no. 69: hot plates

Sometimes people ask me if there’s a piece of restaurant equipment I particularly miss – and there is: the French top. 

French tops are living fossils, the coelacanths of cooking technology, relics from the time when restaurant stoves were powered by coal. They look like this:

Source: wikimedia commons

This is what all stoves used to look like. The open burner is an invention of the age of gas. Coal stoves in restaurants, bleeding edge kitchen technology in the 19th century, looked much like that weathered grey mass in form and function. 

Unlike the griddle in a diner, that metal plate is not a food contact surface. It’s meant for pots and pans, and actually comes apart along the seams, so if you put food on it, juices and grease will cascade onto the burner below. It’s also unlike a griddle in that it doesn’t heat evenly. There’s a single round burner beneath the bullseye, which creates a heat gradient between the center and the edge. 

Instead of turning the heat up or down, you move your saucepans. The eye is a constant 900°C, the far corner perhaps 150°C. This makes you conscious of the stove, of heat and heat transmission, in a way you never are with gas burners, which enable you to make the flame rise and fall at your command. Open flame is misleading, a will o’ the wisp, because so much besides the size of the flame you see dictates where and how the pan is actually heating. The control knob is a pacifier. But when you place a pan on a hot iron plate, you know exactly where heat is coming from and where it’s going, because conduction between the pan and the stovetop overrides the other complications of physics. There’s no sense that you’re fighting your equipment, no scorched sides on your saucepans. You literally cook where the stove makes you cook. As you move pans around the stovetop, you lay out a plan: here are the things you’ll need in 30 seconds, in 3 minutes, in 10. Heat and time manifest in a cartesian plane. 

What the Americans call a “French top,” the French call a plaque coup-de-feu. I found this puzzling, since a coup-de-feu is a gunshot, or a fusillade. Then my friend Philippe explained:

“le coup de feu” is a French restauration professionals’ expression describing this specific moment when you have every customer asking for their main course at the same time and your restaurant is full… therefore this “plaque” transforms a “standard” gas stove on which you can put maybe 4 or 5 pans or pots if it’s a big one, into one flat area on which you may put 8 or 9… and then you are much faster…

It turns out that in French, a French top is “that plate you use when you’re absolutely slammed.” 

When we knew we’d be opening a restaurant, we started looking for a used French top. They’re not common in America, unless you want an enameled Molteni that costs $35,000 secondhand and swoons if it’s not polished daily (those can readily be found on ebay). We didn’t, so it actually took us longer to find a French top than to find a restaurant space to put it in. The Beast, as we named ours, came from a place on the Bowery, the kind where there are always two guys on the sidewalk, hosing things down or wielding angle grinders. It had clearly been extracted from what the trade calls a cooking suite – a phalanx of stoves coupled together in the factory, sharing a single gas manifold and a custom built stainless steel mantle. There were scars where it had been chopped free from its comrades, the gas line had been replaced at least once, and its legs didn’t match. The oven door didn’t open, it flopped. Its thermostat resisted three attempts at repair by different people, so the oven was either off or on, and when it was on, it was hot enough to singe hair. It cost us $1500, plus shipping. When lit, the Beast raised the temperature in the restaurant so much we joked about making the money back in savings on our heating bill.

So you can put a French top in a home kitchen, but I don’t know why you’d want one. You need to turn it on 20 minutes before you start cooking, and then you have 50 pounds of hot steel making your kitchen throb with waste heat. It’s a rare dinner that’s worth the discomfort, and the 20 minutes of scrubbing later, during which your face and arms will steam like dumplings and your kitchen towel will get grease and iron cooked into its weft, because a French top needs to be scrubbed while it’s still hot enough that water boils practically on contact. Of course, the kind of domestic range that includes a French top costs more than a new car, so the people who buy them probably don’t have to clean them, and probably aren’t actually cooking on them either. 

I think the question about equipment comes from seeing the restaurant kitchen as a place of wonder – this sense that there’s a sort of Rubicon between cooking in a restaurant and cooking at home. My affection for French tops stems partly from the fact that they’re so clearly on the other bank. To understand why the French top is a wonderful thing, you need to be getting crushed, to be cooking for dozens if not hundreds of people a night, to have everyone in the restaurant asking for their main course at once. You need to cook enough that you think like your stove. You need not just to merge with your environment but to be forced into its pores, to feel your joints and nerves turning to oil in the pressure and the heat.

Otherwise, it’s just this massive block of iron that’s making your kitchen hotter and needs to get scrubbed a lot. 

But the same is true of many of the mindsets and emotions and habits you acquire if cooking is not just a thing you do, but the thing you do. If you keep them in your kitchen, maybe they’ll just make it hotter and need to get scrubbed a lot, and every time you turn a burner up or down, you’ll think of heat in two dimensions. I miss French tops because they’re everything you shouldn’t take back across the Rubicon if one day, you have to cross it again, going the other way. 

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If you liked this piece and want more kitchen color, you might enjoy The Recovering Line Cook, by Wil Reidie, an Englishman who worked in a bunch of high-end kitchens in England and Scandinavia and now writes about the experience with considerable affection and honesty. 

Also, this is now my favorite short story about Singaporean food and Singaporean families, which means, inevitably, Singaporean intergenerational conflict. 

I commend both of these to you for your weekend reading.