A Kitchen full of New Yorkers

When I got to the restaurant this morning the first thing Antonio told me was that there might be someone else coming to observe how things worked along with me. Sure enough about then minutes later another American showed up. His name's Nick and he is one of the chef's at Gramercy Tavern in New York. He grew up in the City, went to Regis for high school and then studied Art History at Columbia but decided in his semester abroad in Rome that he wanted to go into the professional food industry, and the rest is history. He is in Rome for two weeks researching a new restaurant that Danny Meyer will be opening in the Gramercy Park Hotel and where he will be, I think, the head chef. Basically he is in Rome eating as many different things as possible, not a bad way to spend two weeks.

Other than showing Nick around the kitchen a little bit, it was business as usual. I cleaned and chopped tomatoes, brought various veggies up from the walk in refrigerator in the basement, brought up a bunch of pasta, sorted and rinsed the basil etc etc. Today we made a mushroom sauce that can be used as a base for just about anything. The sauce really didn't have anything to it, olive oil, finely chopped garlic and porcini mushrooms. Nick chopped the mushrooms (much more efficiently than I would have) and then put them in a strainer in a bowl to sit for an hour or so in order to clean them. After lunch I strained the chopped mushrooms and Antonio told me to chop up about 15 garlic cloves. When I was finished he threw the garlic in a pan with some oil and let it cook for 3-4 minutes, then he tossed in the mushrooms and let them cook for about an hour, stirring pretty regularly. And that was that.

After he had put the mushrooms in the pan a delivery of various shellfish came in, including something I have neither seen nor heard of, Alfredo called it a sea bug in English. The best way I can think to describe it is a cross between an armadillo and a spiny lobster. Apparently they are rather irritable and when placed on the counter one of them started to scamper away (towards the floor) and when touch sort of jumped around a little bit, Nick caught the whole thing on video. It really is a madhouse in that kitchen.

Lunch was pretty slow, I cleaned and chopped a bunch of tuna and sword fish, which I can know skin relatively quickly, made a few trips to the basement for some pasta. At one point Antonio sent Nick and me down with very specific instructions of which type of pasta and which brand he wanted. We managed to mix up the types and the brand and were sent back down. On your second trip up the stairs we almost simultaneously asked how many Americans it takes to pick out the right kind of pasta. Obviously more than two.

As lunch was winding down and I was about to head out Lorenzo came into the kitchen with a plate of raw scampi and shrimp. He looked around the kitchen and everyone was more or less occupied except for myself so he yelled across the room asking if I could put together the plate, raw over a bed of arugula. I said of course, which has become my general answer even when I'm not all sure what is going on, but assume I can figure it out as I go along, or someone will chime in with a helping hint or hand at the right time. So I managed to grab the wrong plate to start and then took too much arugula, but in the end with a little help from Alfredo deveining the shrimp I got the plate back out of the kitchen in 2 or 3 minutes.