Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (21 page)

Smythe looked at me, expressionless, and said, “I prefer to think of myself as the Pharaoh Sanders of lecturing chefs.” He plucked the tool from the wall and walked on.

By 5:00, the room was mayhem. Haste does make waste, and a lot of it: The surfaces of the worktables were covered with vegetable scraps, meat trimmings, spilled ground spices, and small puddles of soy sauce. The attempts at high-speed cooking we were all making saw us getting careless. Brookshire and I had split the labor so that he would sear the lamb, simmer it, and measure out the dry ingredients. I’d handle the vegetables. I quartered a couple pounds of mushrooms, with spastic hands that tried to move faster than they were able, and, when I went to sweep them into a bowl, I swept half of them onto the floor. No one noticed but Brookshire. He said softly, “Just pick them up.” I moved on to mincing ginger—it was in ugly chunks when I was done, not close to a mince—and garlic, which didn’t fare much better. I rough chopped cilantro and made stalks of celery into tiny cubes. The clock kept jumping forward toward six, and none of us could move fast enough.

Adam and Tara were hissing into each other’s faces; across the room, near the spice rack, Dan and Yoon were bitter over who was going to use the last of the dried chiles. Around the room, other partners weren’t talking to each other. Smythe was at his computer, sipping tea. We had a poor handle on the prep work, had only barely
started cooking, and still had to set up all the equipment: get the soup warmer hot, get the deep fryer on, set out dishes, remove the tops of the two worktables closest to the door (they doubled as steam tables to keep the food warm during service). At six, there was a line at the door. Students kept poking their heads in to check our progress. Smythe was still at his computer, watching us, looking up at the clock, and shaking his head. Brookshire was setting our lamb into trays, spilling sauce all over. Other pans full of moo shu vegetables, braised cabbage, and dumplings arrived. The rice wasn’t done yet. At 6:20, we started serving. Two people put rice on plates. Others of us stood with spoons over the lamb or vegetables or dumplings and ladled them out according to what was ordered. We took a long time doing this, too. The students who’d waited—and more than a few had walked away—looked angry and put-out. When the last ones got their food and left, we all stood still for a moment and looked at the mess.

“Twenty minutes late,” Smythe remarked. “That’s pretty bad. I’ve seen groups smaller than this one get the job done on time. And look at this place. I mean …” He trailed off and gestured. Around where the rice was, there were more grains on the table than in the pan. It looked as if it had snowed.

“Go eat. Be back in half an hour.”

We filled our plates, then went to the cafeteria, where we all sat in silence, eating the food we’d made. It tasted pretty good, but we were all so shell-shocked from the rush and fumbling that no one seemed to enjoy it. I just wanted to go home for the night.

We got back into the kitchen and spent an hour and a half cleaning up. When we were finished, it was around 8:45. Smythe said, “This can’t happen tomorrow. I know it was the first day, but you were all running around like little kids, pushing and grabbing and whining. Figure out how you guys are going to cooperate. Figure out how you’re going to communicate better. What you did tonight wasn’t A-, B-, or C-level work. It was D-level, F-level.

“And I have a little more I want to say about China.”

Out in the parking lot, I turned the key in the ignition, and nothing
happened. The lights had come on when I opened the door, so I knew it wasn’t the battery. I turned the key again and pumped the gas and eventually a sputter morphed into a cough, then into a hack, and the engine turned over.

The moments I’d shared with Jimmy Stewart over the weekend, those two hours that injected me with so much goodwill, had taken a hit during class and evaporated completely when the truck hiccuped. I had to stop and admit to myself that actually, I was playing opossum with reality.

For the last week, Christmas carols had been on the radio—I’d really crank the volume when “Good King Wenceslas” came on—and people had already decorated their houses with lights and little statues of Santa and reindeer. If the truck not starting was anything other than just the cold, I’d need to get it looked at and I’d need to get it fixed. And this was an impossible thing, because I had no money whatsoever in the bank. I had exiled that fact from my mind through sheer will, but it was furloughed now.

The next day, Smythe’s lecture took up only one hour. He discussed tea: green, white, and black; the caffeine levels of each one; how they were, in Indonesia and parts of India, picked by trained monkeys; how to brew the tea, on and on. It was like the day before: frantic note taking in the attempt to capture each piece of information, giving way to selectively recording only pieces of information, giving way to giving up. It was a torrent of information that jumped from context to context. But there was no denying that Smythe was a serious intellect.

Adam agreed with me when I commented on it later during prep time.

“But,” I added, “I guess we’re just being given
all
of that intellect.”

We were a little better behaved that second night, but we still snapped at one another, got outlandishly angry that someone had maybe taken a little more ginger than required, still dropped things, and wasted things out of carelessness. We opened at 6:10 that night, cooking the exact same menu as the night before. We ate dinner and then cleaned up almost silently again.

When I got back to Saugerties, I found that Smythe had sent us all an e-mail. The subject line was “The Group Falls Down.” It read:

A
DAM CALLED A GROUP
meeting before class. He wanted to discuss the past two days and try to fix the problem. We all sat at tables in the empty cafeteria. The drink machine hummed and clicked in
the background, and we could hear Sartory’s class setting up for the day.

“Why were we able to get through Coyac’s class—
Coyac
—and not fuck up like we’re fucking up now? How did we get through Sartory’s class, being as bad as we are in Smythe’s class? What’s the problem?”

“You want to know what the problem is?” Tara said, indignant. “We have no time. He talks, and talks, and talks, and talks, and we have no time to cook.”

“I think Adam’s aware,” I said. “Obviously he is. He has no time either. I think what he’s getting at is why we’re such horrible slobs. And we shouldn’t be fighting with each other. I know we all think we’re a pain in each other’s ass, but we still need to work together every night. And besides, it’s Christmas. Peace in the kitchen, goodwill toward men.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Adam started, but Tara cut him off.

“I don’t think you’re a pain in the ass, Jonathan. I just think you’re incredibly lazy.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wash a dish. And it always seems to me that you have your partner doing the hard stuff while you sit back and watch.”

Brookshire spoke up. “No. First off, I wouldn’t take that if that were the case. Second, Jonathan pulls his own weight. And why would you say that here in front of everyone? If you were so concerned about it, why try and embarrass him right now? And me, too? Do you think I couldn’t handle the situation if it were true?”

Carlos yelled out, “Can we stop talking about how lazy Jonathan is and talk about why we suck?”

Tara said, “I think the two are connected. Mike—have you ever seen Jonathan wash a dish?”

Brookshire thought for a second. “Actually, Jonathan, I haven’t ever seen you do a dish.”

In one sense they were right. I rarely did dishes. But the reason is, there were always three people at the dish sink. One person who scrubbed and passed it off to his or her right, where the next person
rinsed it, and then passed it to a third, who dunked it in sanitizing solution and then put it away. Because of the volume of dishes, people invariably did a half-assed job. The dishes were always greasy and flecked with pieces of food. Every pan in every kitchen was afflicted with that same sheen of grease. When I was in Perillo’s Skills class, I had done dishes, but I’d done them meticulously because the grease disgusted me. So it took me longer. I remember Dan, who was rinsing, getting angrier and angrier about my pace, and Carlos, getting impatient too. Finally, they kicked me out and took over. It happened the next time I did dishes too, and then one more time before I decided I’d dedicate myself to sweeping and mopping the floors and scrubbing down the worktable surfaces.

Gio said, “Who cares if he does dishes or not? Everyone here contributes. And when he was my partner, he was great.”

I still hadn’t said anything.

Adam tried to get things back into order. “Jonathan isn’t the cause of the problem. And if he didn’t work, as group leader, I’d make it my business to say something. And I haven’t needed to.”

Tara said, “I think we really need to talk about this group leader thing. I did not elect to put you in charge. You are not my chef.” I heard something that sounded like assent from a couple of people.

I stood up. Class was in forty-five minutes. I was tired of this; every single one of these meetings went exactly the same way. “I’m going to the bathroom for about forty-five minutes,” I announced. Adam looked at me, anger and what seemed to me like betrayal veiling his face. I stopped at his shoulder and leaned in toward his ear. “This is bullshit,” I said. “You and I can talk later.”

We didn’t, really. When I showed up for the beginning of class, Adam quietly asked me, “You okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “You?”

“I guess.”

“I think you should start practicing for your final,” Smythe said. He’d laid out trays full of ingredients: fish sauces, black bean sauce, bean paste, different soy sauces, different sesame oils, tamarind, rice
wines. “Start tasting, start memorizing. On your final, I’ll be asking you to identify everything on this table by taste.”

We moved dutifully around the table, filling small plastic cups with things from the trays and tasting them. It was interesting; you could recognize experiencing the essence of, say, the black bean paste in a finished dish, understanding how it helped make something delicious—even if it was overpowering on its own. The fish sauces were almost nauseating. Everyone—myself, Sitti, Adam, Joe—all made a face of distaste. I guessed when it came to an entrée, this stuff was like salt: You didn’t want to taste it, you just needed it in there.

It was the fifth day, the Korean menu. Joe and Yoon moved through class with supreme confidence. It occurred to me, as Brookshire and I were preparing Ginseng Chicken, that I had eaten Korean food once in my life, when I lived in Woodside, Queens, right after moving to New York City. My grandfather was in town and one of his business associates took us out to dinner at a Korean barbecue restaurant right by my apartment. We all had barbecued pork and beef for dinner, lacquered with soy and sugar. How could it not be delicious? But otherwise, I had no experience with this food at all.

As Brookshire and I did prep, washing fresh ginseng, soaking jujubes, mincing shallots, Joe and Yoon called out to each other in Korean, looking around at all of us and laughing. I felt like they were mocking us, and me in particular. After the meeting, which I refused to think much about, my paranoia was slightly piqued.

They were, I decided, in actuality, probably remembering some nightspot in Seoul they’d been to.

Brookshire and I finished a minute or so ahead of schedule. The chicken had braised in water, garlic, dates, and the ginseng. After the meat was cooked, we seasoned the broth, and brushed a glaze of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil over the bird. When an order was called, we’d be putting the chicken in a bowl and serving it with broth.

“Hey,” I asked Brookshire. “Did you taste this?”

“No. Did you?”

“No. We should probably do that.” We tasted the dish. Then we paused.

“It tastes good,” Brookshire said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But is this how it’s supposed to be?”

“How wrong could we go?”

“Probably not very wrong. But still—is this how it tastes in the mother country?”

“Ask Smythe.”

“Okay. I will.” I called over to Smythe and asked if he could come taste the dish. He got up from his computer and came over.

“It looks good,” he said. He turned and went back to his desk. Brookshire and I looked at each other.

“Hey, Joe,” I called out. “Can you taste this for us?”

Joe came over and tasted the chicken. “It’s good,” he said.

“Does it taste authentic?”

“Authentic.” He repeated the word a couple of times. “Shit if I know. It’s chicken. It’s been poached. I like it; it’s fucking good.”