Work Clean (19 page)

Sosa became a trusted lieutenant in Vongerichten's expanding culinary empire before leaving to
stage
in Europe and, thereafter, opening his own restaurant back in New York. But he continued to learn about the costs of speed.

When Angelo Sosa's child was born with a debilitating genetic condition, he figured it was time to slow his career climb a bit. But in the midst of his son's recuperation from heart surgery, he was pursued by the producers of Bravo's reality program
Top Chef.
He turned them down; they courted him some more. Sosa's competitive instincts kicked in, and he relented.

Oh, the irony of that very first “quickfire” challenge: a mise-en-place
speed
drill. In a finish that would have made Jean-Georges proud, Sosa came in second for speed, but won the overall challenge for his finesse. He cooked all the way until the last episode when—utterly spent—he was felled by a stomach virus. Hallucinating, Sosa oversalted his dish. After a season in which he cooked well but was portrayed in the narrative as a cutthroat—the kind of guy willing to wander off base for a head start—Sosa lost again later that year in the all-stars competition.

The young chef took stock of the costs of velocity. He had lept forward in name recognition but lost the subtlety of the real person behind the TV character.

Sosa took a breath, slowed down, and began again. You can find him at one of his three restaurants in New York, where the food is fabulous and the pace is relaxed.

From the start, no one wanted Elizabeth Briggs in the kitchen.

Her mother didn't. Briggs grew up poor, in New England. Whenever the young Elizabeth tried to watch her mother cooking, she'd get shooed out of the room.

Her first culinary teacher didn't. Briggs's instructor at a vocational school told Briggs that she would “never amount to anything” in the industry.

Her first chefs didn't. Briggs found a job at the Mountain View House in Whitefield, New Hampshire, in the 1970s, where she and a 69-year-old cook named Florence were relegated to working in a tiny room outside the main kitchen because—in the common manner of European-style operations of the day—women weren't allowed to cook on the “hot line.”

This practice of deliberate exclusion continued when she became garde-manger at The Balsams—the famed luxury resort in New Hampshire—and then at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Florida, where she worked for a hostile French chef.

“He did everything he could to make it impossible for me,” Briggs recalls.

While the men of the culinary world had the opportunity to apprentice at the right and left hands of their chef-mentors, women like Briggs were often kept at arm's length. Briggs had to steal her education like baseball players steal signs from an opposing team.
She did this by developing an acute sense of hearing and seeing.

The one preparation that the chef didn't allow anybody in the Everglades Club kitchen to observe was his pâté. He shielded the recipe and wouldn't let any of his cooks near him while he made it. But Briggs kept her eyes open. On the chef's day off, Briggs stepped into the walk-in refrigerator where he kept his ingredients. She measured everything carefully and wrote it all down. On her own she was able to successfully reproduce his precious pâté.

For Briggs the ability to see and hear things in the kitchen sprang from a hunger to pry open its secrets. Decades later as a chef-instructor for the CIA, Briggs teaches a generation of students for whom the culinary world arrives as an open book. Recipes and techniques abound online. With the abundance of information at their fingertips, it's no wonder that new students don't have to exert as much effort with their eyes and ears to get what they need. Briggs is the person who must teach them how.

Today, Briggs shoos her flock of novice students around her kitchen like a mother hen.

“Okay, stand out of the way. Out of the way. Stand out of the way.”

The newbies look like chicks, too, all baby fat and wide eyes, bursting out of their stiff, newly issued, too-bright whites. Clustered in the narrow area between the entrance and the ovens, they don't move much upon her commands; they shift their weight from foot to foot like baby penguins, pushing each other around. They don't seem to understand language yet; why else would Chef Briggs have to repeat almost everything she says several times?

“Now, here's what a sanitor needs to do every day . . . ” Chef Briggs looks around her and fixes her gaze on a student named Elena. “
You!
Walk out the door for a minute. Look down the hall. Walk down the hall, both ways.” Elena pushes past the swinging front doors of kitchen K-7, turns to the right, and disappears.

“She's gonna come back,” Briggs continues. “Stand out of her way, stand out of her way. Watch, watch.”

But Elena doesn't return.

“Tell her to come back now. Where'd she go?” Briggs asks another student. “Oh, I hope she didn't go home. Tell her to come back. Just yell out, ‘Come back!'”

A male student pokes his head out of the door and says, “Come back?”—more question than command.

Elena does not hear him call. She's down at the end of the hallway, confused by the chef's conflicting instructions to “look down the hall” and “walk down the hall.”

“Okay, stand back out of the way so she can look down the aisle. Out of the way. Out of the way. Let her look down the aisle when she comes. Pull the bucket around. Pull the bucket.”

Another student calls out: “She just went the other way.”

“Oh my God, she's killing me,” says Chef Briggs.

The student pokes her head out of the double doors: “Elena, come back!”

Within a moment, Elena is back in the kitchen, unsure of what to do. Chef Briggs directs her attention to the aisle on the right side of the room. “Now take a look.”

Elena sees something she didn't see before she left: The kitchen is a complete mess. Nothing changed since Elena left the kitchen a few minutes ago except her perspective.

“When you leave the kitchen, it clears you of all the stuff going on, right?” Briggs says. “Because there's so much going on, you can't think or see. You go out, you stand at the door for a minute. You don't have to run to Poughkeepsie next time, all right? But you go out and you clear your head. You come back and you're like, ‘Whoooh, what happened?'”

Chef Briggs has been teaching first-day students in this way for 28 years at the CIA. She's demonstrating the same mise-en-place principles as the other instructors, like preparation, arranging your station, and cleaning as you go. But the skill that's the hardest to teach—the one she's struggling with now, the one that's so fundamental to a cook's ability to execute all the other principles—is listening and seeing.

A chef's work requires concentration. Some chefs tell you that their work induces a meditative state so deep that it shuts out the chaos around them: the clatter, the heat, the movement, the shouting.

Yet in that tumult are signals that need to be heard and seen: voices making requests and issuing commands; printers clacking and spitting; bodies gesturing, moving, and prodding; pots of water boiling; pans making a certain sizzling sound indicating their contents' degree of doneness. In the kitchen, during the heat of service, new cooks can become so focused on the skills they've learned with their hands that they forget the other half of the job, which is to be a part of a functioning organism, responding not only to messages from people but from physical signals around them. The reverie of cooking is antithetical to the awareness that a cook needs to execute her job, a behavior that some call
kitchen awareness,
maintaining a constant consciousness of all five senses: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. We've discussed presence as one of three key values in the kitchen: Be here now. But cooking requires the cook to be in two places at once: in her head, and in the room. In essence we are talking about achieving two kinds of presence simultaneously, internal and external. Experienced cooks develop an ability that is perhaps one of the most enviable in modern society: to be focused and at the same time aware on multiple levels. For our purposes—cultivating a similar kind of awareness outside the kitchen—we'll call this behavior
open eyes and ears.

It's difficult to learn kitchen awareness. The most humbling moment for me in the kitchens of the CIA came when I was reporting inside American Bounty, observing students on their first day of cooking on the hot line. Here I was, trying to evaluate their ability to field and process incoming orders, and I myself was miss
ing them right and left. I couldn't keep track of half of what was coming in, and unlike the students, I didn't have to cook a thing.

My challenge resembles what Elizabeth Briggs faces with each new clutch of students in her classroom. Some students are naturally alert. And some are built for quick shifts in awareness. “We have people with ADD [attention deficit disorder] and ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]. Those are the perfect people in the kitchen because they can multitask. But they hyperfocus, too, like tunnel vision. So what I need them to do is open up their vision.”

When students don't respond to repeated calls for attention, a teaching tactic that Chef Briggs uses is what basically amounts to an incursion into their personal space. She moves in close—close enough for discomfort without touching them—and stands there. She whispers: “You know, it's really important that you hear me.”

When she encounters a student who is particularly unresponsive to her commands, even those spoken into a microphone and amplified by her class PA system, she applies a rather unorthodox tactic: Chef Briggs sends them to the CIA's health office to get their hearing checked.

“I usually wait until lunch break so I don't interrupt their class,” she says. “They think I'm kidding, but I'm not.”

By the time the student returns to Chef Briggs's classroom, clutching a clean bill of health from the school nurse, three things have happened: He has recognized the gravity of kitchen awareness because he has seen the lengths to which the chef and the school will go to reinforce its importance, even to use student time and school resources to engage in a bit of theater; his insulation has been peeled back through a bit of indignity to expose that raw nerve of awareness; and he understands that it's his responsibility to continue to develop that sensitivity.

Beyond hunger and willpower, Briggs recommends techniques that any student can use to sharpen his or her awareness.

Attunement.
Chef Briggs distinguishes between a focus-scattering
openness and what she's really advocating, which is something more selective. “They need to tune in to my voice,” she says. Eventually, she implies, the brain will create channels, loopholes in their wall of focus—the sound of their chef's or colleagues' voices, the hiss of a pan, the clack of a dupe printer, the clack of clogs on a tile floor.

Triggers:
It helps to have your colleagues broadcasting on the same frequencies to which you're tuned. Chefs push certain words like buttons (or lean into them like car horns), a signal for everyone's attention on what's to come: “Ordering!” “Fire!” “Pickup!” Certain words, certain voices, certain sounds, certain movements—they can all pull us out of our reverie, as long as we're tuned to them.

Could we use attunement and triggers to cultivate open eyes and ears in the workplace? Or perhaps the first question to ask is this one:
Why in hell would we want more sensitivity to stimuli at work? We can barely concentrate as it is!

Our ability to maintain focus at work is being challenged on three fronts.

Digital multitasking.
Scientists and thinkers disagree about the effect of technology like digital screens, the nested hypertext of the Web, mobile alerts, and push notifications. One group believes that humans weren't built to sit gazing at digital screens all day. They say our brains haven't evolved to handle the amount of information that's thrown at us, nor to cope with the constant interruptions and digressions that technology foists upon us. They hold that humans aren't meant to multitask and point to studies showing that there is really no such thing as “multitasking” anyway, but rather a kind of rapid “task switching” at which few of us are good. As a result, they say, we may not only be hampering our brain's ability to focus, but also fostering a generation of humans who've lost some of that ability: Generation ADD, so to speak. The other group, however, holds that the brain is and has always been, quite on its own, a jumpy factory of distractions. Just close your
eyes and sit, they say, for a minute in silence and know that truth. Our ability to create focus from chaos, they argue, comes from the potent functioning of our brain. “Attention blindness,” the phenomenon wherein the mind concentrates on one thing and filters out other stimuli, can be cultivated. In other words, we can learn what to pay attention to, and what not to.

Digital mobility.
Though the personal computer has been a part of work life for decades, the Internet, along with a proliferation of powerful mobile devices all connected to it, has demolished the walls separating our jobs from the rest of our lives. The same devices on which we work are a portal to the personal and vice versa. The impact of this connectivity depends on your perspective: Smartphones can destroy focus and participation in meetings, or they can more easily bring information and resources into them. Their presence during our personal interactions can help us share experiences or kill intimacy and trust. The increasing phenomenon of remote work—meaning work outside the traditional office—can give us an unprecedented freedom, or chain us to our jobs 24/7.