A Day with the Saucier At One of New Orleans’s Oldest Restaurants | On the Line | Bon Appétit

Arno's has been open since 1918. We serve traditional Creole cuisine with a little bit of a French flair. This place is over 40,000 square feet, almost 5,500 square feet of kitchen space, but we have an additional 16 dining rooms, which can seat up to an additional 900. It encompasses 11 buildings side by side. I've been in Arno's since 2009. I'm responsible for all the soups, stocks, and sauces. Every single plate here starts with me. We do measure everything by the gallon. Sometimes you just get so damn busy, it's hard to keep up, but we always manage. We always do. Morning. Beautiful day in New Orleans. I'm Bobby McNabb. I'm the saucier chef here at Arno's Restaurant. We got a lot to do today, so let's get this party started. Arno's is a family-owned restaurant. They've only had two owners in the over 100 years we've been open. You'll see the tile changes as we go along, because Arno's started off as just the main dining room. Over the 100 years we've been open, we've purchased an additional 10 buildings, so you can see how each one of them was a separate house at one time. This place is haunted, you know that? People that died in here, I guess. All right, here we go. We're going to show you the kitchen. What you've got to keep in mind with this kitchen is that it's a street. You come in on the right-hand side, you go out on the left-hand side. It's just traffic. This is a saucier and prep area. This is where all the behind-the-scenes magic happens. Every dish at Arno's starts out in this area right here. We do requisitions the night before. The storeroom keeper and the sous chef coordinate this, and they'll load us up with everything we need for the day. These are diced tomatoes and tomato puree. Just take these, and we have a shelf over here in the back, and we'll just start putting these items away. So this is our storeroom. We limit it to the basic items that we use every day. It just cuts down on the traffic. Whenever you're coming in, we all bump into each other. But when we bump in, we say, excuse me, please and thank you, and we just keep riding along and going. All right, it's 8.30 in the morning, and we're going to have a quick breakfast before we get the day started. This is Raquel. She's like a sister to me, but she's everybody's mama. She prepares breakfast and lunch for us, and she's the heart of this kitchen. Let's have breakfast, folks. Everyone at this table is family. We've all known each other for years. Rocky, how long have you been here? You've been here almost 20 years. I started here in 93. There you go. So I mean, I've been here 20-plus years. Everything's intertwined here in New Orleans. People say, oh, it's a big city. It's not. It's really a small village, if you think about it. We have a lot of deliveries coming in. I have some veal bones. I have some whole chickens, because we're making two of those stocks and soups today. And here in a few minutes, I'll be getting out with the banquet chef and the banquet sous chef, talk about what they're going to need for this week. His footprints are everywhere on this menu. He touches every sauce. He's the foundation. Yeah, he's pretty damn, pretty damn good. So far, so good. Thank you, chef. Appreciate that. Yeah. It's 9 a.m. I have 30 pounds of chicken. We're going to roast them off until they're nice and golden brown. And we'll make a nice, rich brown stock. This is the stock pot. This is the reduced pot. These will hold about 60 gallons. And it is big. And I have almost filled it many times. We have to make at least 40 gallons at a time, sometimes 50. And this stock pot over here, we have veal stock. It's been going for about 19 hours now. We still got another hour or so to go. All right. Got to put the old back brace on. I'm an old man. So we're going to take these chickens, we're going to take them in the oven, we're going to roast them off to a nice golden brown. And we'll make a nice, rich brown stock for the filet gumbo that I'll be making later on. All right. It's about 9.30. We're going to start draining the veal stock that we made. We'll start off with a five-gallon bucket here, and I got a row of buckets that we're going to lay out and pour them into. You'll feel it, and your hand will start getting sticky, because all that gel, that's when you know you got a good stock. This is what you use the back brace for. And it's just a repeat until the pot is empty. We'll take each one of these buckets, we'll put them on the cooling rack. Takes about a half hour to empty all these. First of all, you got to take your time, because these spouts are big, and you don't want to splatter it all over the place. And you will get a nice facial from it. It will open and clog your pores at the same time. Veal stock is used on almost half of everything that we cook, as far as sauces go, because this is like our base stock for our au poivre, duck elsey, veal chantrelle. It's just a host of different sauces. Arno's is known for its consistency. You can come back today, you can come back tomorrow, you can come back 10 years from now, and you're going to get the same dish. I want the best product that I can possibly do, because of my pride and my humility, and the respect that I have for this city. It all starts in your heart. All right, got some nice, beautiful, golden brown chicken. I'll take out the last one here, let them cool off just for a second, then we'll transfer these trays over to the pot. It is backbreaking, but that's why I wear a back brace, so, like I said, it keeps me feeling young until tomorrow. So we're going to put all these vegetables in here, just like you're making a chicken noodle soup at the house. Same exact concept, except we're just making 20 gallons of it. So now what we're going to do, we're going to add 20 gallons of water, bring it up to a boil, let it simmer for about a half hour, 45 minutes. It's 11.30, what we're going to do next is talk to the banquet sous chef, talk about what they're going to need for this week, and then me and Mike will start preparing that. Probably one of my favorite parts of the day, because the banquet sous chef happens to be my son. So what we got up and coming in banquet soup, Anita? A gallon of Marchand de Vins, and that'll be good for tomorrow. That's for Wednesday. Yes. How's this weekend looking? This weekend's looking all right. We have a party of 75 at 6 o'clock, and it'll be au poivre, we'll need about a gallon of that, and I'm going to need about a half a gallon of Marchand de Vins also. Okay, sounds good. I'll go ahead and get that started so it's ready for you tomorrow and we'll have time to set up. Yeah. He followed me into the culinary industry back when he was a kid, he became a sous chef at other various restaurants, and then when a position came open, Chef Tommy Whitton recruited him. We get along, we got the same vision. I think we're a good pairing for what needs to be done. We all need to be on the same page all the time, 100% communication all the time. We take care of it. Coming up on 1 p.m. We're making veal stock. We got four cases of veal bones, each one is 50 pounds, we're looking at 200 pounds of bones. You got to take them, you got to give them a little snap a couple of times. All right. These are the femur bones, which is from your hip, got that good marrow in there. So what we're going to do, I got some, they got started a few minutes ago. These bones are ready to come out. So this is what you're looking for, all the fats in the meat is all dried out, marrow is all nice and cooked and golden brown. This is going to give it its color, its flavor and its texture. You want all that fat, nice and crispy and crunchy. So we're going to take all these out. These fresh ones that we just got in, and we're going to take these and cook these in the oven for about three to four hours. Let's go get this over in there and get it ready to go in the pot. Carefully, that's why you got the back brace on, let's hold it up, let's carry it on to the back. Come around hot, let them rest for a couple of minutes. This is roasted vegetables that goes into the veal stock. We put these in the oven, we roast them down. I made this a few days ago, and as you can see, it's almost like a gravy consistency. If you see all this float around the top, that's the gel that we got from making the veal stock. This gallon of gravy, if I had to guess, is probably $100. It's a very expensive gravy. Oh yeah, that's some good stuff. Here's our Marchand de Vin sauce. So we're going to hook this up with about a bottle and a half of wine. We're going to have it afterwards. Quality wine, if you can't drink it, don't make it. The amount of ingredients I'm using today is going to make about a gallon. Typically when we make this for a large amount, a party, we'll do eight gallons of it. So we're going to pour this Bordelaise in there now. A lot of flavor in this little bucket. Everything is starting to just flow together now. I think she's ready to go, so we're going to shut this off. Once it cools down, I'll put it into another container, and the banquet chef will take care of it from there. Three o'clock, we're going to make some shrimp creole. We're going to throw in a little bit of clarified butter, celery, and onions to just sweat out all that natural flavor, get a little caramelization on it. We've got our bell peppers. We weren't going to make an entire batch for this one, but it was a special request. We're going to season all that up. We've got our fresh thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper. This is a very classic New Orleans dish, shrimp creole. This is a base sauce. You can use this and turn it into a sauce piquant, use it with alligator, use it with shrimp, chicken, some people throw it in pasta. So this is ready to go. We'll put in our fresh local shrimp, because shrimp are like sponges. They will collect any sauces, any spices, anything that's being used in it. As you can see, the shrimp, the tails have started to come up. Shrimp creole is complete. The sautéed chef here will finish the plate up when our guest arrives in about 10-15 minutes. Got a lot to do, guys. Let's get back to work. All right, it's four o'clock. Fitting to get set up over here with Chef Homie. He is our oyster chef for the evening. All these take a few days ahead of time to create because they have to set up. Oyster topping, we start off in the tilt skillet. So I had to make this ahead of time. Chef, we got a banquet coming up tonight. We need six dozen of the Rockefeller and two dozen of the Oyster Biennial, and the rest will be the Oysters Arno. He'll be assembling those this evening. This is Rockefeller, traditional Rockefeller that's world famous. This is Oysters Biennial, this is our recreation that we came up with in the 20s. This was to rival our competitors, the Rockefeller. Chef Homie is going to stuff these oysters. I'm going to leave this to him because I got other things to do. Okay, guys, it's 5.30. We got people starting to get in. I can see the crew's getting ready. Thanks for coming out. We appreciate it. But it's time for y'all to get the hell out. We got things to do, fixing to open for business. Have a good one. Thanks for coming. Come on, go, go.