戴夫·伯兰（Dave Beran）将头保持在水面上
Dave Beran is trying not to be weird about it, but he's staring across the dining room at your empty water glass and probably wishing he could fill it with his mind. So many things—cosmic, personal, and every shade in between—have been knocked askew by the pandemic, but this one is just scratching at his soul. Beran (F&W Best New Chef '14) has在餐馆工作从十几岁开始when he was "toast boy" at a diner，通过在诸如时尚关节的行政总厨之后的任期Alinea和Next, and now his own restaurantPasjoliin Los Angeles, and certain things are just muscle memory for him. You cut the onions for the soup just so. You plate the pressed duck down to the millimeter. You make elegant conversation sussing out how much people actually want to spend on wine. And, perhaps most core to his vision of hospitality, you keep your guests' water glasses filled.
Safety protocols vary city to city, if not hour by hour, so circumstances may have changed as you read this, but as of a Friday morning phone call in mid-April, L.A. County was not allowing servers and sommeliers to pour water or wine beyond the first glass or do anything tableside for restaurant guests—which was a hallmark of Pasjoli from its inception. As all the adaptations, pivots, accommodations, and (often expensive) points of hygiene theater washed over Beran and his team over the course of the last year-plus, they bobbed, weaved, and generally sailed ahead with grace. But this particular wave caught him square in the chest. He's not letting it knock him down.
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不断变化是贝兰烹饪精神的核心。就像大多数与季节合适的厨师一样，他和Pasjoli的团队自2019年9月餐厅开业以“高架社区小酒馆”开业以来一直处于菜单评估和调整状态，但他一直认为他一直接受极端。作为芝加哥的下一个行政总厨，贝兰的任务是每个季节的概念完全重塑餐厅的概念，从“童年”的主题转变为埃尔布利的食物到西西里人，然后在一个日历年中转移了凯兹基美食。亚搏电竞在对话中，他最近在圣莫尼卡（Santa Monica），贝兰（Beran）和团队（Team）的近期座位的18个座位的米其林星级独奏，受到渴望不断询问他们对美食的所有事物的愿望，并保持与自然的无休止对话（大概是赏金的供应商）。但是，这一切都是根据选择而变化的，主动重新发明为实践，每个新元素都考虑，重新考虑和永恒评估。这并不意味着他想在一年半的时间内关闭并重新打开Pasjoli三次，但他接受了它所提出的机会。
"We always try to look at the positive side of everything, because it's easy to look at all the negative stuff. But it's almost like in being forced to rethink and open the restaurant three times, the restaurant gets substantially better each time," Beran says. "You have all these ideas of what your restaurant wants to be. But usually when you go into a restaurant the first time, it's in its infancy. It takes two or three years for a restaurant to really understand what it wants to be. I wanted everyone to order their own food, and not share. I wanted to branch away from the idea that we're going to get all this for the table, and we need this and that. Obviously within a month, I realized it didn't matter how hard I fought, it was never going to change. I feel like the best version of a restaurant is towards the end of its second year, when you have the confidence to just be what you want it to be without feeling like you have to uphold these obligations to your diners."
他继续说道,“每一次我们重新开放,这就像,'Well, we can't pour water tableside, or pour wine at the table for that matter. Let's just stop being frustrated about it, and let's figure out what else we can do instead for a guest experience.' We had to shrink the menu. Then, you start finding the importance in what you really want to keep on the menu, because there's four of us who work the line instead of the seven originally, plus two chefs on the outside of the line."
Financially, he says, "It sucked," but the enforced strictures brought some clarity. "It's really forced us to rethink the importance of the restaurant, and how it connects. Not from me feeling like my ego's fulfilled, but rather how it connects with diners and the neighborhood. Because when we first opened, it didn't connect with the neighborhood at all."
That started with the price point, which Beran says is still not inexpensive by any means, but there were other barriers. "Initially, we didn't have any patio out front. Our host stand was inside. The front door was always closed. It's a pretty aesthetic on the outside of the restaurant, but nothing about a restaurant like that makes you want to peek your head in and just see what it looks like. It just wasn't a community-feeling restaurant in Santa Monica initially; it was definitely a destination," Beran says.
He took the note, and as COVID-19 regulations came into play, Pasjoli adapted to be the restaurant the neighborhood needed. "Once we had the patio and moved the host stand outside—with dog treats in the host stand—all the neighbors got to know us. We started opening for lunch on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at a much lower price point. Now we have regulars who come twice a week for lunch that live down the street who never would've come for dinner, or never would've come had we not been outside."
That takes physical and financial readjustment, sure, but also a nudging aside of ego—often a tall order for a chef-owner who's spent their whole career and countless cash to finally be the one to call the shots. "I think the first time we opened, it was such a push to prove to the world that this was a French restaurant, to the point where we're doing things like, 'Here's your main dish. Every main dish comes with a side dish,' and they're all like, 'Here's a byaldi that is the style of this, and an Escoffier dish of this.' It was awesome, but it was our version of other people's established French food," Beran says.
He used the pause to ground himself and look around. This restaurant was in California, not Chicago or Provence, and he needed to embrace that, starting with the produce. "I had this whole epiphany before we reopened the second time where I was looking at the French food that I love, and some of my favorite French chefs. You start looking at the stuff that they talk about, or you look through their books, or even Alain Passard's Instagram for that matter. He's glazing turnips in an apple cider reduction. That's not in the Escoffier book; that's just his food, and it happens to be French,"
He started to ask himself, "Why aren't we just cooking our food? Our food is French at this restaurant. Now, we have a beurre blanc that has miso in it. Because of my time at Next, for example, I had so many different influences. Why weren't we using all of that as our own influence, but treating it as our version of the French food?"
这一切都以某种方式释放了Beran，使自己和团队可以以如火如荼地进行的方式仔细检查实践。“当您搬进新房子时，您不太可能重新装修您当前的房屋，并重新考虑墙上的东西，而不是搬进新房子。显然，一切都基于您以前所做的一切。但是，但是幸运的是，作为必须关闭的副产品，我们可以真正评估有效的东西的价值和什么，以至于我们重新开放时不会浪费时间。”
Beran closed his other restaurant, Dialogue—a plan already in the works—brought everyone who wanted to over to Pasjoli, and with the full input of the team, developed a compensation model that allows more hours and greater pay for everyone on staff (minus himself). "I've pretty much been working six days a week since the pandemic started. Because as an owner, you have to start looking at things and saying 'I'm almost like free labor,'" he says.
“我们真的优先给员工more hours. We collectively as a team opted to shift our labor a certain way, so rather than hiring more people, the management, as a collective decision, opted to work a little more. I'm the only one who works six days. Everyone else is still five days," Beran says. "If you could hire 12 people, and give them all three days a week, inevitably they're going to look somewhere else for two to three days a week. Or if you can look at all of them and say, 'I can give you five days a week with eight to nine hour shifts, so you can a little bit of overtime,' then you have a full time job with healthcare that you can always come to, and you don't have to split your time." It's better for their mental health, he says, because they have a sole job they can rely on without having to worry about stitching together hours, possibly at a place where they're reliant on tips, or in a non-tipped position.
"During the pandemic, diners were like, 'Why don't you have a tip line? We want to leave …' We're like, 'Service is included,' but they wanted to leave more. We have an optional tip line. We printed very clearly on the bottom of the menu that service is included, and it's completely optional. And we made stamps that we stamp right over the top with red ink that says, 'This is optional. Service is included in the price.' And on average, people leave five to ten percent for the staff," Beran says.
此外，加利福尼亚最近通过了一项法律，称房屋的后背可以包含在小费池中，没有规定。“我们与工作人员的所有人进行了交谈，我们有一个整个结构系统，其中包括房屋的背面，不是80/20。这是一个非常公平的分歧。就像任何人都被压迫的一样。因此，工作人员中的每个人都在看到额外的钱。”
伯兰坚持认为，照顾工作人员是餐厅的责任，而不是对食客的压力。“如果我们要作为一个专业行业的行业发展，我认为我们必须像其他专业行业一样行事。其中包括医疗保健，其中包括我们对员工的责任，而不是客人的责任。”即使大流行（触摸木材，交叉手指）的记忆，该模型仍将保持到位。
But back to the water. This change in staffing has forced the Pasjoli team to reassess how that precious labor is allocated. This doesn't mean cutting corners or dropping standards—something that is anathema to Beran, who'd probably rather forgo sleep entirely than serve a dish he deemed subpar—but rather doubling down on the things that are within the restaurant's control, and skimming off some things he'd always taken as rote. The meal kit version of the pressed duck for which the restaurant is famous included components for the sauce, and copious cooking instructions (including videos), but the sauce was curdling when people attempted to make it at home. Now the team focuses on making the best possible version of the sauce, and it's sent along fully made. The finished dish might not be as pretty as at the restaurant, but that's OK.
“我们放弃了控制权，这成为我们目前提供的所有食物的毯子。我认为我们的食物仍然很漂亮，但这与审美的动力更少，而与粉底有关，更多的是亚搏电竞风味和深度，即使您摇动整个待机容器，并从中制作一碗辣椒，它仍然会味道很棒，”贝兰说。
他没有为法国洋葱汤（French Onion Soup）提供75磅重的洋葱，这需要两个小时的小组，而是看着Robo Coupe上的一个附件。“它削减了他们的努力，并做得65％至70％。那种精美的就餐心态，我变得懒惰。”伯兰说。“现在我的评估是同样的评估，我从本质上释放了六个小时的劳动。那六个小时的劳动还能做什么？”
So while it's driving him up a wall to see a bottle on the table, or a semi-filled glass, Beran knows that he doesn't have any say over the matter, that there are perhaps are more pressing tasks at hand (he notes that previously, there was a person in each section whose time was primarily taken up with pouring water), and that he has to just deal with it. The diners are given a list of regulations when they make their reservation, and honestly, as long as he doesn't point out the elephant in the room, they may not even notice.
“我认为只要我们不让它奇怪的我们don't pour your water," Beran says. "I don't think guests are like, 'Wait, why didn't you pour this?' If I made it awkward, if I was like, 'Uh, I can't do this, but I'm sorry,' then guests are like, 'Oh, that's weird.' So I just need to not be weird about it."