Brunch is a blood sport

Most customers at Prune can hardly imagine the behind-the-scenes scramble that produces their meal.

Most customers at Prune can hardly imagine the behind-the-scenes scramble that produces their meal. (Christian Johnston)

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton looks less calm and collected on Sundays.

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton looks less calm and collected on Sundays. (
)

There’s always a Sunday morning crowd outside East Village spot Prune, which packs in the diners – space be damned. (Christian Johnston)

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of the wildly popular East Village restaurant Prune. Her new book, “Blood, Bones & Butter,” out March 1, tells the story of this unconventional chef’s journey through kitchens the world over to find her life’s purpose and to re-create the sense of family she experienced as a child. In the excerpt from her book, below, she delves into nothing so lofty: Instead, she explains the battle-like endeavor that is serving brunch to hundreds of hungry New Yorkers.

Sunday brunch is like the Indy 500 of services at Prune. There is a roaring, thunderous stampede every 40 minutes as hordes of hungry, angry, tricked-out customers line up at the door, scrape the chairs back, take their seats, blow through their steak and eggs. The line is two full seatings long at 9:30, even though we don’t open the doors until 10. They are waiting for the “go” flag. Some have physically harmed the hostess as they sprint to get a table. I once worked the host shift on a Sunday brunch at 38 weeks pregnant — and even my huge belly, my chronic shortness of breath and my clear proprietary aura (you can just tell when I am in the room that I am not an employee; I exude ownership), even that did not stop the stampede that is Sunday brunch.

We do a little over 200 covers on a Sunday in five hours with only 30 seats, if that tells you anything.

We hardly have the space on the tiny dining-room floor to accommodate the crush of bodies, the trays full of Bloody Marys going to every table, the large plates of eggs, potatoes, toast and bacon sailing through the room.

The staff are like professional drivers, taking the turns on two wheels, screeching around the room getting the tables turned, the Bloodies shaken, the eggs delivered . . .

The hosts program loud, rocking music to keep the pace what it needs to be, music that is otherwise forbidden at dinner and lunch service when we are seeking a more civilized experience.

The kitchen, for its part, is hunkered down, the two full rails packed with tickets that all look exactly the same because it’s all pancakes, eggs and bacon, with no coursing to be done.

Sunday is an order fire day. Every ticket comes in and is shouted out and is picked up immediately. We do not wait patiently while the customer enjoys a section of the Times over a nice bowl of homemade granola before firing up his sour cream and caraway omelet. We are sometimes laying down omelet pans on the flames by the half-dozen, and delivering that many omelets in as many minutes.

My station, if I am expediting and not working eggs, is at the front of the pass, where I can look out over the dining room while keeping my focus on frantically assembling fruit salads, smoked fish platters, youth-hostel breakfast plates, and ricotta with pears and figs and pine nuts, and buttering every piece of toast or English muffin that leaves this kitchen, which, on a weekend, is about 192 Thomases and 1,440 eggs.

This is nothing compared to a hotel or a big restaurant; the only thing that makes it monstrous is that we are doing it in a kitchen the size of a Lincoln Continental . . .

[There’s an elderly woman named Annie who lives in the building, upstairs from Prune.] Annie memorized our phone number the day it was published, and calls us every day to tell us to turn down the music. And she’s got us on redial.

In the first few months, we were energetically neighborly and ultra-accommodating to all of the needs of all of the people in the building upstairs, and the building next door, and the building on the block behind us. And the building on the north side of us, and the west side and so on — until we finally realized that when you open a restaurant, you are a magnet for every lonely, angry, unfulfilled New Yorker who can’t afford a better apartment, a haircut or a meal in a decent restaurant. It’s like shaking a tree and out fall all the critics, the naysayers, the people with allergies to even the smell of anyone else’s success, or with litigious impulses over the sound of silverware in a dish rack being hosed down, or who call the fire department at the suggestion of meat-grill smoke.

You get the people who moved to New York in the first place to bask in its nearly assaulting vibrancy, but who now write letters to councilmen and form committees to make it more like Main Street back home.

Annie’s thing was “black music.” We could be listening to Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Johnny Cash and the Talking Heads all night long at a healthy volume, and she wouldn’t ever call. And as soon as the Angie Stone, Stevie Wonder or Finley Quaye tracks hit the rotation — we could set our watches by it — the phone would ring and Ms. Vegetarian in a terry-cloth robe would be shrieking at us to turn it down. She would come down in her robe and nightcap and complain about the bass, with a restaurant full of customers. To spare us both, we arranged a volume level together — she in her apartment, us downstairs in front of the stereo, both of us on the phone:

“Can you hear it now?” OK. “Can you hear it now?” OK. “How’s this. Can you hear this?”

Until, mutually, we agreed on a volume. We took white paint and black permanent marker and labeled the level on the volume knob ANNIE with two exclamation points, so that any host of any shift would know what not to go above. But after a while, she would again start to call constantly. And then . . . we kind of realized it wasn’t us or our music. Our sound system is two sh – – – y speakers from J&R Music World. We’re a small bistro, not a rave club with bouncers on headsets.

These people make entertaining characters in your journal. [But] on an average day in my life, I could do without the added “color” they provide.

This work is intensely stressful on its own, the hours are already long, the physical demands are significant. The egg shift at Sunday brunch alone could take down an average man . . .

Much has been written about facing the shocking heat of a restaurant’s set of burners, and in spite of what it may reveal about me, I am the only one I know who likes it. I always feel like I am a contender in a nicely matched bout every time we meet when I enter that station at 7:30 in the morning and begin my setup. Every time I step in front of those 10 burners, in that tight space, less than 12 inches from the wall . . . I feel like we are two small-time boxers — me and the heat — meeting in the center of the ring to tap gloves.

The fight begins with a little slap, totally manageable, when I put that first large pot of water on to boil. It then increases in ferocity from there, when the large cast-iron skillet starts to vaguely shimmer and smoke and sputter, magnifying the already immense power of my opponent — inching up the temperature — as I start to render the pancetta for the carbonara. When the pig-urine stench of that excellent pancetta hits me in the nose, I am red-eyed and snotty; your nose runs in the heat and in the cold equally as it attempts to regulate your body temperature.

And it’s only 8 o’clock in the morning.

That your eyes are already a little swollen and your nose is running and your skin is tight on your face gives you a Raging Bull kind of feeling — which gets me immediately in the right mindset. The whole crew feels it — that tension before a fight.

The customers line up outside before we have even turned on the lights and had our family meal, the total knowledge of what we know is coming — the relentless, nonstop five-hour beating.

We practically huddle up, poised for the bell. We are scared even, saying in psyched but tense tones, “Here we go!” as Julie unlocks the door and they flood in, scraping the chairs, and that milk foamer on the espresso machine rages its monster roar, and we stand motionless in the kitchen, looking out onto the floor, waiting for the panic of tickets, tickets, tickets.

It’s important not to go down early in your shift.

And there are things that will bring you down: You start your first ticket of the day, and by accident you tip a full gallon of pancake batter over in your reach-in . . . The expediter does not stop calling out tickets just because you have a mess in your station.

The orders — all of them at least in part your responsibility, because every dish at brunch comes with eggs — keep pouring in while you hustle to get that glop cleaned up and your station back on track.

The circumstances won’t change. You are always, always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees. No matter how well set up you are, how early you came in, how tight and awesome your mis en place is, there will be days, forces, events that just conspire to f – – k you and the struggle to stay up. To not sink down into the blackest, meanest hole, to stay psychologically up and committed to the fight, is the hardest, by far, part of the day.

The heat, the crush of customers, the special orders and sauces on sides, the blood-sugar crises: None of it is as difficult as the struggle to stay in the game, once you have suffered a setback like dropping a full quart of ranchero sauce, which has cracked open and exploded in your station all over your clogs and the oven doors.

I like to swear the dirtiest, most vulgar swear words I can think of to get me through it. It can be very Tourette’s syndrome back there when I am working that egg station and the expediter has failed to tell me about a sauce on the side or a well-done poached.

I always take the moment to apologize to everyone around me, to promise them that I am not serious, that nothing is personal — but then I rip it out, jaw tight, spewing combinations of the word “f – – k” that even David Mamet has not thought to put together.

I have fired people who can’t suffer their setbacks and petty failures. If they go down early and spend the rest of their five-hour shift that

way, it threatens to sink the whole boat, and that can’t happen just because you burned your first omelet and had to refire it.

You’ve got to get your GI Jane on.

From too many years of going all day without eating — that freakish thing about restaurant work: Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink — I have blood-sugar issues. And they can feel serious. There are a couple of points in that shift — every single time I work it — that I legitimately fear that the entire brunch service will come to a screeching halt if I don’t get some orange juice, iced Ovaltine and a full quart of ice-cold Coca-Cola down my throat in seconds, and in that particular order . . .

During the eighth round, close to 3 o’clock, I get dizzy stupid. I don’t even know what I’m cooking. By which I mean, I know what each individual item in front of me is, but I don’t know what I’m cooking in the larger picture. Is this the eggs Benedict that picks up with the salmon omelet? Or is this the Benny that picks up with oatmeal and lamb sausage?

This may seem inane to anyone on the outside, but in my industry, which benny is which matters. You don’t just cook food indiscriminately, without phrases, without groupings, and carelessly shove it all to the pass to let the expediter sort out.

You have to time your food, according to a system, so that you don’t produce a Benny that sits in the window waiting for five minutes for a lamb sausage from the guy working the grill station. Five minutes in the life of a cooked egg, unlike a nicely resting piece of meat, is the difference between excellent and bulls – – t.

At 3 o’clock, with the last pummeling of tickets on the board, I need to be told over and over by the expediter, and probably much to his irritation, which Benny is this particular Benny. I know all of the strategies, and I use them — repeating back the ticket after it’s called, “echoing” the expediter and constantly talking in minutes and seconds with my fellow line cooks:

“I’m two out on Benny/carbonara.”

“Selling Benny/oyster!”

We break it down to each other from minutes to seconds to sold! But invariably, all I can see by the last round through my red, swollen eyes is the pan and the egg in front of me. I’m just punching and hoping I land one on the guy’s jaw.

Produced by Stefanie Cohen. “Blood, Bones & Butter”

© 2011, reprinted with permission from Random House