Balthazar may look like a rustic bistro, but behind the scenes, it's a highly efficient, well-oiled potato-chipping machine.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
7:05 a.m. — A prep cook cutting herbs for lunch service.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
7:21 a.m. — The doors at Balthazar open.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
9:18 a.m. — The breakfast customers at Balthazar.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
9:29 a.m. — A prep cook cutting tomatoes, onions and lettuce to be used for burgers and sandwiches during lunch service.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
11:25 a.m. — The first batch of fries for the day.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
12:20 p.m. — The first steak of the day being cooked.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
Balthazar sells more than 100 orders of steak frites — on a slow night.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
2:34 p.m. — A waiter delivering a food order.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
12:12 AM — The last steak cooked on that day.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
1:54 AM — The last customers of the day leaving Balthazar.
It's 5 a.m. on a Friday morning, and I'm looking at the "vault." It's not actually a vault, but it used to be, back when this was a bank. Now it's used to store wine, glassware and plates for Balthazar. Erin Wendt, the restaurant's general manager, took me here, rounding off a tour of its underground hinterland, a warren of storage rooms that have been colonized, piece by subterranean piece, since the 180-seat brasserie opened in 1997. Beneath the dining room on Spring and Crosby Streets, and moving west, there is a cavernous prep kitchen, the chef's office, six walk-in fridges and one walk-in freezer, a bakery prep station and delivery room, a laundry area, a rather bleak staff break room, kegs and soda lines, managers' offices, a room seemingly dedicated to storing menus and menu sleeves and, finally, beneath Broadway, a half-block away from the dining room, the vault. You can hear the N, Q and R trains trundling by with remarkable clarity.
For now, everything is quiet at Balthazar. The last guests from the night before left just a few hours ago, and the nighttime porters are still finishing their thorough scrub of the restaurant. But the delivery trucks are starting to arrive all over again, idling on Crosby. Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls. That's just the fish and meat order.
Produce comes in, too — 50-pound cases of russets from Idaho stacked head high and six deep; spinach, asparagus, celery, mushrooms, tomatoes — as do dry goods, dairy and some 500 pounds of insanely expensive peanut oil for the French fries. The restaurant employs six stewards to deal with deliveries and storage alone; they weigh goods and check them against invoices, putting everything in its proper place, keeping the Health Department happy. At a typical restaurant, as much as one-third of the overhead goes to food costs, and so efficiency is an imperative. "Monday, you'll see," Kelvin Arias, the head steward, tells me, "all the walk-ins will be empty."
SoHo has so thoroughly become a pleasure ground for the global 1 percent that it's easy to forget, architecture aside, that it was once a manufacturing district. Before Keith McNally, the serial restaurateur who supposedly "invented downtown" Manhattan, opened Balthazar, the building at 80 Spring housed a tannery. Upstairs was a leather wholesaler; downstairs a vast sweatshop. "There were about 200 women down there on sewing machines," McNally says.
Yet in many ways, Balthazar still operates like a factory. Quite literally, raw materials enter through one side early each morning, moving through various stations, where 150 to 200 employees, each playing a narrowly defined role, produce finished, value-added and marked-up goods and serve them directly to end users. During the busy season — roughly fall Fashion Week to Memorial Day — the restaurant spends $90,000 a week on food to feed some 10,000 guests.
Over the course of what I will be repeatedly told is a slow day, 1,247 people will eat here. (Normally, it's about 1,500.) But within a narrow range, Balthazar knows how many people will come through its doors every single day of the week, and it can predict roughly what it will sell during every meal. It mass-produces high-quality food and pushes it out to customers, and its production numbers are as predictable as the system that churns out the food itself. Just about everyone who works at Balthazar calls it a machine.
Roughly one in 10 people who enter Balthazar orders the steak frites. It is far and away the restaurant's best-selling dish, and Balthazar can sell as many as 200 on a busy day. A plate of steak and potatoes requires a tremendous input of labor if you're going to charge $38 for it. At a smaller restaurant, cooks are typically responsible for setting up their own mise-en-place — preparing food for their stations — before each service begins, but at Balthazar, things are necessarily more atomized. The fries, for example, go through numerous steps of prep, done by a few different people, before they wind up on a plate.
Step 1 begins at about 6:30 a.m., when Diógene Peralta and Ramón Alvino, the prep cooks in charge of potatoes, each grab a 50-pound case of GPODs, from the Idaho company that sources Russet Burbank potatoes, known for their consistency, and place a massive plastic tub on the floor behind them. This morning, Alvino is flying, his left hand's fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone's stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man from the Dominican Republic, has been doing this same job for 15 years. "Like anything else, it was difficult at first," he says, but he caught his rhythm after a couple of months. Peralta has been at it for 14 years. Today, they will peel and chip about 600 pounds of potatoes. (Since russet supplies are short in late summer, Balthazar stockpiles thousands of cases of potatoes in a New Jersey warehouse.) Next, they will soak them in water that must be changed three times in order to leach out starch. The potatoes that are peeled today won't be fried, actually, until tomorrow, and then refried — but that's another guy's job.
In traditional French fashion, Balthazar uses a rump cut for the steak frites: top butt, which requires a production line of its own. One butcher breaks a majority of top butt down into seven cuts of similar weight but different size. Another, armed with a Thor-size tenderizing mallet, pounds them into standard thickness. "If I have to cut a piece off to make it the right shape, I will," one butcher, Franklin Cruz, explains to me. He routinely preps 150 steaks in 30 minutes. His hammering arm is noticeably larger than his nonhammering arm. His apron is splattered with blood. But his work makes the steaks easier for the cooks to time when they hit the grill upstairs, and each swing of the hammer also adds value to the tough but flavorful cut. Top butt is typically a braising cut, and in fact, about one-fifth of it is cubed and stewed for the beef stroganoff ($23). The rest is used for stock.
By 6:30 a.m., the underground prep kitchen is bustling. Breakfast service hasn't yet begun, but the prep staff is already focused on dinner. One cook browns whole chickens for jus, haricots verts are boiling in pots large enough to fit a small child, bundles of parsley are reduced to piles of green dust in no time flat. A steam kettle about four and a half feet tall — it looks more like a large, industrial vat, something you might find in a chemical plant — sits in one corner, filled with about 200 pounds of veal bones and 20 pounds of mirepoix and tomatoes, which churn on the surface as the stock simmers and reduces. This will be ready by midday tomorrow, almost thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Once it's strained and chilled, it will be time to make about 50 gallons of chicken stock. A batch that size will last for about two days, used for soups, the jus and, upstairs in the kitchen, as an "all-purpose lubricant" for finishing dishes. At 7:25 a.m., the shift manager yells, "Doors open!"
When the first party sits down, a waitress takes their coffee order, turns around and heads straight to a computer terminal. Balthazar's waiters — like waiters at most restaurants — spend a lot of time doing the seemingly duplicative work of punching orders they have already written down onto touch-screen computers. The point-of-sale terminals (or P.O.S., as the occasionally vexing machines are known) remove a certain degree of human error, but more important, they keep waiters on the floor, selling food and booze, turning tables as efficiently as possible. Food runners bring the plates to the dining room; busboys take them back to the dishwasher. There is a coffee runner whose sole task is to bring coffee from the barista to guests. For the most part, a waiter's job is to manage the flow of plates around the restaurant. As Wendt explains, "Anything that we can do to keep the waiters on the floor more, we do."
The importance of salesmanship becomes more apparent during the prelunch huddle, held in a hallway by the service entrance. Laure Sauvonnet, an energetic woman from Jura, France, and one of the managers on duty, begins by going over the day's menu: the soup du jour, the 86'ed items (currently, and strangely, just conches), the West Coast and East Coast oysters. She has one server try to sell her the plat du jour — today, the bouillabaisse — as if she were a customer; she chides him about his pronunciation. Then she produces a fig financier with vanilla sabayon, the day's special dessert, which is passed around for waiters to taste. "Everybody needs to sell two," she says. "If you do more than four, I'll give you a drink or an appetizer. That's a good deal."
Before it went out of business in 2010, the industry magazine Restaurants & Institutions ranked the nation's highest-grossing eateries every year. Balthazar was No. 27 that year, and 9th in New York, which put it one slot behind the four-star Del Posto and above Junior's, Brooklyn's touristy greasy spoon. In a way, Balthazar straddles those worlds. It's not fine dining, and certainly not a diner, but it creates the veneer of luxury while still turning a table for two in well under 90 minutes.
The secret behind this volume lies in training not only the waiters but also their support staff. Balthazar's busboys are so efficient, in part, because they've been doing the job for so long. Wong Cheng (or Koon, as he's known at the restaurant) has worked for McNally since 1982, soon after he opened his first restaurant, the Odeon, in TriBeCa. Koon's wife works downstairs in the laundry room. Rumor has it that Koon owns several buildings in Chinatown. ("I've heard that, too," McNally tells me.) One member of the staff tells me he's "probably a millionaire." (Koon, when I asked, demurred.) But while busboys are generally spread thin at restaurants, Balthazar puts as many busboys on the floor as it does waiters, 10 each during dinner. A favorite piece of trivia among the busboys is that McNally used to ply their trade. His first job in New York was bussing tables at Serendipity 3, on the Upper East Side. And when he opened Balthazar London this year — a piece-for-piece facsimile of the SoHo restaurant — he flew out a team of busboys to teach his British employees how to keep tables turning.
During lunch, their contribution is quickly obvious. The kitchen pushes out a stream of the upscale comfort food that Balthazar excels at: toasted ham-and-gruyère sandwiches, macaroni au gratin, cheeseburgers. On the floor, the actress Emily Mortimer sips rosé Champagne in a V.I.P. booth along the restaurant's eastern wall, as improbably large, presumably wealthy families crowd in alongside young women with big, floppy hats and young men with topknots. One after another, the bussers create precariously balanced plate sculptures, all draped under a faux-shabby dishrag posing as a napkin, and whisk them from the table to the three-man dishwashing operation in the rear. Downstairs, the breakfast cooks are already preparing for tomorrow's brunch service, which can easily do 1,000 covers (restaurant parlance for "diners"): parboiling potatoes, shredding cheese, cracking eggs, cutting English muffins.
Shane McBride has been Balthazar's head chef for nearly three years, and he is the first permanent replacement for Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, the chefs who opened the place in 1997. Despite the fact that he has worked in three- and four-star kitchens, McBride has adopted something of a bruiser look. His forearms are tattooed (one is of a Ball jar; another depicts four stars out of five), and he has a scraggly blond beard and a chipped front tooth. "They didn't bring me in here to change things," he says. Nasr and Hanson left Balthazar to open up another McNally venture, Minetta Tavern, and McBride's mandate was to keep things working pretty much as they had always worked. Along the way, he has made some minor tweaks, like changing the poultry supplier, refining the preparation of pork belly, bringing in more seasonal food. "I had some high and mighty ideas that I had to reel in," he says. (Among them, scrubbing the All-Clad cookware in the prep kitchen until it shines, daily. But it soon became clear that the pots and pans simply get too much use down there for that to make any sense.) "To change things here is like taking a quick right-hand turn in an aircraft carrier."
McBride's first high-volume job was at Thompson's Clam Bar on Cape Cod. They did up to 3,000 covers a day, he tells me, and they even had a mesh-bottomed conveyor belt for breading fish. They bought whole swordfish three at a time. "It was just a monstrosity," he says. He finds the upstairs kitchen at Balthazar more impressive. "The nighttime cooks, they make it look easy. I still go up there" — to the restaurant's 23-by-15-foot upstairs service kitchen — "and sometimes I'm like, 'Goddamn, this is awesome,' " he says. "There's not tweezers and all that. It's just cooking. There's a difference between the guys here and the guys at Per Se. The guys at Per Se have different goals," he says, implying résumé-building. "This is a restaurant where guys come to work. They're cooking food." They also speak Spanish, which McBride doesn't really, and so he has found his time is better spent downstairs in prep, rather than running the line. "All the flavors are built down here," he says.
By 2:30 p.m., much of the heavy dinner preparations — the potato cutting and steak pounding, filleting of salmon and shaving of asparagus — have already been done. A nighttime prep cook caramelizes about 100 pounds of onions, prodding them around an industrial-size pot with a steel paddle that might prove useful in a dinghy. (Eventually this will become 15 gallons of French onion soup.) Upstairs, the late-lunch crowd is piling in. Steaks hit the grill, blanched fries are finished in bubbling peanut oil and the two are reunited for the first time since the prep kitchen. They'll sell just 111 orders today, the bulk during dinner, finally closing the loop started yesterday by Alvino and Peralta, who presumably will be fast asleep by then, dreaming, perhaps, of something other than potatoes.
Despite the 300 reservations that constitute a "mellow night," dinner is the smoothest service at Balthazar. The upstairs kitchen is broken down into six stations behind the line — fry all the way on the left, then grill, sauté/meat, fish, hot appetizers and garde-manger (salads and cold appetizers) on the far right — and the menu was created to distribute work evenly without creating a pileup. The plat du jour, for example, is rarely a grilled dish because the grill station is already so busy with steaks and burgers. "The menu was written for balance," McBride tells me at around 8 p.m., as he watches the line, fussing with some ricotta salata on the Balthazar salad ($17). (The dishes containing the word "Balthazar" are incredibly popular with foreign tourists, one waiter told me.) Then McBride breaks the cheese into smaller pieces before putting it back on the pass, the counter that separates the sous chef from his line cooks. By 9 p. m., as Robert Trujillo, the bass player for Metallica, sits down at Table 13, the chef was already gone for the night.
No matter, the kitchen is in capable hands. Raúl Hernández, the sous chef, is expediting the kitchen's work flow, casually massaging the fries into attractive piles and talking about how excited he is about Trujillo's presence. He gives each plate's edge a wipe with a damp sponge before arranging it, with others, on trays to be ferried out by food runners. Aside from the occasional calling of orders in kitchen Spanglish, a phone call downstairs to bring up more fries, there is hardly any talking. Runners stand by, placing doilies on stacks of liner plates, waiting for the word. At 10 p.m., Hernández shows me his spike, packed to the brim with P.O.S. tickets, representing dozens of meals already consumed — birthdays, anniversaries, whatever — as he empties it into the trash.
"That's the second batch," he tells me. "You'll see it full again by the end of the night."
By 10:30, the dining room is more crowded than it has been all day. A party of eight Europeans crams into a table meant for six, right next to Trujillo. A manager, Robert Khimeche, watches them, arms crossed. "I must protect him," he says, only sort of kidding. At around 11, as this surprise rush's orders come in, the pass fills up with dishes, but none of the four food runners are present. This could prove disastrous, the sort of domino effect that a kitchen might not bounce back from: dishes could go out cold and come back for refires, clogging up the line for rest of the night, creating delays, angry customers, cuss words and — worse — comps. The sous chef paces, showing signs of stress. He walks out of the kitchen to yell, "Runners!" through the swinging doors. And sure enough, the machine kicks back into gear. The runners return from the floor, or wherever they had been, and the pass is emptied again in two minutes. A new stack of P.O.S. tickets hit the spike.
By the end of the day, the rotating staff of six cooks behind the line will have produced 111 steak frites, 90 French onion soups, 88 Balthazar bar steaks, 69 burgers, 68 omelets, 62 goat-cheese tarts, 56 chicken paillards, 51 chicken clubs, 48 seared salmon fillets, 46 heirloom-tomato salads, 45 sides of fries, 44 chicken-liver-and-foie-gras mousses, 43 duck confits, 40 grilled dorades, 39 steaks au poivre, 39 eggs Norwegian, 38 steak tartare appetizers (plus 16 entrees), 32 escargot, 32 moules frites, 29 grilled trout — the list, pulled from the P.O.S. terminals, goes on and on and on. The volume benefits the whole staff. Tonight, the waiters earn $345 in tips, the runners $207 and the busboys $172, which does not include the $5 an hour Balthazar pays them.
A little past midnight, the dining room is emptying out. Even the bar is empty, which is where the manager on duty sits down for a plate of duck confit. Shortly after, the waiters whose sections have emptied change out of their white shirts and aprons, and the waitresses ditch their French-maid outfits, and they gather to drink wine from unfinished bottles, raiding the kitchen for leftover prep. The night porters show up and start scrubbing the kitchen upstairs and hosing down the prep kitchen, where the veal stock still bubbles away.
The closing manager, Khimeche, traverses the restaurant's catacombs carrying a key ring that would put an N.Y.C.H.A. superintendent to shame, dropping it a number of times as he rushes about, frantically locking everything up, placing cash in a safe with an obscenely noisy crank, running a few photocopies and then booting the waiters from a V.I.P. banquette before finally closing the doors. He steps outside at 2:30, as the waitstaff, having decided against going out for more drinks, disperses into cabs. In just a few hours, the delivery trucks will return and it will start all over again.
Willy Staley is a writer and editor in New York.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
The Food & Drink Issue: 22 Hours in Balthazar
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-food-drink-issue-22-hours-in.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
The Food & Drink Issue: 22 Hours in Balthazar
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
The Food & Drink Issue: 22 Hours in Balthazar
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar