After decades as a restaurant critic’s long-suffering sidekick and date, my wife has grown diffident where dining out is concerned—except, for some reason, on Monday nights. On Monday, at dusk, her dormant appetite rears up and startles us both. “What do you have to review?” she pleads.

“Nothing’s open on Monday.”

“What about a hotel? What about Truffles!” So we ended up at the Four Seasons—this was some months ago—on a quiet Monday night, and settled in to the Truffles experience: the pampering service, the skilful sommelerie, the cooking that always flirts with four stars but hasn’t achieved them for more than a decade. Not in my book, at least. I liked the new menu. It read beautifully, laced with interesting, quietly unconventional pairings of protein and vegetable. As always, the starters were dazzling—lucid flavours, textures just so. It was always the main course that let the side down with some overly rich combination or a heavy hand with the salt. Not that night. My juicy slab of smoked sablefish slid apart into glossy, magnolia-coloured petals, its sweetness matched by that of a golden carrot broth and balanced by delectably bitter braised celery hearts. There was no starch on the plate. None needed. The entire meal was flawless, a cinch for four stars, and, as we lingered over coffee, I asked the waiter whether Lynn Crawford, the hotel’s executive chef, was in the kitchen that night. No, she was out, teaching a class at Dish Cooking Studio. Well, what about the Truffles chef, Lora Kirk? Monday was her night off. That evening, the restaurant—and Kirk’s elegant, unencumbered menu—was entirely in the hands of Carl Baptista, one of seven sous-chefs at the hotel.

There’s a ba-da-bim one-liner attributed to French superchef Paul Bocuse (though another great chef, Roger Vergé, probably said it first). “Who cooks in your restaurant when you’re away?” asks the innocent. “The same people who cook when I’m there,” says Bocuse. It’s not really a joke. Of course, chefs still do their own cooking in smaller establishments, but when a place reaches a certain size and importance, their attention is required at a more exalted and disengaged level. Look through the glass at Mark McEwan on nights when he’s in the kitchen at North 44°. Pan in hand? Not at all. Does a field marshal carry a rifle? When Rob Feenie opens his new restaurant in Toronto (maybe early 2008, he tells me), will he be there or back in Vancouver? Devotees of the Food Network may see celeb­rity chefs cleaning fish, grilling meat and deglazing pans and imagine that’s what they do for a living. In a real restaurant of any size, the actual cooking is done by others. Line cooks—also known as chefs de partie and demi-chefs de partie—are the artisans who prepare, cook and assemble the components of each dish on the menu, over and over again, exactly as the chef wishes. Leading them, ready to step in anywhere at a second’s notice, ready to run the whole kitchen, come to that, is the sous-chef, the chef’s second-in-command, the unsung hero who works brutal hours and bears enormous responsibility for barely a whisper of glory.