Let’s call him Dexter. Dexter was an IT consultant who had made enough money to buy a house with a fancy kitchen, half a dozen copper pans, and a set of hand-forged Japanese knives. An entire wall of cookbooks sat opposite the Bertazzoni stove and he’d seen every episode of Chef’s Table, at least twice. Even the ones in French. Even the ones about pastry. Dexter liked food, enjoyed traveling around the world collecting stars like they were baseball cards.
But eating food was merely a past-time. Cooking it was his passion. Dexter told me this in an interview, turning up with a pristine bespoke leather knife roll, starched Bragard and shiny leather Birkenstocks.
At the time, I was just a few months into running a kitchen of my own. Short-staffed and scrambling to get ready for lunch, I offered Dexter a trial shift, starting immediately. I set him to work in the pastry kitchen, showed him how to plate the cold larder and dessert dishes and made sure he was set-up before darting back to the hot line.
At first, things seemed to be going OK. A gentle trickle of orders were accompanied by a gentle trickle of dishes making their way out of the pastry kitchen. Then the printer pace picked up, the dessert tickets started coming thick and fast, and the flow of dishes coming from the pastry kitchen just… stopped.
Getting no response to my increasingly frantic calls, I broke away from the burners and darted into the tiny pastry kitchen. There was Dexter, spinning in place, the printer’s chits snaking their way down from the gantry onto the workbench and over half a dozen half-finished plates. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the chaos, all I could think was that this was the most perfect manifestation of the weeds I had ever seen. Since this moment, whenever I see a chef spin and turn and panic like this, I call it Dexing.
On the Dex
We’ve all been Dexter. Paralyzed in the face of mounting pressure, with no idea where to start. The brain pivots so fast that you can’t settle on one task without a new one seeming more urgent. It’s painfully counter-intuitive, but the only solution is to stop a moment: wait, breathe, and plan. I grouped the tickets, counted how many of each dish were on order and set about ticking off those that were fast and easy to plate. In a couple of minutes, the kitchen was back on track. There’s something deeply gratifying about turning a morass of chits into a steady stream of completed plates.
I don’t recall the last time I was truly in the weeds, my brain flooded to the point of inertia. Like a parent who is reminded once their children are grown up that, many years ago, they unknowingly picked the youngest up off the floor for the final time, my final trip dans la merde wasn’t one that I can recall.
Over time, experience, organization and smart modeling have all but eliminated Dex-ing. And mostly I’m OK with that. But every now and again, when the wind is blowing in the right direction and the smell of noisetting butter is getting dangerously close to burning, when I hear the faint crackle of a tiny printer gurgling out yet another ticket in the kitchen of a restaurant where I’m dining, and sense the strange serenity that precedes the insanity of a scramble out of the madness, I yearn for just one more dalliance with the weeds. Dexter doesn’t. He hung up his whites after a week and went back to the far less weedy world of computing. As far as I know he’s still there, still coding and still throwing great dinner parties.
The Secret Chef
