Minette Men

Along for a ride to the James Beard House with Bistrot La Minette's Peter Woolsey.

by Drew Lazor

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Published: Dec 29, 2010

Drew Lazor

THE BUCK STOPS HERE: Bistrot La Minette chef Peter Woolsey (rear, with saucepan) plating his venison entrée at the James Beard House Dec. 22.

In the unfathomably cold early-morning hours of Wednesday, Dec. 22, I was kidnapped out of a dark alley by a gang of rowdy, foul-mouthed chefs. And I have lived to tell the tale.

To be fair, it was a willful abduction. This summer, Peter Woolsey of Bistrot La Minette was invited to cook a fancier-than-hell French Christmas dinner at New York City’s James Beard House, and he asked me to come along to document the proceedings. One of a select group of chefs to get the prestigious call in 2010, Woolsey began planning this lavish holiday meal — a Christmas Eve tradition for French families — while me and you were still getting sunburn.

I landed in the unique position of seeing this dinner unfold from two perspectives: behind the frantic kitchen doors, and from a seat at the $170-a-head table. Here’s how it happened.

6:07 a.m. I’m freezing my ass off in the aforementioned alley behind La Minette’s Sixth-and-Bainbridge HQ. Woolsey hovers in his restaurant’s back door, casting a bespectacled eye on a long list of items he’ll split between two cars for the trek to NYC. Every ingredient needed for his five-course feast, from chives and croutons to chervil and crème fraiche, must be packed and brought along, and at Woolsey’s own expense. The Beard House, named for the late chef and author many ID as the great champion of American culinaire, operates as a non-profit, meaning Woolsey is technically donating both time and materials. (The Foundation, which holds roughly 200 of these events each year, does kick back $15 a head for each ticket sold.)

It doesn’t matter, though, as this is not about making money — it’s one of the most distinct honors a chef can receive, sought after by those cooks who, as Beard House manager of operations Victoria Jordan puts it, are “trying to put that feather in their cap.”

Woolsey’s sous chef, Steve Stryjewski, is not a morning person. Meanwhile, Woolsey’s former sous, Bryan Friedman (El Rey), is ready to go — so much so that he’s singing Pete Townshend to himself while bounding up the stairs, arms stacked with gougere-dotted sheet trays and plastic bins stocked with quart containers.
 
“Come on, Steve!” Friedman yells enthusiastically, grabbing his cohort by the shoulders and rattling him like a cocktail tin. “It’s 6 o’ clock! Wake up!”

“Seriously, if you keep this up,” Steve counters, “I will murder you.”

6:50 a.m. The crew — Woolsey, Friedman and Steve, plus Steve’s older brother Waldemar “Val” Stryjewski (Pumpkin) and La Minette GM Brad Histand — loads the remaining supplies into the cars and we’re off.  Somewhere between here and a stop at Wawa, the shit-talking begins. And it does not end for 17 hours.

9:10 a.m. We arrive at the Beard House, the entrance to which is an unremarkable door on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village marked with a humble little plaque. Beard lived here for the last dozen years of his life (he died in 1985), and the brownstone has been converted into a culinary center, home base for events as well as for the Foundation’s culinary scholarship arm. I walk around the dining room, cold and dark at this hour. There are two large portraits of Beard on display, including one where he’s posing jauntily and brandishing a handful of asparagus.

9:40 a.m. The guys congregate in the kitchen for a prep meeting. Woolsey runs down what should be done immediately (baking baguette — a recipe from a retired Burgundian baker, aka Woolsey’s father-in-law) and what can wait until later (finishing a bordelaise sauce). Woolsey considers, then vetoes, forming his duck confit rillettes hors d’oeuvre into spoon-smoothed quenelles. Though the typical French Christmas dinner is quite opulent — black truffles, foie gras and langoustines are but a few of the high-price elements of this one — that’d be too pretentious of a move for La Minette, Woolsey’s painstaking rendition of the decidedly not-fine-dining Gallic bistro.

“I just want it to be fucking delicious,” he says.

Drew Lazor

10:18 a.m. The now-aproned crew — with the exception of the Histand, who’s come to tend to the wine and serve as the day’s fallback chef punching bag when I’m out of the room — begins rolling out dough, a relatively mindless task that allows the chefs to run their mouths more than usual. Friedman, a Jew who earlier in the day raved about chopping down his own Christmas tree, is fondly described by Woolsey as “Half Jewish, half asshole.”

10:30 a.m. “Look, I’m a lobster!” says Steve, bounding around the Beard kitchen with silver tongs in his hands.

“And a shitty cook,” adds Friedman.

11:20 a.m. It’s seriously impressive how much these dudes can get done while disparaging each other. Your mom is a this, your girlfriend is a that, you suck at cooking, you suck in general … the insults flutter around the kitchen like angry cicadas, all while Val cleans up fancy chanterelles, his brother builds adorable meringue mushrooms for a Buche de Noel dessert and Friedman dices up salmon for a tartare. A Beard House employee asks Woolsey if he has any use for a giant box of microgreens a previous visiting chef left behind. Woolsey politely declines.

Drew Lazor

Noon Woolsey and Val squiggle herb- and Green Chartreuse-infused butter (they brought three pounds) on top of escargot (they brought upwards of 200), each snail housed individually in tiny ceramic pots the size of thimbles.

12:32 p.m. Steve pulls the baguette out of the oven and I nearly get drunk on the smell.

1:25 p.m. We’re sitting down for lunch at 15 East, a tony sushi place nearby that just so happens to be owned by Friedman’s cousin’s husband. Uni, o-toro and foie-infused chawanmushi are hitting the table and people are oohing and aahing, but the usually collected Woolsey is looking a little anxious. He’s worried about time.

2:29 p.m. We’re on our way out the door and Woolsey is full-blown nervous. You can tell as much because he’s walking six paces ahead of everyone while intermittently cocking his head around to run down what needs to be accomplished before guests arrive at 7. “Hey, blogger,” Val says to me. “You’re now a cook.”

2:39 p.m. Woolsey’s now a good 12 paces ahead of the group. Earlier, I made the mistake of telling them that I worked at Subway in high school, and it’s been brought up in random intervals. “Where’s your sandwich artistry now?” Friedman asks me. I’m not sure what he means.

2:42 p.m. I can no longer see Woolsey.

Drew Lazor

2:53 p.m. Steve and Friedman take on langoustine-wrapping duty, draping the tails of the expensive crustaceans with shredded phyllo dough for the dinner’s opening course, served with a classic sauce Américaine. (They stack up a total of 140.) Val immediately hops on sauté, getting color on halved Brussels sprouts. Woolsey drifts here and there, tending to sauces, peeling hard-boiled eggs and otherwise centering himself.

3:18 p.m. A plucky culinary-school volunteer named Nicole materializes. (The Beard House sets up local students to assist visiting chefs.) She’s stuck on parsley-plucking duty, and assures the kitchen that her virginal ears will not be hurt by their banter. Lucky for her, they don’t believe her and dial it back a little.

3:29 p.m. Woolsey asks Val how long it will take him to sauté off all 140 langoustines. “Twenty minutes,” he replies.

7:20 p.m. After leaving for awhile, I show back up for dinner, toting a sixer of Guinness specifically requested by Val. (This apparently means that I have a crush on him.) They’re well into cocktail hour now, held right in the kitchen and an adjacent room; New Yorkers who are richer than me schmooze, nibbling on rillettes-spread bread (no quenelles), spoons of lentil-topped tartare and sipping on flutes of Brut Rosé. Woolsey’s coming off poised, chatting with guests while his guys hum with activity around him. Of course, dinner has yet to start.

8 p.m. I find my seat at Table 5, which is topped with more glassware than I’ve ever seen. We join some friendly Philadelphians, a NOLA-turned-NYC couple and Woolsey’s guests, chefs Christopher Lee and Katie Busch, both of whom Woolsey worked with at Striped Bass. Barely lit and jammed with murmuring, wine-swirling diners, the room’s giving off a definite Clue vibe; I half-expect the lights to come up, revealing Mr. Boddy’s lifeless corpse at my feet, a meat fork plunged into his back.
 

Drew Lazor

9:05 p.m. With excellent langoustine and foie gras courses in the bag and escargot pots scraped empty in front of me, I slip down to the kitchen to observe Woolsey crank out his venison main (“It’s very Christmas-y to eat a fucking deer,” Woolsey explained earlier in the day). It's quite the orchestration, plates spread out on every cubic inch of counter space, disparate elements — Brussels! mushrooms! Bordelaise! Pommes noisettes! — flying into place, servers toe-tapping, and an inquisitive photographer documenting it all. For all the hubbub, the kitchen is, for once, quiet.

Drew Lazor

10:03 p.m. After Woolsey's Q&A with the dining room, dinner is over, guests are collecting their coats and the kitchen is breaking down and cleaning up. For a long-ass day, it went by pretty fast. Woolsey pores over the details (was the venison cooked to medium-rare?), but as far as I could tell, the meal unfolded just as he envisioned. He seems relieved, and proud.

Which, of course, is the green light for his guys to resume talking shit to him.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)

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