Trailing at Gramercy Tavern

Gramercy Tavern Squid Ink Spaghetti
Squid ink spaghetti, grilled calamari, sesame, fresh green chickpeas (!), crisp, mussel broth, pepper flakes

“Fire four halibut.”
“Four halibut!”

A warm evening in May, and flowers were blooming inside the wood accented dining room of Gramercy Tavern. It was early for dinner, but students were already gathering with their families, a parade of graduation gowns mingling with power suits and little black dresses.

You know how sometimes things that seem totally unattainable become magically available when you just ask? I hadn’t even considered trailing at a restaurant the caliber of Gramercy Tavern, until a friend mentioned that he was pretty sure they would accept an intern, and he could put in a good word for me and find out. Sure enough, just a few days later, I was stepping through the swinging doors at one of New York’s classic arbiters for fine dining and good taste.

After signing a legal waiver and slipping into a jacket, I made my way upstairs to the pre-service staff meeting. Chef Michael Anthony was introducing Sean Barrett, founder of Dock to Dish, a cooperative of fishermen based in Montauk who distribute to restaurants and consumers. Dock to Dish supplies their catch to Gramercy Tavern, and Barrett was in house today to talk about his story and business model.

“I started fishing out of Montauk, and grew up on same day seafood,” Barrett said. “I wanted to make this available for a larger community, and I thought, how can we can catch locally and get it to the community? So, we founded a community supported fishery, and as a member, you’re entitled to whatever comes to the dock that day. We’re able to get you the top of the catch, and we subscribe to an ecosystem-based management approach. We use spear guns and rod & reel methods, but there’s no halos around any one method. Sometimes we use small boats, but we use larger boats in tough weather.

“I’ve always known Gramercy Tavern would be a perfect fit for us, with its focus on local sourcing and letting ingredients drive the menu, and I had Chef Mike on the top of my list. It’s no easy feat for a restaurant to receive whole fish, but the trade off is that you’re getting extraordinarily fresh seafood. That is definitely something we’re proud of. We’re thrilled to be working with Gramercy Tavern and Le Bernardin, and we’re a natural fit for them philosophically. Today, we’re partners with 10 restaurants and 100 community members. How do we keep this going for the next five years? By doing exactly what you’re doing, and demanding full traceability.”

There was a round of applause and a series of quick questions. “Ok guys, I’m sorry but we’re out of time,” said Chef Michael. “Write down your questions and I’ll pass them on to Sean!”

Gramercy Tavern mise en place

“Hi, I’m Duncan, the pm sous chef. Welcome to Gramercy Tavern.” He motioned for me to stand at the end of the pass. “Be careful where you stop, this is a good spot to hang out and observe the action.” I was hovering near a big tray of garnishes, sauces and other finishing touches. Sea salt, chives…was that chocolate sauce? Nope, olive paste.

Chef Duncan would be the dominant voice heard for that night’s call and response church service.

“Fire entrees. Flounder, black bass, cooked through.”
“Flounder, bass!”

“Can I get a spring salad and soup now? Allergies to peanut, soy, corn.”

I raised my eyebrows at this. Perez, the expeditor, whispered, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” He’d been on expo for 17 years. “Back when I started, I was 40 lbs lighter, and I was handsome too!” he cracked. His job as expeditor was to monitor the flow and pacing of the courses that went out, working in parallel with the sous chef. Here beneath the bright, height-adjustable heat lamps reigned Perez in his home territory. Armed with a black Sharpie, he marked each ticket with its table number and times to indicate when a course was sent out, to ensure there wasn’t too long of a gap between dishes. Before each plate left the pass, he would inspect it to make sure it was clean, swabbing with a rolled cloth to clean up any errant sauce drips or grease spots.
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How to Stage/Intern/Trail at a Restaurant: The Wrong Way

kitchen line

So you want to cook professionally and think you have the mettle to work your way up the line? Or you’re a culinary student who’s looking for an internship to get real world experience? Welcome, young stagiaire!

A stage (rhymes with corsage) is the French term for an unpaid internship or apprenticeship, where a trainee volunteers in a kitchen in order to learn new techniques. This can apply to inexperienced cooks, or to experienced professionals who want to learn new cuisines. Ferran Adria’s El Bulli was flooded with applications from aspiring stagiaires, for instance, all of whom were at the top of their fields in their home countries.

Having decided that I wasn’t going to continue with culinary school, I immediately began scouting for new kitchens to work in. The restaurant would need to be 1) located near my apartment (so that getting home at midnight would be relatively painless), 2) offer a supportive teaching environment (not just take advantage of free labor), and 3) serve non-French food (I was definitely experiencing some cream and butter fatigue). With my shortlist of candidates in hand, I fired off an email to the first restaurant.

Days passed and no response to my perfectly crafted email. That’s when I realized I was going to have to simply walk in and talk to chefs directly.

The next day, I checked the lunch and dinner hours for each restaurant. I wanted to walk in right as lunch service was winding down but before the rush of dinner prep, so that I’d be more likely to catch the attention of a chef. Around 3 pm, I put my best clogged foot forward, walked into a restaurant and announced that I wanted to talk to the chef about working there.

A stern-faced woman strode out to meet me. Great, I thought, I like seeing female leadership in kitchens. I stated my case, mentioned that I’d had some classes at French Culinary, and wanted to come in to work. Then I mentioned that I had a full time job, 9 to 5. She coughed a bit. “Our pm line cooks start at 2 pm and leave around midnight. Our weekend brunch cooks start at 7 am and leave at 5 pm.” I gulped. “That’s ok, I’m happy to work weekends, either morning or night. I know it sounds crazy to want to work on the line after having another full time job, but I really do want to learn. Plus, I live just a few blocks away, I can be here in minutes if someone doesn’t show, I pull my weight and I don’t call out sick.” She nodded and said, “Ok, come back next Saturday, 2 pm. Bring your knives.”

Yes, that was so easy! I strode out the door beaming. I threw out the cover letters and resumes I’d pre-printed. Was it really that easy to just walk into a restaurant and land a job?
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How to Carve a Sharkmelon

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I always thought it would be an earthquake that would be the end of Los Angeles. Or a meteor shower. Zombies even. Black plague. Aliens. But sharks? Come on!

If you aren’t familiar with Sharknado, it’s the made-for-TV movie about sharks that get caught in a hurricane and rain down terror on an unsuspecting L.A. I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t Citizen Kane, but if you enjoy so-bad-it’s-good movies along the lines of Snakes on a Plane, then you’ll probably like Sharknado. And if you don’t have a fine appreciation for the kind of movie that you drink to, then clearly you have misplaced priorities. 😉

After attaining cult fame and viral popularity, the SyFy channel wisely decided to make a sequel, called Sharknado 2: The Second One. This time, the sharknado would be hitting NYC. Sharks attacking New York from the skies? Now that’s something I totally want to see! I decided to throw a screening party and sent out an email, something to the effect of, “Let’s watch Sharknado 2. Because it’s muthafuckin’ sharks in a tornado, that’s why!” And of course, we needed shark-themed food. Enter the Sharkmelon.

I’d previously seen a Death Star watermelon, so I knew that the watermelon was a highly versatile sculpture medium. Lo and behold, there are plenty of examples of watermelon sharks on the Internet, and with this how-to video guide, I was soon on my way to sculpting the David of sharkmelons.

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First, you start with a watermelon and place it on a relatively flat surface. Usually, the melon has a lighter yellow side where it naturally rests and stays put. Take a large chef’s knife and cut off one end at an angle, so that when the melon sits on that end, it’s tilted.

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Next, cut a wedge out of the other end of the melon. This will form the mouth. Save the rind from this wedge because you’ll use it for a fin later.

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Score a line above and below the open wedge, so that it tapers to the corners of the mouth. Use a paring knife or peeler to cut off the green part of the melon rind. Be sure to leave the white layer behind because this will form your shark’s teeth.

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Hollow out the entire melon, using a melon baller, spoon or whatever else you have on hand. This part is the messiest and most time consuming, and you’ll probably have to wipe down your counter a few times as you scoop out the melon innards.

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After your watermelon is hollowed out, use a paring knife to cut out teeth. I tried to make the center teeth larger and then taper down the teeth in size toward the edges.

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On the back of the melon, you can attach a fin. Cut the rind that you saved from the mouth wedge into a triangle, and shape it so that it lies relatively flush against the watermelon’s curve. Use two toothpicks to attach it to the back of the melon.

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Add eyes to finish the sharkmelon’s face. I attached two blueberries using toothpicks. You can use a paring knife to scrape off some of the rind to create eye sockets. Fill the sharkmelon with fruit (watermelon or a mixture of melon and other berries) and enjoy as you watch film footage of the 7 train getting flooded by sharks!

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Naturally, for a well-balanced meal, we also needed a shark pizza (sharkzza?).

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And a shark cookie (which expanded a bit in the oven and now mostly looks like a cute goldfish).

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Best party mascot ever.

How to Munch on Munch

Food Scream

(With apologies to Edvard Munch)

At this time of the year, the produce aisle at the Food Coop is just bursting with color. Yellow tomatoes! Magenta beets! Purple broccoli! I’d been considering doing a series of meals using only ingredients of the same color. Then, a friend sent me this NPR article on art-inspired food. Presto! I decided to recreate “The Scream” in edible format. The results were quite palette-able, if I do say so myself.

Ingredients:

  • Red: swiss chard stems
  • Pink: prosciutto
  • Orange: squash
  • Yellow: beet
  • Green: zucchini
  • Violet: purple daikon radish
  • Black: seaweed
  • White: cheddar
Taste the Rainbow
Taste the Rainbow

Soylent Experiment: Cake, Cooking Without Tasting, and How to Fail Forward

Strawberry Cake Batter

I’ve been writing about what a tremendous struggle it is to fight boredom when you eat the same thing every meal, and how desperately I was craving something new (preferably greasy and cheesy). In reality though, all of the temptations I’d encountered in social situations during the week paled in comparison to what I faced yesterday, and in the end, the person who finally broke my Soylent fast had no idea that he’d done it.

My fundamental problem was this: you can’t cook without tasting. Well, you can, but it’s far from ideal, and I’m not as pro at cooking as Grant Achatz. One of the first things they teach you in culinary school is to always taste your food as you go along, so you can learn how flavors are structured and built during the cooking process, and also just to make sure what you’re serving tastes good. Every ingredient is naturally different, so you can’t simply rely on recipes or memory to cook; a tomato sauce made from ripe tomatoes in the summer might need some extra sugar in the winter.

On weekend mornings, I moonlight on the line at a local restaurant. Soon after starting my shift on Saturday morning, I was confronted with just how hard it was going to be to get through the day without eating anything. Was I going to have someone else taste all of my fillings? Each salad dressing? How was I supposed to learn how to make seafood sofrito sauce without tasting it? I didn’t see a practical way to uphold my professional obligations and continue with the Soylent experiment. It was akin to Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony while deaf.

Moreover, I was surrounded by food, and even worse, strong smells of food. I’ve always had a good sense of smell, but for the last few days, my sense of smell has been particularly heightened. Every whiff of street meat, every curl of smoke, every warm blast of rising yeast and crackling crust was a siren call to me, a torrent of emotions, desires and urges. For the first time all week, I was being constantly assaulted by food memories and I couldn’t walk away.

So, we made a strawberry cake, using petite, perfectly squishy strawberries from the farmers market. Afterwards, I commented that it hadn’t risen as much as previous iterations, but it also looked less crumbly and had a better consistency than before. T said that he’d changed the amount of baking powder he’d used, and handed me a piece of the cake. “Try it,” he said, “so you can taste the difference.” Oh no, that’s ok I’m going to pass, I replied. “No, try a piece,” he repeated. “It’s really good!”

I caved. I tried the cake.

I should mention that I had not explained the Soylent experiment to my kitchen team. Part of this was because up till now I’d been debating whether it even made sense to try to explain what the hell I was doing, given that I was still going to have to eat at some point over the day. The other hindrance was that I was nervous about explaining a philosophically-driven, esoteric, First-World-Problem type experiment to a bunch of Mexican line cooks. Look, I love my crew and we’re pretty tight. We’ve had long conversations on topics like friends with benefits (Me: “Guys, I need friends with benefits…like a yacht.”), arguments over the best whiskey, and lessons on curse words in Chinese and Spanish. But when it came to describing the Soylent experiment? Let’s be honest, I was pretty sure I’d be laughed out of the kitchen.

By the way, the cake was indeed really, really good.

Roasted Pork Leg

Then I went back to pulling watercress leaves off the stems and shredding two whole legs of pork, fresh out of the oven with crisp crackling on top. I pressed the pork fat through a chinois, added salt, vinegar and hot sauce to the meat, then tasted it to make sure it was properly seasoned. It tasted like victory.

Lately, I’ve been playing Dungeon World with my role-playing game group. In that game, the mechanics work such that every time you fail, your character automatically gains XP (an experience point), which means they’ve gotten a little wiser and are a bit closer to gaining new knowledge and powers.

In the same way, although I’ve failed my stated goal of doing a Soylent fast for a week, I do think that I have failed forward, and come away with some wisdom and insights I never could have attained otherwise.

Pizza

After breaking my Soylent fast, I took a sip of the Soylent that I’d stashed in the lowboy cooler. I was immediately repulsed by the monotony of the texture, the leaden color and the rush of misery that flowed forth. Having already broken my streak and decided that I’d accomplished what I set out to learn, I was ready to go back to enjoying food again. After my shift ended, I went around the corner and grabbed two slices of pizza. They dripped grease and seared the roof of my mouth. It was, no joke, the best pizza I’d ever had. I’m pretty sure that meal has undone whatever health gains I might have obtained from my stint on Soylent, and I’m quite content with that.

Soylent Shake

In the future, I do plan to keep drinking Soylent now and then, when I’m in a pinch and don’t have time to cook. It is after all, by design, the fastest healthy food, or the healthiest fast food. I have some Soylent mix leftover now, and in fact, I just drank some for breakfast since I need to head off to the restaurant soon. I’ll be heading to the Food Coop after work to stock up on lots of fibrous vegetables, fatty yogurt, and yes, some more chia seeds and nuts for future batches of Soylent.

Here’s to a future of healthy, fast AND pleasurable food, however you may define it.

Soylent Experiment: What Do I Have in Common with Astronauts, Soldiers and Prisoners?

Free food!
Photo: Traci Cappiello

It’s day 4 of Soylent week, so I’m over halfway through the experiment. Last time, I posted in a state of relative euphoria over my newfound productivity gains. Let me tell you, the closer you fly to the sun, the harder you crash into the ground.

On day 2, social obligations kicked in again. I went to an event with free food and drinks, and turned everything down. I met with old friends and tried not to stare at their sandwiches. I met with new friends who kept offering beer, and explained that yes, I do drink, just not today, and no, I don’t have a problem with alcoholism, I swear. I met someone for the first time and casually asked if they were familiar with Soylent, and they said that it sounded like a terrible, ridiculous idea.

The one super strong craving that I’ve been having is for a slice of pizza. Not fancy pizza, a greasy New York cheese slice, the kind you get while drunk at 2 am. My roommate just told me she has pepperoni pizza in the fridge RIGHT NOW. This has been an incredible test of willpower and self discipline.

See, food has become really, really boring. For the first time in my life, I’m eating for purely utilitarian reasons. There’s nothing fun or interesting about my meals, and I only eat enough to stop from feeling hungry. It’s akin to forcing myself to work out because I know it’s good for me. I look at the container and think, “Just drink 2 more ounces!” in the same way that you’d push yourself to run another 1/2 mile. This means I’ve been eating smaller meals, but more frequently throughout the day. Overall, I’m eating less than when I started, and I’m definitely not drinking the entire 2000 calorie batch each day. I really hate the taste of chocolate/cocoa powder right now. No chocolate, ever again, after this week.

It’s so bad that I look forward to brushing my teeth just to taste another flavor. Time to dig out that orange-flavored toothpaste.

This makes me ponder what’s it like to be an astronaut or soldier or prisoner eating very similar meals all the time. In some prisons, they provide a bland “nutraloaf” for unruly prisoners. In my opinion, this is cruel and unusual punishment. Or, can you get used to repetitive meals? If you were never exposed to a diverse diet, would you be more comfortable drinking Soylent for every meal?

What about animals, do dogs and cats get tired of eating the same thing for every meal? A friend with a dog assured me that no, dogs will be excited when you give them food, every time. But who knows, maybe they’d be happier if they had different types of food to look forward to. Are we so sure that humans are the only ones intelligent enough to crave a diverse diet?

Another unexpected effect: I’m incredibly thirsty and my mouth is dry, and no matter how much water I drink it doesn’t seem to help. This might be because the weather has gotten hotter this week and I’ve been sweating more. (I’m still biking my normal routine of 7-15 miles per day.) Other possible factors: fiber is hygroscopic (absorbs water) and I’ve probably doubled my fiber intake, solid food also contains water so I need to supplement with additional water, and chewing solid foods helps stimulate salivary glands, so when I don’t chew anything my salivary glands go dormant.

Ironically, after explaining all of this to my roommate (who is sick this week with a severe cough), I offered her some Soylent and SHE LOVED IT. “Wow, that was really nutritious, I feel so much better and more energized now,” she said. “This is like crack! Can I make more for myself in the morning for breakfast?”

Sure, no problem, I’ll just be over here staring at the pizza…