Setting Up

When I was just starting out, I didn't know about Fredy Girardet or Paul Bocuse, I think a lot of cooks in the industry these days do not know those names or know that they are working the same trade, the same craft, that those legends worked decades, lifetimes to master. I peeled apples in my mother's bakery and touched hot pans to see what they felt like. I washed pots and dishes in the bakery, and in a Japanese restaurant where I also helped make tempura and miso soup and learned a bit about rolling sushi. I made bagels at Skolnik's and pizzas at Vinnie & Scalia's and Bertucci's and bussed tables at Chez Robert. All of these jobs were to make a couple nickels to rub together to have money for pizza and eventually gas and more eventually, beer, but (in a not so surprising bit of foreshadowing) it always felt like it was more than that to me. I did not know at the time that I was in the process of becoming a very tiny leaf on a small branch on a tree, as old as fire, of chefs and their cuisine.

In college, senior year, I took a part time job at Dave & Eddie's Post Road Bar and Grill and Donnie Highland took me under his wing. Donnie was the "head cook" who loved blues and drank smirnoff and coke (it's been a few decades, so, forgive me, Donnie, if it wasn't smirnoff and coke) and he turned out very good food and ran a very solid kitchen and gave me a good glimpse into what this world is like. He was a funny guy and could joke, and the jokes were always ones we can't tell anymore, but he was serious about the kitchen and our cooking. I was a prep cook, peeling shrimp for cocktails, cutting salad to be stored in water in rubbermaid roughneck cans and I worked the pantry (one day I'd call it the garde manger), shucking oysters and clams, making salads and plating desserts, pouring Tia Maria over Grasshopper Pie. Then there was Kurt (probably his name was Kurt...we will stick with Kurt), the saucier, making all the bechamel and pot pie base and soups and stock and sauces. He loved his demi-glace, was proud of it. No matter where I went and with whom I worked, the look of pride is always the same when a cook puts their soul into a sauce or a braise or even a fine cisle of chives.

One Saturday night one of the hot line guys called in sick and Donny, tired of me always telling him I thought I could work that side, threw me into the deep end. We did 300 covers that night and I was on the sauté station, Donny expediting walking me through each dish as it came in on a ticket... fried calamari, chicken penne with hoisin sauce, alfredo, veal marsala... the switch was flicked. I was hooked. Every cook worth their salt (and a lot who are not) knows exactly what that feeling is. The waves of tickets coming in and riding that wave; it never got old and the infrequent times I still have to step on a line it is like riding a bike or hanging out with old friends...it just works and it is a welcome respite from all the challenges of the world (you don't know that when you're starting out and shitting your pants trying to get set up, but trust me, it is the eye of the storm, it is pure zen time...as long as you have your shit together).

One weekend, months later, I was a stalwart on the hot line, no going back to the pantry, I had returned from a visit home and brought to work with me a copy of Philadelphia Magazine (a publication about which I would come to have very strong opinions...another bit of foreshadowing...with still more to come in this very same paragraph). The cover story was about the legendary Le Bec Fin and its chef and proprietor, the even more legendary Georges Perrier. I could not stop reading it. I paid particular attention to the part about the prep cook and his particular approach, Perrier-approved, to chopping fresh parsley. The restaurant sounded like a revelation, a team so dedicated to this craft of cooking that even the parsley had meaning and deserved care and attention. (Here is the next bit of foreshadowing and the hook) "Donnie," I said, after force-feeding him the article, too, "I'm going to be a cook there one day." There was no doubt in my mind. I was wrong, though, about being a cook there one day. Fifteen years, later, give or take, Georges Perrier's Le Bec Fin had lost its precious 5th Mobil Star; I became its Executive Chef and led the culinary team that restored that 5th star.

This is the middle of the story, both end to one chapter and beginning to another...more to come.