Don't Try This at Home Read online

  "Take a handful of culinary masters, toss in stories of utter humiliation or heartache, and you wind up with a spicy little essay collection . . . Lots of fun for foodies both ardent and casual."

  —Kirkus Reviews

  "A reminder that—in real life as in the kitchen—guts are as important as genius."

  —People ****

  "A dishy collection of stories . . . lively additions to the Kitchen Confidential genre."

  —Julie Powell, Food & Wine

  "Surely, you think, real chefs aren't bedeviled by these problems. Think again. You can't even imagine the hidden kitchen terrors recounted by professionals in Don't Try This At Home"

  —Washington Post Book World

  "Happily reminds us that even big shots have off days."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "A sometimes comical and always unique glimpse behind the scenes of restaurant kitchens [and] a fantastic collection of personal stories that depict these great chefs as real people."

  —Library Journal

  "As in every other profession, chefs love their war stories. Finally someone had the good sense to collect some of the best."

  —Los Angeles Times

  "Witherspoon and Friedman have gathered memorable stories from some of the best chefs in the world, and it's just plain satisfying to read about their flubs."

  —New York Sun

  "You'll love Don't Try This at Home . . . It's proof that celeb chefs climb into their checked trousers one leg at a time just like the rest of us."

  —Oregonian

  "For those considering a life in the kitchen, these are cautionary tales, since they suggest that a career in a place replete with sharp tools, open flames and stressed-out lunatics may be fraught with peril. But for true foodies, these comic tales are a delight."

  —Winston Salem-Journal

  "An inspiration for anyone who has been discouraged or shy to return to the kitchen after burning a soup or adding sugar instead of salt to a recipe."

  —San Antonio Express-News

  "What a wonderful idea for a bedside table book . . . these comic tales are a delight."

  —Virginian-Pilot

  "There's often humor in disaster, especially at the hands and in the kitchens of some of the world's top chefs . . . You'll smile and remember your own kitchen disasters."

  —Kansas City Star

  A NOTE ON THE EDITORS

  Kimberly Witherspoon is a founding partner of Inkwell Management, a literary agency based in Manhattan. She is also the coeditor of the collection How I Learned to Cook and is very proud to represent seven of the chefs in this anthology: Anthony Bourdain, Tamasin Day-Lewis, Gabrielle Hamilton, Fergus Henderson, Pino Luongo, Marcus Samuelsson, and Norman Van Aken. She and her family live in North Salem, New York.

  Andrew Friedman has coauthored more than fifteen cookbooks with some of the most successful chefs in the country, including Pino Luongo, Alfred Portale, Jimmy Bradley, and former White House chef Walter Scheib. He is also the coauthor of Breaking Back, the autobiography of American tennis star James Blake. He lives in New York City with his family.

  DON'T TRY

  THIS AT HOME

  Culinary Catastrophes from

  the World's Greatest Chefs

  Edited by Kimberly Witherspoon

  and Andrew Friedman

  BLOOMSBURY

  To Summer and Paul

  —K.W.

  As always, to Caitlin, and for the first time,

  to Declan and Taylor, two great kids

  —A.F.

  Copyright © 2005 by Inkwell Management

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Don't try this at home : culinary catastrophes from the world's greatest chefs / edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-940-2

  1. Cooks—Anecdotes. 2. Cookery—Anecdotes. I. Witherspoon, Kimberly. II. Friedman, Andrew, 1967-

  TX649.A1D66 2005

  641.5—dc22

  2005017992

  Excerpt from "Brick House": Words and music by Lionel Richie, Ronald LaPread, Walter Orange, Milan Williams, Thomas McClary, and William King. © 1977 Jobete Music Co., Inc., Libren Music, Cambrae Music, Walter Orange Music, Old Fashion Publishing, Macawrite Music, and Hanna Music. All rights controlled and administered by EMI April Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  First published in the United States by Bloomsbury in 2005

  This paperback edition published in 2007

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  FERRÁN ADRIÀ Horror in Gerona

  JOSÉ ANDRÉS All by Myself

  DAN BARBER Meet David Bouley

  MARIO BATALI The Last Straw

  MICHELLE BERNSTEIN Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

  HESTON BLUMENTHAL Lean Times at the Fat Duck

  DANIEL BOULUD On the Road Again

  ANTHONY BOURDAIN New Year's Meltdown

  JIMMY BRADLEY Ship of Fools

  SCOTT BRYAN If You Can't Stand the Heat

  DAVID BURKE White Lie

  SAMUEL CLARK A Simple Request

  TOM COLICCHIO The Traveling Chef

  SCOTT CONANT This Whole Place Is Slithering

  TAMASIN DAY-LEWIS Euphoria

  TOM DOUGLAS Hope for Snow

  WYLIE DUFRESNE Beastmaster

  JONATHAN EISMANN The Curious Case of Tommy Flynn

  CLAUDIA FLEMING The Blob

  GABRIELLE HAMILTON The Blind Line Cook

  FERGUS HENDERSON Genus Loci

  PAUL KAHAN (Not) Ready for My Close-Up

  HUBERT KELLER Just Add Water

  GIORGIO LOCATELLI An Italian in Paris

  MICHAEL LOMONACO A Night at the Opera

  PINO LUONGO A User's Guide to Opening

  MARY SUE MILLIKEN SUSAN FENIGER a Hamptons Restaurant &c Our Big Brake

  SARA MOULTON A Chef in the Family

  TAMARA MURPHY For the Birds

  CINDY PAWLCYN Chef's Table

  NEIL PERRY Our First Friday

  MICHEL RICHARD Alibi

  ERIC RIPERT You Really Ought to Think About Becoming a Waiter

  ALAIN SAILHAC You're in the Army Now

  MARCUS SAMUELSSON The Big Chill

  BILL TELEPAN Neverland

  LAURENT TOURONDEL Friends and Family

  TOM VALENTI The Trojan Cookie

  NORMAN VAN AKEN Shit Happens

  GEOFFREY ZAKARIAN The Michelin Man

  JAMIE OLIVER The End of Innocence

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  NEARLY TWO HUNDRED years ago, the legendary French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin observed that "the truly dedicated chef or the true lover of food is a person who has learned to go beyond mere catastrophe and to salvage at least one golden moment from every meal."

  In these pages, a selection of the
world's finest chefs share, in refreshingly frank detail, the stories of their biggest mishaps, missteps, misfortunes, and misadventures. To our delight, much of what they salvage goes beyond the strictly culinary.

  For their honesty, we thank the chefs themselves, who may surprise you as they discuss moments they'd rather forget, bringing their stories to life with revelations of humility, self-doubt, and even shame. Disasters, especially those involving food, are funny to look back on, but can be ego-deflating when they occur—it's a credit to these chefs that they are able to be simultaneously profound and laugh-provoking.

  As we consider the stories, a number of themes emerge: The fish-out-of-water syndrome that greets young cooks working and traveling abroad proves itself a fertile breeding ground for near-farcical scenarios. The constant struggle to find and keep good employees is another popular motif, leading to tales of everything from a blind line cook to a culinary faith healing. Restaurants make for strange bedfellows, a truth examined in these pages via the tension between cooks and chefs and chefs and owners. Finally, the chaos that ensues when a chef leaves his or her kitchen and takes the show on the road can lead to countless unforeseen catastrophes.

  For all of us, both cooks and noncooks, this book offers its own form of hope—evidence that even those who are the very best in their chosen field, famous for exhibiting perfection on a nightly basis, can make a mistake, maybe even a disastrous one, and then laugh at it, and at themselves.

  Even more reassuring is how often, and how well, these storytellers improvise a way out, finding inspiration when they need it most, and emerging victorious, even if it means sometimes telling a white lie.

  "In my business, failure is not an option," writes one chef in his story. It's one thing to say that and quite another to live it. These professionals live it on a daily basis, and we're grateful that they took time out to rummage through their memories and pick out the worst—by which we mean the "best"—ones to share.

  KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON

  ANDREW FRIEDMAN

  Horror in Gerona

  FERRÁN ADRIÀ

  Ferrdn Adrià began his famed culinary career washing dishes at a French restaurant in the town of Castelldefels, Spain. He has since worked at various restaurants, served in the Spanish military at the naval base of Cartagena, and in 1984, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the kitchen staff of El Bulli. Only eighteen months later, he became head chef of the restaurant—which went on to receive its third Michelin star in 1997. Adrià’s gift for combining unexpected contrasts of flavor, temperature, and texture has won him global acclaim as one of the most creative and inventive culinary geniuses in the world; Gourmet magazine has hailed him as S(the Salvador Dali of the kitchen.”

  THE LOBSTERS ARE off," said the voice on the other JL end of the telephone.

  This was not good news: Off is the word we in the culinary business use to express succinctly that something has spoiled, or gone bad in some way. Usually, when something is off, it's so far gone that you can detect it by smell alone. Indeed, tasting something that's off is often a very bad idea.

  That the lobsters were off on this particular day was worse news than it would normally be. Normally, you could remove them from your menu for one night, or secure enough replacement lobsters to remedy the situation before your first customers arrived, and nobody would be the wiser.

  But on the day in question, the lobsters were to be the main course of a private function we were catering: an international medical congress in Gerona, a beautiful city in northern Catalonia, near the French border. Dinner was to consist of four courses, what we called our Fall Menu: a chestnut cream and egg white starter, hot pickled monkfish with spring onions and mushrooms, and a dessert of wild berries with vanilla cream. The piece de resistance was a lobster dish garnished with a cepes carpaccio and a salad with Parmigiano and a pine nut vinaigrette.

  And there was another detail that made the lobster news particularly alarming.

  The dinner was to serve thirty-two hundred people.

  When chefs have nightmares, it's moments such as these that play out in our heads. Unfortunately, I was wide awake and the situation was very, very real.

  A banquet for thirty-two hundred people was not something I did every day. Never in my twenty-five years as a chef had I catered for anywhere close to such numbers. Our routine at El Bulli is fifty people a night. Admittedly, we serve fifteen hundred dishes at each sitting, but still, going from fifty to thirty-two hundred is like jumping out of a warm, familiar bath into an icy hurricane sea.

  Naturally, our kitchen at El Bulli wasn't up to the task. So, to ensure ample space, we commandeered three production centers: two vast kitchens nearby in Gerona and one in Barcelona. In addition, we hired plenty of extra help; more than a hundred people were on the job. But even if we'd had a thousand people on board, that wouldn't have prevented the lobsters from going bad.

  I received the lobster call at 8:00 a.m. on November 18, 1995—a date forever imprinted in my memory—and was instantly plunged into a state of fear, uncertainty, and panic the likes of which I have never experienced in my professional life, and hope never to experience again. The call came from the Barcelona kitchen, ironically situated in the city aquarium, right on the waterfront.

  It wasn't just some of the lobster that was off; practically our entire stock had fermented overnight: 80 percent of our lobster haul was unusable, inedible, unfit for human consumption—never mind in any state to grace a dish prepared by the chefs of what was then a two-star Michelin restaurant.

  How could this have happened?

  To maximize efficiency, we had shared out different tasks among the three production centers. The chief task of the aquarium team was to clean, boil, and cut the lobster, before dispatching it to Gerona by road for assembly on the plate alongside the carpaccio and the salad. They had already done the cleaning and boiling and cutting—three pieces of lobster per dish—the night before, and the idea was that we'd simply load it all onto a van the next morning and off we'd go. Consequently, the lobster, all cut up and ready, had been placed inside white polystyrene containers until morning. We'd never done such a thing on such a scale and we supposed this was the right thing to do. The thermal containers insulated the lobster from the outside temperature, which seemed like a perfectly good idea; indeed it was a good idea—at least for the hot road trip north to Gerona. When it came to the refrigerator, however, the night before, it was an absolute calamity. Inside the containers, the lobster pieces were also insulated from the cold of the refrigerator. And so, while we had carefully refrigerated the lobster, none of the cold could actually get through the polystyrene to reach the lobster—which consequently remained at room temperature all night. Room temperature, for that length of time, was the lobsters' ruin.

  So, as you can see, it was the end of the world, the end of civilization as we know it. My first reaction—which I imagine is the first reaction of anyone, in any context, on receiving catastrophic news—was, "It's not possible. I cannot believe it. It cannot be true. Tell me, please tell me it's a bad joke." Once I had digested the indigestible and acknowledged that it was, indeed, true, that I was awake and so it was actually a lot worse than a nightmare, I proceeded to descend into despair. As second by mortifying second passed, the implications of what had happened sank in deeper: thirty-two hundred mouths to feed in thirteen hours' time and the chief raw material of our main dish missing! I kept asking myself, "What are we going to do? What the hell are we going to do? How in God's name are we going to manage now?"

  But then, with my heart still hammering at a hundred kilometers an hour, I thought, Okay, calm down. This is probably an absolutely hopeless case . . . but maybe there is something we can do, maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe there will be a miracle. So I started to think and think, trying to come up with ways to get around this. Though the one thing I knew for sure was that, whatever finally happened, ahead of me lay the most excruciatingly stressful day of my life.

&nb
sp; The first and foremost question, of course, was how were we going to find the one thousand lobsters we needed—yes, a thousand—in time to get them cleaned, cooked, delivered to Gerona (more than two hours away), and ready for consumption by nine o'clock that same night. So, amid the utter chaos of it all, I gave the order, "Let's hunt down every last lobster in this city! Let's get them all until not one is left!" We got on the phone and called everyone and anyone who could possibly have a stock of fre sh lobster ready to go. "How many have you got? You've got fifteen? Great! Hold them, we'll go and collect them now . . . How many have you got? Twenty-five! Fantastic! Can you bring them over? Perfect." After a frantic rush of phone calls, we assembled a team of ten people in the aquarium kitchen—most of them having imagined that their work had been over the day before—to clean, boil, and cut up the lobsters as they arrived.

  By late morning, we realized that five hundred lobsters was the maximum that we were going to get. So what to do? Simple. Here was the solution: reduce the contents of each dish by one piece of lobster, from three to two. That allowed us to stretch the utility of the 20 percent that had not gone off overnight and to fill the quota we needed, especially as the happy news filtered down from Gerona around lunchtime—this did help bring the temperature down a bit, at last—that a few hundred participants of the medical congress would be going home early, and the total number of dishes required had fallen below the three thousand mark.