Saturday Stagiaire: Uptown 21

Some of the greatest chefs in history have started out in the lowly post of stagiaire, apprentice.

Pick just about any prominent chef, one actively cooking or one overseeing a small food-empire of restaurants, and chances are he or she has done a stage somewhere and at some point in the arc of the culinary career. They can start as young as 14 years of age, prepping and chopping veg, cleaning produce, sweeping up. For some, it is a process that never ends and regular stages become regular refresher periods from the kitchen grind and educational opportunities.

When, eight or nine hours later, dinner service begins, stagiaires might observe the pace of the kitchen and the meshing of the various stations, grill cook timing his rib eye with the sous chef’s principle dishes. The stagiaire absorbs the pace and flow of service and sees how the three or four cooks interact, physically and verbally in the often incredibly tight confines of the kitchen. They note how the ingredients they have brunoised or chiffonaded, ripped or fine-diced, the dozens of mushrooms they have cleaned earlier that day are cooked, plated and sent to the pass.

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Cooking is a noble profession, I’m going to call it; whether cooks have been formally trained or self-taught—or have honed their basic skills through stagiaires around the world—it is indeed a noble, and a tough, profession too. But most interesting is that it, like many, many other trades and skills, is one that has centuries of craft behind it and imbued within it: a classic sauce developed by Careme or Escoffier, and which is faithfully duplicated (or even just riffed on), carries with it an entire culinary history. That’s pretty cool–especially if you add to it the creative aspect that is so vital to a robust kitchen and restaurant.

So many great cooks today have worked their ways through stagiaires that I’m loathe to even use the term as it applies to what I’ve done. So let’s just say that what I’m doing is spending a bit of time at Nick and Nat’s Uptown 21 in Waterloo observing how their kitchen operates, before, during, and after dinner service: in a series of “Flog” food blogs, I’ll chronicle the events and insights, edited and compressed for brevity and economy, and share them with you. Thanks to Nick and Nat and their staff for letting me sneak in their back door to observe their world. I hope you enjoy.

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Uptown 21 Stagiaire One

2:00 p.m. – The back doors of restaurants must have no few tales to tell: cooks, suppliers, repairmen open that door onto a world that front-of-house diners rarely, if ever, see.

2:30 p.m. – With the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing in the background, I dip my hands into a large, deep pan of lion’s mane mushrooms, suspended in a light salt-water solution. They an unusually fuzzy species in the so-called “tooth mushroom” group which grow upside down from trees. If it gives you an idea of what they feel like, they feel fuzzy and have the basic quality of a softer cauliflower when you pick them apart.

Benninger got the ’shrooms from a local forager—it was my task, in true stagiaire tradition—to pick through them to remove debris and check for livestock (of which I found a few).

Lions' mane mushroom prep.

It’s early in the day, and the banter and back-and-forth between the cooks is pretty much constant and upbeat: chef-owner Nick Benninger, his sous Sean Fancy, and garde manger and recent Conestoga College culinary school graduate Emily Schlieper. It is Schlieper’s “cold” garde manger station (salads, appetizers, desserts) to which I am attached. She, I notice, must only be old enough to be one of my children—younger even than my daughter.

3:07 p.m. – I bend slightly over a sink and de-beard mussels, clean them quickly under cold running water, check for broken shells (which I immediately bin). Passing by, Benninger highlights the age difference between Schieper and I quite, shall we say, succinctly: “Dude, set up those mussels better. You’re past the age of a normal line cook.” He’s right of course. I was once doing a similar task in a popular landmark downtown Kitchener restaurant and was just taking a  moment to lean over to stretch my back; the mustachioed resto owner, about the same age as I, said, “It’s a young man’s game, Andrew.” Copy that.

Local salad mise en place.

3:32 p.m. – As the discussion turns from some chat about Hawking at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute, I’m breaking down some broccoli and cauliflower trying to figure out how brassica oleracea could fit into black holes and string theory conversation. The instructions I get are pretty clear and a lot simpler than astrophysics: “Don’t cut that veg as if it’s for the old folks’ home.” I try to decide if it is a good natured jest about my age.

4:14 p.m. – Schlieper asks me to cut two pounds of butter into cubes for the line at Benninger’s station. I love butter and it pleases me to get it ready for the kitchen. Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, called it “coagulated sunlight.” That pleases too.

Rows of 1-litre containers of produce sit waiting in the walk-in.

4:25 p.m. – Heading up the back four or five stairs to the pantry area and walk-in cooler, I’m thinking I’m glad I had a couple of Advils before heading in here. Earlier this summer–call it the summer of Ibuprofen–I reached into my oven at home and pulled out my lovely heavy cast-iron pan and wrenched my elbow: it still isn’t 100%. On my way back to the kitchen, sous chef Sean and Benninger are taking a quick nosh: “It’s-peanut-butter-sandwich-break-time,” Fancy says offering. I pass on the offer, figuring it will just slow down my already slow pace as I start to clean and trim a box of frisee, a member of the chicory family—it is beautiful stuff, looking like a cross between a sort of ground cover from the gardening store and a small pet. Or, maybe a Star Trek tribble.

Beautiful heads of frisee; or, The Trouble with Tribbles.

5:06 p.m. – Schlieper starts a quick sweep up of the kitchen; I grab the broom from her figuring that this is the correct level of my stagiaire abilities and that I won’t be able to help much with other things. I think a couple of customers have arrived early. Benninger asks me, again, how I’m doing. I’m doing fine: I older than they are but I’m fit, I hasten to tell them.

5:33 p.m. – My first encounter with “ground cherries.” These are delicious. Most importantly, I devised a cunning way to cut the small pea-sized cousin of the tomatillo that have a tomato texture and a flavor at once like a tomato in its flesh with hints of gooseberry and kiwi. They are a nice addition to the “local salad” that is part of tonight’s menu. And there are a lot of them. A friggin’ lot of them.

My ingenious method for bisecting many tiny ground cherries in one fell swoop.

6:04 p.m. – The click and whirry-buzz of a ticket coming in: the night’s first order and we’re off. And I’m mostly watching, not yet knowing the ingredients of the specific dishes. But it feels good to be watching after so many (yikes, nearly 20!) years. Schlieper takes control. She works calmly and smoothly.

6:31 p.m. – The door of the lowboy is malfunctioning and needs to be opened gingerly. Just another thing a restaurant has to deal with—repairs. Restaurant equipment gets used a lot, and it gets used roughly. A solid application of duct tape is a temporary fix until the repair can be made; the door provides a bit of comedy during the night even though it is a bit of a frustration. The real story here? If kitchens know how to do one thing, it is surely how to improvise, react, and adapt on-the-fly.

Ingredients for a lovely chunk of seared tuna. Temporarily duct-taped lowboy lurking just below.

7:55 p.m. – Good chefs move with a controlled alacrity, with efficiency and little wasted energy. They are economical in how they use ingredients, and they are economical in how they use their bodies and their energy. You have to take care of yourself, bearded mussels notwithstanding.

Benninger played goal in hockey back in the day, and he now apparently rides a pretty mean trail or two on his bike during his time away from Uptown 21. It looks like to me that he could have played linebacker; a smaller linebacker, granted, but he’s built on a solid frame. Yet, he moves fluidly and athletically and calmly, as he works three or four pans on the stove-top, bungs another into the blast of a convection oven, shouts out another order, turns off a burner, reaches for some oil and injects a jet of it into a pan while tossing the ingredients (a romesco perhaps?) in another. He plates a dish and tosses the sautéuse into a hotel pan for the hot discards. Oh, and he often just grabs a plate that’s been warming under the sally for a pretty good period of time … asbestos-fingered cooks.

Chris at work.

8:09 p.m. – It seems pretty busy and things are hopping. Sous chef Sean, as cooks will do, tries to label the pattern and rhythm of service: sometimes it’s somewhat ordered; at others it’s out of control. “There’s a weird flow to the night. Hard to put a finger on,” he says. Maybe it is a sort of astrophysical, chaos-theory kind of flow.

8:20 p.m. – What of the myth of the yelling, ranting, ballistic chef a la Ramsay and “Kitchen Nightmares”? That’s not Benninger (at least on this night)—but he does throw things: in a playful way. He tosses a small, empty container to Dishwasher Shawn (DWS), the prep-cook and plongeur—whom Benninger refers to as the best DW in the city—and it looks like they have done it a few hundred times before. Benninger says with a laugh, “It’s one of our favourite parts of the night.” DWS, they refer to him as “Handsome or L’il Shawn,” catches the shovel-pass for an 8-yard gain. Excellent kitchens need excellent dishwashers, and you can tell he is an important member of the brigade.

8:34 p.m. — For my part, I fumble my first pan of food and it’s on the floor: grabbing some ingredients out of the convection oven with tongs, they slip and down they go. It’s one of those things where you are trying to go too quickly rather than going with certainty.

My mess: croutons, bacon, onion go from the oven to the floor to the garbage pail. Ooops.

9:45 p.m. – Sous Sean sets up the “Lobster Three-Ways” plate. Every restaurant has a dish that only rarely seems to get plated, that seems to get forgotten by customers, even if it is really appealing. L-3-W is it at Uptown 21.

Set-up for Lobster Three Ways, usually when you have 15 things to do.

The dish is 1) lemon-herb grilled lobster; 2) baked lobster stuffed with bacon, basil parsley, and kalamata olives; and, 3) a marvelous combination of tempura with truffle-soy (who would have expected that interesting pairing). It has a shaving of Parm (in a nose-thumbing to no-cheese-with-seafood-convention). Sous Sean calls it a “nightmare” of a dish to prepare. “We don’t get it often. When it does come in, you usually have 15 other things to do at the same time.”

Sous Sean garnishes L-3-W with Parmesan.

10:32 p.m. – Last orders in. A few desserts still to come. Andy the regular—and avid—Uptown 21 customer is finishing his meal at the bar that looks into the kitchen. He has been enjoying it.

Clean up starts. Cooks clean while front-of-house staff put the dining room back together for next time. For next time, I’ve made both a physical note and a mental note to myself to have a nap before returning here–and bringing a few more Advils.

10:40 p.m. – Benninger has left the restaurant to see his kids at home. Sous Sean and Schlieper put together staff meal: a heaping lettuce salad with, I’m sure, buried-treasure ingredients beneath (precious little is thrown away in a restaurant), a very large bowl of sautéed sausage chunks, and some garlicky pieces of bread.

Who can eat this late? Cooks and restaurant staff. They no doubt love the peace and quiet—and a simple meal when the night is over.