When Eric Ripert was a young cook at La Tour D’Argent, possibly the oldest restaurant in Paris and certainly one of the most stuffy, all the cooks sat down before serving a proper French meal: appetizer, main course, dessert and cheese.
He doesn’t feel nostalgic about his stay there. (“I have PTSD” from the experience, he said.) But he had that meal on his mind when he posted a job offer as “Staff Meal Chef” at Le Bernardin, his seafood temple in midtown Manhattan, which led him to It becomes possibly the first American restaurant to hire a chef just to cook for its own employees.
Serving and sharing a meal before diners arrive is a long-standing tradition in the culinary world, in restaurants that can afford it. In most kitchens, especially fast food and casual dining, workers have to stagger their breaks and bring or buy their own food. Even at high-end restaurants, staff food has often been a last-minute effort, with cooks scrambling to refuel their co-workers as quickly and cheaply as possible.
But many American chefs are devoting new attention and care to staff meals, or family meals, as they are often known. In a notoriously abusive industry, the physical and mental health of employees has become a priority, and retaining staff has become an imperative amid post-pandemic workforce shortages. With benefits and advantages such as family food, restaurants try to retain their employees. Increasingly, they also use food as a teaching opportunity, a testing tool, and a creative incubator.
Ripert said he created the position at Le Bernardin because the daily struggle to prepare the family meal offended his pride in a kitchen that works like clockwork. “She got under my skin,” he said.
One afternoon in May, a few weeks into his new job as the restaurant’s staff food chef, Noah Steers was loading a cart with trays of chicken shawarma, turmeric-tinged rice, beet salad, Greek salad, tzatziki, and honey mousse. chocolate. He had to feed 100 employees between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m., a task complicated by the fact that his kitchen is many hallways and an elevator ride away from the converted warehouse where the workers eat.
When Steers applied for the position, his experience cooking in Thailand, Peru and Mexico so impressed the chef de cuisine at Le Bernardin that he was offered a job in the kitchen, but he chose this position.
“It’s more creative than being at a station preparing the same thing every day,” he said, running through the bowels of the office tower that houses the Le Bernardin complex.
The tradition of restaurant workers staying to eat together exists in many parts of the world. The French system that Ripert produced, codified by chef Auguste Escoffier in the 19th century, was designed for busy hotel kitchens that served constantly from breakfast to dinner. The cooks ate while sweating on the stove, and the task of keeping them alive with food and drink was delegated to the lowest person in the culinary hierarchy: the “comunero”, who was only above the “cook” and the waiters. .
The low status of the position – and the low quality of the food, in most restaurants – was the standard in the United States until very recently. Long before food waste became a public concern, chefs were worried about squeezing every last penny out of their budget. Family meal cooks had to prepare meals from leftovers, offcuts, and spoiled foods, usually fortified with starch such as pasta or rice.
But as the farm-to-table movement took off and the culinary profession attracted more recruits, that changed. In 1999, “The French Laundry Cookbook” by Thomas Keller included recipes for “staff lasagna” and salad dressings. In 2000, David Waltuck, chef and co-founder of Chanterelle in TriBeCa, dedicated a cookbook to the topic: “Staff Meals From Chanterelle.”
Along the way, the “staff meal” has become a “family meal,” emphasizing the emotional connections forged by sharing food during a break in the tornado of service.
In America’s most ambitious restaurants, there is now a container of ingredients dedicated to the family meal, or a shelf on the counter labeled “food.” This time of year, there may be asparagus that is not pretty enough for the dining room, or an excess of ramps.
Figuring out how to turn them into a satisfying spread is what makes family meals such a testing ground for cooks. Cheetie Kumar, chef at Ajja in Raleigh, North Carolina, said she uses it as a teaching tool and as a test.
“It is an opportunity to develop all the skills that make a cook a chef: planning, breaking down a recipe into its components, delegating and time management.”
And it often produces exclusive dishes. At Budonoki in Los Angeles, said chef Dan Rabilwongse, two dishes created for a family meal have made the jump to the regular menu: charred sweet potato with miso butter and chives, and deep-fried chicken wings smothered in a South Asian sauce ( based on the skewers at Disneyland’s popular Bengal Barbecue stand).
Chef Fariyal Abdullahi said posting photos of family meals at Hav & Mar in Manhattan to her 28,000 Instagram followers is part of her mission to help customers connect with the people who make their food, not just those who deliver it. to the table.
He also uses familiar food as a motivator to get reluctant employees to work on Sundays, providing head cook Victor Estolano with the ingredients for an extensive Filipino feast.
“Family food replenishes not only the body, but also the spirit and mood,” said Estolano, who has worked in kitchens for 11 years.
Musashi Osaki, a Brooklyn sous-chef, said he tries to achieve the combination of lightness and nutrition he observed in family meals when he worked as an apprentice in Kyoto, Japan.
Osaki rose to sudden fame in TikTok videos made by his partner, Jasmine Stoy, that show him cooking in his home kitchen and behind the scenes at Yuu Restaurant in Greenpoint. He is often seen stirring soup or roasting vegetables for a family meal, in order to prepare the team to serve 15 dishes to 18 guests twice each night, in a theatrical sequence of culinary choreography.
“The family meal is not considered a social time,” he said. “We really need the fuel.”
Osaki grew up working at her parents’ busy sushi restaurant near the Hamptons and moved to Kyoto when she decided to pursue a culinary career. Like the other cooks at the traditional kaiseki restaurant, who had committed to a 10-year apprenticeship, he often worked from 7:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. six days a week, eating the family meal (always a soup, a protein and rice) as the only rest in the day.
Laila Bazahm, chef at El Raval in Austin, Texas, is one of many chefs who encourage employees to bring their home cooking skills to family meals. She grew up in the Philippines, worked as a banker in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and decided at age 26 to move to San Sebastian, Spain, to train at the famous Mugaritz restaurant. As in most high-end European kitchens, she and other unpaid interns (called stagiaires) were responsible for the family meal, an experience she describes as “terrifying” for an unskilled cook.
He turned to adobo, the food of his childhood. Later, at Hawker45, her restaurant in Barcelona, Spain, the staff came from so many parts of the world that Thai curries, Senegalese stews, and Vietnamese soups came to influence the menu.
“We used to trade family meals with nearby restaurants,” he said, a goal he is now trying to achieve in Austin.
Family meals rarely respect standard meal times. At Hawker45, because many Spanish restaurants do not open for dinner until 8 pm, the staff meal was served at 7 pm; in the Raval, it’s 4 p.m.
The family meal is served at 6:30 a.m. at Koko Head Cafe in Honolulu, an all-day breakfast spot created by chef Lee Anne Wong. It has to be good to get employees to work on time, she said. “In Hawaii, people don’t think twice about eating rice and protein first thing in the morning,” so the family meal might be bibimbap with spam or rice soup with fish.
Parche is a new restaurant in Oakland, California, dedicated to modern Colombian food, where chef and owner Paul Iglesias encourages cooks preparing family meals to start with a cookbook. The classic “Great Book of Colombian Cuisine,” commissioned by the Colombian Ministry of Culture and published in 1984, is the only cookbook that his mother, an art history professor, brought with her when the family emigrated to the United States. Joined.
“It opens their eyes to Colombian food: the Lebanese and Turkish influences from the Atlantic port of Cartagena, the breads we make with cassava, cassava and corn, before Spanish settlers brought wheat,” Iglesias said.
The staff’s favorite family meal is buñuelos, meat-filled cheese buns that are so popular they have to enforce a two-per-person rule. Parche’s family meal is open to all employees, whether they are working that day or not. “No questions asked,” she said.
At Le Bernardin, where the restaurant’s famous fresh fish starts arriving before dawn, there are two family meals each day. Ripert said he only has one rule when it comes to feeding the cooks him: he prefers meat and poultry.
“They get a little tired of seafood,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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