The slightly inconvenient aspect of working with Canario this week is that I haven’t had the chance to watch a real service. The huevo caldo is so labor and time intensive that we end up missing most of the lunch and dinner services. Finally, tonight, however, I got to be a part of the partida during dinner as the executive chef was pleased, after all of our attempts, with our caldo (success!!).
Immediately, I was struck by how much more difficult it is to plate carnes dishes than primeras dishes. For starters, the carnes partida is extremely limited in space and, as with every other station, overstaffed by two. This means that there can’t be a single extraneous of superfluous movement. Precision is not only key, but also essential. It’s nerve wracking. You have to know where not only your hands, arms and body are moving, but also where your partners’ hands, arms and body are moving. It is a well-coordinated symphony of exact movements.
There are two islands to plate on and people plate across from each other working in the same exact order each time a course or dish is fired. Say for example, there are four plates about to go out—in this case—Aroldo will start (facing the grill) with the upper left, followed by the lower left, upper right and lower right. His partner will trail him by a second, or once Aroldo starts the third dish and Arolodo’s arms are out of the way. There is a pattern for any number of dishes and this pattern is never deviated from.
The second reason plating is so much more difficult in carnes is the temperature factor. Each of the carnes plates (pigeon, egg, solomillo, manitas (pig feet), liebre (hare), and tripe) have a protein and sauce (or sauces) that must be hot once they arrive to the table. Accordingly, we have a very short window to complete the dish and bring it to the server so that everything remains a perfect hot when it is placed on the table.
I don’t know why I’m such a sucker when it comes to watching plating, but when it works well and people do their jobs efficiently, it’s gorgeous. It’s like watching a well-choreographed ballet and reminds me of my seven years in the Nutcracker when I was young. But, in contrast to being a dancer, where you can only feel yourself being part of a larger whole, when it comes to being a cook and plating a dish, you have the added luxury of watching the final product unfold.
I had pathetic written all over my face. I wanted nothing more than to be plating and our chef instructor knew it. When we had just about finished service, he came to me and (via Luis) told me to watch and memorize. He would let me help plate the last pigeon dishes. I was so nervous, but too excited to have shaky hands and knew that if I just took a moment to breathe, that I could do it. I had already memorized what the steps were/are.
The pigeon dish goes like this:
When the previous course to pigeon is fired (salmonete, which is red mullet), snipped brotes (micro herbs) are removed from the timbre (a low-boy—a small, under-the-counter refrigerator) and the toasty is made. The toasty is a dime-sized thick slice of two inch by half an inch slice of sourdough bread, toasted in the oven at 170 degrees celcius for 13 minutes. It is topped with a long cylinder of liver mousse and brought to the station’s mini sous chef at this point.
When the course is actually fired, Aroldo grabs a pot of pasta rings—they call it calamari pasta, because the rings look and are the exact thickness of calamari—with two spoonfuls of carbonara sauce. He leaves this on the grill for one second, grabs the necessary amount of plates and places them on the island where we plate. While he returns to the grill to bring the carbonara to a boil (and hence reduces it), I spray the plates with gin (yes, gin!) and wipe them clean with a white napkin stacked on my right. At this point, I also bring the plate of brotes and place them either on the servers’ tray or in the middle of the island depending on how many plates we are sending out.
During this time, our chef instructor is cooking the pigeon. It takes only a few moments. Our station’s mini sous chef is warming both the pigeon sauce and farse that will fill the pasta. Once the pigeon is cooked, our chef instructor tells us to plate and Aroldo throws a pinch of chives into his diminutive pasta pot. He starts with the upper left and places once ring of pasta, with a fork, in the exact center of the plate. Once he has finished two dishes, I start with the farse, which Canario has warmed and placed in front of me at the end of the grill. First, I fill the ring of pasta and then drop a very tiny amount above the ring, swiping my spoon through it to the right, creating a mini rainbow. I move off to the right (to the short end of the island, Aroldo has already moved back to the grill to fill a small, square tray with potato and black truffle espuma (foam)) and Canario moves in with the pigeon sauce. He drops two long lines of sauce on either sides of the ring and drops the pot behind him once he has finished. Our chef instructor has already left a tray of cooked pigeon just next to where Canario will leave his pot and he brings it to the island. Each piece of pigeon must be picked up with a fork, slightly dabbed and dried on a pile of small, square white napkins and then placed on top of the pasta ring. Aroldo is dropping three penny-sized coins of espuma, from left to right, just ahead of Canario’s pigeon dropping. Once Aroldo moves to his right, to the next set of dishes, I move in from the short side of the island and drop three brotes on each plate—one brote per espuma coin. The brotes are set leaf side down, stem side up on their plate so that they can be grabbed immediately and rapidly. Aroldo moves out and Canario and I finish the dish. I grab a warm toasty by a fork and one hand from a small tray that has been left by our chef instructor in the middle of the island and lay it, at a diagonal, on the pigeon and plate. Canario grabs a small tin of sautéed chanterelles and black trumpets to scatter over the dish, which has been reheated by the guy who works on liebre, and I sprinkle each plate with a finely crumbled hazelnut cookie in the bottom right hand corner.
I took the first tray that I plated out to the servers. You have to make eye contact with our chef instructor before doing so, saying aloud the table number so that he knows you have heard him. When I brought the tray to the designated drop off point, it was Antonio, our sommelier, who was there to receive it.
“Mesa ocho,” I said.
“Mesa poro?” he asked, taking the tray from my hands.
“No, mesa ocho,” I said again. The servers like to play with me given that my accent is even less than sub-par.
“Si! Mesa poro!” he said again.
And then I realized what he was saying—mesa marijuana.
I did what I do in any tense situation and started laughing out loud, uncontrollably. It was going to be a while before people stopped playing with me for moving on to a new station. They love the fact that I am so nervous. I returned to the kitchen and was told by my former chef de parti that I could start smiling at midnight, once the service was over. My new chef de parti, just raised his eyebrows at me and seemingly gave me the death-stare.
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