Don't Try This at Home by Kimberly Witherspoon, Andrew Friedman Read Free Book Online

of your f—ing employees.

On the Road Again
    DANIEL BOULUD
    A native of Lyon, France, Daniel Boulud is one of the most acclaimed chefs in New York City. His empire includes the four-star dining temple Daniel, as well as Cafe Boulud and DB Bistro Moderne. Trained under some of the legendary chefs of France, Boulud made his name as the executive chef of the Polo Lounge and Le Cirque in New York City, before opening his own restaurants. He is the author of several cookbooks and the designer of the Daniel Boulud Kitchen line of cookware.
    W E CHEFS FREQUENTLY find ourselves practicing our craft away from our own restaurants, whether for one ofthe seemingly nightly benefit events carried on around New York City, at private affairs, or at smaller occasions like a television
     appearance or book signing.
    Whenever you leave the carefully calibrated setting of your own kitchen—a facility that each chef tailors and tweaks to his
     own ever-changing needs and specifications—there is a risk. Away from your home base, variables abound: the setting and infrastructure,
     the support staff, the kitchen equipment, even the serving vessels can cause unforeseen problems.
    Out-of-house disasters are funny to look back on, but only because they usually end well. I'll bet if you ask chefs for their
     best stories from the road, they all wrap up with the food on the table and the customers having no idea of the chaos that
     transpired behind the scenes. There's a very simple reason for this: in my business, failure is not an option. The mark of a professional is that no matter what happens, no matter how catastrophic the circumstances, you complete your
     job on time and to your standards and those of your guests.
    To minimize the chance of a disaster, many chefs transport, even fly, their own ingredients to event sites. But sometimes
     this is impractical, like the time I was in Tel Aviv, Israel, to do a gala dinner for two hundred with Norman Van Aken, Thomas
     Keller, Nobu Matsuhisa, and Toronto's Susser Lee. Susser was going to prepare a stuffed quail, but when the quail showed up
     at two o'clock on the afternoon of the dinner, boneless, limp, and corroded by kosherizing salt, I saw before me a man in
     crisis.
    It was a truly terrible situation to be stuck in. Nobu, Thomas, Norman, and I wanted to jump in and help, but Susser had to
     completely change gears and literally didn't have time to collaborate. He ordered the support staff to just "bring me stuff,
     bring me stuff," in hopes that some new ingredients would spark his imagination. And they did: by the time the dinner rolled
     around, he had pulled off a lovely duck dish. The happy guests had no idea that anything had gone awry.
    Equipment is another fertile breeding ground for trouble. I once did a dinner at a major New York museum, in a room that had
     no stoves, and which was forbidden by building regulations from having any gas or electric machines brought in. One of my
     new cooks, looking for a way to reroast the meat dish, put fifteen to twenty cans of sterno under a sheet pan in an enclosed
     wooden cabinet. When we opened the cabinet door, we were greeted by a fireball; the heat was so intense—easily in excess of
     700 degrees—that the sheet pan had started to melt.
    But the most difficult element to control is people, especially those you didn't hire and who will only be working with you
     for one day. For example, one of the most heart-stopping things that ever happened to me involved the most unlikely worker:
     a truck driver.
    The year was 1989. I was chef at Le Cirque, Sirio Maccio-ni's legendary restaurant. Malcolm Forbes had famously decided to
     throw himself a seventieth-birthday party in Morocco, and to transport his seven hundred American guests, including such legends
     as Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters, he chartered two private 747s and a Concorde to fly out of Kennedy Airport.
    Le Cirque was enlisted to prepare a four-star breakfast for the