Kitchen in the Desert – Cooking on the Las Vegas Strip
This is a piece I wrote in 2015, chronicling a day when I was fortunate to step into the kitchen at Bouchon Bistro in Las Vegas. Cheftimony is going to have more to say about the food scene in Las Vegas, one of my favorite places to visit, and this piece seemed a good place to start...
Bouchon Las Vegas is organized. Top-to-bottom and front-to-back, this place is procedure. The largest of three Bouchons in Thomas Keller's restaurant empire, it has to be. This bistro is bigger – much - than the Napa Valley original, but it delivers by the same standards. Morning and night over hundreds of covers, those standards demand organization.
Bouchon Las Vegas is creative, big picture and small. Decisions that affect every restaurant in the group happen well before product sees pans in Las Vegas or Yountville or Hollywood. Smaller decisions happen minute-to-minute because chefs do here as chefs do everywhere; they execute the big decisions in their own ways.
This is my second shift at Bouchon, one year after my first. I arrive ten minutes early, forty minutes before the start of dinner service. The hostess promised to be there when I arrive is there when I arrive. She looks small under the vaulted ceiling, Bouchon's zinc bar tracking the length of the restaurant behind her. That bar is the stability of the room. Functional and beautiful, it divides the restaurant - bartenders behind zinc, mirrors behind bartenders, kitchen behind mirrors.
Chef de Cuisine Joshua Crain comes straight out to greet me. I like this guy. Josh runs his kitchen strictly, with order. He's also friendly and generous. From the restaurant entrance we walk through the kitchen (brighter lights, lower ceilings) and down anti-slip stairs to Chef's office (lower ceilings still). Alone in the tidy room, I see familiar cookbooks on the shelves as I change into jacket and clogs. Good. Validation.
I step back up the no-slip stairs. Chef suggested I join the team on this March night because in addition to its usual business, Bouchon has a private company event for 88 guests. That's where I will pitch in. Chef Josh turns me over to Chef Kyle who is in charge of the private dinner and who in turn introduces me to my partner for the night, Chef Hyman. I like this use of title at Bouchon. Here, everyone in a white jacket is “chef”. That's new to me, more formal than the Canadian kitchens I know, and meaningful. The word conveys respect every time to each person entitled to it, even a guy from Vancouver who has accumulated more hours in law firms than kitchens.
To work. Sometimes, particularly early in a relationship with a restaurant, a volunteer shift means picking herbs or scrubbing mussels. Often it does. But this Monday night in the desert is busy, and the team trusts me with real work on both a canape and an entree. Appy first. There are many, all beautiful, and I work on the mushroom vol-au-vents, a delicious chopped mushroom mixture – call it duxelles if you like – napped in a reduced veal stock and served in puff-pastry shells. What's not to love?
Minute-to-minute creativity. To keep the mushroom mixture warm, Chef Hyman places the pan holding it on a cooling rack set directly on our hot stovetop. When orders come in, I shift that pan to the “eye” of the stovetop, the hottest spot on the flat-top surface. There it bubbles almost instantly, so we transfer it to the stove edge, half on cooking surface, half on six-inch metal perimeter. The mushrooms settle immediately to near-boiling but not over. Success. The same placement for the metal sheet pan full of pastry shells gently warms the shells on the stove side without making the perimeter edge of the pan screaming hot for busy hands. Spoon duxelles into pastry shells on the sheet pan. Scatter minced chive on top. Transfer sheet pan to pass. Plate vol-au-vents on copper platter. Find a server. Six at a time the vol-au-vents go out, hot and precise.
Preparing the entrees is faster work, with more anxiety and louder voices. Guests have four options, and I work on the fish, seared branzino in a chorizo broth. Of the 88 guests, exactly one quarter order the branzino. We are serving four-and-a-half ounce filets, two per guest. Forty-four pieces of fish, and I use three pans at a time on the flat-top to prep them. Oil into pans. Wait to heat. Fish on oil. I sear the pieces skin-side down to colour the presentation side. The key is to blister the skin without cooking the fish through. You want a crispy first bite with perfectly cooked fish to follow. Pull pans from stove. Transfer fish to towel-lined sheet pan. Leave to rest. Dipping a spoon into Chef Hyman's chorizo broth, Chef Kyle frowns until he tastes. “Great flavour, needs colour.” We leave the broth to simmer.
To make sure the servers get the right plates to the right guests in the right groupings, we divide the 88 entrees across four orders. Call those orders “picks” and you'll fit in fine. Military. There is a reason kitchen teams are called brigades. A chef diminutive in all but voice acts as expeditor - “Expo” - the critical link between chef and server. Expo constantly consults and updates both a map of the restaurant seats and a detailed pick list. The call goes out from Expo: “Seats one and two, table six: fish, beef!” The response comes back from a server: “Seats one and two, table six: fish, beef!” We work our way on through the list, and the unending line of servers, bowtied and precise, cycles through kitchen and restaurant. Three picks to go.
When we finish the entrees, I leave the private-dinner kitchen and rejoin Chef Josh in the main. Behind me the pastry team is taking over. They do beautiful work, incredible really, but I'd rather talk about savoury food than work with sweet. So I talk to Chef. What seems to me like a very busy night is routine for him. Behind Chef and under the clock in the main kitchen, I see the sign I'd first noticed last year: “Sense of Urgency.” Accurate. Josh and I talk about seasons in Las Vegas, the times Bouchon is busiest, and how the sun feels close to you here all the time.
Servers circle back into the kitchen behind us, dropping empty plates at the dish pit and conveying compliments from guests. And here is one way cooking has it over law: immediacy. From the guests' phone call for a reservation to the end of their meal is a matter of weeks, at most. The preparation is intense, as it is in law. Menus, trials. The service of dinner is more intense than the preparation, a trial in its own right, but the feedback is immediate. The guests are happy, tonight at least, and you know it right away. There is rarely a reserved judgment, and certainly no right of appeal. Cooking brings achievement – or failure - in something close to real time. Prepare, cook, learn. And repeat.