cooks in fine dining restaurants, it's an extremely difficult task.
If there aren't any call outs, you get a cool, calm, peaceful moment in the dim office to take stock. Then you plan the day's menu, and prepare. Afterward, you smoke another cigarette out on the loading dock and ready yourself for the rest of the day in the kitchen.
