Wilson High School Stories From Napa

Archives for Stories from Napa

Part 1 ** 2 ** 3 ** 4 ** 5 ** 6 ** 7 ** 8 ** 9 ** 10

Stories From Napa Part 10: A Relaxed Environment

I cant believe Im still working here. Ive been working here for a year and a
halfthats a really long time for this place. These were two separate comments
made by two separate chefs on two separate nights at the French Laundry. Both
statements paint a picture of a difficult working environment, but why is it so
hard? What makes the French Laundry such a notoriously intense kitchen to work
in? I can tell you from just a month of working there that it is plain and
simply the stress level.

Any person in the restaurant industry can tell you that it is a lot more
stressful job than your average nine to five office work. The speed and
intensity of service creates a high stress environment naturally. When lots of
plates are being cooked at once on a busy Saturday night, there is a lot more
multi-tasking going on than what you would see in a normal job atmosphere.
Along with this, all of the multi-tasking has to be done really fast and really
well or else food gets cold and diners get upset. The big difference between a
restaurant and another job is that there is no such thing as no, or there
shouldnt be. If a diner wants something you do everything you can to get it to
them. When food needs to go out, it has to go out. It isnt no chef, I dont have
anymore of that, I cant cook you that plate. If you dont have anymore of some
item you find out how to get more of that item and you get it without skipping
a beat. If you dont, you get yelled at, plain and simply.

This type of environment is common place in a professional kitchen, and yet the
French Laundry carries even more impact because of one more aspect: perfection.
Take all of those things in a regular restaurant, the speed, the multi-tasking,
the have to get it done mentality, and add perfection to every aspect of it,
and you come up with the most stressful day any of you have probably hadbut
that is everyday at the French Laundry. To get food worthy of being served at
the countries best restaurant (according to the James Beard Foundation), every
component has to be perfect. That is why if my brunoise isnt a perfect
sixteenth of an inch dice, it is thrown out and made again. That is why if my
topped eggs dont have a perfectly smooth edge, they are thrown out and made
again. That is why if a lobster tail is overcooked and it isnt realized until
right before the plate goes out, it will be thrown out and the entire plate
will be re-made. Nothing leaves the kitchen unless it is perfect, and yet the
same speed and intensity is still applied as any other kitchen. If something
you were working on is thrown out because it wasnt good enough, it will be made
again good enough, and it will still be done in time because thats how it is.
There is no other way to explain it than it will be done on time and it will be
done perfectly. If it doesnt seem physically possible to meet these
specifications and this time limit, you find a way to make it physically
possible, and you do it at a speed that meets that time limit.

At school they force you to write out a timeline of what you are going to do
during class everyday. You are actually graded on whether or not you have a
timeline and how accurate the timeline is. This is so that you can manage your
time and all of the multi-tasking going on. Running around in my head is a
constant timeline. I have actually reached the point where I timeline out even
my days off to about the half hour. Ok, it will take me ten minutes to get to
the grocery store, then Ill be shopping for a half an hour. Ill take another
twenty minutes to get to the bakery, sit around there for forty-five minutes,
drive back home in twenty minutes, which will get me back around 11:30. Then
Ill give myself an hour to watch TV and Ill probably start lunch and so on. Now
this timeline isnt set in stone, I am probably modifying it every twenty
minutes and running through it every five minutes. Then when I get into work my
mind goes into overdrive.

The one thing you quickly learn at work is not to rely on your mental timeline
much because no matter how well you think you have your night organized you
will always have something disrupt it. One of the chefs will need asparagus
brunoised right in the middle of the hour you have set aside for egg shells.
Then as soon as you get done with that and get back to the egg shells another
chef needs cabbage chopped and blanched and after that lobster tails cryo
-vaced. All of a sudden you are an hour behind your timeline because of jobs
you have had to do for other people and, oh yeah, you didnt have an extra hour
to be behind because you had already knowingly short- changed yourself on time
for eggs because you needed extra time to shuck fava beans.

At every restaurant you have a night where you for some reason are just always
behind schedule (in the weeds or in the shit would be the industry term). I can
vividly remember a night at JoPa when I was working the salad station last
year. I was completely slammed the entire night and it just so happened that an
article had come out about me in the Oregonian so none of the chefs felt like
helping me out while their stations were relatively calm, but instead enjoyed
watching me suffer. Now this was one night I can really remember being behind
while at JoPa. If you asked me whether I have had a night like that at the
French Laundry I would quickly tell you, oh yeah, about twenty-four of them
(thats the number of nights I have worked there). So basically every night you
are working stressed and behind, and on top of that, every day when you arent
at work, you are running through all of the things you were supposed to do
yesterday, trying to remember if you did all of them. No matter how confident
you are in whether you did them all or not you have this sick, anxious feeling
that you forgot something and are going to get railed for it as soon as you
step into work. As Tony, one of the chefs de partie put it, when youre working
in a restaurant youre always working against the clock. I cant even get a day
off where Im not checking the clock every fifteen minutes. To this Jason, one
of the sous chefs replied, if you work at it hard enough you can forget about
timeor at least I think I can remember a time when I
didnt pay attention to it.

Stories from Napa Part 9

The ordering system at the French Laundry is largely based off of inspiration. What this means is because of the fact that the menu is changing everyday, the restaurant is able to truly take advantage of what products are in season or particularly good at the time. If the gardener Scotty comes in and says the beets in the French Laundry Garden are looking amazingly good then the menu will adapt to include them in the nights meal. If a produce order comes in and the fava beans that are supposed to be with the lobster dish that night look terrible, then rather and try to work around a bad product, the menu will be changed on the spot so that they don't have to be used.

Everyday but Sunday a produce shipment comes into the restaurant. All deliveries come in around 11:00 in the morning and are immediately put away. Nothing is stored in cardboard boxes, but instead moved to plastic containers. The reasoning behind this is that a cardboard box could have been anywhere, and put down on anything, so why would you want that then touching your clean counters. Meat orders come in a couple days a week and everything is immediately broken down and cleaned, vacuum-sealed, and stored in kits. A kit is one of the plastic containers with more than one product inside. All of the products inside will be labeled with what they are, the date, and the initials of the person who stored them. Then labels will be placed on the outside of the container saying what all is inside. Everything is labeled with green painters tape and with the same system of identification, date, and initials. The painters tape doesnt leave any residue and is easy to peel off. When I say that things are immediately put away or put to use, I mean that often times bones go directly from the box they just arrived in to a pot of water to blanch.

To set up the meat order since it comes only a couple times a week, there is a forecast sheet with all of the services and amounts of orders that will be needed per day. Devin, the Executive Sous Chef, will plug in all the orders that are in house at the time, and then
figure out how much more he needs to fill the weeks services. This is one big bonus of only serving guests with reservations because it allows for a lot better prediction of the week to come. Ordering fish is a little bit more difficult because it often depends on what is
being caught from a day to day basis. Weather and other outside sources can affect this and so fish orders come in more often. Once again, since the menu is changed every night it is very easy to just adapt it to what is coming in. Basic dairy products and kitchen
ingredients like sugar, salt and flour all have an initial par stock that is simply filled by the delivery company once a week according to the restaurants specifications.

The list of purveyors the restaurant has is incredibly extensive, and although not all are used regularly, they are all important. What is even more impressive than the number of purveyors is the way that Devin is able to just rattle them off the top of his head. I wont
name all of the purveyors, but I will mention some of the most used ones. Produce comes from Cooks Co., Sonoma Organics, Fresh Point, or as mentioned earlier the actual French Laundry Garden. Connie Green is a small purveyor they use for all of their unusual mushrooms. Meat comes from Elysian Fields Farms, Facciola Standards, and Domestic
Newport Meats. Foie gras comes from Hudson Valley Farms or Plamax. They get milk-fed chickens from Four Story Hills and game birds from Brent Wolf. Fish comes from lots of different purveyors but their basic fish orders are from Royal Hawaii. IMP is where they get their Japanese fish, they use Pureless for Atlantic fish, and Gary Seafood for Florida and Gulf Coast fish. The Chefs garden in Ohio supplies a lot of their micro greens and their spices come from Le Sanctuaire or Viola Imports. A lot of the specialty purveyors like Elysian Fields Farms and Four Story Hills are mentioned on the menu whenever their
products are used. This is a trend that is becoming popular in many restaurants and a way for restaurants to encourage small farmers to continue growing the excellent rare products that commercial companies cant afford to produce.

In terms of a food budget and monitoring how much the restaurant spends on food; it really isnt important. Although they keep an eye on it just to see where it is at, the restaurant really doesnt restrict itself from buying whatever it needs or wants to use. This, just like the ever-changing menu, gives it the ability to adapt to whatever is good at the time. Whether they spend $25 a pound on Callotte (a cut of beef from the rib-eye) or $85 a pound on Japanese Wagyu doesnt really matter as long as the products are being utilized properly. Even with this non-chalent attitude about how much it spends on food, the restaurant is still able to keep its food cost at an impressive 25-30%. I think it is a
good example of the fact that if you truly find the best ingredients and dont restrict yourself to save money, people will eat at your restaurant and end up making you money because you are serving better products than anywhere else.

Stories From Napa Part 8: A Euro State of Mind

About ten miles north of Yountville is a small town called St. Helena. Similar to a Multnomah Village for those of you in the Southwest Portland area, it is one of many small towns in the Napa Valley that seems to be set on good food and gourmet delectables. It is also where I like to spend my mornings over a cup of espresso, and
one of their flaky pastries, in a more European approach to greeting the day.

This whole charade of taking advantage of the cultural similarities that Napa shares with France and other romantic European countries came about in a mildly ironic way because it was influenced by a source that you wouldnt usually think of when leading such a relaxed, laid back lifestyle. Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen
Confidential, host of No Reservations, and icon to every true line cook in the food business, is known as being a bit of a brash, disgusted by sissy-stuff, grumpy old celebrity of a chef, and was the person that influenced me into taking time out of my day to just relax, sit around, and watch people.

It all happened around 1:00 in the morning, when I, sleep schedule completely destroyed by my strange work hours, decided to sit around and watch TV, since I wasnt tired at all. Bourdains show No Reservations happened to be on the Travel Channel at the time and I eagerly tuned in to one of my favorite celebrity chefs. He happened to be visiting Paris during this particular episode, and rather than try and partake in the strangest experiences he could find like most shows (well minus the Absinthe bar in a back alley he happily visited) he was using the show to document how the French truly take advantage of the simple pleasures in life. The whole point of the show was that all it really takes to lead a less stressful life is a little extra time spent to slow down from your modernly fast-paced lifestyle. Now, partially due to the fact that at one in the morning most people are a little bit more easily influenced by outside sources, this sounded like a great philosophy to me, and considering the fact that I had been dealing with a lot of stress recently, I made a vow that I too would follow in the Bourdain lifestyle of relaxation. That morning, well later on in the morning that is, I woke up at a decently early time of 9:00 and headed myself up Highway 29 to visit a place where I knew I would be able to find a bakery that could transport me to a European state of mind.

What makes St. Helena, and much of Napa Valley, great in my mind, is that it is basically a place dedicated to food. Well technically it is dedicated to wine but the whole reason anyone drinks wine is because of how it works with food and so the valley has to uphold both spectrums of the wine world. I had visited St. Helena before
where much to my delight I had found blocks of shops containing purely food related commodities. There is actually a shop with six extra virgin olive oils on tap so that you can just take in your own bottle and fill it up. What makes this even more impressive is that when you read the labels, you realize that all these oils are coming
from places that you might have actually driven by on your way to the shop. Adding countless tastes of spreads and exotic vinegar combinations makes these kinds of stores perfect places for me to get lost in for hours.

The Model Bakery is a quaint little caf that I found in the heart of St. Helena and a place I thought would fit exactly what I was looking for; all house made pastries and breads along with various espresso drinks and free papers lying around the room. All the other customers sitting around me were there for the exact same reason I was: to just relax, and this made me appreciate the West Coast for the fact that people are willing to take time to do this. I may be judging strongly but I never got that feeling when I was back at school in New York.

So San Francisco Chronicle and cappuccino in hand, I spent over an hour just sitting around this little bakery, enjoying watching the people and the flaky pastry I had also purchased. I can honestly say that the only things that would have added to the experience would be someone to share it with, and some outdoor seating since the weather in Napa has been consistently sunny for the last couple weeks. These disappointments aside, the morning was a stress reliever, and one I plan to repeat. Driving back home, winding through vineyards in either direction (I took the long way home on purpose) I very nearly felt like I could have just spent the morning meeting up with my sister at a little caf, drinking espresso in France (well maybe she would have ordered hot chocolate).

Stories From Napa Part 7: The Roots of the Best Restaurant in America

The French Laundry had been many things before Thomas Keller ever arrived at the Napa Valley. An actual Laundromat was one of its past jobs which was what prompted the original restaurants name, the restaurant that existed in the building before Thomas Kellers creation. Don and Sally Schmitt were the owners of the first French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, CA, a highly regarded restaurant for sure, but nothing compared to the culinary Mecca it has risen to since the arrival of Keller and his vision. When Don and Sally looked to sell the restaurant, Keller was able to scrap together enough financial investors to help him purchase the restaurant. The Schmitts were happy to sell it to someone who seemed so passionate about the future of the restaurant, and this is how the current French Laundry was born.

The summer of 1994 was when Thomas Keller opened his version of the French Laundry, and it came with immediate attention. Keller had been flying under the radar of the culinary world after acclaimed restaurants in New York had failed due to economy troubles. When he appeared on the scene again, this time in California, restaurant critics flocked to his new restaurant. The wait had been worth it for the food world as the French Laundry was immediately marked as an excellent restaurant. Awards for Kellers success were almost instant. In 1995 he was nominated for the James Beard Awards Best Chef in California, and although he didnt win it that year, he did win it the next year in 1996. To top that achievement, 1997 brought him the title Best Chef in America making him the first chef ever to win back to back James Beard awards for Best Chef in a certain area. Other awards have followed including Restaurant Magazine claiming it as the best restaurant in the world in both 2003 and 2004, and currently it is up for the James Beard Best Restaurant in America award for 2006 (In May it won the award and Corey Lee won the title "Best Rising Chef in America").

The menu lay-out at the French Laundry is a prix fix nine-course chefs tasting menu or a nine-course vegetarian menu. Both of these menus have multiple options included so that diners can have some say in what they are going to eat. These menus are changed at least to some extent everyday and are currently at $210 per person for either one. Each night at around 1:00 a.m. the chefs gather to plan the next day's menu. Certain seasonal ingredients will remain on the menu everyday, for instance, in the spring some dish will always contain fava beans or morel mushrooms. There are also signature dishes that always are served whether or not they are actually on the menu like the oysters and pearls or salmon tartar cornets. Aside from these staples though, the menu will have changed drastically from a day to day basis in terms of how those ingredients are prepared. Each chef de partie has some say in what they want to do with their dishes, although the final decision is left up to the chef de cuisine.

But what makes the French Laundry such an acclaimed, award-winning restaurant? What sets it apart from other high-end restaurants to put it at the top of restaurant guide lists consistently every year? What makes it a good enough restaurant to have had Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic for the New York Times, claim it as the most exciting place to eat in the United States.? One of the chef de parties made a comment that the French Laundry doesnt get noticed by using complicated techniques or zany food preparations, instead the restaurant has thrived on using simple techniques but executing them perfectly. Corey Lee, the chef de cuisine, said that what the whole restaurant is about is refining and manipulating food in a way that makes it better than it was before. As opposed to other mentionable restaurants that are pushing the barrier of how food is perceived, the French Laundry has always remained rooted in classical French cooking. Utilizing seasonal products and making sure that the ingredients they get are the best available. The relationship with the purveyors the restaurant is in business with are one of the most important aspects to the overall foundation of the restaurant. What sets the French Laundry apart from standard restaurants to some extent is the fact that other restaurants literally cant get as good of products as the Laundry does. By not forcing itself to get crazy with food, the restaurant is left to focus on perfect execution while remaining creative and playful in the process.

When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy. Thats what cooking is all about. This quote is posted on the wall of the kitchen at the French Laundry and embodies the core philosophy of the restaurant. Although Keller is known as being one of the most perfectionist chefs in the industry, and the French Laundry is geared towards that level of achievement, he also realizes that there is no such thing as true perfection and therefore a simpler goal has to be acknowledged. The whole idea behind a restaurant and why people go out to eat is because they are looking for a good time, they are looking for a night of happiness, and the French Laundry tries to do this at the nearest level of perfection possible while realizing that, unpretentiously, they can never get there, but will do everything they can to get close.

To top off an egg you need the following things: six flats of eggs, an egg topper, a very thin paring knife, a large bucket of acidulated hot water, a garbage can, and a lot of patience. The last two things are most important because you’re going to be throwing away a lot of eggs, and if you don’t have any patience you’ll just get frustrated with the task and none of the eggs will come out. An egg topper is kind of like a melon baller with a little hammer attached to the back of it. You pull back on the little hammer which is kind of on a spring and then release it so that it strikes the back of the melon baller. Topping eggs is another of my daily tasks.

The whole process begins with that little egg topper and an egg. Holding the egg topper with even pressure against the pointier side of the egg, you pull back on the hammer a little bit and let it hit. This is done a couple of times until you can hear that the egg cracked. Now this isn’t a big shatter sound or anything, because that would probably mean the egg just exploded in your hand. Instead it is more of a hollower thunk because the sound waves are able to travel through the egg once it’s cracked. You can then look just under the rim of the egg topper and see where the egg cracked, if there is a portion of it that hasn’t cracked yet you put your thumb over that spot and pull again. Now this isn’t a huge crack or anything, it’s more like a hairline fracture all the way around the egg. Once you’ve got this perfect little line going all around one end of the egg, you set it back in the crate and go on to the next one. After all six flats have been done, you are done with the first step.

This is where the thin paring knife comes into play. You take the knife and poke a little hole into the top part of the egg (the part you’re going to be throwing away) and slide the egg around the knife, not the knife around the egg, following the little line you made with the topper. From here you separate the white and the yolk, and put the egg back into the crate, the top removed and the contents separated. Once you have done this to all six flats, you are done with the second step.

Now you take the hot acidulated water and submerge all the eggs in it. You have to manually push all the eggs down and let them fill up with water or else they will just float there and the inside, which is the part you want getting wet, will be dry. After about an hour of soaking in the water you take an egg out at a time and work on the membrane. I should actually say membranes because there are three layers of membrane on an egg. Didn’t know that? Neither did I for a while. You roll part of the membrane down until you can get your finger behind it, rotate the egg, and then slowly pull the membrane out. If you go slowly enough all three of the membranes will stick together and you’re done. You put the egg back in the crate that you saved, upside down to dry, and move on to the next egg. Once all of them are sitting in crates with membranes removed, you are done with the third and final step. Oh yeah, if at any point during the process an egg gets even the slightest crack or chink along the cut side then it has to be thrown away. That’s why you probably don’t have to save all the egg crates because you aren’t going to be filling up all the slots you started with.

I went into such a lengthy description of how to top an egg because for one you probably have never had to do it and so don’t know how it’s done, but also because I wanted you to understand the detail involved in doing it. Topping eggs is the epitome of a French Laundry task and I think that everyone in the kitchen at some point had to do it. It is infamous to the point that even front of the house people know and joke about it. Why it is so true to a French Laundry job is that it takes so much care, so much finesse (one of Thomas Keller’s catch words) that even if you are good at doing it a lot of time is going to be spent at it. More than one of the senses is needed to do it well. You have to listen for the egg to crack, you can also feel where it needs more pressure, and you can see where the fractures are going to happen. If you ever get frustrated with the task it will be even worse for you because it will make you tense up and then this delicate little thing in your hand is going to shatter a lot more easily. Just like with the brunoise, something cheap and common, a plain old chicken egg for Pete’s sake, had been made into an expensive ingredient purely because of the time that went in to making it. And all of this was done for a garnish, just like the brunoise as well. These delicate egg shells, once dried, would be filled with a truffle custard, a perfect chive potato chip would be stuck out of it, and they would be served to every VIP guest who ate at the French Laundry. All of this work for something a bowl could just as easily do.

Part 6: Egg Shells

Part 5: The Buy-Out and In-N-Out?

Today I found out that a buy-out is an amazing thing. Youre probably wondering what a buy-out is. Well a buy-out is when some rich person shells out about fifty grand to use the French Laundry as their own party place. The whole party is served a standard nine
course French Laundry tasting menu along with a lot of extra canaps and dessert courses, as well as being supplied with lots of wine and beverages, as well as being supplied with a great setting in the French Laundry garden, as well as being supplied with the awe factor
that their party is being held at one of the best restaurants in the country.

Now when I said that a buy-out is an amazing thing, I wasnt referring to the actual event, I was referring to the effect the event has on the kitchen. Since it is a single party, everyone is served at the same time. Although this means getting tons of plates
out all at once can be hectic, it also means that service gets done at around 10:00 instead of the usual 12:30ish. It also means that since everyone wants to get out early, the interns (i.e. me and Ed) arent assigned a whole lot of side tasks to finish. So by ten
oclock we were all cleaning and getting ready to go. We got out of the kitchen at around 10:30 instead of 1:00 like I had been the last few nights.

This is where it gets to the really great part about a buy-out. If everyone in the kitchen is done early and able to shut the restaurant down. The chefs, Thomas, Corey, and Tim, take the whole kitchen crew down to Bouchon and buy them steaks for dinner (actually it isnt
specifically steaks, but everyone orders them anyway). So at 10:30 on a Thursday night I got to spend two hours sitting across the table from Thomas Keller, listening to him talk about various things, while eating an amazing steak that I didnt have to pay for.

It isnt every day that you just get to sit around and talk to Thomas Keller about whatever comes to mind, and so this was a very special occasion. What did we talk about during this fine meal at a fine dining establishment you might ask? Fast-food. No seriously. Fast- food. What prompted the conversation is that I had thrown on an In n Out t-shirt before heading down to Bouchon and Thomas had noticed it. This started a conversation between all of the chefs down at our end of the table about various fast-food comments. Thomas said that ifanyone ever needed a gift certificate to In n Out he had tons of them because people always seemed to give them to him for his birthday or Christmas and they just piled up.

My Dad will also appreciate that we all commented on the fact that their French fries are a weak point because they dont cook them twice. To get a French fry nice and crispy you must first cook them tender in oil that is around 250 degrees, drain them, and then throw
them into 350 degree oil. At In n Out, because they want to make a point of how fresh their fries are, they just cut them and throw them in the fryer and theyre done. This results in a soggy limp French fry that one of the chefs said makes him go to McDonalds for his
fries but In n Out for his burgers. I got some satisfaction out of the fact that Thomas assumed that they did it because of the aesthetic appeal of seeing a potato cut and then instantly thrown into the fryer as a patron. That is almost the exact analysis I had
given my Dad when we were having the same conversation a few days before.

So the In n Out conversation led into other fast-food related topics like how its kind of weird that White Castle has a little hole in its burgers and how on the East coast Dunkin Donuts is huge but on the West Coast it has kind of fallen off the map. It was also
determined that the biggest selling point Dunkin Donuts has is that they are usually open 24-hours making them a great stop for late night drivers because whats better than coffee and donuts at 1:00 a.m. Even with their love of fast-food they thought I had stepped
over the line when I said that the most fast-foody of all things I like are the chili cheese fries at A&W. Since most A&Ws are connected to a gas station they thought that it was a bit much when most of your meals are coming from a gas station convenience store. In a way I agree but it wont stop me from eating that cheesy goodness. With that the night was done, and feeling more like I had just gotten done with a night of hanging around with friends rather than a long workday, I was able to head home and add an extra hour of sleep into my schedule.

Part 4: A Brunoise

A brunoise, as defined by the Culinary Institute of Americas Skills class, is a knife cut that produces a perfect 1/8x1/8x1/8 cube. What separates it from a dice, other than the size, is that it is such a perfect three dimensional shape as opposed to a dice which is
often a semi-flat square. A fine brunoise is defined as a perfect 1/16x1/16x1/16 cube. There is no such thing as a fine brunoise at the French Laundry; it is just assumed that a brunoise cut would be that small anyway. If you dont have a great understanding of size,
please take out a ruler. For my benefit just look at what a true 1/16 of an inch looks like, and then visualize what a little cube that size would be. That size cut is one of my main responsibilities on a daily basis.

Aside from being the name for a certain cut, a brunoise also defines what goes into the cut, at least at the French Laundry. The brunoise consists of one part leek, two parts carrot, and two parts turnip, all cut the same size and then blanched to just tender, mixed
together, and held. It is used by the meat station and sometimes the fish station as one of the components to their sauces. Most sauces start with a base of mirepoix (a combination of carrot, celery, and onion). The brunoise is added not to really contribute much flavor, but instead to remind people what the core flavor of the sauce is
made out of since mirepoix is almost always strained out of a finished sauce (it gets all mushy and unappealing looking). This perfect little confetti of vegetables that are all exactly the same size is just a garnisha very time consuming one.

Each day at least two delis (the little plastic containers you get at a grocery store when you buy olives or something, roughly a pint) of brunoise need to be in the walk-in for the meat station. To get this amount one deli of carrot, one deli of turnip, and half a deli of
leek needs to be filled. After getting cooked off this amount will just fit into two deli containers and youre done with that task. If only it was that easy.

Keeping in mind the size of that little 1/16 cube you measured, imagine what cutting over two pints of them would be like. Just as ungratifying as shucking fava beans, two plus hours worth of work only yields a couple of small plastic containers of finished product.
What adds pressure to the task is that if your cuts arent all uniform, the chefs have no problem throwing a whole deli, and an hours worth of work, away and making you do it again. This meant that you had to take your time even when you had so many to cut. This
meant me, the guy who could cut his Skills tray in under 10 minutes and get high marks on all the various cuts, was spending two hours to get a couple containers full of brunoise.

I had only spent two days with this aggravating cut; Ed had already spent five weeks. He warned me of the weeks to come, the frustrations. You know in Kill Bill 2 when Uma goes to Pad Mei and punches a wall for a really long time? And because shes spent so much time doing it and the task is haunting her so much shell wake up at night because she just punched the wall in her sleep and it hurt so much? Ed said he had gone through similar situations in the past weeks. And make sure you dont ever drop the delis, Ed said. I
couldnt even imagine the frustration of losing that many hours of work because of a dropped dish. But that is what the French Laundry did; it took something common and refined it so much that it became an amazingly valuable commodity. Because of the amount of time and work put into it, a handful of carrots, turnips and leeks had just
been turned into one of the most valuable ingredients in the kitchen to me, and they were only used as a garnish. Equate that into every component of every dish, the work and precision put into it all, and you begin to understand what sets the French Laundry apart from other restaurants.

Part 3: The First Night

HmmI had been here before. Quite recently in fact. I was sitting in my car, parked on the street behind the French Laundry, and I was very early. Not as bad as last time, but still, I couldnt show up yet. I used the time to listen to some music before my first day of work. Starting off with loud, exciting, pump yourself up music like Metallica and Linkin Park. I ended it with some calming Soulive, actually a track called Steppin to be precise. This is a routine I had done before. Back working for JoPa when I had some extra time before work I would go through this cycle to get ready for service. The loud blaring stuff helped to build confidence and excitement for the night to come. The jazz ending helped in two ways. First of all it calmed me down a bit and secondly the last thing I listened to would be running through my head the rest of the night. I wanted something smooth and methodical to help keep me focused rather than a crazy torrent of sound. By the time the track was over it was close enough that I figured I should be heading in.

After suiting up in the changing room (to my dismay the coats they give to most staff members arent special at all and dont have the French Laundry label on them) I headed into the kitchen, nerves acting up a bit. It was just as crowded as it had been when I had been there for the tour. It took me a few minutes to find Devin but once I did he directed me to the back prep room where I would be working with a guy named Ed. Ed was a 25 year old intern who would be training me for the first week. If all went as planned I would take over his job at that time and he would get to move on to the next level.

The very first task I was ever assigned to do at the French Laundry was clip little doubled leaves off of micro pea shoots for a garnish. As I picked up the scissors and pea shoots to do this I noticed an interesting thing; my hands were completely shaking. Now this brought me back instantly to the first morning in Breakfast Cookery. That was a class that started at 2:00 in the morning and so required some pre-class prep work to be done...as in drink four or five cups of coffee in the few minutes before the Chef got there. On that first day I had done this little waking up technique and had then been assigned to brunoise some stuff for a sausage dish. I realized quickly that due to the amazing amounts of caffeine I had pulsing through me this task had become incredibly hard because I couldnt hold my hands still. The only difference between that time and this one was that the last caffeine I had consumed was hours ago. So, hands shaking, I spent a good amount of time trying to clip these perfect little doublets from a moving target. I somehow managed to get through and was quickly thrown into the next task.

It was about this time that all the nerves started to go away because the thinking part was taken out of the equation. I found out that I was helping the AM prep cooks finish up their stuff because they were way behind and supposed to already be out of the kitchen by now. This meant I had to work FAST, which was fine by me because when you get to a certain level of speed you really have to stop thinking because there isnt time to. I was thrown into shucking fava beans, an amazingly tedious task when they havent already been blanched. Its also quite disappointing how a huge box of whole fava pods turns into a couple of small plastic containers of shelled beans when all is said and done. It is a very ungratifying task when you see this measly little pile of beans after an hours worth of work.

Once the AM crew got out of the kitchen, Ed and I were left alone in the back prep room to start on our nightly list of prep work. Since this was my first time and I was just training under him I really couldnt do a whole lot. I felt a little helpless, wanting to be kept busy but having to wait at every moment to be told what needed to be done. As it grew dark outside (the prep kitchen looks out onto the garden) candles were lit around the courtyard and Ed lowered the lights in the kitchen so it wasnt quite as industrially bright. We carried on through 1:00 doing our little mundane tasks that I had been warned about, but doing them as perfectly as we could. It became peaceful almost, the low glow from outside, the repetitive knocking of my knife on the board, and the murmur of sound coming from the main kitchen right next door. It was with this setting that my first night as a French Laundry cook ended, after a quick clean-up and run through of the day with Devin, I was released into the night. One down and 119 to go.

Part 2: The Final Supper

So the day before the first day of the rest of my life, I just kind of laid around. I think a big influence to this was the weather outside. Amazingly it was much warmer, sunnier weather in upstate New York than it currently is in Napa Valley right now. The cold, gray gloom kept me from wanting to go exploring around the valley like I had been, and so I instead just laid around reading The Soul of a Chef (this is the day I got the idea to write these). I think I read the entire last section of the book in a matter of a day and a half.

For those of you who haven’t read it, the last section is all about the French Laundry. I don’t think it was probably the best thing for me to read because the author glorifies the restaurant incredibly. That isn’t to say that I don’t myself, as any of you who actually know me will understand. But I had been spending the last few days trying to forget everything I knew about the restaurant so that I could walk into it like it was just another kitchen. Reading the book definitely didn’t help the cause.

By about 5:30 I had finished the book and was starting to get hungry. I had been on a diet of either tuna fish or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the last few days and that just didn’t seem appropriate after reading about such good food. It was then that I decided to give myself a “last supper” so to speak, on the eve of my first workday. What better place to go after reading so much about Keller than one of his restaurants. Although I think I probably could have gotten into the Laundry as a single diner the money issue took that out of the equation. There was still Bouchon though, and so I decided to head to Yountville to see how good of a place it was. I changed out of my laying around the house clothes so that I would look a bit older and more sophisticated for dining at such an establishment, I didn’t want Keller to by chance be eating there and see me looking like a slob, and headed back up Highway 29.

The exterior, and interior for that matter, of Bouchon is very impressive painted a deep burgundy, the same color as the cover of the cookbook. I was quickly seated since I was only a single diner and left to look at the menu. It’s a little strange looking over a menu that you have at least read a recipe, if not actually made, every dish on it. What is even more amusing is when the waiter tells you about the dishes that you have already known so much about, but I let him go at it anyway to see how his descriptions were.

For an appetizer I decided on “rillettes aux deux saumons,” a mixture of fresh and smoked salmon spread. A rillette is a preserved dish that is served in a little glass jar with a layer of clarified butter or some type of fat sealing the top of it. To eat it you just scrape half of the fat to one side and get to work on the preserved meat underneath with some croutons (served warm that they happened to refill as many times as necessary without asking). It was a relatively filling appetizer for one person, mainly because of the richness of the fish, but I got through it easily (keep in mind I had been laying around the house all day which usually equates to not eating anything because I’m too lazy to get up and make something).

I decided on poulet rôti, a fancy way of saying roast chicken, for my main course. Now I think two people in particular will appreciate my selection of this dish when I’m dining by myself at an amazing restaurant and have a large choice of more exotic dishes. First of all my sister, because I think she will just be amazed that I would still pick a dish like roast chicken when we ate it so many countless times at home for dinner. Secondly Andrew because he will appreciate the reasoning for why I chose this dish. Roast chicken is one of the most basic things you can make, we made it in Skills II, it was one of the dishes you could draw for the cooking practical at school, and basically it is just a very plain, straightforward dish that you can find anywhere, including home. It was exactly for these reasons that I chose it; I wanted to see if Keller would make a noticeably better roast chicken when I had eaten it so many times before.

The first thing I noticed about the chicken was that it had incredibly dark skin with fleur de sel embedded in it. I should have known that Keller wouldn’t leave out his favorite seasoning on something even as simple as roast chicken. Along with being dark, the skin was incredibly crisp and the meat was amazingly juicy. I’m talking really, really juicy. I am by far a dark meat person because it seems that no matter how perfectly you cook breast meat, it will still to some extent be drier than a thigh. This was not the case in this dish. Every part of the chicken was just bursting with juice, and yet there was absolutely no pink, not even a shade of it, anywhere. The mixed mushrooms and spring potatoes underneath the chicken were cooked well too and had picked up all the liquids from the chicken so they had great flavor. I can say quite honestly that this chicken was noticeably better than what I had eaten before. I think that if somebody had made their chicken this good back in Skills they would have been allowed to skip the class because the techniques executed were done so perfectly.

Dessert was an easy choice because I knew some of the background behind the menu items. Lemon tart is the only recipe that is repeated in The French Laundry and Bouchon cookbooks because Keller likes it so much, and thinks it is a near perfect recipe, and so it was obviously my choice as well. When the dessert arrived my first thought was that I personally like my presentation of the dish better. This was a slice of lemon tart from a full-sized tart pan. When I do it I make little five inch individual tarts that I think look more refined than the common pie-wedge shape that this was. Aside from that though, the flavors were amazing, as I had expected them to be. Unlike the chicken though, which was better than any other roast chicken I had had, the lemon tart was still a lemon tart. This by no means is meant to degrade it, it was amazing, the best recipe for a lemon tart I’ve had, but I’ve also made that recipe, and I think it tasted just the same. By the end of the tart I was quite full and about ready to head back home, but first I had to finish up the conversation with the table next to me.

Eating alone, taking notes on what you’re eating gets you noticed, as I said before. I think that every time I have been out to dinner by myself or with other culinary students, it has been figured out by the people around me that I must be a cook. The older couple sitting next to me figured this out early and we had been talking the whole night about what I was doing with myself and good places they had eaten. In a matter of an hour I think I made lifetime clients if I ever make something of myself, because after asking my name this couple said they’d make sure to follow me around as long as they could. It was funny, in a way, that it took so little for them to be so engrossed by me that they would make a point of watching the papers for me. They have no idea how good I can cook, no idea what type of experience I have or what I necessarily have in mind to do. All they know is that I go to the CIA, am about to be working at the French Laundry, and at some point want to own a restaurant, and that was enough to hook them. With that my last supper was over and I headed back home to start writing things down. I guess if the whole cooking thing falls through I'll at least have the start of a book (fat chance of either of those things happening).

Part 1 - The Tour

I am prefacing these stories/entries/journals/e-mails by saying that you don’t have to read them, they will probably be longer than the average e-mail but I have a lot of time on my hands and thought this would be a good use of some of it. These are similar to an online journal, but they aren’t actually for two reasons; the first is that I find those to be kind of creepy and at the same time a huge fad, the second is that I don’t have a good enough internet connection to be constantly updating a journal and so found a group e-mail to be an easier way of doing things. I think I got the idea for doing these from two sources. The first is that I was reading The Soul of a Chef and thought I could write very similar material, especially due to my upcoming experiences. The other is that I was sitting eating dinner by myself at Bouchon (I write about that dinner in my second entry, but I thought I should include the tour that happened before the idea of doing these journals for those of you that I haven’t already told that story to). Taking notes on what I was eating as I often do I realized that I either looked like a very young restaurant critic, a crazy person, or a cook (the last two often being one in the same) because nobody else would be sitting eating dinner alone with such intensity. It was then that I thought I should probably use this material as something to write about because my parents are always trying to convince me to keep a journal; I can vividly remember an empty notebook that was given to me for my trip to Europe and was returned with a few measly pages filled. So without further ramblings (although I can tell you quite honestly that everything you read on from here will be only more of that) here are my adventures in Napa Valley, California, working at what has been considered the "Best Restaurant in the World" by Restaurant Magazine…

I arrived at The French Laundry embarrassingly early, but I had pretty much expected as much. I had left an hour before my scheduled tour time even though the car trip only took about fifteen minutes. I was planning on using the extra time to explore Yountville and all it had to offer. I quickly realized that isn’t much unless you are planning on eating at multiple restaurants in one afternoon. After taking a walk the length of the town I returned to the car about fifteen minutes later to wait it out, I wanted to be early but still not that early. Sitting around talking on the phone for a good twenty minutes I decided that it was close enough to 3:30 to go into the kitchen. Walking through the flower-filled courtyard I opened the copper kitchen doors for the first time.

Sitting on a stool in front of a desk between the kitchen and pass was Devin, the sous chef I had never met until now, only sent countless e-mails to…which he immediately made a crack about when he realized it was me. After finishing up some quick paperwork he said he’d take me on the “25 cent tour” of the kitchen; an expression I had never heard before but quickly realized it meant a very short one. He first introduced me to Corey Lee, someone with a huge reputation in the restaurant biz (he is currently up for the James Beard Award for "Best Rising Chef in America"). Then he walked me around the kitchen, introducing me to people as he went.

What sets apart The French Laundry kitchen from others is hard to figure out at first. I think Michael Ruhlman makes a good description of it in The Soul of a Chef when he says “That the kitchen is clean is something you sense immediately upon entering, but you don’t immediately understand why it feels so clean; you only sense clean’s effect.” The kitchen is impeccably clean, and amazingly quiet although not in a stifling way. Service was still going on when I was being walked around, but there were no loud clanks of pots being slammed down or calls of orders being fired like I was used to. It wasn’t that the cooks were forced to be quiet by a stern commanding chef, they just all naturally were. Along with that they were calm, no rushing, just steady-paced work. Back to how clean it was, a good example would be the walk-in. Devin was griping to me about how messy the walk-in was and how they were just about to go through and clean the whole thing. Upon entering all I noticed was that it was the cleanest, most organized professional walk-in I had ever been in. Perfect stacks of plastic containers, all lidded with green painter’s tape carefully labeling everything. Keep in mind that this was considered its “messy” state.

The tour was incredibly brief, just a quick walk-through and introduction to everyone in the kitchen and I was done. Devin just had a brief pep (?) talk with me before letting me go since he had to get back to service. He told me to take the first week as a chance to get used to the flow of the kitchen and how they do things there. I would only be responsible for topping off eggs for the truffle custard, brunoising various vegetables, and making lots of tomato diamonds. If I could get all these things done than I would be able to take on more exciting projects like breaking down a whole lamb with the butcher, but I should mainly be focusing on doing these three tasks amazingly well, and better each day. He said that what sets regular externs apart from great ones is whether or not you push yourself with the daily mundane tasks you have to do. If you come in and do the easiest thing better and faster than you had the day before than it would show. He went on to say I will need to be able to take constructive criticism well because I would be getting a lot of it (he actually repeated the words constructive criticism many times, emphasizing the fact that I would be experiencing lots of it). After that I was done and sent on my way so that he could get to plating a foie gras terrine. Racing back down Highway 29 with music blasting, all I could think about was what type of constructive criticism Devin was talking about.

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