For Wendy & Isaac.
My right place is where you are.
IMAGINE IF, EARLY in our schooling or career, we learned a system to organize ourselves and manage our work. We could carry this system with us no matter where we worked or what we did for a living—be we contractor or teacher, salesperson or doctor. And with this system we would have a code to guide our conduct; techniques to help us channel our energies, thoughts, and emotions productively; and the means to get through a tough workload and deliver with excellence.
Bits of that philosophy live in many professions and corporate cultures. Pieces of that system exist in any number of organizational methods.
But only one profession has developed a refined philosophy and comprehensive system of how to work. That profession is the culinary arts, and that philosophy and system is called mise-en-place.
It’s a French phrase translating as “put in place.” In the kitchen mise-en-place means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking. But for many culinary professionals, the phrase connotes something deeper. Mise-en-place is a tradition of focus and discipline, a method of working and being. Many cooks call it a way of life.
What makes the professional kitchen’s system so special? Over the past 2 centuries, chefs and cooks all over the world developed an informal regimen of values and behaviors in response to the unique demands and constraints of those kitchens. Because of those singular circumstances, chefs and cooks created an approach to work that has no equivalent.
What makes that approach applicable outside the kitchen? What wisdom could a chef impart, for example, to a lawyer, when those two jobs are so different? The simple answer is that lawyers weren’t forced to create that system. Chefs were. And the values and behaviors that spring from that chefly system aren’t about cooking, but about achieving excellence. So many of us have convinced ourselves that because we are busy, we are working to the fullest extent of our abilities. But chefs know that there is a big difference between working hard and working clean.
That mise-en-place might be useful outside the kitchen, and that the chef’s philosophy of working might be as nourishing to our minds as the chef’s food is to our bodies—those ideas are why this book exists.
This book teaches the lessons of mise-en-place in three courses. The first section, The Power of Working Clean, takes us straight to an exceptional kitchen where we’ll spend a day discovering how mise-en-place works and how it helps its practitioners focus amid chaos. Then we’ll spend a very different kind of day in an office, showing how we work without mise-en-place and how we often suffer for it. We’ll see that mise-en-place applies to the office despite its differences from the kitchen. And we’ll learn the three universal values of working clean: preparation, process, and presence.
The second course, The Ingredients of Working Clean, breaks mise-en-place into 10 distinct behaviors, each its own chapter. Each of the 10 chapters begins with a story, taking us into the life of a chef and how he or she learned that behavior. We then look at what chefs do and know that we might not. Then we suggest exercises and habits to integrate that behavior into our work lives outside the kitchen.
The third course, Working Clean as a Way of Life, converts those ingredients into a recipe for regular use. First, we reshape the values and behaviors of mise-en-place to fit our lives outside the kitchen and lay out the Work Clean system for organizing our workflow. Then we’ll walk together through an ideal day of working clean, which weaves all the values and behaviors we’ve learned into an average workday and includes the book’s most important recommendation: developing a regular practice of planning, a 30-minute Daily Meeze.
Working clean can transform your life, and this book gives you many useful ways to do just that.
As the global economy changes, our personal career trajectories become more like those of culinarians—nonlinear, itinerant, with plenty of false starts and surprises, successes and failures. Restaurants open and restaurants close, but because of mise-en-place, chefs and cooks bend where we might tend to break. A personal mise-en-place imparts a kind of learned resiliency that, if you practice it, can travel with you from workplace to workplace, from opportunity to opportunity. Mise-en-place can provide comfort as we move through those spaces because we understand that the responsibility for our success lies in our self-direction. Any door we walk through, we carry our own mise-en-place with us.
Some additional notes about the writing of Work Clean:
It may seem odd to advance mise-en-place as a spiritual practice, with spirituality’s implications of balance, especially when so many chefs and cooks do not live balanced lives at all. But mise-en-place is a philosophy of how to start things and how to complete things, how to speed up and how to slow down, how to say “yes” to things and “no” to others, and as such, when practiced consciously, mise-en-place can be helpful in creating balance.
I cannot promise you, nor would I want to, that working clean is easy. It is not. Chefs and cooks spend their entire careers perfecting these principles. But I do promise that whenever you work clean, you will be the best that you can be.
IN MODERN LIFE, there are few things we dread more than cleaning up a pile of work.
Yet cleaning itself is relatively easy—we can do it with the sweep of a hand or the flick of a cursor.
Establishing a system is also easy—lots of lists, color-coded schedules, empty manila folders, markers, and good intentions.
The hardest thing to do is maintain that system, to actually work clean: with space, with time, with resources, with people.
With our Daily Meeze we can maintain any system, because our Daily Meeze is a system of organization designed to maintain systems of organization.
And the idea that underlies our Daily Meeze is the same one that underlies mise-en-place as a whole: Excellence requires human presence.
Excellence is why, in this age of fast food, people still visit high-end restaurants. It’s why, even in the age of technology and robotics, the most sought-after products are often crafted by hand and the most expensive services are personal. It’s why, even though corporations are born, grow, and become hugely profitable, these same companies teeter and fall as their customers leave and their managers and employees flee.
You can’t automate excellence, though we will likely keep trying. It’s futile. Why? Because people are actually worth something. Thus Work Clean is a manifesto for people who see a future for people.
People like you who cultivate a personal mise-en-place know that no teacher, no system, no software, no algorithm, no company, and even no amount of money or resources can do the job for you. You are the one who has to push the button. You are the one who must decide. You are the one who must make the moves and take the steps. But you understand the sacrifice and choices and work involved.
The miracle is you.
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
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Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the United States of America by Rodale 2016
First published in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2016
Copyright © Dan Charnas, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustrations by Christina Gaugler
ISBN: 978-0-241-20038-4
My sincerest desire is that you exhaust
all the strength and the effort of your lives . . .
and every moment of every day
into your practice.
—DOGEN
THE TEENAGER STANDING at the pot sink beheld the job before him. Perhaps tens of thousands of adolescents in restaurants across the country at that same moment faced a similar sight, wanting nothing more than to leave work, play ball, listen to music, hang with friends, or engage in other youthful diversions. The dishwasher at the Palm Beach Yacht Club in Florida desired those things, too. But rather than carelessly dash through the work, Thomas Keller decided the quickest route to the outside world would be to wash the dishes with as much care as he could muster.
The first thing Thomas realized was that to get the work done quickly, his movements had to be small and efficient. To be efficient, his movements had to repeat. Thomas grew to respect and love repetition, doing one thing, over and over. For his movements to be repetitive meant that the dishes themselves had to be organized, stacked in a predictable pattern—bread plates here, service plates here, dessert plates there. He began demanding that the servers return those plates to him in a predictable manner.
The point of washing dishes, Thomas decided, was to actually get them clean. Why leave crud on plates if it meant he had to redo them, doubling his work? The thing he liked about his job was that he didn’t have to guess whether he was doing it right. He got instant critical feedback. If he didn’t stack, scrape, scrub, spray, and then inspect the dishes correctly, he saw the results seconds later when the dish machine door opened. Washing dishes in this way became a sport. Thomas didn’t like losing. He made corrections.
Every sport has its rituals, and those of the dishwasher became indispensable for Thomas. The first thing he did every morning was clean the bathrooms. Every 2 hours, he changed the water in the dish machine. He changed the soap at specific times. He took the garbage out at specific times. He swept the floor at specific times. The exactitude was critical. If he didn’t start or finish tasks at certain times, that might cause a cascade of events that would keep him working longer and less effectively. If he didn’t change the water in the dish machine regularly, the strainer baskets would fill with pieces of food, and soon the dishes would be covered in sediment, and he’d have to run them through again. If he didn’t take the garbage out, the garbage can would overflow, causing more mess. He learned that if he started messing with ritual, suddenly it wasn’t a ritual anymore. Even if the garbage wasn’t completely full, he emptied it. He didn’t mess with time. You could see the results of not doing so.
Thomas finally saw that he was a crucial member of a team whose sole purpose was to feed the guests. The guests needed food and drink. Thus the cooks needed dishes, the bartenders needed glasses, and the servers needed silverware. And one person, Thomas, gave them all those things. Without him nothing worked.
The behaviors Thomas Keller learned as a dishwasher—organization, efficiency, feedback, rituals, repetition, and teamwork—stayed with him when he was promoted to cook. He kept them when he moved up to Rhode Island and met his first mentor, Chef Roland Henin. The disciplines supported him as he worked his way through fine kitchens in New York, where he became a chef of a renowned restaurant. They sustained him after he left that restaurant rather than compromise those disciplines. They steered him to California, where he found a small restaurant in the Napa Valley called The French Laundry, and they helped him round up the money to buy the place. They powered him as he cooked through the lean years, through his first good review, and his first Michelin stars. They kept him humble even when he was named the best chef in America by the James Beard Foundation. And they grounded him when he opened restaurants around the country and became the chief executive of his own corporation. For Thomas Keller, the six disciplines of the dishwasher, as he calls them, have guided his trajectory from the start and lead him still.
It starts with organization. The French Laundry makes sense. When something offends Keller’s eye or feels just slightly off, the chef starts asking how he can make it better, and he doesn’t stop asking until he finds an answer and good sense is restored. He’ll question anything, even the sacrosanct. The tools of chefs and cooks are sacred. Cooks guard their knives. Keller cherishes his spoons; he’s had some for decades. “God forbid if I should lose one,” he says. Those holy items travel with the cook in a vessel, the knife roll, the daily opening of which looks just like a sacrament. But Keller always found these knife bags unsightly and inefficient, stowed on top of shelves at cooks’ stations with their straps hanging down. So he decided to get rid of them. He built knife drawers at every station and asked his cooks to keep their tools in the kitchen.
The idea of leaving their precious knives in an unlocked drawer overnight felt alien to his cooks, but for Keller the exercise was about building a team as much as it was about organization. “These are your colleagues,” he says. “Why shouldn’t you trust them? If you need to borrow one of my knives for whatever reason, I’m going to trust that you’re going to not only use it properly, but you’re going to clean it, you’re going to return it to my drawer.”
Keller asks his cooks to abide by rituals like “shaking in and shaking out.” When cooks arrive, they walk around, shake everybody’s hand, and say hello. This is our house, Keller says. This is how we respect one another. Departure works the same way. If cooks don’t shake out, the other cooks notice.
Even Keller’s take on efficiency is geared more toward personal growth than productivity. That plaque beneath the wall clock that reads “Sense of Urgency” isn’t about the customer’s meal; it’s about the cook’s career. “The sense of urgency is defined in our kitchen as an opportunity for you to finish your job before you have to finish your job,” Keller says. “If you have aspirations and ambitions to become the poissonier, for example, then you can actually have time to go over to the fish station and work with the poissonier for 15 or 20 minutes and learn something. . . . You’re going to get to the next level by being ready for the next level before that opportunity arises. Because when I look around the kitchen, I’m going to choose the person who’s already prepared to be that person. That’s a mise-en-place that is an individual mise-en-place,” Keller says. A career mise-en-place.
Because Keller values repetition, he’s floored when young apprentices declare that they’re bored. You’re a cook, he says. Get used to it. You’re going to be doing this the rest of your life. Keller puts his new cooks in the back room by themselves at night: skimming stocks, making shells for truffle egg custard, cutting vegetables. But the night shift isn’t relaxed; it’s 5 hours of compressed work, punctuated by unpredictable requests from the kitchen during dinner service. This, says Keller, is the life of a chef: balancing work that a cook knows must be done against constant interruptions and new requests. Through these challenges, he sees his apprentices craning their necks toward the kitchen. They want in on the action. But Keller says: Pay attention to what you’re doing here. You can learn. It’s repetition. It’s responsibility. It’s self-motivation. It’s interruption. Being ready for all the unknowns.
But of all the disciplines, Keller knows that taking and giving feedback is the hardest to learn and teach. Keller warns his young cooks: You’re going to get feedback all day long. You have to take it as just pure information. There’s nothing personal here. You can’t be crippled by critical feedback. You have to grow through it. At the same time, Keller encourages his chefs and managers to be, literally, soft spoken. “When I whisper, they’re leaning in,” he says. “They’re getting close to hear me. You yell at somebody, they’re pulling away from you. When you’re giving really critical feedback, you want them coming in to you. I’m really disappointed in you doing that. Then they go, Oh my God. It becomes so much louder to them.”
Thomas Keller still envisions his job as a sport, where he is no longer a player but the coach of a franchise charged with cultivating, training, and promoting a deep bench of talent. He coaches with the disciplines of the dishwasher, the disciplines of mise-en-place. “I think they pretty much can be translated to almost any profession,” Keller says.
The dividend of these values is excellence. The price is constant attention. “You can never stop asking the question: ‘How can I do something better?’” Keller says. “Once you stop asking the question, you’ll never do it.”
Outside Keller’s kitchens, that attention to planning, process, and presence is often too high a price to pay.
“Mediocrity has become something that’s acceptable,” Keller says, “and in many cases, something that is aspirational.”
To get by and get over, to work less and get paid, to be, essentially, above work. Many people pursue this American dream.
Keller, America’s greatest chef, pursues another. He works toward it as he always has: He beholds his kitchen. If there are dishes to be done, he washes them. If the floor is dirty, he picks up a broom and he cleans.
TO THE PEOPLE who helped me conceive and build this book before the first words were written: Larry Lieberman, Sara Moulton, David Dunton, Harvey Klinger. To Jen Levesque, Mollie Thomas, Mary Ann Naples, Yelena Gitlin Nesbit, Hope Clarke, Chris Gaugler, Gail Gonzales, Bob Niegowski, Jean Lee, and the entire team at Rodale. To Jeff Levine at the CIA, who was with me every step of the way; and to Tim Ryan, Michael Sperling, and the faculty, staff and students of the CIA. To Dorothy Cann Hamilton and the ICC. To Michael Ruhlman for his example and encouragement. To the folks who opened doors: Chloe Mata Crane, Jeannette Park, Margarita Sullivan, Nancy Aranson, Kimberly Blanchot, Jaime Caldwell, Jetty-Jane Connor, Lynne Estes, Irene Hamburger, Jacqueline Hensel, Stacy Himes, Benjamin Kemper, Michelle Lipa, Ron Longe, Dana Meeks, Griffin Parker, Liz Pierson, Jessica Rosen, Meghan Sherrill, Lina Varriale, Christa Weaving, Richard Kashida, and Steven Charron. To Dr. Ruth Beitler and Major Erin Hadlock at West Point. To Tom Cole, Nina Gregory, April Fulton, Maanvi Singh, and Frannie Kelley at NPR. To those who provided help and feedback: Marshall Malin, David Tischman, Christian Moerk, Milind Shah, John Mietus, Jon Smith, Phonte Coleman, Marc Gerald, T-Love, Tamara Palmer, Gabriel Tolliver, Charlie Stettler, Jarobi White and Kamilah Rouse. To my NYU colleagues at the Clive Davis Institute: Jeff Rabhan, Nick Sansano, Jason King, Jeff Peretz, Jim Anderson, Bob Christgau, Bob Power, Errol Kolosine, Lauren Davis, Michael McCoy, Nora York, Matthew Morrison, Brianne Powell Hayes, Nikki Mirasola, Alan Watson, Chelsea Falato, Marat Berenstein, Ashley Kahn, Vivien Goldman, Harry Weinger and our incredible students. Thanks to Allyson Green, Sheril Antonio, and Dan O’Sullivan. To my colleagues on VH1’s The Breaks: Maggie Malina, Bill Flanagan, Seith Mann, Darren Goldberg, Gary Guidice; to Jason Goldberg; to Doug Herzog, Chris McCarthy and Amy Doyle; and to our incredible cast. To Laurie Pozmantier and John Buzzetti, Jake Stein and Scott Prisand. To my crew of creatives who strengthened me with their support for this book, and the last: Joe Schloss, Jay Smooth, Jeff Chang, Adam Mansbach, Sophia Chang, Joan Morgan, Miri Park, Oliver Wang, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Shawn Setaro, Brian Coleman, Adisa Banjoko, Aliya S. King, Erik Parker, Elliot Wilson, Jerry Barrow, Michael Berrin, Dvora Myers, Chris Faraone, Stephen Henderson, Michaelangelo Matos. To my chefs: Sylvester Burke, Ophelia Barnes, Phillips Peters, Bill Stephney, Bill Adler, Cory Robbins, Tom Silverman, Manny Bella, Rick Rubin, Russell Simmons, Forest Whitaker, Jim Biederman, Jesse Collins, Ryan Dadd, Stephen Murray, Michelle Kerrigan, Nat Robinson, Mel Klein, Kim Nauer, Sam Freedman, June Cross, David Blum, Julie Hartenstein, Rich Lieby, Josh du Lac, Jonathan Shecter, Joe Boskin, Floyd Barbour, Hubert Walters, Adelaide Gulliver, Murray Levin, Howard Zinn, Jim Curtan, Santokh and Suraj Khalsa, Gurmukh and Gurushabd Khalsa, Shakti Parwha Kaur Khalsa, Kartar Khalsa, Siri Ved and Gurujodha Khalsa, and Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji. To the friends who have kept me and my wife afloat and happy, and to our parents and our wonderful, loving extended family. To Wendy S. Walters: best wife, best editor, best confidante and best friend. And to our son Isaac, who brings both a healthy mess and a divine order to our lives.
‘A distinctive and fascinating read! Work Clean shares the skills used by chefs to help you manage your time and resources to effectively get the most out of life’ Chef Alfred Portale
‘The concept of mise-en-place can seem stoic or robotic even, but Dan Charnas has revealed otherwise [in Work Clean]. It is a means to completing successfully what is right in front of us – whether in or out of the kitchen – through consideration and action’ Chef Sam Henderson
‘Systems and organization have always been a key to my success in the food service industry. Work Clean uses excellent examples to explain the necessity of structure as the foundation for not only restaurants but everyday life as well’ Chef Marc Djozlija
‘Dan Charnas writes informatively about the sometimes unglamorous yet undeniably crucial role of organization in our kitchens and our lives with clever wit and eloquence. Work Clean should be required reading for all aspiring chefs’ Chef Rob Halpern
MANY THANKS TO these chefs, cooks, bakers, chef-instructors, culinary faculty, culinary students, managers, waitstaff, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs for sharing their observations, experiences, and behaviors in interviews and discussion either in person or by phone. Though the narrative of this book focuses primarily on a select few of these people, all were helpful in creating the philosophical bedrock for this project.
Ilan Ades
Chris Albert
Carlos Arciniega
Candy Argondizza
Greg Barr
Denise Bauer
Riccardo Bertolino
Rachel Black
Ari Bokovza
Caitlyn Borgfeld
Jimmy Bradley
Elizabeth Briggs
Eric Bromberg
Matt Campion
Hailey Catalano
Dominick Cerrone
Richard Coppedge
Juanito Cordero
Chris Cosentino
Jessica Crochet
Lucian Davis
Marc Djozlija
Sarah Donnegan
Zoe Dries
Wylie Dufresne
Josh Eden
Mark Erickson
Gerard Fischetti
Michael Gibney
Gary Giudice
Marcus Gleadow-Ware
Melissa Gray
Michael Guerriero
Jawed Halepota
Rob Halpern
Dorothy Cann Hamilton
Ronald Hayes
Sam Henderson
Avi Hoffer
Ryan Hunter
Joel Javier
Charlene Johnson-Hadley
Liam Kamp
Thomas Keller
Ryan Kemp
Andrew Kochan
Shuichi Kotani
Keith Krajewski
Tim Lanza
Matthew Lightner
Toni Linen
Dwayne LiPuma
Malcolm Livingston
Arbil Lopez
Elise Macur
Noah Marion
David McCue
Randy McNamara
Sam Mendes
Misel Mendoza
Kathleen Merget
Rossi Morillo
Sara Moulton
Chris Muller
Rahmie Munther
Ayanna-Tamar Mutaz
Francois Nadon
Kaitlyn Ngo
Kelly O’Connor
Ronald Ohler
Charlie Palmer
Michael Pardus
Ryan Pascullo
David Pasternack
Jacques Pépin
Alexander Phillips
Brian Plant
Alfred Portale
Larissa Raphael
Eric Ripert
Katie Ritter
Michael Ruhlman
Scott Samuel
Marcus Samuelsson
Yukihiro Sato
Ralph Scamardella
Andi Sciacca
Jason Sheehan
Reggie Soang
Andres Soltner
Fritz Sonnenschmidt
Angelo Sosa
Rudy Speckamp
Masa Takayama
Erica Tatham
William Telepan
Alexandra Tibbats
Amy Trubek
Alyston Upshaw
Tom Vaccaro
Patrice Vassell
Howie Velie
Natasha Veloso
Mark Viloria
David Vinjamuri
Jean-Georges Vongerichten
Melissa Walnock
Ian Whalley
Jarobi White
Jordan Williams
Sang Yoon
Jimi Yui
The above list does not include the kitchen staff and students, too numerous to mention here, with whom I had dozens of more casual conversations.
The following nonculinarians helped me with their observations about workplace organization: Andrea Duncan Mao, Tori Horowitz, Jozen Cummings, Mary Pryor, Mark Brodie, and Rachel Sullivan.
Special thanks to Dr. Joseph LeDoux for his generous clarification of many neurological issues related to human learning.
Full endnotes and sourcing for Work Clean are available online at workclean.com/endnotes.
CHEF DWAYNE LIPUMA’S entire kitchen staff just quit. He’s looking at reservations for 40 people for lunch, then another 140 for a banquet tomorrow. To make all those meals, LiPuma’s bosses have provided him with 19 recruits, some of whom have never cooked in a fine-dining restaurant. Aside from LiPuma’s assistant and a pastry chef, not one of the staff has ever seen the menu, much less prepared the items on it, all gourmet dishes with elaborate presentations.
But by the end of the day, the diners will leave satisfied. In fact, the customers—some of whom have waited months for a reservation at LiPuma’s restaurant, American Bounty—will scarcely notice that their entire meal was made by neophyte cooks.
A miracle perhaps? Nope. It’s a regular day for Chef LiPuma. In 3 weeks, when LiPuma has his crew trained and confident, they will leave and a new group of inexperienced cooks will replace them. He will repeat this process every 3 weeks, thus providing the penultimate course for students who will soon graduate from the Culinary Institute of America.
What makes this impossible rhythm possible is not a miracle. It’s a system called mise-en-place.
The Culinary Institute of America, called the CIA without irony by people who think more about the epicurean than they do espionage, sits like a citadel on the banks of the Hudson River almost 100 miles north of New York City. Its grand campus in Hyde Park, New York, centered around a former seminary—housing an average of 2,400 students, 140 full-time faculty, 49 kitchens, and four student-staffed restaurants—the CIA is among the world’s most renowned culinary schools, with branches in Texas, northern California, and Singapore.
From the first day of classes to the last, CIA students will hear the term mise-en-place, pronounced like “me’s on plahhs.” It’s on the lips of Tim Ryan, the president of the college, as he greets new enrollees. A few of the students may have heard the term before they arrived, perhaps in a kitchen for which they worked during high school or thereafter. Some will refer to their textbook, The Professional Chef, which provides the English translation of the term, “put in place,” and a definition: “the preparation and assembly of ingredients, pans, utensils, and plates or serving pieces needed for a particular dish or service period.” At first, mise-en-place blends into the dozens of French words and phrases they must remember as they make their way through their introductory class, Culinary Fundamentals, like mirepoix, brunoise, tourner, arroser, fond de veau, roux, consommé. But as students learn the basic techniques they’ll need to succeed in all the courses that follow—knife cuts, making stock, making sauce, cooking vegetables and meat—they learn that mise-en-place encompasses an entirely different set of vital skills, and that putting their ingredients and tools in place is just the first level of a deceptively simple concept that keeps unfolding.
Instructors invoke mise-en-place when they tell students to keep their cutting boards and workstations clean and when they tell them to arrange their tools in a certain order and return them to that order after they use them; when they move too slow and also when they move too fast; when they move too much and when they move too little; when they start tasks too early and when they finish them too late; when they talk too much and when they don’t say enough; when they don’t use their five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, sound; and when they fail to use their sixth sense: common. As the days go by, the chef-instructors begin to talk about a deeper notion: mental mise-en-place, the idea that students can’t master physical organization without first organizing their minds. It starts with the CIA timeline, a paper form that chefs expect students to use every day and master. In preparation for each class, students must list their needed tools, ingredients, and tasks for the day. They must arrange those tasks in time, plotting precisely when each thing is supposed to happen. When students find themselves running behind in class or skipping steps, the chefs refer to the student’s timeline; usually the chefs can point to the error in thinking that resulted in the error in behavior. Students commit these timelines to memory. Then they begin to tackle planning on-the-fly, the mental work that allows them to move smoothly from one task to the next. Over time, mise-en-place begins to reveal itself as a set of values: Apprenticing oneself. Getting to class early, not just on time. Working with intensity. Cultivating a sense of urgency. Remaining alert. Aiming for perfection.
This idea of mise-en-place, a curriculum unto itself, begins to migrate outside the kitchen. Students load their backpacks and lay their clothes out at night before bed, iron their chef’s whites and shine their shoes. They use timelines and prep lists to study for their academic courses, not just their cooking classes. They organize their desks, their closets, their rooms. They even begin “mise-en-placing” their social activities to maximize their time off.
Then the students go home for their first holiday and wonder how the rest of the world changed so much since they were last in it.
Maybe, like Alexandra Tibbats, they watch their parents scurry around the house for car keys that should, of course, have been put back where they belonged, or wait hours for high school friends who can’t seem to show up on time. Or maybe they’re like Kaitlin Ngo, whose mother watches in stunned silence as Kaitlin—for whom the opening of a suitcase had always been comparable to the uncorking of a geyser—now demurs on a quick shopping excursion to stay home and methodically unpack.
The students return to the CIA and learn to cook à la carte breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for their classmates. At the end of their first year, they go on their “externship”—18 weeks working in a restaurant in the real world. Some will cook; others will do the kinds of jobs that kitchen trainees are expected to do: working in the prep kitchen, cutting vegetables and cleaning. They will marvel at how fast and smooth everyone around them seems to move, confirming how much they still don’t know. As their second year draws to a close, they will be assigned to one of the CIA’s four first-class restaurants, and the training wheels come off. Some of them will enter the kitchen of American Bounty and be greeted by a smiling Chef Dwayne LiPuma.
But LiPuma is not here to assess their cooking skills because they’ve learned and been evaluated on all their techniques already. What LiPuma will be teaching and testing here is their physical, mental, and ethical mise-en-place, without which they will never be able to use any of those techniques in a professional setting.
Nineteen students dressed in clean chef whites gather in a wood-paneled private dining room next to the lobby-bar of American Bounty. It’s 7:45 a.m. when Chef Dwayne LiPuma walks in for the first day of class. For the next 75 minutes he’ll lecture them on the daily work schedule and the rules of the kitchen, review the menu dish-by-dish, and describe how he’ll grade them. LiPuma is 5 feet 6 inches of compacted power, with spiky brown hair and metal-rimmed glasses. He talks fast, very fast, Martin Scorcese-on-a-double-espresso fast.
“Welcome to American Bounty,” he says. “We are going into the whirlwind. Your anxiety level is off the chart. Everybody’s except for mine.”
LiPuma is calm because he has his own mise-en-place. He’s done everything he can to ensure the success of his new charges. He ordered the previous class to prepare a few days’ worth of ingredients so the new class won’t have to do any physical mise-en-place except for arranging those ingredients. LiPuma tells them they can ease their fears by getting the lay of the land—a “plan” in the literal sense of the term, the French word for “map.” Make a mental diagram of where everything is and should be. Know the recipes. And come to class every day with your timeline. “No timeline means 20 percent off your daily grade,” he warns. He knows that when they get into the professional world, these students won’t write timelines. Instead they’ll internalize them.
“I’m not going to teach you how to cut a carrot,” he tells them. “I’m going to teach you how to organize yourself.”
It’s one thing to apply cooking techniques to a recipe and construct a plate. It is quite another thing to do that a dozen times with speed and consistency. LiPuma argues that organization is going to deliver the speed they’ll need. Speed will come from their brain’s basal ganglia memorizing repeated muscle movements, which—if they are to be quick—should be as small as possible. They will gain some of that speed by selecting their tools with care. “What kind of ladle do you need for the soup?” LiPuma asks. “An 8-ounce ladle. Why? Because that’s the portion size.” If students have a 2-ounce ladle, they will have to ladle four times instead of one. They will win additional speed by arranging their tools. “I should be able to blindfold you,” the chef says, “and when I say, ‘Pick up your tongs,’ you know that they’re always right there, that your ladle is right there, that your oil is right here.” They will accrue even more speed by properly arranging their ingredients. LiPuma wants all their ingredients “zoned out”: all the ingredients for one dish in one area. “The less your hand moves, the more efficient you are.”
“You’ll see,” he continues. “By being organized, you will be more efficient. By being more efficient, you will have more time in your day. By having more time in your day, you will be more relaxed in your day; you will be able to accomplish the task at hand in a clear, concise, fluid motion.” LiPuma promises them that by the time they leave his kitchen, they’ll be smooth and calm, like him.
“Like oil on glass,” he says.
The students enter the kitchen at 9:00 a.m. They have 1 hour to produce “demo plates”—one sample dish of every menu item on their station. Each student is responsible for two or three menu items. On tougher stations students work in pairs. The demo plates give them a chance to practice before service and give LiPuma a peek at their skills: Can they actually do the cooking?
At 10:00 a.m., once their demos are done, they take a break for “family meal,” prepared by a team of three students. Chef LiPuma kicks everyone out of the kitchen and doesn’t let them back in until 11:00 a.m. “They need to decompress,” LiPuma says. “They get so stressed out. And sometimes when you leave the scenario that’s stressing you out—Oh, God! I’ve got all this work!—and you step back, eat something, rethink it, and revisit it, it’s not so stressful. Plus, they need to eat, period. Because they’ll skip eating, leave here, and they’ll have nowhere to eat until dinner.”
But while his students decompress in the dining room, LiPuma compresses their time in the kitchen. He doesn’t want them to work through lunch and thus encourage a lazy pace. With cuisine as it is with culinary students, no transformation happens without heat. LiPuma needs to cook his class, too.
While they’re eating, LiPuma and his sous-chefs-in-training straighten students’ mise-en-place, writing reminders on the stainless steel tables with a black-ink Sharpie: “Your chervil is brown,” “Paper towel under parsley,” “Brush with olive oil.” At 11:00 a.m. the students return. They have 45 minutes before the first lunch orders start coming in.
All morning, as the students work, Chef LiPuma prowls the “line”—the row of ovens, burners, and grills where most of his cooks stand and most of the kitchen’s food gets prepared.
Some students use the wrong tools for the job: Zoe tries to cook potato pancakes in pans that are too big and use too much oil. Alex puts the butternut squash soup in a pot that’s too small. “It’s gonna burn,” LiPuma says. Later Alex blots extra-virgin olive oil onto bruschetta with a paper towel. “Don’t do that!” LiPuma moans. “Get a brush.” Caitlyn discovers that the smashed potatoes left for her by the previous class have been put in a narrow, plastic quart container and have thus disintegrated under their own weight. “Why don’t you make a necklace out of them?” LiPuma says. Caitlyn cooks replacement potatoes and puts them back in the same container, repeating the failure.
Other students don’t check the ingredients prepared for them by the previous class: Rahmie places his own bruschetta in the oven to toast without noticing that there’s no olive oil on them at all. “It doesn’t matter that this is what they left you,” Chef says. “You gotta make it right!”
With first day jitters, many students move too fast. “Juan!” Chef LiPuma says, seeing four cuts of steak on the grill. “What are you cooking all that beef for? When are you supposed to mark off that meat?”—meaning sear it so it acquires a nice crust and grill marks on the exterior before cooking to a finish in the oven. “When I come back from family meal,” Juan replies. LiPuma nods: “So finish marking one. Easy there, Slick.” When Juan and the others return from family meal, they continue to rush and confuse the proper order of things. They begin cooking side dishes well before the proteins are ready. “This is à la carte cooking, guys,” LiPuma booms over the class PA system. “You cook your vegetables and starches on pickup,” not when food is ordered. In other words, proteins get the heat when the order comes in, and when the chefs later call for pickup, that’s when they heat the starches and vegetables, as they take less time. They remove meat from the oven when it’s still raw. “Don’t take anything out of the oven until you clear it with me first,” LiPuma orders. The students bring warm plates down from the heat lamps well before their dishes are ready, letting them get cold. “If somebody plates on a cold plate again, zero for the day!” LiPuma bellows. “Are we clear?” “Yes, Chef!” the crew shouts.
Other students move too slow. Because meat takes a certain amount of time to cook—as much as 20 minutes from raw to medium-well—many line cooks “pre-cook” their protein to rare, reducing the time it takes to heat it to the final temperature, or “doneness,” once an order comes in. The goal is to always stay one item ahead of the incoming orders. But almost all the students are having a hard time understanding how this process works. Once service starts, LiPuma must constantly remind the line cooks to move on orders as soon as they come in. “Drop a pan!” he yells as an order comes in for lamb. Ronald takes some lamb out and begins seasoning it. Here comes LiPuma, straight for him: If you don’t drop that pan before you season, then you’ll be twiddling your thumbs waiting for that pan to get hot. “Are you helping time or hurting time?” LiPuma asks. “Hurting time,” Ronald replies, slapping a pan down on the range.
A pork order has come in for Zoe. Here comes LiPuma:
“That pork’s in the oven?” he asks her.
“Yes, chef,” she replies.
“Now you want to replace that one, right? You already seared off another one?”
“I’m gonna sear off another one when that one’s done.”
LiPuma scrunches his face: “Say what?!”
Zoe stammers. She doesn’t understand that she can’t wait to get the next one started.
“No, what you’re going to do right now is drop a pan and start getting it hot. And by the time you’re done seasoning it, the pan will be hot.”
It’s not that Zoe isn’t prepared. She arrived in class with a perfect, color-coded timeline with every ingredient and tool, with every task she needs to do and when she needs to do it. She has a plan for the day. But each of those tasks has an internal order, too, and she just doesn’t know the correct order. This is what LiPuma is teaching everyone: order in space, order in time.
Some students move too much. Rahmie takes handfuls of garlic, onions, chorizo, and potatoes, brings them over to the stove, and drops them into a hot pan with oil and stock to make a broth for steamed mussels. “Do you think it might be easier to bring the pan to the mise-en-place than your mise-en-place to the pan? Maybe less moves?” LiPuma asks him. “Yes, Chef,” Rahmie replies. LiPuma will continue to bust the ever-smiling Rahmie’s chops about the dish. Now Rahmie jiggles the pan. “Don’t worry about shaking it,” LiPuma says. “Just get the rest of the ingredients in there and then you can do the little shaky-shaky thing that you guys like to do.”
Other students don’t move enough. The family meal crew stands around a pot of rice, stirring occasionally. “How long are you going to mother that rice?” LiPuma calls to them. “Put a lid on it and go away, do something else.” They don’t understand, LiPuma says. Every time they stir it, they’re cooling it, and it’s taking longer to cook. They do it because they’re nervous, and it’s a comfort zone. But they’re wasting valuable time that they could be using to prep for the next few days of service. “What are you doing, man?” LiPuma asks Ronald. “Cooking the mushrooms,” Ronald replies. “They’re in the oven! You can’t even see them! Get outta here! Go do sumthin’! Go bag up the chilis!” LiPuma walks past Zoe. “Are you leaning, Zoe? Don’t lean. There’s a bunch of other stuff you can do!”
Some students don’t communicate enough. An order comes in for lamb, and LiPuma yells to Ronald, “Take the lamb and put it in the oven.” He hears nothing. He yells again, with a bite: “Take the lamb and put it in the oven!” “Yes, Chef!” Ronald replies. “That’s a good answer,” LiPuma says. But LiPuma is having a problem with all the “Yes, Chef!” he’s getting. When he calls out a quantity of something, he wants them to tell him what they heard: Two fish! One pork!
Other students communicate too much. The pastry chef calls twice for a food runner while the waiters talk among themselves. “Hey! Hey! Pickup pastry!” LiPuma screams. “Shut up now and pay attention!” The back waiters ought to know better; they were the last class of cooks in this kitchen before this one.
organization.