No casualties in kitchen experiment

While interviewing Diane Ruona, owner and chef at Antoine’s Creole Maison, for our monthly Chef’s Dish feature, I revealed that one of the gimmicks I planned about a year ago was for me to volunteer (or beg for the opportunity) to work the line in a restaurant kitchen for a night or two, or however long a chef might let me before slitting my throat. (For the record, this idea came along LONG before that schlep Bill Buford published his book “Heat,” in which he recounts his experience working in Mario Batali’s kitchen and learning the fine art of butchering in Italy after he quit his sweet job as the fiction editor at The New Yorker. As far as I’m concerned, he heard my footsteps here at the mighty Foodservice News and cranked his manuscript out that much faster before I could steal his thunder. He’s lucky I threw out my back earlier this year and couldn’t stand up for longer than an hour.)

For those regular readers of this publication (and I know there’s at least 14 of you), you know that the Chef’s Dish article includes a recipe from the featured chef. When I asked Ruona for hers, she responded with a suggestion: “Why don’t you come down and cook the recipe I give you?”

“O.K.,” I said. “What am I going to cook?”

There were several options, all of which were on the menu. “Is what I’m cooking going to be served?” I asked.

“Yes. But we’ll have you try it first, and make sure you don’t pass out,” she said.

“O.K.,” I repeated, clearly unaware that I’d just stepped in over my head. I walked out of the restaurant feeling pretty good. Not cocky, but confident. I think I’m a decent cook at home, able to cook most proteins and vegetables in a few different ways that friends tell me taste pretty good. Although many of my friends are heavy drinkers, so their opinion could be suspect.

But, as I walked to my car, I began to think about all the little parcels of life that I, for one reason or another, have never experienced, while the great majority of the people in my world have. One is watching “The Brady Bunch,” and other iconic pop-culture television shows. Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch television until 1981. Start talking Marsha and Greg and…whoever else, and you will be met with a blank stare, my friend.

The other is work in a restaurant in any capacity. Never a server, busser or cook was I. The only experience I have within a restaurant is sitting down to eat. I was hoping Ruona might let me come in during a slow time of the day, but she insisted I drop in at about 5 p.m., the start of her dinner service. “That way you’ll get to see the place hopping,” she said.

A busy kitchen. I pictured me getting in the way of Ruona and her cook while I fumbled around.

Our first attempt was rescheduled because Ruona suddenly found herself short staffed, and she would have to spend all of her time on the line. We rescheduled for the next week. The extra time allowed me to really think about what I might be doing: I envisioned dicing vegetables and stirring a pot, surely I wouldn’t be really getting my hands in to possibly corrupt a meal going out to the dining room.
The day arrived, and I called Ruona to make sure we were still on. “Yes,” she said. “And I was going to have you help me prepare jambalaya, but I’ve had to get started on it because tonight it’s ‘all-you-can-eat.”

She was still short on staff—she’d been the only one in the kitchen for a week—but she decided to have me prepare a dish she recently added to her weekend breakfast menu: Bayou eggs vermillion (recipe for home cooks on page 9), which is a cornmeal breaded catfish filet, pan fried, and topped with two poached eggs and a tomato gravy sauce with sautéed vegetables and crawfish tails. This being the dinner rush, the only people sampling this dish would be me and FSN Graphic Designer Joe Veen, who was photographer for the evening. I felt better knowing that I wouldn’t put Ruona’s reputation and business at risk. Of course, there’s always the chance I could start a fire.

When we arrived, Ruona was preparing a take-out order and getting things ready for the dinner rush. Pots lined the range; everything smelled rich and full, reminding me of a café I hit two nights in a row in New Orleans. The space between the range and counter was tight; two cooks back there would have to be artful dodgers. Ruona moved smoothly around her domain, constructing the meal, and keeping all the other pots and pans moving around for the anticipated rush.

In about 15 minutes, it was my turn. What I thought would be a somewhat labor-intensive outing turned out to be a lesson in preparation—something very important to wanna-be cooks like me. A saucepan on the range heated water, and one of the finest-weathered cast-iron pans I have ever seen sat on another burner heating oil. A catfish filet lay on a cutting board, a bowls of spices, hot sauce and cornmeal were lined in a row beside.

Did I know what to do? Sure. But my cooking confidence is easily shaken outside my own kitchen, and particularly when standing in a professional kitchen. Ruona directed me through the steps of spicing the filet and running it quickly through the slurry of hot sauce and cornmeal. I carried it over to the cast-iron pan and slipped it gently into the hot oil. And that was about it. From that point began my lesson in efficiency.

There was no need to make up a new tomato gravy sauce for the meal, not when Ruona had already made drums of jambalaya for the evening’s special. She ladled some of her spicy jambalaya sauce—already filled with the required vegetables—into a pan, started a burner, and tossed in a small handful of crawfish tails. Grits were already prepared in another pot. “The key to all this is preparation, that’s the way you stay on top of it all,” she said.
True enough. From my handling of the catfish filet to plating the meal took about 12 minutes. But that’s what chefs do; they make things look easy, get you thinking that you just might be able to do what they do, and maybe as fast. But us civilians don’t think about all that unglamorous, integral prep time that goes into a meal before all the fancy-schmancy sauté pan flippin’ and flamin’ and the resulting cantilevered construction on the plate.

Now, there’s no architecture required to plate a good Southern meal. For this one, it was placing the catfish on the plate, the eggs on the catfish, a scoop of hash browns or grits on the side, the sauce on the eggs and it’s ready for consumption. The dish, Ruona said, has become one of her most popular at breakfast and lunch.

The dish plated, Joe and I wandered from the kitchen and commenced to halve and eat it. Ruona also came out with samples of her jambalaya and red beans and rice, which were quickly devoured.

Now, with all the home experimentation I’ve been doing, I’ve never explored Southern cuisine, which is subdivided into countless regional interpretations. Louisiana, Ruona’s native state, itself has a number of different traditions within its borders. Contrary to stereotype, there’s more to it than deep-frying, barbecuing and gallons of sauce, Ruona explained. Like other cuisines, it requires broad knowledge—what fits together and what doesn’t. And the southern verbal tradition carries on through the kitchen—a lot of the best recipes have never been written down, just passed from generation to generation through time spent in the kitchen.

While my time in Ruona’s kitchen was short, it was a valuable lesson in Southern hospitality nonetheless. How do you make things look easy? Be prepared, and pay attention.