Kitchen, Not Confidential

Let us see how the suçuk is made

April 2014, Kabul, Afghanistan. My first time here. My parents show me around; their childhood homes, schools, parks, street markets and picnic spots on the outskirts of the city. They take me to a kabob restaurant for lunch, where you have to show up two hours before your meal to place your order. In the window, a whole lamb carcass is hanging from the ceiling, and my dad asks for specific cuts, for 4 people. Slice, weigh, see you later brother. We go for a walk on Chicken Street and come back to sit in a family room, on the floor, for the most memorable meal of the trip. The secret: the meat is pressure cooked before it’s finished on the grill.

Fast forward to September 2023. To celebrate five years of marriage, a very special friend invites us to The Modern, a contemporary American restaurant at the MoMA. With a twist: we’re sitting inside the kitchen, facing the cooks while they’re working. One of them shares background on the recipes as we eat and answers our questions. The dishes are spectacular. The service is beyond any expectation; one could call it Unreasonable Hospitality (TM).

Both experiences stood out for breaking down the distance between the guest and the cook. At the kabob restaurant, you choose which part of the animal you’d like to eat. At the fine dining place, you see the workers assembling ingredients and hear them interacting in a surprisingly quiet environment.

Are we moving away from the long-standing division between kitchen and dining room? The three hours at The Modern was one of my first exposures to the Unreasonable Hospitality movement, led by Will Guidara, as an explicit effort to create magical moments for guests, foster symbiosis between front and back of house, and rebalance their respective powers.

Guidara was the general manager at Eleven Madison Park (EMP for insiders) in New York, where he and Chef Daniel Humm transformed the place into one of the biggest names in global fine dining. Their efforts on both the meal and hosting experience led them to receive three stars from the Michelin Guide and the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. At EMP, Guidara pioneered the art of extreme customer service, detailed in his book, Unreasonable Hospitality (2022). His goal was to create an experience on par with the chef’s elite cooking ability. At The Modern (where he actually worked for a short period), this meant congratulating us on our anniversary, letting us interact with the staff, and giving us a small instant camera to play with during the meal - “someone” must have told them about my film photography hobby. They went above and beyond when I asked for a menu at the end: they had it made from scratch and edited by the chef himself before printing. I can’t imagine how precious those ten minutes were in the middle of service, but they did it anyway. I felt bad, but also great. With the waiting staff owning so much of the experience, their influence on the restaurant’s direction increased. This put general managers in a position to negotiate menus with head chefs to maximize guest satisfaction. Guidara once noticed the overwhelming number of interruptions that happen during a tasting menu - switching plates and cutlery, refilling waters, checking on guests, etc. - adding to the overall stuffiness fine dining places are known for. He pushed for simpler menus to reduce this side effect and put guests at ease. He also led the development of beverage programs beyond wine, including cocktails, beer, tea, and coffee, which had been neglected.

One trick in the Unreasonable Hospitality playbook is inviting guests into the kitchen, through a tour after the meal, a conversation with staff, or a chef’s table experience. Recently, the Troisgros restaurant in France had Frederick Wiseman’s cameras film the work involved behind the three-star outfit. In the food and hospitality worlds, pop culture coming from behind the counter has been significant in the past decades, elevating chefs to rockstar status.

Kitchens have never been this open to guests, and for good reason. It's a world of secrets we’d rather not know about. From Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) to Bourdain’s Don’t Eat Before Reading This (1999), what happens there is unsavory. Dirt, sweat, loud instructions, clanging pans, heat from stoves and bodies, tight spaces: sensory overload as an appetizer. On a human level, the quasi-military organization of restaurant brigades leads to abuse and tough labor conditions. Add to that the infamous gender issues and exploitation of undocumented staff, for your main dish. On the side, the cooks’ disdain for waiting staff, seen as servile “hands” called upon to deliver dishes. Severe dysfunction during busy coup de feu times at lunch and dinner: any misstep results in chaos. And for dessert, protective chefs who keep their recipes and practices - such as questionable management of produce - hidden from the outside, on purpose.

On television, we’re shown kitchens more and more, not always in their truest form. Gordon Ramsay berates small restaurant owners for mismanagement and bad technique, while Guy Fieri takes us to Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives to showcase the greasiest food in America in suspiciously spotless kitchens. (I would love to see a crossover of these two shows). Many cooking programs rely on artificial time limits and fabricated competitions. My favorite is Un dîner presque parfait (“an almost perfect dinner”): each week, five contestants invite each other for a meal they cook from scratch, on their own. Each host is judged by the four others for the food, the table’s decor, and a group activity they organize before dinner. We get a front-row seat to the tension between the kitchen, where the host is under pressure, and the dining table where they have to be relaxed and open to live critical feedback. A behavioral transformation portrayed by Orwell in his chronicle of restaurant workers in Paris (op cit):

“It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn priest-like air. […]

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan.”

The small screen has brought us closer to the world of cooking. Open kitchens have become popular in restaurant architecture; cooks even show up tableside with dishes prepared or finished in front of us and our smartphones. Sizzling steak sliced and seasoned from an elbow slide, Caesar salad or beef tartare mixed in real time in a wooden bowl, moka pot coffee poured on ladyfingers, topped with mascarpone for single-serve tiramisu. Carts are rolled around to present dessert and cheese options. Lobster tail brought on a small, live charcoal fire, tabletop shawarma spit and cheese-wheel pasta: this is as much about delighting guests as gaining social media exposure. Actual taste isn't always improved, but followers will eat up those vids. The guest is a medium to more business; waiters cater to their every need, cooks must adapt and deliver accordingly. The dining room is in charge.

In the most informal restaurants, kitchen openness has been a feature for long. At Higuma in Paris, I'd skip the line by showing up alone and asking for a seat at the counter, with the cooking happening in front of me. I always went with the same order: yakisoba, hold the pork, prompting the cook to switch to a clean wok. The show of technique and efficiency was fascinating and a cherished memory of this highly transactional, inexpensive eatery. Back in Kabul, the casual street food places have the main action happening at the front of the restaurant: the goggle-wearing grill master handles the lamb skewers in a small plastic-enclosed porch, the fumes escaping from the top and using the open air and street as exhaust and to attract customers.

After the kabob lunch, we went to a traditional sheer yakh (“ice milk”) place where they make the delicacy in the window, hand-shaken inside tin bowls over ice or snow. It’s scooped out and topped with qaymaq (clotted cream) and crushed pistachios. High risk of food poisoning in this third-world street food establishment, thankfully luck was on my side.