It may take years of sacrifice and training for a cook to work his way to the top in a professional kitchen, but a few weeks ago, I managed to claw a path from prep slave to saucier under one of the city's best chefs – and all in just 51/2 hours.
One night each month, Chris Brown, the chef at the Stop Community Food Centre, throws a high-end, five-course fundraising dinner for 30 in the charity's soaring greenhouse in the city's west end. The $75 tasting menu is a bargain for diners: Before Mr. Brown signed on at the Stop, he was head chef at Perigee, the acclaimed (albeit now defunct) restaurant in the Distillery District, and in many ways his cooking at the centre, an innovative non-profit that engages people to grow and cook healthy food, is as accomplished as it's always been.
But one of the most interesting things about the events is that Mr. Brown's sophisticated creations manage to make it to the table at all. Aside from just one other professional cook, sous chef Scott McNeil, and a dishwasher, Mr. Brown staffs his kitchen with amateurs, charging them $100 for a spot on his crew for the day.
It's safe to say that this simply does not happen in other restaurant kitchens; most high-end chefs have a hard enough time entrusting seasoned professionals with their menus, let alone a band of bumbling amateurs. Chris Brown, by contrast, likes to see his dinners as “cooking classes on steroids.”
Which is how one night earlier this month, in spite of what might retrospectively be termed “everybody's better judgment,” I nearly ruined lobster risotto for 30, among other things. But that didn't happen until 8 p.m. or so, when I was well into the twilight of my professional culinary career.
I showed up at noon. Nobody arrived earlier or keener than me – I even brought my own apron and knives. “You're going to make the lobster stock,” Mr. Brown said, after a quick pointing tour of his kitchen. He showed me how to thwack my knife down between the lobster's eyes, using the heel of my hand to drive the tip of the blade down through the carapace to dispatch the beast with a glasses-splattering crunch.
By the time the next of the night's eight paying kitchen hands, an IT consultant named Jason, showed up, the stock was near a simmer and I was trimming fat and skin from a dozen crimson duck breasts. Jason, it transpired, had learned cooking by watching Mr. Brown at Perigee and then honed his skills at George Brown. He had worked the last two dinners here and had impeccable knife skills. I sensed he was going to be my competition for the stove.
By 2 o'clock, the kitchen was jammed with other acolytes. Good chefs are good only in ideal situations. But great chefs? Great chefs can work with just about anything that comes their way – particularly if “anything” is eight amateur Mario Batalis trying not to wreck a high-pressure dinner service. Throughout the day, Mr. Brown adjusted his plans to the realities of the evening. He somehow kept his attention on all his cooks, swooping in to direct when he was needed (which was often) and correcting mistakes (lots of them) before they mattered (almost never). He leapt in when he saw one cook cutting up a foil-wrapped block of butter (an excellent way to serve somebody a mouthful of metal, he said) and helped another to melt $40 worth of cream and dark chocolate without burning it. Another of the cooks tried to show us all how to open a beer bottle with a 9-inch chef's knife, but sliced his hand and nearly ruined the knife (one of Mr. McNeil's prized possessions) in the act.
Mr. Brown even had to bail Jason out. On the other side of the kitchen, Jason was struggling with a batch of Red Fife flour pastry. He may have been good with a knife, but it looked as though he'd never held a rolling pin in his life. I smiled an inside smile.
We all opened beers – all of us except for Scott McNeil. “I need to stay sharp tonight,” he said, “so I can bail the rest of you out when everything starts to crash and burn.”
To my mind at least, the best place in a kitchen is at the stove. The other cooks chopped, barbecued, stirred, plated and sauced at Mr. McNeil's and Mr. Brown's commands. But I was up on the front line, having way too much fun to leave.
“Hey, chef, you need those eggs poached for the appetizer?” I called out. (Whereupon I poached 34 eggs and dropped them into cold water to hold.) “Hey, chef, do you want me to start that risotto?”
As the guests arrived and the plates started going out, the servers, and even some of the diners, came into the kitchen with glowing feedback. Mr. Brown was managing to pull it off, in spite of us.
The risotto, the record should show, started brilliantly. When it was about halfway done – I was only supposed to cook it part way – I asked Mr. Brown to taste it. It needed a couple more minutes, he said.
I probably gave it a couple more minutes than a couple minutes, and added a couple too many ladles of stock.
Mr. McNeil came by a little while later. Half an hour before we had to serve it, the rice was on the cusp of being overcooked. “We've got to cool this down right away,” he said. This was what he had meant by going down in flames.
Mr. Brown and Mr. McNeil rescued the risotto by chilling it on a baking sheet. When it was time to serve it, they directed (but far more closely now) as I hit it with stock, water, and a sweet-sour beurre blanc and heated it slowly. Once Mr. Brown plated it with warm, lemon-kissed ricotta and barbecued B.C. spot prawns, it was actually pretty great. I'll bet that none of the diners out in the greenhouse knew anything was awry.
There wasn't the time to stand around gloating, though.
“Hey chef, you need those duck breasts seared off?” I called, hopefully. “Yup, go!” he said.