Volume I Episode VI

Sunday, March 2, 17:03:53

Man, its been a while. I think Im out of blogging shape. Anyway, now that my grammar, punctuation and most importantly, paragraph structure, have been adequately chastised and corrected, we can return to the business at hand. First and foremost we need to discuss 2 critical Saints offseason acquisitions. Randall Gay, cornerback, formerly of the almost world champion New England Patriots, and Jonathon Vilma, linebacker, former Pro-Bowler and Defensive Rookie of the Year, from the Jets . Good to see the focus this offseason is on defense. Sometimes, when I get lonely, or miss home or my people or my life at 401 Detroit Street, its good to think about the Saints, and all the glory, joy, pain, tears, anguish, heartbreak, jerseys, paraphanalia and tequila they have brought to my life. Ok, now, back to the story.
So, since Meredith left, the Restaurant, has gone from dream to reality. She was a guest at our first practice dinner, which was also a thank you to the owners of the building and store in which the restaurant is housed (sollano 16). That dinner, went quite well, as you can witness by the glory of the pictures in the last episode. We continued last week with a series of dinners for various friends and investors to hone our skills, practice our coordination between front and back of the house and iron out the kinks.
In my mind one of the most overlooked aspects of restaurant organization is the job or task of the host and/or reservationist. On our second practice dinner, the ship sunk(to put it succinctly) as we tried to seat all 24 guests within a fifteen minute period. It wasn't anyone in particulars fault. All the guests were friends of the owners and wanted a tour, or wanted to hang out for a drink or whatever. Therefore, nobody wanted to be the first to sit and nobody wanted to be the last. Anyway, the difference in the kitchen (and the front of the house) between receiving orders spaced 5 or 10 minutes apart and being hit all at once is huge. You very quickly realize all of the issues when 4 or 5 orders come in at once. No space for plating. No space for cooking (only 6 burners on each side of the line several of which are used up with a bain marie - double boiler used to keep sauces and starches like polenta or mashed potatoes warm- as well as a pasta pot, as well as a stack of pans that wont fit on the shelf above the line). 12 burners may seem like a lot to your average home cook. But when you think about an average restaurant plate...protien, starch, vegetable and sauce (let alone messing around with two different vegetables or sauces or garnishes) and each of them needs to go from cold or room temperature to hot and glossy and seasoned in a matter of minutes you can imagine how we can go through some serious pans and burner space. Most restaurants have at least 10 saute pans in each of 2 or 3 different sizes depending on the number and type of dishes to be picked up at once in each.
Different pick-up times for different dishes is a whole nother complicated aspect. For instance, searing and cooking a hind leg of rabbit in the oven takes much longer than sauteeing a filet of red snapper on the plancha. Grilling, resting and refiring a 1 inch thick piece of steak to medium rare, takes even longer. Which takes longer, tossing a green salad and stacking it on a plate or frying 3 balls of brandade? Depends on the cook, the fryer and the plate-up style (some chefs want you to dress and stack a salad leaf by leaf. Don't bruise the lettuce!. These things (some people call it communication) all need to be figured out kitchen by kitchen and cook by cook. So, that adds to the confusion. Especially, when the kitchen has 2 open doors to the outside, as ours does, which allow the cold air in to cool off the hot food within minutes or seconds. Not to mention cooks speaking English, Spanish, a little bit of culinary French, ghetto slang (English and Spanish) and a little hungover mumbling. I cant imagine what it must be like working in a kitchen in a country where there are like 43 dialects. It was bad enough in Barcelona where we had Catalan, English, Spanish and French whipping around non-stop.
Occasionally, I end a night in the kitchen not wanting to talk to anyone about anything. Pretty much stomping out like a spoiled kid who had his playstation taken away. That was night two. I just take this cooking thing real seriously for some reason (I mean, its only food) and it takes a minute to step back and get perspective.
Anyway, I guess thats what makes this business hard. If we could do it right on the second night, there would be a lot more excellent restaurants in the world. There is no formula (other than to make money - like McDonalds) for the independent restauranteur. Its about caring, patience, perseverence, thinking, evolving, flexibility, vision, reaction and hard work. Luck helps, although, it seems pretty rare.
A couple of more practice dinners later in the week helped smooth out some of these ruffles. The only thing I can remember of much siginificance is that we ran out of water two nights in a row. Not exactly how you want to end a night in a restaurant. It kind of cuts into your cooking, dishwashing, beverage service, etc. Not to mention toilet flushing and handwashing. Anyway, its not always easy to get to the bottom of these problems. Our dishwasher, seemed to think that there are 2 kinds of water service in town. One that is 12 hour service pumping water from the street into your underground storage well (cistern)which can then fill your tenacos (the big unsightly water tanks that are on the roof of every building in San Miguel) from midnight to noon. The other is called business service which is 24 hour. All we had to do was change our service to solve the problem. Sounded good and fine until the people at the water service had no idea what we were talking about. Other people said that we didnt have enough storage. The only solution was to buy more tenacos or expand our underground water storage. Neither of these options really sounded that fun. Tanks are big and not that easy to hall up and install on the roof and need additional pumps and pipes and everything else. Expansion of the cistern is even less appealing involving tearing through concrete and digging up big tracks of the almost finished restaurant. Luckily, it turned out that the problem was with the electrical pump from our underground tank to our tenaco. As you can imagine this little bump in the road caused a little forehead grabbing and hair pulling out on the part of Donnie and Cynthia.
Ive been helping Donnie work out a dessert menu that is both up to the standards of the savory fare and easy to prepare and execute. Donnie, like myself and lots of other chefs, leans way out to the savory side with little love, patience or comprehension of the sweet art of pastry. Its a completely different world. More hocus pocus, chemistry, turning water into wine than what we do in the savory kitchen. Baked dishes dont evolve slowly like savory dishes. You cant taste each component, reseason as you go, and make mid stream adjustments like you can when making a stew or soup. You put it in the oven and you pray that it works. And high altitude effects pastry like the wind effects disc golf. IT goes from fair and comprehendable to complete randomness. IT effects every aspect. Additionally, unlike savory food, sweets seem to me to be much more black and white. Its either right or wrong. So, not only can you not fix a problem midway, its trash if its not right. Our current menu includes a goat yogurt and mesquite honey panna cotta with strawberry soup and mixed berries (the berries are pretty incredible. We get them from this superstar farmer in Michoacan who also supplies us with quail and has the best mangoes Ive ever eaten. When he and his wife came in to deliver our goods this week, they gave me at least a 45 minute sermon about the mountains in which they live and grow, how to care for my berries, and the 20 types of avocadoes they offer), chocolate caramel tartlette with cajeta ice cream (the almond crust is still one of those work in progress things), apple strawberry crisp with vanilla ice cream (this is the kind of dessert that is like money in the bank. Its easy, tasty, stores and reheats very well, and is relatively cheap and low on the labor) and a shaker lime pie with geranuium (from our herb garden) cream (Im not sure how many people in Mexico know what a Shaker is, but it doesnt really matter since that didnt make it into the Spanish menu translation. Anyway, its almost a good dessert. Mexican limes seem to have a more bitter skin than the lemons the Shakers used in making this dessert originally. We are trying to soak them for a few days in cold water to remove the bitterness. )
So, you may ask, whats going on outside of the restaurant? Not much. We are into the 70-80 hour weeks of opening. Some might call it the ides of March. Its like harvest time...the hard work, the big pay off, the glory or disappointment. The social world of my people in San Miguel seems to axis around a bar called Limerick. San Miguel, like New Orleans, has a pretty active, vehement, and nocturnal, drinking crowd. Occassionally, Ill put in a night at Limerick. Check in with how the rest of the world lives. I try to make my exit before 2, the witching hour aka the tipping point. Before 2 its social, fun, hanging out, catching up. After 2, you never know where its going. Some crying, some heated talks about the fate of the world, some back room antics, some chest puffing tough guy shenanigans, and worst of all, daylight. I mean, if professional football teams impose a curfew, to keep their players fresh, game ready, and out of trouble, why shouldn't I.
So this week we have been getting geared up for the opening. Organizing....shopping lists, purveyor lists, prep lists, station lists, employee lists, recipes. What dishes are we gunna make. How many are we gunna make each night. What ingredients are needed for each dish. How are those ingredients prepped (washed, dried, skinned, diced, sifted, cored, peeled.....). Where do we get those ingredients. Do they deliver. What if they are out of that ingredient. Who or what is the back up. What size do we want. Who is going to pick it up. Whats the best route to make the maximum stops with the minimal driving and traffic. How can we pay...... Its incredible how much fetching you do to open a restaurant.
For instance, Tuesday morning we went to the Taingis market to start. Actually, before we even made it to Tainguis we stopped at a butcher shop in a tiny little Colonia (kind of a village or neighborhood within a town). Pretty cool when you get to custom design your pork chops. We would like 4 11-bone pork loins with a 1/2 inch fat cap left on (we could say this because the butcher had the whole pigs hanging in his refridgerated store room right where we could see them). Not like the butchers at my local market at home who probably couldnt point out which part of the pig the loin is in. I mean, if you need another pork loin, this guy calls the farm (about 30 miles away in Dolores), the farmer slaughters a pig, and you get your meat the next day. At home, first of all, the pork is coming out of a cryovaced package. Second of all, if they want more pork for your order, the pull it from their freezer, or call their supplier (a local distributor) who then pulls it from their fridge or freezer. And if they are out as well, they call their supplier ( a meat packing plant probably), who pulls it from their fridge or freezer. The meat we eat is so far from the pig, its no wonder it has a different name.
So, after the butcher, we head over to SuperGuapos supersweet iron works. SuperGuapo built us the most bad-ass legitimate grill three California white boys (Donnie, Andrew and I) have ever seen. A big old 3 ft square iron grill with a huge rolling drawer underneath to store wood (we are mostly burning mesquite although we throw in some pine from broken down packing crates, oak from random dead trees, and charcoal as well). Its really hard to be even remotely tough or manly when you are hanging out with a dude who makes cast iron grills and is wearing a red puffy vest, matching red truckers cap (not from a vintage store like all you San Francisco wanna bes. This thing is the real deal from some sort of huge steel works that probably employs 50,00 people or so in some sort of half step above slavery type conditions and kills off ten or twenty endandgered species a year without thinking twice) and cowboy boots polished with the blood of dying roosters. This guy is so tough his pit bulls are nice. He has such a complete disdain for paperwork and any sort of drawings or plans, it really brings a new perspective to the American business ideal. Anyway, after Donnie foolishly and somewhatly meekly tries to argue with SuperG over the barbeque price, we grab our big nylon shopping bags and head across the street to buy our produce. Guapo yells out at us as we leave in Spanish grabbing his huevos for extra emphasis "Where are you pussies going? Only grandmothers carry shopping bags!¨ I guess Im not going to try to tell him that he's the star of my blog.
Im not sure how many grannies lug bags as big or heavy as we did. Packed full of everything from lemongrass bought from the herbalist, to quail eggs (I assume they were quail...they looked like them) from the lady who sells all kinds of little parakeets and other exotic birds, to mesquite honey which of course had to spill all over my shoes and honeycomb to 50kg sacks of onions and carrots (those we admitedly did not haul around with us). ITs a pretty sweet market. You want stolen drills of any sort, they've got em. T-shirts with pictures of a plane crashing into a tall building and the slogan Just Do It, they've got those too. Barrettes, shampoo, chili covered tamarind balls, mops, random electrical equipment, gummy worms, puppies, all kinds of jeans with rhinestone pockets (ask Mer about that one), you name it, the Tianguis pretty much sells it.
Next stop was at a random little organic produce, chicken and wine store in a tiny back alley off a street near my house. What inspires a person in Mexico to start an organic store in a back alley of a random neighborhood is still way beyond my comprehension. Especially one that only has about 8 different items, maybe 6 or each type. The day we were there, they had 3 bunches of beets, about 12 white onions, 2 chicken legs, a few heads of broccoli, 4 or 5 heads of lettuce, a dozen eggs and maybe one other thing. I could use all that in one meal for 4.
Next stop was the little cheese shop who is supplying us with our goat yogurt as well as 3 locally made cheeses for our cheese plate. The place is called Luna de Queso and the cheese is pretty pimping. I guess the woman who owns it is the daughter of two former veterinarians and current cheesemakers. Although they are now seperate, both parents make some of the best cheeses in Mexico. They apparently did some studying in France, and it shows. The goat milk camembert is tangy, creamy, rich and smooth (and I should know having spent a few days engorging myself at the camembert festival in Normandy). We are also using an organic sheep's milk Manchego made by some friends and a cow's milk pont l'eveque. That all gets slapped up on a plate with some local hand made quince paste (known as membrillo here in Mexico) and some of the mesquite honeycomb.
My final point about all of these pick-ups and shopping and purveyors is that the only people who have really screwed us badly so far in our shopping quest have been the two large corporate outfits with whom we have tried to order some of our dry good and dairy supplies. Both ended up being so far behind in their deliveries that we were forced to go and pick shit up off their trucks while they were parked in front of other restaurants. Same crap just like in the states. High minimums, terrible customer service, crappy products, high prices and the illusion of convenience with absolutely no flexibility or compassion. Fuck Sysco and the corporate food oligarchy.
That was all before noon on Tuesday. Needless to say between then and now we did some major prepping. We have a pretty cute little staff. Lots of Mexican ladies of varying ages from about 20 to at least 60. Unlike some of the dishwashers Ive encountered at home, these ladies have absolutely no compunction with washing linen and ironing it by hand, cleaning bathrooms, scrubbing walls and floors, carrying big sacks of garbage out to the street (the garbage truck around here comes around every afternoon and is preceeded by a young kid who rings a bell to let you know to drag out your garbage bags and load the truck yourself.), washing lettuce three times, peeling huge sacks of garlic etc. If you are getting paid by the hour, it should be all the same. Work is work as long as its not actually painful or degrading or disgusting or whatever.
Alright, I gotta go now. Carnitas is calling. You will have to wait for the exciting story of our opening