“I teach the material, and try to change their perspective on table service,” Mr. Papineau said, leaning casually back in his chair, his jacket removed. It struck me then that all his movements were somehow bigger than life.
In truth, while he claimed only to teach, Papineau did much more than that. There were several facets to his work and they blended with each other, mixed, overlapped, and mimicked one another, so that you never knew which he was doing or whenâit was all one thing. He was the maître d' of a public restaurant. He was a lecturing instructor on the faculty of the Culinary Institute. He was a teacher by example; the posture he held and the values he practiced during service were observed and absorbed by the students around him. And he was a kind of private tutor for Craig. Excellence in one of these areas fed all the others and they fed it; the better maître d' he was, the better teacher he became, and the students learned more. The boundaries between school and business, education
and work were in fact nonexistent. Each was an expression of and fed the whole.
He said the dining room was a classroom, but this was not practice; real people came to eat here and pay well for their meal. The students were four blocks away from graduation at this point and it was time for them to know the people who would be eating the food they were learning to cook, but also to know themselves. This was among Mr. Papineau's fundamental maxims.
“In a few short days,” he said, swiveling lazily in his chair, hands behind his head, “they learn who they are, they learn confidence. And when they have that they can learn more, faster.”
But the biggest thing one gained in table service, he said, was “wisdom about yourself.”
“They learn to be sympathetic and sincere, and strong, to lead people,” he said. “They'll need to be role models.” How could you be all these things if you weren't reflective, he asked, reflective about yourself and about how others responded to your own actions. “Know thyself” would be a waiter's most important rule. Here, at the Culinary Institute of America, one learned Platonic cooking and Socratic table-waiting.
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P
hilip Papineau was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1954 to parents who believed restaurants were entertainment. “I always loved the show,” he said. “I grew up going to restaurants. We weren't richâthere were six of us, four of us and my parentsâbut every Saturday night, we went out to a restaurant.” Throughout school, he had always been the sort of student whose knees rattled during public presentations, pages quivering in his hands. The first table he waited on was at a restaurant owned by his brother and sister-in-law. His sister-in-law had listened in on his maiden voyage, told him he'd spoken so fast no one had understood a wordâget back there and do it again. It was his first lesson in table service and he remained grateful for it.
Papineau graduated from Worcester State College in 1977 and continued to wait on tables. He had some friends in Poughkeepsie, moved there, and got a job as a waiter at a place called the Treasure Chest, a high-end formal French restaurant.
“My parents kept waiting for me to get a real job,” he recalled. “But to me, that
was
a real job.”
His seriousness paid off. When the Captain at the Treasure Chest left, Papineau was offered the job. The restaurant was a favorite of IBM vice presidents during an era of enormous expense accounts. “The money was just incredible,” Papineau recalled, with genuine nostalgia.
In 1984 he left the Treasure Chest for another restaurant and eventually applied for a job at the Culinary. He did not feel as though he was good enoughâthe other maître d's had worked all over Europe; who was he, this American maître d'? “But I
wanted
to be here,” he said, his teeth gritted.
He had learned French service. If you only knew American, he said, that's all you could do. If you knew French service, you could do anything. And he lamented the demise of such service.
I told him how much fun I'd had eating at the Culinary's French restaurant, the Escoffier Restaurant, how the waiter, a young woman, had prepared for me the best Caesar salad I had had anywhere ever (it was her first, she told me), how they sautéed tableside in beautiful copper pans. Such service had long been out of fashion, and yet because it was so rare these days, I found it not stuffy, but instead thrilling.
“I - love - that,” Papineau said, lustily. “I -
love -
that.” To perform something by nature flamboyant and difficult and to do it low-key, he said, to do it with humility and subtlety and grace and perfectionâthe man's eyes shined brightly. He did not want me to get him wrong though. “I like show,” he conceded. And he loved it when, as he said, “somebody's really puttin' on the dog.” But “low-key” was where it was at. He adored, he said, “the theater of it.”
Like Pardus, Papineau noted the downside: “You can't celebrate Christmas. You can't celebrate Mother's Day. âI'll have to see you the day after Mother's Day, Mom.” Christmas, though, that was the rough one. He could manage the rest, but Christmas was when you really felt the rift between restaurant people and the rest of the world.
While he regretted that formal service had fallen out of fashion, he also noted that, as the cup and saucer were slowly reentering the scene, so too might formal service. “And these kids,” he said, rising forward in his chair, “will be the ones to do it. These kids will change the service industry.”
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B
y Day Four, everything seemed to click. We would huddle at eleven-twenty. Mr. Papineau would check that everybody possessed crumber,
pad, wine key, and pen, run down any specials of the day, what desserts were being offered. He would look at his watch and say, “It's eleven-thirty. We're officially open, let's have a gooooood Friday.”
Service, after a few days, became as natural as conversation with friends. It was fun to serve people, to answer their questionsâvisitors wanted to know why we were here, what we were doing, where we were goingâthey were here “to dig the scene,” as Papineau had said.
Papineau's lectures remained fascinating through to the end. Even the simplest queries offered him an opportunity to reflect on human nature, the behavior of humans in groups. One of the last things I asked him was how to prioritize various duties, and he said without hesitation words that would serve one just as well in the kitchen as in the dining room: “Do the job that can be done fastest, first. Take the deuce before the four-top, even if the four-top came in first, because the four-top will take longer, and a six-top will take even longer than that. That's just the way it is.”
I
arrived shortly after six A.M., stored my briefcase in a locker, and headed up to the kitchen. The day before our group had circled around group leader Gene Huey, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, of Chinese descent, as he briefed us. “You have to be here at six-fifteen,” he said. “This is not to scare you or anything, but if you're here at six-sixteen, you're late. The chef is very particular. If you're in the bathroom, you're late; if you're downstairs, you're late. Six-fifteen in the kitchen. Standard uniform. Two sidetowels, I believe. Keep a locker. Your knife kits up there are fine. So are tool boxes. Remember, this guy talks in grams. It's about thirty grams per ounce. Read the handout, read the handout, read the handout.”
I was already familiar with the layout of the kitchen, having been a waiter, but any time I had crossed the line into the kitchen I'd felt like an intruder; my posture and haste whispered “excuse me” and “sorry,” whether washing my hands or drinking from the water fountain. Now I was back in my whites and, with my fellow students, could take possession of the place. Part of my possessiveness arose from being added to the class roster. The chef, Ron De Santis, had put me on family meal. This would be the lowest rank in the kitchen; you cooked for your fellow students, often forced to put leftovers and on-their-way-out vegetables to use somehow; if you screwed up, people bitched but it didn't really matter. You were the clerk of the kitchen, the gopher.
Nevertheless I was pumped up and ready because I had a job to doâ
John Marshall, Paul Angelis, and I were to make fifty plates of food for waiters, instructors, fellows, and the two St. Andrew's dishwashers.
A voice over loudspeakers said, “Will everyone come up front?” I stowed my knife kit on a standing rack in back of the long kitchen and strode to the front with my comrades. The clock above the display-kitchen window read six-thirteen. We gathered before Chef De Santis. The chef was not tallâfiveten, five-eleven maybeâbut he was trim and compact, his chef attire crisp and smooth, a good-looking man with sharp features. He read roll callâall here but for Manning and Mimi; no one knew where they wereâand when the chef called the final name, the clock read six-fifteen exactly.
As always, the first order of duties was a tour of the kitchen, beginning with service stations. With our backs to the window looking past the bar and into the cool quiet dining room (Craig and Mr. Papineau were there, preparing for the arrival of a dozen-and-a-half new waiters), and facing the kitchen, pastry station was to our right, followed by garde manger, the cold station that prepared sandwiches and salads, then soup, veg, sauté, pasta, and grill in a counterclockwise semicircle. The kitchen had been built in 1989 and had been designed for cooking and service; that is, it had never been anything else, as was the case with many kitchens, and did not have to confine itself to an already existing space. A
Y
-shaped service counter, upside down from our vantage point, split the cooking area. The chef would stand in the crux of the
Y
, calling orders, expediting as it was called, and plates from any station came right down the same runwayâan efficient design for getting a lot of different plates with many components from various stoves to the waiters.
“Your stations are set,” Chef De Santis said. “You have everything you need there. Day Two, you set your own station.”
“At nine A.M.,” he continued, “put your plates in the warmer or the cooler. This counter is hot.” He rubbed a palm across the bright stainless steel service counter. “Do not keep raw vegetables here.” This was the kind of important, small detail you had to learn coming into a new kitchen; every kitchen had its own quirks. And so did every chef. You had to learn these, too, and get a sense of the chef just as fast. Often, the chef and the kitchen were the same thing. De Santis was an easy read because he didn't talk, lecture, or explain; rather he declared thingsâsometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but always clearly.
“There is the ice machine,” he said as we circled through the kitchen. “Before you take ice, you
must
check with me. We must be sure it's available
for service. You'd be surprised how little ice you really need ⦠. The most important station here is the hand sink. You should be standing
in line
to use the hand sink. This, for lack of a better term, is the garbage station. We have a problem already.” The blue recyclable bin was missing, and someone hustled to roll it back into place beside the gray trash and yellow recyclable bins. “They do not move. That way you
always
know where they are.” We passed dry storage to the walk-in. “Only use the left side of the walk-in,” he said. “Not the right side. The right side is for P.M. mise en place only. If I catch you there, you will repeat this course. I wanna be
real
clear about that. If I catch you thereâyou will repeat this course ⦠. Plastic wrap. See it?” He pointed to the huge roll beside the sink. “That's where it
always
is. It's a matter of efficiency ⦠. While you are with me, you weigh, measure, and scale things. It is not an option. Two reasons. One, it affects quality and consistency. Two, we have nutritional parameters. Otherwise, it's a joke what we're doing.” On a board on the wall behind the grill station were kept various sheets (reservations for the week, parties, and so on), as well as a list of our names. “We sweep every half hour,” Chef De Santis said. “When you sweep, put an initial by your name. It works well. It's always
nice
and
clean
here.”
He had told us a lot about his style already. Promptness. Efficiency. Everything in its place. Cleanliness. And something more. There was clearly something of Jack Nicholson in this man, the way he said “
nice
and
clean
” in almost a whisper, something theatrical and something ever so slightly demented. At first I thought he smiled a lot. But I saw him smiling when I knew he was very angry, and I realized this was just the shape of his mouth. Often his teeth were clenched while his lips were parted in a wide smile. This enhanced your caution when you were near him.
“It's now six-twenty-four,” he said. “At six-fifty-five, that's the last time we're going to be able to order supplemental. Check your mise en place. Never assume everything is correct, fresh, servable. You are in charge now. Family meal. We begin plating at ten-fifteen. At ten-thirty, we're gone.”
Chef De Santis told us that he considered family meal to be the most important station in the kitchen because it determined the tone and morale of its workers. He told us he'd once worked for a chef who instructed the family meal cook to make a bolognese sauce with the consommé raft and the restaurant suffered for it.
Still, I didn't buy it. I figured he said this because over the years he'd realized that people on family meal have a self-esteem problem. Family meal had
to be done, and that was about all there was to be said for it. Today's family meal had been partly prepped by people who were now seated in chairs listening to Mr. Papineau's Day One lecture, so we had plenty of time to put it together and had only one decision to makeâthe chef wanted us to use several pounds of carrots, to be served with the roast beef and mashed potatoes. John immediately suggested julienning them, then sautéeing them in butter with diced apple and caraway seeds; the chef nodded and left. Everyone had a few minutes to check their mise en place and familiarize themselves with their station before lecture, which began at seven. The restaurant, its new staff formally inducted, opened for business in less than five hours.
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D
ay One lecture was simply a matter of going through the course guide on policies, dress code expectations, the things everyone had heard in every previous class. But Chef De Santis was going to make us interested in this even if we didn't want to be.
“Skills, you'll see three bullets there,” Chef De Santis said, looking at his own course guide at the head of the classroom. We'd convened downstairs in a long narrow classroom with rows of white tables on either side, an aisle down the middle, and in front, a desk, a podium, a board, and an overhead projector. “Mise en place, fundamentals, service. When we talk about fundamentals, it means everything you have to do till it's seasoned and on the plateâthat is fundamentals. If it says minced garlic, it doesn't mean big chunks of garlic. It means very, very, VERY fine!”
The man knew how to raise his voice. And when he lowered his voice, it moved way down to a delighted, wicked whisper.
“I really believe in the dress code,” he said, continuing a description of how we were graded. “I think they've got it just right. I think symbols are importantâit's really a symbol. We
can
wear other clothes. We don't. One violation is a seventy percent grade violation; it is possible to fail for the day because of a single violation. The second one, it's a zero for the day. That means you repeat the class. I am serious about this. Work with me on this. I wear this.” He tugged at his neckerchief, neatly tucked in. “I button up. You can do the same.
“For the next seven days, you must speak like a professional ⦠. I have zero tolerance for discrimination or intolerance. I will dismiss you on the spot if I see it. And I will do everything I can to have you thrown off this campus,
permanently
! Too much garbage goes on out there.” He paused.
“Professionalism. You can't buy it. You can't order it from a catalog.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. “It's not a
thing
. It can't
cut
you. You can't
have
it! It is something you work toward.
“At ten-thirty, you must leave the kitchen. Our industry, there's too much workaholism. You don't have to eat family meal, but you must leave the kitchen. That's the point of being organized. You can't work through family meal.
“By eleven-fifteen, we have to
look
like we're ready to go. Even if we're not. We are a display kitchen. You've seen people looking in. They're ready to come in and
siddown
.” His eyes narrowed and he got that evil look in his eye. He said, “We have to
glisten
.
“If no one has said it to you already, welcome to restaurant row. It is the best time here at the Institute. It's
real
fast. You will not believe how fast graduation comes. The work is much more independent. A lot of responsibility is given to you.
You're
in charge. If you need a demo,
ask
me. If you need info, ask me. If you need an opinion, ask me. If you need feedback, ask me.” He gave out his office and home phone numbers, should a student need to call at any time. “Real strange hours I'd appreciate if it were an emergency.”
“There will not be a meeting at the end of the day. If the day didn't go well we
know
which stations had a bad day.
“If you think you've made a mistake, do
not
throw it away. Maybe we can cook it longer, maybe we can season it. Do not throw it away. That's the wrong message. Any amateur can throw something away and start again. Everybody, when you leave here you are going into business. Do you all understand? Food cost is a part of that.” But, he noted, “Don't come to me with burnt. I can't help you with burnt. Black. Crisp.
Burnt?
That's way
past
mistake.”
He addressed service commands. “Order” was more or less advance notice. “Fire,” he said. “That means
cook
the
food
. Or assemble the item. The last thing the expediter will say is pick up. When is the best time to plate the food?”
A couple of people call out, “As close to pick-up as possible.” Chef De Santis asked “Why?” then answered it himself: “The food looks likeâ
freshly plated FOOD!
It's glistening,
steeeeeeeaming
”âin that whisper of hisâ“
juicy
. What does food look like when it's been plated too early? It looks like hot-plate food. It looks like it's been
sittin
'
around for a while
!”
I knew a talented actor when I saw one; seven-o'clock lecture would be fine with me.
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B
y eight-thirty, Mimi and Manning remained AWOL. They had been slated for grill station, and with the restaurant planning to open in three hours, John and I were discussing carrots for family meal when the chef walked up and said, “John, you and Paul are on grill today.” To me he said, “Chen and Brian are going to help you with family meal.”
Chen-Hwa I think was glad to be in the kitchen. The previous week after table service, I asked him how he was doing and he said, “No broken plate, no water on customer. Good day.” Chen's food English was proficient but he had more difficulty in conversation. His classmate, Geoffrey Rassmussen, from Staten Island, was helping him with that. When Brian, looking into a job position in Shanghai, asked Chen if the Chinese were friendly to Americans, Chen said, “Yes, all slant-eyes like honkies.” This was Geoff's doing. Geoff was twenty-two, had been on his way to playing college football until an injury ended his career, he said. He had permed strawberry-blond hair, and during table service when the day was slow, he would goof around in the corner striking Calvin Kleinâlike poses. He said his modeling name was “Tyler” and we often called him Tyler after that.