THE KITCHEN, Sharpe Refectory - A plate drops and cracks. "Oh, you know they're taking that out of his paycheck!" jokes Ray Trinque, a second cook at the Ratty.
Trinque is in the bowels of the Ratty, which Brown students rely on every day for nearly 4,000 meals but which few have ever seen. It's a sprawling, multi-level kitchen that's buzzing even at 3:30 p.m., one of the quietest times of the day upstairs in the dining hall.
"Unlike at Chili's or (TGI) Friday's, our ingredients don't come to us prepared," Trinque said, pointing to a 15-foot "prep table" that holds various choppers, slicers and dicers that look more like torture devices than cooking tools.
Trinque gestures to the basil for the roasted eggplant and tomato sandwich served at last Friday's lunch. "We don't just order up stuff from (food supplier) Cisco. It's all fresh," he said.
He also points to spinach that was chopped Thursday so it can be cooked the next day. "We took spinach off the menu for a while because of the health scare. We got rid of it from the menu entirely because we didn't want people to wonder, 'Can I eat this? Can I not?' We tried to make it easy and safe," Trinque said. "But spinach is back at the Ratty, baby!"
The concern about the spinach is part of a larger commitment to health and safety. Throughout the sprawling kitchen, the floors and machines are immaculate (even on a surprise visit by The Herald). Dining Services employees are mopping floors that already look clean enough to eat off, and every ingredient and dish in sight looks freshly prepared.
Dreaming the dishesOver at the prep table, Cook's Helper Frank Capaldi is perusing a thick binder that lists all the ingredients needed for the Ratty's six-week menu cycle. Each day from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., the prep cooks ready the fresh ingredients for the meals that will be cooked and served the next day, said Rose Forrest, the production manager.
Forrest is a petite, soft-spoken woman among a kitchen of hearty, loud, mostly bearded men. They all claim she's in charge, though she repeatedly insists this is not the case. According to Forrest, every Ratty dish starts out as an idea in the minds of Bridget Visconti, Dining Services' dietician, and John O'Shea, the executive chef. Visconti said Dining Services has thousands of recipes going back decades and takes suggestions from staff, diners, other schools and trade publications.
"They conceptualize what's going to go on the menu, what's healthy and what tastes good," Forrest said. From there, O'Shea "thinks it over and then puts it on the rotation."
The meal will then get "tested": the staff cooks the trial dish on a small scale to make sure it's not too tricky to make and that the ingredients aren't too difficult or expensive to obtain, Visconti said. This process also allows the staff to correct any problems that might arise in preparing the dish regularly.
"When we're testing, we might make 24 portions instead of 700, and then we find out if special ingredients are necessary or whether we can keep the food warm enough to serve," Visconti said. "We don't serve many skewered dishes, for example, because it's too difficult from a production standpoint."
A lot of cerealAfter prepping ingredients, the kitchen staff begins to cook whatever is on the day's menu. This seems simple enough, but it takes a huge amount of machinery, space and people to make it happen.
The earliest of this work happens in the bakery, which starts filling up around 3 a.m. Between six and eight people work here full-time, using the bakeshop's giant rotisserie oven to make desserts. "Here! Put your hand in this oven!" Trinque tells The Herald. It's still piping hot hours after it was shut off. "Now this - this is a production oven!" he says.
In the bakery's cold-storage area, 5-foot stacks of trays of magic bars have been baked and are ready to be cut and served for Friday's meal. Uncut like this, they look like the surface of a different planet - maybe Venus.
Also in the morning, giant kettles are filled with ingredients for sauces and soups, which have to be cooked gallons at a time.
"We use kettles here all the time," Trinque said. "If it can be made, we can make it in a kettle."
The Ratty also has its own butcher's shop, which is hopping from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. Its special machinery includes a device that spits out hamburger patties like clay skeet pigeons and a meatball maker that transforms beef into meatballs three at a time at nearly 100 per minute.
"This machine means you don't have to eat those spongy things you get at Friday's," Trinque said. "Here, we're making our own meat."
Before they're prepared, many of the dry goods are stored in the building's basement. Different types of food are kept separate in fenced-in cages. There's a spice cage, a pasta cage, a cereal cage - there's even a booze cage.
"I can say, categorically, you guys eat a lot of cereal," Trinque said.
There's also "a freezer so big you can drive your car into it," which holds packages of frozen juice cartridges for the drink machines, fruit, French fries and the more than 900 grilled chicken patties that get served up daily, Trinque said. In addition to this freezer, the main kitchen includes a vast network of walk-in cold storage rooms - so many that the staff has taken to numbering them to avoid confusion.
Without a doubt, Trinque said, the most infamous refrigerator is Number 9. There's nothing in Number 9 except garbage cans filled with, well, garbage. Dining Services stores food waste and then sells it to local pig farmers. It also tries to compost some of its refuse.
"I don't know if there's any place on earth that has a such a large fridge for garbage - but we got Number 9, baby!" Trinque said.
Besides what ends up in Ratty serving lines, Dining Services runs a $2 million to $3 million catering operation. Trinque said it's a common misconception that the catered food is made of different ingredients than the food in the dining hall. In fact, the only difference is in the presentation.
"(Catered food) is plated differently because it's for smaller events," Trinque said, pointing to a garnished fruit plate with a yogurt dipping sauce. "If we gave (students) catered stuff like this, you'd kill it immediately - you'd absolutely destroy it."
Unusual ingredients are only brought in for special guests like members of the Brown Corporation and guests of the president.
If these ovens could talkBack in the main kitchen, Cook's Helper Henry DeBarros is mopping up near the dishwashing line. Every dish is washed before every meal, Trinque says. Normally, six to eight people work in this area, which looks like a mix between a disassembly line and a carwash filmmaker Tim Burton might have dreamed up.
DeBarros has been here 31 years. "They built the building around Henry," Capaldi, the prep cook, said. "When Henry first started, they prepped everything by hand. Condiments, everything."
DeBarros points to where he used to skin potatoes. It's done by machine now. DeBarros said back then Dining Services workers would skin up to 10 50-pound bags of potatoes each day. "A lot's changed," he says. "Some things are the same."
Nearly 200 people work in the Ratty on any given day, and there are up to 40 or 50 full-time staff in the kitchen. There are Johnson and Wales University students looking to hone their culinary craft, undergrads cooking to pay their tuition, old-timers, newcomers and joke-tellers. DeBarros and Capaldi - one a Democrat, the other a Republican - are in the corner, chiding each other about the election. "Everybody's a comedian down here," says one refectioner.
DeBarros looks around. "It's a nice place to work," he said. "A lot of my family works here."
