For those of you who are interested, here's my Vue de monde story, as seen in theage(melbourne)magazine a couple of weeks ago (a glossy released with The Age newspaper once a month). It's an article about the life of an apprentice in a high-end restaurant's kitchen: I spent four days in chefs' whites trying to get a sense for it. And me and Brussels sprouts — well, we're just not friendly anymore.
THE APPRENTICE
On the bench in front of me, 1.6 kilograms of brussels sprouts. In my hand, a devilishly sharp paring knife. On the wall next to me, a timer counting down 45 minutes. My task: to remove the most curvaceous leaves from 1.6 kilograms of brussels sprouts in 45 minutes without tearing them, the bloodshot eyes of four top chefs on me.
Trimming the base of the sprout with the knife and tearing off blemished outer leaves is just the start of the task. The leaves underneath, which are to be later reassembled as “handmade” brussels sprouts, overlap in a protective grip. It’s a long slow haul of gently prising the leaves free of each other to release them unscathed. On day two of my four days working as an apprentice, of sorts, in the Vue de monde kitchen, it takes me 90, hunched-over minutes to get a small bucket of leaves — and painfully cramped fingers.
This is what apprentices (and their seniors) do at restaurants such as the idealised and idolised Vue de monde. Spend up to 16 hours a day on their feet repeating, at a sprint, fiddly, minute, exacting, menial tasks to create any number of elements for an executive chef’s vision of a highly engineered whole. They’re the factory workers pumping out the nuts and bolts and panels and motors that contribute to the car designer’s dream.
My brussels sprout leaves and the handmade sprouts they have become will be one small part of a hare dish. It’s not until “service” later, when the kitchen is gripped by adrenalin, frenzy and focus, and hundreds of dishes move from open kitchen to dining room, that I understand to what end I spent 90 minutes of my life bent over brussels sprouts.
At a bench known as “the pass”, tattooed English head chef Ryan Clift,
deputy and ever-present frontman for celebrity chef Shannon Bennett, is
“dressing” the dish. Bent over, face centimetres from the plate, he
lays down a slice of terrine that looks like a miniature checkerboard.
It’s made up of white polenta and hare-leg-meat squares that Bennett
likes to call a “mosaic”. Now Clift puts down the hare loin, still
attached to its skinny, cleaned ribs, which has been cooked in goose
fat. The restaurant and kitchen’s activity, noise and colour seem
frozen in a tableau as this scowling chef with “LeesaJayne” tattooed on
his right arm and Japanese characters on his left pours a jus onto the
plate. Then comes the bread “air” – a foamy confection spooned over the
loin – and a sprinkling of bayleaf powder around the circumference of
the plate. And, finally, my brussels sprouts.
After my efforts, a chef had taken over and, in a culinary sleight of
hand, turned the cupped leaves back into perfectly formed sprouts using
a palette knife and a bayleaf-flavoured chicken mousse. Now Clift
arranges the freshly steamed sprouts on the terrine and, in a second,
wipes the plate edges clean and bellows “Pick up!” A waiter swoops.
“Careful, don’t spin so fast,” Clift shouts after him. “It’s not one of
your turntables at home.”
Streaks of Insanity
There’s plenty of time when you’re pretending to be an apprentice chef
to muse over the Darwinian reasons for a brussels sprout’s anatomy. To
come to the conclusion that, if life’s too short to stuff a mushroom
it’s almost certainly too short to disassemble a brussels sprout only
to stick it back together again with mousse. And to decide that to be
an apprentice chef, a chef of any rank, in a restaurant like this, a
person must have a streak of insanity. How else could he tolerate the
crazy hours and hard labour, the danger and discomfort of working with
samurai-sharp knives amid scorching stoves on slippery floors; the
unnatural division of labour — mostly the menial slog of mise-en-place
(preparation) punctuated by the fleeting delirium of service.
And what of the abuse, the bollockings, that chefs apparently dish out
to their juniors on a daily basis? These days, in Australia at least,
screaming, deranged chefs, ritual humiliations and flying pans are
confined to restaurant reality shows, but this kitchen is still not a
place for delicate sensibilities. “I’m working with absolute fucking
retards,” mutters Ryan Clift, passing the “larder section” where I’m
slowly picking the microscopic tops off coriander, basil and celery
shoots on my first day in the kitchen. He’s not talking to anyone in
particular but I pick ever more assiduously. (Make no mistake: picking
herb shoots that will garnish dishes matters. A day or so later,
Bennett pulls aside a larder chef to demand longer stalks be left on
the coriander shoots — millimetres of difference between success and
failure.)
Tom Arnel, who graduates from apprentice to qualified chef on my last
day in the Vue kitchen, seems to take the lion’s share of Clift’s
wrath. The day during service that he dresses a plate with caviar that
hasn’t been ordered, Clift is livid; it’s too late to retrieve the
dish, which is now being enjoyed by a customer who won’t be asked to
pay for the expensive addition, but the cost will come out of Clift’s
food budget. Arnel’s face is grim as he takes the 31-year-old head
chef’s rage, but he later tells me that the bollockings don’t bother
him. They wouldn’t waste their breath on him if they didn’t think he
was worth it, reasons the cocky 21-year-old from Geelong. “It’s almost
a good thing when they tell you off, because you know they want more
from you,” he says.
The four-letter words, the stress, the occasional bollockings, might
horrify the ladies and gentlemen of the dining room who, despite an
open kitchen, see only a fraction of what goes on. Clearly though, the
apprentices aren’t bothered. In a restaurant like this, it’s all in a
day’s work. In fact, if you’re to believe the
“it-wasn’t-like-this-in-my-day” mutterings of Clift and his senior
chefs, the Vue kitchen is a picnic compared to European and British
kitchens where most of them endured their apprenticeships.
Says Clift: “They don’t realise how lucky they are … the jobs they get
here, the responsibility they get here … it’s way ahead of what they’d
do overseas.” Clift remembers living in physical fear of his head chef
during his days as a commis, or apprentice, at London’s Claridge’s
hotel restaurant. “I would stand in the corner with my pants down if he
told me to.” Clift one day made the mistake of visiting a few bars
after work with another chef. He drank until 5am, then went home to
shower before returning to work at 8am. “I woke at 3pm and had about 15
missed calls from the premier sous chef at Claridge’s.” He was made to
clean every stove in the huge kitchen for three days.
“These guys,” says Clift, nodding in the direction of an apprentice,
“you give them a bollocking and they just shrug it off. The lack of
respect gets worse … these kids are coming in thinking they’re great …
They want all the money, they want to work less hours and they want
loads of glory.”
“They’ve got an easy life,” says sous chef Mark Briggs, a slight
Englishman with a wan complexion whose CV includes a stint as the only
English speaker in a kitchen of 18 French chefs at the restaurant
Pierre Koffman in London. “I was the lowest of the low — you get so
immune to the bollockings.” Shannon Bennett also recalls bollockings
from his days in overseas kitchens. “Losing my job was my biggest
fear,” says Bennett of his year as a commis under boss John Burton Race
in the kitchen of L’Ortolan, a two-Michelin-star restaurant outside
Reading. “Every night you’re fighting for your career; he’d always
employ extra chefs because he knew he was going to sack one (each
night).”
He also remembers the temper of English chef Marco Pierre White when he
worked for him at The Restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel. “He threw a
couple of things at me, and sacked me a couple of times. I’d go home
and then a taxi would turn up with a note from Marco saying ‘Get the
fuck back to work’.”
Bennett has never had a reputation as a “screamer”. Even in the
gruelling early years of Vue de monde when it was in modest Carlton
premises, he had a reputation for being tough but fair. These days, as
the 31-year-old master of a lavish city spread of restaurant, bistro
and cafe, he presents as a benevolent elder statesman in the kitchen.
Both the Bennett disposition and the open kitchen have contributed to
his more restrained style of management. “You can’t really control a
kitchen like that here because you’d have no staff left, and probably
no customers.”
The Larder Section
I’m trying to sneak peeks at the customers as I put down “cleansers” on
the larder pass during lunch service on my first day and then weakly
call “pick up!” at passing waiters as I’ve been instructed. I feel like
a fraud. And I’m worried. Perhaps I’ve stuffed up the cleansers —
filled the glasses too high, left a smeary fingerprint behind. And what
if Chef Clift hasn’t heard my shy call, “cleansers to table 4”, so he
misses his cue to start assembling the duck or whatever it is that
Table 4 is having next?
I’ve spent the morning working alongside commis chef Andreas from
Athens in the larder section. It’s almost time for lunch service by the
time I finish picking those microscopic herb shoots and straighten my
aching back, but there’s still time for a more interesting task. I can
cut myself on a spoon, but someone clueless hands me a mandolin, a
cunning slicing tool that has blooded most apprentice chefs at one time
or another. I use it, tentatively, to shave slivers of garlic, which I
place with a sprig of thyme on confit cherry tomatoes. The finished
tomatoes are sent in two directions — some off to garnish an
unconventional “cannelloni” dish, the remainder into a salad.
The larder section of a kitchen is the cold preparation area for things
such as salads, garnishes and the pre-prepared elements of main dishes.
It’s the place from which early courses in a meal emerge before the
pressure moves to the more senior chefs in the “fish” and “sauce”
sections. It’s where Vue de monde’s flashy palate cleanser, Bennett’s
way of inserting a moment of reflection, a clean slate, into the middle
of a diner’s extravagant evening, is prepared.
What you have to understand about the food at a contemporary
restaurant, circa 2007, is that things are rarely as they seem. Take a
menu at face value at your peril. Pay close attention to its explicit
or implied ironic quote marks, and its delicious inner meanings.
Because “consomme” may very rarely be consomme. A “risotto” may not
have rice in it, “spaghetti” no wheat. New techniques, high-tech
equipment, chefs’ egos, ambition and over-excitement, and the
ever-increasing influence of a Spanish chef/molecular gastronomist
called Ferran Adria, are changing the face of contemporary restaurant
food from Richmond to Ripponlea. It’s a lot for an apprentice to get
her head around.
For example, the Vue cleanser, “Consomme Froid a la Tomate” is much
more than broth in a bowl. Sure, there’s some tomato consomme, cool and
orange-tinged, but after that, things get a bit wacky. Andreas
demonstrates. First, he pours the liquid into tall shot glasses. Then,
he spurts tiny blobs of “gazpacho jelly” from a piping bag into the
glasses, where they dance happily. (A traditional gazpacho, set as a
jelly and cubed.) Andreas sets the glasses on a custom-made wooden
board, sticks a white paper straw in each glass, and carries the tray
to the pass. The punch line, which can’t be activated until a waiter is
standing by ready to whisk it away, impressed one customer so much that
he video-recorded it, set it to music and posted it on YouTube, titled
“Vue Gazpacho”. The wonders of dry ice: a few pellets dropped into the
consomme create a bubbling eruption that makes a handmade brussels
sprout look positively archaic.
I’m up to the job, I’m sure of it: pour liquid into shot glasses, pipe
out gazpacho jelly blobs, place shot glasses on tray, straw in glasses,
transfer tray to pass, drop dry ice pellets into shot glass, smile at
the nice waiter standing by. Problem is, there’s no nice waiter
standing by. I’ve peaked too early and the dry ice pellets in the
glasses are slowly starting to lose their powers. A tray of cleansers
has been wasted and I look around nervously at a kitchen in full flight.
But Andreas from Athens is no Marco Pierre White. “Here,” he says,
handing me a cleanser and nudging me out of view. “Try it.” I sip the
delicate consomme, roll the jelly bits around my mouth and suck on a
remaining ice cube. My mouth takes on a life of its own, the ice has a
super-glue grip on my tongue and I double up in discomfort. Later, I
overhear a waiter instructing a table in the art of consuming a
cleanser: wait until the dry ice has dissolved.
For an eager young apprentice, “molecular gastronomy” is dazzling
stuff. During a brief afternoon break, 22-year-old beefy blond
apprentice Matthew “Butch” Butcher watches me inhale a coffee, tells me
mercilessly that it should have taken me 10 minutes to get through
those 1.6 kilograms of brussels sprouts, and shares his excitement
about the techniques. “It’s like a new toy,” says Butcher, who started
his career behind the stoves of a Taco Bill’s in Echuca. “I like the
air: when you put it in your mouth it just disintegrates. That’s pretty
cool. And I like the gnocchi out of a foam gun.”
At William Angliss where he has just finished his studies, Butcher the
student played teacher. He taught a pastry chef at the hospitality
institute how to make a foam and has shown others how to use some of
the chemicals such as gums, emulsifiers, stabilisers and setting agents
that modern restaurants are using. “I did a competition a couple of
months ago and did some chemical work … I made pear juice ‘grapes’. The
teachers got a bit worried because they had no idea what I was doing.
“I don’t think you could ever go back to traditional cooking … the
bistro and all that; this is more interesting,” he says. Apprentices
Paul Gajewski and Tom Arnel are just as enthusiastic. “Everything Ryan
does, we’re like, ‘wow,’ “ says 21-year-old Gajewski, of Clift’s
experimentations with new chemicals. “He looks like a mad scientist
sometimes.” Arnel dreams of using the techniques and ingredients one
day in his own restaurant. It’s “the way things are being cooked as
well,” he says. “Things like this blow me away.”
Working on my Theories
I’m not sure I like peas now any more than I like brussels sprouts. But
hidden away in the back of the kitchen, just me and a mountain of fresh
peas, I have time to develop some theories about apprentices and
kitchens.
Imagine a bag of dried split peas — the type you use in a pea and ham
soup. Peas don’t pop out of a pod, then slip out of their skin and
split on their own. Podding them is the easy bit. After they’ve been
blanched and dunked in a bucket of iced water, each pea has to be
pinched gently until the split halves squeeze out of their skin. At
least that’s how Bennett likes his peas for a slow-cooked lamb belly
dish.
There must be thousands of peas to fish out of that icy water. I have
lots of time to think about my theories. A restaurant kitchen is like
an army platoon: the centuries of tradition, the hierarchy, the titles,
the uniform, the unquestioning loyalty, the physical demands. Any
order, comment even, from Bennett or Clift is met with the barked
acknowledgement “Chef!” or “Yes Chef!” or “Oui!”. The kitchen rings
with the responses all day. There is the almost robotic repetition of
tasks, the polishing of boots and buckles, the picking of herbs — all
to a standard for which the soldier, the apprentice, is held
accountable.
And the kitchen is a boys’ club, a bastion of laddishness. Bennett
talks about the things that separate “the boys from the men”. Wives and
girlfriends are “the missus” or “the boss”; even 21-year-old Gajewski
from Dandenong, whose dad picks him up every night to drive him home
and whose mum gives him an Up&Go breakfast drink in the mornings,
calls his girlfriend “the missus”. During my time in the kitchen, the
four female chefs (of 21 chefs dedicated to the restaurant alone) seem
to work mainly in pastry.
Gajewski, who, with his stocky build and close-cropped hair, looks very
much like he could be in the army, tells me that when he feels
exhausted, he thinks of his brother — who is in the army. “I think how
he is hurting more.”
Popping peas and shifting from one sore foot to another, I’m not sure
the army could be that much worse. From Tuesday, when Vue de monde
opens for the week, to the end of Saturday night service, a chef can
work up to 70 hours. They get a half day off during the week, and
Saturday mornings. The rest of the time they’re in about 8am and work
through to 11pm or later. Defending the hours, Clift says: “They’re
only working four-and-a-half shifts, which in the industry is pretty
much unheard of at this calibre of restaurant.” A third-year Vue de
monde apprentice gets the award wage, $484.45 per week. Penalty rates
apply in specific circumstances, a Vue de monde staffer tells me.
For most of the chefs, breakfast is a foreign country – “a Berocca in
the morning and a toasted sandwich at midnight, that’s it. I eat on my
days off – we’re like hamsters, we store it up,” one tells me. Mark,
the wan sous chef, pats the place where his stomach should be and says,
“I don’t eat.” The chefs can take a break during the afternoon, but few
seem to. “We get a break if we want one,” says Matthew Butcher, “but
you don’t even think about a break because you have so much to do.”
Those chefs who do eat the staff meal at 5.30pm do so standing,
grabbing bites between finishing their prep work for dinner service.
Days off are for collapsing: “Most people don’t get out of bed until
three o’clock on their first day off,” says Butcher, who is stoic about
his painful foot problems.
Many don’t cope and there’s a constant turnover of people trying out
for a spot in the kitchen. After four months, 24-year-old Chelsea
apprentice Ben Flowerday is working his last day in the Bistro Vue
kitchen. “It’s what I want to do but I physically can’t do it,” says
Flowerday, who is a diabetic. He is moving to a position at Donovans in
St Kilda, where he says he will work about half the number of hours.
But for the apprentices who survive, being part of the Vue team is an
intoxicating cocktail. Beyond the sense of belonging forged by the
difficult, long, shoulder-to-shoulder hours, and beyond the male
bonding and working with male leaders they idolise, they are part of
something bigger than them — a restaurant consistently named the
country’s best restaurant in national awards; a glamorous workplace,
and possibly future (after all, the boss’s wife is an actress); a
restaurant that’s the talk of the town. “Have you heard the latest
rumour about Vue de monde,” Ryan Clift says one morning. “They do
cocaine on the pass there.” The derisive response from his team is
enough to confirm it ain’t so.
Making Potato Scales
I’ve found the job I like best — arranging potato “scales” on King
George whiting. “Nice scales,” says the fish chef. Now I’m really
contributing something.
I’m picturing the diners who will eat the fish I have decorated,
perhaps a young couple from the suburbs celebrating their engagement.
I’m imagining how they might effuse over the whiting as a waiter
explains the technique to them. How tubes little bigger than a lipstick
are punched out of potatoes, then sliced on a mandolin to form the
thinnest potato circles, which are blanched in oil and laid in orderly
rows on the fish skin. I’m remembering the stories that Arnel, Butcher
and Gajewski told me about their first, awe-struck experiences of Vue
de monde as paying customers. Just kids they are, really, so few
fine-dining meals under their belt, and such a long journey ahead.
Butcher’s first meal at the restaurant with friends was “amazing,
unbelievable”. “I was in here for five hours and spoke about eight
words.” Later, he came back with his mum for another meal. Butcher
handed the waiter a letter he had written to Bennett, asking for a job,
explaining his credentials. Bennett came out to say hello and told him
to come in for an interview the next week. Gajewski, who grew up on a
diet of cabbage, potato and braised meat, brought his girlfriend in for
a late Valentine’s dinner. Arnel brought his parents. “It blew me away
– I didn’t realise the food we were doing, when you sit down and have
the whole experience as one.”
A few days after I take off my apron for the last time, I return for a
meal myself. Like Arnel, I feel the need to see the whole experience as
one; to see where all the bits and pieces I’ve done fit into the
puzzle. There’s a parmesan crisp in the amuse bouche – I helped make a
batch and was mildly ticked off for making them too big; a quail egg
on the Linguini a la Carbonara – I snipped the tops off a dozen or so
with special French scissors and then separated white from yolk through
my fingers. And there are my brussels sprouts leaves. Seen from this
perspective, the hare dish with its mosaic and jutting ribcage and
sprouts is a beautiful thing. But how can I say this? In the case of
the taste of a handmade brussels sprout, the end simply doesn’t justify
the means.
