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Restaurant Relics and Recipes part 1

In search of culinary artifacts from the ephemeral meals served in Bay Area restaurants today, I started an archeological dig, and uncovered a mountain of records and relics: Craig Stoll’s “brain” diagrams of mise en place scribbled by nervous new cooks, and chef’s plating illustrations. Like searching through an ancient shell mound, I found water-resistant tags, once attached to shellfish deliveries, piled up next to order sheets, annotated menus, and partial recipes scrawled with a Sharpie – each recipe written in the restaurant’s regional dialect.

As I deciphered the hieroglyphics of kitchen-speak, I found some to be distinct to a specific kitchen while others combine a wide range of influences. A printout from the “Zuni Recipes” computer file lists “1 c. mirepoix.” This translates to modern cookbook language as “one eight-cup leftover ricotta container filled with a ¼" dice of equal parts carrots, onions, and celery.” Dennis Leary, chef-owner of Canteen, writes recipes in a generalized familiar kitchen language: a combination of English, Spanish, French and baker’s terms. A single scrap of paper might list ingredients as: “huevos, sel, AP, azucar, BP, lait, and monteguilla.” All common kitchen words, Leary uses any combination he likes because he does most of the cooking himself at Canteen.

At Ajanta, I found a clipboard with tattered recipes. The ingredients are measured in “spoons,” referring to a karachi serving spoon. “Fry” is used instead of “sauté,” but the names of all spices are left in their original Indian languages. Lachu Moorjani, a successful cookbook author, created this version of English specifically for his cooks because they all come from different places (South India, Punjab, Pakistan, Mexico) and don’t share a common native language.

“Greens runs like an airport,” Executive chef Annie Somerville likes to say. The amount of detail and legibility of a restaurant’s recipes is generally determined by how far removed the chef is from personally cooking each dish. Labeled binders full of detailed recipes in plastic sleeves fill a whole shelf in the upstairs office at Greens: Grilled Apps; Lasagna and Cannelloni; Griddle Cakes; Soups; Tomato Soups; Potato and Winter Squash Soups; Tarts; Stews and Ragouts; Crepes and Enchiladas; Risotto, Pasta, Ravioli and Gnocchi; Filo Turnovers and Timbales; and Gratins. The oldest yellowed recipes are handwritten on a form, photocopied so many times the headings are barely legible. In the early ’80’s, Greens got an IBM Selectric typewriter. Then the recipes evolve through a dot matrix phase, to the current Laser Jet. Handwritten notes between the lines, in margins, and on sticky notes show further recipe evolution. The completed recipes that I found in restaurants, unlike cookbook recipes, usually read the way a cook on the hot line works: with prep out of the way, the recipe quickly lists essential steps with instructions “to order” or “to finish.”

My careful digging paid off when I hit a vein at Masa’s and piles of recipe shards spilled forth. Some of Gregory Short’s most precious recipes are on ten-year-old sticky notes. Early notebooks contain the neat, nervous details of a new cook working for Thomas Keller: cooking instructions (“season salmon and cook skin side down first!”) are preceded by a map of Short’s mise en place setup at his poissonier station. Like most chefs, with experience, he quickly began to rely on his cooking knowledge rather then detailed recipes. Fragments of paper with quickly scratched lists of ingredients fill the “notes” portion of an old business checkbook and the stray pages from an unbound Moleskine notebook that suffered kitchen abuse. Some of Short’s detailed recipes remain on Thomas Keller’s “Menu Item Worksheets” written out in full detail under the headings: Ingredients, Equipment, Technique, Variations.

The hill of remnants that I sifted through at Delfina amounted to a Rosetta Stone of kitchen artifacts. Craig Stoll transfers the contents of his brain directly onto scraps of paper in the unfiltered language in which he thinks. A page in a legal pad contains shorthand recipes mixed in with menu planning notes: “Ragu Napolitana–Pork Riblets, Braciola, Riggalare bene, Add 1 btl. Vino, ½ onion, passatod pomodoro. Cook 1½ hours. Basil, Salt. Or Sausage, meatballs.” His pizza recipe can be traced back to a travel notebook in which he wrote a timeline of everything he did working at a pizzeria in Napoli, the names of all of his coworkers and the fact that they only put four basil leaves on a pizza. The scraps of paper that make up Stoll’s “Brain” are cut from old menus as the side work of one of Delfina’s employees. Stoll doesn’t like the waste involved with sticky notes. Reading his notes is a random, stream-of-consciousness encyclopedia of every aspect of running a restaurant: “Alla vecchia maniera (a reminder to do things in the old style); Season early; Use the knob on the stove (a reminder to cooks not to seer on too high a heat–lower it and get some carmelization in all the nooks and crannies); Don’t dump stuff down the drain; New cheese yuck; Make a cherry chocolate cannoli; Plant bougainvillea.”

My archeological rummaging took place when the restaurants were closed. As I sat in an unlit dining room with chairs upended on the surrounding tables, and stacks of papers before me instead of a plate, I imagined what I might have tasted.

Reading his notes, I join Steve Jaramillo for another imaginary meal as he sits down with a glass of wine to wind down after work at Lalime’s. He flips through favorite cookbooks, jots down a few page numbers, ingredients, times and temperatures, and we are part of the reverie of tomorrow night’s meal.

Restaurant Relics and Recipes part 2

Romantic visions of chef’s logs befitting a pirate captain filled my head as I began my archeological dig through the food stained piles of paper records of meals served in contemporary restaurants. I imagined finding well-worn leather notebooks filled with secret recipes, future menus, and personal accounts of feasts in distant lands. But the treasure chests I unearthed contained hastily scrawled, barely legible notes written on check stubs, frayed binder paper, pieces of old menus, and post-it notes. I sat in empty dining rooms looking over what seemed like plates of gristle, bone, and shells, as if I had missed the feast. Then, careful study of the artifacts revealed insights into the production and creative process of the culinary arts.

The “red book” (the At-A-Glance Standard Diary) is the closest thing I found to my illusionary chef’s log. At Masa’s, it serves as a less romanticized business record and tool for communication between staff on different shifts. An entry by chef Gregory Short: “Soup—chix consommé, fried thyme. Canapé—miso black cod wakame. Reservations, started—74; finished—74. 19—6 course; 22—9 course; 33 à la carte. 1—8 top want a 9 course. Rugged first seating, lots of changes on stations, then smooth sailing.” There are occasional inventory or menu notes between chef and sous chef. Short began keeping a “red book” after working for Thomas Keller, who uses his “red book” to look back at the previous year’s weather and number of covers each night. At Foreign Cinema, the diary is used as the manager’s log. It focuses more on front-of-the-house business, with notes on service, complaints and how they were resolved, wait times, and staff issues. Each entry also lists the number of covers, weather, and total sales. The chefs read the conversations between different shift managers and add their own comments.

Chefs tend to abandon their logs quickly, and those that remain are thin. Lalime’s chef Steve Jaramillo’s notebook starts out with plating diagrams for each course of a New Year’s meal, then quickly digresses to barely legible sentence fragments. Zuni chef Judi Rodgers says simply, “Notes don’t make the food good.” Although she instinctively commits things to writing, she rarely looks back at the loose sheets of random paper that she stashes in various drawers. She explains that it is much more important to have interest, passion, and pay attention to the food, rather then writing long descriptions of it. Her notes become more succinct each year because there is less that is new.

Handwritten, but fleeting, guest checks are used at Masa’s instead of a computer ordering system, which doesn’t accommodate the variables on the menu and personal information that servers note. The dessert orders are written on the back of pieces of old menu. These are all tossed at the end of the night with one exception. A small art gallery in the pastry kitchen called Pepe’s Corner is dedicated to a server who draws caricatures of coworkers on checks, which he delivers with the announcement “ordering.”

Inside Masa’s pastry kitchen, chef Keith Jeanminete keeps a five-tier system of production notes in a 4" x 5" spiral-bound notebook. Every two weeks he uses up a notebook making daily lists for: himself, his assistant, the ice cream and candy assistant, tomorrow’s tasks, and a list of ideas for future projects that he usually thinks up in the parking lot of the market in the morning. Keith says, “If the writing starts at the top of the page and goes on to the back, I can’t waste a second.” His assistants understand his succinct language of words and symbols: cut high clouds, puff stix, green tea mix/foam, panna shots, coins, prep rice rings, shiso honey,  (attn. pastry assistant), ∅ (attn. ice cream assistant), * (come ask me). They respond with their own language on the masking tape labels on food storage containers: “Popeye’s girlfriend” means it’s full of olive oil sorbet.

Most chefs prefer to develop new dishes hands-on with their cooks. At Chez Panisse, a week’s worth of instructions from the pastry chef, and the pastry assistant’s end of shift comments, all fit in the margins of a single menu page. As Chris Cosentino of Incanto puts it, “Why plan a menu ahead of time if, when I go to market in the morning, I’m not going to find a goat?” One artifact that remains from menu planning is Lachu Moorjani’s “matrix.” A former engineer with an MBA in finance, Moorjani likes to keep track of the one appetizer and three specials that he changes each month. His graphs, started in 1996 and written in ballpoint pen on the back of used financial print-outs, list Appetizer, Lamb, Specialty Meat, Chicken, Seafood, and Vegetarian categories to insure variety in the rotation of new dishes.

Craig Stoll likes to convey more to his cooks at Delfina than is possible with a hastily-drawn sketch in a notebook. A diagram of his risotto’s beautiful simplicity, with bits of white asparagus in a white bowl with no garnish, would look like dots in a circle. Instead, he might tape a picture of a dish of pasta that he had in Italy to the shelf in front of a cook’s station to show the proper amount of sauce to use, or the correct depth of color for the cuttlefish ink. He uses travel photos and personal instruction to show how to ribbon the lardo on the plate to give it volume without fussiness, how to chunk parmesan, and how to stop twisting greens to be tall on the plate like CCA (California Culinary Academy) teaches.

“The most inspired person in the kitchen is the one who just got back from a trip,” says Michael Tusk of Quince. Rather then writing in a journal when he travels, he collects menus, scraps of butcher paper, business cards, and bills from meals. Looking at a bill that simply lists the number of antipasti, primi piatti, secondi piatti, contorni, and formaggi that he ordered, he can describe the details of his whole meal, because “if it’s really good, I remember the flavors” without an ingredients list. A former art history major, he’ll “throw out a Mondrian reference when instructing cooks in plating zucchini and tomatoes,” or play with the positive and negative space on the plate like a Henry Moore sculpture. He thinks of Cézanne when apples are around, and Rothko when harmonizing various colors of pepper purée. The difference, Tusk says, between making art and food is the camaraderie in the kitchen.

Dennis Leary of Canteen, a former literature major, who writes a combination menu plan/ inventory/shopping/food-prep list all on the back of an old menu, also mentions the teamwork in the kitchen. But he lists commercial considerations and perishability as major influences that make execution of the culinary arts radically different from its inspiration. To him, writing is a contemplative, cerebral process and cooking is mostly action—more of a craft involving repetitive reworking and an element of cunning. He used to take notes when dining in restaurants but now he sees familiar patterns in food and prefers to be in the kitchen, without outside influence, to see what he comes up with from a mess of raw ingredients. When he has an ingredient to use up, he looks through old classic cookbooks, relatives’ recipes, and searches the web. He adds spices, changes proportions, and makes the recipe his own. “Most people aren’t going to make it everyday for three weeks like I will,” he says. “But sometimes the first day is the best.”

Chef Gayle Pirie of Foreign Cinema, a painter and a former art history major, compares the process of writing a new menu every night to a jazz riff “bouncing off notes you know and putting ingredients in a logical, poetic place.” She begins by looking around the walk-in and finding four containers of perfect ingredients to make that day’s soup, reads the closing cook’s “night note,” and continues by receiving new orders, writing notes on her hand, a napkin, or old menu while rushing up and down the stairs, ending up with a seasonal variation on the previous night’s menu. She says her painting informs everything. “If you’re comfortable with a blank canvas, one thing leads to another, which leads to another.” Each plate is a composition, and each piece of food has a beautiful side and an ugly side.

My search for artistic chef’s logs was like studding an x-ray of a painting masterpiece for clues to the creative process: the scraps of paper with sentence fragments that I unearthed were like the layers of ghostly images roughly sketched underneath the final composition. The absence of records isn’t for lack of artists, writers, musicians, or even pirate captains in the kitchen. It is because, as Pirie puts it, “Cooking is more spontaneous than art because it all has to be done by 5 o’clock.”

This is part two of Restaurant Relics and Recipes found in the Fall 2006 Edible San Francisco
Cleo Papanikolas is the author and illustrator of Cook Until Desired Tenderness. www.cleops.net