Delancey Read online

  When whatever had broken was fixed, or when a repairman was assuredly on his way, Brandon would start prepping the pizza station. He would drain the tomatoes for sauce, grind the Grana in the food processor, slice mushrooms on the mandoline. That went on for a while, and then, around lunchtime, he would start portioning the three tubs of dough into 126 pizza-sized lumps and hand-shaping those lumps into 126 balls. In the beginning, it would take him three hours to weigh and shape them all. While he worked, he would prop his laptop on the shelf above his station and stream B-movies or second-string cable TV shows. Prison Break, he reported, is remarkably transporting when you’re a prisoner of dough.

  To be honest, I don’t know what I did all morning. But somehow, it would suddenly be lunchtime. I think I spent a lot of time cleaning. I was always cleaning something, because everything gets dirty in a restaurant. You wouldn’t believe how many people manage not only to spill their wine, but to spill it onto a wall. We didn’t know that when we chose a flat white paint for Delancey’s dining room. I can now tell you that red wine, hastily wiped up and left overnight, leaves a stain that looks a lot like a fresh bruise.

  I was also very busy obsessing over the glasses. There’s no reason to think about this unless you’ve worked in a restaurant, but every glass—wine, water, beer, or otherwise—that comes out of the dishwasher needs to be dried and polished by hand before being put on the shelf and used again. And you can’t polish them with just anything, because you don’t want to leave lint behind. You need to use a microfiber cloth, or a clean cloth napkin with a tight weave. And you have to wash your hands before you begin, even if your hands are technically clean, because you probably have just enough oil on them to leave fingerprints. And don’t forget to hold the glass up to the light as you’re wiping it, to check for smudges and residue and lint. On a busy night, nobody had time to exorcise their obsessive-compulsive disorder on the glasses, so sometimes, while Brandon tended to the dough, I would rewash and redry every glass in the restaurant.

  Then I would prep my station, running down a list of all the ingredients that I would need and washing, chopping, or otherwise preparing as much of them as I expected to use that evening. When we first opened, this would take all afternoon, even though I was responsible for only two or three salads and two desserts. I was a very slow prepper. I didn’t know how to work any faster. The truly tragic part is that my slowness created a vicious cycle: because I was slow, I could never prep quite enough, so by mid-service, I would run out of some ingredient and have to rush to prep more between orders. If the ingredient in question was cherry tomatoes, it was no big deal: they just had to be plopped into a strainer and held under the tap. But I was up a creek if it was foraged wild watercress, which cannot be prepped at any speed faster than plodding, lest you fail to notice a crumb-sized snail or worm or other streambed cargo on the underside of a leaf and only learn of it when the diner sends the entire salad back to the kitchen in disgust.

  In any case, once we were prepped and ready, or poorly prepped and somewhat ready, we’d serve our customers. We’d do that from 5 p.m. until the last table was seated around 10, which meant that we were finished cooking around 10:30 or 11. While we waited for the last customers to leave, Brandon might lie down and nap on the sacks of flour on the shelf under his station. Then we’d clean up, which meant packing up our leftover ingredients, wiping down and sanitizing the stations, and then sweeping and mopping. Sadistic dictators should equip their labor camps with pizzerias instead of cafeterias, because sweeping and mopping the room where a person has been tossing flour-dusted pizza dough for five hours is the purest form of punishment I know.

  Finally, around midnight, we would start making the next day’s dough. This required musical accompaniment, or else we would fall asleep. Most nights, we would put on an album by the band Elvis Perkins in Dearland and turn it up loud. (The opening song began, “Sweep up, little sweeper boy, sweep up.” I felt a real affinity with that boy.) I would weigh out the yeast, salt, water, and flour while Brandon operated the mixer, and when one batch was done, we would do it again a second time, and then a third time. Then I would sweep some more, because there would be a whole new layer of stuff on the floor.

  When I would tell people about what our days were like then, they would often say that it sounded a lot like having a newborn baby. Not having had one, I only sort of knew what they meant, but I remember being comforted by the idea anyway, by the sense that other people understood—and even more, by the knowledge that, even when everything went wrong, at least the restaurant, and the dough, always slept through the night.

  STONE FRUIT WITH PROSCIUTTO AND MOZZARELLA

  That summer and fall at Delancey, between prep work and other tasks, Brandon and I would often build a quick cold lunch around whatever we found in the refrigerators: one stray plum, let’s say, or the last handful of arugula, or a sample of salami sent by one of our vendors. My favorite of these lunches—and one I’ve repeated many times since—was a composed salad assembled from a cold, perfect nectarine, the last of a leg of prosciutto, a hunk of fresh mozzarella, and plenty of our best olive oil. You could make a similar dish with any stone fruit or melon, of course, and with any kind of cured ham, but what follows is my loose version. Feel free to use more or less of any ingredient, depending on what you’ve got.

  1 ripe nectarine, pitted

  1 ball of fresh mozzarella

  6 to 8 thin slices of prosciutto

  A small handful of fresh parsley, mint, or basil leaves (optional)

  A fistful of arugula (optional)

  A squeeze of fresh lemon juice (optional)

  Olive oil

  Crunchy salt, such as Maldon or fleur de sel

  Bread

  * * *

  Slice the nectarine thin, so you wind up with about a dozen slices. Divide the slices between two plates. (Or, if two plates sounds like a lot of work, use one small platter and share it. That’s what we did.) Tear the mozzarella into bite-sized nubs, and scatter them over the slices of nectarine. Tear the prosciutto into bite-sized pieces, and drape them over the top. If you’d like, scatter some fresh herbs or arugula around the plate, too, and maybe squeeze a little lemon juice over them. Finally, give each plate a generous drizzle of olive oil, and salt to taste. Serve with plenty of bread for mopping up the juices.

  Yield: 2 servings

  17

  It is a very nice thing to be your own boss, presuming that you know how to do your job. But I knew almost nothing about co-owning a restaurant, and only a little more than that about cooking in one.

  I was a slow prepper, and I was a slow pantry cook. My job was to plate cold dishes, which meant salads and most desserts. Pantry cooks are sometimes also in charge of hot dishes that can be quickly rewarmed and plated, with little actual cooking involved. The station requires organization and precision, like every station in a professional kitchen, but it’s not considered difficult. In most restaurants, pantry cook—or garde manger in the classic French kitchen—is an entry-level position, one that does not come with a lot of cachet or require the ability to tell if a steak is medium rare just by looking at it. When (or, rather, if ever) you find a pantry cook on a reality TV show about restaurants, he or she will not be presented as a tattooed badass with a hot girlfriend.

  I understood all of that. I’d worked the pantry station during my restaurant internship in college, though that had been ten years earlier. Also, the internship was only eight weeks long, and the other cooks had made it exceptionally easy. Cakes, compotes, ice creams, and anything else on the dessert menu was prepared by the pastry chef: all I had to do was slice or scoop. If I was to plate a hot dish—a chickpea stew, let’s say—it would be waiting in a chafing dish when I arrived. If I needed to slice kumquats for a salad, someone would tell me exactly how much to prep. I didn’t have to guess, and I never ran out mid-service. I figured the other cooks were just being nice, trying to ease me in gently. Now I get it: they were trying to sav
e themselves some trouble. Any mistakes the newbie made would probably fall to them to fix, so they might as well babysit her from the outset.

  In order to run my station at Delancey, I had to first buy enough of each ingredient to serve a given night’s diners. I’ve made plenty of grocery lists, but scaling up to restaurant dimensions struck me as nearly impossible to do without consulting a psychic. There’s no way to know how many diners will come in or how many of each menu item they will order. One way to handle the situation would be to buy a lot of everything, Costco-style. But a restaurant is trying to make a profit, and a home cook is not. Food waste in a home kitchen is lamentable, but food waste in a restaurant kitchen can be fatal. Also, because we didn’t have a walk-in, refrigerator space was tight. (Actually, space in general was tight. While fresh tomatoes and peppers were in season, we stored cases of them under a bookshelf by the front door because there was no room in the kitchen.) The fact that I ever figured out how to buy for my station is due entirely to our friend Olaiya, who looked over our menus for the soft opening and walked me through a calculation of each ingredient quantity, stopping just short of holding my hand. Once I had made it through the soft opening, I had a decent idea of what I would need each night. Of course, that didn’t mean that I would be able to get it washed, chopped, and otherwise prepped before the doors opened. I never really mastered that part.

  I also knew very little about the flow of a restaurant kitchen during service. When a server takes a table’s order, that information has to be transferred somehow to the kitchen, and to the relevant cook. Telepathy would be fastest, but most restaurants use point-of-sale computer systems. The server taps in her orders on a screen at the edge of the dining room, and the orders show up, a second later, on tickets that spit from a small printer in the kitchen. It’s a tidy system, but it has its problems: namely, no one ever has to talk to, or even look at, anyone else. When an order gets messed up, it’s easy for the staff to split along team lines, the front of the house versus the back of the house.

  This tendency is rooted, I think, in industry-wide discrepancies between what cooks earn and what servers earn. Cooks work longer hours than servers, but almost without exception, they make less money. Many states have tried to alleviate the problem by creating a lower minimum wage for tipped employees like servers, but that helps only so much, because tips can still tip (har har) the balance. And then there are states like Washington, where the minimum wage is the same across the board—and, as of this writing, the highest in the country. Brandon and I have taken our own steps to try to equalize pay at Delancey, giving our cooks above-average wages plus a share of the nightly tips, but a server at Delancey can still wind up taking home more than a cook.

  In any case, we wanted to use a computerized order system. It simplifies accounting and a whole bunch of other tasks that we’re bad at. But we also wanted to cultivate a pleasant working environment. We didn’t want our staff to wind up treating each other, or us, like rivals in a National Hockey League game.

  About a month before the soft opening, we ran into Renee, one of the owners of Boat Street, and when I mentioned my uncertainties about working in the kitchen at Delancey, she invited me to observe her kitchen at Boat Street one night. I arrived around two in the afternoon and, trying to be useful, busied myself with pitting a giant bag of Montmorency sour cherries from a tree in Renee’s yard (!) while I watched the cooks set up for the evening. When the diners began to arrive, I noticed something: there was no printer in the kitchen. The printer was in the dining room, next to the computer terminal, a good fifteen or twenty paces from the kitchen. Each time a server entered a new order, she had to grab the ticket herself, walk the ticket all the way back to the kitchen, announce it to the relevant cook, and lay it down on a designated table. It was inconvenient for the servers, but conveniently, it meant that they spent a lot of time with the cooks—dropping off, picking up, checking in, and, inevitably, chatting. That was when I figured out why Boat Street feels the way it does: like any good dinner party, everybody winds up hanging out in the kitchen.

  So we bought only one printer for Delancey, and it sits next to the bar. It’s not an ideal setup; when a server has an order for the pantry station, she must carefully escort it past the wood-burning oven, risking an accidental jabbing from the long handle of Brandon’s peel as he retrieves a pizza. At the outset, we weren’t sure whether it would be the secret to our success or an instant worker’s compensation lawsuit. But I am pleased, if somewhat surprised, to report that no one has been injured. Whether by luck or by design, the system works, and the cooks and servers not only talk to one another but actually seem to like one another.

  * * *

  In mid-September, we decided that we could afford to hire a prep cook. Jared quit his other job and came to work for us full-time, picking up three morning prep shifts in addition to his three nights. This meant that, most mornings, Brandon could now go in around eleven, and I could go in sometime between noon and two, depending on the day’s prep list. We would still get home very late, but we were getting more sleep. It also helped that now we knew what to expect. In the beginning, I would be mopping the kitchen floor after the last customer had gone home, thinking, I can’t believe I have to mop this stupid, stupid, stupid floor. Why does pizza have to be so messy? Why is pizza so STUPID? Maybe if I impale myself on this broom handle, I can go to the hospital, and MAYBE THERE I CAN ACTUALLY GET SOME SLEEP. But after we had a prep cook, and after a few weeks had gone by, I began to think, Right. Here I am again, mopping the floor at one in the morning. This is what I do now. The restaurant was dependent on us, and it wasn’t going to stop depending on us. But we could begin to adjust, and we could begin to find ways, like hiring Jared to work more shifts, to make it adjust to us.

  And it wasn’t like Delancey was a constant grind. There was more to it than that. It was the hardest work I had ever done, physically and otherwise, but sometimes I’d be standing at my station, absorbed in a task, when I’d suddenly think, I KNEW IT! I wasn’t supposed to be a writer! I’m supposed to be a cook! I’m supposed to help run this restaurant! Ding ding ding!

  I was learning. We were learning. I asked Susan the Oracle about her bookkeeping system at Boat Street, and she invited me in to watch her process a day’s receipts. Sitting next to her in the cramped back office, hunched over spreadsheets and files, I was so overwhelmed that I cried. Susan and I are not the kind of friends who comfortably get weepy together, but she patted my shoulder. Back at Delancey, Brandon and I sat down and hashed out our own system. Together we worked out tip-sharing percentages for the staff, and then I taught myself how to do payroll. Only the first three times did I come close to screaming. I now do payroll every other Monday, using my TI-85 graphing calculator from high school trigonometry. I get to make charts and fill in boxes and make neat bundles of receipts and nightly tallies. Like fetishes and pet names, this kind of loaded information is perhaps best reserved for intimates, but I really, really like doing payroll.

  And once the initial panic wore off, there was a lot to like about professional cooking. I might never have survived as a pantry cook in another chef’s kitchen, but at Delancey, there was no one to report to except myself and Brandon and our customers. The food we were serving was the kind of stuff that we wanted to eat ourselves, the kind we like to make at home. We were using great ingredients, keeping it straightforward, trying to make every bite as good as possible. Why make things complicated when it’s hard enough to do simple things well? I’ve never been drawn to restaurants where every menu item has a dozen different flavors going on, the kind of place that serves a dish like Grilled Entrecote Steak and Charred Red Onions with Caramelized Turnips, Tarragon-Spinach-Potato-Cheddar Gratin, and Cabernet Grape Reduction (an actual dish I saw on a menu recently). When we opened, our menu had two starters: a salad of spiky wild arugula from the farmers’ market, with radishes, shaved Grana Padano, and a Champagne vinaigrette; and the sliced tomato salad from our
soft opening, with kernels of sweet corn, basil leaves, and shallot vinaigrette. After that, there were eight pizzas, and then three desserts: a chocolate chip cookie, a raspberry popsicle in a shot glass, and sliced peaches in white wine.

  Brandon’s job was, of course, to obsess over the middle portion of the menu, the pizza. My job was to obsess over everything else. Obsession is a job I know how to do. Each tomato salad started with a whole, sliced beefsteak tomato, and because there would be no way to fix it if the tomato was insipid or mealy, I tasted a sliver from each one as I sliced it. I probably ate the equivalent of a tomato a night, meted out in quarter-sized portions. When an order for a popsicle would come in, I’d pull it out of the freezer and dip it cautiously into a tub of warm water, like a reluctant swimmer, until it was defrosted just enough that the diner could twist the stick and ease the popsicle out of its holder. When the arugula started to wane and we switched to butter lettuce with a red wine vinaigrette, I found that I loved, and I mean loved, plating it: making sure each square centimeter of each lettuce leaf was lightly and evenly coated in dressing and then stacking them, largest leaf on the bottom to smallest leaf on top, like a child’s nesting blocks. Nothing about my life looked the way it had a few months earlier, but I could make a salad that looked really, really nice.

  For the first two or three months, there was no sign outside the restaurant, because we hadn’t gotten around to having Sam, who is a designer, do a logo. But we talked about it a lot, the same way we talked about making a stamp of the logo and stamping the top of each menu in orange-red ink, to match the paint color of the pendant lights in the dining room. But until we had that logo, I wrote delancey by hand on every menu every night. I was usually getting to the task around 4:59 p.m., as the line of customers began to fidget out front, and each time I would finish a half-dozen or so menus, one of the servers would run them to the host, so that she could hand them out as she seated the tables. Sometimes my mind would wander midway through the stack and I’d lose my ability to spell. But I liked it, and Brandon did, too—the idea that, like pretty much everything in the place, we were even making the menus by hand. When we did finally get around to doing some signage, we decided to scrap the logo plan and just use my handwriting, blown up and painted on the front window. We still have no stamp, though I’m working on it.