Chapters (17)
I want to see my friend at work, so I turn up one morning to attend the shift, the way you might attend a show. The team is young, international, a mix of male and female. The atmosphere in the kitchen is chill, hip, a little bit rock ’n’ roll. Mauro told me about this: the people hired by La Comète had the means to create their own gastronomic culture; they are passionate about cuisine, a far cry from the mass of restaurant workers, who are essentially high school dropouts, kids who had to choose between being a boilermaker, a mechanic, and a cook, and who drifted toward the latter option. Mauro is paid twenty-five hundred euros per month for what are often seventy-hour weeks.
At eight in the morning, when work starts, nine, in addition to the chef, are in the narrow kitchen, divided between four workstations (one on meat, two on fish, three in the pantry, two on patisserie, and Mauro, the assistant chef). No one speaks. Everyone knows what he or she has to do—peel mushrooms and beans, hay-smoke the beef for the carpaccio, boil (but not blanch) the fava beans. At ten o’clock, the tempo accelerates in a way that is barely perceptible. Voices are raised—Have you gutted the fish yet? How’s the turbot? Can you bring me six pounds of cream?—and the cooks chat about the latest news: who’s leaving, who’s just joined, an assistant chef who’s got a chef’s position down south, that brilliant sommelier who’s quitting his job to live in Chile, that new restaurant opening in Ménilmontant—So? What’s it like? They compare jobs, wages, hours, contrast the reputations of different restaurants, different chefs. At eleven, everyone stops: it’s time to clean up. The kitchen is made beautiful again, ready for the lunch shift. The employees assiduously scrub an area of their workstation, leaning over the stove top, stretching an arm across the stainless-steel surface, exposing the top of their underwear and a strip of flesh if possible. Perforated rubber mats are laid out everywhere. After that, the pace accelerates gradually, and when it finally starts, it’s a thing of beauty: rapid and fluid, rhythmic and precise, the plates whisked away one after another with each announcement. The rush starts around one thirty and the intensity goes up a notch; concentration is at its height; this is the moment when the precisely calibrated choreography most impresses the watching diners. When at last it slows down again, it’s nearly three. The dishwashers have cleaned nearly 420 plates because the restaurant was full, and I hear a familiar voice ask out loud: So, what are we going to cook tomorrow?