Chapter 1 Part 3/4: From Fryers to Functional Fluency

In kind consideration of my culinary interests, that year my aunt and uncle took me out for a birthday dinner at Philadelphia’s Le Bec-Fin. Le Bec-Fin was for a time considered to be the best restaurant in the United States, and while this effectively ceased to be the case once George Perrier, the restaurant's founder, relinquished everyday control of the kitchen, at the time it was one of the best examples of French haute cuisine in the country. It was certainly the best food I had ever eaten.

Toward the end of the seven-course dinner, probably close to the salad course, I noticed George Perrier making his rounds of the dining room introducing himself to the diners. When he came to our table, I asked him if I could have a look at the kitchen, and he led me back. When I crossed through the tiny server station and into the kitchen, it was as if the cooks sensed the presence of an intruder as they all immediately looked up from what they were doing and glared menacingly at me as if I had encroached on their territory. Chef Perrier introduced me to the chef du cuisine, Frederic.

Frederic was an enormous guy, around six feet six inches with huge meat-hook hands who spoke broken English with a heavy French accent. Although obviously extremely busy overseeing the kitchen, he took a brief minute to talk to me and I told him that I was working as a cook and said something intelligible to him in French. I must have felt that I was in midst of a very rare opportunity, and I asked Frederic if I could “volunteer” in the kitchen on weekends.

As I had apparently left him with the impression that I could both cook and speak French, both of which were true to probably a much more modest degree that he believed at the time, he was immediately sold on the idea and told me to come in at one o’clock on the coming Saturday.

I went back to the table, told my aunt and uncle “I got the gig,” and was immediately confronted by who I believe was George Perrier’s brother, who asked me extremely condescendingly, “So, you will be working for us?”

I showed up early on the day of my “audition” at around noon and sat in a coffee shop across the near Le Bec-Fin to mentally prepare myself for the day ahead of me. I had been told to come in through the back entrance, and so at about 12:45 I walked around the back of the Walnut Street entrance to a back alley where I figured said entrance must be. Restaurant back entrances are uniformly disgusting, surrounded by overflowing dumpsters of food waste, stagnant pools of greasy water, smoking cooks, homeless people -- and the alley to the back entrance of Le Bec-Fin was no exception.

I located the brown door in a series of many identical brown doors with the ornate cursive “Le Bec-Fin” stenciled in fading white paint, and thought it would be proper to knock before entering. After about ten minutes of knocking like an idiot, one of the dish washing crew opened the door and told me that the chef usually got there around two and to just come in.

I didn’t really know where to go so I walked up the stairs at the rear of the service kitchen and ran into a cute and therefore approachable pastry cook, who asked me if I was “auditioning” that day. I told her I was, and she showed me the cooks’ changing room, where she said I could wait for the rest of the cooks, who usually showed up a little before two.

The cooks did start to show up at about ten of two and one of them asked me in an accusatory tone, “What, did you get here early?” and I took this to mean that showing up early was not something I should continue to do.

The cooks at Le Bec-Fin at the time were as stereotypical a bunch as one could imagine. Greg, the American sous-chef, was as big as Frederic, nice to the cooks that worked for him, but had very little tolerance for screwing up in the kitchen and would yell at people in a second for doing so and was very scary when he did. Kenny and Chris followed Greg in the kitchen hierarchy and formed the core of the cooking line.

Kenny was short like me, about five foot eight, and extremely serious to the point of being an asshole, which is exactly what one has to be like to become a chef, which I believe was his plan. Chris was another big guy, with an amazing amount of energy and a genuinely kind attitude to everyone in the kitchen. Kenny ran the fish station and Chris the vegetables and garnishes.

Mai, one of the many ethnic Haitians that worked at Le Bec-Fin at the time, was a tall, lanky, soft-spoken and also serious guy who worked the meat station, one of the hottest and hardest stations in the kitchen. Then there was Anne, a shorter blonde girl who worked garde manger, and Maria, also short, and mixed race, who worked both garde manger and the fish station.

This was an incredibly fun group of people to work with. We got along well and had fun with each other, which was good because the work was extremely hard. Before I started working at Le Bec-Fin, I had created in my head the idea that the pace of the work must be slower and more deliberate to produce the quality of food the restaurant put out.

This was of course stupid. People still expect to eat in about the same amount of time no matter how much money they are paying, and cooking times don't get longer just because you are making nicer food. The pace was the same -- the people were just way more talented.

For anyone who has the mistaken conception that cooking is glamorous and dainty, know that it's only that way on the cooking shows on TV. Restaurant cooking is hot, physical and fast-paced, while requiring extreme precision and an artistic attention to detail. It is like being a construction worker, floor trader, watchmaker and floral arranger all at the same time.

And almost all of the people that do it do so out of love and for very little pay. I have always felt that one of the biggest legalized rackets is restaurant pay systems. Wait staff, whose job skills include speaking limited English and carrying things, are paid multiples more than people who work much harder at much more difficult work.

I certainly wasn't paid much. While I legally couldn't "volunteer" (In my 20-year-old head I felt this was my best shot at an otherwise unrealistic opportunity...), I got paid close to minimum wage. But I learned an amazing amount about food in the short time I was there, and the extreme challenge of the work environment was something that would benefit me in future jobs.

The pace was unrelenting, and even the simplest of tasks that were assigned to me were not easy. Take the mashed potatoes, or pomme puree. First there was a precise balance between yellow and white potatoes. They could be left in water after being peeled to keep them from oxidizing, but only for a certain amount of time, or they would retain too much water to be smooth enough when prepared. The water had to be salted to the exact saltiness of sea water, if there were in fact an exactitude in such a measurement. They needed to be boiled just long enough to come apart when poked with a fork, but not so they crumbled from being touched. After they were boiled, they needed to go back into the empty pot with the fire on to boil off the excess water so they wouldn't be runny. Then they got pushed through a food mill while still hot. To the milled potatoes I would add about a third of the volume of the potatoes worth of butter (the good French butter used for sauces, not the regular butter) and then blend in whole milk infused just long enough with thyme sprigs. Once the mixture had the right puree consistency, it got passed again through a fine sieve to remove any bits of peel or thyme. And this was one of the easiest things to make in the kitchen.

Layers of processes to produce complex deliciousness. This was the French cooking I learned at Le Bec-Fin. I made mashed potatoes, boiled haricot vert, made crab galletes, broke down lobsters, and blended cauliflower puree for long, long shifts at breakneck speed for little pay while getting screamed at. I think the most colorful thing I ever heard out of the chef's mouth was "Move your fucking dickhole!" but there were stories of worse...I apparently missed a near knife fight on the line. This is kitchen work, and the people that do it love it, including myself for the time I was there.

But summer is also the season of vacation for the French, and the tradition extended to the American members of the staff also. After having sweated in the kitchen of Le Be-Fin for nearly four months, a strong and unanticipated wanderlust overcame me, and I began to look for a language study program in Japan for the summer of 2001. This was where my journey to Japan would begin.