Thank God, I thought. Service was in a few hours and the brown sauce, after the roux was cooked and the mirepoix was cut and caramelized, would take an hour to cook out. Fifteen minutes later, he hung up his phone and called out, “Michael, you're gonna have to make your own brown sauce.” This gave me a very large headache. I was tired. We already had a million things to do. I tried to go through in my head how much roux I needed for a quart and a half of brown sauce. I knew we'd used eight ounces in Skills for
forty ounces. I couldn't remember how much flour weighed, and I couldn't do the math in that state and didn't have time, anyway, so I filled a pan with flour till it looked right and shoved it in the oven to get it started while I cut the mirepoix.
All time was not the same in the kitchen. There was something about the forty-five minutes between arrival and lecture that was enormously important, far more important than, say, the forty-five minutes before service. If you used that first forty-five minutes to get everything you needed to your station and hammered out a couple of itemsâsay I'd measured the flour, made the roux, cut and caramelized the mirepoixâthe rest of the day, all the way through service, would be smooth, and you could give yourself a full fifteen minutes for family meal. But if you putzed for twenty minutes, didn't have your head together, only got one thing done instead of three, the rest of the day was a disaster no matter how fast you worked or how much time you saved. You would never catch up. It was like some kind of thermodynamic law.
You could actually watch mental disorganization. While the brown sauce was simmering, I'd walk to the dry-storage closet, about a fifteen-second trip from my station if no one got in the way, to grab another onion (I'd already gone there once for the mirepoix) and garlic, and I minced those. Then I'd run down the recipe and see that I needed sherry vinegar, also in dry storage, and all the way there I'd kick myself for not getting this when I got the onion and garlic, which I should have gotten before
that
when I collected the mirepoix. Was I
thinking
? After I'd measured the vinegar I realized I needed honey,
also
in dry storage, but where was the bourbon? “Chef,” I said, “do we have any bourbon?”
“You're asking me
now
where's the bourbon?” he said. “You should be
straining
your sauce by now.”
I wanted, of course, to respond, “I'm not straining my fucking sauce now; do we have any fucking bourbon?”âsuch was my self-loathing. But I said, “Yes, Chef,” and eventually located the bourbon at the patisserie station without the chef's help.
At ten-thirty, John pulled out all the chicken breasts to get them marked offânice crosshatch, render the skinâbut the grill wasn't hot enough. This was one of those physical things that you might have figured out if you weren't swamped, but instead of noticing that the chicken didn't make a nice sizzle when it hit the grill or noticing that your hand didn't get as hot as it usually did when you slapped the chicken down, you thought about what
you could get done while these things were searing. Because the grill wasn't hot enough, the skin wasn't rendering as quickly as it normally did, and it took longer to mark them, and he thus had to leave them on the grill longer than he wanted. He got some off and left others on the grill.
Chef Turgeon happened to walk down the line and, passing the grill, said, “You're
cooking
these, get these off the grill.” Then he halted. He turned and saw the chicken John had taken off the grill and set on a sheet pan at his station. Turgeon jabbed at them with his fingers; he did this hard, punching them, and I was surprised his fingers didn't pop right through to the sheet pan. “Oh,
man,
these are cooked!” he shouted. “I said
rare
!” He punched at more. And then, in his anger, he picked one up in his two hands and ripped a hole through the center of the breast, stared at the pale pink flesh, threw it down on the sheet pan, and walked away. “Damn!” he shouted, throwing his hands up.
He returned moments later and evaluated each of the thirty John had cooked and kept about twelve. “Keep these separate. Give the rest to family meal.” He went to his computer stand, sat on the stool there, and called the meat room. “I need 'em bad,” he said. “Yeah, six whole chickens, I can take that.” A few minutes later he said, “Grill! I need somebody to go to the meat room and pick up chickens.” I felt bad for John and bolted. The meat room was on the other side of the building, down two flights of stairs. I raced back with six chickens and gave them to Manning, who would butcher them for their breasts, and got back to work. Service approached. The chef made a customary tour of the line, checking everyone's mise en place and tasting sauces.
He and John exchanged words. I don't know how it began, but I turned from my frantic, before-service cutting when I heard the chef say, “Don't get an attitude with
me
,” and he laughed
he-huh!
, his voice even deeper than usual, shaking his head
John said, “I didn't come to school to be restaurant labor.”
The chef said, “Maybe because you're older, maybe because you have some business experience ⦔ What amazed me here, aside from the fact that John was getting right in Chef Turgeon's face, which you didn't do to any chef at the Culinary, was that Turgeon, while he was saying all this, didn't pause once in his checking mise en place and sauces. While he and John were having this dialogue, he was poking his fingers into the shallots, leaning over pots, stirring to check consistency, adjusting flames. He said, “Maybe because you have some business experience ⦔
“Maybe I just don't learn that well from your teaching
style
,” said John.
I needed the chef to check my sauce, which I'd finally gotten blended and strained. He let some fall off a tasting spoon. “Nice consistency,” he said. “Perfect consistency.” He tasted it, nodded, winced. “Put about two tablespoons of molasses in it, and a little bit of salt, not much, and I think you'll be fine.” And he was gone.
Service came and the banquet was served; Ã la carte was slow and, as always, the tension that built through the morning was released during service. By the end of the day, Chef Turgeon and John were chatting leisurely about D.C., where both had worked.
The kitchen was cleaned early that day and we gathered around the chef, who stood at the end of the service line next to the expediting microphone.
“Today,” he said. “Better. It's getting better, but it's still not quite what I expect. Banquet was still not in sync. A la carte, again, details.” We had a few minutes to kill and the chef, musing, said, “You know, I tell students to hurry and they say, âI'm
going
as fast as I
can
.' Well,
no,
you're
not
. You will be amazed how fast you can do things. There is no limit to how fast you can go. You can never be good enough, you can never be fast enough. Remember that.”
He asked each person, one by one, what they had learned today. Mimi learned about clabber cream, another type of soured cream. Geoff said, “When someone does something for you, double check it.”
The chef smiled and said, “Ah, you realized that. Yeah, I see that all the time. Bill?”
Bill said, “I learned how to do a really good vegetable stock.”
The chef said, “I think mushroom stems and sweating is the key to good veg stock.” He liked to sweat the veg till they were nearly mush before adding them to the stock or water.
Another learned about wiping down sauce containers, and the chef said, “I've worked in places where that was huge, always wiping down containers so no crud builds up, always putting stuff in the smallest possible container. John, how about you?”
John was last in line. He said, “I learned not to share your feelings when you're in a bad mood.”
The chef nodded, chuckled, and said, “O.K., see you tomorrow.”
Â
Â
C
onversation was limited in the kitchen for the obvious reason that we had work to do, and I asked the chef if we could sit down one day after
service. I knew very little about Daniel Turgeon, other than that he was thirty-three, born in Chicago. He drove a shiny red American sports car. He was smart and articulate about food, though here he talked more about mechanics and hustle. He had cooked with Madeleine Kamman at her school in Californiaâ“Great lady, great lady,” he said of the author and cookâand noted how surprised he was to find that “she had a cook's mentality.”
I'm tougher than you, I'm faster than you, I'm
better
than you.
Turgeon himself
secreted
this mentality. And I knew that if you weren't prepared for him, if your mise en place wasn't ready or there was salt and scraps all over your station, he could be like bad weather coming down the line. One of his main themes, in the kitchen and in lecture, was how hard the life of a cook really was, and it was this I wanted to address first: why is he in this business if it's so hard?
He laughed an abrupt guttural he-huh!, smiled, and began talking with a lightness I had not seen in the kitchen.
“Ya know, it's funny. I remember when I started teaching Skill Development, after a couple weeks, in my head I was thinking, Day One, tell 'em, â
Why
are you doing this? What, are you crazy? Why are you getting into this
business
?!'”
Turgeon couldn't answer the question even for himself except to say that he'd always cooked. As a boy he wrecked the kitchen for a batch of botched sugar cookies, sugar all over the floor. His first job was busboy. And from that youthful vantage, the kitchen was the coolest place of all; he always wanted to get back there. And when he got back there all he wanted was “to move up the line, to be cooking on the hot line.” He knew in high school he was headed next to culinary school, and when he visited the CIA, he knew this was the place to be, he said. He graduated in 1985.
Here is another facet of “a cook's mentality.” After six years in the business, six-day, ninety-hour weeks, stressed, beaten down, and seriously considering getting out of the business, he was asked to become executive chef at a new hotel and restaurant on the Maryland shore, and he said sure. “It was crazy, but I enjoyed it,” he said.
I turned the conversation toward cooking and learning to cook. As inevitably happened at this school when I brought this up, what we talked about was the basics.
“Rose Ann was talking about that this morning,” he said. “She's consulting on a property, and a lot of stuff's out of a can and they just have no idea; she looks back at what she was taught here and said it's just so important.
How to properly cook a green vegetable. That's what they hammer into you here. It's really, really important. If you look at these master chefsâwe used to talk about this in lectureâall they've really done is perfected, mastered those basic cooking techniques. And you just kind of progress from there, but that's something you always lean on. And that's what you're always doing. They've mastered it, it's what they
always
do, it becomes a habitâevery time they cook a green bean it's a
perfectly
cooked green bean.”
“Are you a good cook?” I asked.
“Yeah. I think everybody has a little bit of a lazy nature to 'em, everybody does. And I think the most successful cooks are those who are the least lazy. It's an everyday struggle to be the best cook you can possibly be. That's my main goal. I don't care about being a great executive chef. I think it's learning how to be a good cook and then teaching people to be a good cook. It's something I'm always striving for, to be the best possible cook.”
I said being a good cook was hard. He himself had hammered into us you can never be good enough, you can never be fast enough. Details fly out the window.
“It's funny, a situation happened today with the group leader,” he said. “I talked about it in class. About speed and things, you can never be fast enough in the kitchen; the older you get the faster you get, the more efficient you will work. It was funny he made a comment today, he was a little bit behind, he kinda blurted out by accident, âI'm movin' as fast as I can!'”
I laughed; we'd learned never to say this.
“I went back to his stationâit's common senseâhe was saucing something with a little teaspoon. I put a big spoon up and said, âI think you can be a little bit
faster
.' He was in the weeds. He was starting to get mad at me. I was like, âDon't get mad at
me
. You have this job to do here. Save that for later.' And later he apologized.
“Because there's a lot of pressure, I think it's a natural thing that's probably been done to me, and I kind of do it to them. At the time, I say, âWhat's goin on here?!' And they're in the weeds and you can see they start to raise their temperature a little bit; but I think it's good to feel that pressure because eventually when they look back they're gonna say, âNext time I'm just gonna keep a level head and go right through it, and then worry about it later.'”