In the Open Kitchen
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of open-kitchen cooking, cooking where the diners can watch you work. In my case these days, I’m doing it as a one-woman-band in a pop-up restaurant that appears, like a mushroom in the lawn, on Sundays at a local venue that normally showcases local/regional agricultural produce of various sorts, some whole foods grocery, and the products of a few very good local small businesses along the food/health-and-beauty continuum.
It’s not a traditional restaurant. It’s not a restaurant at all. There’s none of the infrastructure you would associate with a restaurant, save for a walk-in refrigerator in the back where cases of produce get stored. There is no dishwasher, no flat-top, no grill, no broiler, no fryer, no oven, and no range, to say nothing of any more esoteric kitchen appliances. If you can’t cook it on a butane burner, you can’t cook it there. What we have is a long rolling worktop with a bunch of butane burners on it, and a dishwashing setup on a second set of rolling wire shelves. There are no stations, no convenient eye-level shelf from which to hang your order tickets, none of that. There are no conveniences and no crutches. What you see is what you get. Essentially, it’s a street food setup, only the diners eat with forks and knives (or chopsticks and spoons) and real bowls and plates, seated at tables. We’ve even got tablecloths. We’re civilized like that in Baltimore.
So no, it isn’t fancy. But the food is good and the low overhead means my prices can be much more reasonable than might otherwise be the case. And, for those who like dinner and a show, it’s a setup that offers an unparalleled chance to watch your food being made. The “kitchen” is about five, maybe six feet from the closest two tables.
I thought this would be intimidating. It’s not. Not everyone watches. Some read the newspaper, or talk to their dining companions. Some bring a book. But some people do watch me cook. Whether they watch avidly, as if trying to learn how to do it themselves, or distantly, like people tend to watch fry cooks’ backs at diners, depends on the customer. Sometimes they like to stand right in front of me and chat with me while I cook, and mostly that’s okay unless there’s a big rush on and I’m managing too many things at once to be an engaging and ingratiating conversationalist.
I worried, at first, about what people would think. Would they judge my technique? My looks? My headwrap and my Virgin of Guadalupe apron? Compare me unfavorably to the polished, coiffed, professionally-lit denizens of Kitchen Stadium or any of the zillion cooking instruction shows out there?
Would they look at my mise-en-place, in all its unglamorous dishwasher-safe plastic tubs, and decide my food wasn’t fresh enough because I wasn’t peeling/paring/chopping/zesting/mixing absolutely everything from its raw state for absolutely every single cover? (You’d be amazed the kinds of things that come out of people’s mouths and minds, sometimes, truly.) And anyway, what if I screwed up? What if I didn’t flip a crepe properly and I had to redo it? What if I dropped something? What if I messed up an order? What if I looked inept or amateurish? Hell, what if my technique just wasn’t very interesting? Or I couldn’t make conversation and cook at the same time and my customers took it personally? What if? What if?
The night before I first did this particular gig, I lay awake in bed worrying about all this stuff and a thousand other variations on a theme. I’d worked in kitchens before, but always well behind the scenes. It had never occurred to me then to be grateful for the anonymity.
But you know, it’s really okay. A beautiful thing happens when I get onto the line in the open kitchen and start filling orders. It’s actually a familiar thing, something I learned to appreciate from childhood as a musician. You take that couple of steps out onto the stage, out behind the butane burners, and you’re on. It’s showtime.
It takes a lot of concentration to keep everything humming and to keep everything straight. You have to be mindful to know when your crepe needs to be turned your mushrooms pan-seared your egg cracked your sauce spooned your wontons taken from the boiling pot your steamer base filled your dishrack emptied your backup container of chili-garlic paste fetched from the walk-in and at the same time hey, good to see you, we’re doing such-and-such for brunch today, what looks good to you? There is no time to care whether anyone is watching or what they might think, you’re busy. The shift is a single stretchy moment and your attention is right there, every minute. It has to be.
What I’m describing isn’t inspiration, it isn’t the cliched ecstasy of artistry that everyone assumes is the animating force behind anything that can be described as art. I’ve experienced that too, and it’s different. (It’s also not a requirement for art.) That comes from without, the proverbial bolt from the blue. This comes from within. It’s attention, it’s focus, it’s being so caught up in the activities of being a good craftsperson that that’s your whole world, the only thing you think about, the only thing you can think about, all there is. I’m lucky. There’ve been multiple kinds of work in my life, as a musician, a writer, a teacher, a public speaker, where I’ve been able to spend good chunks of working time with this kind of focus and flow. It’s a gift to get to work like this. To get to live like this. Even if it’s only sometimes.
I don’t mean to romanticize the situation. God knows it’s not romantic. It’s hard work. Really hard. There are steam burns and grease spatters and stains and broken dishes, confusion and mixups and all the rest. It’s intensely physical and enormously brain-consuming, for all that it isn’t intellectual. After the 48-hour or so cycle of prep and pack in, set up and service, cleanup and breakdown and pack out is all over, I’m dead tired, brain fried, good for nothing much more complicated than walking the long-suffering dog and running the dirty kitchen linens and tablecloths through the washer and dryer. (Linens service is another thing pop-up restaurateurs have to do for themselves.)
But it’s good, being in the open kitchen.
