BEHIND THE SCENES AT L’AUBERGE
BY ANN HELLER
KETTERING - The kitchen at l’Auberge is cold. It is 9 a.m. and chef Dominique Fortin is by himself. He brews a pot of coffee and says, `I love to come in in the morning. Nobody’s here. It’s so quiet.’
It is the time he uses to check the resources on hand, deciding which specials he will create for dinner. He approaches the cooler with the excitement of a fisherman casting his line. This morning the catch includes pheasant from Wisconsin. And some skate wings, seafood the chef will elevate to star status with a dollop of caviar. Pompano from New Orleans is at the airport, awaiting pickup.
The book shows reservations for 50, but an overnight six-inch snowfall makes it difficult to predict how many will show up.
Fortin shrugs off the weather. A four-star restaurant must have luxury on the menu. That dollop of caviar is spooned from a jar that costs $395 for eight ounces. He will use it in more than one way this night.
L’Auberge, which opened in Kettering in 1979, has held its four-star rating for all but two of the past 18 years. By the four-star definition set by the Mobil Travel Guides it is `luxurious, creatively decorated, superbly maintained.’
The restaurant is, predictably, pricey, a favorite of doctors and pharmaceutical company salesmen, executives of Fortune 500 companies, and those once-a-year- guests who pick l’Auberge to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. They spend, says owner Josef Reif, an average of $75 per person, including the wine and cocktails. They can spend more, if they order from a wine list that includes choices ranging from a $24 Oregon pinot noir to a 1992 Romanee Conti for $2,200, or if they choose to splurge on Petrossian caviar, sold at a `market price’ that ranges from $60 to $75.
The kitchen is the foundation of any four-star restaurant, and these days the inspiration comes from Fortin, who was hired in August. At 42, his style is contemporary, and it shows in the sauces he starts to make first thing in the morning. It is the beginning of his 12- to 13-hour day.
Fortin steps up to the stove, warming himself, pulling a battery of huge saucepans over the heat. Quickly bones, trimmings and herbs sizzle in the pots. Glistening meat stocks that have jelled overnight and an abundance of jug wine add flavor and substance. By nightfall, the kitchen will have a bank of a dozen sauces, assuring differences from plate to plate.
For Fortin, they are not the sauces of his apprenticeship in France. Many are light, thickened without flour and used by the sparing spoonful. He is as likely to reach for a squirt bottle of vinaigrette as he is a ladle of butter-rich sauce.
Despite the image fostered by today’s celebrity chefs, this is hard work, modestly done. Though Fortin accepts conveniences of ready-peeled shallots and equipment such as a $200 immersion blender, he is on his feet all day, six days a week.
His tool of choice is the knife he has carried with him for almost 30 years. It was the first knife he bought as a 13-year-old apprentice in France. He uses it to chop shallots, bone pheasant and to portion the salmon and tuna and the steaks.
BODIES IN MOTION AS PACE PICKS UP
By midmorning the pace in the kitchen picks up. Pastry chef Lynn Hart is working in her own corner of the world, in the only kitchen space with windows. She is making the starter for the olive bread that will be served in the dining room. The heady aroma of yeast rises from the giant mixer.
Snow is still coming down. Owner Josef Reif, delayed by the storm, worries aloud about the weather. But the work behind the scenes goes on as scheduled.
Alisa Palmer, who is a server in the dining room by night, sets up space in the kitchen to arrange the flowers. She has this day’s shipment of purple iris, baby’s breath, roses and bird of paradise to make large showcase arrangements and small bouquets for each table.
The kitchen serves both the four-star dining room and, through another door, the more casual Bistro. Though the Bistro has its own bank of stoves and assigned chefs, tasks and space are often shared.
The kitchen is small. Not just small, but full of bodies, all in motion and on unrelated missions. Waiters who will serve lunch in the Bistro are arriving, their paths intersecting the purposeful steps of chefs headed into the cooler, down into the storeroom. It is an endless swirl, like an unchoreographed ballet, and the dancers seem to have some sixth-sense awareness of each other, their bodies barely grazing. Occasionally a shout of `Hot!’ punctuates the air. Chefs carrying boiling pots move quickly and everyone gets out of the way.
`We’re going to bake the haddock,’ Fortin calls out, seemingly to no one in particular. `Do you have a sauce for it?’
A tall young chef, Jeremy Berlin, is at the Bistro stove and returns the question.
`What would you like?’
`You do it. I taste it. We will see,’ Fortin says, adding confidentially, `I want teamwork. I don’t want a robot in the kitchen. I want a future big chef.”
Berlin could be that chef in training. He will work 12 hours this day, without an afternoon break.
At 11:30 a.m., the waiters confer with sous chef Keith Taylor about the Bistro lunch specials. During the busy noon hour in the Bistro, staff in the quiet dining room are setting tables for dinner, rolling satin napkins, tucking them into silver napkin rings.
For most diners, the behind-the-scenes details are invisible, noticeable only if they are forgotten. They are as mundane as checking the menus for spots and fingerprints, as utilitarian as polishing silver wine coolers, domes and rolling carts. Stemware must be held to the light and polished to remove a fleck of lint or a spot.
SKILLS THAT START AT THE FINGERTIPS
At midday in the kitchen, preparation switches to the side dishes. Potatoes are available in multiple incarnations, as Potatoes Anna, potato mousse, a shiitake potato pancake and a celery root potato pancake.
Fortin himself will make the souffleed potatoes. Once these puffed potatoes were classics in a French dining room. They were a casualty of nouvelle cuisine, but, Fortin says, they are coming back.
He asks for seven peeled potatoes. `But don’t put them in the water,’ he cautions. Using a mandoline, he cuts them to a precise thickness.
`You know there is a company in New York that sells these frozen,’ he says. His disapproval shows on his face.
He pats each slice dry and one by one slips them into a big copper pot of oil, as though he were dealing a deck of cards.
It is a special skill he mastered when he was at the Connaught Hotel in London 20 years ago.
Bare-handed, he holds the pot by one loop handle, shaking it ceaselessly for 10 minutes. Berlin comes to watch. `I don’t know I’d want to shake the pan like that.’ Hot oil splashes out. Reif walks by and the chef hails him to watch. `Ah, is so much work,’ Reif says with a sigh. Work is time and time is money, and Reif is the man who must pay the bills.
Fortin removes a single potato slice and checks the rough texture, rubbing the oily hot surface with his finger. The young American chefs, who sometimes wear plastic gloves while they work, are skeptical. But his deft touch determines that the potatoes are cooked just right, and Fortin scoops them out to dry on paper towels. The potato slices must rest until dinner. The second cooking in a hotter oil bath will make them puff into pillows.
It is 2 p.m. and the chef still must bone the pheasants before he takes a midday break at his home, just five minutes away. Today that break will last only an hour.
`You know when you start,’ he says. ‘You don’t know when you go.’
As the clock approaches the dinner hour Fortin begins making the tuna tartare. He likes to make it late in the day, so the raw tuna remains fresh. It is tedious work, but it is important to scrape the raw fish instead of cutting it. The seasonings include Worcestershire, olive oil, chives, Tabasco - and Japanese pickled ginger, a variation on a classic.
`Now you need to be more sophisticated, ’ he says.
SHOWTIME BEGINS WITH A LAST-MINUTE CHECK
The dining room will open at 6 p.m., and now the entire 15-man and woman kitchen brigade is in place. There are 12 sauces at the ready, and the chef tastes them one last time.
One young chef calls to him. `The pompano is out, do you want to see the plate?’
`What I do every night is make the special with them,’ Fortin says. The plates are displayed on the rolling cart, shown off to tempt diners.
Reif comes into the kitchen. A special guest wants the caviar with scrambled eggs. It is a premier preparation, one Fortin will do himself.
At 5:50 p.m. servers are eating the staff dinner of chili on the run, spooning it out of ramekins.
The servers have rechecked the wineglasses and flatware. The lighting is dimmed. But the romance of the 60-seat dining room, the flowers and gleaming display of Waterford, Baccarat, Orrefors and Lalique crystal fades in the cramped kitchen. It is as romantic as cooking in a submarine.
The chef changes his jacket and takes his position, facing the three chefs on the line. They will pass the plates to him for a final touch.
`I see every plate that goes out,’ says Fortin. It is a chef’s ritual that helps put a restaurant in a four-star class.
The first guests are being seated. It will be up to the waiters to sell the specials.
`The skate appetizer is very nice,’ Fortin says, looking them in the eye. They know their mission.
The show, in rehearsal all day long, begins when the printer produces the first order. Terrine of eggplant and goat cheese. The skate special, the pheasant special, partridge and squab. Filet with bordelaise sauce.
And there are special requests.
Head captain Chris Dykes says, `A customer wants to know if you can still do the sauteed foie gras with apples and Calvados.’ It is the way l’Auberge used to prepare it under former chef-owner Dieter Krug. `Sure,’ Fortin says. ‘We have the foie gras, we have the apples, we have the Calvados. And we cook to order.
`When you do something for people they do not forget,’ he says.
AS NIGHT PROGRESSES, THE RHYTHM NEVER FALTERS
Despite the snow, the dining room is beginning to fill up. The pace in the kitchen picks up and never stops until after 9 p.m. Blasts of steam from the dishwasher waft toward the chefs. Servers on a seeming collision course skirt the rolling carts, brush bodies and murmur a perfunctory `pardon me.’
Sometimes they just stand and wait.
Fortin has spent 20 years in this country, including years in the kitchen at the five-star Le Francais near Chicago, with stints in Atlanta and the East coast. Despite the years his accent is thick. He peppers his speech with `Voila’ and `Ooh la la.’ `OK, monsieur,’ he says to Jason Stumpf, the young, very American chef in the blue cap. Berlin, tall and lean, is hunkered over a plate, building up a molded round of couscous, arranging the lobster tails and curry sauce. Fortin puts on the finishing touch, maybe just a sprig of thyme, or propping up the pommes soufflees with the pheasant.
An order is slow coming off the line. `I need my scallops,’ he calls out. `Two minutes, chef.’
He puts it on the waiter’s cart with a flourish. Before the plates are covered with gleaming silver domes, servers wipe off any spots of misplaced sauce.
A waiter comes in, `Chef, they’re raving about the skate.’
The calls become more strident. `I need…’ `I need…’ `We need silver.’ An unsung hero, the dishwasher pulls a basket of clean silver from the steaming bath. Each piece must be hand-dried and polished to remove any water spots. It is a challenge to keep up demand for the special plates Fortin favors for his most novel creations.
Once Fortin scolds a server softly. `You are asleep. Did you bring me the plates for the skate? Did you bring me the napkins?’ She busies herself wiping the silver dry.
Now the diners are beginning to order dessert. A star this night is layers of phyllo, baked under a heavy weight to fragile crispness, layered with mousse and berries, artfully scored and sprinkled with powdered sugar. It is as much art as a sweet finale.
Fortin looks tired. It has been, as usual, a long day. But he beams. `We sold out of the pheasant, and have maybe three or four orders of skate left. I am happy when I see that.’
Guests linger in the dining room over coffee and drinks.
Fortin stays on, in the kitchen. He is not the kind of chef that glad-hands his way around the dining room tables, though Reif prods him sometimes. But he stays as late as 10:30, to check the cooler once more, to see what he needs to reorder.
Because the performance starts again at 9 a.m.
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LUXURIES ADD UP AT L’AUBERGE
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“It takes $100,000 a month just to run a restaurant like this,” according to L’Auberge owner Josef Reif.
Some behind-the-scenes figures show that flowers for the dining room alone cost about $15,000 a year. Entertainment, with a pianist in the dining room and various attractions in the Bistro, adds up to $60,000 a year.
The laundry bill for the tablecloths and napkins is $3,500 a month, which comes out to $42,000 a year. That’s an expense that has caused most restaurants to dispense with table linens.
And the gas and electric bill each month is about $4,000.
“In 20 years we’ve paid DP&L almost a million dollars,” Reif says.
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