Chef Jennifer Maloney changes the dinner menu weekly at Cafe Sebastienne in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Today, she talks about her week in preparation for the dinner service on Friday and Saturday nights. Yesterday, we learned why hot dogs and champagne make a good pairing, and on Wednesday, she talked about what it's like to see Italy with chef Mario Batali.
The dinner menu for Friday and Saturday is likely to originate on a Tuesday.
"Tuesday is my day. We're closed on Mondays, so I can usually come in and look around. I like to write my menu and plan the week on Tuesdays," Maloney says.
But where does she get her inspiration for the dinner menu?
"I think about the stuff I like to eat. Sometimes if it's cold out, it's
comfort stuff. Or I call my fish guy in Boston, and I say what's going
to be good this week," Maloney says.
She'll take her ideas in with her on Thursday in an effort to get her prep started. Over the next day, Maloney and her staff lay the foundation for the menu by roasting mushrooms, putting together a coconut curry or making stock. But if you're working on Maloney's line, don't expect to be handed a precise list that you have to follow to the ingredient.
"I rarely work with recipes. That's why I'm not a pastry chef. I hate to measure, and I cook very intuitively. I just tell them to do this or do that. I don't tell them amounts. We all collaborate," Maloney says.
She typically arrives around 11 a.m. to help expedite lunch. While Maloney works on the fish special, she's got her cutting board on the line. In the small kitchen that has stations at right angles because of the curves of the building, the cooks are elbow-to-elbow.
"It's so small, we have to make room for each other. I'm in their way, and that's the way it's going to be," Maloney jokes.
The lunch crowd comes quickly and hungry, and inside of an hour, the kitchen is likely to have blasted out 30 starters. But lunch is merely the tipping point. Some afternoons have a cocktail party with passed appetizers followed by a sit-down dinner in the cafe. The lunch cleanup is usually around 3 p.m., and that's when the countdown starts for dinner.
"We start doing the countdown to a quarter to five by figuring out who is doing this and that," Maloney says.
Happy hour starts at 5 p.m., which is usually right around the time the kitchen is finally set for service. After that, it's just a question of knocking out rock-shrimp fritters or a pan-fried Berkshire pork chop over the next four hours.
"At the end of the night, we do a big cleanup, and then we do it all over again the next day," Maloney says.
[Image via Flickr: ulterior epicure]
Comments (0)