At 9:00 on a Saturday morning, Oliveto's executive chef, Paul Canales, is explaining to Rhea Dellimore how fish move through water, why they don't get the bends, and the difference between fast- and slow-twitch muscles.
The conversation began last January when Dellimore, a line cook at the restaurant, confessed that she struggled with cooking proteins. Canales responded by creating a curriculum to bring her up to speed. He had her read the chapter on protein coagulation in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking and then, for her first assignment, Canales handed Dellimore six eggs. "Cook these any way you can imagine, observe what happens, and tell me what you think. And, by the way, make them taste good." Dellimore spent the rest of the day in the kitchen, collecting her full salary, even though none of the food she was cooking would be served to the customers. One egg she deep-fried, another she cooked sunny-side up. Her favorite was one that she slowly baked in olive oil. The poached egg was a mess. "I didn't use enough acid in the poaching liquid, and the egg didn't set correctly," she recalls. But a month later when Dellimore had to poach eggs for a dish at her station, she didn't hesitate. "I had already made the mistake so I didn't have to do it again."
Her next lesson in mastering proteins took place the Saturday before the restaurant's annual week of oceanic dinners. After another discussion with Canales, Dellimore spent the day cooking scallops, petrale sole, black cod, halibut, and tuna. On the first night of the all fish menu, he assigned her to the sauté station. "I was flattered," she says, "because in terms of experience, I was among the least qualified cooks in the kitchen. It scared the hell out of me."
At the daily menu meeting, cooks hear for the first time what dishes they’ll be preparing that night |
Paying his cooks to make mistakes, scaring the hell out of them whenever he can--these are simply smart management tools, as Canales sees it, intended to challenge his staff to go beyond what they think they're capable of doing.
When Paul Bertolli took over the kitchen at Oliveto in 1995, he developed a carefully crafted Italian menu that pushed the Oakland restaurant into the national spotlight. Under Bertolli's direction, the kitchen made its own pastas and salumi. Even the polenta was ground by hand. When Bertolli left the restaurant last July to produce his salumi on a commercial scale, Canales, a 10-year veteran there, moved into the top spot. Diners are unlikely to have noticed the change. The menu, still with its spitroasted pigeon and maccheroni with pork cracklings and balsamico, has kept its rustic Italian focus. Canales's hand is best appreciated from the perspective of the staff, whom he manages with the same attention to detail that Bertolli brought to the food.
A compact man with a closely shaven head, Canales moves about his kitchen like a boxer, bouncing lightly from corner to corner ready to deliver a hit wherever he sees an opportunity. One moment he's turning breadcrumbs in a pan, next he's on the other side of the room dipping a spoon into the ragù. A cook calls him over to taste a sausage and he does so before moving on to teach an intern how to clean morels, all the while keeping up a steady .ow of conversation about everything from his favorite jazz recordings to the World Cup. He stops to ask a prep cook how her kids are doing and comment on the state of the day's produce delivery.
Long before he ever thought of cooking for a living, Canales was a marketing director for Pacific Bell. It's difficult to picture such an animated man working in a cubicle. Canales had the same trouble. "The problem for me with the corporate world was that it was the corporate world. About 10 percent of my day was interesting and creative, but the rest was not. I knew I had to have passion for my work more than just a few hours a day."
While he was working at the phone company, Canales lived across the hall from a woman who had been to cooking school. "We were both in long-distance relationships at the time, so we spent most of our evenings together, cooking for each other at least four nights a week. She was the first to encourage me to take cooking seriously." It was at his friend's urging that Canales quit Pac Bell and enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.
The popular image of restaurant kitchens put forth in books such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and television shows like Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen is of an adrenaline-fueled battleground headed by a sadistic chef who rules a staff of coke-snorting misfits with a combination of intimidation, terror, and even violence. In one of the most recent restaurant tell-alls, Heat, former New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford tells of working in the kitchen at Mario Batali's Babbo in New York City and getting splashed by hot oil when he got in the way of another cook. "Did I burn you?" the cook asked. Before Buford could answer, the cook said, "Good," and splashed him again.
A sense of urgency is one thing Canales requires of all his cooks. Missy Jones prepares the raw bar for the oceanic dinners in June. |
As anyone in the industry can tell you, it's not an inaccurate picture. Professional kitchens are hot, uncomfortable places where the stress is high and egos often run unchecked. For many years, restaurants were a refuge for uneducated, unskilled workers. A place where drug addicts and ex-cons could .nd work when no one else would hire them. Turnover in the industry is famously high, and hazing and humiliation are often seen as the best way to keep such an undisciplined and unstable crew in line.
These days restaurant work is a respectable career. Celebrity chefs and the Food Network have made kitchens glamorous and attracted better educated, more mature people to the field. But behind the kitchen door, much remains the same. Despite the feel-good proclamations concerning organic ingredients and humanely produced meats on their menus, many Bay Area restaurants still run on a model more appropriate to the Citadel. Traditionally, kitchens are fashioned after the military. The line of cooks is known as the brigade, the chef is referred to by his title instead of his name, uniform checks are often part of the daily routine, and, as in the army, there's a macho, I-survived-this-hell-now-it's-your-turn-sucker attitude. Omri Aronow, an Oliveto line cook with more than 12 years of experience in the industry, says, "Other restaurants describe their atmosphere as competitive. Cutthroat is a more appropriate word. They're run by intimidation. I was always afraid of getting my ass kicked."
Moving from the Dilbert-like world of the phone company to the ferocious culture of the kitchen wasn't easy for Canales. "This business is so Neanderthal. Too many chefs suffer the myth of the artiste and use their talent as an excuse to be abusive. Does dumping food on the floor make someone a better cook? I don't see how. I work very hard to avoid drama in my kitchen," he says. "Think about it. There's .re; knives; a hot, crowded work space; and a tremendous amount of pressure. The last thing I need is tempers spinning out of control."
It was during his tenure at the phone company that Canales was recruited to be part of a leadership development program, and he was sent to Stanford Business School. The experience turned him into a management geek, sopping up the works of such business gurus as William Edwards Deming, Peter Drucker, and Johnson O'Connor and becoming an enthusiastic believer in their theories of participatory management.
When Canales came to Oliveto in 1995, he hated the chaotic way things were run. "There was no structure, and the decisions all seemed so arbitrary." It took five years for Canales to advance from intern to line cook to sous chef to chef de cuisine, when he .nally had a chance to put some of his ideas into action. He began to develop strict protocols for hiring, clear performance expectations for the first 90 days of employment, station management responsibilities, annual reviews, and offsite training programs--practices that are as common as paperclips in the corporate world, but almost unheard of in the world of small, family-run restaurants like Oliveto. And like any good company man, Canales creates reams of paperwork. The annual review for line cooks is a two-part, six-page document that evaluates employees on 25 points and requires them to come up with six goals for the year ahead and a plan for implementing those goals.
Of course, there are plenty of chefs who aren't despots, 
Line cook Elaine Rivera prepares for the evening ahead. “The learning curve is huge here,” she says. “I’m in no hurry to move on.” |
who treat their employees well; but very few have ever received any formal training as managers. "Management is a real discipline," says Canales. "It's not just about being in charge. The things that make you a good cook don't necessarily translate to being a good manager. The way this business works is that people get promoted because they make nice food, but then they're put in a position to manage people and they move into a domain where they're no longer competent."
At 2:45 every afternoon, the kitchen staff gathers in the dining room to learn what they'll be cooking that night. The meeting usually begins with a recap of the night before. Canales checks in with each cook, and they seem quite comfortable admitting when things have gone badly. "I lost my handle on the consommé," says Curtis Di Fede, one of the line cooks, as Canales nods in agreement. "Can I try it again?"
Because the menu changes daily, cooks are regularly responsible for dishes that they've never made or even tasted before. Canales passes out assignments, often just a list of ingredients. "We got some nice squid today, and I think I saw some beans. Why don't you come up with a pasta using them?" is a common direction. Or, "We've got spinach--make something delicious." The process is part of what he calls pushing decision making down the production line. "The people who work here have a chance to make an impact on the menu and do creative work. It's important that the people actually doing the work have some say in what they're doing."
One of Deming's pet peeves was "the destructive effect of competition on productivity and the bottom line." Number eight of the leadership guru's 14 Points for Management is "Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively." So in addition to preparing something different every night, cooks rotate through the stations of the kitchen, working the rotisserie one night, making pasta the next. In most restaurants, a cook typically works just one station, often for a year or longer before moving on to learn another part of the kitchen. It's a system that creates a lot of competition for what the cooks consider the most prestigious stations, with the one on the grill flaunting his firepower over the guy who makes the salads. And it contributes to the industry's high burnout rate.
Di Fede came to Oliveto a little more than a year ago with a resume that includes Commander's Palace in Las Vegas, Terra in St. Helena, and Bouchon in Yountville, as well as internships at the French Laundry and London's highly regarded Fat Duck. At Bouchon, Di Fede worked the meat station for a year. "It was very discouraging," he says. "I felt like I was stuck in limbo the whole time. I lost my passion." These days, Di Fede does something different every night. "I've become a much more rounded cook here," he says.
 "It keeps people interested," says sous chef Guy Frenette of the rotating system, "and it eliminates a lot of the jealousy you .nd in other kitchens. No one here feels that they're not as good as someone else." That's a sentiment you hear even from the least-experienced members of the staff. Kelsey Bergstrom had no restaurant experience at all when Canales hired her last September. "I never feel self-conscious about what I don't know," she says. "I feel like the people here are watching over me." According to Aronow, at most restaurants, people are very protective of their territory. "It's rare that someone makes an effort to bring someone else along," he says. "Everyone here tries to work as a team."
But Canales insists that his approach is not a hippie thing. "It's not just, Let's Cook and Be Happy." He's intense and demanding, regularly tossing challenges at his cooks to test their ability to handle them. "Freedom," he likes to say, "comes with capability." Canales's vocabulary is littered with corporate catchphrases familiar to anyone who has ever spent an afternoon doodling at a management seminar. His cooks rise up the ranks through "concentric circles of freedom." As he describes it, "The parameters start off very tight with new people. Giving cooks too much freedom too early only sets them up to fail. They don't have the experience to make good decisions. But if I spend a lot of time training, and they develop into mature cooks, they earn the freedom to make creative decisions."
The Canales system is cutthroat in its own way, however. "The level of personal responsibility in this kitchen is astounding," says Aronow. And if you can't handle the freedom, you're out. "I had one guy here who Alain Ducasse recommended," Canales says, referring to the multistar Michelin chef. "He told me this guy was one of his best cooks, but he couldn't work without someone riding him all the time. He wasn't self-motivated and he didn't have the internal discipline needed to cook in this type of kitchen. I had to let him go."
Among his peers, Canales's reputation is anything but warm and fuzzy. "That guy is a hard-ass," says Charlie Hallowell of Pizzaiolo. "He thinks nothing of firing people." Canales laughs at the characterization. "I'm very confrontational," he admits. "I don't feel bad about that. When I see someone doing something that's criminal--something that they know they shouldn't do--I don't hesitate to say, 'You have to stop that now or you won't be here tomorrow.' I'm compassionate because I know what it is to struggle, but I'm not sympathetic. I don't feel sorry for anyone. If a cook isn't working out, I .re him. If I don't, I'm just helping to create an underperformer, and there's no room for that in my kitchen." Replace the word "cook" with "executive" and "kitchen" with "company" and Canales's comments would fit right into a Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch memoir.
Though he's been at the helm for only a year and a half, stories of Canales's leadership are beginning to spread. Some are genuinely arresting; others seem mundane until you realize how unusual they are in the context of restaurant work. Elaine Rivera, who has put in time at both Globe and Jardinière, says, "At other restaurants, no one was willing to take the time to explain things. Here there's so much to learn and it's all so accessible. At my other jobs, the only time the head chef sat down to talk to me was when I was in trouble."
Michael Tusk, who worked with Canales at Oliveto before leaving to open his restaurant, Quince, says the chef has a knack for connecting with people. He remembers that Canales made a point of getting to know everyone who passed through the kitchen. "We all knew the guy who dropped off the wood for the rotisserie as the charcoal guy. Canales found out his name, where his kids went to school, and what kind of music he listens to." Bergstrom, then a 22-year-old fresh out of Sarah Lawrence College, walked into the restaurant last September clutching a letter that read in part: "I will wash dishes and mop floors, I will hostess or polish wine glasses or scrape crumbs off the tables…if there's the possibility that someday I can pick up a knife and be part of Oliveto." When floor manager Allison Gurley handed the letter to Canales, he told her he had no time to talk and continued peeling onions. But his eyes drifted to the letter, and a few moments later he called out to Gurley, "Is she still here?" Bergstrom was eating pizza in the café, and Canales went downstairs to meet her. He ended up spending the next four hours with her, taking her with him to the Berkeley farmers' market that afternoon. At the end of their visit, he offered Bergstrom a stage (an unpaid apprenticeship) in his kitchen. "I had no idea what that was, but I immedately said yes," says Bergstrom. Two weeks later, she was on the payroll as a full-time cook and will celebrate her one-year anniversary in just a few months.
Canales's management skills are gaining notice beyond the restaurant walls. When a relative, who works at the Bay Area-based design think tank Ideo, mentioned the chef's innovations to her co-workers, they were so impressed with the amount of discretion Canales gives his cooks that Ideo produced a video featuring his kitchen for a presentation on collaborative workplaces for the World Economic Forum.
When Oliveto's owners, Bob and Maggie Klein, hired Paul Bertolli, they knew exactly what they were looking for: a high-profile, charismatic chef who could re.ne their menu and attract the press. Bertolli succeeded at that beautifully. But when the time came to imagine the restaurant without their celebrity chef, they would never have thought to go looking for a corporate refugee with a flair for management--if he hadn't been cooking in their kitchen for the past decade.
"There's an aspect of what goes on here that's just blind luck," says Bob Klein. "Even if I knew all that I know now and had all the money in the world, it would still be very hard to recreate what's happening here."
It's unlikely that chefs at other restaurants will start looking to corporations for inspiration in how to run their businesses. Too many cooks are unfamiliar with the world outside the kitchen and management skills are simply not a priority. But as the appeal of cooking as a profession continues to grow and career changers like Canales enter the .eld, they bring experience that can't help but change the culture of restaurants.
A prime candidate for reform is the industry's habit of burning through cooks. Financially, restaurants are designed to support just a few key players--the executive chef and the owners--and make quarterly payments to investors, using the employees on the bottom rung to make the numbers work. For their part, the kitchen staff is said to be in it for the experience. Cooks typically move from restaurant to restaurant, staying a year, two at the most, building résumés in hope of someday getting called to head a kitchen of their own. It's rare that a chef takes the time to develop his or her cooks and build a stable employee base that will support a restaurant for the long run. Canales takes a different tack. There's little financial incentive for cooks to stay at Oliveto (the pay, from $10 to $15 an hour, is in line with industry standards), but what they get instead is the opportunity to constantly learn new skills, even after they've been on the job for several years.
In fact, there are times when the kitchen at Oliveto seems more like a graduate seminar than a commercial venture. (See Deming's 14 Points, no. 6: institute training on the job, and no. 13: institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.) Canales's latest program for continuing education is based on "learning environments," a concept very much in vogue in companies with cutting-edge management programs. If, for example, a cook wants to learn more about .sh, Canales will have her spend a week working alongside Tom Worthington of San Francisco's Monterey Fish. The cook will report to Worthington at 5:00 on Monday morning and spend the week checking in, inspecting, and cutting .sh. On Friday morning, when Canales calls in his .sh order, instead of speaking to Worthington as he usually does, he'll talk to his cook to .nd out what's best that day. To bring the experience full circle, the cook will return to the restaurant that evening to cook the .sh she sold it that morning.
A cook who's interested in produce can spend a week working on the farm of one of the restaurant's suppliers. And every year at least a few Oliveto employees travel to Italy on the restaurant's dime to research recipes and techniques for the kitchen.
Any time they're traveling or training, cooks collect their full salaries. "It's radical to pay people when they're not producing, but the thinking is that we'll be making better cooks, and in the long run the restaurant will profit from that," says Canales.
From the Kleins' point of view, it's an extremely good investment. "The cooks always come back with lots of experience and insight into what they're doing," says Bob Klein. "This is not a boondoggle. It's an indispensable way to get people to understand something they need to understand. I can see the benefits in the bottom line."
One way in which Canales's innovations have clearly paid off is in reducing turnover. Currently, cooks at Oliveto have been on the job for an average of five years. That's double what the average length of stay was five years ago.
"These things do cost money," Bob Klein continues, "but mostly it's energy, and Paul has the energy. The profit margin of any passionately run restaurant is very thin. We're willing to limit our profits and not squeeze every nickel out of the business in order to make this a better place to work." In the end, he says, "It's fun to come to work where people are happy."
For Canales, the bottom line is what happens in the dining room. "None of this training is informational," he says. "No way. I expect these experiences to prove out on the plates that go out to the customers. That's the only reason to be doing any of this."
"We can invest in lots of cool stuff--fancy plates and brand new ovens--but you have to remember that all those are animated by human beings. And if those people aren't aware and making distinctions between right and wrong, it's not going to make any difference. My staff is where I can make the biggest improvement in this business.
"At the end of the day, I'm Duke Ellington," he says, "but the cooks are Johnny Hodges and the rest of the band. They're the ones who make the music."
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