claim he carries a gun, insist that he sniffs "thinner" and "pintura", that
he's done a lot of prison time. I don't care if he killed Kennedy, the man
is the greatest prep cook I've ever had. How he finds the time and the
strength to keep up with deliveries, the nuts and bolts of deep prep, like
cleaning squid, washing mussels and spinach, dicing tomato, julienning
leek, filleting fish, wrapping and deboning pigs' feet, crushing
peppercorns and so on, and yet still finds time to make me beautiful,
filament—thin chiffonaded parsley (which he cuts with a full-sized
butcher's scimitar) is beyond me.
The last cook to arrive is our French fry guy. This is a full-time job at
Les Halles, where we are justifiably famous for our frites. Miguel, who
looks like a direct descendant of some Aztec king, spends his entire day
doing nothing but peeling potatoes, cutting potatoes, blanching potatoes,
and then, during service, dropping them into 375-degree peanut oil,
tossing them with salt, and stacking the sizzling hot spuds onto plates
with his bare hands. I've had to do this a few times, and it requires
serious calluses.
I hold the waiters' meeting and tasting at eleven-thirty. The new waiter
doesn't know what prosciutto is, and my heart sinks. I run down the
specials, speaking slowly and enunciating each syllable as best I can for
the slower, stupider ones. The soup is soupe de poisson with rouille—
that's a garlic pepper mayonnaise garnish, for the newbies. Pasta is
linguine with roasted vegetables, garlic, baby artichokes, basil and extra
virgin olive oil. The whole roasted fish of the day is black sea bass—
that's not striped bass, for our slower students—and crusted with sel de
Bretagne. The fish of the day is grilled tuna livornaise, asparagus and
roasted potatoes. Does anyone need "livornaise" explained . . . again?
The meat special is roast pheasant with port wine sauce and braised red
cabbage. There are faux filets for two available (that's the big, hip-end
piece off the sirloin, strip-carved tableside for fifty bucks). Dessert
special is tarte Tatin. It's not too bad a line-up on the floor today: Doogie
Howser, "Morgan the part-time underwear model," Ken the veteran (who