Michael Gibney - Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

CONTENTS

Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

First published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York

www.canongate.tv

Copyright Michael Gibney, Jr. 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2014

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 9781782112532

eISBN 9781782112556

Book design by Susan Turner

For my family

Fyodor Pavlovich, when he heard about this new quality in Smerdyakov, immediately decided that he should be a cook, and sent him to Moscow for training. He spent a few years in training, and came back much changed in appearance. He suddenly became somehow remarkably old, with wrinkles even quite disproportionate to his age, turned sallow, and began to look like a eunuch.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov

Walk-in Freezer Locker Room Chef Office Exit to Loading Dock Curing and Ripening Rooms Pastry Department Walk-in Boxes Dry Storage Meat Roast Fish Roast Cold Side Prep Area Entremetier The Pass Coffee Station Production Storage Dish Area Entrance Exit to Dining Room

ON A WARM AFTERNOON IN THE SPRING OF 2011, I FOUND myself on a shady corner of Forty-Third Street, just off Times Square, smoking one last cigarette before returning to the twentieth floor of the Cond Nast building to complete the second half of my day clipping magazine articles for The New Yorkers editorial librarya temporary gig Id taken between kitchen jobs. I was about to chuck the butt into the gutter when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a figure whose large silhouette seemed familiar enough to warrant a second look.

He was a tall manat least six foot threewith a nest of unattended curls atop his head that made him appear even taller. He stood with his back to me, a navy-blue pin-striped suit hanging loosely over his broad shoulders. He puffed at a cigarette and chatted on his phone, making lively gestures with his free hand while a nimbus of smoke collected in the air around him.

Even though I couldnt see his face, there was something about his posture that I recognized immediately. He was poised, yet oddly stooped at the same time. His movements were quick and fitful, yet marked by a certain calculated, meditative finesse, which could be detected even in something as simple as the way he flicked the ash from his cigarette.

And then my eyes fell on his shoes and it hit me: checker-print slip-on tennieswith a suit, no less. I knew this man: Chef Marco Pierre White.

I lit up another smoke and waited for him to finish his phone conversation so I could say hello.

Of course, I didnt actually know the man; I only knew of him. I had read his books and I had seen the hoary BBC clips of him preparing noisette dagneau avec cervelle de veau en crpinette for Albert Roux while a young Gordon Ramsay traipsed around in the background trying to make his bones. I knew that he was the kitchens original bad boy, the forerunner of our modern restaurant rock stars. I knew that he was the first British chef (and the youngest at the timethirty-three) to earn three Michelin stars, and I knew that the culinary world quaked when he decided, at age thirty-eight, to give them all back and hang up his apron. And I knew that in recent years hed made his way back to the stove, in one form or another, on television and elsewhere. So while I didnt actually know him, I did know that no matter how gauche it is to descend starstruck upon idols, I couldnt pass up the opportunity to make his acquaintance.

At first, I was met with the annoyance and reservation one comes to expect when approaching celebrities on the streets of Manhattan. I assume he thought I knew him from television. But once I announced that I was a fellow chef, and mentioned the inspiration I drew as a young cook from his books White Heat and Devil in the Kitchen, he let his guard down and we were able to speak casually. Over the course of five or ten minutes, we talked about the craft of cooking, its values and its drawbacks, and what pursuing it professionally does to the body and mind.

Eventually he had to get going, and I had to return to work as well. I concluded the conversation by asking him how he felt about quitting the industry. He paused dramatically and pulled on his smoke.

No matter how much time you spend away from the kitchen, he said, cooking will always keep calling you back.

We pitched our butts and parted ways.

I was sixteen years old when I started working in restaurants. I managed to land a job washing pots in an Irish pub owned by a high-school friends father. Half an hour into my first shift, the floor manager swept into the kitchen in search of a dishwasher.

Hey, you, he said. Some kid puked in the foyer. I need you to clean it up.

It was then that I decided I had to become a cookif only to avoid vomit detail.

More than thirteen years have passed since I made the decision. In that time, Ive seen all manner of operationbig and small, beautiful and ugly. Ive climbed the ladder from dishwasher to chef and cooked all the stations in between. The experiences Ive had along the way have been some of the best ever and some of the worst imaginable. What follows is my attempt to distill these experiences into a manageable, readable form: a day in the life, as I have seen it.

Within these pages, Ive compiled material from several different restaurants and several different periods in time. Ive also sometimes modified the names of people and places. In all instances, Ive done so in service of authenticity and concision. I dont presume to offer some judgment of the restaurant business as a whole. I only hope to provide a genuine impression of the industry, to throw its nuances into sharper relief, so that when you, the aspiring cook or the master chef, the regular diner or the enthusiastic voyeur, wish to reflect on the craft of cooking, you can do so from a slightly more mindful perspective. I leave it to you to weigh the virtues and vices.

And now to work.

THE KITCHEN IS BEST IN THE MORNING. ALL THE STAINLESS glimmers. Steel pots and pans sit neatly in their places, split evenly between stations. Smallwares are filed away in bains-marie and bus tubs, stacked on Metro racks in familiespepper mills with pepper mills, ring molds with ring molds, and so forth. Columns of buffed white china run the length of the pass on shelves beneath the shiny tabletop. The floors are mopped and dry, the black carpet runners are swept and washed and realigned at right angles. Most of the equipment is 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 garbage cans are empty. There is not a crumb anywhere. It smells of nothing.