Local talent

In the late afternoon I went over to visit an old haunt –l’Etoile restaurant, Madison’s flagship culinary powerhouse. Odessa Piper, winner of the James Beard Award for best Chef of the Midwest back in 2002, was presiding over the staff meal and I thought I’d join up and listen in on the latest buzz. It seemed timely since this weekend marks the seasonal beginning of the Saturday Farmer’s Market on the Square. L’Etoile and the Market are so interlinked that I do believe if one would vanish, the other would soon follow.

The restaurant world is like no other (and yes, I know, you can say this about any subgroup of intensely focused, crazily obsessive people). In a place like L’Etoile, cooking on, say, a Saturday evening becomes a total adrenaline run: one sweats, curses and moves so quickly, in such tight spaces, with complete body awareness of all the other players, that it becomes more like a test of agility than food preparation. And everything, everything has to be timed to the second, so that it is ready for pick up, at exactly the right moment, not a minute too soon or too late, coordinated with all other dishes that you work on for a given table.

The turnover among cooks is extremely high. The l’Etoile cooking folks from two years ago are now mostly scattered all over the globe – the pastry chef is in Chile, the fish cook is in Japan, the appetizer guy’s in California. But the waiters are all the same, down to the last one, and so are the Latin American dish washers, with some new cousins thrown in.

The staff meal was good – but for the food! Typically, one chef takes on the chore of cooking for the bunch of them (using scraps and ingredients that were purchased in excess of what was needed). Not infrequently, the chef will humor the desire to get away from high-end cooking. So, for example, today we could enjoy potato salad with bacon (ahhh, but the ingredients are always the best that the local small farms have to offer, so that it was NUESKE’s bacon!) and something that looked like sloppy joes. It’s not unusual to see the chefs douse any or all of the meat dishes with fiery Mexican sauces that someone will have picked up in Milwaukee. Left-over meat or fish are a staple of staff meals because the restaurant life of these products is extremely brief and so if customers don’t order in a predictable pattern, the ingredients are retired for the staff to enjoy.

I like this world of intense people with lives that appear oftentimes on hold. I left just as the first L’Etoile diner was making her way to the table. The meal that will be served to her within the hour of her arrival will be pricey. It will be admired maybe, criticized perhaps, but it most certainly will be a product of a day-long effort to make it appear just so. It's really quite amazing: so many people conspiring to perfect something on her plate. I wonder if she’ll even give it a second’s thought.