The Genius in the Kitchen: Behind the Scenes of Fine Dining at Crabtree’s Kittle House

Chef Brad(ford) McDonald

After a month poking at the Kittle House website and creating general Internet harmony (like moving their email systems to Gmail), I decided I wanted to hang out in the kitchen.

Chef Brad McDonald graciously allowed me to hang out in the kitchen for a day. It was a Monday night, so we had plenty of time to chat. He’s from Mississippi, and has cooked at Alain Delancey, Per Se, and Noma.

I’d eaten quite a few of Brad’s dishes already and admired his precision in contrasting textures, along with a elegant, playful wittiness to his flavor pairings. Seared foie gras with sour cherry brownie. Beet salad with peanut meringue.

He is economic in body mass and motion. Before meal times, he’s bent over the counter, peeling shrimp or working on some dill with short, swift motions. If you talk to him, he carries on conversation while still deeply engrossed in his task.

Brad is a very particular kind of person. The first thing you notice about him is the beard – his semi-sarcastic explanation is that it’s winter, hence, beard-growing season. He does not tolerate bullshit, nor does he speak it, cook it, or serve it. While he radiates a certain cynicism – or, if he were to explain it, realism – there’s a beauty in how it rubs up against extraordinary pride in his work. His words are as blunt as his mind is agile. You see, Brad does not describe things. He critiques them.

And everything should be perfect. He will work 7 days a week to see that it is precisely that.

He had me put on some highly unflattering chef’s whites – it involved very high-waisted pants and a top with much-too long sleeves. Then I watched from noon until 9pm.

The general rhythm was that an order would come out through a machine, then Pete, another cook, would handle the protein, while Brad would prepare the vegetable component. On busier nights, Brad would be in sole charge of plating.

Brad and Pete worked in a choreographed high wire act – Pete would fire up a piece of salmon, relay how many minutes until it was ready, then the two would magically be finished at precisely the same moment. All plating was done underneath scorching heating lamps, then placed on a gridboarded table with table numbers and settings relayed for each dish to the wait staff.

Pete's hands

Pete’s hands were covered in scars, discolorations, and a blackened flap of skin on his thumb hung open like a door left ajar. “You should have seen my hands last month,” he said when I scrutinized his arms. He shared one horrifying story of an employee at another kitchen stepping knee deep into a fryer.

“He didn’t work for awhile,” he said.

Pete also taught me a neat kitchen trick: by touching your index finger, then middle finger, and so on, to the fleshy part of palm under the thumb, you can approximate the increasing doneness of a steak. Another highlight: there was a photo of Giada De Laurentiis taped to the inside of a storage door. We both agreed she was gorgeous.

During lulls, Brad worked on a new recipe concept. He a squared off base of a cauliflower, with all its natural nooks and crannies, and immersed it in a gelatin-laden red pepper puree. The idea was that the puree would fill in the holes, solidify, then he could cut off slices into a millefiori vegetable terrine. I asked him about it later, and he said it was going to be more technically challenging than he had originally thought.

Plating

Another challenge I found was the sheer heat of a kitchen. To watch them work, you’d think they were handling cold plates. They both kept poker faces squeezing, prodding, and holding insanely hot food and tools. At one point, Brad tried to make me useful by moving a dish literally two feet.

I failed. The plate burned me. I had to resort to wrapping an apron around my fingers to sustain three seconds of contact.

Clearly, I’m not cut out for kitchen work. The most labor I did all day was stirring a bowl of chocolate truffles – sitting in an ice bath. More my comfort level.

If you run into me, I’d love to talk about hierarchy, culture, and other things I learned behind the scenes. But the main point here is that kitchen work is incredibly demanding – Pete’s hands can prove it.

Cauliflower panna cotta, caviar, shoestring fries