garde-manger

But years ago, after cooking at the now-closed Boston restaurant Clio, he saw how the garde-manger chef laboriously processed the many vegetables required for the green salad — “17 or so,” he guessed.

“I could sear up a good piece of fish with potatoes like my grandfather; I could make an old-fashioned butter cake with rhubarb and a thick custard sauce that reminded me of my grandmother. My knife skills were subpar at best, and I had no idea what … mise-en-place or garde-manger was.”

The prep cooks chopping vegetables in garde-manger were mostly East Asian and Central American immigrants.

I was assigned to garde-manger, where I chopped carrots, cleaned buckets of squid, and fixed the occasional salad.

I usually worked in garde-manger, preparing salads and chopping vegetables, but I was occasionally allowed to work on the line, searing steaks, duck breasts, and thick slabs of foie gras.