Politics in the kitchen

It’s an election year, and so the word “politics” is being trampled on more than usual. It is often considered an epithet, particularly by politicians who are not getting what they want, and so accuse other politicians of playing politics with things that are, of course, political.

I hate to pour cold water on a steamy topic, but for humans, life is politics and politics is life. You show me an executive chef who is not a politician and I will show you a deserted kitchen and an unemployment check. The style may range from benevolent dictatorship to outright tyranny, but it’s still politics: There are compromises to be made, issues to be addressed, and subjects to be avoided at all costs.

When I was in my late 20s, I quit my job at a cockroach-infested hellhole in San Francisco’s financial district to move out into the fog of Richmond, 30 blocks or so from the Pacific. The new job was at a restaurant called the Café Maisonnette, and it was “ette” indeed: A diminutive space of 26 seats at eight tables, and a kitchen with two open burners and a six-burner hot top. Underneath the hot top was a conventional oven; next to my two burners was a tiny four-hole steam table. The walk-in was a home refrigerator. The bathroom was through the kitchen and in an outside walkway, next to the stairs that led up to an apartment. The workforce consisted of the owner, who made the chocolate mousse, the dressing for the hearts of palm, and waited tables; a waitress and sometimes another on weekends (three was a pretty amazing number for a place with eight tables: French service, y’know); a dishwasher (everything by hand, of course); and your humble prep/sauté/executive chef.

I knew going in that this could be the best cooking gig I would ever get, and 20-odd years later, it’s still in the lead. By this time I’d been cooking professionally for about 10 years, and I’d worked my way around pretty much every station in the kitchen (except—shudder—pastry), so I felt ready to go solo. Young egotist seeks spotlight, however small.

In addition, I was being welcomed as a savior. There had recently been two owners, a he and a she, and a chef. The chef died on the line one night, and one of the owners had to step in to do the cooking. This strained their partnership too much, so the he of the he-and-she sold out and headed off to Napa to open a new place just in time for the floods. Tough year.

Before he left, though, he trained me in on the menu and the kitchen, and I talked to the two of them about the changes I wanted to make. They were fine with this—I wasn’t attacking their late chef’s menu, which was really rather nice; I just wanted to make the food taste as good as I could manage.

The first change was chicken stock. They had been using mediocre bases for their soups and sauces, and David (we’ll leave the he-and-she for another time; her name was Peg) looked stunned when he tasted his soup made with my stock. This was not something he had had time to learn, and the difference was a revelation.

So with that little victory in hand, I took over the kitchen, David left, and within a couple of weeks I almost got fired. I had taken David’s good opinion and Peg’s early approval a bit too confidently, and proceeded to eliminate beef base and make my own demiglace.

The cooks among you will say, as I did: “So what?” You couldn’t buy demi in a pail like you can now—if you wanted it, you made it; and if you worked in a French restaurant, you by God wanted it.

So with the perfume of roasting bones wafting through a 500-square-foot dining room, Peg sat me down to tell me I couldn’t do this any more. I was bamboozled: We weren’t open for lunch, there was no one to be bothered by the smell but us, and how were we going to make a decent Espagnole if I couldn’t make a beef stock? How was I going to make a decent Marchand de Vin without demiglace? How was I supposed to improve flavor without improving ingredients?

I was on my high horse and not about to back down, but the waitress mediated and got us to agree to wait until the final product was tasted before anything was decided. And this was me at my snootiest: I’d have walked away from the job in a heartbeat if she’d said the old sauces were better, and I made that clear. I don’t think that affected her evaluation, though; at that point I don’t think I seemed like such a prize.

My sauces came through for me, of course. There’s no secret to making decent food: use good ingredients gently and let them do the work. I did learn an important lesson in product introduction, though. Thereafter, whenever I wanted to change an ingredient, I’d make two versions of a dish, one with the old formula and one with the new. I’d present them to Peg, and, without telling her anything about them, ask her to taste both and choose her favorite. This led to steak sauces made with what would now be a $40 wine, shiitake mushrooms in the duxelles, and rack of lamb marinated in pomegranate syrup. It also led to a certain sympathy for lobbyists, and for politics in general.