I used to work for a chef who — when faced with a bucket of slimy tomatoes, a tray of graying livers or half a roast chicken that had lost its crisp — would bring the decaying food in question a hair’s width from her nose and inhale with the force of a heavyweight lifter. If the food failed the test, her face crumpled and she turned her back; if it passed, she would wave a wiry hand and command, "Give it to ‘family.’"

  Family meal, staff meal, employee meal, help food and, in New Orleans, "krewe food," all refer to a regularly occurring, sometimes politically charged, event in the world of restaurant work that customers rarely witness. In general, staff meals are free repasts prepared by the kitchen crew. In theory, staff meals boost employee morale and keep the troops from raiding the walk-in cooler. In some instances — like when all employees sit down to staff meal in the same place at the same time as a " family" — staff meals aim to promote camaraderie during the few moments when the two sides of the house are on the same side.

  It’s a tricky business. What your server eats or doesn’t eat before his shift could mean the difference between a few French fries on your seafood platter. How your server and the kitchen interact over staff-meal food could affect the kitchen’s willingness to do that server favors later on, like not charging you for one more side of hollandaise sauce.

  Just as no two restaurants provide the same dining experience for paying customers, no two food-related businesses are alike in the way they provide for their staffs. Many smaller, privately owned places like Martinique Bistro and Vega Tapas Café don’t have formal, family-style systems. Taqueros Taqueria-Cantina and La Crepe Nanou feed their staffs at the end of the evening shift, while other restaurants like Palace Café subtract a nominal fee from employee paychecks to cover staff-meal costs.

  Chef David Waltuck, who runs a wildly successful restaurant in New York City called Chanterelle, recently introduced the staff-meal phenomenon to the public consciousness with his cookbook Staff Meals From Chanterelle. In the book’s cover photo, Waltuck and company sit at Chanterelle’s staff-meal table, which is draped in white linen, set with silver and scattered with open bottles of wine and San Pellegrino. Everyone is smiling. The book’s 448 pages are kissed with 200 recipes that conjure up images of farmer’s markets and grandmothers pouring cake batter into Bundt pans. (Waltuck’s favorite, indicated in his introduction, is Chicken with Black Mushrooms and Chinese Sausage made with ingredients gathered on a jaunt through Chinatown.)

  While the few recipes I tested (Chicken Pot Pie and I Don’t Care, and Ginger Pickled Vegetables and Spiced-Up Honey Cake) were simple enough and rendered gorgeous, family-worthy recipes, Waltuck throws a fairy tale staff meal that very few restaurant employees ever experience.

Once a week, Chef John Besh’s Artesia employees get close. Like Waltuck, Besh is a restaurateur with a rare passion for sitting down to dinner with his workers. Saturday evening is the busiest shift of Artesia’s week and therefore requires the presence of nearly every staff member. It’s before this service that Besh alone whips up a staff meal based upon classic European cooking techniques, like a Milanese risotto, choucroute Alsacienne or veal Normandy. "I want to educate the staff about where Louisiana traditions come from," says Besh. The linens are draped, the silver is set, and wine bottles are corked for a blind tasting. The entire staff, from dishwasher to host, mingles at assigned tables.

  "More than anything, it’s a gesture that I’m here for the staff like they’re here every day helping me. It’s a little thank you," says Besh, who quizzes his employees about the food and wine during the Saturday feasts as on-the-job education. Besh awards them one point for each correct answer regarding, for example, the origin of the evening’s dish or from which grape varietals the wine was produced. Four times a year, the highest-scoring staffer is rewarded with a meal out. Next spring, the grand prizewinner from the front of the house will go to Napa Valley, while the top-scoring kitchen employee will accompany Besh on his annual trip to France.

  Staff meals during the rest of the week at Artesia resemble the more hectic and sometimes-divisive goings-on at other restaurants, as cooks do what they can to make leftovers appealing. Or they might fire up the grill for some fresh kill that Besh, an avid outdoorsman, landed that day. But as any mother cooking for her family will attest, you can’t please everybody.

  One of Besh’s star cooks, Michael Law, recounts an afternoon when his popularity with the staff took a swift downward turn. "John handed me a duck and a quail he had shot that afternoon and then left town," Law remembers, noting the chef’s escape before his staff began biting into pellets.

  Cooking for your colleagues, like singing to a roomful of opera stars, can be more stressful than cooking for paying customers. After all, meals sometimes end minutes before the first seating. Since the economics of feeding a large group can get out of hand, cooks often are faced with leftovers and inexpensive staples like beans, rice, pasta and chicken. When a cook screws up, there’s no time for repairs — I never lived down the day my fellow staffers ate rare meatloaf with al dente potato au gratin.

  "You get beat up a lot when you make help food," says Kent Booth, executive chef at Joel, a New Orleans catering company. Booth gathered years of staff meal experience cooking at Emeril’s, Commander’s Palace and Smith & Wollensky. "Some people think they should be fed better than others. Especially in high-end restaurants, servers seem to have this idea that they should be eating as well as their customers."

  Whether or not the "front" of the house and the "back" of the house have different expectations at mealtime, Booth has seen it from both sides. "The guys and girls in the kitchen know how hard it is sometimes even to find time to eat. So a hot meal, no matter what it is, is lovely," says Booth. "On the other hand, the front-of-house employees have no idea how much the food costs or how long it takes to make. They just look at you as ‘kitchen’ and expect you to produce." But that’s no excuse for laziness, says Booth: "When a cook sees family meal as something to throw together in 10 minutes and doesn’t put any care into it, that tells me something about the cook. Anytime you cook, you should do it well."

  In many hotels and casinos, where staffs can outnumber guests, a separate cafeteria is designated solely for employee dining. There’s a full-time kitchen crew that feeds and cleans up after employees in the Royal Sonesta Hotel’s cafeteria called Chatterbox. Since the hotel’s salvageable leftovers are donated to Second Harvesters, managers draw up a monthly menu and order food for Chatterbox in advance. According to Manager Rosalinda Winley, the cafeteria’s suggestion box is taken into account during these meetings. After repeated requests, for example, the Chatterbox yanked shepherd’s pie from its regular rotation. Sharon Dase, a full-time cook at Chatterbox for seven years, says that she doesn’t suffer employee complaints anymore: "I like it because I can deal with my people. I see the same people everyday, and for the majority of them I already know what they like and don’t like."