As the days go by...

It's been quite a while since my last posting to the blog. None too many notable events have taken place in that time, but there have certainly been some profound changes to how things are rolling along in the kitchen. Since the bulk of my "staff" is just one other person and that person is relatively new (see earlier posting "The Search"), then you might say I have turned over my whole brigade and started fresh. It definitely seems that way. With the addition of a culinary school extern to the team for a short while, you might also say that my staff has doubled in size. The most obvious affect this has had on my life in the kitchen is an opportunity to take a little more personal time. I've been able to take off a little early on certain nights and even made plans to be out of town for an upcoming holiday weekend. When the extern had first arrived and proved to be competent enough for line cooking I was actually leaving early every night. This proved a bad idea, as I became very bored and had to pencil myself back into a cooking shift a few nights a week. I still do a fair amount of dish washing, but did you really expect me to give that up so easily?

With every new staff member my approach to management has evolved a bit, and with a near complete turnover such as the one mentioned above it has taken a leap, so to speak. This is due largely in part to the abilities and attitude of the new employees. I consider choosing those people over all the other applicants as one way in which I've become more competent over time. In the beginning I lacked the confidence required to run a kitchen efficiently. I certainly got the job done but little details were overlooked or forgotten. Those details are the difference between a great restaurant and all the others. When you are too busy or overwhelmed to notice or care that a few sesame seeds fell into your salt so are now scattered randomly in everything you season with salt (which I hope is everything, but at that point who the hell knows?), that means your priorities are not straight. It's a situation that even the best can find themselves in and I would argue that if you've never been there, you can't truly know the difference between "getting it done" and "getting it done right." Even with my dedication to getting things done the right way only, I was unable to deliver on that promise early in the game. My menu, schedule and general approach to organization were not as efficient as they could be. lacking confidence, the process of creating a dish became collaborative with everyone in the kitchen because I always had this nagging feeling that whatever idea I had must be wrong in some way. Don't get me wrong: input from your staff is great, but not when you are seeking their approval rather than fielding new ideas. As my staff has changed and I've been able to build confidence, the entire energy in the kitchen has shifted. For one, the menu and schedule and pretty much all the day to day minutiae has been revamped for greater efficiency. I know it sounds boring and unimportant, but picture for a second if you will the amount of energy and passion wasted when you are stressed out for whatever reason. Never underestimate the importance of working in a cool, calm and collected environment. The old cliche that professional kitchens are high stress environments and "if you can't handle that then get the fuck out," is totally bunk! Certainly pressure will bring out the best a cook has to offer, but it can't be external pressure derived from fear. It has to come from the inside. A cook has to use their own desire to perform well as a means for upping the ante. Stress and fear sap that ability. It has become my mantra to create the most stress free environment possible. Other things begin to fall into place. My increased confidence in dishes created has in turn given the cooks more confidence in those dishes. They have more desire to reproduce them well, more inward pressure to please the chef and themselves. Most importantly their vision is not clouded and their passion not sapped by yelling, cursing and fear mongering. Let the old kitchen cliches go and I promise you'll see more clearly...

Pablo's wisdom...

Earlier today I was reading an article in Meat Paper that made reference to the factory farming objective of breeding pigs to be more lean than fat (boo! but that's not what this post is about). It seems that early on in the process scientists had achieved the goal of creating a rapid growing, muscular pig that made farmers and agribiz tons of money, but there was one problem. The pigs were randomly dropping dead. Rather than recognizing the omen, they pressed on to try and figure out what might be causing these spot occurrences of porcine demise. It turns out that stress was the culprit. An outwardly invisible genetic trait that is commonly associated with leanness was making the pigs so highly susceptible to stress that the slightest noise - a stiff wind, backfiring tractor, errant oink, or frolicking siblings in the hayloft above - would send the herd into a contagious panic that would leave some short of breath and, well....dead. This delightfully macabre image got me to thinking...

The restaurant is a fast paced and stressful environment. It's been clear to me for some time that success of an individual lies not as much with intelligence and physical prowess as it does with the ability to cope with pressure. In other words, some of the finest cooks, servers and bartenders I've known have only one thing in common: they are cool under pressure. In his book, Blink, Malchom Gladwell writes about how our heart rate spikes when we are under pressure and that there is a range of beats per minute where our performance of the act at hand improves greatly. Sharper focus, prioritising movement, split second decisions and the like. Beyond that peak range we begin to break down. Things go out of focus, our movements become clumsy, and little makes sense. While reading that I remembered images of cooks looking from a rail stuffed with tickets to me and saying, "I don't know where the hell we are anymore!?" And yes...I humbly remember myself being in that situation many times before. In fact, the first kitchen job I ever had was an over-taxed pantry station in a very busy restaurant. I worked with this guy Pablo, who told me in my first week there, "just don't get angry while you're working. If you get angry, it's all over." That moment still ranks as one of the most memorable and certainly one of the most important lessons I've learned during my career. Over time and with much practice, I believe it's possible to train one's self to operate in the range of improved performance. Much like the spontaneously dying pigs, we can selectively eliminate our propensity for falling to pieces and move towards a state of mind that stays together most of the time, no matter how badly rattled it gets. More to the point, though is that stress is contagious. In making the transition from cook to chef I realized that how I act in the kitchen when we are busy is central to how everyone else performs, and in a restaurant so small, the entire house is affected one way or the other. There is no cook bad-ass enough to save a chef who spins in circles when the tickets start to dangle from the printer. The frazzled state of mind one person is in while busy can easily drag others along with it. That being said, I think the opposite is true. Calmness and focus can trickle down to the people around you and make even the busiest service seem like that well oiled machine we always hear about. Sure, it sounds a little new-agey, but I've found that staying calm and collected has gotten me out of more tight spots than I care to remember being in. These days, when I feel myself getting close to imploding on the line it's always the result of being overcome by stress, not because it's "too busy," or someone else fucked up the seating. I feel more confident now than I did in the past and it's easier now to pull myself back into focus. Those are the moments when life in the dish pit seems pretty attractive to me. It is the one place where I have come close to mastering the zen-like concentration I'm trying to describe above. Luckily, I get to spend time there regularly these days...