Don't Try This at Home (14 page)

The French word for
owl,
by the way, is
chouette,
which also means "cool" or "brilliant."

Yeah, right.

The Curious Case of Tommy Flynn

JONATHAN EISMANN

Jonathan Eismann is the chef-owner of South Beach, Florida's
perennially hot Pacific Time restaurant, which has been at the
center of the Lincoln Road scene since the restaurant was
launched in 1993. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of
America, Eismann began working professionally with Fan Asian
flavors in New York City in the 1980s as chef of the Acute Cafe
on West Broadway, and then at such restaurants as Batons,
Fandango, Mondial, and China Grill. In 1994, he became one of
the first chefs to receive the Robert Mondavi Award for Culinary
Excellence.

T
HERE ARE MANY differences between a chef and a cook. A chef, in a competitive big-city environment anyway, needs to
have vision, create his own dishes, and manage a crew of peripatetic soldiers for hire. He needs to be able to stay calm under
pressure, navigate any number of thorny political situations, and be able to recognize and coddle the media.

A cook doesn't have to do all that. A cook has to do one thing: execute, execute, execute—the same dishes, over and over,
all day, every day, for months if not years at a time. Some cooks want to be chefs one day, and that's fine. But ambition
isn't a job requirement, at least not in my kitchen. I'm looking for guys who can cook well and consistently and are willing
to work their butts off.

I've always put a premium on hard work. Back before I owned my own place, you could find me right alongside the contractors,
painting, tiling, and woodworking. Even
in
my own place, I'm happy to come in on, say, Christmas Day, and refinish the floors.

I respond to this work ethic when I encounter it in others. I'm not making any judgments about people who don't have it, but
when I see it, I'm drawn to it.

Which is how I came to hire a young line cook named—for this story, anyway—Tommy Flynn.

This was in 1989. I had been the chef at restaurants such as Mondial and Fandango, and most recently China Grill. I was planning
to open my own restaurant down in Miami—Pacific Time on Miami Beach—which I eventually did, and from where I'm writing this
story. To bide my time, and make a living, I took a low-profile gig as the chef of a ninety-seat Victorian-style cafe way
up in nosebleed land in the East Nineties on Madison Avenue.

The restaurant was really a glorified bar typical of the Upper East Side. If you've been to or read about Jim McMullen's or
J. G. Mellon's, then you know the kind of place I mean. The menu was perfunctory, but I created and executed it with pride.
In fact, we were once written up in
Gourmet
magazine for our burgers.

Across the street from this restaurant was a small epicurean shop fashioned as a mini-Balducci's: dark wood paneling, fresh
fruits and vegetables piled artfully in crates, and lots of imported condiments and delicacies. They also had a sandwich counter
from which I often bought my lunch.

This is where I met Tommy, a short, scraggly, pimply, redheaded, working-class Irish kid from Queens. He was about twenty-five
years old and an intense worker, especially compared to the preppy but lethargic neighborhood kids alongside whom he worked.

Tommy had great New York sandwich-counter style. He'd slap your sandwich together in record time, always making it exactly
the same way—with just the right proportion of meat to cheese to salad to bread—then snap open a paper bag with one hand—I
still remember the quick "pop" it made as the air was forced into it—and pack it up for you.

I didn't know Tommy that well. Because of the counter that was always between us, I had actually never seen him from the chest
down or even shaken his hand. But I admired his work ethic.

You're constantly losing employees in a restaurant kitchen, so one day I decided to stroll across the street and casually
poach young Tommy. Having watched him work for months, I had no doubt that I could teach him what he'd need to know to be
a cook in my five-man kitchen.

In return, I thought, I'd earn his loyalty and have a guy on board who wasn't always on the lookout for the next job.

We spoke. He took the job. We set a start date. And I stopped going to that shop for my sandwiches, a small price to pay if
my plan held true to form.

When Tommy showed up in my kitchen a few days later, he pretty much looked like what I'd expected him to when he left the
confines of his counter.

Except for one thing. On his left arm was a device: a tan colored cuff of sorts around his wrist, with opaque plastic appendages
that stretched under and around his knuckles. On his forearm was a lever; whenever he wanted to open or close his fist, he
had to crank the lever to manipulate his hand.

If you had a GI Joe with action grip as a kid, then you get the idea.

I took one look at that device and felt terrible. This kid had left his job for me and I was pretty sure that I had screwed
him up bad. Surely, he could never work in a professional kitchen.

"Tommy, I don't know what to say. There's no way you can work here, man."

Tommy had obviously been down this road before: "Listen, boss," he said. "Don't worry about it."

He went on to explain that he had gotten trashed on beer one night and fallen asleep on his arm, cutting off the circulation
for hours. As a result, he had "put my nerves to sleep."

He continued, with sunny optimism, to explain that "the doctor said I was really lucky. A few more hours and they would've
had to amputate it." Twice a week he was going to a Queens clinic for therapy, but it obviously wasn't doing any good.

I subsequently learned that this injury presents itself in drunks and junkies all the time. Not that Tommy was either.

To convince me of his physical dexterity, he began grabbing, lifting, then putting down a series of pans and utensils. Even
though he had to crank the lever each time he picked something up and again to release it when he put it down, he had such
a rhythm about it that he was, it seemed to me, faster and quicker than most guys in my kitchen.

Okay, I thought, let's give the kid a shot.

It turned out that Tommy was exactly what I had hoped he would be: a great executor. All you had to do was show him how to
make a dish—explain what the signs of doneness were, what to look and sniff for, and how to plate it—and he was good to go.

And he had great instincts. For example, many young cooks who aren't blessed with natural finesse miss the center of the plate,
by which I mean they will put down the protein, the starch, and the vegetable, and when all is said and done, there'll be
a big white portion of plate showing through in the middle. Tommy didn't have that problem; he naturally filled out the center,
making it that much easier to train him.

Over the next few months, he worked the saute station, then the fry station.

One Sunday, we were grinding our way through a typically long, grueling brunch. The kitchen was hot—so hot that we all wore
shorts in the summer—and Tommy was flowing to his own unique rhythm, a series of traditional kitchen movements punctuated
by his emphatic, though strangely silent cranking of the hand lever.

As if brunch weren't enough of a circus, we had to keep producing a ridiculous amount of toast to go out with the entrees.
As a result, we had a line of five or six toasters lined up along the lowboy—a waist-high stainless-steel shelf—and periodically
when they were all going at once, they would overload the outlet. I'd have to stop everything and run over and play around
with the cables, or reset the breaker, until they came back on.

As I was making my way over for the umpteenth time, Tommy said, "Chef, if you want, I'll come over there and fix that for
you."

I told him to just stay where the hell he was and do his job. What was he, crazy? How could he tackle an electrical problem
with that crazy contraption on his hand?

Tommy pulled a New York City Electrical Union worker's card out of his wallet and flashed it at me.

"Chef, I'm an electrician. I can fix that."

As always, Tommy was full of surprises.

I handed him my needle-nose pliers and stood aside. He hopped up on the lowboy, his exposed knees on the steel, and went to
work on the socket.

"Tommy," I said. "You're the electrician, but that thing's hot. There's two hundred twenty volts running through it."

"Don't worry, Chef, I—"

And right there, right where it's supposed to say "know what I'm doing," a deafening boom rocked the room and the kitchen
went pitch black.

A few seconds later the emergency lights came on and washed the room in their B-movie glare.

All of the cooks were standing around, rattled. But Tommy had vanished.

Then I heard a noise from the ground, like the crying of a sick baby goat. I looked down and saw Tommy in a heap, a crumpled
bundle with a little pile of red hair on top. He had been blasted right off the lowboy.

"Omigod, Tommy. Are you all right?"

Not a word. Just more wounded groaning.

I dispatched one of the line cooks to call EMS and knelt down beside the kid.

"Tommy! Are you okay?"

He began to nod unconvincingly.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah."

"What's your name?"

"Tom . . . Tom . . . Tommy."

"Let's try to get you up."

I hooked my arms under Tommy's armpits and helped lift him up off the ground. He put his arms out, one against the lowboy
and one against the door to the walk-in.

Suddenly, he snapped into consciousness, his eyes locked on the door.

No, not the door.

His left hand.

It was open, and as he stood up on his own two feet, he held his hand out before him, like an infant just discovering that
it was attached to his arm. He opened and closed his fist . . . without the aid of the lever.

"Chef! My hand. It's fixed. It's fixed."

He continued opening and closing his palm with delight. Laughing.

"I can't believe it! It's fixed!"

He took off the device and threw it in the garbage can, flexing his hand again and again, faster and faster.

"It's totally back to normal!"

Of course it was. Because, Tommy later told me, his biweekly therapy consisted of a technician attaching electrodes to his
hand and forearm and zapping them with little bursts of electricity. If only they had turned it up to a near-lethal dose,
he might've been spared all those months with a semiprosthetic hand.

His paralysis cured, Tommy got back on the line and went back to work. He was a little thrown at first—not having to crank
that lever threw off the rhythm he had established over the past few months. But Tommy was a great cook, an intrepid professional,
and he adjusted soon enough, pumping out dish after dish just the way I always knew he could.

The Blob

CLAUDIA FLEMING

A native of Long Island, New York, Claudia Fleming originally
moved to Manhattan to become a dancer. To support herself,
she worked in the dining rooms at Jams and Union Square Cafe,
and eventually decided to pursue a career in the kitchen,
studying
at Peter Kump's New York Cooking School, then working at
Montrachet, Tribeca Grill, and Luxe, as well as Fauchon in
Paris. She rose to fame at Gramercy Tavern in 1994. Her
numerous accolades include the James Beard Foundation's
Hawaiian Vintage Outstanding Pastry Chef for 2000.
Pastry Art & Design
magazine named her one of their 10 Best Pastry
Chefs in 2000 and 2001. She is the author of
The Last Course: Desserts from Gramercy Tavern.

T
HEY CALLED IT the Sugar Tower.

That was the name the cooks downstairs had for the pastry kitchen on the second floor of Tribeca Grill, the Drew Nieporent-Robert
DeNiro partnership in what would soon become the Tribeca Film Center in Lower Manhattan.

I was the assistant pastry chef, which means I was the daytime pastry cook, the one in charge of production, who'd get all
the food prepped so the nighttime pastry team, led by Pastry Chef Gerry Hayden—also the restaurant's sous-chef—would be ready
to roll come the dinner hour.

This was in 1990, before Tribeca Grill began serving lunch, and long before I had anything remotely resembling a clue.

Oh, I knew the basics. I had attended Peter Kump's New York Cooking School, and worked in a kitchen or two. But I was given
this job more for my spunk than my experience: I had served my culinary externship at Montrachet, one of Drew's

other restaurants, and in my spare time, I'd make myself useful by polishing glass and silverware. Drew, himself a service
veteran before he became one of the most successful restaurateurs in the country, took note of my work ethic and when Tribeca
was set to open, he rang me up and offered me a job. Just like that.

Having had a previous career—as a dancer—I came to cooking late, and was an old lady by kitchen standards. I was thirty-three,
and the prep guys and line cooks wanted nothing to do with me. I guess I didn't want anything to do with them, either.

So I spent my mornings alone in the spookily empty restaurant, up in the Sugar Tower, a small self-contained kitchen with
a counter along two walls and a big mixer in the corner, not seeing much of anyone else even after they started showing up
around lunchtime.

Not that I had the time to socialize. There were cakes, ice creams, sauces, and garnishes to be made, and I was so new to
all of it and so overwhelmed that I was working at a manic pace, racing frantically to keep up. I didn't even have time to
enjoy or take note of the buzz the restaurant was generating. I'm told that it was frequented by celebrities galore, but I
never saw them. One night, Nelson Mandela had a party there, and I didn't even know it was happening.

I was so unconnected with anything else going on at Tribeca Grill that one morning, when I ventured down into the empty dining
room, and I spotted an old guy who had found his way into the restaurant and was wandering around aimlessly, pushing his bicycle,
I barked, "Who are you and what do you want!"

"Umbobbyere," he mumbled.

"What! Speak up."

"Is Bobby here?"

"There's no Bobby here. Bobby who?"

"Bobby DeNiro. I'm his dad."

Turns out that not only was this guy with the bicycle the father of our superstar owner, he was also the artist whose paintings
graced the walls of the dining room in which we were standing.

Whoops.

That's what it was like for me in those days. And this kind of mind-set can take a toll on you. In time, the amount of things
you don't know erodes your confidence in what you actually
do
know.

Case in point: when you're a relatively newly minted cook, you look for ways to cut corners and do things your own way, and
so one day, I decided to save time and get ahead of schedule with my production of meringue, the whipped-egg-white- and-sugar
mixture. Rather than starting with one quart of egg whites, I would begin with about eight quarts. I dumped them in the 40-quart
bowl and switched on the industrial mixer.

Then I turned to some other work, heating a pan of sugar and using a pair of pliers to pull antennaelike wands from it, setting
them aside to cool.

As the mixer continued to whirr away, making the meringue, I strolled downstairs to the ladies' room.

When I returned, I was shocked to see that the whites had whipped into a giant sudsy beehive, a frothy mass that was currently
peaking two feet over the top of the enormous stainless-steel bowl.

I gasped—and the sound, a quick little inhalation, seemed to be more than enough to cause the ensuing egg-white avalanche.
With a plop, the beehive toppled over the sides of the bowl and ran down the sides of the counter.

My hands flew to my mouth. I stood frozen, in horror, as the blob continued to grow, sliding down to the floor and then, upon
making contact, beginning a slow but steady path
right for
me.

This was just meringue, mind you, but my mental faculties were so shot that I was actually terrified of it. Indeed, visions
of what this blob might do next filled my head. I imagined it flowing without end, making its way out the door, bulging into
the private party space, and slithering down the stairs into the kitchen, where it—and by it, I mean "I"—would become the
source of jokes for years to come.

I spun around and ran for help.

"Gerry, Gerry," I cried, to anyone within earshot, all those young cooks with their baseball caps on backward who never talked
to me.

They must have thought someone was injured because they responded with genuine concern.

"What's wrong?"

In my panic, I didn't think these wet-nosed kids could help me. Only a seasoned pro like Gerry would know how to stop the
dreaded meringue from continuing its march.

"Gerry. Gerry. Where's Gerry?"

"In the dining room."

I ran out into the dining room and found Gerry having an impromptu meeting with one of his cooks.

"Gerry! Gerry!"

"What?"

Breathlessly, I described the situation: "I put too many egg whites in the machine." Deep breath. "And it came up over the
top." Deep breath. "And it's running down the sides and across the room." Deep breath. "And it's almost out the door and,
and—"

"What?"

I was at the end of my rope.
"What do I do?"
I screamed.

He could not have been calmer or more matter of fact: "Turn off the mixer."

Oh, right. Turn off the mixer. I guess I knew all along, back in some regrettably overlooked recess of my mind—in the same
vicinity where I stored the fact that egg whites left to whip without end will multiply up to eight times in volume—that if
you turn off the mixer, they will stop volumizing.

Duh.

Without a word, I ran up the stairs, back to the Sugar Tower. I stepped over the blob and approached the machine. With a defiant
look at the fluffy white beast, I shut off the mixer, abruptly halting its march.

A moment later, Gerry came charging into the room with two line cooks in tow, and when they saw me huffing and puffing and
nearly in tears, standing over a mountain of meringue, they burst out laughing.

I joined them. At least, I had regained my senses enough to recognize that this was funny.

Years later, after we had gone our separate ways, Gerry and I reconnected at the James Beard Awards. One thing led to another,
and we fell in love and got married.

We're still laughing today.