02.27.07
Posted in 1. The Story, 2. Greatest Hits at 2:22 pm by Chef Matt
I wrote a while back about how the humor in kitchens can trend a little more towards the “ribald,” and I am guessing that is about as mildly as I can put it. My own sense of humor tends to skew in this way as well, so I was actually looking forward to working in an environment that not only catered to my “low-browedness,” but one that would encourage it and allow it to blossom.
Imagine my disappointment (and that of my good friend Boutros) when my first kitchen job (Cafe Tirolo) was about as straight-laced as they come. I don’t think I ever once uttered so much a single bad word in that kitchen. OK, maybe I said something when I burned my arm, but I don’t really remember… In short the humor there barely made it to the “PG” rating, though Vic did tell me one joke that made me laugh out loud. Here goes:
A man is walking by a store one day and sees a sign in a window offering a $100 river cruise. He is intrigued by this idea, so he goes in to ask about it. The man behind the counter says absolutely, they have a river cruise for $100, and it is about to leave. So the customer pays, and is lead down to the dock out behind the store.
There, the cruise director punches the man in the face, and pushes him into the river.
Shortly thereafter another man sees the sign, and the same thing happens. He pays, gets punched and thrown into the river.
The two men are now floating down the river together, nursing their aching jaws, when one says to the other:
“So, do you think they’ll serve any food on this cruise?”
To which the other man replied, “I doubt it. They didn’t last year.”
Damn funny. So the humor was cute, but hardly the “blue” kind of humor you would expect to hear in The Aristocrats, or a professional kitchen for that matter.
The move to Vero brought me into a kitchen whose humor is definitely more “adult-oriented,” and no, I am not going to share the jokes/topics of conversation held there - you’ll just have to use your imagination on that one.
But this recent joke/prank played in the kitchen was just too funny for me to keep to myself. I am still laughing about it now, several days later.
To set the scene, it was last Friday night, and of course it was busy. Orders, as I have mentioned before, are coming in fast and furious, and we are doing everything we can to keep our heads above water. At this time, the owners, Joy and Veronica, had dinner in the restaurant with some friends. While it may seem like this would be a bad time for them to take up a table, this is actually a great time for them to be in the dining room. They can observe from the floor how everything is handled when the restaurant is at its busiest.
“I’ll have a half-double decaffeinated half-capp, with a twist of lemon.” |
In addition to that, they like to place complex orders on these occasions - I am guessing both to test the ability of the server to take and communicate a complex order, and to test us in the kitchen with our ability to fulfill these orders. That, and why not get exactly what you want when it’s your restaurant? Sure, we are not happy to get such a complex order when we are at our busiest, but when is there a better time to test us?
So to cut to the chase of the order that actually pertains to the whole “humor” aspect of this story, (sorry for all the administrative notes on how to run a restaurant there…) Joy ordered her rib eye with a small salad and a grilled jalapeno pepper on the side. My efforts to organize the walk in fridge have not yet been absorbed into the behavior patterns of all my fellow employees, so there was a bit of a mad scramble to find a jalapeno to grill for her. The rib eye was placed on the plate, and the pepper leaned up against the steak, then the plate was passed to me so I could make a quick side salad for the dish. I was putting the salad together when Jay (Joy’s brother) came over and with a devilish grin said, “Wait, I got something for my sister…”.
For those of you who are having trouble visualizing what I am talking about… |
He then took two grape tomatoes from my salad and placed them on either side of the jalapeno. The resulting arrangement of vegetables made an unmistakable phallus that was hilarious, but maybe subtle enough that she wouldn’t see it. We were thinking that we had a great inside joke that was a kind of “revenge” for her complex order. David then finished off plating the dish with sauce and a rosemary sprig garnish.
Out went the orders to their table, and we continued on with our work, but giggling to ourselves about our little prank. Yes, it was a proud moment for us all to laugh like 12 year olds.
The waitress returned from Joy’s table, and she was holding the rosemary sprig from the plate in her hand. She announced to us, “Joy wanted you all to have this. Since you sent her a dick, she wanted to send you a bush.”
I don’t think we stopped laughing for a full minute.
So yeah, she noticed. And yes, the humor can be a touch crude at times, but it’s what helps us get through the busy nights. If we couldn’t laugh like that when we are working our hardest, the job might just be unbearable. Maybe I’ll share the cruise joke with them tonight…
Matt
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02.21.07
Posted in 1. The Story, 2. Greatest Hits, 3. Recipes at 2:01 pm by Chef Matt
This story requires us to go back to several previous posts, so please bear with me regular readers (all four of you) as I recap for the newly-initiated. Back in December, we were reviewed by the Washington Post, and it was a very favorable review. However, seeing as how this reviewer visited Vero before I was an employee, I could hardly take any credit for the praise we received. Quoting myself:
“I want to be clear about this review though. I claim absolutely ZERO credit for this glowing review. All of his visits occurred before I was an employee, so there is no way my additions for the past two and a half weeks had anything to do with what Mr. Nicholls experienced at Vero.”
The business at the restaurant really picked up as a result of that, and I was proud to be working in such a well-liked and busy restaurant.
As time has progressed on though, I have had more ability to flex my own “creative muscle” in the kitchen, and come up with some of my own dishes to serve to the public. The first addition to the Restaurant Vero menu I created was a trout and persimmon salad in Belgian endive that, while good, was ordered by exactly nobody. The road that must be climbed to reach culinary recognition is indeed a steep one…
Fast forward now to two weeks ago, and you may remember the incident where I was actually able to start a fire in the kitchen using only a stove, a pan and some cranberry juice. Well, further down in that post I mentioned that the redeeming moment of the day was how I invented a spinach and mushroom stuffed calamari braised in a tomato-basil sauce that was served to some local restaurant reviewers. Quoting myself once again:
“One of [the reviewers] ordered my recipe for stuffed calamari. I was nervous of course, but all the same, I wanted to know how it would be received. After that round of dishes came back, the server reported to me that this particular reviewer said that the stuffed calamari “exceeded all his expectations”…I [choose] to believe that this meant he felt that my creation was really something special.”
Well, yesterday Veronica showed me the review they wrote about their visit to Restaurant Vero.
This is another great review for our restaurant - and I especially liked the jab they took at the Post reviewer’s “wimpy palate”, with which I took umbrage as well. However, nestled in this review - if you don’t want to read it all - is the following comment:
“The special of SPINACH & MUSHROOM STUFFED CALAMARI Braised in TOMATO BASIL SAUCE with Endive, Watercress & Daikon Salad was also a gem with tender whole squid stuffed to perfection.”
I did an image search for “gem” and surprisingly, the results included zero pictures of squid… |
Yes, this was my dish they were talking about, and I am still on cloud nine that the words “gem” and “perfection” were used in conjunction with a dish I invented, cooked and plated myself.
But again, I can hardly take all the credit for this. Look at all the other amazing dishes they mention, and the fantastic service as well! If you take no other point away from reading my blog, please take this one:
Working in a kitchen is a TEAM effort! Nobody can go it alone and expect to achieve any sort of success!
So while my one addition was well-received, and even achieved “gem” status, I give all thanks to my bosses for taking the chance to allow me to be creative, my fellow cooks for letting me - the salad chef - take up space on the stove and in the
bain marie for the creation of this dish, and to the servers for getting it to the right people at the right time. The seeming success of one in the kitchen is really the success of all - which may be yet another reason
why “celebrity chefs” annoy me so much.
The road to culinary recognition may be a steep one, but with the help of my great co-workers, I think I may have finally taken my first step!
Matt
P.S. Allow me to beat the rush of those of you who are going to ask me for the recipe and give you the recipe for these stuffed calamari here:
Again, these are not my calamari, since I didn’t have a camera on me in the kitchen, but this is what they should look like. |
Spinach and Mushroom Stuffed Calamari with Tomato Basil Ragu
- In one pan, sauté 2 cups of sliced mushrooms (a mix of them is nice) with olive oil, a clove or two of minced garlic and some chopped rosemary. Cook until most water is out of them, place in large bowl off heat.
- In another pan, sauté a bag of baby spinach with oil and some more garlic until wilted down. Press excess water out in a strainer, and place in bowl with mushrooms.
- To the spinach/mushroom mixture, add salt, pepper, lemon zest, parsley and finally some bread crumbs to give it a little “body”. You are not looking to turn this into a bread stuffing, but you want something there to bind it together.
- In a large pan - like a Dutch oven - heat a few tablespoons of oil, sauté a minced garlic clove until fragrant, then add one can of whole tomatoes and their sauce. Bring sauce to a boil, and crush the tomatoes with a potato ricer/masher in the pan. (Can use a metal spoon for this too…) Add about 10-20 leaves of roughly chopped basil, a pinch of sugar, and let simmer gently while stirring occasionally for about 30 min.
- While the sauce is cooking, stuff the calamari. This recipe should fill about 6-8 tubes of calamari, depending on their size. Make sure the “tip” of the tube is closed, and if it isn’t, close it off with a toothpick. Fill the tube only about 1/3 - 1/2 with the stuffing, and seal off the big end with another toothpick.
- Slip the calamari into the simmering sauce, cover pot, and cook for a total of 45 min to an hour, flipping the tubes every 15 minutes.
- When serving, please be sure to remove the toothpicks first - they could be a nasty surprise otherwise…
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02.19.07
Posted in 1. The Story at 10:56 am by Chef Matt
Saturday night is always a busy night in kitchens. Everybody else is as deep into their weekends as they can get, so they figure why not live it up a little? Tomorrow will be Sunday, and that usually means church and/or chores, so now is the time for them to go out and have a little fun, right?
Well, that seems to have been the thought pattern for all of Northern Virginia last night, and coincidentally they all were thinking that the ideal place to undertake their weekend celebration was Restaurant Vero.
I mentioned a few weeks back about how we all entered a pool to guess how many covers we would have during a Saturday night. I actually ended up winning that night with my spot-on guess of 120. We did this pool a few more times after this instance, but it soon lost any feeling of random guessing as the number of guests who would come in on a Saturday night was consistently falling between 118 and 124. There was such a lack of variety in the outcome that we soon all wondered why we should bother to create a pool to see who was the lucky bastard that guessed the right number out of only 6 or 7 possible outcomes.
“You’re a Baldwin, right?”
“Yes.”
“Which one are you again?…” |
So the cover pool is no more. I retired from it with a record of 1-4. (Nobody ever won twice.) Which means I made money on the venture when all is said and done. (Which I lost in a bet as to which Baldwin brother was in “The Hunt for Red October”. Could have sworn it was William…)
The most covers we had ever done on any night to date was 127 - we did that shortly after our great review in the Washington Post came out. People really do read the reviews, and most of them think that the best time to come to a restaurant is right after it goes to print. I personally like to give it some time so the crazy scramble to get a seat can subside. But in our case, the average Saturday night was still only 6 or 7 covers off the record anyway. In short, Fridays and Saturdays have always been busy for us since the review.
Which brings us to last night.
Wandering into the kitchen I saw what can only be described as “the usual scene”. The same people that I would expect to see at 2:30 in the afternoon were all present, and the attitude in the kitchen was completely casual. I started about my duties, with no real concern as to the night’s schedule. The levels of all five of my vinaigrettes were low, so I had to make a fresh batch of all of them. Though I noticed that perhaps there was still enough apple cider vinaigrette for the night, provided we didn’t have too busy of a night.
“Hey Jay, how many covers do we have on the books for tonight?” I asked, hoping to perhaps weasel out of making more of that dressing.
“We got one hundred eleven on the books tonight,” said Jay.
“Yeah, 111 covers… that’s the ticket…” |
Now most people would react with shock to such a high number of reservations. But you have to keep in mind, as I have mentioned before, that Jay is a master bullshitter. In fact, he usually gets the number on the books, and then tells us about double that just to scare us. So my reaction was based on these many past experiences - not out of some chip on my shoulder.
“Bullshit, Jay.”
“No, really!”
I still didn’t really believe him, but thankfully one of our waitresses, April, was walking into the kitchen just then, so I asked her about the cover count.
“Well, we just had a cancellation,” she started, so I expected a relatively normal count of about 65 or so, “which brings us down to 109 for tonight.”
“Holy crap!”
“Told ya!” said Jay.
I still don’t believe too much he says, but he was actually telling me the truth this time. (For once…) I began making more of the apple cider vinaigrette.
The night proceeded in pretty much the fashion one would expect it too when we were almost completely booked on reservations. Every time one of the waitresses would come back, they would regale us with horror stories about the dining room - about how there were too many people in there for them to even move around. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to offer much sympathy as our lines were usually 8 orders deep and constantly growing. For the first time in months I had to ask for Dave’s help to bail me out and help me with some dessert orders. I was about 10 or 12 salads behind, and had three full dessert tickets on my station as well. The frantic pace of the kitchen was truly a sight to behold for about an hour or two there.
Many people ask me what it is I love most about being a chef, and I have to say that to some degree it is the fast-paced mosh-pit like crush of a busy night. You either live off that adrenaline rush, or you get out of the kitchen. Well, this night was like an overdose. I was doing fine on the levels I was seeing before, and this was a heavier dose than I was used to. But hey - that which doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger, right?
The list of dishes that we ran out of was relatively short considering how many orders we had filled. But with only three tables left we seemed to have run out of the unthinkable. Kim came back and asked me, “Do we have any more bread?”
We had enough bread to feed over 130 people. One would have thought that would have been enough… |
I was stunned by the thought that we might be out of this most basic of restaurant staples, but sure enough, the tub of sliced bread from which we fill our baskets was empty, and I didn’t see any in the usual spot where we kept our reserves. I jumped over to the fridge by the bread station and frantically began to shove blocks of butter and cartons of eggs to the side in a desperate hope to find…. yes! There was one slab of focaccia left. I pulled it out, sliced it up and began to warm it in the microwave. Hopefully this last pile of freshly sliced bread would last us until we clos….*sigh*.
It lasted about 30 seconds.
With one more table still sitting down, we again tore through the kitchen in the quest for any sort of bread suitable for serving to our customers, and Dave found a half loaf of bread somewhere. (I still am not sure where he found it, but it was indeed fresh…) We sliced and warmed that as well, and with careful portioning were able to make that last the rest of the night.
There is perhaps no better description for how busy a restaurant was on a given night than to say, “It was so busy - we ran out of bread.”
Well thanks to the unrelenting march of time, the night finally came to an end, and the feeling in the kitchen was a healthy mixture of exhaustion and relief. My hands were brittle from being washed so many times, my feet were sore from running all over the kitchen, and I felt that if I had to push one more waitress out of my way from standing in front of my dessert station I was going to have to kill them in the process. But the night was over, and that was all that mattered.
Such record-busting had not been seen since Takeru Kobayashi doubled the hot dog eating record in 2001 by eating 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes. |
Our hostess came back into the kitchen to say goodnight, and as we always do, we asked her about the cover count for the night.
“One hundred thirty five,” she said.
“Wow! A new record!” we all said.
“Oh wait, we had one last table of two… One hundred thirty seven.”
“Holy cow.”
We broke the old record by ten covers. Sure, that may only be an 8% increase over the previous record, but think of it this way:
When was the last time you had 10 people over to your house and you had to cook for them? Was that easy going for you? Now imagine they all ordered something different, but you wouldn’t know what they wanted until they showed up… Yeah, ten people can be a bit of work all on their own, but add them on top of 127 previous customers, and well, you have yourself quite the record-breaking evening.
I wonder who would have won the cover pool this time if we had run it?…
Matt
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02.15.07
Posted in 1. The Story at 2:53 pm by Chef Matt
While so many other blogs that I read have had some sort of treacle about how great Valentine’s Day is, or all the cute things that they and their loved ones did for Valentine’s - mine is not quite that kind of story. However, being married, I am not also going to post the “I’m all alone for Valentine’s Day sob-fest” that I also am seeing so much of.
Rather, I am going to tell you the story of how Valentine’s Day works for a chef. Or at least how mine went down.
What DC looks like when it actually snows. |
The story starts the night before, when my wife calls to tell me that she is staying at a hotel where she was having an off-site conference since the weather was getting really bad. I was in favor of this, since the quality of driv