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Open Book: Now We're Cooking With GasOpen Book: Now We're Cooking With Gas
In this week's book, we learn about the seamy underbelly of the restaurant trade. Correctly identify the book and you might win a nonedible information prize.
3 Min Read
If you've ever contemplated packing in your IT career and opening a cafe, this week's book might send you scurrying back to your nice, safe cubicle. The author of this recent nonfiction best seller describes how the restaurant business works, in graphic detail, and the result isn't always pretty. The kitchen staff are out of control, the business practices dubious, and the work unglamorous.
I pressed the red flashing light, signaled for Steven at the grill to turn down the radio.
'Feed the bitch!' said the voice on the phone. 'Feed the bitch or she'll die!'It was Adam.
What he wanted me to do--what he was telling me--was that he was too drunk, too tired, too involved with some squalid personal circumstances to come in and feed his starter: a massive, foaming, barely contained heap of fermenting grapes, flour, water, sugar and yeast which even now was pushing up the weighted-down lid of a 35-gallon Lexan container and spilling over on the work table where it was stored.
By reading this book, you'll learn what types of restaurants are most likely to fail. (Four out of five of them do.) You'll find out the tricks that unsavory food purveyors attempt to perpetrate on chefs. You'll learn about backbiting, mean staffs.
Yet, despite a lot of complaining, the author conveys--with funny, opinionated anecdotes and plenty of personal stories--just how much he loves food.
On the line, a truly awe-inspiring crew of talented Ecuadorians made focaccia and white truffle oil-filled pizzas, rubbed fresh striped bass with sea salt, filled them with herbs and roasted them until crispy, sliced translucently thin sheets of Parma ham and speck, and prepared an amazing array of pasta dishes, yanking the fresh-cooked stuff to order out of two simmering pasta cookers and finishing them in pans from a mise-en-place of ingredients so vast and well-prepared that I had no idea how they kept them all straight.
The author also shares advice about getting the most from your dining-out dollar--and where and how you're likely to be screwed. For instance, don't order fish on Monday (it's the same fish left over from Friday). Keep away from the Sunday brunch's Hollandaise sauce, which the author describes as "a veritable petri-dish of biohazards." And don't ever order your steak well-done.
What happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut of sirloin, that's been pushed repeated to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that's a total loss, representing a three-fold loss of what it cost him per pound. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can "save for well done"--serve it to some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won't be able to tell if what he's eating is food or flotsam. Ordinarily, a proud chef would hate this customer, hold him in contempt for destroying his fine food. But not in this case. The dumb bastard is paying for the privilege of eating his garbage! What's not to like?
For a chance to win a nondigestible information prize, E-mail [email protected] by noon Thursday with the book title, the author, and at least one of the items that, the chef suggests, you'd find in a restaurant kitchen but not in the typical home. Two respondents will be chosen randomly from correct answers.
Feb. 18 quiz: The Inferno (part of The Divine Comedy) by Dante Alighieri. Third question: The prophetic inscription on the giant gates leading to the book's locales is "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here." Winners: Vicky Go and Marco Parillo.
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