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This past Wednesday I was invited to participate in the New Taste of the Upper West Side’s Vegetable Dinner at Dovetail. People paid $195 for dinner, and got all-vegetable courses from a bunch of chefs: I did the amuse bouche, then there were courses from Dovetail’s John Fraser, Harold Dietrle of Perilla and Kin Shop, Missy Robbins of A Voce, Ed Brown of Ed’s Chowder House, and Christian Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar. Even though I wasn’t included in the publicity materials, I really was there.

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I could not be driven.

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This was a strange event for me (although it wound up being a lot of fun), and I’ve got a lot to say about it, and you probably don’t have a lot of time, so in the spirit of a picture being worth 1000 words on today’s open market, I’ll be telling my story in pictures.

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Normally I’m in a cab crammed with food and my staff,
but this time it was only me. I did the event all alone.

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It was so lonely. Just me and my milk crates.

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I’m one of those people who’s always on time, and I was told to be there at 4pm. I got stuck in traffic and didn’t show up until 4:45, but it didn’t stress me out at all. Normally I’d be crawling the walls, but I was really proud of myself. This time I’d be the one to stroll in fashionably late. So I showed up at Dovetail and I found…

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…an empty restaurant. I found John and he said
“Oh, yeah. No one would ever be here this early.”

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Here’s John. (And me. It’s my blog so, by law, I have to appear
in every photo featuring another chef).

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The kitchen at Dovetail is huge, like the massive, sweeping prairie.
Knowing I wouldn’t be comfortable out in the middle of all that space where
anyone could just sneak up on me from behind, they gave me this tiny
corner where I could feel at home.

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The strangest thing about Dovetail is all the staff. The second your
dish was ready to be plated these…people would just come from out of
nowhere and hunch over your plates and start their plating frenzy.
Then they’d stop and…

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…there were your dishes. Plated! It wasn’t just me…

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…everyone’s plates took up all the surfaces and the plating
monsters swarmed them all, like killer kitchen ants.

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Missy Robbins of A Voce did a Barley Risotto with a Nettle Puree
and a cheese that none of the rest of us could pronounce (or even spell).

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Adam, from A Voce. I felt naked for not rolling with a crew.

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Halfway through the night, drinks started to arrive. This
is where things got fuzzy, but I did the amuse bouche so my dish was
already out. Kitchen fun fact: everyone drinks from quart containers.

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Even when we went up to the bar later, they knew that we kitchen
people would be uncomfortable with actual glasses in our hands.

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Lots of late-night drinking ensued, during which I learned that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Talking to John, Missy, Harold, and the rest of them, you realize that if you’re a chef, you just keep working this hard forever. We all slog away, six days a week, working crazy-long hours (12+ most days), and we all think that other chefs have it easier, when, in fact, we’ve all got it just about the same.

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Then on the way home I found a hand exerciser in
my cab. So maybe things are turning around? I’ll have
a more powerful grip?

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