GRACE UNDER FIRE : A Saucy Symphony Nightly in First-Class Kitchen

Don’t spend any time in the kitchen of the Chez Cary restaurant if you think you are a whiz with food.

Just don’t.

Even if you can fillet a halibut like a samurai, and your entire back yard is an herb garden, and you think Hamburger Helper is a German au pair, and you say steack hache instead of ground chuck, and your own kitchen was laid out by NASA--still, don’t do it.

You will feel incompetent. Guaranteed. You will feel like starting over, beginning with the preparation of cornflakes.

And, if you hang around long enough, you will probably lose a pound or two. The constant movement and the occasionally searing heat of a traditionally organized European-style kitchen can do that. After all, the members of the kitchen staff don’t spend the evening sampling food.

They spend it chopping, peeling, mincing, dicing, frying, sauteeing, baking, grilling, poaching, braising, deglazing and flambeing. And sweating.

Working in a kitchen such as the one at Orange’s Chez Cary--one of the county’s oldest gastronomic meccas after 23 years in business--is to occupy a place in a regimented operation that is part tradition, part craft, part art and part theater.

Each member of the staff occupies a specific niche in the fragrant machinery of the kitchen, and all are interlocked through a hierarchy that can be compared, with equal truth, to that of an orchestra or an army (in some 19th-Century European kitchens, the head chef actually stood on a raised platform in the middle of the kitchen to direct operations).

The evening’s work, however, does not begin with a bang. The night staff at Chez Cary shows up about 4:30 p.m., about 2 hours before any evening diners arrive, and methodically begins to piece together everything that can be done in advance. Preparation man Rafael Serrano is already methodically chopping up a huge pile of parsley on one of two large wooden blocks in the kitchen’s preparation/pantry area.

The block, used exclusively for chopping vegetables, is well worn--in fact, it has taken so many blows from knife blades that its surface is concave and undulating. The surface of the meat-cutting block next to it is even more thoroughly worn.

Across the kitchen, in the tunnel-like enclosure containing the broilers, grills, ovens and gas burners, night sous chef Albert Lusser and day sous chef Chico Abarca (substituting this night for one of the grill chefs) are assembling the ingredients for one of the evening’s specials, a bouillabaisse.

They are also performing the nightly ritual of whipping up dinners for the staff, tonight a coq au vin with a side of noodles. Their motions are quick but not hurried as they saute the chicken and pasta in large aluminum saute pans--the same sort of speedy but deliberate movement one might see in a professional poker dealer or a sketch artist.

With nothing to occupy his hands for a moment, Lusser absently twirls a pair of aluminum tongs around his index finger.

It is Lusser and Abarca, and not head chef Eugene Piquemal, who will do most of the cooking. Piquemal, like all head chefs in the European tradition, is an overseer. He is responsible for drawing up the menu, buying food and coordinating the kitchen’s operation. It is the head chef, Piquemal says, who determines the personality of the kitchen.

“If the head chef is a loudmouth, everyone else around will be a loudmouth too,” he says. “If he’s low-key, the people around him will follow that too.”

Since Piquemal first worked as an apprentice in 1943 in the kitchen of the Hotel Barbacanne in the French Pyrenees, he says he has seen enough clamorous kitchens and aloof chefs to know that he does not like either.

“You’ve got to have discipline,” he says. “There are some (head) chefs who are always drinking wine. They’ll have a gallon in the walk-in (refrigerator/freezer). Or they sit in their office and say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ But I think you’ve got to have discipline. My philosophy is to work with my people. I work with them and cook with them. Everybody has to do his part.”

The parts the staff members play at Chez Cary are not as rigidly defined as those of larger, more traditional European restaurants or hotels. For instance, the French culinary encyclopedia, “Larousse Gastronomique,” lists--in descending rank--such staff positions as chef de brigade (head chef, assisted by a sous chef), saucier (sauce chef), garde-manger (larder chef, sometimes assisted by a cold chef), rotisseur (roast chef; may also act as a staff cook), entremettier (vegetable chef, sometimes assisted by a soup maker), poissonnier (fish chef), patissier (pastry chef, sometimes assisted by an ice cream maker and a confectioner), communard (staff cook, sometimes assisted by a keeper) and a tournant (relief chef).

Dish and pot washers and vegetable preparers and other prep workers round out the traditional kitchen.

At Chez Cary, kitchen staff members sometimes double up on jobs. Piquemal, for instance, routinely acts as the pastry chef, and Miguel Garcia, the pantry man, often assists as a cook.

Most of the time, however, Piquemal is a kind of culinary traffic cop, walking to the different work sites in the kitchen and checking on progress. Occasionally, he steps behind the counter with the cooking chefs to make a suggestion or lend a hand.

Tonight the soup is a creation of Piquemal’s: cream-of-butter squash. And he takes delight in reminding Abarca of Abarca’s first taste of the bright yellow soup.

“He made this face,” Piquemal says, “and I said, ‘No, it’s not done yet.’ I added some things and then told him to taste it again, and he said, ‘Oh, chef, this is delicious. ‘ You have to show them you know how to do it.”

Abarca grins.

Things have just begun to pick up about 6:30 as Lusser strains several gallons of shrimp stock from a large steam pot at the end of the ranks of burners, stoves and broilers. Abarca enjoys a last cup of coffee before the rush, drinking it from a wine glass.

About 10 minutes later, Lusser and Abarca are moving. The waiters, pushing brown Formica-topped trolleys fitted with burners, have begun to return from the dining room with orders. The pitch of the kitchen begins to rise slightly.

Abarca quickly but gingerly picks up several rosette-shaped duchesse potatoes and plunges them into the deep fryer. He turns, shakes a pair of saute pans sizzling brightly on high flames, turns again and begins to butterfly a lobster tail. He is deliberate and spare, with no motion wasted.

He and Lusser work in a sort of series of pirouettes, adding spices by hand (no measuring), ladling oil into pans, occasionally producing high flames out of the pans as they add splashes of brandy.

And, just when the thought occurs that the duchesse potatoes have probably shriveled to a cinder, Abarca turns yet again and, almost without looking, raises the basket out of the hot oil and rolls the potatoes into a rectangular metal pan, perfectly browned.

Does he remember everything that’s going on?

“Everything, “ he says. “Been working at this for a long time.”

By 7:15, the kitchen is up to cruising speed, and the heat level in front of the burners is approaching the No. 15 sunscreen stage. Abarca disappears briefly and returns with a plastic beer mug. He takes a long pull from it and places it on the top shelf above his cutting board.

“It’s water,” he says, pointing to the mug. “This is good because a lot of chefs, they use a glass, and if it breaks”--he spreads out his arms to indicate the vessels before him that are filled with chopped vegetables, onions, garlic, spices, butter and other condiments--”you have to throw everything out.”

Not that the stuff is irreplaceable. Next to the preparation/pantry area is a large walk-in refrigerator/freezer, a.k.a. the larder from heaven. Inside is stacked just about everything incorporated into the Chez Cary dishes that can be prepared in advance, which is a lot.

Inside the blessedly cold, moist (you can see your breath) walk-in are racks of fresh asparagus, delicate green beans, peeled potatoes and carrots in cold water, ornate lemon garnishes for fish dishes, watermelons, kiwi fruits, decoratively sliced cheeses for onion soup gratine, breads, milk, trays of piped duchesse potatoes and snails in tiny rings of French bread, frozen cuts of beef, veal, fish and shrimp.

Much of it goes from there directly to the cooks, who store an evening’s worth of it near the burners in small tureens and dishes, or in refrigerated or heated cabinets.

Each chef’s domain along the burners (and each other kitchen worker’s area) is considered inviolate, Piquemal says. Within these kingdoms about 5 feet long, each chef works with the same rapid efficiency of a crack Marine assembling a rifle blindfolded.

“These (areas) are for them and only them,” Piquemal says. “They have everything the way they want it, and nobody touches it but them.”

On Lusser’s end, for instance, are arranged containers of flour for dredging, butter, olive oil, capers, shallots, chopped green peppers, sliced mushrooms, garlic, basil, oregano, mint, beef stock, chicken stock, soups and bottles of Marsala wine, sherry and brandy.

There is no painstaking portioning out of these ingredients by the chefs, no measuring spoons or cups hanging on pegs. Each item is snatched up quickly, cleanly and tossed into the ubiquitous saute pans without ceremony. And, a few minutes later, the finished product--a lobster thermidor, a saltimbocca Florentine, a grilled pepper steak, a poitrine de poulet cordon bleu-- is slid across the counter for Piquemal’s perusal before the waiters whisk it away.

(The chefs do not prepare all the items on the menu, however. The salads are mixed and tossed at table by waiters, as are dishes that require flaming and instant serving, such as the dessert bananas Foster.)

Such variety and skill, in any fine restaurant, does not come cheaply. Most entrees on the Chez Cary dinner menu are $20 to $25. Lunch entrees are in the mid-teens.

There are dangers.

“You can cut, you can burn, you can slip on the floor and break your neck,” Piquemal says. “That’s why we have padding on the floor, and we wear special shoes.”

Spills occur regularly, but “that might depend on the moon,” he says. A chef is likely to be lightly cut or burned “about once a week.”

And there are long periods at the beginning of most chefs’ careers that are lean, monetarily at least. Piquemal says that during his apprenticeship in France, he worked without pay. Lusser says his early years at hotel school in Innsbruck, Austria, did little to make his wallet bulge.

They do better now. Estimates of a head chef’s pay range from $50,000 a year to about $100,000. A sous chef can routinely earn $35,000 to $60,000.

Today, they say, the reward is the opportunity to create dishes of their own, sometimes at the request of a diner or, in Piquemal’s case, as part of piecing together a new menu for a restaurant. In fact, Piquemal spent a part of the evening in his spare office off the preparation area, surrounded by shelves laden with institutional-sized cans of fruits and vegetables, working on a new menu that he says will debut at the restaurant in about a month.

It includes such esoterica as medallions of venison chausseur, roasted and stuffed pheasant with truffle sauce and one that got away: brochette d’alligator a la bayou-- broiled Cajun alligator.

“It’s absolutely delicious,” says Piquemal, kissing the tips of his fingers in a classic chef’s gesture of high praise. “But I don’t think we’ll use it. I don’t think a lot of people are ready for that one.”

There are other perks: tasty on-the-job meals, an occasional trip into the dining room to take a bow (“Some chefs like to go out into the dining room and impress,” says Piquemal, shrugging. “That’s really not for me, but if they ask me, I go.”), and, at Chez Cary, live music.

The hot corner of the kitchen turns into a highly flavored sauna by the time Marianne Rotstein and Larry Rousseve show up at about 7:30, dressed in formal black and carrying a violin and guitar, respectively.

“We always play for them before we go out into the dining room,” says Rotstein, smiling. She tucks the violin under her chin, and she and Rousseve take a request from the prep area: “Besame Mucho.”

Abarca and Lusser smile and, for a second or two, stop to listen. Then they dab their foreheads and turn back to the burners.