Kelly MacDonald, Executive Chef for the Napa Valley Wine Train, was standing in a walk-in refrigerator, pointing to a large round of stinky white stuff. “We have an assortment of fine cheeses, some local, some imported,” he noted, shuttling us out of the cold and into the next walk-in.
Kelly was giving my dad and me a tour around the commissary, a large building that serves as kitchen, warehouse, and prep-station for all the meals eventually served on the Wine Train. We had eaten on the train a day earlier (see, “On the Wine Train With Dad”), and Kelly had graciously invited us here to get a glimpse behind the scenes.
It was 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and the large kitchen was abuzz with activity. A dozen or so white-coated workers, mostly Latino, bustled about chopping, mixing, frying, and stirring. Large stainless steel tables were set up as prep stations, each one demarcated with a “universal symbol”—a picture of a chicken at the poultry station, a cow at the beef station. Over at the fish station, a sous chef was filleting and weighing slices of halibut; a large slab of beef was meeting its Maker at the meat station; baby artichokes were soaking in lemon water at the vegetable station. At the enormous open ranges—Wolf ranges on ’roids—cooks were adeptly wielding skillets of sauce over large flames. A huge cauldron awaited soup. Every spot had a purpose, and every person had a focus. The train would be departing the commissary in less than an hour, and once it left the station, there would be no turning back.
During the summer high season, about 600 people will eat on the train per day—half lunch, half dinner. Like all fine dining operations, major preparation and planning is required. The fact that meals are served aboard a moving venue, however, adds another element of difficulty. The food is prepped in the commissary, but cooked to order on the train, which has three kitchens spread throughout nine cars. Different cars have different dining options—a fixed menu in one, a choice between six entrées in another, à la carte in a third—so each kitchen receives its own ingredients. On board, the cooking quarters are close, and because there is no possibility of reaching back into the pantry if something goes wrong, there is even less room for error. Trying to make excellent cuisine, while dealing with the logistics of multiple kitchens, seemed to me like a grand headache. I wondered if Kelly, like many notable chefs I have read about, had a mad schedule.
