Ritz Pride
What gets done when no one is watching.
She Slapped my hand!
I was squeezing oranges. The pantry at the Ritz Carlton Boston was on the other side of the corridor that ran from the swinging doors that separated the kitchen from the dining room. On one side, to your right looking from the dining room into the kitchen, was the line. On the other side, the pantry, then the bake shop. At the end was the Garde Manger. A stainless steel balcony faced the corridor, topped by a pickup shelf so the waiters could collect their orders. I was doing what they called their training program, which meant working in every station of the kitchen but the Saucier and Broiler Cook. They were too exalted to be handled by a novice. It was my first day of training.
“She” who slapped my hand ran that pantry with an iron fist. Small woman, heavy Boston accent — the kind you could picture on a Saturday at Filene’s Basement, arguing over a price tag, taking no prisoners. She had been at the Ritz fifty years but refused to retire, and nobody had the courage to question it. She made the salads. She made the fruit cups. Normally, she squeezed the juice.
I had started squeezing. She was working on something else. She had eyes in the corners of her eyes. Before I’d gotten through the second orange, she crossed the pantry. The slap came first. Then:
“Don’t squeeze the white pith of the orange into the juice. If you squeeze the white part, it will make the juice bitter.”
A pause.
“That’s not how we do things at the Ritz.”
She was brash, sometimes crass. A working woman, completely herself — her manner direct to the edge of rude. And she had this other thing, completely separate and unexpected. A fierceness about the work. The force who had kept one corner of that kitchen exactly right for fifty years.
I stood there, in awe, holding the orange.
She began talking about “Mr. Banino.”
That was how she said it. Mr. Banino. Though he had died long before I had worked there, she didn’t say his name like you would a dead man’s name. An Italian immigrant who worked his way up from dishwasher to head of Food and Beverage at the Ritz Carlton Boston. The old-timers all talked about him the same way, as if at any minute he might come around the corner and test a soup, or suggest a sauce sit a few more minutes before going into the bain-marie.
She had become everything he stood for. When she talked about him you could hear it — almost like she didn’t want to let him down, even now that he was gone.
He was still alive in that kitchen.
Years later I was a sous chef at the Bay Tower Room, a private club owned by the Ritz. The standard had followed me to a new kitchen — and it had followed Chef Paul Malcuit, who asked me to oversee the cooking for a Boston Celtics championship dinner, the year Larry Bird started playing and Kevin McHale came in as a rookie. Paul had roots in it of his own. His uncle had cooked at the Ritz, and had brought Paul in to watch from the time he was a boy.
Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Celtics and the winningest coach in professional basketball, stood up to make his season-ending pep talk. Small man, cheap plaid suit, big cigar. Two-meter athletes around him — he slapped their hands as well. He warned them:
The next season, he said, will be the most difficult of their careers, much more so than winning the championship. Even the worst team in the league would play like they were in the finals in every game to have a chance to beat the champions — every game, every minute. By winning the championship they had taken on the burden of being The Champions. Everyone will want to humiliate them. Therefore, to remain the champion, they would have to understand the true meaning of Celtic Pride. Twenty-four hours a day. At the gas station, at the supermarket, with their families, alone, every minute of every day they would have to act like champions. Show grace, walk with pride. That was the price of the crown. That was what he meant by Celtics Pride. Suddenly this room filled with giants fell silent,
and every person in that room — players, cooks, waiters — was lifted up by this small man in a cheap plaid suit, who made fun of the players for spending so much money on their clothes. He even told one, your suit cost as much as I make in a year.
Years later I read an interview with the Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes. He of the fall away. He said he had heard of the Celtic Mystique, and Celtic Pride, but didn’t believe it. The first time he entered the Boston Garden, he said to himself, “What a dump!” The arena was a mess, old, seeming to be long past its prime. Steam rising between the wooden slats of the parquet floor, which sat on top of the ice rink used by the Boston Bruins. What pride? What mystique?
Dribbling down the lanes unopposed, he slipped gracefully to the right side to take his first fall away jump shot. From out of nowhere he saw a blur, a shadow, and the ball was smacked from his hands, bounced on the floor, and into the hands of Bill Russell, the great Celtic center. As he woke from what seemed a dream, inches from his face were Russell’s eyes, glowering with frightening glee, saying, “Welcome to the Boston Garden, Rookie.”
It didn’t matter that Hayes was a nobody yet, or that he’d just called the place a dump. Russell met a rookie’s first shot like the whole season turned on it. It took Hayes many games before he could make a shot in the Boston Garden.
The Pantry Woman wasn’t giving a lesson. She was seeing to it that the job was done the way it was supposed to be done, the way she’d learned it, the way she’d done it for fifty years. Joe Banino had been dead for years. His standard was still in her hands.
Auerbach’s men had a crown to defend and a city watching them defend it. The Pantry Woman had an orange and no one watching. She made the same choice they did — every minute of every day, for fifty years — with no bonus at the end of the season, no banner, no crowd on its feet. Just the juice, squeezed right, for someone she would never meet. The Celtics called it Celtics Pride. She called it the way we do things at the Ritz. Joe Banino, dead years before I arrived, had never needed to call it anything. It was simply in him, and then it was in her.
I wish I had met him.
Her standard lived in something as small as a squeezed orange, not in a speech, but in the technique. Below, Kitchen Notes walks through how to segment citrus the way she would have insisted on: the cut that removes every trace of pith, the chemistry of why pith turns bitter in the first place, and how oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and Meyer lemons each ask you to handle them differently.
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