Garde Manger: Form As Function
By Ethel Kleiman -- Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, 12/1/2002
Nothing evokes the creative spirit in skilled kitchen staff more than using an imaginative array of presentation and preparation tools to create Oamuse bouche,' sushi and hot and cold appetizers through the art known as garde manger.
 Garde manger requires aesthetic creativity and an eclectic assortment of preparation and presentation tools. A kitchen staffer uses a plastic container to form salad greens into an upright rectangle. photos by marc berlow |
"If I weren't a chef, I'd probably be a china salesman or a china maker," said celebrity chef Rick Tramonto of Tru, discussing his inspirations and involvement with garde manger. "Equipment doesn't inspire me, but china definitely does," added Tramonto, Tru's executive chef/co-owner. "I use a lot of non-traditional surfaces - ashtrays, candlestick holders, all kinds of things people would normally not use, 12-in. by 12-in. bathroom tiles, every kind of abstract Oframe' to plate on. That's part of my signature style."
"The garde manger stands at the garde manger doing garde manger." If this sounds like double (or triple) talk, that's because a "garde manger" station is more than a kitchen's culinary launching pad or its source of "first bites." Sure enough, cold foods - appetizers, hors d'oeuvres, salads and pâtés - are all prepared at a garde manger station in many fine-dining restaurants. But garde manger also refers to the staff preparing those foods, as well as the art of decorating them.
At Tru, Chicago, an upscale restaurant specializing in "tasting" dinners, garde manger is inspired by arts of all kinds - music, painting, theatre, the Cirque du Soleil - as well as other foreign locales and other restaurants. Besides seeking artisans and artists to fashion plates and other culinary surfaces and platforms, Tramonto also designs his own backdrops. "I wanted people to look through a magazine and know my food without seeing my name," he said, referring to his signature spiraling "caviar staircase." "You know a Picasso when you see it. You know a Dali when you see it. I wanted to have that effect."
For example, a tiny fish bowl holding a live Japanese fighting fish forms the base for his tuna tartare presentation. Tramonto's sushi sits on a glass plate resembling the best abstract painting, his own creation fashioned for him by a local glass maker. Tramonto scours antique stores, thrift shops and garage sales for "finds," including old-fashioned checkerboards to display sushi. Art stores offer up paint brushes, linoleum, tile scrapers and painter's palettes. Home improvement stores supply mirrored medicine cabinet shelves, as well as marble and granite floor tiles for plating. "I paint my sauces," Tramonto said, referring to his beet, carrot and asparagus reductions. "Everyone has seen the little dribbles of sauce and dots of sauce. To create my effects, I started using pastry brushes."
 Utilizing excellent hand skills and art-inspired display ware, garde manger staff at Chicago's Tru restaurant (left) assemble portions of amuse bouche, sushi and hot and cold appetizers, piping ingredients from squeeze bottles. Right, an example of Tru Chef Rick Tramonto's bold, signature plate painting. |
So, how should DSRs or reps approach this art-inspired chef, a man who has popularized miniature, fanciful combinations known as "amuse bouche" - amusements for the mouth - into a craze? Avoid recommending commonplace products or the china equivalents of Styrofoam, surely.
"A smart salesperson would visit my web site, eat at my restaurant, look at my books and understand the type of contemporary food and china that I use," Tramonto advised.
While acknowledging the importance of equipment and supplies, Tramonto advocates the prowess of knives, fresh products, technique, talent and a great staff. Still, he and partner Gale Gand came up with the design for their glamorous, efficient kitchen in 12 weeks, then continued their collaboration with consultants Romano-Gatland, who asked them to name their top three necessities. Windows figured among Tramonto's "must haves," as did a French cooking island and the ability "to stand at any vantage point and see my whole kitchen." The garde manger station's window, which looks out onto the dining room, and the station's openness thanks to its see-through shelves, create an example of visual perfection wedded to efficiency. The granite walls, kept intact from a previous restaurant, are mirrored by Tru's granite counters.
Ingredients used in garde manger are measured in drops, sprinkles and fractions of a spoonful, as demonstrated by this Tru staff member (above). Also required, however, is proximate refrigeration sufficient to hold a meal period's worth of products. |
Throughout Tru's tidy yet colorful garde manger station, cleanliness and orderliness reign. An aerosol canister creates blue cheese foam. Juice is poured through droppers. Wasabi has its own shark-skin grater. There are whips, Chinese spoons, a box of tiny colored shells, a tiny melon baller for sorbets.
"Some 1,800 to 2,000 plates come out of this kitchen nightly. Our repertoire, our mise en place, the amount of prep work done here is extraordinary," Tramonto said, referring to his menus that range from three to 15 offerings per diner. "Everything is labeled. Everything is zoned. Everything has its place, and I'm talking about 1,500 items that we update on a monthly basis," he said.
Since many cold appetizers require hot preparation, garde manger at Tru extends its functions throughout the kitchen, tying hot and cold production together in a totally air-conditioned space. So, if Tramonto could change anything at the garde manger, what would he do? "I wouldn't want to change anything, except to have more space," he said. However, more gas and induction burners at the garde manger would allow staff to warm more dishes right at the station, he noted.
 At Chicago's Tru, garde manger tasks are performed at a granite-topped amuse bouche and caviar station adjacent to a central aisle. Products are held prior to preparation in undercounter refrigerated drawers. |
At the Sofitel Chicago at Water Tower Place, garde manger is a multi-purpose affair, supporting 600 to 800 catered meals daily, a high-end restaurant called Café des Architects that serves 200 meals daily and an employee foodservice program.
"We use the garde manger work areas to prepare all our salads, cold fish items, cold terrines, pâtés, dressings, aspics, chaud froid and similar cold plates. Garde manger is a little more exciting here than in France," said Chef Frederic Castan, a native of Avignon, who worked in California for many years. Two discrete areas facilitate garde manger activity - a self-contained garde manger room and one arm of an L-shaped main cooking line.
"The temperature at a garde manger station should be kept at 70°F. It has to be isolated from the rest of the kitchen for sanitation. We don't want it to expand into the hot areas of the kitchen," Castan stated, explaining the presence of the self-contained room located between the main line and a back cooking area, where equipment remains stationary but everything else moves. A large stainless-steel island with below-counter refrigeration and freezers dominates a room surrounded on three sides by counter space with a cooler on the fourth wall. "It's a good-sized room, easy to clean, with good drawers. While we have what we need there, a slicer, chopper, juicer, we could always use more kitchen tools," Castan said.
 Graters and other precise portioning tools are used in garde manger to create ingredient combinations that are as delicate and visually appealing as staff skills and chefs' imaginations can devise. |
"We love garde manger tools. They make our life easier," said Johanne Killeen, chef/co-owner of Al Forno, Providence, R.I., which she runs with husband/chef/co-owner George Germon. Her vegetable peeler, with its plastic ridged handle that provides a good grip, elicits outbursts of praise, as does her $20 Japanese knife, which she called, "as good as some $500 knives for our purposes, especially when we travel to cook." A plastic Japanese mandolin with stainless-steel cutters and graters is used to make spaghetti out of beets. Inexpensive Asian sharpening stones hone knives. Artist's mico-planes, normally used to smooth plaster, serve as graters.
International supplies are easy to find at Al Forno. Killeen pits olives with a German cherry pitter and oysters shimmer on their French coquillage stand. Kitchen staff here plate micro-greens with a French form or employ good old American ingenuity. "George will cut out a one-pint plastic container and fill it with greens, which remain in a rectangular shape when you take it away," she explained. "Every day brings a new idea or inspiration. I recently saw a few items in a friend's house we can use for garde manger, including two ice cream scoops, one square and one heart-shaped," said Killeen, noting the square scoop would do well portioning coleslaw or cabbage salad.
Al Forno's stainless-steel garde manger station has a double-well stainless-steel sink for washing vegetables, an adjacent hand sink, two slicers and a salad refrigeration unit. There is a stainless-steel counter with a three-door refrigeration unit below and a stainless-steel dip-in unit above. "We never use floor mats," Killeen said, remarking that they produce "sloppy cooks." Instead, she relies on her tile floors, her nightly apron checks and her side towels for cleanliness and order.
Overall, well-designed equipment layouts and inspiring supplies make form support function at garde manger stations here and abroad.
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