Best Food Writing 2010 Part 7

"The poutine."

"Like the fries with the fat gravy? We'll take five."

"Five?" someone at the table said, alarmed.

"Shut the f.u.c.k up. O.K., three," Batali said, and glanced at the menu. "And two pig ears, two gnocchi, two sweetbreads, two quail, two fluke, and then, after that that, two crispy rabbit legs, two pork ribs, two flat irons medium rare/rare, two veal b.r.e.a.s.t.s-what's loco moco? Two-a them. And I don't want any f.u.c.kin' vegetables." He took a swig from an open wine bottle.

In the kitchen, Dotolo slumped intently over the salad station, strewing balsamic onions over chicken-liver toast. To Batali's order, he added everything else on the menu. Shook took over expediting, and told the cooks to fire the ears, fire the quail, fire the sweetbreads and poutine. Dotolo looked up testily from his ministrations; he didn't want there to be too much food on the table at once. "Just 'cause you're hungry, doesn't mean we have to f.u.c.kin' kill 'em," he said. But Shook ignored him, and killed them anyway.

SWEET LIFE.

By Francis Lam From Gourmet Gourmet

A former Gourmet Gourmet contributing writer, now the food editor for contributing writer, now the food editor for salon.com, Lam combines curiosity, enthusiasm, and stealthy wit. As a CIA-trained chef himself, he gives us a unique chef's perspective on the process of developing the menu for a hot new L.A. restaurant.

Their Los Angeles restaurant, Street, is just weeks from opening, and Susan Feniger and Kajsa Alger are living the dream: wrangling with contractors, getting permits, and reporting break-ins. So this weekend, they're unwinding by tras.h.i.+ng Feniger's house-breaking cupboards, warping wallboards, burning holes in the upholstery. The crash and bang of professional cooking does not enter the home quietly, and these two are cranking out recipes, testing and tasting and retesting them for their menu.

"Tomorrow we're testing food and beer; Sunday it's Champagnes, liquor, and food," Alger told me with military precision when I met her. Then she smiled. "It always sounds so organized when I talk about it. But when we're three c.o.c.ktails in, not a lot of food happens."

I'm up in the hills of L.A., in Feniger's home, learning how the two partners decide what goes on the plate and which plates go on the menu. Because a menu is a funny thing. When you're at the table, with a drink in your hand and hunger in your belly, its purpose is obvious. For a chef, however, it might be a statement of vision or a doc.u.ment of her past. For the kitchen, it's a plan for how to use precious s.p.a.ce and manpower. For the accountant, it's all numbers: What's going to sell well enough to keep the lights on? As chefs and owners, Feniger and Alger have to look at every dish from all of these angles, and so, as with all your favorite movies and all your favorite records, lots of ideas get left on the cutting room floor.

Like the hot dogs. A street-food-inspired restaurant should have some hot dogs on offer, right? So Alger did some research, which is to say she ate 42 hot dogs in one brutal day in Chicago, and followed that up with a 30-dog day in L.A. She and Feniger then developed enough hot dogs to occupy a whole section of the menu, only to realize (eventually) that, you know, people might not want to come to your restaurant and spend more than $2.50 on a hot dog. So they ditched them. The lesson: When writing your menu, be sure that you know your price point and your clientele's perception of value. And, apparently: Be ready to sacrifice your life for your restaurant.

The hot dogs were a dalliance they thought better of. But sometimes they'll fall a little in love with something even if they know they shouldn't. Alger takes leaves of collard greens and carefully cuts circles out of them while Feniger chops piles of limes, chiles, dried shrimp, coconut, and ginger and pulls out bowls of roasted peanuts and tamarind caramel made earlier. The Thai Bites are becoming unwieldy, each component crowding the cooler in its own container. And I imagine the poor pantry cooks, every time an order comes down, having to whip out all this stuff and arrange it neatly in ramekins as Alger was doing. Feniger smears a collard round with caramel, wraps it around the fillings, tries one, and offers it to me. Her eyes widen with excitement behind her Bunsen Honeydew gla.s.ses, and her words purr and gear up before being blurted out. "Ffffffabulous!" she says. It's sweet, sticky, salty, sour, hot, and wild; crunchy and cool and sharp and round. It's crazy, and it shows on my face. Alger nods. "It takes up too much time and s.p.a.ce, but it's worth it. We'll just have to drop two or three things from the menu so we can keep this one on," she says.

But it's not always the needs of the restaurant that dictate a dish. Sometimes, a dish can dictate the restaurant.

Twenty-five years ago, before she had four restaurants, before she had cookbooks and TV shows as one of the Too Hot Tamales, before she had managers and accountants and a.s.sistants, Feniger was just a young chef visiting a friend in India. He took her to a small village, where women offered them a dish of tapioca, chewy and sticky, festooned with pungent spices and neem neem leaves. It wasn't delicate, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't anything like the French cooking that she had trained for and maybe even understood. But in that moment, with those people, it was everything she wanted to eat, the most serendipitous and yet fundamental of shared experiences. leaves. It wasn't delicate, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't anything like the French cooking that she had trained for and maybe even understood. But in that moment, with those people, it was everything she wanted to eat, the most serendipitous and yet fundamental of shared experiences.

So when she decided that she wanted to see if she could go back to scratch and start a new restaurant on her own, without the whole apparatus that she and business partner Mary Sue Milliken had built up over the years, Feniger went back to India. She ate from 8 a.m. through midnight for 14 days, until she came back to that village. Those women were still there, making that dish, and Feniger decided Street would be where she would share those memories, those flavors you find when in a community that is not your own but that, with a bite or two, might become a little more so. "The thing with street food," Feniger says, "is that it's not food created for carts or trucks. It's food that came out of someone's home." No wonder, then, that people take their street food so personally. It's iconic; it's their culture.

"But how do you make sure your dishes are true to those cultures ?" I ask. The easy answer is that Feniger and Alger called in ringers, experts who could train them in the flavors and techniques of cuisines they didn't know firsthand. But it's bigger than that. Alger is thoughtful, excited and challenged by this question, and finally says that the lines she won't cross are felt rather than delineated. They made Korean-style dumplings, for instance, flavored with cilantro. They loved them but couldn't find any cilantro in Korean cooking, so they dropped them, too. "The more we learn about these cuisines, the harder it gets," Alger says. "At first I might think, 'Let's do a stir-fried noodle dish.' And then we'd cook with a master who shows us twenty different variations, and all of a sudden something called 'stir-fried noodles' just sounds so amateurish. So we pick one and learn to nail it and it looks and tastes and sounds great, but now the kind-of-lame dishes we had penciled in next to it on the menu sound totally ridiculous."

But there's one dish they feel they've nailed for sure. Alger draws me to the stove and shows me a bowl of tapioca b.a.l.l.s soaking in water. She fires up a pan, gets some ghee good and hot, pops some spices and chiles, and stirs in the starchy pearls. "When I first tried to make this, I was trying to chef my way through it too much," she says. It was looking too gluey, so she tried to sear it with high heat, but it became weirdly chunky. For this dish, she had to learn to cook against her instinct, to let it ride the way Feniger suggested, to let it get mushy, sticky, tacky. Alger hands me and Feniger spoons. It's like chewy b.u.t.ter, heat and c.u.min and gra.s.sy herbs. "Prrrrretty nice," Feniger says. She takes another bite. "Mmm! That's rrrrreally good."

The women pause to notice the sun going down, the light so low, so directed, so yellow and beautiful. We go outside to take a break and marvel, and Feniger's cat Squirt takes advantage of our distraction to nuzzle her nose right into a big bowl of bacon. They start to freak out. Then they stop and look at each other. "Do you . . . care?" Alger asks.

"Well . . . as long as we're not serving it to patrons," Feniger laughs. There are no health inspectors in the living room. This isn't Street food quite yet.

GINO CAMMARATA, GELATO KING.

By Sarah DiGregorio From the Village Voice Village Voice

As restaurant critics for the Voice Voice, DiGregorio and her counterpart Robert Sietsema tend to cover the low-profile restaurants that their uptown colleagues ignore-thereby catching the real pulse of New York life. Case in point: this profile of one Bay Ridge restaurateur.

Gino Cammarata talks to himself while he shops. Sniffing an orange, peering at bottles of olive oil, he mutters unhappily in Italian, remembering the smell of tangerine peel in October and the fragrance of ripening olive trees. "When I go shopping, I go crazy," he says. If there's anything that would make you an obsessive about food, it's growing up in Sicily, like he did, on a farm where your father cultivates citrus, olives, and peaches. Where your grandmother always has a surplus of fresh goat's milk. Where you work in your uncle's restaurant, as a 10-year-old gelato-making prodigy.

Cammarata, who moved to New York in 1970 when he was 15, has just opened Piattini, a Sicilian-inflected restaurant in Bay Ridge where he serves his now-famous gelato, along with dishes like bucatina with sardines, linguini with bottarga, charcuterie, and various fish and meat secondi. Cammarata's story is an immigrant's tale of making it (and not making it) in New York, but it's also a parable of the city's restaurant industry over the last 25 years-skyrocketing rents, condos replacing restaurants, and the little guys ending up in Brooklyn.

The Cammarata family left their farm, and the "modern, American-style" gas-station-c.u.m-restaurant owned by Gino's uncle, to settle on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. There, Giuseppe, Gino's father, got a job at Zampieri Brothers Bakery on Cornelia Street. "All his life, he was cold," says Gino, describing the chilly early mornings his father spent in the orchard. "And he always wanted to become a baker so that he could be warm."

Imagine leaving a small Sicilian farm town and arriving in Greenwich Village in the '70s. Hippies filled Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park-Gino thought they were exotic and fabulous: "The long hair! The guitars! I never wanted to go back to Sicily. I thought, here, I wouldn't have to go to school." The food was a different matter. In those days, the pasta was mushy and the tomato sauce sour. He started eating nothing but ham and eggs. On the weekends, he delivered bread from Zampieri to legendary venues like the Rainbow Room and the Waldorf-Astoria, chatting up the chefs along the way. After starting at 1 a.m., he always reached a certain midtown Italian steakhouse around 6 a.m., where the chef would give him a gla.s.s of wine.

On a recent Tuesday, the day Piattini is closed, I stopped by the restaurant to talk to Gino and check out his gelato machine. Gino is a garrulous, st.u.r.dy, middle-aged man, in a loose, white linen s.h.i.+rt tucked into chinos, with a gold chain around his neck. He's p.r.o.ne to proclamations like, "Good food, good wine, and good women, that's all I want!"

Gino pats his gelato maker as you would a good dog. He bought the squat, Italian-made machine in 1987, and has been lugging it around with him ever since-wherever Gino and that machine go, his followers scamper behind, seeking out what is considered the best gelato in the city. "It's my Ferrari," he says of the contraption. The machine churns out nine-liter batches, turning Gino's mixtures of milk, cream, and flavorings like ricotta, licorice with mint, hazelnuts, and Sicilian pistachios into miraculous confections. The ca.s.sada-a frozen version of the Sicilian cake of ricotta and candied fruit-is a dense, creamy concoction that tastes more like ricotta than ricotta.

Back in 1982, Giuseppe-along with Gino, his brother, Enzo, and their mother, Maria-went out on their own and opened an Italian gourmet shop and restaurant called Siracusa, after the region where the family came from. This was just as well, because a year or two later, Zampieri Brothers closed to make way for condos. Siracusa was situated on Fourth Avenue near Astor Place, a kind of culinary no-man's land at the time, populated with bookstores.

At Siracusa, Gino was in the kitchen with his parents, while Enzo worked the front of the house and the wine program. The restaurant sold Italian groceries and served Sicilian standards. In 1984, in the Times's Diner's Journal, Times's Diner's Journal, Bryan Miller praised the gelato, the pastas-like fettuccine with porcini-and the Italian wines (a bottle of Barbera d'Alba for $9!). Bryan Miller praised the gelato, the pastas-like fettuccine with porcini-and the Italian wines (a bottle of Barbera d'Alba for $9!).

But as the restaurant became more popular, the family dressed it up until it resembled, in Gino's words, a grand hotel lobby. The look didn't work for the neighborhood, so when the lease was up in 1992, the family closed Siracusa, made repairs, and revamped the dining room. They reopened as Bussola Bar & Grill, which had a more casual, affordable approach.

Still, the house specialty was Gino's gelato, and when Ruth Reichl visited in 1997 for a Diner's Journal, she gave the pasta with bottarga special mention, before noting, "The Cammaratas have always made great gelato. That has not changed." Alas, when 9/11 rolled around, business suffered. Then, in the old familiar story, the landlord cranked up the rent from $5,000 a month to $35,000. The neighborhood was gussying up, and the Cammaratas could no longer afford to be Manhattan restaurateurs. They closed Bussola Bar & Grill in 2002. Later, the s.p.a.ce became Ippudo.

"It was so sad. [The restaurant] was my life, me and my brother," Gino says. He disappeared from the city for five years, working on the line as the pasta guy at a resort in the Hamptons. Then the resort was sold to make way for, yes, condos.

So Gino did what many New Yorkers priced out of Manhattan did before him-he moved to Brooklyn. (Actually, he already lived in Bensonhurst.) He and his trusty gelato machine set up in an unlikely location: a tanning salon in Bensonhurst, selling gelato from a small window. But then he found a proper spot on Fourth Avenue and Marine Avenue in Bay Ridge, and he and Enzo decided to give it another go.

At Piattini, the gelato machine is ensconced in the back, behind a small freezer display case holding the lovely green pistachio confection, the nut-dotted hazelnut, the licorice, and the blood orange-almond milk. On the handsome wooden tables and chairs, diners slurp up the Sicilian cla.s.sic-bucatina with sardines, raisins, and cauliflower-and crunch on the small fried polpettes that Maria taught Gino how to make, in salt cod or squash-and-pistachio versions. Actually, Maria still likes to putter around, and sometimes takes the bus from Bensonhurst to fry up cartocci (fried sh.e.l.ls), which Gino fills with shrimp and mascarpone.

I wished Gino luck as I headed out the door-and meant it. He replied that business was "beautiful." "You should see the Verrazano Bridge at night!" he exclaimed. "It's kinky!" Silence. "Not kinky! What do you say? Funky! It's funky!"

WILL WORK NIGHTS.

By Jason Sheehan From Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, s.e.x, Love and Death in the Kitchen Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, s.e.x, Love and Death in the Kitchen

Reviewing restaurants for Denver's WestWord WestWord magazine, and now for magazine, and now for Seattle Weekly Seattle Weekly, Jason Sheehan doesn't just describe a meal, he somehow divines the inner life of a restaurant. As this flamboyant, picaresque memoir reveals, it's an insight bred from his former life as a chef.

Eleven P.M. Sixty minutes before the first rush. On the line, they're lighting everything. Fryers are being super-heated, burners roaring. The four front flattops and the two in the back-the cake grills-are being cleared and wiped clean of oil. Sheet pans are being laid over the grills, double-stacked, and even the ancient gas four-burner is being coaxed to life. Usually it remains covered with a thick, custom-fitted plastic cutting board, used for storage, as a shelf on the already overcrowded line. There's nothing on the menu we can't do on the grills, in the fryers, in the two nukers bracketed to the wall above the cold table. It's faster not to use burners.

Only now, the cover is popped and all four rings are blazing merrily away, bleeding flames across the grated top because the gaskets are worn and the gas lines leaky.

"Why are we eighty-six?"

I get icy, p.i.s.sed-off stares; quiet wrath. Nothing. I'm going to kill Lucy. I figure this is all Wendy's fault somehow; you don't just bring someone new into the family without asking.

"Look, guys. If this is about him him"-pointing-"I had nothing to do with it. I just-"

Freddy kicks the front of one of the fryers. "It's Friday, dude. What the f.u.c.k?"

"I know, Freddy. That's what I told Lucy."

"This isn't about him," James says.

"Dude, fish. Fish Fis.h.!.+" Freddy is shouting now. "It's f.u.c.king Friday. Where's all the f.u.c.king fish?"

I stand stunned. And then I fold as if punched, right up around the impact point of the sudden realization of what I'd forgotten. I close my eyes. Brace my elbows on my knees. Pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers. Try not to scream. s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t . . . .

Behind me, James is muttering, talking to himself. Freddy's still yelling. Hero, laughing, slapping the board with his spatula. "You suck, wheel!"

It's Friday night. And this being Friday night in upstate New York (all full of Catholics-Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics and Polish Catholics, Catholics who've come here from everywhere that Catholics have fled)-that means fish fry. Fish dinners with fries and a monkey disk of milky-sweet coleslaw, fish sandwiches going the same way, both battered and dumped in a fryer sequestered just for this foul, noxious, evil duty. Not just a tradition, an edict. G.o.d's law. Friday fish fry.

How had I forgotten to check on the f.u.c.king fish? Favorite trick of the dinner crew: not pulling the tubs of cheap, rock-hard haddock fillets out of the coffin freezer in the back for their slow thaw. In a water bath they take two hours or more. Dumped out on a prep table and allowed to collect bacteria, even longer. The fish would've been on special all night, written up on the board by the front door, put on a menu insert, programmed into the servers' POS system: SPEC FRY or SPEC SANDY. They'd probably served two hundred fish dinners earlier, would've gambled on how few cases to pull to leave us maximally screwed.

From my wounded hunker, I ask Freddy, "How many fillets we have?"

"Six, man. And they all stink."

I try to think. We'll only do half as many orders tonight-it technically being Sat.u.r.day for most of the s.h.i.+ft-but I can't have the fish pulled from the menu. Friday f.u.c.king fish fry is pure heaven on any restaurant's books-a fast mover with low food cost, high menu price and customers commanded by G.o.d to eat it or else they'll go to h.e.l.l. I blame the Pope, the dinner s.h.i.+ft, the management, everyone. But the last, best curses I save for myself.

Then I stand up straight. I look around at my guys, at Wendy. Briefly, I wonder if there's still some way I can blame this on him. "All right. Wheel sucks. I forgot to check the fish. My fault." Mutiny in the eyes of the crew.

"But we know what to do," I continue. "We can do this. Freddy, whatever fish is in the coolers, bury it. James, set the pans. Hero, get the hose. Freddy, on me when you're done. Wendy, on James." I step up to the pa.s.s, lean across the gleaming, hot aluminum, ducking my head under the glowing heat lamps, looking for Lucy. I call her over, tell her where we're at. "How's the floor?"

The floor is mercifully empty, servers rolling silver, slicing lemons, preening, staring dumbly at the walls-whatever servers do when there are no customers to pester. I tell Lucy to stall any new tables that come in as long as possible, then we break.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS to do a fish fry at a short-order restaurant.

The first is to slow-thaw a bunch of haddock fillets in a forty-two-degree prep cooler or under cold tap water in a clean sink. Once thawed, the fillets then need to be individually inspected; trimmed, if necessary, of excess skin or blood-dark belly meat left attached by the fishmonger; laid out on clean paper towels and stacked three deep in a clean, dry fish tub. The tubs are then stacked Lincoln Log-style in an upright ready cooler or lowboy. As soon as an order comes in, a single fillet is delicately lifted from its bedding and the company of its friends, dusted with flour and gently, lovingly dredged through a pan of room-temp beer batter made sweet and strong with b.u.t.termilk and a good stout. The gummy fish must then be thinned by running it between the index and middle fingers-sur plus batter sc.r.a.ped back into the pan-and only after all this can the jacketed haddock be placed carefully into a hot fryer using a swirling motion: introducing it to the heat slowly to keep the fillet from curling as the batter tightens and to keep the batter itself from just bubbling away. There's a motion to it. A grace. Work one Friday night on fryer station in Catholic country and you will never forget it.

A couple minutes in the oil and voila: perfect fried haddock, golden brown and puffy, religiously satisfactory and ready to be plated alongside crisp french fries and cold coleslaw. That's the way to do it right.

Then there's the way we do it in a hurry (the way we do it tonight): 1. Collect from the freezer the eighty pounds of frozen haddock fillets that the dinner crew neglected to pull. The fish is already separated into ten-pound consignments-each batch a solid block of chunky gray ice inside a stiff-sided but flimsy plastic box. The boxes are heavy, slippery, annoyingly hard to handle. They'll take the skin right off your hands if your hands aren't bone-dry. When the crew is hurrying, the odds of a broken toe from a dropped box go up dramatically. Doesn't happen tonight, though. 1. Collect from the freezer the eighty pounds of frozen haddock fillets that the dinner crew neglected to pull. The fish is already separated into ten-pound consignments-each batch a solid block of chunky gray ice inside a stiff-sided but flimsy plastic box. The boxes are heavy, slippery, annoyingly hard to handle. They'll take the skin right off your hands if your hands aren't bone-dry. When the crew is hurrying, the odds of a broken toe from a dropped box go up dramatically. Doesn't happen tonight, though. 2. Take those boxes out the back door, pull off the locking lids, set them up inside empty bread racks braced at an angle against the back wall, and let Hero open up with the power sprayer we use for cleaning the floors and the grease out of the hood vents. With the hose screwed into the hot water tap and the sprayer turned against ice, it might as well be a flamethrower. 2. Take those boxes out the back door, pull off the locking lids, set them up inside empty bread racks braced at an angle against the back wall, and let Hero open up with the power sprayer we use for cleaning the floors and the grease out of the hood vents. With the hose screwed into the hot water tap and the sprayer turned against ice, it might as well be a flamethrower. 3. Power-wash the s.h.i.+t out of the fish tubs until the steam stops and the ice starts to crumble, stopping periodically to set back up the racks that have been pushed over or to retrieve the icy fish bricks that have slipped from their boxes and gone skittering off into the gravel. During these interludes, the chances of the sprayer "getting away from" Hero and "accidentally" soaking either Freddy or me are 100 percent. Tonight, Hero gets Freddy while Freddy is lighting a cigarette, his timing perfect, catching him just as he bends to cup the flame of his lighter against the wind. Freddy jumps, sputters, charges and takes a running swing at Hero. This just gets him another shot with the hose. The two of them need to be separated briefly. I shove Hero aside, tell Freddy to go back inside, and he does, shaking water out of his long, ratty blond hair. 3. Power-wash the s.h.i.+t out of the fish tubs until the steam stops and the ice starts to crumble, stopping periodically to set back up the racks that have been pushed over or to retrieve the icy fish bricks that have slipped from their boxes and gone skittering off into the gravel. During these interludes, the chances of the sprayer "getting away from" Hero and "accidentally" soaking either Freddy or me are 100 percent. Tonight, Hero gets Freddy while Freddy is lighting a cigarette, his timing perfect, catching him just as he bends to cup the flame of his lighter against the wind. Freddy jumps, sputters, charges and takes a running swing at Hero. This just gets him another shot with the hose. The two of them need to be separated briefly. I shove Hero aside, tell Freddy to go back inside, and he does, shaking water out of his long, ratty blond hair. 4. Bring the partially thawed cases into the prep kitchen, dump them out on the tables, and split the disintegrating fish-cicles length-wise into twenty portions, preserving as many whole fillets as possible. Place each chunk of fish ice into a long, shallow metal baking pan called a hotel. 4. Bring the partially thawed cases into the prep kitchen, dump them out on the tables, and split the disintegrating fish-cicles length-wise into twenty portions, preserving as many whole fillets as possible. Place each chunk of fish ice into a long, shallow metal baking pan called a hotel. 5. Walk twenty laden hotel pans onto the line where James (with Wendy's bewildered a.s.sistance) will have set up deep bains 5. Walk twenty laden hotel pans onto the line where James (with Wendy's bewildered a.s.sistance) will have set up deep bains1 on every available hot surface, each filled with a few inches of (hopefully already boiling) water. on every available hot surface, each filled with a few inches of (hopefully already boiling) water. 6. Set hotel pans on top of bains, making twenty scratch double boilers, and cover hotels with plastic wrap, now making twenty jerry-rigged pressure cookers. 6. Set hotel pans on top of bains, making twenty scratch double boilers, and cover hotels with plastic wrap, now making twenty jerry-rigged pressure cookers. 7. Wait. Smoke cigarettes. Bicker angrily with crew. Freddy is off in his corner by the fryers (standing post for the absent Juan), muttering under his breath and staring death rays at Hero. Hero just keeps laughing. This is going to come to a head soon, but not yet. 7. Wait. Smoke cigarettes. Bicker angrily with crew. Freddy is off in his corner by the fryers (standing post for the absent Juan), muttering under his breath and staring death rays at Hero. Hero just keeps laughing. This is going to come to a head soon, but not yet. 8. After ten minutes or so, pull the plastic wrap off the hotels, and what you have is eighty pounds (give or take) of surface-poached, center-frozen, limp gray haddock fillets and a G.o.d-awful stink. To get rid of the stink faster, pop the filters out of the ventilation hood and just let that baby roar. Hero does this, climbing up between the grills and pulling the greasy filters out of their tracks. The suction immediately snuffs the flames on the four-burner. This is going to come back to haunt us, too. But not yet. 8. After ten minutes or so, pull the plastic wrap off the hotels, and what you have is eighty pounds (give or take) of surface-poached, center-frozen, limp gray haddock fillets and a G.o.d-awful stink. To get rid of the stink faster, pop the filters out of the ventilation hood and just let that baby roar. Hero does this, climbing up between the grills and pulling the greasy filters out of their tracks. The suction immediately snuffs the flames on the four-burner. This is going to come back to haunt us, too. But not yet. 9. Because they are now half-cooked, the fillets will flake to pieces at the least prompting. Look at one wrong and it's likely to dissolve into fish mush and ice. Owing to this physical instability, they can no longer take the pressure of being dredged in batter so must be ca.s.seroled. In a.s.sembly-line fas.h.i.+on, bring in a new set of hotels. Layer each one with batter, ease in as many fillets as it can hold using a long spatula, then cover with more batter. Stack the pans back in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up the batter and shock the fillets, then remove to the ready cooler. As orders come in, shovel fillets gracelessly into the oil. Fry long and hard. Carefully remove to plate for service. 9. Because they are now half-cooked, the fillets will flake to pieces at the least prompting. Look at one wrong and it's likely to dissolve into fish mush and ice. Owing to this physical instability, they can no longer take the pressure of being dredged in batter so must be ca.s.seroled. In a.s.sembly-line fas.h.i.+on, bring in a new set of hotels. Layer each one with batter, ease in as many fillets as it can hold using a long spatula, then cover with more batter. Stack the pans back in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up the batter and shock the fillets, then remove to the ready cooler. As orders come in, shovel fillets gracelessly into the oil. Fry long and hard. Carefully remove to plate for service. 10. Pray to whatever G.o.d might be listening that no one catches you. 10. Pray to whatever G.o.d might be listening that no one catches you.

Oddly, the fish actually tastes pretty good this way.

Well, maybe not good good, but less bad than you'd think. Flaky and slightly oily outside, mid-rare in the middle. In texture it's not unlike a poached fillet of sole, and in flavor only as bad as frozen haddock ever is-which is pretty bad even under the best circ.u.mstances.

The real problem is, going into the oil cold (and often still frozen in the center), the fillets will drop the temperature of the fryer oil precipitously. This screws with the fry cook's timing, and when cooking for drunks-especially lots lots of drunks-the fry cook's timing is of paramount importance to the synchronization of the rest of the kitchen. It also makes a terrible mess, p.i.s.ses off the dishwashers, breaks about a dozen different health codes. of drunks-the fry cook's timing is of paramount importance to the synchronization of the rest of the kitchen. It also makes a terrible mess, p.i.s.ses off the dishwashers, breaks about a dozen different health codes.

And it's just wrong.

You probably think that wouldn't matter to a bunch of guys like us. But it does. It matters a lot. If you've ever worked in a kitchen, you understand what I'm talking about. You know that little catch you get in your chest when you're doing something you know is wrong. And if you haven't worked in a kitchen, you'll just have to take my word for it. All the bulls.h.i.+t, the punching, the posturing, the macho c.r.a.p; all the bad behavior and criminal impulses; all the hard talk and pleasure-seeking and shameless conduct-that's all true. That's The Life, the atmosphere in which so much food is created every day. But it's also true that we want to be good good.

Not good people. Not good citizens. Not good in any general way. A lot of us (and I'm talking about all cooks here, not just the four guys standing with me on this line) prefer the opposite of good so long as we can get away with it.

But we want to be good at what we do because being good at what we do is what saves us-balancing out all the rest, at least in our minds, at least in my my mind. Someday, when the heat comes down, when they finally slap on the leg irons and the Hannibal Lecter mask and lead me off to come-what-may, I want my guys to be able to say, "He was a good cook. Sure, he was a reprobate, a degenerate animal. Always broke. Always borrowing money. He was a foulmouthed, bad-tempered, cross-eyed, snaggletoothed, brain-damaged, tail-chasing f.u.c.kup and a total wreck of a human being. But man, Sheehan could really cook." mind. Someday, when the heat comes down, when they finally slap on the leg irons and the Hannibal Lecter mask and lead me off to come-what-may, I want my guys to be able to say, "He was a good cook. Sure, he was a reprobate, a degenerate animal. Always broke. Always borrowing money. He was a foulmouthed, bad-tempered, cross-eyed, snaggletoothed, brain-damaged, tail-chasing f.u.c.kup and a total wreck of a human being. But man, Sheehan could really cook."

That would be enough, I think. Mitigation-that's all I'm after. And I'm not alone in that. I've known chefs who'd scream and curse and throw pans and torture cooks for any little slight. I've known guys who went to jail for stealing food stamps from old ladies, for sticking up convenience stores; guys who would work any angle, screw their friends over for a buck, behave in ways that are just unimaginably bad. But I've seen these same knuckleheads quit good jobs rather than do wrong by the food. I've watched them take pride in the perfect placement of scallops in a pan, in cutting a microscopic brunoise brunoise, in standing up under fire on a Friday night with a bunch of other like-minded b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, throat-cutters and f.u.c.kups without blowing it for the team.

Cooking can be a miserable gig sometimes. Gouge-out-your-own-eyeb.a.l.l.s awful. But when you sign on to a kitchen crew, what you're doing at the simplest level is indenturing yourself to the service of others. You're feeding people, providing for one of their basic needs, and that is-all else aside-a n.o.ble thing. And I have long held to the conviction that at every station, behind every burner, in all the professional kitchens in the world, is a guy who wants to walk out the door at the end of the night, into whatever personal h.e.l.l or weirdness is waiting for him, knowing that, if nothing else, he did one thing real well.

But tonight, we have done wrong and are duly ashamed. Still, that's how you set up eighty pounds of fish fast-freezer to line in just a little over twenty minutes. It's a nice trick. Jesus is satisfied. The Pope is satisfied. Management will be satisfied. All our masters are pleased. Everyone is still pulling sheets and bains off their stations, yelling for the dishwashers, when I holler out to Lucy, "Luz! Galley up! Bring it on."

The printer starts chattering immediately.

RUSS & DAUGHTERS.

By Rachel Wharton From Edible Manhattan Edible Manhattan

Deputy editor of Edible Manhattan Edible Manhattan and and Edible Brooklyn Edible Brooklyn-just two of a growing chain of regional Edible Edible food magazines-Rachel Wharton recently won a James Beard award for her Back of the House columns. This profile brings fresh color to a Lower East Side inst.i.tution. food magazines-Rachel Wharton recently won a James Beard award for her Back of the House columns. This profile brings fresh color to a Lower East Side inst.i.tution.

There are many signs on the clean white walls of Russ & Daughters-the Lower East Side landmark that's been serving smoked sable, pickled herring and slices of salmon so thin you can read the paper through them, since 1914-but the one that tells you all you need to know isn't the jokey Lox et Veritas Lox et Veritas (a pun on Yale's motto of light and truth); or the old-fas.h.i.+oned hand-painted signs that promote "Genuine Sturgeon, Imported Nuts and Caviar"; or even the one reading (a pun on Yale's motto of light and truth); or the old-fas.h.i.+oned hand-painted signs that promote "Genuine Sturgeon, Imported Nuts and Caviar"; or even the one reading De gustibus non est disputandum De gustibus non est disputandum , which is Latin for "of taste there is no dispute" and Russ-ese for "we don't decide which fish is best, you do." , which is Latin for "of taste there is no dispute" and Russ-ese for "we don't decide which fish is best, you do."

Instead, the sign that sums the salmon-slicers' superiority is the one that boasts a quote from Anthony Bourdain, a man known more for his barbs than his bubbly blurbs. "Russ & Daughters," it reads, "occupies that rare and tiny place on the mountaintop reserved for those who are not just the oldest and the last-but also the best."

Bourdain is no dummy. Russ & Daughters isn't the only 100-year-old, fourth-generation family-owned business in town, not by a long shot, but it's one of the very few places in that category where the word on the street, instead of "Meh, it was better way back when," whenever when might have been, is still that the hour-long, out-the-door weekend line is worth the wait and that yes, you really do have to eat here before you die.

This is that rarity in the New York food world: The purveyor beloved by everyone from street thugs and city politicians to chefs like locavore Peter Hoffman and lion Marco Pierre White. ("It was the finest quality fis.h.!.+" White enthused by recent letter.) Russ & Daughters has been profiled by PBS, canonized by Martha, lauded at length by Calvin Trillin in nearly everything he writes and even immortalized in a 2008 J. Crew catalog, all for good reason. Because the hand-whipped, eat-it-by-the-spoonful scallion-cream cheese, the chocolate-covered jelly rings, the egg creams spritzed with real bottles of Brooklyn seltzer, that salmon-each bite an alchemy of smoke and fat-the tins of caviar and trays of whitefish salad and luscious chopped liver and latkes (those last few made from scratch in the back) at Russ & Daughters are just as good as when Joel Russ first handed over the t.i.tle of the shop to Ida, Hattie and Anne in 1933. Adding them into the now neon-lit name, by the way, way before women's lib.

Heck, now that there's more herring (with cream, with onions, with curry sauce), and even more salmon (thick-cut Scottish loins, gravlax, pastrami-style, organic double-smoked Danish), and even sandwiches like the now-famous Super Heebster (whitefish and baked salmon salad, horseradish cream cheese, wasabi-roe), you could argue Russ & Daughters keeps getting better. Especially for those who shopped for 40 years before the place started toasting the bagels. ("Yes, we toast!" says the sign.) Actually, those bagels-chewy and legit, they're made by a local baker-weren't around at the start either. Neither were the flatter, carb-conscious "flagels" or the mini-bagels, which oldtimers argue are actually the size a bagel should be. What was there was herring.

Like so many Jews in New York City, Joel Russ emigrated from Eastern Europe, arriving in 1907 to help his sister "with her little herring business." They sold the Jewish staple from one of many pushcarts on the streets of the Lower East Side until Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia decided to "clean up" the city streets, pus.h.i.+ng those carts into new indoor markets like the nearby Ess.e.x. Luckily Russ had saved his pennies, and in 1914 he opened the tiny J. R. Russ National Appetizing at 187 Orchard Street, expanding his stock to include other smoked and cured fish, plus accoutrements like cream cheese, and then moving, by 1920, to the current home at 179 East Houston Street.

Those foods are what the second line on the neon sign means by "appetizers." To Jews of a certain age in New York City-and their offspring, no doubt-appetizing is a noun, not an adjective. Traditionally New York's Jewish delis sold meat, while "appetizing shops" sold smoked sturgeon, hand-packed tins of caviar, cured salmon, pickles, whitefish salad, cream cheeses, chocolates and "all the stuff," says Mark Russ Federman-the third-generation owner who recently handed over the business to his daughter Niki and her cousin Josh Russ Tupper-"that goes with bagels."

Russ & Daughters is now just one of a handful of appetizing shops in the city-there's a counter at Zabar's and a few out in Brooklyn's Jewish enclaves-but back in the day, they were in nearly every Jewish neighborhood, with scores on the Lower East Side alone, says Mark, who inherited the business from his mother Anne after working as a lawyer. But even with stiff compet.i.tion, Russ & Daughters always held their own; Jews and gentiles from across the city made the trip for the city's best smoked fish. (And from the city's most beautiful servers: Joel Russ, never subtle, proudly called his daughters the Queens of Lake Sturgeon, putting the moniker on both the shopping bags and the letterhead.) In the 1940s the shop expanded to include the s.p.a.ce next door and added dried fruits, chocolates, nuts and sweets. Photos of a party archived in the office upstairs-a far cry from that early push-cart, the family now owns the building-show jazz trumpeters and guests in finery and feathered hats where today you order chocolate-caramel-covered matzo, some of the world's best dried fruit and hand-cut hunks of halvah. Of course other things have changed since then, too: The customer base is now only 50 percent Jewish, there's an espresso machine, electronic scales, online ordering, a blog cleverly called Lox Populi, and the major s.h.i.+ft, inst.i.tuted back in the 1970s but regarded by regulars as a recent revolution, of making customers take a number before being served.

And if you think the place can be chaotic now, the old way was not for pa.s.sive newbies: Customers would jockey for a s.p.a.ce in front of their favorite slicers, who would yell out "I see you! Who's next?" Then the customer next in line would yell, "my next!" The ins and outs of calling the queue weren't the only ropes to know: Eastern European custom calls for haggling, for jabs and barbs, explains Mark. "It's a whole other way of interacting," says Niki, of the old-school ways the old-timers conduct business. "I like the way the customers feel like they have owners.h.i.+p."

Because they do: A vast majority are multigenerational too. "I fed her Russ & Daughters in the womb," crows one second-generation customer of her daughter when Niki stops by her stroller to say h.e.l.lo.

Kibbitzing with the community is as much a part of the job as stocking herring. On a recent Sat.u.r.day, the crowd includes an older lady who points to a bulging basket of bread and says, "That bagel in the middle there. Is it soft?" There's the slew of old guys who come in to buy fish for the family and eat a half pound of chocolate-covered jelly rings while they wait. There's Mr. Abe, who comes in nearly every Sat.u.r.day afternoon; as he leaves, everyone in the shop calls out: "Goodbye Mr. Abe!" And there's Eric: Brought first by his parents, Iraqi Jews who adopted the Ashken.a.z.i appetizing tradition when they moved to the States, he's about to relocate west himself, to California. "Russ & Daughters," he jokes, "are the two things I'm gonna miss most."

Many of these people watched Josh and Niki grow up, and saw them ride big bags of sweet onions destined for herring back to the storeroom, years before they donned the same long white coats their grandparents did. Now the cousins and co-owners work under paintings of first-generation owner Joel ("He brought in a big leather armchair and would sit under his own portrait," says Niki) and third-generation owner Mark (who still occasionally works the store).

But it wasn't inevitable that the fourth-generation Russes would end up slicing salmon and schmearing cream cheese: Josh was an engineer while Niki worked in international relations, but when Mark wanted to retire and sell the shop, both decided to quit their day jobs. "I didn't want it to leave the family," says Josh, a lefty who has since learned to slice fish with his right hand beautifully.

If Niki and Josh are somewhat new to the counter-both have a few years under their belts, hardly the blink of an eye in this storied inst.i.tution-much of the rest of the staff has worked there for decades, like Herman Vargas, a master-slicer with dedicated fans who started out cutting up those bags of onions in 1980. Most of them still remember the 1970s when the Lower East Side was littered with drunks and muggers instead of designers and mixologists, and on weekends the shop shuttered by nightfall. (It's a sight yet to be seen by Anne and Hattie, who now live in Florida and are amazed to hear stories of the rebirth of their neighborhood.) No matter the decade, however, the crowds have always been four-thick on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, every head turned to the counter awaiting their turn and watching the zen-like hand-slicing, each transparent piece of salmon sliced with one smooth left-to-right move of a super slender knife, the little bit of fat at the center deftly trimmed just at the end. (Everybody here makes it look easy, but a recent reality show episode where chefs Chris Cosentino and Aaron Sanchez butchered a few pounds prove it's not.) "There's something about slicing," allows Niki, who has also worked as a yoga instructor. "It's very meditative. It puts you in this zone." Especially on Sat.u.r.days, when the entire crowd of white-coated servers stands at the wood counters that run the length of the shop, every inch made a silky golden-brown thanks to decades of a daily dose of fish oil.