It was tough finding good help for a restaurant of our caliber in Fort Bragg. And I don’t mean for that to sound snooty. First of all, I always try to have high standards so, even if we were slinging hash, I wouldn’t have hired the vast majority of people that applied. If someone’s going to fill out an application for employment and be sloppy, and make grammatical and spelling errors, I figure they’re not going to make much of an effort at a job, either.
At one point, I coined the term “labor puddle” to describe the availability of help. It wasn’t a pool at all. It was a puddle. Not too broad and not too deep. It’s funny, because I used the term with a fellow chef on the coast, who later used the term with a reporter, and I ended up reading it in the paper.
Beyond the ability to fill out an application, the skill level for fine dining in a town like Fort Bragg, where fine dining for the most part doesn’t exist, is pretty much itself non-existent. Few people have had the exposure to either the type of cuisine involved--and thus lacked both the palate and the vocabulary--or the style of service.
Beginning with the application... If you answered the question “Where did you hear about us?” by saying “an add in the paper,” you had little chance of getting an interview. That was all too common a mistake. I remember one person who was already waiting tables at a restaurant, and she misspelled the name of the restaurant at which she was working. And if you didn’t fill out the application completely, it just showed us a penchant for laziness.
Even with those whom we invited for interviews, we ended up wasting a lot of time in the interview process. Often after the first few minutes, we’d realize the candidate wasn’t for us, but we’d be polite and finish the whole interview. Finally, we got smart. We devised a waitstaff questionnaire. Five pages of brain-picking concerning, food, wine and service. It was fun devising it. It was fun (for the most part) reading them. Best, 90% of the people who picked up an application and a questionnaire never returned. Ultimately, we got much better candidates to interview, and wasted far less time. Too, it gave applicants a taste of what we were all about.
Somewhere, in the deep, dark recesses of a storage unit, are all the questionnaires we ever got back. I wish I had quick access to them now. From memory, though, here are some of the better answers, though not verbatim. Question: A person drops their napkin. What do you do? Answer: Kick it to the side. Or, pick it up and hand it back to them. Question: The restaurant’s closed, and there’s one table lingering. What do you do? Answer: I tell them we’re closed, and suggest a place they can go that’s open later.
One of our more complicated questions was this: A four top comes in for dinner--an older and a younger woman, and an older and younger man. The older woman is hosting the dinner. In what order do you serve them?
Many people did well on the questionnaire, and that’s nice. Others rose to the occasion and researched a lot of the answers, because they didn’t know. And that was really cool, and very much appreciated. You were asked to draw a table setting, showing the placement of silverware and glassware. One applicant found a photo of a vase of flowers in a magazine and carefully cut that out and pasted it on as part of the table setting.
The questionnaire backfired only once (that we are aware of), when we had an applicant feel it was beneath him to have to fill it out. And it was, but he did. He was one of the best waiters we ever had. He had worked in San Francisco. He was polite and amiable. He could make the guest experience a superb one. He could up sell in a very polite and knowledgeable way. His name was Abdellatif. We nicknamed him the “Rockin’ Moroccan.”
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Soups
When we started the Rendezvous, if there was a forte I was lacking, it was soup-making. I’m not necessarily saying I was particularly good at anything, though I guess there would be some that would say I was. But I certainly didn’t feel adequate at making soups. So, I put a lot of effort into that area, to the point where I recall customers having told me a I could make soup from a rock.
One of the keys to the success of our soups were the bases we used. Most soups began with chicken stock. Some used crab, lobster or fish fumet. Occasionally, we’d use veal stock. All of the stocks and fumets were made in-house.
I’ll be the first to admit our chicken stock was incredible. We’d order a case of chicken carcasses for the sole purpose of making stock. We’d spread the carcasses on sheet pans and roast them till they were golden brown. We’d do the same with the vegetable mirepoix--carrots and onions--that would go into the stock. Celery and leeks wouldn’t get roasted. Other additions to the mix were bay leaves (we had our own European bay bush on the property), garlic, black peppercorns, fresh thyme and parsley. Of course, we’d deglaze the roasting pans from the chicken and veggies so that no flavor would be lost.
Everything would be dumped into our huge stock pot, which would be filled with water and put on the stove over a very low flame right before leaving for the night--so, usually, around 10 or 11 o’clock. The stock would simmer. And simmer. And simmer. It would go till at least 4 o’clock the next afternoon, when we’d pull it off the stove. We’d let it cool a bit before straining it, then passing it through a chinois, and carefully degreasing it.
I’ve gotta tell you, I had an obsession with getting the flame adjusted properly under the stockpot before leaving at night. When I was a kid, there was a house several blocks from where I lived that blew up because of a gas leak. On a commercial stove, the lowest flame was enough to keep the stock simmering. If you turned the flame down too low, it would eventually begin to flicker, and then go out. But that might take a minute or two. And that meant the gas was still on. So I’d adjust and watch, adjust and watch. The obsession was fueled (if you’ll pardon the pun) by the fact that there were guest rooms for our bed & breakfast upstairs. When I was pretty certain I had the flame just right, I’d head for the back door, turning the kitchen light out and often pausing to stare at the flame a little more. I can only imagine if I had had obsessive compulsive disorder!
The result was a fairly dark, heady stock, with tons of flavor. If you were to taste one of our soups next to the same recipe executed with the best store-bought stock, well, you might be impressed at the difference. I find it really difficult to bring myself to use store-bought stock. Ever. To this day, I will still make stock in small batches and, when finished, reduce it by half (to save space) and then freeze it.
Our crab and lobster tasting menus almost always had a bisque as one of the courses. For crab, I’d run down to the harbor--a couple of miles away--early in the morning and pick up a garbage bag full of fresh crab shells, take them back to the kitchen and begin crushing them right away to get going on crab fumet. I found that crab shells had to be incredibly fresh and needed to be used right away, or they would begin to become ammoniated--something that would pervade the fumet and couldn’t be eliminated. When we were doing our lobster menu, we’d get the live lobsters in and poach them lightly, removing the meat from the shells, and then immediately use the shells to make a fumet.
Our fumet recipes called for crushed crab or lobster shells, and chicken stock. We then took it a step further on the subsequent batches, substituting fumet for the chicken stock so that with each successive batch, the crab or lobster flavor became a bit more intense. And that’s probably why a noted cookbook author and food columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle said our crab bisque was the best she had ever had.
From the fresh halibut we got in would come a white fish fumet, and from salmon, a salmon fumet. Cases of veal bones were utilized in the same fashion as chicken to make veal stock. It’s all about flavor at every stage of the process. You have to start with the best ingredients. There are a lot of restaurants which use commercial bases--chicken, veal, lobster, etc. I’m not sure which is worse--store bought chicken broth or a commercial chicken base. All I know is that there’s no way you’re going to get an extraordinary finished product by starting with an inferior product. I won’t disagree that working from scratch is expensive. It is. But using a base is, in my opinion, both cheap and lazy.
We were frequently complimented for the amazing flavors of our food, and our food was often compared to the French Laundry, probably more than any other restaurant. I take that as a huge compliment. I like Thomas Keller’s cookbooks. We seem to think along the same lines in many ways. If there was one thing that struck me as odd, though, it was his requirement that all stocks, when they were transferred from container to container, had to be passed through a chinois. We passed stocks once. It’s good to get a lot of the particulate “garbage” out of the liquid. But what’s left in the chinois also represents flavor that’s being taken out. And I think there’s a limit to how much you want to take out. It’s like filtering a wine. Many people feel that filtering a wine at all strips it of flavor, and I believe that to be true. Unless, of course, you’re making a consommé or gelée. In which case you’re using egg whites to get the suspended protein matter out of the liquid to get it as clear as possible, which is similar to the “fining” technique used in winemaking.
So, what were some of our better soups? Hard to say and, like everything else, it depends on your taste. Our made-to-order cream of asparagus was pretty good. A lot of folks liked our cream of hedgehog soup in the fall. I remember a young couple one evening--the guy ordered it. His girlfriend looked on as he consumed it.. Somehow, it didn’t look like an animal-based soup at all. I had to tell them hedgehogs are a local wild mushroom. Brave soul, for not having known! We did a smoked corn chowder with chipotle sauce in the summertime that was a favorite of many. It was pretty amazing--the sweet and the hot, and the smoky-red sauce against the bright yellow. It was incredibly labor intensive though, and burned out an awful lot of blenders. Oh. Roasted garlic soup. Do you like garlic? This was heaven. I still make it from time to time. At the end of Thanksgiving dinner, we’d pick all the meat off the turkey carcasses and make stock from the carcasses. Then we made a curried turkey chowder. Thanksgiving leftovers don’t get much better. Finally, I always wanted to do a really good French onion soup. But I didn’t want it to be a “normal” French onion soup. I wanted something other than that delicious (when properly done) crouton with gratinéed cheese on top. So, we ended up baking small loaves of rye bread. We sliced the bread and made a grilled cave-aged Gruyère cheese sandwich which we cut on the diagonal and placed criss-crossed on top of the soup. It was a different take, and pretty delicious.
One of the keys to the success of our soups were the bases we used. Most soups began with chicken stock. Some used crab, lobster or fish fumet. Occasionally, we’d use veal stock. All of the stocks and fumets were made in-house.
I’ll be the first to admit our chicken stock was incredible. We’d order a case of chicken carcasses for the sole purpose of making stock. We’d spread the carcasses on sheet pans and roast them till they were golden brown. We’d do the same with the vegetable mirepoix--carrots and onions--that would go into the stock. Celery and leeks wouldn’t get roasted. Other additions to the mix were bay leaves (we had our own European bay bush on the property), garlic, black peppercorns, fresh thyme and parsley. Of course, we’d deglaze the roasting pans from the chicken and veggies so that no flavor would be lost.
Everything would be dumped into our huge stock pot, which would be filled with water and put on the stove over a very low flame right before leaving for the night--so, usually, around 10 or 11 o’clock. The stock would simmer. And simmer. And simmer. It would go till at least 4 o’clock the next afternoon, when we’d pull it off the stove. We’d let it cool a bit before straining it, then passing it through a chinois, and carefully degreasing it.
I’ve gotta tell you, I had an obsession with getting the flame adjusted properly under the stockpot before leaving at night. When I was a kid, there was a house several blocks from where I lived that blew up because of a gas leak. On a commercial stove, the lowest flame was enough to keep the stock simmering. If you turned the flame down too low, it would eventually begin to flicker, and then go out. But that might take a minute or two. And that meant the gas was still on. So I’d adjust and watch, adjust and watch. The obsession was fueled (if you’ll pardon the pun) by the fact that there were guest rooms for our bed & breakfast upstairs. When I was pretty certain I had the flame just right, I’d head for the back door, turning the kitchen light out and often pausing to stare at the flame a little more. I can only imagine if I had had obsessive compulsive disorder!
The result was a fairly dark, heady stock, with tons of flavor. If you were to taste one of our soups next to the same recipe executed with the best store-bought stock, well, you might be impressed at the difference. I find it really difficult to bring myself to use store-bought stock. Ever. To this day, I will still make stock in small batches and, when finished, reduce it by half (to save space) and then freeze it.
Our crab and lobster tasting menus almost always had a bisque as one of the courses. For crab, I’d run down to the harbor--a couple of miles away--early in the morning and pick up a garbage bag full of fresh crab shells, take them back to the kitchen and begin crushing them right away to get going on crab fumet. I found that crab shells had to be incredibly fresh and needed to be used right away, or they would begin to become ammoniated--something that would pervade the fumet and couldn’t be eliminated. When we were doing our lobster menu, we’d get the live lobsters in and poach them lightly, removing the meat from the shells, and then immediately use the shells to make a fumet.
Our fumet recipes called for crushed crab or lobster shells, and chicken stock. We then took it a step further on the subsequent batches, substituting fumet for the chicken stock so that with each successive batch, the crab or lobster flavor became a bit more intense. And that’s probably why a noted cookbook author and food columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle said our crab bisque was the best she had ever had.
From the fresh halibut we got in would come a white fish fumet, and from salmon, a salmon fumet. Cases of veal bones were utilized in the same fashion as chicken to make veal stock. It’s all about flavor at every stage of the process. You have to start with the best ingredients. There are a lot of restaurants which use commercial bases--chicken, veal, lobster, etc. I’m not sure which is worse--store bought chicken broth or a commercial chicken base. All I know is that there’s no way you’re going to get an extraordinary finished product by starting with an inferior product. I won’t disagree that working from scratch is expensive. It is. But using a base is, in my opinion, both cheap and lazy.
We were frequently complimented for the amazing flavors of our food, and our food was often compared to the French Laundry, probably more than any other restaurant. I take that as a huge compliment. I like Thomas Keller’s cookbooks. We seem to think along the same lines in many ways. If there was one thing that struck me as odd, though, it was his requirement that all stocks, when they were transferred from container to container, had to be passed through a chinois. We passed stocks once. It’s good to get a lot of the particulate “garbage” out of the liquid. But what’s left in the chinois also represents flavor that’s being taken out. And I think there’s a limit to how much you want to take out. It’s like filtering a wine. Many people feel that filtering a wine at all strips it of flavor, and I believe that to be true. Unless, of course, you’re making a consommé or gelée. In which case you’re using egg whites to get the suspended protein matter out of the liquid to get it as clear as possible, which is similar to the “fining” technique used in winemaking.
So, what were some of our better soups? Hard to say and, like everything else, it depends on your taste. Our made-to-order cream of asparagus was pretty good. A lot of folks liked our cream of hedgehog soup in the fall. I remember a young couple one evening--the guy ordered it. His girlfriend looked on as he consumed it.. Somehow, it didn’t look like an animal-based soup at all. I had to tell them hedgehogs are a local wild mushroom. Brave soul, for not having known! We did a smoked corn chowder with chipotle sauce in the summertime that was a favorite of many. It was pretty amazing--the sweet and the hot, and the smoky-red sauce against the bright yellow. It was incredibly labor intensive though, and burned out an awful lot of blenders. Oh. Roasted garlic soup. Do you like garlic? This was heaven. I still make it from time to time. At the end of Thanksgiving dinner, we’d pick all the meat off the turkey carcasses and make stock from the carcasses. Then we made a curried turkey chowder. Thanksgiving leftovers don’t get much better. Finally, I always wanted to do a really good French onion soup. But I didn’t want it to be a “normal” French onion soup. I wanted something other than that delicious (when properly done) crouton with gratinéed cheese on top. So, we ended up baking small loaves of rye bread. We sliced the bread and made a grilled cave-aged Gruyère cheese sandwich which we cut on the diagonal and placed criss-crossed on top of the soup. It was a different take, and pretty delicious.
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