One of my all-time favorite restaurants, in the whole wide world, is Balthazar in NYC’s SOHO neighborhood. An icon–marrying casual dining with a quasi-upper scale feel–fun, fast, and amazing, and killer-busy!
The below is an excerpt from Willy Staley of the New York Times, from this week’s NY Times Magazine annual food issue.
Welcome to my world, times 10!
“By 10:30PM, the dining room is more crowded than it has been all day” “At around 11… the (kitchen pick up window) fills up with dishes, but none of the food runners are present. This could prove disastrous, the sort of domino effect, that a kitchen might not bounce back from: dishes could go out cold and be returned to the kitchen for refires, clogging up the line for the rest of the night (as cooks have to re prioritize and lose the order of things, creating delays, angry customers, cuss words and worst of all…comps! The sous chef paces, showing signs of stress. He walks out of the kitchen to yell, “RUNNERS!” through the swinging doors. And sure enough, the machine kicks back into gear. The runners return from the floor, or wherever they had been, as the (window) is emptied again in two minutes. A new stack of (orders) get spiked. By the end of the day…the line has produced 111 steak frites, 90 French onion soups, 88 Baltazar bar steaks, 69 burgers, 68 omelets, 62 goat cheese tarts, 56 chicken paillards, 51 chicken clubs, 48 seared salmons, 46 heirloom tomato salads, 44 chicken liver-and-foie-gras terrines, 43 duck confit, 39 steak au pivres, 39 eggs Norwegian, 38 steak tartare, 32 escargot, 31 moules-frites, 29 grilled trout…”
“The closing manager…boots the (drinking staff) and steps outside at 2:30AM (to lock the doors)….In just a few hours, delivery trucks will return and it will all start over again (with the prep cooks arriving at 5AM)”
We had breakfast at Balthazar a couple of years ago. Cool place. I have Pok Pok on my to-do list for our next visit (http://pokpokny.com/). Saw it on Anthony Bourdain’s show when he covered Brooklyn. Looks amazing!
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