Free Work Clean by Dan Charnas Page A

legend, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Dufresne began a routine. On his way home from work, he’d take out a small pad and pen and write down everything he knew he had to do the next day. He’d finish the list, tear it out of the pad, and crumple the list up. Then he’d go back to his pad and write the list again from memory, and destroy it. The next morning, on the way to work, he’d reconstruct the list again. It became a game. Every day, Dufresne would scorch a list into his brain. Years later, he still has shoeboxes full of notepads containing his old lists. Occasionally, he’ll look through them—each list a little movie of what he was doing on one evening, many years ago. Dufresne instructs his chefs to make lists, not only of the things they know they need to do, but everything they
might
need to do—telling them that he’d rather have them cross needless items off their lists than miss an item and realize it only when it’s too late.
Chefs plan ahead, chefs plan backward
    Ã€ la carte
cooking turned the culinary arts into an industry, but it also made that profession a constant gamble. A successful chef must do more than cook well. She must predict what dishes her customers will want and when they will want them. The contemporary chef must stand on both sides of time: in the present, making projections into the future to calculate needed resources; and inthe future, counting the minutes and hours backward to the present to calculate needed time.
    One of the first things that Dwayne LiPuma tries to teach his students is the simple concept of menu mix: predicting how much of each menu item to prepare. Every day at American Bounty, students will have to prepare 10 portions of each item per every 100 reservations. For example, if their reservations are at 40, they’ll have to prepare to make four of each menu item. All the ingredients that go along with those dishes have to be portioned accordingly. Experienced chefs know that certain days and times of the year favor certain menu items more than others. For off-site events, planning starts with the plate itself: a vision of the finished dishes on the table. Then, a chef counts time backward:
How long will it take to plate and serve those dishes? How much time to finish those dishes for service? How much time for transportation from the kitchen to the off-site dining room? How long will the cooking process for each thing on that plate take before that? How long will the prep be for each of these dishes? How much time do I need to allot to gather those tools and ingredients? And how much time can I shave off these times by adding more bodies, by getting help?
    Chefs’ backwards planning skills are as applicable as they are enviable outside the kitchen. Before she became an academic and a noted scholar of culinary history, Amy Trubek began her career as a cook and caterer. She remembers the call she got the day her father got a job as dean at a prestigious midwestern university.
    â€œAmy,” he said, “I want to send all the associate deans to culinary school.” Trubek, nonplussed, asked why.
    â€œBecause I have noticed how organized you have become since you worked in restaurants and went to cooking school,” her father replied. “You know how to start and finish projects following a deadline.” Trubek credited her transformation to mise-en-place and in particular the idea of working backward from time of service.
    The constant for all great chefs and cooks is the effort they put into planning. The result of all that physical and mental energy they devote to planning is excellence and calm execution—in the face of both the expected challenges and the unexpected.
OUT OF THE KITCHEN
    How do
we
greet the day?
    Some of us relegate planning to the margins of our schedules and our psyche. We see planning as something that interrupts and delays our work. We plunge into our mornings with a quickly made list, if