Product. Passion & Salt.

I have steaks on the grill as I write this.  I’m going to turn them, again, in a couple of minutes.  So wait… “The French” say that you should always sear a steak to seal in the juices, and turn them only once.  The logic is that since the juices (blood) move away from the source of heat they will rise to the upper half of the steak.  By turning them once, you now have the juices (blood) on the bottom half.  Perfection is achieved when the juices return to center.  Now, take them off the heat, put them on a rack and let them rest at least ten minutes.  THIS IS CRITICAL.  The rack keeps the steak off of a flat surface that would in effect keep cooking the meat.  The resting does magic.  It allows the meat to reabsorb the juices and ‘relax’.  It’s quite amazing, this resting phase, and critical.

Except this logic is flawed.

When Chef Guenter Seeger took me under his wing, he had ideas and techniques that ran quite contrary to what I had been taught.  For example he would take a nicely seasoned venison tenderloin steak and put it into a cold pan with a dab of butter and a smidgeon of grape seed oil.  A cold pan?  Stupid German, doesn’t he know the basics?  As the pan heated up he would turn the steak over, baste it, turn it again, baste it, and again and again.  Since the heat source kept changing, there was no place for the juices (blood) to go so they stayed put and cooked the meat from within.  Now, instead of driving the juices away and reabsorbing what you could, you kept all of the juice and flavor and ended up with a tender, melt in your mouth delight.  Who knew?

What I’ve really described here is rotisserie cooking.  Think about it.  A chicken on a spit slowly turns in front of the fire.  The juices stay inside and leave you with a succulent bird.  Again, letting the bird sit for 10-20 minutes does a world of good.  It finishes the cooking process.  When you roast your turkey this year, let that puppy rest a good half hour before carving.  You’ll impress.

Oh, another thing.  The flavor of a steak is in the juice, and fat.  I watch all these folks at Sam’s Club pick out the lean ribeye steaks, leaving the marbled ones for me.  Thank you so much.  Then, cook it rare plus.  Rare plus.  What the hell is that?  Somehow the new generation of cooks got off track on their temps.  If I order a steak rare, it comes out raw.  If I order it medium rare, it comes out medium.  I want it between rare and medium rare please.

I once sat on a panel with noted food writer John Mariani where we discussed the evolution of food. John got up and said “I have seldom met a dish that wouldn’t benefit from the removal of two or three ingredients”. I noted that if you took two or three ingredients off of my plate, you would have a plate.

As Coco Chanel famously said, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.”

I ventured afar recently with my mother, now 88.  We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that has been getting lots and lots of ‘blog press’.  I had a crab cake, moist with a crust, that was quite good, served on a piece of toasted thick bread.  $14, no sides.  But hey, good crabmeat is not cheap.  Heck, bad crabmeat is not cheap.

My mom wanted a hot dog, which luckily they had.  It claimed to be a Kobe dog, which meant nothing to Mom.  She wanted a hot dog.  It was brought out on a bun, on a plate.  No garnish, no chips, no pickle, just a naked dog on a bun.  $9.  When Mom asked for some diced onion she was told they didn’t have any.  Any what?  No onion in the kitchen or none diced?

Oh, and the waitress took our order while holding a stack of dirty dishes from another table.

Is there a lesson here or is this just what’s become of our industry?  As I told one stunned magazine owner, you do more harm praising a poor restaurant than you do dissing a great one.  The great restaurant will continue putting out great food and service at a fair price while elsewhere the standards get lower when you heap praise on mediocrity.

When asked how his day was going, he replied

“I’m sorry to say that today, mediocrity rules.”

Chef Rene Ryckenbusch 1979

Most people wear some kind of uniform at work.  Or school.  Maybe it’s a suit, a white shirt and a length of colored ribbon knotted around the neck, maybe it’s high heels and makeup.  For me, it’s jeans and Lucchese boots (although I have recently begun wearing Birks.  So sue me.)

I’ve been wearing jeans pretty much exclusively for over 45 years.   I got married in jeans in ’76.   In fact, it’s probably not a stretch to say that being able to be myself and not having to wear a suit or tie was a major factor in my choosing to become a cook.  It was definitely a factor in my choosing Memphis State for my freshman year of college as the other schools I applied to back in 1970 did not allow jeans on campus.  Seriously.

But I digress.

I wear jeans and do not own a pair of ‘slacks’.  It has become a point of pride.  So when I went to Las Vegas to interview for a job there I wore jeans.  I met the Executive ‘Chef’ and the vice president of Food and Beverage, then the Vice President in charge of restaurant development,  and then I met the President of the entire operation, all the while wearing jeans.  Finally I was invited into the inner sanctum to meet the owner.  I was wearing jeans.  And so it went.  I got the job.  In fact, I got a restaurant named after me.

A couple of months later we moved to Las Vegas and I reported to work at an off-site office building, as the hotel/casino was under construction.  On my first day the chef comes up to me and says “Sorry Jimmy, but you can’t wear jeans here”.

I felt as if my whole world was crumbling.

I noted that in seven interviews I wore jeans.  His reply: “When you open the restaurant you can wear jeans.  But here in the offices, you can’t.  Simple as that.”

So I went home to tell Stacey not to unpack our shit:  It looks like we’re going back to the East coast.  “You are not quitting this job over jeans!”  There was a tone in her voice that I had only heard once or twice in our marriage.

This sucks.

So I compromised on my scruples, my integrity and my identity and bought a pair of black Dockers.  For seven months I would ride my motorcycle to work wearing my jeans, go to my cubicle, open the drawer, pull out my Dockers and change, hoping nobody important would walk by.

I’m still trying to understand why that job didn’t work out……

Joe thinks I’m a dick.

He’s wrong.

Joe is the chef/owner of a nice little restaurant in town.  My wife and I had dinner there a few weeks back.  Joe came out to say hi, which was nice since I had never met him before.  Or so I thought.

Joe noted that I had done a few guest dinners at the Ryland Inn in White House, NJ where my friend Craig Shelton was the chef.  (Side note: the hostess was a teenager from Williamsburg who became the opening hostess for me at The Frog and the Redneck, and later married my chef, Dale Reitzer.  They now own Acacia).

But, I digress.

Joe was one of Craig’s line cooks and had the great fortune of being assigned to work with me on my dish for the big dinner.  Lucky guy.  Noting that was a long time ago, I jokingly asked if I was an asshole to work with (a recurring theme in my blogs).  The answer I got back was “total”.

Assuming he was joking, I moved the conversation forward.  Then, we agreed to have coffee together the following week.  Coffee turned into lunch and it was obvious that this guy was serious about food, and serious about our profession.  Real potential.  I’m gonna keep my eye on this one.

Then I reminded him of his response to my question.  He informed me that he had gotten so mad at me that evening that he walked out of the kitchen into the parking lot ready to quit his job rather than finish the evening with me.  wtf?

“I was there to help you”, he began.

Whoa.  Stop right there.  No wonder you didn’t like me, you silly goose.

You weren’t there to help me.  You were there to work.  You were there to work hard and learn.  You were there to do what was asked of you.

You see, I have very little time in a strange kitchen to put out a course of food for 200 people that will blow them away.  If you listen to my instruction I will very clearly convey exactly what I need you to do.  Your best response would be “Yes Chef” to everything I say for the next three hours.  You are not there to ‘help me’.  You are there to work, learn, and be part of a small, productive team.  If anything, I was there to help you.

I don’t think he got it.

This wasn’t my first rodeo.  I spent many years ‘helping’ put out great food for chefs over the course of my career.  As the years passed and young cooks began to see themselves as future TV stars, it became harder and harder to identify the ones dedicated to becoming the best cooks they could be: few and far between they are.

I recall one high profile event at Universal Studios a while back.  There were plenty of ‘famous’ chefs like Wolfgang Puck, Hubert Keller, Cal Stamenov, Thomas Keller and so on.  As we gathered for our booth assignments, we were offered a slew of culinary students from which to choose as many helpers as we needed.  I needed three and asked for volunteers who were willing to work hard and learn.  Three stepped forward.

“Ok”, said drill sergeant Sneed, “take off your sunglasses, button your coats up to the top, one fold of the cuff and no drinking, smoking, autograph hunting or wandering around until we are cleaned up, packed up and ready to go at the end of the night.  You will see plenty of your co-students walking around with a glass of champagne, a cig in their mouth, and an air of arrogance.  That will not be you.  Everybody still on board?”

Yes Chef!

Good, let’s get busy.

First, I need someone to slice the baguettes.  Here is how you hold the knife, here is the motion.  Do not push the knife, let its weight do the slicing or the bread will squish and the slices will be misshapen.  I’ll show you.  With your first motion you make a small cut on top of the bread, ¼” from the end.  Then, with long slicing motions you will let the weight of the knife do the cutting.  Do not push down on the knife. I know, it’s a lot of motions for once slice but do you see how nice they are?  That’s work you can be proud of.

Now, I need 600 just like those.

Returning a couple of minutes later I find that Sara has been following her instincts and pushing the knife thru the bread.

Stop!  I will show you one more time how to do this.  Use 8 or 9 slicing motions for each slice, just like this!

An hour later, Sara had turned 15 baguettes into 600 perfect, thin, symmetric slices.  “Now, toast them lightly, turning them over so both sides dry a bit and get a slight crunch.  Here, I’ll show you the first batch…..”

So, I hope you see, Joe, that there was much to be learned that night.  If you chose to be offended by being shown what to do, and criticized for not listening to my precise instruction, then I have no apology to make.  I want every cook that I work with to become better and I want to become better with every event I work.  But this I promise you.  I would never intentionally demean, degrade, or humiliate you, or any cook.  It’s not who I am.

That does not mean a cook won’t feel humiliated, but that would never be my intent.  It’s a crazy element of human nature that you can say something to one person, who acknowledges it and moves on, and say the same to another person who takes great offense.  As Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”.

Until now, that is.  My daughters each have a WRIR  T-Shirt that they sport.  I never really noticed.  Then I started following journalist Chris Dovi on Facebook because 90% of the time he has great commentary on important subjects, 5% of the time I don’t know what he’s talking about, and 5% of the time he’s just plain cuckoo.  Then he asked if I wanted to do an interview on this all volunteer low wattage FM station.  Sure, I said, even if I mess up there’s probably only a couple of listeners anyway.

First I decided to give them a listen.  There was this hour long African drum beat and chant that pretty much made me want to go out and cut the grass.  Another time it was an elderly woman from Appalachia that performed mountain music singing that sounded like she caught her big toe in a bear trap.

Then I caught some NPR type interviews, revealing stuff.  When I heard some local interviews, also enlightening, I started listening more and more:  when I could get reception that is.  It turns out to be my station of choice now.

So I gave my interview and talked about the dining scene; more, actually, about the lack of professionalism in so many restaurants.   Afterwards Chris asked if I’d like to do a regular ‘show’ focusing on Richmond’s growing world of restaurants.  It seems I have a face made for radio.

Thus was hatched “Product, Passion and Salt”, a 20 minute interview show.  My first one aired yesterday Friday at around 4:20 p.m. where I interviewed Michael Byrne, former owner of Richbrau, about the Virginia ABC, its role and the distinction between restaurants that serve alcohol and bars that serve food.  You should be able to catch it by going to their website (WRIR.org — Opensource, Friday June 13^th).  It airs again today around the same time.

So, if I don’t screw things up I’ll be doing this the second Friday of each month.  But really, have I ever screwed anything up?

I take it that you’ve indulged in eating some soft shell crabs already this season.  But do you really understand how the crab got that way?  It never ceases to amaze me when customers, and other chefs, watch a blue crab molt for the first time.  Although they have all eaten their share of soft shell crabs it’s evident that they never really understood the process.  I admit to my own lack of understanding in the beginning.  When I first moved to Urbanna, Virginia, over twenty five years ago, I became totally and utterly fascinated with the entire crab shedding process, from capture to digestion.  The local crabbers were more than generous in sharing their knowledge with me.

Now I would like to share with you some of what I have been taught .

The molting, or shedding, process begins with a ‘peeler’.  Actually, it all begins with the blue crab, callinectes sapidus.  In order for it and all crustaceans to grow it needs to molt, or ‘shed’ its shell.  In the days before it is ready to actually shed, it develops a ‘sign’ on its backfins that indicates it is a peeler.  The color of the sign tells the crabbers just how close it is to shedding: a white line tells us that it is a ‘green’, a pink sign tells us that it is a ‘ripe’, and a dark red sign tells us that it is a ‘cherry ripe’ or ‘rank’ and shedding is imminent.  The discovery of the art of reading the fins was the key to making this a viable industry. Read the rest of this entry »

“Good service can make up for bad food but good food cannot make up for bad service”
Ancient proverb (1960’s?)

I just read an opinion piece about the state of restaurant service in this town. I think the point was missed. You see, the writer was lecturing the servers: don’t bring the food if one of us is in the john, don’t grab my glass mid-swig to refill it, and don’t ever, ever…….

Many factors play into why the server doesn’t know good service, not the least of which is that, in my experience, very few of them have had the opportunity or wherewithal to witness it firsthand. They haven’t dined at Daniel, Le Bernardin, The French Laundry, The Inn in Little Washington or a hundred other great restaurants. Who can afford to?

So what about good restaurants, instead of great? Honestly, I’ve gone militant. Read the rest of this entry »

(Written for the Jan/Feb 2014 issue of Food Arts)

I’m writing a book, trying to decide a title and direction. You see, I spent five and a half years working for what I think are the two greatest chefs of our time: Guenter Seeger and Jean-Louis Palladin. Which one was better? You’ll have to read the book.

But this is about Jean-Louis. I just read Bryan Miller’s gentle tribute to Jean-Louis in Food Arts. One thing is true: every cook, chef and food lover in America owes much to what Jean-Louis brought to the table, so to speak. When I began working with him in 1982 he had been open a scant two years at the Watergate.

I got the job, not because I was a talented cook (I wasn’t) but because I speak French. I wanted to learn from a master. And I was willing to do whatever it took. As my friend Chef Jeffery Buben advised me, “Stay with him as long as you can stand it, because there’s not a better chef anywhere.” So it was that I spent five miserable years in his kitchen. I wouldn’t change a thing. Read the rest of this entry »

It turns out that Richmond’s premier dentist also happens to be an extremely talented watercolor artist. Extremely talented. Baxter Perkinson is so good that he has been able to raise millions of dollars for charities by auctioning off his works.

 
To make it interesting, he would get some local ‘celebrities’ to help, serving as guest auctioneers. He was a fan of folks like former Governor George Allen, Grammy winner and sausage king Jimmy Dean, cosmetic magician Dr. Joe Niamtu, local anchor Lisa Shaffner, and his favorite chef, hopefully me.

 
We would take turns going to the podium and chattering up the price of his works. Over the years I ended up owning three of them myself. Baxter is a very generous guy, even if his politics are a bit misguided.

 
At the end of the auction we all went onstage to take a bow at which time a gentleman who, unknowingly, happened to be sitting next to my wife. As he surveyed the scene of the Governor, the Singer and the Chef he noted a common thread: “Look at that” he said to my wife, “the three biggest assholes in Richmond all wear cowboy boots.