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
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