I had to jump through a lot of hoops and there was a lot of drama in the year preceding opening Carnivale, that’s a tale for another day. Let’s just say who was going to be the chef at Carnivale was not so cut and dried, and I had to prove to a lot of people that I was up to the task. In all honesty, I didn’t really blame them. Even though I had a passion for the cuisine, and had a good amount of experience, I had never run a kitchen that big before, I had never worked in a place where over the course of a night you might feed 1000 people. In fact, the owners were worried I wouldn’t be able to handle the volume and all the chaos that would ensue. They hired an executive chef with a lot of experience working at big busy places. They like me though and had liked the tastings I had done for them so wanted me to be an executive sous chef, or a chef de cuisine and focus mainly on writing and developing the menu. I was actually okay with this because when I actually toured the space pre-construction I sort of freaked out at the sheer size of the place. When I saw the space where the kitchen was going to be I definitely felt that I was in way over my head. Once we started doing regular tastings with the owners and doing all the preopening work, I became even more fearful that I was just going to crash and dive when we opened, it was just such a massive undertaking. There were going to be over 600 seats, how do you even begin to think about planning for that? I quickly became terrified. I had classic imposter syndrome, sooner or later I felt the owners were going to realize I had no clue as to what I was doing. The fact that there was an executive chef who approved my decisions helped me not feel panicked, but I still felt the owners were going to figure out my lack of experience and fire me. I thought this many many times when I would show up for work, which consisted mainly of meetings, tastings, and interviews. When I started, the timeline said that we were about four to six months out from the opening.
The more we talked about the concept for the restaurant it was becoming clear that the executive chef they had hired might not be the best fit. I felt it was best to keep my opinions to myself, despite a growing uneasiness about working with him. But as fate would have it I walked into work one day, we were still months away from opening, and the general manager told me they had let him go. He asked me if I wanted the job, he said the owners were still figuring out what to do but he was going to push for me to take over. Inside, I was freaking out, I didn't want the responsibility of running a 4000 square foot kitchen, let alone feeding thousands of people every week. I was horribly afraid. There was no way I could do this, was there? One thought popped into my head. If I said no, they were going to find someone else, someone who didn't feel the way I did about Latin American cuisine. That could be ego talking but I felt if I didn't take this chance, I'd regret it. I felt that what I lacked in experience I would make up in passion and hard work. I knew how much attention this place was going to get, and if I wanted to be the kind of chef I wanted to be, I needed to do this, no matter how scared I was of just absolutely falling on my face.
The general manager told me to think about it and we left for the day, I remember how excited I was at the idea of designing a menu, cooking the kind of food I wanted, creating the kind of place I had always dreamed about. But then I would think of all the other things a chef does, ordering, doing inventory, expediting, training and mentoring, server meetings, talking to the media, and I would become overwhelmed. The minute I got home, my cell phone rang and it was Jerry. He wanted to know if I was interested in becoming the chef of Carnivale. This was it. This was my shot. I knew it. But I was afraid. I was terrified. There was just so much to do, so much that could go wrong, so many things I didn’t know how to do. My mind was going a mile a minute, picturing all the scenarios, all the things that could and would go wrong, all the things that I would have to do that were WAY outside my comfort zone. But, in the end, I knew I had to do it. I had to. I would regret turning down an opportunity like this my entire life and I just couldn’t live with that. I knew it was going to be a monumental challenge but if I wanted to be a chef, I had to push myself into doing things that made me uncomfortable, so I told Jerry I absolutely wanted to be the chef at Carnivale. He laughed and asked if I knew what I was in for, I was honest with him, I said no. He laughed but told me he would still have to talk it over with the other owners but he was going to push for me. I thanked him and I hung up.
I think I got out my notebook and started writing down menu ideas right there and then. I had so many ideas, I had to start getting things on paper now. I called a friend of mine that had agreed to come on as a sous chef, even though he was terrified as well. We had worked together for years and I knew he was an absolute beast in the kitchen, along with just having a positive friendly attitude. We worked together and I knew that together we could do anything. So we talked about our biggest worries and fears, and how we could mitigate some of the inherent bullshit of running such a high-volume kitchen. I was feeling better about it but knew the hardest part would be the day we opened the doors.
Now, the next few months seemed to fly by. We did what seemed like a thousand tastings with the owners, we ordered plates and flatware, we hired staff, we came up with a training schedule, we wrote and rewrote the menu, made prep lists, order guides, there was so much to do. Once we had our staff in place we scheduled training days, we would run through certain menu items over and over, tasting them over and over, then tweaking them, getting feedback, then reworking dishes. Right away I realized how some of the dishes were not going to work. If we were going to be as busy as I thought we were, the food had to be simple and streamlined. There was just no time for more than a few things on the plate. But we came up with the idea to have the food runners garnish all the dishes instead of the cooks and this saved a lot of time.
I had worked at some very busy restaurants, but nothing like this, I knew I had to draw a line in the sand as far as quality. We had to decide what was acceptable and what wasn’t and that had to be crystal clear to the cooks. I knew that a lot of chefs would allow the cooks to cook food ahead of time and reheat it during service, sometimes this is unavoidable. I felt however that we could never do this. I thought people would look at us, and figure that the food was going to be awful, after all, how could you possibly deliver quality day in and day out when feeding a thousand people? So I made it a point to figure out how we could deliver on the highest quality we could. That meant more training, better ingredients, holding cooks accountable, and coming up with creative ways to make tasty food in such a way that the cooks could pump the food out of the kitchen.
I was feeling fine going into the first week of staff training. It was hectic and stressful but we had a good team and we were figuring it out. The second week of training I was starting to get jittery, we were opening the following week and I was starting to let fear take over. The cab rides home I would go over every detail in my head over and over. I decided to change one of the main courses two days before we opened and it threw everyone into hysterics. The feedback we had got was mostly negative and I felt we should change it now rather than deal with it once we were open. That meant rewriting the menu and all the training materials we had, retraining the wait staff, it was kind of a mess. I started having a couple of beers every day when I got off work.
The first week we were open we had a series of cocktail parties and that kept the pressure off the kitchen, passed hors d'oeuvres weren’t all that difficult to execute especially for an hour or so. But it was a good warm-up. Then we had three practice services, we had about 200 people come in for three nights in a row and we got their feedback and it all went fairly smoothly. The next week we opened for real, however, we put a cap on the total number of reservations, we kept it under 300. This allowed us more time to practice and get our systems together. For the most part, everything was going well, there were some minor issues but nothing too worrisome. After service on Wednesday, the general manager came into the kitchen and said he wanted to talk to me. He told me that they intended to open up the books Friday, they were going to take as many reservations as possible. He felt that he should give me a heads up. At the time I wasn’t too concerned, things were going smoother than expected and I felt a few more reservations wouldn’t be that bad.
That Friday I walked into Carnivale and I asked the daytime host how many reservations we had for the night. She looked at the computer screen for a minute and then looked at me said with a smile “990 right now, but we still have some 10 o’clocks open” It was at this point, although I couldn’t see it, I’m sure all the color drained from my face. I walked into the kitchen like a zombie and was greeted by a sea of prep cooks running around and talking loudly in Spanish. I remember standing in the middle of the kitchen in my street clothes, wondering if I was going to have a stroke or heart attack. I knew I couldn’t let the staff see how absolutely terrified I was or they would freak out too. I walked up to the prep cooks, and greeted them and told them tonight was going to be very busy and told them to make sure we prepped as much as possible. One of the older Ecuadorian cooks looked at me “ 900 people! Amazing! So exciting” He thought it was great. I was about pop a blood vessel.
I then did something I don’t do very often, or ever honestly, I made a beeline for the men’s restroom. I went inside, got down on one knee, and prayed. I prayed that somehow someway I could get the kitchen through this night. I knew that a lot of people were depending on me and I didn’t want to fuck this up. There were 27 cooks, 5 dishwashers, two sous chefs, a pastry chef, 15 busboys, 22 servers, 6 bartenders, three hosts, four managers, and 990 diners depending on me to steer them through this night and I had to find a way. I had never done that many covers in one night, never, I think 500 was the busiest night I had ever experienced. This was going to be double that. I remember looking in the mirror, seeing that look of terror on my face, and I tried to think of something that would help me get through it. It did occur to me that the worst thing that could happen is I do a horrible job and get fired. That really was the worst-case scenario right? I get fired. When I thought about it like that it did calm me down a bit. I mean, I liked the job, I made good money, I didn’t want to get fired, but if that’s the worst thing that could happen, I’d get over it. It might not be a whole lot of fun but I’d survive, I went downstairs into my office and changed into my chef coat, and went back upstairs. I knew this was going to be a crazy night, I’d better prepare myself…..
Part 3 next week.
I am really enjoying your articles. I was a very lucky recipient of many wonderful meals at Carnivale. You made it look so easy. After you left, I kept going when David was in the kitchen but after that it just wasn’t the same. I recently noticed Pernil is back on the menu. So I’ve been wanting to go back again.