01.14.07

Cover Pool

Posted in The Story at 3:35 am by Chef Matt

Tonight was Saturday night, and that means one thing - time to get shakin’. We usually have a full house on Saturday nights, and this was no exception. For a gauge of how busy it was, the record number of covers (customers) we’ve ever had is 127 (give or take). Tonight, we had 96 covers just in reservations! We knew it was going to be a madhouse, and so we spent our time before opening in frantic preparation for just such an onslaught.

Place your bets people - lots of good numbers left!

While preparing for the sure-to-be-hectic night ahead of us, we were batting around guesses of how many covers we would actually have when all was said and done tonight. Being no stranger to gambling myself, I decided we should create a pool out of these guesses. Everyone was game to throw in a buck, so we had the following predictions as to how many people would actually walk in and be served:

Amy: 104
Edwin: 130
Jay: 111
Dave: 125
Me: 120

But to our surprise, the hostess suddenly came back into the kitchen. She looked at all of us and asked to the room in general: “So, you all have a pool going on how many covers we’ll have?”

We were shocked that word had gotten out, but still nodded to the affirmative.

“Let me in for 140 - how much is it?”

“Gary sent me… and put me in for 138 covers…”

While we were glad to get another dollar into the mix, it was a bad sign that the hostess (the person who arguably most has her finger on the pulse of how many people come through the door) was predicting tonight to be a major record for us. We triple-checked our prep stations.

Then the two owners - Joy and Veronica - walked back into the kitchen. Joy asked to the crowd again, “So, you have a pool going for how many covers we’ll have?” At this point, I have to admit I was a tad nervous. Sure, Joy and Veronica are cool, but at the same time, what we were doing is in fact technically gambling, and therefore technically illegal. While this was hardly the kind of activity that would warrant a police raid, all the same, maybe this was something that they didn’t want going on in their kitchen.

“Put me in for 126,” said Joy.

“I’m thinking 128,” said Veronica.

Crisis averted. And now the pool stood at a cool $8.

Then dinner rush began. And it was indeed the madhouse we thought it was going to be. The highlight for me was when an order came in for two Caesar salads, and the server came back to tell me that this was a VIP table (yes, that happens) and I was not allowed to know the identity of the people I was serving. This had never happened to me, and so I assumed perhaps there really might be an A-list celebrity out there who wanted to keep things hush-hush. I made the salads and sent them on their way.

The server then came back when the main course had gone out and said “OK, the person at this table is a ‘Chef Sinopoli’, and he now says it is OK for you to know he is here now that he has his food.” Chef Sinopoli was one of my instructors at Stratford, and was actually the one who inspired this post about kitchen humor. He is a good friend, and the whole hiding his identity is just his sense of humor. I was thrilled to know he had finally come to my restaurant, so of course I to a moment (it was still early) to go out to see him. It was really great to talk to him for a few minutes, so I could let him know how much I was enjoying myself here at Vero. Also, one of his dining companions had ordered the duck tonight, which was a dish I had helped to put together.

More chef’s math. There’ll be a quiz on this later.

Earlier, while putting the menu together, all the chefs had discussed how we would prepare duck as a special. I came up with the idea that we should serve it over wild rice with sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts and then top the sliced breast with an apple compote. I made the compote myself, and added dried cherries and bourbon to give it a kick. The final product was fabulous, and in fact we sold out of it in just over an hour.

But the dinner rush is four hours, so we were only just getting started when we had to send out the call to 86 the duck. All the same, I really think my compote kicked ass, and I was thrilled that not only was it good, but my idea had resonated so well with customers as to sell out so fast.

The orders were pouring into the kitchen at breakneck speed. The servers were pushed to their limits, the line cooks actually asked for a temporary slow down in the ordering so as to catch their wits as to what was going on. We actually 86′d the calamari preemptively because we had so many orders come in for it at once, we weren’t sure if we had enough to fill all the orders. (We came up one short…) In the midst of all this, one of the servers needed a hand carrying out her order since she had four plates, and I volunteered to help since I had just (somehow) cleared my line of all tickets.

Yeah, it looked something like this - only there seemed to be a lot less room for me to move around when carrying I was carrying two hot bowls of soup.

There is nothing I could have done to adequately prepare myself for the scene that accosted me upon walking out into the dining room. Sometimes as a chef, when you spend all your time in the back never once looking out into the dining room, you lose touch with what it really means for the dining room to be “busy”. This certainly qualified. Every table was full. The wine bar, which seats five people, was three people deep, all waiting for their tables. The noise created by all the customers crammed into this space and all carrying on conversations in varying stages of sobriety was unimaginable. Looking around, I could see people eating food that I had prepared for them only just a few minutes before, but somehow, in this setting, it was all different. Now, somehow, it was their meal - the food they were enjoying and sharing with each other. The food that would either encourage them to come again, or for them to think was no good, such that they vowed never to return. (Of course, nobody thought that…) Basically, entering the dining room meant that I was seeing the result of the journey where a “plate” becomes a “meal”.

I came back to the kitchen after making the run, and reported to the other chefs that it was in fact a zoo out there. And so it continued until 9:30 that night. We made it through, yet again, but not before we had to 86 a grand total of five dishes on the menu:

• The Pan-Seared Duck (yes, it was fabulous)
  
• The Fried Calamari (which one patron the night before declared the best she had ever had)
  
• The Apple Crisp
  
• The Double-Chocolate Cheesecake with Mixed Berries
  
• The Beet Salad (I thought I had enough beets at the beginning of my shift - I was wrong.)

So as the hostess called it a night - she always leaves shortly after the last table is sat at 9:30 - she came back to give us the official count for the night.

“One hundred and twenty.”

“We didn’t break a record?!?” said everyone else in the kitchen.

“Holy shit, I won!” said I.

Yes, I quickly pocketed the $8, and felt like the luckiest bastard on earth. I was sure Edwin’s pick of 130 was closer, but who am I to argue? So maybe we didn’t break a record, but yet another great night had been well-executed by everyone on staff. And I was now seven dollars richer - and it was time to start mopping.

Matt

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