Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

The cook's spoons with holes or slots are, unsurprisingly, female, and the unslotted ones, male.

batches and laid out unrinsed and still warm on lightly oiled sheet pans before being finished in sauce a few minutes later.

Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business.

gastrite (sugar and vinegar)

Watchwords for fine dining? Tuesday through Saturday. Busy. Turnover. Rotation. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York.

Those paper toques are coffee filters or clown hats,

'Have you seen this foam guy's shit?' I asked, talking about Ferran Adria's restaurant of the minute, El Bulli, in Spain.

If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.

You need a nice thick non-stick pan, and not one with a thin veneer of material that peels off after a few weeks. And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don't use metal in it,