Going Slowly
It’s easy to miss: The last scene from “Big,” a bittersweet movie that happens to be one of my favorites, despite the sentimentality. The 13-year-old version of Tom Hanks returns to his suburban New Jersey home, and the camera pans away from the house to what seems to be a simple shot of the neighborhood. It’s easy to miss the message embedded in the pavement: “School. Slow.”
Perhaps the emphasis on being more deliberate, savoring each moment, tasting as one goes, not being in such a hurry to move on to the next thing, is a function of age. I don’t know. I do know that it is a fundamental tenet of our soul food kitchen.
This may sound like a bit of an anomaly in the food business. You’re in such a hurry to get the order cooked and in front of your guests, constantly watching your time, planning the amount of time it will take to shop and prep for a service. Who has time to stop and smell the roses, much less taste them? And frankly, it has taken me quite a while to not get all worked up about the timetable of my orders. Quite a while.
Partial help comes from the fact that so many of our dishes take a long time to prepare, sometimes as long as 3 or 4 days in advance: sourdough bread and buns, whole roasted chicken, bbq brisket and roasted baby back spare ribs, among other things. And even the seemingly less time-consuming dishes often involve a number of steps and layers that simply can’t be rushed. So even if I wanted to rush headlong into the fast lane, our kitchen is chronically stuck in 2nd gear.
I’ve had to learn not only to accept this pace, but embrace it. Not as easy or as simple as it sounds. It means accepting fewer orders/reservations. It means not being so quick to say “yes” to every guest’s request. It sometimes means re-doing a dish that doesn’t mass muster. And yes, it means, trying to embrace the negative feedback, when it occurs, as a gift that bears fruit over the long term, if I’m willing to start from scratch, unpack a dish, go back to the beginning, and do it again and again until it is right.
