Up the Cooking Ladder

Thirty-five-year-old Gilbert Castro is from El Salvador; 25-year-old Luis Martinez hails from Mexico. Neither of them, by their own admission, had even boiled water before arriving in the United States.

But a new-found passion for cooking has pushed them steadily up the food-industry ladder, and today, sous-chef Castro and sous-chef-in-training Martinez are two of many Latino immigrants that have found their niche in the growing diversity of Southern California’s kitchens.

If you think that only a French-trained chef can devise a real Bearnaise sauce, or that only an Italian cook can produce true al dente pasta, consider that according to the 1990 census, 66.73% of the cooks in Los Angeles County restaurants are of Latino descent. Those places include all the restaurants you’ve heard of--including Spago and Patina--and even the tiniest ethnic restaurant, from Korean barbecue joints and Japanese noodle shops to Russian delis and soul food houses.

Walk into almost any restaurant in Southern California and you’ll find Latinos in the kitchen. Latinos are the supporting cast to celebrity chefs and the backbone of even the humblest hamburger stand.

Most, like Castro and Martinez, start at the bottom of the totem pole as dishwashers, one of the few jobs available in Southern California that requires limited skills and no English. From there, many become prep cooks, but few ever reach the top position in the kitchen. They chop the onions, peel the carrots, tend the sauces, work the grills, but rarely do they meet the press. The most famous example of someone who rose from dishwasher to head chef of a high-profile restaurant is Martin Garcia--he headed the kitchen at Michael’s in Santa Monica for seven years.

It may be that many Latinos get their first breaks as dishwashers and prep cooks because they are willing to work for less money than chef-school graduates, but the pot scrubbers and onion-peelers who do rise to sous-chef and beyond are getting their training the old-fashioned way, through the apprentice system that is still in place in many of France’s great three-star restaurants.

What follows is a look behind the scenes of two Southern California restaurants with two Latino chefs on the rise.

Gilbert Castro

Gilbert Castro is an early riser. By 6:30 every morning, after eating a hearty home-cooked breakfast, he’s en route from his home in North Hills to Cha Cha Cha in Encino, where, as sous-chef, he’ll spend the day feverishly cooking other people’s brunches and dinners, Caribbean style.

For Castro, the ascent from dishwasher to sous-chef has taken a laborious 15 years, of which the last three--in Cha Cha Cha’s kitchen--were decisive.

“I started here as a dishwasher, working a few hours a day,” recalls Castro who was forced to leave El Salvador when the war broke out. Castro talks as he does the prep work for this Saturday’s brunch. It is 8 a.m. and he’s been in the kitchen, which he opens every morning, for nearly an hour.

Encino’s Cha Cha Cha is one of three Southern California restaurants with the same name that specialize in Latin and Caribbean cuisine. The original Los Angeles branch at Melrose and Virgil and a Long Beach branch are owned by the chain’s co-founder Toribio Prado, who himself rose from cook at Ivy at the Shore to prominent Latino restaurateur with a small empire of places, including Cava and Prado. Lee R. Laine, who opened the Ventura Boulevard Cha Cha Cha is now the principal owner of the Encino restaurant.

None of the dishes Castro makes at Cha Cha Cha can be traced back to his native El Salvador, but that doesn’t bother him. He’s too busy. Right now he’s mixing batter for French toast and pancakes in one pan; in another, he’s clarifying butter, and in a third, fresh tuna steaks for tuna salad are poaching in a spicy broth.

Castro, who worked as a farm administrator in El Salvador, is in charge of ordering all ingredients at Cha Cha Cha and supervising the kitchen staff (all Latinos) in the chef’s absence. Today he makes sure all prep work is done by the time brunch orders start pouring in.

Prior to Cha Cha Cha, Castro worked a variety of jobs--none particularly promising--as dishwasher, prep cook and cook for a fast-food seafood restaurant.

“People always get an opportunity and mine came here,” he says. “There was an American chef who helped us a lot. He said, ‘learn and when an opportunity comes up I’ll move you.’ ”

Castro moved, from dishwasher to prep cook, to bread maker to pastry chef and finally, a year and a half ago, he became sous-chef.

“I never get bored here,” he adds as he tests pasta for doneness and starts chopping vegetables. “And I love to cook.”

It’s 10:30 a.m now and Castro has some 10 pots to watch: beans in one, rice in another, chips frying for chilaquiles in the next, seasoned chicken breasts in the oven. There’s not a lot of imaginative cooking going on at this time, but rather a show of supervision and organization, something Castro knows how to do well.

Going from dishwasher to sous-chef, says Cha Cha Cha owner Laine, is “not unusual but not that common either. . . . It takes a brain and ambition. Gilbert understands that this is a business. He knows how to order, how to buy, how to get good prices and quality.”

Laine and his wife Norma are appreciative enough of Castro that they nominated him this year for a HEROS Award (Hispanic Employees of Restaurants Outstanding Service)--which he won.

On his way to the back storage fridge, Castro stops briefly to joke with the prep cooks, who are shaping crab cakes to the beat of Mexican-music radio station KLAX-FM.

“You know, he’s too macho to cook at home,” says prep cook Araceli Magdaleno, who happens to be Castro’s sister-in-law.

“Oh, I do now and then,” Castro says with a laugh, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache. The truth is, Castro managed to charm Araceli before her 19-year-old sister Maria came to work as a prep cook for Cha Cha Cha. “Araceli said I’d be good for her sister,” says Castro. The couple wed last year and Maria quit work a few months back to prepare for the birth of their first child, a girl.

Castro is surrounded by family at the restaurant. A little before noon, waiter Pedro Magdaleno, Maria and Araceli’s brother, hands Castro the first order of the day: corn chowder and Caesar salad. It’s a breeze, since everything is already prepped.

A few minutes later, however, the pace quickens when 12 orders come in and Castro becomes a whirlwind, shouting orders in Spanish, grilling chicken, sauteing vegetables and finishing the sauces needed to fill the plates laid out in front of him. With Pedro waiting impatiently, he quickly garnishes the dishes and hands them over. For a few minutes, at least, things return to normal.

By the time chef Steve Maxie comes in at 12:30 p.m., things are in full swing in the kitchen.

Maxie, who’s been with the restaurant a year and a half, confers briefly with Castro, and satisfied that everything is going well, starts working on a new duck special for that evening.

He knows he can rely on Castro to follow his instructions and get the work done. But in order for him to make the jump to chef, Maxie says, Castro still needs to work in a couple more restaurants, to gain some more knowledge.

“Sure, I’d love to be a chef someday,” says Castro as he serves new orders. “But that’s still far away. I’m only starting and I have too much to learn. I love Cuban and Mexican food. If I could open my own restaurant, that’s what I’d cook.”

At 1 p.m. Castro hasn’t eaten a thing since he arrived at 7:30 a.m. Nor has he sat down.

Tired? No way. “If you sit down, you get lazy,” he grins, summing up his whole philosophy.

Luis Martiniez

Luis Martinez, sporting a short pony-tail and stud in his left ear, gets his daily workout by going up and down stairs: down to the food storage in the building next door, up to the kitchen at 72 Market Street in Venice.

Before putting a single pot on the stove, Martinez, who drives to the restaurant early each morning from his Mid-Wilshire apartment, checks that all the ingredients are in, makes a note of the ones he’s supposed to receive and makes sure line and prep cooks are in place. He then carefully studies the lists of ingredients and the recipes chef Roland Gibert has left for him the night before. Next, he starts making the French sauces that are the essence of Gibert’s menu.

“I have to be very careful with Rolando’s sauces,” Martinez explains, using his own Spanish version of Gibert’s name. “Some of them take five or six hours to make,” he adds, not without some pride.

Gibert has invested a lot of time in training Martinez. The young cook is talented, says Gibert. He’s a fast learner, and most important, he has a sense of taste.

Martinez never knew he had any particular talent for cooking until he came to Los Angeles when he was 17. Unlike Castro, he left his country by choice--to look for a different life. Like Castro, he had never cooked before.

In his hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico, he says, “I had my mother and sisters who would cook.” In Los Angeles, he’s the one relatives call to man the kitchen when they have a party, and Martinez happily obliges.

“The truth is, I love to cook,” he says as he melts butter for the Dijon mustard sauce. “I could do it all day.”

No wonder his stint as dishwasher for one Santa Monica restaurant lasted only a year. Since then he’s stuck exclusively to kitchen work, in Italian, American, Iranian and French restaurants.

“The first time I saw a kitchen--the fights, people screaming, all those orders--I thought ‘I’ll never get in!’ Then one day the cook didn’t come and the owner asked me to help,” Martinez recalls. “My next job, I asked to work as a prep cook, and when I realized I liked the kitchen, I decided to go to school and learn English.”

His real opportunity, however, was Gibert, who he met working at Tulipe, the chef’s former restaurant.

“They offered me a job as a busboy, but I didn’t want that,” says Castro, who stuck it out in the kitchen and caught Gibert’s attention. When Gibert went to 72 Market Street a year ago, he asked Castro to come with him.

“Rolando is always teaching me. In other places, if they have you as a prep cook, they’ll keep you as a prep cook forever.” Instead, in this kitchen, where cooking is a very serious affair, Martinez is being groomed to be sous-chef, in charge of the morning shift.

As such, he has to cook for the kitchen and restaurant staff, “ la familia ,” Martinez says, and starts to do so at about 10 a.m. Today’s staff menu will be sauteed chicken gizzards, pasta and, of course, a healthy green salad, befitting 72’s movie-star image.

While he sautes gizzards in one pan, Martinez tastes the reduced mustard sauce and, satisfied, adds a hefty dose of chicken stock that will simmer for about three hours. In a few minutes he’ll start two other sauces, the demi-glace , and the whole-grain mustard sauce.

“You have to learn the flavor of each dish and each sauce,” he explains. “That’s why I like the kitchen. You’re always learning.”

Martinez never shouts orders. He gives them quietly, always following them with a “please.”

“This is milk; this is cream,” he explains to the dishwasher who has handed him the wrong ingredients. “They have to learn what I do, so they can take over when I go on vacation,” he adds. Martinez will be going to Mexico soon to get married, to a girlfriend who doesn’t speak any English and has never been in the United States.

The prospect worries Gibert, who is afraid Martinez might not return. But there’s no way, argues the young cook. “After all I’ve worked here, what would the point of not coming back?”

It’s 10:30 a.m. and Martinez has several pots going. One boils potatoes for mashed potatoes, another warms the soup special, smoked cabbage, yet another heats up the restaurant’s famous kick-ass chili. At the same time Martinez chops up the vegetables for the meatloaf gravy and starts the sauce for today’s fish special: grilled baby salmon.

At 11 a.m., before lunch orders start pouring in, he goes over the specials and prices with the secretary and finally takes a sip of Coke, the only thing he’s had all morning.

“I barely eat because I taste all day long and it fills me up,” he explains.

Oddly enough, he prefers the taste of French and Italian cuisine over his native Mexican food. French food, in particular, interests him, and decorating the plates before they go out to the table is his passion.

The dinner menu, however, is a decidedly better venue for decoration. Lunch orders, which start coming in a little before noon, focus on sandwiches, burgers and salads.

“Diana Ross is coming for lunch at 1,” announces a waiter.

Everyone snaps to attention, but Martinez is unfazed. He’s too busy watching the grill.

Chef Gibert has been in the kitchen since 11:45 a.m., working alongside Martinez and the prep cooks. From time to time, he’ll stop and give detailed instructions to Martinez who hangs onto his every word.

Martinez is starved for cooking knowledge.

“I’m happy here,” he states. “Rolando pays me well and he teaches me. But eventually I’d like to go learn somewhere else, maybe one day a week. I want to learn more about French foods, see another point of view,” he says as he sears vegetables for duck spring rolls per Gibert’s instructions.

Martinez has no doubt that one day he’ll open his own restaurant, and he’s already developed his own recipes.

“I love to do pizzas,” he says, his eyes shining. “Last time I went to Oaxaca I tasted some pizzas and they were really different from what I make. So maybe I could go back and open something there,” he says, and pauses and looks around.

“But not yet. Here I have a future. I can be someone.”