Worker Bees

 

                                                                        

 

People often ask me what the various famous chefs are like to work with on a regular basis. Most of the ones that we deal with, especially at this point in our life, are great. I guess we’re spoiled.

As I’ve written before, Jean-Louis Palladin was very important to the start of our business. He became our mentor in many ways and was a driving force in bringing great products from the farm to the table. He also was a worker bee.

After having started selling to Jean-Louis, I realized that to keep this kind of business going, I would have to be “on call”. He was so charming and charismatic that he made it, if not easy to be at his “beck and call,” at least acceptable.

But there was something else. When he called me to make a special delivery a month or so after we had just started selling to him, I was ok with it, but it was still a three and half hour trip. I arranged my day at the farm, loaded up and then took off for Washington. I knew that by the time I drove down, delivered, “shot the stuff” with chefs, cooks and others, my whole day was shot.

As I finally pulled into the underground garage at The Watergate Hotel, I had been on the road too long, put up with DC traffic too long, and was starting to develop a seriously cranky attitude. Trying to be as efficient as possible, I made the first trip into the restaurant and then rushed back to pick up a remaining box from the back of my truck.

As I started back into the garage I heard and then saw a Mercedes 450 SL flying into a designated parking spot, piloted by the smiling, bespectacled Jean-Louis, his big wiry hair blowing in the windshield’s breeze, waving at me as he attempted an accident free landing of his big, black German convertible.

I beamed. With that big toothy grin of his, you just couldn’t stay mad for long. He jumped out of the car, rushed over to greet me and started asking how I was, how was Sukey, how were the sheep, etc. We started walking back to the kitchen, chatting, just having a great time, when he broke mid-sentence, said  something like “scuse”, and then turned and walked towards a big brown dumpster.

He had spied the large, grimacing garbage man wrestling with a plastic barrel as he emptied it into the huge bin. The garbage man finished one last push and then he turned, smiling and started talking to the Chef. Both were smiling, busting each other’s chops, and generally carrying on like two high school kids plotting some recalcitrant prank. They acted like best friends.

After a few minutes of these goings on, Jean-Louis left the now grinning garbage man and rejoined me. He recognized my expression, paused, then looked at me and said in his deep Gascone voice, “E is important.”

It was just before noon, I didn’t expect many cooks, if any to be in the kitchen. As we walked into the kitchen, I noticed a few cooks in the distance but just as we were walking over to see them, Jean-Louis stopped again. This time it was the dishwasher. I had only been in the kitchen a few times but I noticed a few cooks I had seen before. I thought it would be good PR for Jamison Farm if I schmoozed with them for a few minutes, so I went over to say hello. We talked about how busy they were, how they liked the lamb, how it was selling, etc. During the ten minutes or so that I was talking to the cooks, Jean-Louis was still with the dishwasher, laughing, smiling and generally carrying on just like he did with the garbage man.

He left the dishwasher and walked over to me just as I was leaving the cooks to say goodbye to him before I left for the farm. He again saw the bemused look upon my face as he was leaving the dishwasher. He smiled, his eyes twinkling, and said, “E’s important, too.”

Driving back home on I 70 on the way to Breezewood, I couldn’t get what I’d just seen out of my mind. I understood Jean-Louis pumping up Sukey and me about our lamb. He wanted to be our favorite and most important chef partly because he wanted to insure he would get our lamb before anyone else, and partly to be the only chef in DC to have our lamb as he truly thought it was different than any other lamb in the country. In his mind he would have a monopoly.

That was very humbling, but I couldn’t connect his enthusiasm for us and what Sukey and I did with his enthusiasm for the labor of a garbage man and a dishwasher. I started thinking that maybe it was a cultural thing, “Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite’”. Maybe it was, but I hadn’t seen that with American Chefs. While I was just learning about chefs and how they worked, I hadn’t seen anything like this.

It made me wonder that French Food Culture was so different than ours at that time, in 1988, that I just “didn’t get it.” To him, I think, the chef was the restaurant. The chef should be a worker bee when he has to be. The chef should not be above doing any work that helps his restaurant to be the best it can be. That concept was literally foreign to me.

The quality of the product was important as I saw with his belief that ours was the best lamb in the country. But then it all hit me. You could have great product, great chefs, cooks, and servers, but if the dishes don’t get washed and the garbage doesn’t get moved on a busy Saturday Night, you could literally be in “Deep DoDo.”

I think it’s why many of the Chefs we grew up with have become so successful.