The morning proceeded with calm industriousness. After family meal, I would prep the next day's family meal (tomorrow: roast pork loin with a honey mustard glaze, rosemary-garlic potatoes, broccoli and carrots tossed with vegetable lié and fresh herbs) and help out where needed. Most other stations were so busy all the way through clean-up you scarcely had time to blink, let alone think about the food you were preparing. My family meal duties allowed me to wander the kitchen.
I was curious about the food. The Culinary billed St. Andrew's, which opened in 1984, as one of the first restaurants in the country attempting to address nutritional and health issues within the context of a standard restaurant menu. It was not a health-food restaurant, but aimed to serve delicious mealsâsalmon, steak, pork, pasta, hearty soups like gumbo, and rich dessertsâwhile altering technique to make these meals less bad for you. The concepts were simple, and most of America knew them by now: reduce calories, cholesterol, salt, sugar, and protein; increase carbohydrate-rich foods and fresh foods in great variety. This can often lead to serious compromise in pleasure, but some of the solutions CIA chefs came up with were clever and successful. A rich vegetable stock, liéd with cornstarch, replaced two-thirds the oil in vinaigrettes and mayonnaise. Yogurt and ricotta cheese,
puréed till it was very, very, VERY smooth, replaced cream and milk for an “ice cream” that was surprisingly creamy and rich. The sausage that topped the sausage pizza used cooked Carolina white rice instead of pork fat. The point was not to eliminate all the stuff that made food taste good (fat), just reduce it when possible by increasing the use of stocks and vegetable purées (the grilled salmon, for example, was served with a grilled tomato coulis and a roasted poblano coulis).
After family meal, all were back in the kitchen quickly. On Day One, Chef De Santis cooked and plated everything on the menuâfour pizzas, nine starters, and eight entréesâin about forty minutes, explaining each item in detail as he moved from station to station. This amounted to less than two minutes per plate, so the chef had to hustle.
The pork scallopini with caponata, polenta, and spinach was a popular itemâI'd delivered many plates of it the week beforeâas was the panseared chicken and shrimp in a saffron broth. These items were to be handled by Mark Zanowski, the former English teacher, and Scott Stearns at the sauté station. Scott was a very large fellow, twenty-two, from Hanover, New Hampshire; he called me Raymond by mistake the first day and continued to call me Raymond from then on. I squeezed into the veg-sauté-pasta line to watch. The chef first put two pieces of lean pork loin, which had been pounded to about a quarter inch thick, into a very hot, perfectly dry sauté pan, and asked Mark why he did so.
“Because there's fat in the meat?” Mark replied.
“Right. If the pan is properly heated, you shouldn't have a problem.”
The pork did in fact stick, but the chef scraped and tugged and lifted the pork off the pan's steel surface to flip it. It had browned nicely. As the pork cooked he got to work on the chicken and shrimp, searing the chicken in another sauté pan. When the chicken had color, he said, “Give me four ounces of broth”âand with a four-ounce ladle, he dropped it bubblingly into the panâ“cover the chicken and poach it.” Then back to the pork: “When you see moisture pushing up through the pork and some blood, that's medium rare. That's a good sight way of checking doneness.” He let it go a moment longer to medium.
Veg stationâChen-Hwa and Brian Geigerâhad already been demoed. They sautéed the spinach, seasoned with shallots and drops of Pernod, and cooked the polenta that accompanied sauté station's pork and caponata. The chef plated this simply, left it on the service table, and turned to the chicken. “This has been poachin' away now for three to four minutesânice and slow
and gentle.” In a separate pan over a hot flame he dropped some linguine and a little veg broth to bring them up to heat quickly. “No dry food, O.K., guys? Gotta
see
liquid.” During the final couple of minutes, he added two shrimp to the poaching chicken and re-covered the pan. He delivered the linguine, now hot and coated with reduced vegetable broth, to a bowl (servers in the dining room, at about this stage in the item's cooking, would typically be setting a broth spoon at the place setting of the person who would receive this item), placed the chicken breast on the pasta, and the two shrimp, pink and tightly curled, atop the chicken, poured the saffron broth over it all, and garnished the dish with flat leaves of parsley. Good to go.
On to pasta: group leader Gene and Geoff (a.k.a. Tyler) would prepare one appetizerâorzo with morels, Parma ham, and Parmesan cheeseâand two entréesâlinguine with tomatoes, caperberries, and calamata olives, and potato gnocchi with shitakes, oven-dried tomatoes, and a basil pesto. This station was all mise en place and these were done in a flash.
Next the chef hit the grill station, John and Paul. The clock read elevenforty, and the chef began to move even faster than he had been. He began by sautéing oyster mushrooms for the grilled bruschetta, and Martin, the outgoing fellow, said into the microphone, “Ordering one salmon, medium well.” The microphone, necessary for the folks on pizza in the back, made any speaker's voice sound deep and formidable; the first order of the dayâcoming as if from the God of the Old Testamentâalways surprised me. John looked at Martin, surprised, looked back at the chef, then turned back to Martin and said, “Ordering one salmon, medium well.”
“Get the pan hot with a little oil, they sear up well,” the chef was saying. “It gives them some taste.” He reached for the hotel pan containing the white mushrooms he was talking about, looked at them carefully, and said, “Someone didn't wash these mushrooms.” Some chefs instructed students not to wash mushrooms, only to brush them off, because they absorb water, which dilutes their taste. Chef De Santis looked at John and Paul and said, “Wash mushrooms. They grow in
sterilized
horse manure, but I don't want to eat it.
Wash
mushrooms.” These would go with the steak as would some freshly shucked peas that he popped into boiling water. He spooned tomato relishâscallions, tomato concassé, brunoise green pepper and cucumber, minced garlic, seasoned with cider vinegar, salt, and pepper, and cooked just enough to heat throughâinto the center of the plate, placed the beef tenderloin John had grilled onto that. “You've also got roasted potatoes that
go with that,” he said. “You've got a lot of things on this plate.” He returned to the bruschetta, the oyster mushrooms having sautéed nicely by now. The chef was moving like a speeded-up movie. “Load it up with mushrooms,” he said, heaping them on top of the grilled bruschetta, which had been rubbed with garlic. “Don't be stingy with the mushrooms.” He popped this into the oven to heat it all through and pulled out a sizzle platter with four long wedges of roasted potato. “These got a little too roasted; don't roast 'em so much.” The chef piped four dabs of mashed potatoes around the beef.
“Fire four beef, two medium, two medium rare,” Martin intoned into the microphone.
John, startled againâpriority was unclear; was this classroom or restaurant? âlooked at Martin, looked back at the chef, appeared to consider not saying anything, then thought again, said, “Firing four beef, two medium, two medium rare.” He turned to put them on the grill and the chef, with an adrenaline glare, said, “Hey! I need you
here
.”
“I was just going to put them on the grill.”
“Just put them in the dry rub for now.”
John did and turned back just as the chef placed the point of a wedge of potato into the dollop of mashed potato saying, “This is your anchor,” and leaned it onto the beef. He sauced the plate with fond de veau, and moved on to the grilled salmon, served with roasted beets and smokey black-eyed peas along with the two vegetable coulis.
After the grill demo, I strolled back to bone out two pork loins for tomorrow's family meal. A whole loin is about two-and-a-half feet long with an oddly shaped bone concealed within the lean meat; I had never boned an entire loin before and set about with curiosity, sliding my very sharp boning knife along the ribs to separate them from the meat.
Craig Walker, an amiable fellow who worked for a nearby wine maker, and David Sellers, who hoped to return to his home in Cullowhee, North Carolina, to open a restaurant at a defunct boys' camp owned by his father, had been assigned to the St. Andrew's wood-burning pizza station. This was a prized station to be onâDavid and Craig were excited to learn to make St. Andrew's pizza. I happened to be boning the loins at the veg-prep table right next to the pizza station when the chef hustled back for his demo. Martin's ordering and firing were now pretty constant. I could tell from the sound of Chef De Santis's voice that he was getting a little excited after all this demoing.
He squatted at the racks below the station, pulling out trays of mise en place, while Craig stood over him.
“That's not how I set this up today!” He looked up at Craig for an answer. Craig mumbled words to the effect that whatever the chef said, it wasn't his fault. “I had two sheets here!” He was pulling out all the sheet trays and rummaging through them. Craig raised his hands in the air and mumbled something incoherent. “I had two sheets here! One had aps!
I
did that this morning! Are you running this station?! Who's running this station?!”
It was a reflexive reaction of course to deflect the heat of chef-anger off oneself and onto your partner whenever possible, and this Craig did by mentioning David Sellers, who was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is
he
?!”
Scott McGowan, on pastry beside pizza, had initially planned on watching the pizza demo, too, but decided instead, with eyes comically enlarged, to help me out with the pork loins to avoid any spillover wrath.
David Sellers wore a crew cut beneath his toque, had earnest brown eyes behind glasses and a ready, friendly smile. He wore this smileâ
Oh good,
he thought happily,
we're going to get our demo!
âas he bounced up to the station.
“Where were you?!”
the chef cried.
David halted abruptly, unprepared for the chef's anger. “I-I-I was in the bathroom,” he offered
“NOW?!”
said the chef.
“Did you have to go NOW?! During service?!”
David stammered and shrugged meekly. The chef shook his head in disgust and disbelief and quickly began rolling out a ball of dough on the floured wood surface of the pizza station.
Meanwhile, grill station was getting clobbered. Orders came at them twice as fast and at twice the rate they'd prepped for. I was wrapping up the pork loin as Paulâa swarthy Italian with dark eyes and a heavy shadow of whiskersâapproached out of breath and, I believe, with little bits of weed in his curly black hair. “Can you cut some mushrooms for me?” he asked and was just as quickly gone.
I found mushrooms, gave them a good blast of water to remove the sterilized manure, and got chopping. That was when I learned how to chop fast; the knife virtually rattled on the cutting board, leaving a wake of sliced button mushrooms. But no matter how fast I cut, I could not keep up. As soon as I'd finished half, Paul was rushing back for more. It seemed that
everyone in the restaurant was ordering grilled salmon and beef tenderloin on this warm sunny day.
I caught up on the mushrooms eventually, and Dan LeStrud, the incoming fellow who had graduated less than three weeks ago, appeared and asked, “Can you run over to fish kitchen for a side of salmon?”
Off I ran. It was, of course, Day One in Corky Clark's fish kitchen, too, and they were in the middle of lecture. Chef Clark was very quiet, standing, holding his elbows, and shaking his head. He had put his class deep in the weeds today and now he was going to hammer them. He was shaking his head, evidently disgusted, when I entered. “Side of salmon for St. Andrew's?” I asked. He looked at me, angrily, angry at everything in his line of sight, and said, “See the fellow.”
I hustled back with a side of salmon, which Chef De Santis butchered immediately, scaling the first piece and figuring exactly how many fillets he could get out of it. Dan handed me a large bag of pea podsâgrill station had run out of peas; would I mind julienning these immediately?
I did so as fast as I could, and when I had several handfuls, I shoved them into a hotel pan and strode for the grill station. Paul met me half way. When he saw what I held, he closed his eyes for a quick moment, said
“Perfect,”
and dashed back to the station, juliennes in hand.
The kitchen closed daily at one. Today, John and Paul were still putting out plates of food at one-forty, both of them drenched with sweat.
Â
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“O
.K., we had a pretty good Day One today,” the chef said. He had called us to the front after all the stations had been broken down and cleaned, mise en place trays all back in the left-hand side of the cooler, knives cleaned and packed away, the kitchen quiet and cool. “We were a little busier than we expected to be. That's
good
. That's what we
want
. Tomorrow we do not have à la carte.” The restaurant often filled with partiesâI, for instance, had helped serve a group of Dutchess County legislators, the Chatham Seniors, and a large group of elderly women who called themselves “Not To Be Alone”âand the kitchen performed banquet service. “The best thing you can do right now, what I would recommend, is meet with your partner. Talk about how things went, what you can do to make things run smoother.” Chef De Santis dismissed us and we headed downstairs for an hour lecture on vegetarianism.