From Greg Atkinson

At every great restaurant, the cooks make certain meals that customers never see. These are staff meals, family meals, or, as we like to say in my kitchen, “crew chow.” By any name, these are the meals that keep the restaurant going. Every restaurant is different, and each one has its own policies about feeding the staff, but far and away, at least among the better houses, a family meal at least once a day is the norm. When I was executive chef at Canlis restaurant in Seattle there was a staff of about 60 people, and every day at 5 o’clock we had dinner, and then at 11 or so we would have a substantial snack.

This is how it’s been at most of the places I’ve worked. In Friday Harbor, when I was chef at a small café, the entire crew sat down after service every night with bread and wine, and chicken or fish, and salad, or whatever we needed to use up before the next day’s service. There were never more than six or seven of us, and the meals were fairly intimate.

Mealtime was an opportunity to meet and go over the fine points of service, and a chance to share news of our lives outside the restaurant. We worked and ate together like one big, dysfunctional family. Sometimes one of the employees would bring a boyfriend or girlfriend to the family meal, and it was just like bringing a date home to meet the family, only worse. None of us was shy about asking probing personal questions. Some of us, in fact, were bold and rude. Still, a good time was generally had by all.

In his runaway best seller, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain describes the perfunctory family meals that were presented in the various restaurant kitchens where he worked in New York City. Crew chow in Bourdain’s book ranged from the ordinary to the hideous. Most common was the ubiquitous chicken leg, noodles, and salad. Worst was the awful thing called a raft, a mishmash of solids strained out of the stockpot. Most restaurants discard this stuff, but Bourdain insists that at some places, that is all there is for the staff to eat.

When I went to New York some years ago to spend time as a guest cook in three different four-star restaurants, I saw plenty of that famous trinity of chicken, noodles, and salad. But I also saw roast beef, baked fish, sandwiches, hot dogs, all kinds of ordinary foods that would never have been served in the dining room, and all of these foods were consumed with gusto by the hungry cooks and waiters. “We eat really good here,” said Daniel Boulud’s sous chef, as we served ourselves chicken legs, noodles, and salad, and I had to agree.

The meals in New York’s great French restaurants were not quite as interesting as the staff meals in France, however. When I worked for a too-brief time at Moulin de Mougins in Provence, then rated three stars by the Michelin guide, crew chow gave me an intriguing glimpse into the stratified world of the French. Perhaps it was because my senses were heightened by the excitement of being in a foreign country, or perhaps it was because the food really was extraordinary, but the meals I had there were not only the most memorable crew meals of my life, they were some of the most memorable meals I’ve had—period.

Mealtimes at Moulin de Mougins were segregated into three levels of sophistication. The management ate the finest food, virtually as good as what the guests ate, and they drank good wine. The waiters and cooks drank modest wine and ordinary food. The dishwashers ate mysterious things, pots of lentils and polenta with rejected parts of animals butchered for the restaurant, and they drank very plain, barely fermented wine from collapsible plastic jugs.

On my first afternoon at the restaurant, I was led into the dining room and seated at a table with a half-dozen well-dressed sophisticates who were introduced to me as the direction, or management. I smiled weakly. I was uncomfortable with my French and unable to understand much of what was said.

We were presented with tiny plates of smoked salmon, and I ate as politely as I could while the direction practiced obscure idioms in their brilliant native tongue and asked me very slowly if, since I lived in Washington, did I live with the president? “No, no,” one of them answered for me, “He’s from the West Coast, where they’ve only just recently chased out the savages.” No one spoke a word of English.

I sat quietly and allowed the smoked salmon to be exchanged for a neat packet of veal, tied with strings and stuffed with sausage. My glass was filled with a deep red wine. I struggled with the strings around my veal and glanced nervously at the others, who managed to remove their strings with the same fluid ease with which they spoke. My strings wouldn’t budge, and my tongue would not form a single word in French.

Finally came the cheese course, smooth white Camembert and bottles of chilled spring water. It was soothing, and I felt fortified enough to look the others in the eye, but I was far too humbled to practice anything I had learned from the Jiffy French Phrase Book.

The next day, after shucking two cases of live scallops, I ate with the cooks. We had lamb’s brains in browned butter with capers. The meat was pale and soft, and not very appetizing, but the bread and cheese were abundant and so was the wine. Everyone ate quickly so there would be time for cards. The food was pushed aside and out came the deck. The cooks pounded the table with their fists as they lost and stood triumphant, with chairs tumbling behind them, when they won. I was incapable of following the games.

On the third day, I was assigned to work in the laboratoire, a prep kitchen in a separate building behind the main restaurant, where all the basic foods were brought in and broken down before they went into the main kitchen. There, whole birds were eviscerated and plucked. Rabbits and deer were butchered. Fresh mushrooms and berries were made into duxelles and sorbets.

In charge of the lab was one of the few honored master chefs of France. He was in semiretirement and worked at the restaurant, he said, “just to keep from rotting away.” We spent the morning chopping huge bones on a stump outside the laboratoire, where he would later transform them first into rich broth and eventually into a rich concentrate known as demi-glace for use by the other chefs. By lunchtime, the stump had been sprayed down with a garden hose and the bones were roasting with aromatic vegetables.

We ate at a bare table in an attic room, from mismatched plates. With the tattered sleeves of his monogramed chef’s jacket pushed unceremoniously up to his elbow, the grandfatherly chef served spaghetti with meat and tomato sauce. We drank country wine from jelly jars and broke bread directly over the table without bread plates. There was no butter, no cheese, and no pretense. “This, you must understand,” he told me instructively in very plain, precise French, “is real food, simple food.”

Made with beef from a steer he had butchered himself, handmade pork sausage, and fresh tomatoes, the sauce was seasoned unpretentiously with dried herbs, fresh ground pepper, and a sprinkling of commercial chicken boullion granules. It was the quintessential spaghetti sauce. A gentle wind came through the open windows from the herb garden outside and, more than at any other time since I had been in France, I felt at home. “This is good,” I said. “It reminds me of home.”

“Of course it does,” the old man said, as if he knew me, as if he knew my grandmother’s kitchen with its peculiar smells and sounds. “It is real food.” Without referring directly to the haute cuisine served in the dining room 50 meters from where we sat, the old master managed to imply that the food served there at hundreds of francs per plate was something less than real. So I came to France to learn the secrets of haute cuisine and learned instead what I had always known, that simple food is the best food.

“This is the way to live, isn’t it?” he asked me.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” I said.

Most of the best family meals at restaurants are like the best family meals at home: simple, familiar foods served without a lot of fuss and fanfare. People in my crew often cook the traditional comfort foods they grew up with, and since they come from Laos, Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines, crew chow can be pretty interesting. At Canlis, my favorite staff meal revolved around Jeff Taton’s chicken adobo, with steamed rice and salad. Even after eating it two or three times a month for several years, I looked forward to the dish every time it was offered.
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Jeff’s Organic Chicken Adobo

Adobo, the unofficial national dish of the Philippine Islands, was served frequently for “family meal” when I was the chef at Canlis restaurant in Seattle, where my sous chef, Jeff Taton, aften made his version for the crew. But the dish is popular up and down the West Coast, with myriad variations. Some people like to marinate the chicken overnight in the same seasoned soy and vinegar mixture outlined here, then grill it over hot coals and boil the marinade to serve as a sauce on the side. The dish is also quite popular made with pork instead of chicken. Serve chicken adobo hot in wide open bowls with Japanese-Style Short-Grain Rice and a green vegetable such as broccoli.

Makes 8 servings

2 organic chickens, 4 pounds each, cut into 8 pieces each (see Jeff’s How To Cut Up A Chicken)
2 cups organic soy sauce
2 cups organic vinegar
2 cups water
5 cloves garlic, grated or finely chopped
1 tablespoon cracked black pepper
2 bay leaves
Steamed white rice as an accompaniment

1. Put the chicken pieces in a large, heavy saucepan or Dutch oven with the soy sauce, vinegar, water, garlic, pepper, and bay leaves. Bring the mixture to a boil and reduce the heat to medium-low.

2. Keep the chicken simmering gently until the meat is very tender and pulls easily away from the bone, about 45 minutes. Serve it in wide open bowls with plenty of steamed rice and the pan juices.
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See also Greg’s Stir-Fried Chicken with Red Curry Sauce
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Greg Atkinson is author of West Coast Cooking, and The Northwest Essentials Cookbook, and lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Greg is Culinary Director of OrganicToGo.
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