www.newyorker.com /magazine/2021/09/06/magazine20000417hells-kitchen

One Day—and One Night—in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen

Condé Nast 12-15 minutes 4/9/2000

On Friday morning, I wake up at five-fifty-five. While I brush my teeth, and take my first aspirins of the day, I’m thinking about weekend specials. The grill station will be too busy for elaborate presentations, so I need things that are quick, simple, and easily plated. The people who will be coming tonight and tomorrow night to Les Halles, a restaurant on Park Avenue South where I work as the chef, aren’t like the people who come during the week. For the weekenders, a saddle of wild hare stuffed with foie gras is not a good special. Nor is any kind of fish with an exotic name.

Climbing into a taxi on Broadway, I decide that the fish special will be grilled tuna livornaise with roasted potatoes and grilled asparagus. It’s a layup. My overworked grill man can heat the already cooked spuds and the blanched asparagus on a sizzle platter; the tuna will get a quick walk across the grill; and all he’ll have to do is heat up the sauce at the last minute. For the appetizer special, I’m thinking cockles steamed with chorizo, leeks, tomatoes, and white wine—a one-pan wonder. The meat special is more problematic. The tuna will be taking up most of the grill’s time, so the meat will have to be prepared at the sauté station. Not easy. Les Halles features classic French bistro food, and at any one time the sauté station has to be ready to turn out moules à la marinière, boudin noir with caramelized apples, filet au poivre, steak au poivre, steak tartare, calf’s liver persillé, cassoulet Toulousain, magret de moulard with quince and sauce miel, the ridiculously popular mignon of pork, pieds de cochon, and a navarin of lamb that comes with baby carrots, pearl onions, niçoise olives, garlic confit, tomato concassée, fava beans, and chopped fresh herbs. But I’ve got a leg of venison and twelve pheasants coming in. I decide on the pheasant. I can par-roast it ahead of time, so that all my sous-chef will have to do is take it off the bone and sling it into the oven to finish, then heat up the sauce and the garnishes before serving.

Published in the print edition of the April 9, 2000, issue.

As usual when I arrive, Jaimé, the night porter, has his boom box blasting salsa from behind the bar. I check the reservation book—eighty for tonight. I flip through the manager’s log—the notebook in which the night guy tells the day guy about customer complaints, repair requirements, employee misbehavior, and important phone calls. I learn that last night my grill man called one of the waiters a cocksucker and pounded his fist on his cutting board in a “menacing way” when five diners came into the restaurant at three minutes before the midnight closing hour and ordered five côtes de bœuf, medium-well (cooking time: forty-five minutes). Jaimé grins at me from the stairs. He’s covered with grime as a result of hauling hundreds of pounds of garbage out onto the street.

I go down into the cellar to my office, and change into chef’s jacket, apron, and kitchen clogs, which are the preferred footwear for chefs because they “breathe” well and give good back support. I find my knife kit, stuff a thick stack of hand towels into it, and clip a pen into my jacket—sidewise, so it doesn’t fall out when I bend over. Taking a ring of keys from my desk, I open the locks on the drygoods-storage room, the walk-in refrigerator, the reach-in coolers, the pastry box, and the freezers. I push back the plastic curtains to the refrigerated boucherie—a cool room where the butchers do their cutting—and take the assistant butcher’s boom box from the worktable. Then I go back up to the kitchen. While I take cheese, garnishes, mussels, and sauces out of the reach-in at my sauté station, I’m listening to the Dead Boys playing “Sonic Reducer.”

Carlos, my daytime grill man, comes in. He has a pierced eyebrow and a body by Michelangelo, and he considers himself a master soupmaker. He asks if I’ve got any red-snapper bones on the way. Yes. Carlos loves any soup he can jack with Ricard or Pernod, and today’s soupe de poisson with rouille is one of his favorites. Omar, who works the cold station for appetizers and salads, and has a thick barbed-wire tattoo on one upper arm, is the next to arrive, and he’s followed by the rest of the day team: Segundo, the prep centurion; Ramòn, the dishwasher; Janine, the pastry chef; and Camélia, the general manager. (Some of their names have been changed.)

Before noon, I cut and pepper pavées and filets; skin and slice calf’s liver; caramelize apples; blanch baby carrots; make garlic confit; produce a livornaise sauce for the tuna and start a currant sauce for the pheasant; and assemble the navarin. Then I write up the specials so that Camélia can enter them into the computer and set the prices. At eight-thirty, my butcher, Hubert, arrives, looking as if he’s woken up under a bridge. He unloads the meat order—côtes de bœuf, entrecôtes, rump steaks, racks of lamb, lamb-stew meat, merguez sausages, saucisson de Toulouse, rosette, pork belly, onglets, scraps, meat for steak tartare, pork tenderloins larded with bacon and garlic, pâtés, rillettes, galantines, and chickens.

Every few minutes, I hear the bell ring, as more stuff arrives. Segundo, the prep man, is downstairs checking off the orders as they leave the delivery ramp. Segundo’s a mean-looking guy. He’s from Mexico, and the other Mexicans at the restaurant claim that he carries a gun and sniffs paint thinner, and that he’s done time. But he’s the greatest prep cook I’ve ever had; he uses a full-sized butcher’s scimitar to chop parsley, filament-fine.

The last cook to show up is Miguel, our French-fry master. This is a full-time job at Les Halles, where we are justifiably famous for our frites. Miguel, who looks like the descendant of an Aztec king, spends his day peeling potatoes, cutting potatoes, blanching potatoes, and then dropping them into three-hundred-and-seventy-five-degree peanut oil, tossing them with salt, and stacking the sizzling-hot fries on plates with his bare hands. I’ve had to do this a few times, and it requires serious calluses.

I work on a six-burner Garland. There’s another range next to it, which is taken up with a bain-marie for sauces, with onion soup, and with stocks—veal, chicken, lamb, and pork—that have been reducing at a slow simmer during the previous day and night. When we’re serving meals, one of my burners will be occupied by a pot of boiling water for Omar to dunk ravioli in. On another burner he’ll sauté lardons for frisée salads, sear tidbits of hanger steak for onglet salad, or sauté diced potatoes in duck fat for the confit de canard. This leaves me with just four burners on which to prepare most of the orders.

While I’m reducing gastrite—sugar and vinegar—for the currant sauce, I make room next to me for Janine, the pastry chef, so she can melt chocolate over the simmering pasta water. Janine is an ex-waitress from Queens, and although she’s right out of cooking school, she’s tough. Already, she’s had to endure the unwanted attentions of a leering French sous-chef and the usual chick-friendly Mexicans. I admire strong women in busy kitchens. They have a lot to put up with in our high-testosterone locker-room environment.

At eleven-thirty, I convene a meeting of the day waiters and run through the specials, speaking as slowly as I can, so that none of them describes my beautiful pheasant special as tasting “kind of like chicken.” Today’s lineup is not too bad: there’s Morgan, the part-time underwear model; Rick, who’s everyone’s first choice for Waiter Most Likely to Shave His Head, Climb a Tower, and Start Shooting Strangers; and a new waiter, who doesn’t know what prosciutto is, and who won’t be around very long, I suspect. There are also two busboys—a taciturn workaholic from Portugal and a moody Bengali. My runner, whose job is to shout out the orders and shuttle food to the dining room, is the awesome Mohammed, who is capable of carrying five plates without a tray.

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

The key to staying on top of a busy station is to move on a dish as soon as Mohammed yells its name—set up the pan, do the pre-searing, get it into the oven quickly—so that later, when the whole order board is fluttering with dupes, I can tell which dishes I have working and which ones I have waiting, without having to read the actual tickets again.

“Ready on Table Twelve!” says Carlos, who’s got a load of steaks and chops and a few tunas coming up. He wants to know if I’m close on my end. “Let’s go on Twelve!” I say. Miguel starts dunking spuds. I call for mashed potatoes for the boudins from Omar; give the apples a few tosses over the flame; heat and swirl butter into the liver’s shallot sauce; pull the pork mignons from the oven; heat potatoes and vegetables for the pheasant; squeeze the sauce for the pheasant between pots onto a back burner; move the mussels off the heat and into a bowl; then spin and bend to check on how my duck is doing.

The intercom buzzes. “Line One for the chef,” says the hostess, who’s out front. It’s a salesman, wanting to sell me some smoked fish. I start off all sweetness and light, and he goes into his pitch. He’s halfway through it when I cut him off: “So what the fuck are you doing calling me in the middle of the lunch rush?” I hang up before I can hear his reply.

I catch the duck just in time, roll it over, skin side down, and pull it out of the oven. Mohammed yells out another pasta order. I pour extra-virgin into a pan and sauté some paper-thin garlic slices with crushed red pepper, add artichoke hearts, roasted vegetables, some olives. Whenever I do pasta, I start humming Tony Bennett or Dino (today it’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?”). I really love doing that final squirt of emulsifying extra-virgin, just after the basil goes in.

Bourdain at work at Les Halles

Bourdain became the executive chef at Les Halles in 1998.

“Chef,” Omar says, “no hay más tomates.” Wait a minute—I ordered tomatoes, didn’t I? I call Segundo on the intercom. “What the fuck is going on?” I say, as Omar slouches in the doorway like a convict in the exercise yard. “No Baldor,” he says. Although Baldor is a superb produce purveyor, this is the second time in recent weeks it’s failed me. I call Baldor, and say, “What kind of glue-sniffing, crackhead mesomorphs you got working for you? You don’t have an order for me? What?” I hang up, pull a few pans off the flame, load up some more mussels, sauce another duck, arrange a few pheasants, and check my orders clipboard. I’m in the middle of telling Mohammed to run across the street and ask the chef at Park Bistro if we can borrow some of his tomatoes when I see, from the columns of checked-off items on my clipboard, that I did order tomatoes—not from Baldor but from a different company. After screaming at the blameless Baldor, my anger is used up, so when I call the guilty company I can barely summon a serious tone. It turns out that my order has been routed to another restaurant—Layla, instead of Les Halles. I call Philippe, the chef at Park Bistro, to ask for a few tomatoes to get me through until my order arrives.