It is Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve means something different to someone who works in a restaurant. It is often said of the restaurant industry that “We work while others play.” That statement reveals a lot about the person who makes it, particularly around the holidays. Yes, I work while a majority of people are on vacation, or simply don’t have to work. We serve the many happy gatherings of those who would prefer to dine out and enjoy a nice meal on Christmas Eve. They’re with their loved ones. We are not. On holidays, the distinction becomes glaring. I will not pretend that I do not question my current chosen career path at every step, but I must say that I feel secure in my decision on this particular Christmas Eve, and I’d like to tell you why.
My restaurant is a fine dining institution in the very crux of a small beach resort town. It gets quiet during the winter. Very quiet. Last year, the management decided, if only because they had no reason not to, to ask the empoyees whether they would be opposed to opening for Christmas Eve. A majority were perfectly willling to volunteer for the shift, and I believe we ended up serving around 40 diners that evening, largely due to the sage restauranteur principle that some money is better than none. We have a reputation in the quiet town of Lewes, Delaware, as the Restaurant That Is Open and this reputation earned us the bare minimum of customers required to make the night worthwhile that year. This year was a different story.
The executive chef and I sat before two tall glasses of beer Wednesday night. I don’t recall being quite aware of why he had climbed the steps up to his office leading away from the lobby, but he came back shortly, grim-faced.
“197 for Saturday night,” he exhaled as he reclaimed his bar stool. I laughed.
“Well that seems like a lot, ” I replied, playing along with the joke.
Up until that point, I had fully expected an easy night to end my week and a nice day off to enjoy Christmas with my family. Something about the look on his face, however, made me sit up and pay attention.
“Yeah,” he answered. “It kinda is.” From that point on we discussed strategy. He told me not to bother with microwaving the pre-portioned starch components of our dishes, to instead empty them into containers in our steam table. He told me to “sandbag.” This is what really got my attention. In civillian life, sandbagging is when you create a temporary barrier against, say, flooding, with actual sandbags. The term captures the spirit of the restaurant equivalent, which is to prepare many portions of a particular component of a dish at once in order to quickly serve them once they’re required.1 I mentally prepared myself to come in on Saturday night ready to kick ass.
Saturday arrived. I came to work having spent the previous hour doing last-minute Christmas shopping. I arrived somewhat anxiety-ridden because I was a few minutes late. This was not the night to be late, I told myself. When you are late to a job like mine, you feel as though you’re letting down the team. Like you’re signalling to the others that you don’t care as much as they do. A bad attitude is poisonous, however, so I tried to just make up for lost ground. I attacked the remaining items on our prep list with vigor and felt good about how quickly I dispatched them. Soon I was setting up my station. It is impossible to fully describe the carefuly geometry that goes into mise-en-place. Our three different greens, Swiss chard, haricots vert, and broccolini, were submerged in an ice bath, set behind a tub of ice containing a variety of squeeze bottles and a few cold garnishes. i purposefully angled the sheet tray this whole contraption rested upon towards me. I rested my tongs, wrapped carefully in clean side towels, in the center of the short cutting board affixed to the side of the line opposite to the aforementioned arrangement. I had the time to pay attention to these details, and thus, I set everything up to fit me like the cab of a fine German sports car My utensils rested in a container of hot water. The steam table, which would keep everthing warm, had space for the two hot sauces our dishes required, and the two garnishes that needed to be warm - marinated cippolini onions on one side, a cranberry hazelnut relish on the other. I scooped myself a bowl of the stew we made for family meal. I was ready.
At first, it is a little nerve-wracking. The first wave of tickets come in. Your board slowly fills up, and you try to account for the long line of tickets by preparing everything you’ll need to plate them. Things go in the oven. Vegetables get sauteed and put unde the heat lamp. You wait until the servers call for their tables. Of course, since many tables were seated at the same time, the entree courses are called for all at once. You can’t really stop to think at this point. In the parlance of psychologists, you are in “flow.” Once it is time to start arranging the dishes to be sent out to the tables, you have three things to keep track of at once. One is the dishes going out to the customers. One is the prepartory steps required of the tables that have already ordered. And the third is the new order that are coming in. You instinctively realize when new tables add up to another bunch of broccolini to be thrown into the oven, and you scan the next five tickets to see whether you should get a sauté pan hot for more haricots vert. And always, you make sure each component of every dish is intact, and that every plate is clean, before it leaves the “window” in which you’re plating and goes out to the customers.
After this initial rush, I’m pretty much doing more of the same. I get into a groove. I acheive “flow.” It is a challenge to make sure things continue running smoothly, but the restaurant can only seat so many people. At first, I have two areas of responsibility, keeping track of incoming tickets and when their first courses go out, and preparing all of the vegetables and starches so they’re hot and ready to go when the dishes need to go out. Then the first tables are ready for their entrees, and a third area of responsibility emerges as I focus on composing each plate and making it look spotless and beautiful. Once all the tables are filled, I’m back down to two things go focus on, prepping and plating this time, and I can start preparing for the next wave. In other words, it starts to become fun. I experience these moments often when we are extremely busy. Everything slows down for me. I see every piece on the chessboard. My muscle memory takes over for the countless small tasks that make up my job and I don’t have to think about them. I feel like Han Solo shooting down TIE fighters in the turret of the Millenium Falcon. There are many factors that contribute to this state. Trust in my coworkers to deliever the components of the dish they’re responsible for. Trust that the servers will be there shortly to pick up the food and take it to their customers. Knowing where I need to turn to and where my hands need to go to compose each dish. After a while, the first push has been conquered. I’m feeling good. Invigorated. I think to myself, if it were this busy every single night, I would be happy.2
Very often on busy nights, the ending can feel like a long, harsh slog. You find yourself pulling together scraps just to muster up enough to finish, which adds extra steps to each component.This Christmas Eve, however, everything is beautifully portioned. We forsee every shortage and ask our dishwasher, who is normally a cook anyway3, to prep a few things just to make sure we can get through the night. I portion our butter-smashed sweet potatoes to perfection, stretching 14 pre-portioned containers out among 16 dishes. We have only one dish sent back the entire night, from a woman so notoriously picky4, the servers literally argued amongst themselves to determine who would take her. The other 177 diners love their food. Me, the other sous chef, and two cooks assigned to the salads, appetizers, and desserts have conquered one of the busiest nights of the year, without any of the senior front-of-the-house managers or either executive chef. Moreover, I feel the internal satisfaction that comes from knowing, really knowing, that each dish was not simply good enough to pass the scrutiny of the other sous chef and the servers, but met my own personal standards. The athletic, physical skills required for being a good line cook have to be earned through hard-won experience and pushing your limits. Sometimes the athletic nature of it glares, and you feel as though you lack some inherent talent that allows some to play in the big leagues. I still don’t know if that’s true. It’s probably the topic of another essay. But tonight, at least, I performed better than just good enough, and I can be proud of it.
-
My restaurant, under normal circumstances, sandbags nothing. Green vegetables languish under a heat lamp, losing nutrients, flavor, and crunchy, fresh-tasting texture. Rice, mashed potatoes, and other starchy components dry out or become lukewarm. It’s generally bad practice for a high-end restaurant where every aspect of the dish is carefully considered. ↩
-
I get profoundly irritated when the restaurant is slow. I think about the progression of my career so often that a slow night’s lack of lessons to offer gets me angry at the wasted time. ↩
-
Something to note about good restaurant dishwashers. In many restaurants, they are underappreciated. Yes, the job they do is extremely important to the smooth operation of the restaurant, so their hard work is recognized, but I’ve worked in several restaurants where they are marginalized, usually because of a language barrier. We don’t have dishwashers like that. Ours can step in and cook if we need them do, they know how to do much of the prep,we count them as friends and colleagues, and they all speak excellent English, even though they come from a wide variety of countries. Working with a kitchen staff with dishwashers like that has been a valuable experience for me. It’s motivated me to take learning Spanish much more seriously, for example. ↩
-
She wanted her salmon well-done and did not articulate that to her server. Cooking our beautiful Scottish lake salmon to well-done is basically a crime, so her business was not really all that desirable in my eyes in the first place, although we would have gladly accomodated her if her needs had been conveyed properly. Being a server can be a really hard job. ↩
