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skills. Tomorrow they’ll triple their workload. By the end of this 3-week course, they’ll not only have mastered their own physical and mental mise-en-place, they’ll be giving the following class their first few days’ worth of prepared ingredients as well.
MISE-EN-PLACE FOR LIFE
    Students spend 2 to 4 years at the CIA learning how to cook. But that’s only half of their education. Just as important is the CIA’s shadow curriculum in which students learn how to
work
. Withoutlearning how to work, and work
clean
—meaning to do that work with economy of time, space, motion, and thought—they can’t cook professionally.
    Mise-en-place, by graduation day, becomes a motto for all. Valedictorian Eli Miranda compares it to the philosophy he learned while serving in the US Navy. “To succeed, you must set yourself up for success and be ready for anything that comes your way.” Some of Miranda’s fellow students have chosen to express their ardor for mise-en-place in a more personal way, beneath their dress whites, having inked those words permanently into their skin. And they will remember their days at the CIA when their alumni magazine,
Mise-en-Place,
finds them as they move around the culinary world.
    Wherever they go in that world, in whatever kitchens they work, mise-en-place will be the common language. Even in the places where the term itself isn’t spoken, the behaviors and mindset of mise-en-place are expected. In Japanese kitchens, they may not say “mise-en-place,” but Japanese chefs talk about concepts like
jun-bi
(to set up, prepare) and
sei-ri
(sorting, arranging) as part of the fundamental duties of the cook and cook’s apprentice, the
oi-mawashi.
Chef Masa Takayama, who runs the revered Japanese restaurant in New York City that bears his first name, begins his planning on paper—not by writing a list, but by drawing a plate and the food that will appear on it. Then Chef Masa literally makes that plate (he’s a potter as well as a chef) before he prepares the food, mise-en-place at its most esoteric. At small restaurants, mom-and-pop operations, food carts, and humble diners, practical mise-en-place enables one or two employees to feed dozens and sometimes hundreds of people per day. At national restaurant chains and huge catering operations, mise-en-place governs the movement of hundreds of men and women and millions of dollars’ worth of material and ingredients to serve diners by the thousands. Chef Ralph Scamardella oversees the top-grossing restaurant in America, TAO Las Vegas, as part of his job supervising the TAO Group’s nearly two dozen restaurant kitchens across the country; at TAO New York, he runs a 24-hour operation from two vastkitchens providing room service to two hotels and à la carte dining in two different restaurants—TAO and Bodega Negra. At TAO alone, he employs a brigade of specialized sushi chefs, barbecue masters, and dumpling makers, feeding 1,200 people in four shifts, or “table turns.” Michael Guerriero has a different challenge. A graduate of the CIA, he runs the massive kitchen at the United States Military Academy at West Point. At lunch the chef must feed 4,000 cadets in 15 minutes.
    Our culinarians will also encounter more than a few disorganized, dirty, inefficient kitchens in their careers. But most of them will strive to reach the top of the proverbial food chain. What they will encounter at the summit is the most refined version of what they learned in school. Cooks who have the opportunity to
stage
(pronounced “staahj” with French inflection, meaning a limited or trial job) in Yountville, California, at Chef Thomas Keller’s French Laundry—lauded by many critics as the best restaurant in the world—find a calm, clean kitchen whose atmosphere is, at the same time, one of the most intense of any workplace anywhere. Chef Keller posts a plaque beneath a clock in