Work Clean (16 page)

A chef's reprise: No shortcuts

By the time Eden opened his first restaurant, Shorty's 32, the idea of making first moves had become instinctive—as it remains for him now at the reincarnation of August on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

An order comes in—
bam!
—Eden's hand slaps a pan onto the stove by reflex. He doesn't think, doesn't realize it's happening. Every 2 seconds now saves him a minute later. Every pan down is the first move in a series of moves that need to happen to complete a dish. Without the first move, none of the other moves can happen. Eden tries to make as many first moves as he can. When he goes down to the storeroom, he returns with armfuls of ingredients and tools he knows he'll need for his mise-en-place, that he knows his other cooks will need. The newer members of the kitchen look at their chef like he's crazy.

But Eden knows:
Do it now, don't wait for later. Now I'm calm and steady and energetic; later I'm stressed and jittery and exhausted. Now I'm moving perfectly, which saves me time; later I'm making mistakes, which cost me time. One easy shortcut now can force me into any number of bad shortcuts later.
In service Eden urges his cooks to make the first moves, as his chef reminded him to do, and as his chef's chef did—
Guys . . . pans down!—
a lesson about time handed down through time.

Chef Charlene Johnson-Hadley was buried in mushrooms, eight cases in all. Hundreds upon hundreds of musky expressions of earth covered every available work surface around her. Charlene needed to examine and sort each of them, tossing the unusable ones and arranging the rest on sheet trays. Then she'd have to plunge batches of them into cold water, removing loose soil, twigs, and other impurities—another painstaking task. After that, they'd need to be sliced and roasted. The mountain of mushrooms would reduce to almost nothing—caramelizing, crisping, sweetening, losing their water and most of their mass—ending up as tasty slices in the mushroom soup devoured by the lunch guests at Chef Johnson-Hadley's restaurant, American Table in New York City.

Charlene couldn't focus. Her mind leapt to the other projects she needed to accomplish that day. There was a pecan tart. There were sherbets to make. A couple of times Charlene caught herself walking away from her station to start something else—the act was completely involuntary—but turned herself around before she got too far.

“Stop, Charlene,” the chef said aloud. “No, you need to finish sorting these . . . ”

Those mushrooms.
Her subconscious was doing anything it could to get her away from them. She talked herself through the task, like her chef would have talked her through it, like her mother would have.

When the younger Charlene Johnson announced to her mother Hyacinth—a Jamaican immigrant with a master's in education—that she didn't want to finish college, she worried. After the death of a grandmother with whom she was particularly close, Charlene's pursuit of a psychology degree had left her feeling increasingly empty. She told Hyacinth that she wanted to leave academia and learn how to make pastry, and braced for the worst. Instead, her mother gave Charlene her best: “Why limit yourself? Get a culinary degree. That way, you'll get cooking as well as baking.”

After attending the French Culinary Institute, Charlene moved through jobs of escalating responsibility: working with Francois Payard at his famous bistro and patisserie on New York's Upper East Side, rising from line cook to sous-chef at designer Nicole Farhi's restaurant, and taking the top chef's job at Farhi's 202 Cafe in Chelsea. But in late 2010, she saw that the former chef of Aquavit, Marcus Samuelsson, was opening a new upscale, concept restaurant in Harlem—a neighborhood whose most famous culinary attraction until that point had been the down-home soul food restaurant Sylvia's. Samuelsson, an Ethiopian raised in Sweden by adoptive parents, climbed out of some of the best kitchens of Europe into New York City. He was now making an equally improbable leap on behalf of his adopted locale: to bring fine dining uptown in a way that honored Harlem's particular cultural and racial legacy. Charlene got herself an interview and a chance to “trail” in the kitchen, meaning she could observe and have the chefs observe her, too. She had never seen so many chefs of color in a high-end kitchen. Even though she was already a full-fledged chef, she took a line cook job at the new restaurant just to be a part of Samuelsson's enterprise. He named it Red Rooster, after a speakeasy from Harlem's Renaissance period in the early 20th century.

Through the opening in 2011 and beyond, Samuelsson watched Charlene and came to know her as calm, dependable, and disciplined. One evening in the winter of 2012, about a year after she began working at Red Rooster, she felt a hand on her arm. It was Chef.

“Come with me,” Samuelsson ordered.

Oh God, what did I do?
Charlene wondered.

In a secluded corner of the kitchen Samuelsson told her, “I want you to know that I've noticed all of your work. I've got some things happening this year, and I want you to be a part of it. I just want you to prepare yourself.”

Samuelsson made Charlene the executive chef of his restaurant in the sleek new home of the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center. The name itself was a mouthful: American Table Cafe and Bar by Marcus Samuelsson. And that job came with a catch: The kitchen was located in another building across the street, and finished food would have to be carted back and reheated for service. The operation would call on all of Charlene Johnson-Hadley's mental and physical mise-en-place.

After the opening, one food critic visited twice and enjoyed his meals before discovering that American Table was a restaurant without a kitchen on premises, a feat that he credited to “the menu created by Samuelsson and his fellow Swede-in-crime Nils Norén.”

Meanwhile, in the bowels of Lincoln Center, the uncredited chef Charlene Johnson-Hadley ran the engine that made American Table go. Being chef today meant clawing her way out of this pile of mushrooms. She couldn't do it if she didn't stand still and deliver.

A half-hour later she was still coaching herself: “Yes, now we need to plunge these.”

Even after years in the business honing her discipline, she found this was the hardest part of the gig, but one of the most crucial: maintaining a finishing mentality. It was too easy to give in to fatigue and frustration. It was too easy to stop or pause a project as the finish line came into view with a deluded confidence that it could be completed later. She knew that if she indulged her restlessness—even with the intention to get another project started—she would end up throwing her entire day off. If she didn't start the mushrooms, complete them; start the short ribs, complete them; start the pecan tarts, complete them; none of them would have gotten done. Charlene Johnson-Hadley respected the iron law of the kitchen: A dish that is 90 percent finished has the same worth as a dish that is zero percent finished.

Just as chefs have a philosophy about starting, they have a doctrine of finishing that springs from the distinctive character of their work.

The very nature of the kitchen's product demands that chefs develop a finishing mentality. Dishes, for the most part, are all-or-nothing. A chef cannot serve a steak au poivre without the peppercorn sauce, at least not if she expects to keep customers who know the difference. A menu cannot promise fries on the side and fail to deliver them. And let's presume, just for the sake of argument, that the customer isn't so discerning. The customer can't be served at
all
unless the cook puts a plate in the pass. A bunch of dishes in various stages of completion are useless until at least one of them is finished. Ninety percent done is still zero percent done from the perspective of the customer. So a cook must develop a delivery mind-set.

The finishing imperative comes from the nature of kitchen production
—
churning out massive quantities of high-quality food. Finishing all that food requires a lot of repeated motion. The economy of repeated motion is the principle on which the industrial assembly line is built. Individual workers can get more work accomplished, and faster, if they do the
same
action or job repeatedly. If a worker stops, the whole line stops. We can measure the cost of the stoppage not only in minutes lost during a pause, but also in minutes spent ramping up production again. Think of someone like Chef Johnson-Hadley as an assembly line unto herself. She has a number of jobs to do. But she knows she will be more efficient if she does
one
job at a time—to
aggregate alike actions
—than if she stops and does something else, skipping from one action to another. Momentum and aggregation are key rationales for continuing with an action until it is done.

Aside from the goal of delivering the product, the virtues of finishing are twofold.

In the physical realm, finishing yields precious space. Most cooks work in tight spaces, and their workstations must move through several phases of mise-en-place throughout the day: prep, cooking, service. A clean and efficient service is impossible when your station is still covered with the remains of bulk prep work. Finishing those actions conserves space and clears space for the next actions.

Finishing actions clears the mind as much as it clears the plate. An action once finished does not need attention or memory. An unfinished action still needs both to be completed. An accumulation of unfinished actions creates a mental clutter and a brain drain. Whether we possess the kind of mind that deals with that clutter easily or not, the cataloguing and prioritization of those remaining actions demands mental energy that could be spent elsewhere.

Jarobi White recalls cutting carrots in Josh Eden's kitchen at August, placing them in a container, and sealing the lid.
Done
.

Not done,
said Chef Eden.
The container isn't labeled. It's still on your cutting board. It's not in the refrigerator. It's still on your metaphorical plate. Clean your plate.

“I say it all the time: You start a job and you finish a job,” says Eden.

Chefs say two seemingly contradictory things. On one hand, they counsel the importance of making first moves immediately. On the other, they loathe the incomplete:
Don't start what you can't finish.

But how can we start
and
finish everything? We can't. Chefs are saying something more subtle: “Starting” is less about doing
everything
immediately and more about creating a triage system to pri
oritize current and future actions. “Finishing” is not so much about completing
everything
and more about not being distracted by the periodic “starting” of other things. “Finishing” can also be stopping a project while it's incomplete but taking just an extra few seconds to wrap it up for resumption later so as to not leave loose ends hanging. What chefs attempt to avoid are
orphaned tasks
—things that take up physical and mental space because they haven't been tied up in the easiest possible form to be resumed later. And since the polarities of starting and finishing generate tension between them, we must always begin with the end in mind. When you start a project, ask one question:
How and when will I finish?

Chef Eden has seen the consequences of failing to account for finishing when starting: “You're stuck in a kitchen 2 hours past the time you were supposed to go home because you've started 16 projects and you haven't finished one of them. And then you can't leave. Or you're throwing it all in the garbage.”

The principle of finishing actions asks us to
work clean
with obligations and expectations, those that others set for us and those we hold for ourselves.

Finishing actions might not seem so important to those of us who work primarily with words, numbers, images, and people rather than perishables. If I don't finish an e-mail, I don't have to trash it. A half-drafted memo doesn't “go bad.” But it occupies space on my physical or virtual desktop. It preoccupies my mind now, and later when I remember it's not finished. And it can slip my mind until someone or something reminds me that I'm late, that I've failed a commitment.

Better to confront the reasons why we stop before finishing and learn mental and physical techniques to push through.

Better to enjoy the temporal, physical, and mental dividends of finishing than pay the price later for not doing so.

Better to not open too many projects at a time so that I keep orphaned tasks to a minimum and give myself a fighting chance at finishing them.

And better to deal with the incomplete by finding a way to tie it up, temporarily, so that it doesn't crowd precious physical and mental space.

Says chef-author Michael Gibney: “Every time you cross something off of your list, you get a little endorphin rush. Every time you deliver, you get that thing out of your life.”

The perishable and holistic nature of kitchen products and the limited time frame and repetition of kitchen production yield a culture of finishing like no other. We can integrate the principle of finishing actions into our own lives by applying ourselves to the following strategies.

Excellence is quality delivered.