Regardless of the fact that we are down one group member, we're probably the luckiest group in our class because we had the benefit of working in Poissonnier before moving on to Saucier, easily the hardest station in the kitchen. While Poissonnier involved a lot of last-minute cooking of delicate flesh, Saucier serves the main dish of the night, which for the season is a Pork Osso Buco on a bed of Risotto Milanese and a Grilled Skirt Steak with Pommes Frites and a choice of sauces: Green Peppercorn, Choron/Béarnaise or simply served dripping with Maître d'hôtel butter.
The mere idea of grilling steaks to order for paying customers on a Friday night made my armpits moist, so I chose to be at the Osso Buco station with a fellow teammate. Just as we had prepared the incoming Poissonniers, the outgoing Sauciers had left us very well stocked so we only had to get situated, do a small amount of preparation and heat up the leftover pork shanks. We work on a two-day delay, because braised meats are always better the next day, so the meat that was cooked on Wednesday was served on Friday. We had two and a half large pans of pork shanks to get us through the Friday night service, and we were praying it would be enough.
Chef asked us to be ready for his demonstration and direction by 7:30pm, so we gathered the items for the risotto, heated up the sauces and fried a batch of French fries. The risotto, I quickly learned, is the creamiest indulgence I've ever tasted/made, with mascarpone, butter and parmesan all melted in with the saffron-flavored rice. The dish is plated with a pile of risotto topped with a bundle of pork shank and drizzled with a rich pan sauce made from the braising liquid. The finale is a sprinkle of gremolata, or lemon zest, bread crumbs and parsley. We made our demo dish for chef, and I literally took the plate in the corner and spent two minutes closing my eyes while chewing – it's that good.
The pork shanks consist of a small bone surrounded by clumps of juicy meat. To prepare for service, they're lined up in a pan and submerged in the braising liquid (to ensure that they don't dry out). For service, you simply fish one out using a slotted spoon, attempting to keep all of the meat together with its respective bone…which is much harder than it seems. I soon found that most of the shanks had separated from their meat, which was no doubt hovering nearby in the liquid, so I spent much of the night leaning over an open-fire grill to fish out small chunks of meat and arranging them on the plate on top of the risotto in an attempt to make it all look like it belonged together.
Many of you may not know this, but back when I was a Miss, had braces and wore Mudd jeans in a size zero I was actually quite an accomplished concert violinist. I played for several years, studying with various private teachers and practicing with my schools' large orchestras and considered myself to be pretty skilled. If I learned one lesson, one lesson at all, from my years moonlighting as a musician it is this: the public has no idea when you've made a small mistake. I used to stress out about a note that I didn't hit or a break that I messed up, yet the audience members (my parents) inevitably thought everything was perfect.
I am trying to apply that same theory to my cooking in the restaurant. Will the diner really know if I forget the parsley? No. Do they know what that pig's shank looked like intact? Hopefully not. So what if each plate consists of the parts of about four different pigs. Some call that carelessness; I call it a diversified benefit.
We did face one small glitch at the end of the night though, something that could have blown up into a huge problem had chef not saved the day. We were so consumed with keeping track of our orders while trying to interpret the new order board that we accidentally forgot one final request for the Osso Buco. We were both keeping track in our heads, thinking we had four left, and when the time came plated all four, scraping the risotto pan dry to finish the last plate. A few minutes later, we hear, "Fire Osso Buco!" "OhmyGod did chef just say what I think she did?" I asked my partner. "I don't know, I thought we were done!" "I thought so too!" I sheepishly approached The Expediter, and confirmed that she had in fact just fired an Osso Buco. Small problem: we were fresh out of risotto - not a single grain of rice in the entire kitchen. I alerted our chef to the problem (after freaking the freak out), and he happily said, "No problem, Jacques-leen" and disappeared into the other room. How could he possibly be so nonchalant about the situation? Was he seriously just prancing? I was freaking out, considering it had been about three minutes since the issue was discovered and we were expected to take our plate up any minute now. He quickly returned…with a container of rice from the Thursday students. Thank goodness! At that moment he was our Russian Superman. It all worked out in the end, but we'll definitely pay closer attention to the order board next time.
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