Feature
Lords of the Range:
In the Kitchen at New World Home Cooking
By Cathleen Bell

Photo by Dion Ogust

It’s three on a Saturday afternoon at the Saugerties restaurant New World Home Cooking, and head chef/owner Ric Orlando is thinking about garnish. “Avocado,” he says to executive sous chef Heather Stadler. “A dressing. A little citrus, onion, serrano.” For Heather’s benefit, he reviews the dish in question, a striped bass filet, prepared with a blue corn crust, cilantro mashed potatoes, a cuitlacoche—a kind of corn that tastes like mushrooms—and black truffle sauce.

“This is what I’m having for dinner,” says Heather, but Ric is still fixated on the avocado. “We might not want to do too much to it,” he muses. A few minutes later, he’s in his office, which is carved out of a corner of New World’s red, orange, teal, pink, and red Key-West-bar flavored dining room. “Fresh avocado,” he types into the computer, and pauses. The only trace left of Ric’s former life as a rock musician is his hair, which he wears short on top, in a spiky, narrow crown. His eyes are wide, and in conversation wider—he wrote me in an introductory e-mail that he enjoys performing, and it is clear that he likes to please. “There’s a better word than fresh,” he says. “Optimum. These are optimum avocados.”

He passes on his description of the avocado to the wait staff when they gather at a long table in the front of the restaurant. It is a collegial group—at the announcement of a Le Noble Syrah (from Provence) by the glass, a chorus of “Que Syrah, Syrah” is raised—but little notice is paid to Ric’s word “optimum”. It remains Ric’s private improvement.
Private improvements are what make up the bulk of a chef’s work. Ric and the people who work for him are in the habit of carrying spoons in the back pockets of their pants. They dip the front and back ends into pots of sauce, they pick apples out of pie fillings, they toast spices in a pan over the burner, and smell them while they are cooking, always in search of the minute adjustment that will deliver the flavor of a dish more fully, not communicating a taste so much as revealing it.

I am spending the day watching the work that goes on in the kitchen of The New World Home Cooking Company because I am fascinated by the operation of kitchens the way others are fascinated by engines, or complicated inventions. What goes on in a kitchen has always struck me as a mystery of efficiency, and magic. How can the food possibly come out so quickly? The regularity surprises me as well—how do they manage to make the food look and taste the same each time?

Today, Ric has agreed to let me find out by following him around his restaurant. His job on Saturdays consists of finalizing the specials, supervising the work being done in the kitchen, meeting with the wait staff, and working with the line to serve more than 200 dinners over the course of three hours. At four in the afternoon, he is dipping his spoons in and out of sauces, tasting everything. Ric usually makes his tomato-less chili with Rolling Rock, and this time, a sous chef has made it with a darker beer, so Ric can taste the hops. He adds an Ancho chili paste made by soaking toasted chilis in hot water with cinnamon and molasses, which turns the chili hotter and sweeter all at once. He samples the apple crumble, and commends computer-programmer-turned-pastry-chef Nick Grossman on getting the sweetness right, though the apple pieces, in Ric’s opinion, could have been bigger. “They shrink,” he explains to Nick. After poking his head into the jambalaya pot—jambalaya is prepared ahead of time, and the rice added at the last minute—Ric fries up more smoky sausages to toss them in. When he is done with that, he rearranges the pots on the burners so that pantry chef Ricky Menendez—who three minutes before had been mashing five gallons of sweet potatoes with a contraption that looks like a butter churn—can have access to burners in the front, and won’t have to reach over a boiling water bath.

Meanwhile, Nick smoothes a thin, yellow crème anglaise on a baking sheet, and covers it with saran wrap to keep a film from forming. Line cook Joe Della Chiesa, a fresh-faced CIA graduate who instituted the practice of referring to Ric as “Boss”, doles out soy sauce from a five gallon bucket into smaller, liter-sized containers for the chefs to use on the line. “Timer!” someone yells, when the timer attached to the hood over the stove goes off. “Time! Timer!” everyone in the kitchen repeats, until the person responsible claims the beeping. This alarm is part of the kitchen’s code of operation. Knives do not go in the sink where they can disappear under sudsy water; each cook washes his own. Every utensil has its proper place, though dishwashers inevitably put tea strainers with the colanders, or the escargot clamp on the hook with the ladles. Communication is important, and there is little room for diplomacy; “We’re out of Cajun spice,” says one sous chef to another. “And you didn’t write it down last night. You really have to focus in on that. That’s the second time you forgot.”

Unlike many restaurant kitchens, peace is maintained in New World’s (or at least it was on the night that I was there). This is in spite of the fact that among the workers reaching around each other to get to stoves and shelves, warning each other of hot pots coming through, passing half cans of tomatoes back and forth, some speak only Spanish, some speak only English, some have had careers in the Air Force and in computer programming, some are 22-year-olds just out of school, and no one can agree on what music to listen to—the bus boys and most of the line like house and rap; the older waiters like anything but; Ric cut his teeth on The Dead Kennedys in the early 80s.
The commitment to the quality of the process of food-preparation holds the management of the kitchen together. Everyone speaks a common kitchen language, in which nouns become verbs, as in, “I’ll rice the jambalaya.” Nothing in the kitchen has the luxury of stasis: food is constantly changing, whether it is on a stove or not. Fish is kept as cold as possible to keep it from turning. Even tomatoes evolve: “That doesn’t taste like anything yet,” Ric says of a salsa. “Maybe in two hours, after we let the tomatoes hang out.”

At five-thirty, Ric is picking up the pace. The kitchen is already open—sous chef Justin Sedlak is working the hot line, while Joe works the cold. Ric planned to serve a chicken and duck liver paté appetizer on crostini toasts, but a young chef, new on the job, has let the thin slices of baguette alone too long in the oven, missing the crucial moment when they have lost their moisture, and not yet browned. The young chef burnt crostini the night before as well. “Can you talk to him?” Ric says to Justin, but Justin is young himself, and does not talk to the other chef, who is his friend. When Ric is deciding what herbs to add to the breadcrumbs that will be used to roll the toasted goat cheese for salads—“salt, pepper, a tiny bit of dried rosemary to make it smell nice, dried marjoram, actually dill, no wait, no dill”—the chef who burnt the crostini enters Ric’s line of sight. Ric says to him, “Did Justin talk to you? Your crostini are overcooked. It’s all right, but you’ve got to learn.”

At six o’clock, Ric is standing on the line. Even after four hours of watching the line in motion, it is hard for me to understand how it works. Two rows of counter top, broken by cooking ranges, chopping board, fruit bowls and buckets of sauce are open to the dining room, but in spite of the open arrangement it feels cramped. The two rows of countertop accommodate six chefs. Joe prepares the cold appetizers, such as salmon gravlax, pate, sushi, and salads. Nick plates all the desserts, and helps Joe with the salads. In the row behind, Jesse Moffit, a CIA extern, stands at the grill, and Heather, who worked seven years as a medic in the Air Force, and Justin, whose understated movements show how carefully he is concentrating on getting every detail right, share responsibility for the sauté station.

When a wait person drops an order in a basket, Justin or Heather read it aloud, and clip it to the shelf in front of them. Jesse works on what needs to be grilled, while Justin and Heather divide and conquer the sautéing and oven portions of the orders. All this action is dramatic. Heather and Justin pull cuts of raw meat from the small “reach-in” refrigerator—the refrigerator in the basement is referred to as the “walk-in.” Heather and Justin throw ladles of sauce and pre-cut food into sauté pans—often there are ten or more of them going at once, and it is not unusual for spills to cause fires—real ones—that seem to scare no one but me.

Ric serves as quality control, moving the bubbling food from sauté pans and grill plates onto china, and arranging the complementary sides. He tosses rice into the jambalaya. He slides the skin off the back of a salmon filet with his knife. He tosses a scoop of fromage blanche—a mild cheese that looks like vanilla ice cream—into a bowl of pasta in a three-mushroom sauce. He lays a tangle of crisp-fried spaghetti at a rakish angle against a tower of eggplant parmesan. He deposits a scoop each of basil and red-chili garlic pestos into a dish of clams, and gives the bowl a swirl to start the sauces bleeding into the broth. With a turn of the wrist he empties a wok half-filled with mixed vegetables onto a plate, followed by a flank steak sent over from the grill station, glistening in its black bean sauce.

At six thirty-five, there are 14 order slips on the rack in front of the sauté station. “We don’t have any diced tomatoes!” Ric calls out. “Talk to me about a Hong Kong steak!” The fan, which had been turned on to help with the smoke must be turned off again on account of the noise. A waiter pops his head in to check on an order. “You’re on my list,” Ric says. A handle breaks off one of the sauté pans—this is durable, restaurant-quality Calphalon—and Justin looks at the pan dangling from his hand as if he simply cannot comprehend what has happened. Ric gets Thai BBQ sauce in his eye, and leans over a sink, flushing it out. As he’s washing, he shouts down the line, “You have a wok cooking, right?”

Meanwhile, Nick slides a wafer cookie tube into hard ice cream. His hands seem overly large for the task, and he moves slowly to keep the wafer from cracking. When he slices chocolate cake, he bends his knees, and hunches over each slice as if to shield the clean wedges from the chaos that fills the space behind him.
Ric says, “This is a nicely paced night,” but it’s hard for me to share his sense of calm, especially with waiters stopping by every few minutes, to shout “Fire!” They mean, in restaurant language, that it is time to cook the entrée for a table three quarters of the way through with their appetizers. Another piece of shorthand is the term dupe, which describes a table who has ordered the same dish. Double dupe means same appetizer, and same entrée. “Fire C12!” “Double Dupe C10!”

At seven fifty-seven, there are 18 slips of table orders on the rack. That’s at least 36 entrées: more likely 54. The pans that are washed and re-hung from the ceiling drip onto sous chefs heads as they work. But Ric is still calm enough to warn Justin and Heather about skimping on the mussels, “They could be a little heavier overall—a little more mussels, a little more broth.” Ricky brings out a new vat of Ropa Vieja—a Cuban pot roast––and Ric sends it back, saying, “This is a little tight.” Ricky knows exactly what he means, that the gravy on the pulled meat is too thick.

“This bass is raw,” Ric says, handing it back to Justin and Heather in its pan. “Is there another one cooking?” Moments before, I had watched Justin and Heather peek into six or seven covered sauté pans before finding the one they were looking for. Jesse shouts, “We have a count on the eggplant. The count is five.” This information is written on a dry-erase board, above the list of what the kitchen has run out of, which is referred to as “86”.

A waitress shouts “Fire C3!” and Justin, immediately moving to start the order, forgets to let her know that she’s been heard. “You got C3?” Ric asks. “Yes,” Justin says, this time out loud. The hostess comes by to deliver the news that the mysterious party of 21 in the book appears to have in fact been a party of 2 with a question mark following the number (2?), and everyone is relieved—the kitchen is growing tired. When Heather picks up a pan without realizing that it is hot, she drops it on Justin, who is crouching below her, at the oven. He keeps his grip on the pan he is holding, and does not flinch or cry out. Heather asks for ice, but does not have time to put it on her hand.

The joke of the evening is to ask the writer taking notes in the corner if she is planning to abandon writing for cooking. As I’m watching, the thought does cross my mind. It is hard to be in a kitchen without wanting to get involved, without wanting to see if I could withstand the pace, and the pressure, if I too could involve a crowd of 200 in the performance of my ability to cook 25 dishes at once, and get every one of them right. For this is what is driving the chefs behind the counter—the urge to make an impression on a stranger, to win them over, to surprise them, to achieve perfection, to do something, anything, to be remembered. The energy required to get the food prepared is enormous, and yet it is the finishing touches, the effort that can only be made at the completion of that initial push, where the chef’s attention lies.

Even though it does not seem like it could ever be possible, there comes a point in the evening when the dining room is eating, and most of the activity in the kitchen has come to a halt. “This is when you remember that you didn’t change the fan belt,” Ric says, and sneaks one ounce of Venezuelan chocolate—76 percent cocoa—from the dessert station. Justin leaves the line and returns with a cup of coffee. With no prompting, Joe addresses the room: “Dude, where’s my car?” To the tune of Copa Cabana, a waiter sings “Ropa / Ropa Vieja / Garlic and capers were always the …” A curry shrimp dish is discovered in the oven, and no one knows who it is for.

“So what are you going to write about?” Ric asks me. “Do you think you’ll just go chronologically?” I tell him I don’t know. What I do know is that my feet feel like they have been replaced by wooden clubs, that I can’t imagine eating a bite of food, that I don’t see how anyone works as hard as a chef does, day in and day out.

Here is what I want to remember about the night: watching Ric plate the striped bass entrée for the first time. He ladled the dark cuitlacoche-black truffle sauce onto a white plate, which he tilted to train the sauce into a half moon. In an amber-colored ceramic bowl, he mixed chopped, fresh cilantro into mashed potatoes, then arranged the potatoes half on the sauce, half on the naked plate. The browned fish in its blue-corn crust came next, a corner of the filet leaning up against the pile of potatoes. Then the orange supremes. Finally, Ric picked an avocado from a bowl, tossed it lightly in his hand, like a pitcher testing the weight of a ball, and in a few deft motions of his knife, pitted and sliced the fruit, and dropped shavings of it onto the plate in an imitation of blown leaves. “See?” he said, showing me what he has done. I saw that it is a small thing and yet, in his eyes, supremely important. “I want to make it look like it just came down from heaven.”