Work Clean (7 page)

Mortified and indignant, Ruhlman started his car, drove through the storm, took his exam, and
aced
it. In that moment, Ruhlman reflected, he knew that he wanted to be a cook—not to forgo his career as a writer or make his living in a kitchen, but to live his life by the same
code
that cooks live by. In other words, to live by mise-en-place.

After Ruhlman completed his reporting at the CIA and returned with his family to their home in Cleveland, Donna announced that they had only 4 months of cash left before they'd be, as Ruhlman says, “unable-to-pay-the-bills, lose-the-house, flat-out broke.” Ruhlman would only see money when he submitted his manuscript.

Ruhlman had written books. Before his time at the CIA, he would have thought it impossible to finish one of this scope in 4 months.

“But I didn't think like that anymore,” he says. “I had become a cook.”

So Ruhlman began the kind of backwards planning he was trained to do at the CIA. His contract called for 90,000 words. He calculated that if he wrote 1,400 words, 5 days a week, revising on Saturday and resting on Sunday, he would have a book-length manuscript in 4 months.

He stuck to his regimen at his desk as he would have in the kitchen—through holidays and illness and the daily challenges of marriage and childcare. And in the end he delivered the draft on time and secured his advance.

“It turned out to be a pretty good book,” Ruhlman says.

Mise-en-place transformed Ruhlman's life outside the kitchen. For a while he
ran
everywhere, trying to maximize every moment. But what Ruhlman retained from the kitchen was its sense of unrelenting honesty about time and space, success and failure. Good chefs and cooks feared and dreaded failure. Ruhlman determined that fear and anger could be healthy motivators, as they were a noble stand against laziness and entropy. Ruhlman worked in kitchens for a time after his stint in culinary school and saw people taking the path of least resistance every day, places where they
didn't do things like they did at the CIA; where they boiled their stocks and let them get cloudy; where they put out sloppy plates and kept sloppy stations. If you were willing to give in on one thing, the others would soon follow.

Ruhlman wrote his next book with the man some have called the greatest chef in the world, Thomas Keller. During their time together at The French Laundry in California, Ruhlman saw the concepts of mise-en-place played out to their ultimate manifestation with Keller and his crew. All were there because they wanted to become great chefs themselves (and quite a few of them, like Grant Achatz, have indeed done that).

Ruhlman asked Keller:
What did it take to become great?

“Make sure that your station is clean,” Keller said.

Ruhlman paused, thrown off by the simplicity of the statement. “And?”

“And everything that follows from that,” Keller replied.

For Thomas Keller, working clean isn't just about cleanliness, or order, or minimalism. It is about practicing values.
What are your standards? What habits make you successful? How strongly are you willing to hold on to your regimen of good habits in a world that will tempt you to ditch them, often without any immediate consequence? How much are you willing to keep your own focus despite the chaos around you?

This is what it means to work clean.

And with this understanding we examine the elements of mise-en-place that can apply anywhere: a set of values, and a group of behaviors that flow from them.

Mise-en-place comprises three central values: preparation, process, and presence. When practiced by great chefs, these three mundane words become profound. They have formed the core of the conscious chef's work since the time of the tenzo, and they still drive the lives of contemporary chefs. The by-product of these values may indeed be wealth or productivity, but the true goal is excellence.

Chefs commit to a life where preparation is central, not an add-on or an afterthought. To become a chef is to accept the fact that you will always have to think ahead, and to be a chef means that thinking and preparation are as integral to the job as cooking. For the chef, cooking comes second. Cooking can't happen without prep coming first.

The fundamental respect of preparation results in a few things: Chefs and cooks expect to do it, and thus, in many cases, they welcome and enjoy it. Their prep will be thorough. They will prep “before” things rather than “during,” so it won't be rushed. And that preparation happens all the time, in ways small and large.

Though outside the kitchen we lack many of the imperatives that make preparation and planning crucial—dinner service starts at 6:00 p.m. and you can't “push it back” if you're not ready—we can export the value and gain its benefits: a life where we have availed ourselves of every resource and advantage and have the satisfaction of having done all we can to set ourselves up for success.

Embracing preparation also means jettisoning the notion that prep work is somehow menial, beneath us. No chef is above its rigor. In mise-en-place, preparation is royal—except that, as a chef, it is you who is serving and being served at the same time. Your preparation—and its intellectual cousin, planning—thus becomes a kind of spiritual practice: humble, tireless, and nonnegotiable.

Preparation and planning alone are not enough to create excellence. Chefs must also execute that prepared plan in an excellent way. So they ensure excellent execution by tenacious pursuit of the best process to do just about everything.

Chefs have a certain way of standing, a certain way of moving. They've determined where to place their tools and ingredients to make their work easier and better and faster. They've memorized
the best way to execute the dishes they create and determined the best way to handle their equipment. The most successful ones have figured out the best way to handle their people. For the processes that they haven't internalized, they use an outboard memory device called a checklist. Chefs know that success is doing a job right once and then repeating it. The best chefs are always perfecting their processes. Errors become opportunities to do this. “It's okay to make mistakes,” Wylie Dufresne, chef-owner of restaurant wd-50, says. “Just don't make the same mistake twice.”

A commitment to process doesn't mean following tedious procedures and guidelines for their own sake. It's not about turning humans into hyper-efficient robots. Process is, quite the contrary, about becoming a high-functioning human being and being happier for it. Good process must not only make the work better but also make
you
better. Excellence arises from refining good process—
how can I do this better, or easier, or with less waste?
It's a job, like preparation, that never ends.

Chefs commit to being present in ways from the mundane to the sublime.

When aspiring chefs sign up for a life in the kitchen, most know that they are agreeing to a life where being early for everything is obligatory. Showing up late is never an option. It's not only about “getting there,” it's about “staying there,” because a chef also signs up for long hours and, in many cases, no sick days or holidays.

After months and years of repeated prep and process, the cook acquires a deeper kind of presence—becoming one with the work, and the work becoming a kind of meditation. But in the midst of that focus, cooks can't space out. “Kitchen awareness” demands that one not only be “with” the work, but also “with” your comrades and their work at the same time. Awareness must be internal and external at once.

This kind of awareness isn't scatteredness. It is, quite the contrary, something closer to what the Eastern traditions call
mindfulness.
Many meditation techniques strive to evoke this ability: to focus on an object, or a sound, or a thought, or an action, and yet still be aware of the environment around you. Chefs strive to be focused
and
open.

Finally, committing to be present means that chefs cultivate discreteness, boundaries between their work and their personal lives. To being either
in
or
out
,
on
or
off.
When we work, we put our all into it. When we play, we don't hang on to work. Wherever we are, we're there.

Presence in all its forms—getting there, staying there, being focused, being open, and cultivating boundaries—helps us adjust our preparation and process as the circumstances shift around us, like surfers riding the waves.

These three values—preparation, process, and presence—aren't ideals to admire and applaud. They must be practiced—and can be, by anyone, anywhere.

We can practice these values via 10 distinct behaviors. Let's call these behaviors the
ingredients
of mise-en-place. In the course that follows, we will look at each of them in turn: showing how chefs use them in the kitchen and in their lives, detailing them, and then suggesting several specific and effective ways to apply those behaviors in the world outside the kitchen.

*
“Jeremy” is an amalgam of anecdotes compiled from real people.

Want evidence that God laughs at man's plans? Dwayne LiPuma planned to be a forest ranger.

He envisioned himself greeting the day atop a mighty stallion, inhaling the fresh air. In this fantasy he and the horse were in Central Park in the middle of New York City surrounded by adoring young ladies. For an Italian American kid from The Bronx of the 1970s, this was what being a forest ranger was all about.

LiPuma's plan took him all the way to Albuquerque, to the forestry program at the University of New Mexico, where he discovered that the real thing, alas, wasn't like his dream: traipsing through dirt and scrub in the desert, taking soil samples in the mud and looking at them under a laboratory microscope.

LiPuma retreated to New York. He flipped burgers and made sandwiches to bide his time and earn some dough. A few jobs later, LiPuma got serious and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America. He took his first job after graduation in 1986 in the kitchen of a restaurant called The River Cafe, a small place with a big influence. The River Cafe was built in the late 1970s on the dilapidated Brooklyn waterfront during a time when the owner could scarcely find a bank to loan him money for the venture. But the restaurant became an instant success because of its incomparable view of Manhattan and innovative chefs. LiPuma, fresh from the CIA,
worked for the legendary chef Charlie Palmer, impressive considering LiPuma's previous job at an unimpressive suburban restaurant called Orphan Annie's.

LiPuma worked alongside heavyweights and future star chefs like David Burke and Gerry Hayden but couldn't keep up. Every day he'd run out of “prep”—the raw and pre-cooked ingredients he needed for service. Halfway through dinner, his fellow cooks would have to stop what they were doing to help him replenish and finish. Every time LiPuma screeched to a halt, he took the whole line with him. “Why am I recooking my beef because you're not ready with your snapper?” one cook asked. “I'm not getting paid to help you.” One day, LiPuma fucked up so bad, a coworker threw him against a refrigerator, denting it. “Do your job or quit,” another cook said.

LiPuma decided he wasn't going anywhere. He just had to figure out how to plan better. If he didn't make enough mise-en-place, he'd have to make more. If he didn't have enough time to make more mise, he'd have to make more time. He started coming in earlier than his colleagues did. He just had to be honest about what it took—2 hours, 3 hours, or more—and that's what he'd do. What he didn't want ever again was the feeling of panic. He wanted to come in knowing that he had done everything he could to set himself up for success.

LiPuma spent more time on prep than anyone else in the kitchen. He started making it through service. As his confidence and skill grew, his prep time shrank. He no longer needed to come in 2 hours before work. When he could fend for himself, he became one of Charlie Palmer's crew. When Palmer left The River Cafe to start his own upscale restaurant—Aureole, on Manhattan's Upper East Side—he took LiPuma with him.

Dwayne LiPuma planned to be a forest ranger in Central Park. God, laughing, made him a chef near Central Park to show him how to plan a little better.

Years later, LiPuma found a pithy phrase that encapsulated what he'd learned in the kitchen, courtesy of his brother-in-law, Pierre, a successful executive:
Greet the day.

On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he'd see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn't understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier?
Wasn't greeting your day better than fighting it?
Why not make your kid's lunch the night before, lay out your clothes, do anything you need to do so you can get up and not run around like a maniac so you can smile and
enjoy
your day? That was, after all, what LiPuma was beginning to do in the kitchen. Stress and chaos were a normal part of his job. But if he could
control
a little bit of that chaos—preparing for what he knew was going to happen—he could
greet
chaos,
embrace
it. His mastery of the expected would enable him to better deal with the unexpected. You plan what you can so you can deal with what you can't. He knew it took a certain amount of time to get ready in the morning, to get to work, to prepare his mise-en-place. What good did it serve him to pretend that he didn't? He'd just assure himself a crappy day, every day—just like those commuters—exhausted before he even faced a real challenge. He wanted to greet the day.