I fucked up. Maybe this New Year’s menu was a little too ambitious for the amount of experience my team has. Maybe I did not prepare them well enough to be able to accomplish the tasks necessary at the level necessary for everything to go smoothly. One thing is for sure. I’m the Chef, and our failure is all my fault.
I love the New Year’s menu. We charge more money for it, and we use ingredients and techniques that we don’t normally use. It’s the only menu that we do, where I am not concerned by how much money we spend or even if we will make money on the food we sell. I know that mentality is not good for the business, but I don’t care. Its one night, one menu, one time.
The R&D for the New Year’s menu starts about two months earlier. I test out the techniques I want to do and slowly make sure that all the pieces like product orders and equipment orders are taken care of. As we get closer to the 31st of December, I like to begin to change the normal menu to simpler and less expensive versions of what we will do on New Year’s so that the team can get used to prepping and plating some of the dishes before the big day arrives. This preparation and training is not always possible with every dish on the New Year’s Eve menu so on the big day, there is still plenty of unknown for the team and me to deal with.
Prep time for the big day went smoothly. The team worked together to prepare the menu. They had a detailed prep list broken down for each station and I took care of some of the more technical aspects of the menu while also checking on the team’s progress from time to time.
I was excited. I was really proud of the menu that we had prepared. It was going to be some of the finest, prettiest and best tasting food I had ever created. I was also nervous that the team would not be able to maintain the high standards that I wanted in order to execute the menu.
First order in. We had one table that reserved early. They were to be our guinea pigs. One table of two all alone for the first half hour of service. I took my garde manger cook through the plates of each of the first dishes and all was going smoothly. I started to relax. My team was rising to the occasion, and I was proud of them and what we were producing. Little did I know, and hour later, there would be Armageddon.
As service progressed and the number of guests increased, I was pulled over to the hot side of the kitchen to help with the two hot fish dishes and the main course, the meat dish. As the team was spread a little farther apart, with each cook working their stations and plating their respective dishes, service started to slow down. The food was taking too long to come out. My wife, the leader of the service side of the restaurant, did not inform me of this slow down. Everyone in the kitchen was deep in the shit as happens in the middle crunch, of the rush of service. All the joking and playing gives way to heads down, backs bent, spooning, piping, slicing and wiping.
Looking back now, I feel like I was blissfully ignorant that the pace of service in the dining room was slowing to a crawl. Then, it was time for me to focus on dessert. My dessert cook was charged with a simple and easy pre dessert that she had been plating for about 3 weeks. I did that for the purpose of allowing her to focus on the main dessert, a chocolate soufflé.
Soufflés are pretty easy to execute one or 4 at a time. It’s a pastry cream folded with whipped egg whites and baked in a vessel painted with butter and sugar. The hard part is that every little step and detail in the preparing of the soufflé base, and the preparation of the vessel, must be done perfectly to have a consistent result. You only know if the soufflé is going to work out after the order has come in and you put it in the oven. Then around ten minutes later, it has either risen and has to go to the table immediately, or you’re screwed and have to do it all again while the diner waits for their dessert. For us, on this night, the later situation happened.
The first soufflés went out to the dining room to the first table perfectly. In the end, they were the only table that received the dining experience we wanted to offer on that fateful night. By midnight, it was full on soufflé time. All the earlier tables that had waited were now ready for dessert. 18 people in all. I instructed my cook to whip the egg whites while we finished plating main courses and pre desserts and I checked on her to see that she had over whipped the eggs. I made her throw those whipped whites in the garbage and start again. I started to think that there might be a problem, but the first batch of soufflés went out nicely when there was no pressure, so I let her do her job. The difference though, is that this time, there was pressure. The crushing pressure of my expectations and that of 18 diners waiting to have a beautiful soufflé for their end of the year meal. Not to mention her own pride or the hopes of our whole kitchen staff.
My pastry cook folded the second try of egg whites into the chocolate pastry cream and fired them in the oven. Now, all I could do is wait. Two minutes. Five minutes, Eight minutes. The soufflés either weren’t rising, or they were rising unequally, where one half of the soufflé is rising but the other is stuck to the vessel creating a slanted chocolate ramp. After all that work of putting together the menu, all the planning, even the perfect (if slow) execution of the menu up to that point, I could not in good conscience serve these soufflés.
“Table 10 wants the check,” said my wife. “They are ready to leave,” she added, visibly annoyed.
“How long on those soufflés, I look like an asshole.”
“We have to redo the desserts,” I admitted. “These aren’t rising evenly; I’m not going to serve them.”
“What? People are leaving without dessert, they look fine, send them!” She shot back.
“No,” I replied.
“This is bullshit!”
“I’m not fucking sending it!” I barked. “Not after everything we’ve served up to this point!”
My wife threw up her hands, exasperated, and stormed out of the kitchen to return to deal with the customers who were waiting and ready to leave. It was her own personal hell.
The problem with redoing the soufflés was that we had nothing ready. No extra pastry cream, no separated egg whites, no cups painted and sugared, nothing. It is now 12:20am, twenty minutes after “Happy New Year” and we were fucked. Like, proper fucked. Now, we have to make soufflés from scratch.
My pastry cook and I started on the pastry cream while one other cook separated eggs and yet another started painting our serving dishes with butter and sugar. I started barking orders at everyone to move them quickly from one task to another. I made the pastry cream and cooled it quickly. Then, I whipped the egg whites, and finally, I filled the cups and put them in the oven. No one else was going to do anything even remotely technical. Then, we waited. Two minutes. Five minutes, eight minutes. They were rising perfectly. I was filled with relief. The nightmare was going to end as long as no one dropped one of these soufflés before it hit the table.
The guests, to their credit, mostly waited patiently. They heard that they were going to have chocolate soufflé for dessert, so they were going to wait. Soufflé is not something people have often at a restaurant because of its perilous and fickle nature. It is just too risky.
In one swoop, the finished, perfectly risen soufflés left the kitchen and finished safely on the remaining tables. I was relieved, and tired, but mostly embarrassed. I am the leader of the kitchen. I did not lead my team to victory. I failed them, even though they worked their hearts out for me.
The food that we produced was some of the best I ever made. The service, on the other hand, is one of the worst I ever participated in, in 16 years of professional cooking. We cleaned up, I thanked my team for their hard work, and we sat down to have a few drinks. Soon, we had moved on from that service, and started to focus on the vacation that was to follow. Maybe they will forget that night, but not me. I will carry this defeat with me, learn from it, and grow.
Next year will be a new New Year’s Menu. Maybe we’ll do a cheese soufflé for pre-dessert….
As you know, if you never do anything, you never do anything wrong. Don’t be afraid to take chances, and keep the bar high for everyone. They and you will meet it!