Cooking in the New Year

This past week, the cooks at Cochon pulled off an incredible juggling act, serving the regular winter menu to hundreds of diners on Monday, Tuesday and lunchtime on Wednesday while simultaneously preparing an entirely new menu for new year's eve dinner on Wednesday night. This feat, which in effect was like running two separate restaurants at once, created unprecedented levels of chaos in the kitchen. Everyone worked extra hours, the sous chefs barely slept, Steven may not have slept at all, and no one paused for a second of rest until a champagne toast at midnight on new year's morning.
Tuesday's frighteningly long prep list was written out on a slab of cardboard as tall as I am. To accomplish everything on the list, two of the daytime prep cooks worked a double shift, staying from 8 in the morning all the way through dinner service to work alongside me and Bill in the back of the kitchen. Some of the prep tasks were business as usual--slice onions, pick parsley, peel potatoes--and some were completely new. I was charged with preparing crabs for making bisque, a process that involved taking each crab, still alive but sleepy from being packed on ice, inserting a knife into its back side (amidst claw gestures of protest, some feistier than others) and then using a twisting motion to tear the crab's helmet from the rest of its body (if this seems morally ambiguous to you, this David Foster Wallace piece might help you sort through your opinions on the rights of crustaceans). Mass murder aside, this bisque was a real bitch to prepare; the boiled crabs returned to me several hours later in a massive pot, whereby I pureed the mixture, shells and all, with an industrial strength hand-held blender (a close cousin of the jack hammer), then strained it once, pureed it again in batches in the regular blender, and then strained it again through a fine chinoise. All of this just to create the base which, by the time it reached diners' plates on Wednesday night, was seasoned with ginger and cream, laced with lumps of crab meat and garnished with a tomato, crab and shallot salad.
The creative process of developing the new year's menu was the work of Steven and Steven alone. No one else in the kitchen, not even the sous chefs, seemed to have a clue what the menu was going to look like until the paper menus were emerging from the printer well into the afternoon on Wednesday. A mere hour before dinnertime, I watched Steven explain to Didier in pidgin Spanish (Steven is fluent in a Spanish-like dialect, born out of years of working in kitchens, that derives almost entirely from curse words and the present tense.) the soup and salad dishes that he was in charge of preparing that night. Witnessing this new year's meal come together in such a non-collaborative and last-minute way makes me suspicious of holiday menus in general. When I go to a great restaurant, I would prefer to eat the dishes that the cooks know how to prepare in their sleep rather than the creative new ones that they are test driving on your dinner plate (Lesson I've taken away from this: research beforehand or ask your server what a restaurant's signature dishes are, and order those).
During dinner service, Didier was relegated to a station on the back line so that Brittany, the pastry chef (who, for the record, had been working since 2am the morning before), and I could work the deep frier for the fried banana split, one of her three new year's concoctions. The menu, a $60 four-course prix fixe, included dessert, which meant that every single person in the dining room would be getting a postre (instead of the roughly half who order dessert on a normal evening). I spent the night in a whirlwind between the front and back lines, plating chocolate cakes and tarts in the back and then running up to the front line to help Brittany with banana splits--battered fried bananas with dulce de leche ice cream, chocolate fudge, candied peanuts, whipped cream and a homemade maraschino cherry--and then, in between dessert tickets, helping Didier plate salads, ladle and garnish soups, and run his plates up to the heated counter at the front of the kitchen.
Over the course of the evening I scored some significant snacks: a delicious grilled quail on top of a crustless grilled cheese sandwich; a juicy morsel of prime rib with fried onions and mashed potatoes; a slice of hog jowl (a Cajun version of guanciale that recalled memories of the spaghetti carbonara I was enjoying in Rome a year ago); a taste of crab bisque so darn velvety it must have been pureed and strained by a great talent, indeed; and a massive square of chocolate layer cake, I'm talking 3"x3"x5", which seemed the perfectly luxurious new year's eve dessert up until the point when I ate one and an offensively over-the-top tower of excess thereafter.
Overall, the night had an energy and excitement level far beyond average, and I enjoyed every minute of it. By far, though, the best part of the evening was that Steven and the other cooks were so preoccupied with the demands of the new menu that nobody had a single chance to yell at me!