Don't Try This at Home by Kimberly Witherspoon, Andrew Friedman Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kimberly Witherspoon, Andrew Friedman
the new guys didn't give a damn and just left the canisters sitting there, completely
unattended.
At the end of the day, I dispatched a few guys from my kitchen to check on the status of things at the hotel. When they entered
the refrigerator to inspect the soup, there was greenish-yellow-brown foam bubbling over the tops of the canisters.
Though the soup had undoubtedly fermented, this is one of those evaluations that only the chef can make, so my guys ladled
a sample of the soup into a plastic container and had it shuttled up to me at Daniel. As soon as I saw it, I could tell it
was gone, and a taste made this all too clear: the soup, all twelve hundred servings worth, was sour, useless garbage.
At that moment, the event—for me and my team—became more of a military operation than a culinary endeavor. I outlined a rigorous
plan that began with the guys on site pouring the spoiled soup down the drain and ended with a thousand guests enjoying a
perfect soup the next evening.
Okay, now here's the amazing thing about a crisis like this: the actual cooking was the second concern. The first concern was replenishing the supplies required to make that much soup, most notably about 400 pounds of
a variety of five peas. I called every purveyor I could think of, then one of my cooks and I got in a van and personally drove
around town, starting in Harlem and working our way south, buying up all the peas we could find.
As for the stock, even if we could have put our hands on enough bones to make a new one from scratch, it didn't matter, because
there wasn't time for it to patiently simmer. Fortunately I know how to work with a powdered stock base if I have to.
Instead of making the entire soup hot and chilling it, we used a few kitchen tricks to save time, blanching and chilling the
peas, chilling the stock separately, then combining the two. We also used a complicated series of shallow vessels set in ice
water to keep it as cold as possible.
When it was time to serve the soup, one thousand little bowls came marching out of the kitchen, beautifully garnished with
rosemary-infused cream and rosemary croutons, and little bowls of bacon crackling on the side for anyone who wanted it.
Just the way it was always meant to be.
New Year's Meltdown
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Anthony Bourdain has been a chef or a cook for nearly three decades, and in 2000 he chronicled that experience in Kitchen Confidential, which has been translated into twenty-four languages, leading Mr. Bourdain to the conclusion that "chefs are the same everywhere." He is the executive chef at Brasserie Fes Halles in New York City.
I N MY LONG and checkered career I have been witness to, party to, and even singularly responsible for any number of
screwups, missteps, and overreaches. I am not Alain Ducasse. The focus of my career has not always been a relentless drive
toward excellence. As a mostly journeyman chef, knocking around the restaurant business for twenty-eight years, I've witnessed
some pretty ugly episodes of culinary disaster. I have seen an accidentally glass-laden breaded veal cutlet cause a customer
to rise up in the middle of a crowded dining room and begin keening and screaming with pain as blood dribbled from his mouth.
I've watched restaurants endure mid-dinner rush fires, floods, and rodent infiltration—as well as the more innocuous annoyances
of used Band-Aids, tufts of hair, and industrial staples showing up in the ni^oise salad. Busboy stabbing busboy, customer
beating up customer, waiters duking it out on the dining room floor—I've seen it all. But never have I seen such a shameful
synergy of Truly Awful Things happen, and in such spectacular fashion, as on New Years Eve 1991, a date that surely deserves
to live in New York restaurant infamy. It was the all-time, a ward-winning, jumbo-sized restaurant train wreck, a night where
absolutely everything went wrong that could go wrong, where the greatest
unattended.
At the end of the day, I dispatched a few guys from my kitchen to check on the status of things at the hotel. When they entered
the refrigerator to inspect the soup, there was greenish-yellow-brown foam bubbling over the tops of the canisters.
Though the soup had undoubtedly fermented, this is one of those evaluations that only the chef can make, so my guys ladled
a sample of the soup into a plastic container and had it shuttled up to me at Daniel. As soon as I saw it, I could tell it
was gone, and a taste made this all too clear: the soup, all twelve hundred servings worth, was sour, useless garbage.
At that moment, the event—for me and my team—became more of a military operation than a culinary endeavor. I outlined a rigorous
plan that began with the guys on site pouring the spoiled soup down the drain and ended with a thousand guests enjoying a
perfect soup the next evening.
Okay, now here's the amazing thing about a crisis like this: the actual cooking was the second concern. The first concern was replenishing the supplies required to make that much soup, most notably about 400 pounds of
a variety of five peas. I called every purveyor I could think of, then one of my cooks and I got in a van and personally drove
around town, starting in Harlem and working our way south, buying up all the peas we could find.
As for the stock, even if we could have put our hands on enough bones to make a new one from scratch, it didn't matter, because
there wasn't time for it to patiently simmer. Fortunately I know how to work with a powdered stock base if I have to.
Instead of making the entire soup hot and chilling it, we used a few kitchen tricks to save time, blanching and chilling the
peas, chilling the stock separately, then combining the two. We also used a complicated series of shallow vessels set in ice
water to keep it as cold as possible.
When it was time to serve the soup, one thousand little bowls came marching out of the kitchen, beautifully garnished with
rosemary-infused cream and rosemary croutons, and little bowls of bacon crackling on the side for anyone who wanted it.
Just the way it was always meant to be.
New Year's Meltdown
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Anthony Bourdain has been a chef or a cook for nearly three decades, and in 2000 he chronicled that experience in Kitchen Confidential, which has been translated into twenty-four languages, leading Mr. Bourdain to the conclusion that "chefs are the same everywhere." He is the executive chef at Brasserie Fes Halles in New York City.
I N MY LONG and checkered career I have been witness to, party to, and even singularly responsible for any number of
screwups, missteps, and overreaches. I am not Alain Ducasse. The focus of my career has not always been a relentless drive
toward excellence. As a mostly journeyman chef, knocking around the restaurant business for twenty-eight years, I've witnessed
some pretty ugly episodes of culinary disaster. I have seen an accidentally glass-laden breaded veal cutlet cause a customer
to rise up in the middle of a crowded dining room and begin keening and screaming with pain as blood dribbled from his mouth.
I've watched restaurants endure mid-dinner rush fires, floods, and rodent infiltration—as well as the more innocuous annoyances
of used Band-Aids, tufts of hair, and industrial staples showing up in the ni^oise salad. Busboy stabbing busboy, customer
beating up customer, waiters duking it out on the dining room floor—I've seen it all. But never have I seen such a shameful
synergy of Truly Awful Things happen, and in such spectacular fashion, as on New Years Eve 1991, a date that surely deserves
to live in New York restaurant infamy. It was the all-time, a ward-winning, jumbo-sized restaurant train wreck, a night where
absolutely everything went wrong that could go wrong, where the greatest
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