Forget, for a moment, where you are sitting. Forget the room--the perfect white-on-white blankness of the canvas, the accents of richly polished black wood, the carefully arranged flowers and tables laid with clean, spartan cool. Forget the crowds that surround you, the money being brought to bear by top-of-the-hill swells in their fancy shoes and watches that cost more than your first car. Try to forget what dinner here is going to cost you.
Peter Mumford
The New Busy are quiet and efficient.
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Crush 2319 E. Madison St., 302-7874, chefjasonwilson.com. Dinner only, 5:30–10:30 p.m.; closed Mondays.
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Forget the menu. Forget that the menu you see today is likely different, in subtle ways, than the menu you would've seen last weekend, and different, in significant ways, than what was being cooked last month. Forget the truffles. Forget the local this and heirloom that. Forget, if you can, the foie gras, sectioned in its own little space on the board—two different preparations of the stuff, a torchon with spiced pears and a seared piece cut from a whole lobe, served with an almond financière, touched with huckleberries, both lavished with singular and individual attention by cooks who understand the unique power and luxury of the swollen livers of ducks and geese.
Forget the awards that have, both lately and historically, been lavished on this kitchen. Forget the softly ringing phone at the host's stand by the door and the smooth progress of the service staff in their black house livery, cutting courses across the floor like quiet submarines that leave no wake.
Forget everything that came before this instant and everything that might come after, and, for just a moment, sit and watch the kitchen. And listen—really listen.
Can you hear that?
Silence.
The guys in Jason Wilson's kitchen at Crush don't talk. Almost at all. There's no shouting of orders, no yelling for fires or dropped checks or replates. There's no music playing, no hard talk, no discussion of the blonde on 14 or panicked conferences on how to stretch the short demi that the brain-damaged prep cook didn't bother to stock across 57 tables.
Sitting at the bar overlooking the action in one of the city's smoothest kitchens, you can actually hear the music of shallots dancing in the pan, the sizzle of a saucier coming out of the oven. No one is banging oven doors open or closed. No one is slinging dirty gear into the pot sink. When someone sets a plate on the rail, they do so quietly and with the reverence of a priest handling a communion wafer. Not only can you hear the rasp of a pan scraping against the iron of a burner, but most of the time that's the loudest sound on the line.
When the cooks do speak, they do so quietly and with a shorthand so abbreviated that it's not even slang but more a distilled essence of language. Single words, or even just a gesture, will suffice. There and Now and Here and Wipe and Oil—not whispered, exactly, but soft. Gentle. Spoken with a turn of the head, a dip of the chin, as if to sully the smooth operation of the galley machine with ancillary directions or clarification would be somehow shameful and wrong.
Watch them long enough and you get the impression that, in a perfect world, Crush's crew would go an entire night without ever making a sound, without ever raising their heads from their appointed tasks, without ever straying from their positions before the stove, the burners, the garde manger station, or the expo table. You get the impression that all of them would like very badly to achieve this.
On Friday night, they worked to do all these things. I'd already polished off an exceptional bowl of handmade tagliatelle twined around bits of duck confit and fresh morel mushrooms so good and so fresh that they tasted like big, bloody bites of the heart of the earth. It was a dish that had flitted onto the menu like a butterfly, that would be gone again as soon as any of its parts (the duck, the morels, the green English peas, the urge to craft pasta) had passed their peak of availability or fascination to the cooks or customers.
I'd already eaten all the bread brought to me (beautifully dense rounds of baguette and softened, salted butter—each served in their own unique vessels) and devoured the amuse-bouche (gougères, topped with a snowfall of Parmesan, scooped from a plastic tub of them above the fryer station and, unfortunately, not as great as they ought to be because they were the one thing in the kitchen that appeared to be pre-prepped rather than assembled à la minute). I was doing nothing but sipping a glass of ice-cold Japanese beer and waiting for my next course, so I had time for a little culinary meditation.
From my seat at the counter, with only the quiet prattle of the bartender—who, unlike every other bartender everywhere, actually works from inside the kitchen because his post is set on the opposite side of the white counter that divides the European line from the dining floor—and the occasional word from the host behind me as distraction, I listened, observed, and was duly impressed by the unusual, almost impossible tranquillity of the Crush kitchen.
