To Thine Own Self Be True
Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island is a decommissioned prison that now functions as a film set available for rental, owned by Broadway Stages, a production studio with property all over New York City. The first day Russia attacked Ukraine, I listened to the news in the parking lot, early for work. I was brought in to consult on a prison kitchen scene. I have never been to prison, but I have worked in kitchens. The week prior, I worked with the principal actor on his knife skills to play a professional chef. This day, I was there as emotional support for the actor in case he lost his form, as well as a general consultant for the kitchen scene and background actors. The former prison was dark and cold—there was no reason to cut into any profits with amenities like heat and light—and the hallways and cafeteria were inscribed with rules, leftovers from a previous carceral life or movie.
I check the work of everyone in the scene (no blood-letting on my watch) and show an actor how to sharpen a knife with a large metal kitchen spoon, something I learned from a former co-worker. I notice the set decorator put bags of onions and potatoes on the ground, which is a clear health code violation, and I have them lifted to the bottom shelf. The rules are the rules in any kitchen. At the end of the day, I confer with the prop master to make sure the food gets donated to a community fridge.
After cooking in restaurants for years, I work as a food stylist and consultant for TV and film. People assume the food isn’t real, but it is very real, and edible. Sometimes the food is scripted, and other times we make it up according to the scene, style, and time period. You must know how food works, and by that I mean how it sits and how it acts, because it is also a character. Will it die on the set under the lights? Will I have to replace it every scene, or will it hold up? Is this shot a close-up, or is it wide? Are you a hero? I always whisper to the food when I plate it. Make it taste good, but first make it look good.
The biggest project I’ve worked on was Black Rabbit starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman as brothers, and it allowed me to be a continual member of the production rather than a day player because many scenes took place in the eponymous restaurant. This meant I read all the scripts and their rewrites, witnessing the story being honed. I was the restaurant consultant and a member of the food styling team. We created the menu for the Black Rabbit, informed by the head chef Roxie, a queer Black woman from a small town in Maryland, played by Amaka Okafor, who is of Nigerian and Punjabi descent. The food resided at the intersection of these places: soft shell crabs with lima beans, curried lamb shank and jollof rice, a lemongrass and ginger-braised chicken pot pie.
This experience had me hooked:
I like to be consumed.
This level of involvement spoke to me, requiring every piece of information, knowledge and skill I have, a full-contact sport, from making menus to organizing a walk-in and dry storage to teaching people how to work a station. The production design team created this kitchen to look good, to get interesting shots. It was my job to make sense of it as a busy downtown New York kitchen reviewed in the New York Times.
I need stories to understand things, like where the chef is from, what her food is, whom she hires to make her food and support her, and people she trusts. How can this small grill crank out the popular double cheeseburger and all the other dishes for this three-story restaurant? This is a kitchen of necessity, not one of endless investor money to be perfect. In most real places, we make do. Even with the best of intentions and bank accounts, everyone runs out of money before an opening. You make it work, often with materials left behind or picked up at auction.
I approached this task the same way as when I open real-life restaurants: Which thread do I pull first to set it all in motion? Once I figure that out, things fall into place. I can only start at my beginning, and after some meetings in the office, when the kitchen was almost set up and it just needed my eyes on it, I realized that this job is just like a real opening. It’s fun to talk about what wine and booze we’re serving in which glassware and consider the menu, but when it gets down to getting it done, it is hard, with a relentless timeline. And the same is true of a restaurant, which everyone wants to be fun but is intense. I had the same talk with myself I’ve had several times over, in the same situation but a different business, The next few weeks are going to be so hard.
Professional kitchens run on stainless steel, quart containers, and hotel pans and all of their friends—third, 6, and 9 pans. Speed racks are a godsend and metro racks currency (no one has made it better), and yes, affordability and the wipe-clean factor is a part of this fact.
Give me your sauce pans, your sheet trays, full, half, and quarter, fish tubs both shallow and deep—they’re all welcome here.
I’ll figure out which pot from the auction is suitable for the pasta pickup, and yes, I break down the menu into stations with the same actors working the same stations with the same tools because that’s how it works in a real restaurant. I figure out whom I would actually hire. The beauty of a great set is that everyone is too good at their job, so the minutiae makes everything real. You may not see it, but I know whether it’s there or not, and the actors do too.
Why is portraying reality so important? Often people say there’s a responsibility to represent the hard-working people in the kitchen properly, but there’s always a bit of labor fetish to this response—“we’re doing it for the salt of the earth.” The longer I live, the more surprised I am by the so-called experts, how it’s more about who they know rather than what they know. The ultimate reason to get it right is the most cook reason there is: for it not to be bullshit. There’s nothing worse than someone thinking they have some insight into your life because they read a book or watched a show. For those of us on the line, wrapping electrical tape on a cut finger to stay put, making cling wrap belts as our pants become loose after hours upon hours of work, it is nice to be seen for real. It’s nice to know that maybe someone who’s worked her fair share of brunch shifts is getting paid for it.
Millicent Souris is a writer and cook living in Ridgewood, New York. Her newsletter Attitude Adjustment Facility is named after her father’s motto for the family bar.
