[hough in touch] School round 23 -- externship round 10

[Bill Hough]

All:

Last week I learned what real horror is all about.  In the past I've seen some pretty horrifying things in movies like the shark coming up out of the water in Jaws and Jason getting up from behind the couch in Halloween and Julie Andrews taking off her top in SOB.  All of that pales in comparison to what I saw on Wednesday.  I was running late getting dinner ready, and I dashed over to the Safeway to grab some last-minute tasty tidbits to brunoise and saute and generally sauce into a stupor.  As I pulled up outside the Safeway, I noticed a very large, very empty bus idling outside the front door.  Annoying, because I was in a hurry and had to wait for a couple of people who were pulling around it in my lane.  Then the real horror set in.  As I'm driving by I look at the bus and it has "Sunrise Assisted Living" painted on the side.  They have obviously just disgorged an entire busload of wrinklies into my Safeway to dither in the "15 exclusive gourmet items or less" aisle ahead of me.  I parked, rolled up my windows, put my hands over my ears, and did a pretty fair impression of Edvard Munch's "The Scream."

My friend Nancy Yurek emailed me the other day and said:

  "Everytime I step into a restaurant now, I wonder about what kinds of things are happening behind the scenes in the kitchen.  My daughter is in town today staying at the Hotel George while she works on a project for the beautification of the Pennsylvania Avenue streetscape between the Anacostia and the Maryland border, and she invited me to join her and her colleague and a friend for dinner at the hotel's restaurant last evening, Bistro Bis.  It had great food, but I kept thinking about what antics were transpiring behind closed doors in the kitchen area...were they singing and dancing and trading quips in Spanish, or were they simply laboring away under some tyrannical maniac with a knife?"

I laughed when I read it and then thought to myself, "What a great comment.  This is going to give me a chance to indent, use white space, and a font color change, hot dog!  Rick will be wowed!"

I can't testify for Bistro Bis, but I can assure you that the shenanigans are still going on at 100 King.  

Leo the dishwasher continues to be a source of amusement.  We have a new food runner named Jose -- I can't figure out if he is a friend of Leo's or if his middle name is "Isham".   Jose has a goatee and kind of pointy eyebrows and thick dark furry hair, making him look roughly like a werewolf.  When he and Leo are both on duty, Leo howls like a wolfman from the dish area and several of us howl back or bark.  The other day Jose figured out what is going on, and he seems to get a kick out of it.  This means that at various times in the kitchen we've got howling, barking, bird whistles, sheep noises from the "wah", Amanda making cat noises, and me grunting like a pig when I get a pork loin order -- Adrian turned to us the other day and said "you're a bunch of animals, you know that."  Late breaking news:  Last night Jose came in sans-goatee...maybe he didn't like the howling so much after all.

Last week I was on duty at saute while Amanda was doing the garde manger (salad station) beside me.  The food runners were Isham (odds were good for that) and Anwar, both from Morocco.  The manager on duty was Youssef, part of the Lebanese Taverna family, and the assistant manager was Mohammed, who apparently used to work at the restaurant and left and came back.  Anyway, Youssef comes into the kitchen and tells Isham to make an Expresso.  Isham goes over to the machine and starts on it, but something goes wrong and it obviously isn't working quite right.  Anwar comes over to help and a spirited discussion ensues in Arabic with lots of reaching over and grabbing things on the machine and saying "La, La" (no, no).  This attracts the attention of both Youssef and Mohammed, who come over and get into the fray.  At this point we've got the four of them all reaching and grabbing and pointing and "la"ing and giving one another instructions in Arabic and the volume increases until it sounds like a flock of whooping cranes have landed in the kitchen and begun clearing their throats.  I walked over to Amanda and said "It looks like it should be some kind of a joke, sort of 'How many muslims does it take to make a cup of coffee'."  Without skipping a beat she turned to me and said "Apparently allah them."  One of those moments when just the right line comes to mind at just the right minute and we were both crying from laughing.

Last Saturday and Sunday were the Alexandria Arts Festival in Old Town, so they closed King Street and there were lots of vendors and foot traffic -- very busy lunch and dinner Saturday and busy lunch Sunday.  Saturday, I got in around 2 to do a major station setup before the Space Shuttle Wilbur blasted off.  Perla was already in there on the salad station.  I walked behind the line and bent down to look in the undercounter refrigerators to take stock of what had been prepped already, and before I could even open the door to the fridge, Wilbur looked at me and said "nada" (spanish for "nothing").  I looked at him and said "nada?" and he looked me straight in the eye with a grin and said "nada."  I opened up the refrigerators and looked around inside.  A couple of lonely filets, a rack of lamb cowering in the corner behind a pork loin, and a few haricots verts that looked like they had been sent over by Chef Patrice.  I turned to Wilbur and said "there would have to be more in here to qualify for 'nada'."  He laughed.  No meat, no veg, no nothing, not even butter cut up into cubes, a nada-rama.  I went into Brandy mode (face pink, zinging in and out of tight spaces with knives) for the next 4 hours and finally had everything set up by about 6 (while cooking stuff for the cutomers, of course).  It was seriously bad -- at about 3:45 Chef Soriano looked at me and said "In the merde already, Beel?"  ("In the merde" or "muerte" in Spanish is the phrase for the high point of the rush on a Saturday night when the tickets are really backed up).  I smiled and said "the story of Sunday afternoons, Chef."  At 4, Perla got a little behind on some tickets and Adrian asked her if she had two duck confit ready or not.  She answered "in a minute," which from Perla means that she either hasn't started them at all or has just put them in the oven.  I started saying "Perla, two duck confit, come on, long time" and "Perla, where are those duck confit" and "the customer is going to expire from starvation in his chair, not good for business" -- the normal sort of thing we do to one another behind the line.  Perla put on her sweetest smile and her little girl voice and said "Billy Willy?" to which I replied "Yes, Perly Whirly" and she very sweetly said "shut da f*** up" which came very close to making Adrian spit his orange soda all over the counter.

Mondays are generally slow in the restuarant business.  This is definitely true for us, so we do a lot of prep work and cleaning, and we all look forward to closing early before the official time of 10:00.  This means we are all pretty much started on wrapping our stations by 9:00 and cleaning up and getting ready to close up and blast out the door like little Wiburettes at 10 or sooner if we close early.  Last Monday one of the servers came up at about 9:40 and said we had a new table that had just sat down in the outdoor section (we have a small al fresco set of tables outside the front door).  By this time, Perla has the entire salad station closed up and wrapped and moved upstairs to the big fridge, I am about half wrapped, and Angel has about 2/3 of the fish station already under plastic.  For the next 5 minutes, we sit in the kitchen and wait in breathless anticipation for what the order will be.  The ticket machine starts to go and it comes up with one salmon and one halibut -- all stuff from Angel's station.  Perla and I can't believe our luck and drag out the "I Like to Be In America" tune from West Side Story and start to sing "I like one salmon and halibut.  Nothing like salmon and halibut.  Almost free salmon and halibut...for a small fee for the halibut" while Angel just grins ruefully.  Then I look closely at the table number on the ticket and it's for 102 -- 102 is inside, not outside.  All tables outside start at numbers less than 100.  As I'm pondering this, the machine starts pumping out another ticket -- table 6 (outside) -- Rack of Lamb and Beef tenderloin.  Shit.  The song changes to "Ayiii yiii yii yiii, Billy needs rack of lamb."  I'm the last one out that night.

All of the energy not expended on singing and laughing and razzing one another and having a good time appears to be spent on finding ways to get around the rules.  It's been a fascinating education on what goes on in the "back of the house."  One of the cardinal rules is that we are supposed to make "family meal" around 4:15 and then not make any food for anybody except the dishwashers, bartender, and manageress/manager unless the Chef or Sous Chef tell us to.  That includes the line cooks -- we are not supposed to prepare anything for ourselves other than "sauteed scraps" (we're allowed Tabasco, of course -- otherwise there would be a riot).  It's not like people never get tasty treats -- Adrian and the Chef seem to have kind of a "round robin" thing going where they will pick one or two of the waiters each night and say "make Mustafa and Enya something nice tonight," and whenever Anwar does a double (lunch and dinner) food running we always make him something.  The "no additional food" rule is strictly adhered to...until the Chef and Sous Chef leave for the night.  Then the Shrimp Arak and Salmon start to fly from the fish station, and Merguez sausages apparently sprout wings and go missing by the twos and threes from my station while I'm not looking.  Most nights I save up bits and snatches of this and that throughout the evening to do my now famous "sauteed rice thing" at the end of the evening.  This is actually just a fancy version of sauteed scraps with leftover rice in it.  It's very good and I make plenty because everybody wants some, but it's amazing to watch everybody else hitting the reach-ins and grabbing the choicest bits, and the waitron staff putting their heads under the plate warmer trying to look pathetic and saying "would you make me some beef."  Something I will remember for my own restaurant.  

I have to admit that I joined the ranks of the rule-breakers the other day.  The alley where we go to have a cigarette is next to the building (between us and milllion-dollar-ice-cream).  This means it is actually visible from King Street.  Somebody apparently commented to Rita that it didn't look nice to have us smoking out there, so she engaged the emergency fire alarm system on the door to the alley.  Unfortunately, they started this new policy on a Wednesday, and I had Wednesday through Friday off and nobody told me, so on Saturday I got all set up and took a break and went for a cigarette and set off the fire alarm as I went through the door.  In the next 20 seconds I think the look on my face went from "what's that" to "that's the alarm" to "who did that" to "oh shit, I think I know what's going on here."  Fortunately it was about 4:30, so there weren't too many customers.  The chef came running with a key and a scowl and we got it reset and they explained what was going on to me.  Later that evening I said, "Rita, there is no other way for the line cooks to go outside, since we're not going to go through the restaurant in our aprons and coats -- does that mean you don't want us to be able to smoke at all?"  Rita is very sweet and looked at me a little perplexed and finally said "it's good for your health."  I said, "my health, my decision, but your rules, so you tell me."  She said "we have to keep the alarm on."  I did fine through the night and got past the rush and got a break and went upstairs and put on the shirt I wear on the street and tucked it into my jeans and walked through the front of the house with my best "I'm just another patron here" smile on and out the front door for a smoke, but it's clearly not a convenient method.  Two nights later, Rita is in the kitchen and has that "what shall I order for dinner" look on her face.  She says "Bill, can I have a filet?"  I put a big smile on so she knew I was playing  and said "That depends -- are you going to put the alarm on that door?  Your answer is the same as mine."  She said "Maybe, now can I have a filet?"  I said "maybe."  She laughed and got her filet, but the door hasn't been alarmed since.

I was also an accomplice.  Liz (dessert station) cooks all of her sauces on my stove, because she doesn't have one.  This is great fun, because my stove is further away from her station than the grill is from mine, and therefore equally memorable to her.  The moment she gets her pots and pans full of sauce onto my stove with the heat turned all the way up, she returns to her station and they might as well be in San Diego as far as she is concerned -- they are always boiling over.  To add to the fun, her sauces are bright green (mint) or chocolate or caramelized sugar, so there's always lots of cheerful colorful bits for me to scrape off the burners at the end of the night.  The only way Liz becomes one with her sauces is if she has to poach peaches or apples at my stove, because then she can't leave.  The other night she was poaching apples and I said "Something is burning, I can smell it" and started sniffing each of her pans and Angel is sure it is one of them, but I sniff it and it's not.  Then I look at the stockpot just behind the pan of apples, and Ceasar's Osso Bucco sauce is smoking like Edward R. Murrow during a lively Saturday night interview.  We get it off the stove and over to the dishwashing station with a bowl over the top so it doesn't set off the Ansul fire supression system and spray Halon on all of us, but you can still smell the aftereffects.  Osso Bucco sauce is made by straining and reducing the stock the Osso Bucco has cooked in (it had carrots, onions, celery, and nice herbs like thyme and bay leaf and stuff in it) and it also had all the natural flavor of the lamb in it (we did Lamb, not Veal Osso Bucco).  Ceasar has now destroyed the entire pot of lamby goodness, and I turn and say "Let's get the Chef and see what he wants us to do."  Ceasar looks at me like I have just suggested that we go have a group hug with the convection oven or eat the family meal without Tabasco or something equally silly.  He has no intention of telling the Chef, and is also determined to produce a quart of sauce to cover his aspic.  He grabs the veal stock that had some lamb warming in it the night before and intently sets about trying to pass it off as Osso Bucco sauce.  It's a bit like trying to replace Rose Marie with Walter Cronkite in the Hollywood Squares and pass the whole lot off as Paul Lynde.  There's saucy and then there's saucy, and this just wasn't going to be it.  He was so agitated that I did everything I could think of to try and help him -- I reduced port wine and shallots to syrup, added it to some of the stock, did a monter au beurre with butter, but nothing was going to make Ceasar's creation be worth serving over that lovely and tender lamb shank.  About 10 minutes into this fiasco, the Chef came into the kitchen and immediately started saying "something is burning, what is burning?"  He spent the next 10 minutes prowling around the stoves and ovens trying to find out what was burning and we all kept our mouths shut.  When the Chef finally left the kitchen, I made the mistake of saying to Ceasar "We still have some of the sauce left from the last time we made Osso Bucco, and I think we'll probably have to make some more Osso Bucco tomorrow.  Maybe we can stretch what we've got and make more sauce from the stock tomorrow and throw this away."   He got completely indignant and said "We don't have to throw this away.  It is perfectly good sauce."

That was on Sunday.  On Tuesday (Ceasar doesn't work Tuesdays), we had finally run out of the earlier production of Osso Bucco sauce and the Chef said "I found some upstairs -- we'll use that."   I knew that it was the stuff Ceasar had cobbled together.  I managed to assuage my guilt over keeping mum earlier in the week by saying "Chef, before you make me use that sauce, please taste it".  I had to say it 3 times before he caught on and made new, but I felt better.

I think the "rules" game must go on everywhere in the restaurant.  Right by the side door to the alley there is a hook screwed into the wall with a very nice sign above it that says "Do NOT remove this tool".  The hook is empty.

I have spoken to Rita about putting me on as a waiter for lunches on Saturday so I can find out what goes on in the front of the house (and learn the Open Table reservation and ticketing system).  She seemed pleased and is going to work me into the schedule, I think.

In more serious news, it looks like PJ (my sous-chef-in-waiting from school) will be going to Iraq for 18 months starting in January.  He's being very brave, but is obviously shaken.  The good news is that he's going to be assigned to a reasonably safe convoy escort duty along a route that they have been doing every day for the last year without anybody getting hurt.  Apparently they first send him to Fort Somewherereallyunpleasantinalabama for training and then to Kuwait for a month (no doubt to get acclimated to the heat).  Then it's on to convoy duty.  I hope he ends up being OK -- he's one of the good guys...smart, motivated, honest, talented, huge potential.

Makes you think,

Bill
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