Volume I Episode VII

Im just going to start with the last ten minutes of my life and we will go from there. Imagine in your minds eye, heaping, steaming piles of trash...probably about 3 feet high and rising and at least big enough in diameter to house a small pride of lions. Our 3 busiest days in the history of this little, but growing restaurant, worth of uncollected basura plus an extra Sunday and Monday to ferment...piled in bags, boxes, cannisters, tubs, barrels, sacks and satchels. I guess there is no garbage collection here in glorious San Miguel during the second half of Semana Santa also known as Good Friday, Why not throw in Saturday and Easter Sunday.
Guess who just happens to be around, along with 2 of the toughest cleaning dishwashing ladies on Earth, to haul it from one end of our football field size establishment to the other, and then lift it up to the open waiting arms of the trash man who remains firmly ensconsced, inside his truck, 10 feet off the ground. So each bag dripping chicken blood, last drops of beer bottles, dirt and incredible mounds of purple jacaronda flowers has to be lifted over head so he can reach down and grab them before flinging them behind him into his truck. Cheap plastic garbage bags oozing and seeping the dregs of a weekends pleasure into your hair and eyes.
Im not sure how many of you know this about me, but back in high school I had a little incident with the Palo Alto police force that lead to a little community service being performed. Anyway, by the luck of the draw my service, or should I say performance, was to pick up the trash, at the dump. When you have a dump that happens to lie out alongside a very windy bay, a lot of the trash tends to float and fly around fairly haphazardly. So, those of us unlucky enough to be caught serving alcoholic beverages to minors (even if we are minors ourselves), get to walk around the dump with plastic bags and recollect the flying trash. Not too glorious a job, and definitely a stinker. Anyway, to make a long story short I'm having some major dejas vu. Back then, I would come home for about a 2 hour soak in the tub, hoping to cover/clear the stench. Can't wait to see my friend Sr. Espuma tonight.
So, on with the story and opening night. The funny thing is, all I can remember about opening night is that a pair of tongs got dropped in the deep fryer behind me and I got hot grease spattered all over the back of my neck. I didn't deal with it so well at the moment, got a little hot under the collar, I guess. It was a little shocking, but accidents happen, especially on opening night. Anyway, I think I was supposed to take notes on all this stuff, so three weeks later when I went to write about it I still had some memories left. I guess the fact that I dont means that things went pretty smoothly or I have a pretty bad memory or both.
We decided to organize the kitchen so that all of the appetizers come off one side of the line and all of the entrees (except for the vegetarian pasta which comes off the appetizer side since they already have a pot of boiling water using up a burner for mushroom raviolis) off the other. I work in the middle on the big wood grill searing off salmon, steaks and quail as well as cooking the rainbow trout dish.
The food seems to be mostly successful as far as the clientelle goes. The funny thing about working in a restaurant is that its always hard to tell from the kitchen if the food is really good or bad and if people are truly enjoying it. You usually just hear vague positive commentary from the waiters. Yeah, people love it. So and so said its the best chicken they ever had. Things like that. And then occasionally you get something sent back. But even then, you tend to convince yourself that this customer is just picky or crazy or on a power trip. What do you mean that pork chop is overdone? Its pink in the middle. Any pinker and people are going to worry about trichinosis. Were in Mexico for Gods sake. Most people here like their meat cooked to shoe leather. I mean what do customers know anyway. Most people are such plebians when it comes to food. They've never had a good steak. They wouldn't know a proper Caesar salad if it slapped them in the nose. Thats why I never trust other people's restaurant suggestions. Who are you to say whether this place is good or bad? What do you know about French food? Or Mexican food for that matter? Yeah, sure, its not like your mom's. First of all, we arent in your mom's house, so its not always easy to make things the way mom does. We cant cook one tortilla at a time. But also, just cause mom makes tasty food, doesn't mean that its right. As subjective as food is, there is definitely, or at least usually, a right and a not so right. Sure, you can make Cassoulet with chicken apple sausage and turkey bacon, but it ain't right. It might even taste good, but its still not Cassoulet as made in the south of France. This is a kind of hard concept for many people since whether or not food is good or bad is so subjective. But, there is an objective right and wrong. It might be wrong thats more easy to define than right, but still.
I almost never eat in the restaurants I cook in (except for family meal). It just feels wierd. I mean I don't think many strippers come into the bar at the club on their day off work. You have already been so entrenched in that scene, so involved in every meal that goes out, that you know the flavors by heart, even if you have never sat down and eaten the dish in a civilized fashion. So, I don't really know what it feels like to be a diner at the Restaurant, but I can say that pretty much every time I step out into the dining room during service, I get some kind of ovation and people usually stop me for some sort of compliment. I think people here in San Miguel are really appreciative of what we are trying to do and are definitely thankful for a new restaurant experience. So, thats a good start. And every day we are becoming more and more crowded. Breaking our previous nights record almost every night or at least week to week (as in this Thursday was better than last Thursday).
One of the things that I have also seen in the opening of the Restaurant is the infinite value of forethought, foreplanning and flexibility. First of all, you never get any time back. Once the place is open, there are so many challenges to get through every day, you never have time to write lists or read recipe books or search for new equipment. If its not in house and more or less ready to roll when you open the doors, good luck ever finding the time to go back and start from scratch. Of course, that being said, how do you know things like consistency of product, or timing of pick up or difficulty in repetition until you've done something a bunch of times. Therefore you have to stay flexible. This dish isnt working. The macaroni and cheese is too hard to cut in a ring mold. It gets too dry when it cooks. Ok, lets switch to bread pudding. You gotta be ready for things like that. And any chef worth his or her salt knows a few fall back on recipes for a money starch, protein or veg that they can count on when the going gets tough. Sometimes its also good to know a few cookbooks you can count on. Places where you trust the taste of the chef and know that when he or she writes a recipe, its going to come out perfect.
Speaking of which, the second week of work was all about the Sabor Festival and the Friday night dinner we hosted. The main course we were serving was to be a lamb 4 ways inspired by none other than Thomas Keller, who includes a pretty vague chef only description/recipe of lamb 4 ways in his bible, the French Laundry Cookbook.
We came in Monday for a big lamb butchering party. We had received 7 whole spring lamb from our main man Ricardo Vega the week before which had been patiently drying/dripping in the walk-in. First we removed the tenderloin so that it wouldn't get sliced or scarred in the less delicate processes. Next we pulled out all of the internal organs....kidney, livers, lungs, heart and gallbladder. We soaked the livers in milk to try to cut some of the gaminess and stored the rest for a family meal treat. We carefully cut off the front and hind legs conscientious to not lose any of the precious meat around the joints as these lamb only weighed between 20 and 25 pounds dressed (meaning without head and guts but with all of their bones) and we were hoping to feed 12 people with each (we would actually receive 2 more later in the week as our original limit of 80 people quickly jumped up to our absolute maximum capacity of 100). We then cut the neck away from the rest of the body and carefully removed the the loin (to be boned out later) with our trusty bone saw (a large hand held saw with a strong, sharp but somewhat flexible blade). We next cut across the ribs to make a double rack which we would later bring to the butcher shop to have the cut smoothed out with their large electric table bone saw as well as having them separate the rack from the chime. Frenching a rack of lamb is one of the more time consuming and fastidious parts of the boning process. Using a boning knife you cut across the rack at the level on the bone above which you plan on removing all fat, meat and sliver skin. You then score down the back side of each bone with the knife insuring that you cut through all of the silver skin. You then tear the meat and silver skin off the bone from back to front leaving nothing but clean bone on the top of the rack. If you never done it, trust me, its a project. Especially on 14 racks. We then made a stock from all of the bone and meat scraps which slowly simmered over night.
Tuesday, we trimmed up the legs and loins making sure to remove all silverskin, excess fat (which there is almost none on these baby lamb) and tough sinewy pieces. We also tried to shape the pieces to make them equal and visually appealing. This left us with a few pounds of usable scrap meat (from the 7 lamb) which we then ground to be made later into forcemeat. We braised the forelegs and necks in the lamb stock, browning them in a hot oven (they were too large and unwieldy to brown at all efficiently in a pan) before slowly simmering them in stock, red wine, thyme and bay leaf for 4 hours.
Wednesday, we picked the lamb meat from the front legs and neck and then reduced the stock they had cooked in for several hours to make a thick sauce known as a demiglace. Meanwhile we cut a small brunoise of carrots, zucchini and onion which were sweated in butter until soft. Once our stock reduction had reached a stage of gelatinousnous (check that word out Meredith) which we thought would bind our rilletes, we folded the picked meat into the demiglace along with the brunoise of vegetables and some thyme, chives and parsley. This meat mixture, which we decided to call lamb rilletes (although technically a rillete is cooked and served in its own fat I believe) was then rolled up in saran wrap into 16" tubes of about 11/2" in diameter. These would then be refrigerated for 24 hours during which time they would stiffen up enough to be cut into cakes.
We next removed the thigh bone from the rear lamb legs (this makes the legs easier to carve since you dont have to work around the femur bone, but you retain the juices by cooking the meat still attached to the shank bone) and smeared the inside with mustard. These legs were then marinated with olive oil, coarse ground black pepper, sliced white onions, thyme, rosemary and shaved garlic.
Thursday we made a forcemeat from the ground lamb by pureeing it with cream and a little bit of madiera, salt and pepper until we had a light fluffy mousse. We then piped this farce into our deboned and butterflied (when you cut across a piece of meat horizontally making it both twice as thin and twice as large in circumference) loins. We lay the tenderloin across the center and carefully rolled the entire package up (the tenderloin is now the centerpiece of this spiral) before wrapping the whole kitten caboodle three times in caul fat (caul fat is the a lacy web of fat that surrounds the intestines of a pig. It is commonly used in French charcuterie to envelop a meat that doesn't have enough fat itself and/or which needs some sort of wrapping to hold together. And if you think it is easy to find in Mexico you got another thing coming. Luckily, our boys at Nueva Aurora supersweet Carniceria were eventually able to understand our crazy descriptions and figure out what the hell the wierd gringos were talking about and then come through with some beautiful tela just in the nick of time). We also made 100 little flaky tartlette shells, 10 lbs of roasted garlic, lime, herb compound butter with which we would baste our Australian lobsters and 2 gallons of rose geranium pastry cream.
Friday, before service, we cut and breaded the rillete cakes with flour, egg and panko. Our 400 lobsters came in live the night before, so we had to clean them, cut them in half which was done with this cool bread knife stand which Ricardo found at an antique store, and then stuff each half with our "special" butter. We also cut a gallon and a half of tomato concassee (skinless seedless super suanee tomato cubes), pickfresh fruied through, washed and dried 3 kilos of organic baby arugula, piped and decorated 100 individual tartlettes with 3 kinds of ultrafresh berries from our friend in Michoacan. We made a Mexican version of a French spring vegetable medley with baby zuchini, braised baby carrots, cebollita onions, fava beans and cherry tomatoes as well as a basil oil to decorate the plates. We picked pansies, chive tips and thyme from our herb garden to use as garnish and made a rice wine vinaigrette to add some contrasting acid to our lobster plates.
The service itself involved one kitchen cranking out plates of 8 lime and roasted garlic butter drenched lobster halves roasted in a very high heat oven with a salad of tomato concassee and baby arugula. The other kitchen then created the lamb 4 ways entree.... searing the caul fat encased loins, grilling the unadorned beautiful baby racks, roasting the mustard and herb crusted legs and pan frying the rillete cakes. They carefully positioned one slice of each of these over a swash of puree of potato and fennel which held in place the "ratatouille" of baby vegetables. The plate was then sauced with some of the reduced lamb sauce and garnished with basil oil and thyme. Dessert followed....Individual fresh fruit tartlettes with geranium pastry cream and a drizzle of mesquite honey.
All in all a pretty nice meal for the high plains of central Mexico. Definitely a highlight of my career utilizing a lot of the skills, techniques and moves Ive acquired over the years. Unfortunately the pictures taken by all of the fancy professional photographers have yet to show up so in the meantime you will have to make do with what I got.
Finally, just a note that parts of this blog, as of this weekend, were officially published in one of the local newspapers, called the Atencion, in a column appropriately titled "Belly of the Beast".