It’s 5 a.m. on a Friday morning, and I’m looking at the “vault.” It’s not actually a vault, but it used to be, back when this was a bank. Now it’s used to store wine, glassware and plates for Balthazar. Erin Wendt, the restaurant’s general manager, took me here, rounding off a tour of its underground hinterland, a warren of storage rooms that have been colonized, piece by subterranean piece, since the 180-seat brasserie opened in 1997. Beneath the dining room on Spring and Crosby Streets, and moving west, there is a cavernous prep kitchen, the chef’s office, six walk-in fridges and one walk-in freezer, a bakery prep station and delivery room, a laundry area, a rather bleak staff break room, kegs and soda lines, managers’ offices, a room seemingly dedicated to storing menus and menu sleeves and, finally, beneath Broadway, a half-block away from the dining room, the vault. You can hear the N, Q and R trains trundling by with remarkable clarity.
For now, everything is quiet at Balthazar. The last guests from the night before left just a few hours ago, and the nighttime porters are still finishing their thorough scrub of the restaurant. But the delivery trucks are starting to arrive all over again, idling on Crosby. Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls. That’s just the fish and meat order.
Produce comes in, too — 50-pound cases of russets from Idaho stacked head high and six deep; spinach, asparagus, celery, mushrooms, tomatoes — as do dry goods, dairy and some 500 pounds of insanely expensive peanut oil for the French fries. The restaurant employs six stewards to deal with deliveries and storage alone; they weigh goods and check them against invoices, putting everything in its proper place, keeping the Health Department happy. At a typical restaurant, as much as one-third of the overhead goes to food costs, and so efficiency is an imperative. “Monday, you’ll see,” Kelvin Arias, the head steward, tells me, “all the walk-ins will be empty.”
SoHo has so thoroughly become a pleasure ground for the global 1 percent that it’s easy to forget, architecture aside, that it was once a manufacturing district. Before Keith McNally, the serial restaurateur who supposedly “invented downtown” Manhattan, opened Balthazar, the building at 80 Spring housed a tannery. Upstairs was a leather wholesaler; downstairs a vast sweatshop. “There were about 200 women down there on sewing machines,” McNally says.
Yet in many ways, Balthazar still operates like a factory. Quite literally, raw materials enter through one side early each morning, moving through various stations, where 150 to 200 employees, each playing a narrowly defined role, produce finished, value-added and marked-up goods and serve them directly to end users. During the busy season — roughly fall Fashion Week to Memorial Day — the restaurant spends $90,000 a week on food to feed some 10,000 guests.
Over the course of what I will be repeatedly told is a slow day, 1,247 people will eat here. (Normally, it’s about 1,500.) But within a narrow range, Balthazar knows how many people will come through its doors every single day of the week, and it can predict roughly what it will sell during every meal. It mass-produces high-quality food and pushes it out to customers, and its production numbers are as predictable as the system that churns out the food itself. Just about everyone who works at Balthazar calls it a machine.
For now, everything is quiet at Balthazar. The last guests from the night before left just a few hours ago, and the nighttime porters are still finishing their thorough scrub of the restaurant. But the delivery trucks are starting to arrive all over again, idling on Crosby. Men in lifting belts wheel hand trucks stacked high with food from across the globe: 80 pounds of ground beef, 700 pounds of top butt, 175 shoulder tenders, 1 case of New York strips, all from the Midwest; 5 pounds of chicken livers, 6 cases of chicken bones, 120 chicken breast cutlets; 30 pounds of bacon; 300 littleneck clams, 110 pounds of mussels from Prince Edward Island, another 20 pounds from New Zealand, 50 trout, 25 pounds of U10 shrimp (fewer than 10 pieces per pound), 55 whole dorade, 3 cases of escargot, 360 Little Skookum oysters from Washington State, 3 whole tunas, 45 skates, 18 black sea bass, 2 bags of 100 to 120 whelks, 45 lobster culls. That’s just the fish and meat order.
Produce comes in, too — 50-pound cases of russets from Idaho stacked head high and six deep; spinach, asparagus, celery, mushrooms, tomatoes — as do dry goods, dairy and some 500 pounds of insanely expensive peanut oil for the French fries. The restaurant employs six stewards to deal with deliveries and storage alone; they weigh goods and check them against invoices, putting everything in its proper place, keeping the Health Department happy. At a typical restaurant, as much as one-third of the overhead goes to food costs, and so efficiency is an imperative. “Monday, you’ll see,” Kelvin Arias, the head steward, tells me, “all the walk-ins will be empty.”
SoHo has so thoroughly become a pleasure ground for the global 1 percent that it’s easy to forget, architecture aside, that it was once a manufacturing district. Before Keith McNally, the serial restaurateur who supposedly “invented downtown” Manhattan, opened Balthazar, the building at 80 Spring housed a tannery. Upstairs was a leather wholesaler; downstairs a vast sweatshop. “There were about 200 women down there on sewing machines,” McNally says.
Yet in many ways, Balthazar still operates like a factory. Quite literally, raw materials enter through one side early each morning, moving through various stations, where 150 to 200 employees, each playing a narrowly defined role, produce finished, value-added and marked-up goods and serve them directly to end users. During the busy season — roughly fall Fashion Week to Memorial Day — the restaurant spends $90,000 a week on food to feed some 10,000 guests.
Over the course of what I will be repeatedly told is a slow day, 1,247 people will eat here. (Normally, it’s about 1,500.) But within a narrow range, Balthazar knows how many people will come through its doors every single day of the week, and it can predict roughly what it will sell during every meal. It mass-produces high-quality food and pushes it out to customers, and its production numbers are as predictable as the system that churns out the food itself. Just about everyone who works at Balthazar calls it a machine.
by Willy Staley, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Marvin Orellana for The New York Times