The Belly of the Beast
By Blake Kutner March 28, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Shifting into cruise control

Chef Blake Kutner has been in San Miguel, working to open The Restaurant at Sollano 16 with Donnie Masterton and his wife, Cynthia. The latest update continues with more from “Inside the belly of the beast.” For the complete blog, visit www.blakesmexico.blogspot.com.

When it all hits at once

In my mind, one of the most overlooked aspects of restaurant organization is the job or task of the host and/or reservationist. On our second practice dinner, the ship sunk (to put it succinctly) as we tried to seat all 24 guests within a 15-minute period.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. All the guests were friends of the owners and wanted a tour, or wanted to hang out for a drink or whatever. Therefore, nobody wanted to be the first to sit and nobody wanted to be the last. Anyway, the difference in the kitchen (and the front of the house) between receiving orders spaced five or ten minutes apart and being hit all at once is huge. You very quickly realize all of the issues when four or five orders come in at once. No space for plating. No space for cooking (only six burners on each side of the line, several of which are used up with a bain marie—double boiler used to keep sauces and starches like polenta or mashed potatoes warm, as well as a pasta pot, as well as a stack of pans that won’t fit on the shelf above th
e line). Twelve burners may seem like a lot to your average home cook. When you think about an average restaurant plate...protein, starch, vegetable and sauce (let alone messing around with two different vegetables or sauces or garnishes) and each of them needs to go from cold or room temperature to hot and glossy and seasoned in a matter of minutes, you can imagine how we can go through some serious pans and burner space. Most restaurants have at least ten sauté pans in each of two or three different sizes depending on the number and type of dishes to be picked up at once in each.

Different pick-up times for different dishes is a whole other complicated aspect. For instance, searing and cooking a hind leg of rabbit in the oven takes much longer than sautéing a filet of red snapper on the plancha.

Grilling, resting and re-firing a 1-inch thick piece of steak to medium rare, takes even longer. Which takes longer, tossing a green salad and stacking it on a plate or frying three balls of brandade? Depends on the cook, the fryer and the plate-up style. Some chefs want you to dress and stack a salad leaf by leaf. Don’t bruise the lettuce! These things (some people call it communication) all need to be figured out kitchen by kitchen and cook by cook. So, that adds to the confusion. Especially, when the kitchen has two open doors to the outside, as ours does, which allow the cold air in to cool off the hot food within minutes or seconds. Not to mention cooks speaking English, Spanish, a little bit of culinary French, ghetto slang (English and Spanish) and a little hungover mumbling. I can’t imagine what it must be like working in a kitchen in a country where there are 43 dialects. It was bad enough in Barcelona where we had Catalan, English, Spanish and French whipping around non-stop.

Occasionally, I end a night in the kitchen not wanting to talk to anyone about anything, stomping out like a spoiled kid who had his Playstation taken away. That was night two. I just take this cooking thing real seriously for some reason. I mean, it’s only food and it takes a minute to step back and get perspective.

That’s what makes this business hard. If we could do it right on the second night, there would be a lot more excellent restaurants in the world. There is no formula (other than to make money—like McDonalds) for the independent restaurateur. It’s about caring, patience, perseverance, thinking, evolving, flexibility, vision, reaction and hard work. Luck helps, although it seems pretty rare.

A couple of more practice dinners later in the week helped smooth out some of these ruffles.

Savory vs. sweet

I’ve been helping Donnie work out a dessert menu that is both up to the standards of the savory fare and easy to prepare and execute. Donnie, like myself and lots of other chefs, leans way out to the savory side with little love, patience or comprehension of the sweet art of pastry. It’s a completely different world. More hocus-pocus, chemistry, turning water into wine than what we do in the savory kitchen. Baked dishes don’t evolve slowly like savory dishes. You can’t taste each component, re-season as you go, and make mid-stream adjustments like you can when making a stew or soup. You put it in the oven and you pray that it works. And high altitude affects pastry like the wind affects disc golf. It goes from fair and comprehendible to complete randomness. Unlike savory food, sweets seem to me to be much more black and white. It’s either right or wrong. So, not only can you not fix a problem midway, it’s trash if it’s not right.

So this week we have been getting geared up for the opening—organizing, shopping lists, purveyor lists, prep lists, station lists, employee lists, recipes.

What dishes are we going to make? How many are we going to make each night? What ingredients are needed for each dish? How are those ingredients prepped (washed, dried, skinned, diced, sifted, cored, peeled)? Where do we get those ingredients? Do they deliver? What if they are out of that ingredient? Who or what is the backup? What size do we want? Who is going to pick it up? What’s the best route to make the maximum stops with the minimal driving and traffic? How can we pay? It’s incredible how much fetching you do to open a restaurant.