Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (24 page)

I had been waiting for four minutes at this point, and she showed no signs of stopping. I could tell my food was cooling. Now I was pissed.

And she kept going. It became obvious she was arguing with Encabo. He bore an expression of solid patience, an almost kind look, and made no effort to cut her off.

I started tapping my foot. Then I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I kept putting my plate down and picking it back up. I slapped a stuttering rhythm against my leg. I cracked my knuckles. Six minutes late now. I had a sudden vision of upturning my food over her head.

Encabo turned and looked at me. We made eye contact and he held it. The woman turned to follow his line of sight and I saw that her eyes were red and watery.

She’d failed. This was her third time.

Everyone else who had finished was at work cleaning the kitchen.

Abruptly, the young woman stood, turned, and walked with quick steps over to the kitchen door. She gathered her stuff and walked out.

Encabo watched her leave, then motioned me over. I sat and slid his plate toward him.

“My food’s cold,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve kept you waiting. My apologies. It couldn’t be helped. I know you were ready, so no penalty. Now,” he said, reaching for clean utensils, “let’s see what we have here.”

He took a bit of the stew. He chewed for a moment and looked up at me. He smiled, but it seemed rueful. He took a bite of the potatoes, then another. He nodded to himself. He took one forkful each of the root vegetables and the green beans. He tasted the soup. Then he pushed his plate away.

“So, Jonathan.” He leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head. He still seemed kind, almost friendly, but I was beginning to detect a slight hue of pity to his bearing. “What happened here tonight? I watched you at the beginning of the test and you were so efficient. I thought for sure you would ace this. But something … something went bad, no?”

“Yes.” He waited for more, but I couldn’t think of any way to elaborate.

“Well,” he said, finally. “What went bad?”

“I … I … I burned something. I had to start it over and I never got the time back.”

“Yes, you burned your roux.” Shit. He had seen that. “Also, your station looks like a pigsty. Why didn’t you take your dishes to the sink instead of just leaving them?”

“There was no room.”

“Then why didn’t you put them on someone else’s station? Someone who was done? No room? What kind of answer is that? That’s just silly. Come on.”

He stared at me. I figured this was, in essence, a rhetorical question. I shrugged. He held the stare.

“All right then. Your stew is terrible. This is … it’s … edible. That’s about the best I can say and that’s not saying very much. The meat isn’t
quite tender enough. Your braising liquid is thin, sour. This is not what I want to eat for dinner. Not at all. But I very much like your potatoes. Your vegetables are cooked perfectly. Really perfectly. But I cannot get past this stew. Edible. Passable, but that’s it.”

He tallied up my score and wrote it down on a piece of paper that he slid across the table to me. I looked. I had passed. Not by much of a margin, but I passed. I felt no sense of triumph, no sense of accomplishment. Every piece of me, every cell, felt flushed with mediocrity.

“Thanks,” I said, and stood up. He shook his head.

“You have talent,” he said. “But this was disappointing.” He pushed his plate to me. “You have quite a mess to clean up. Get started.”

I walked back to my station. One of the others came up to me. “How’d you do, Jonathan?” he asked.

“I passed.”

“What did you get?”

“I’d rather not say. I passed, though.”

“You pissed?”

I thought for a second. “Yeah, I’m pissed.” I grabbed some dishes and started carrying them to the sink. “Not at him, though.”

The next morning was the last in Garde-Manger. We emptied the refrigerators of our things, scrubbed them out, froze extra sausages, put terrines in storage, wiped down the room, and took our final. I found it difficult because I’d expended most of my recent time preparing for the practical. I couldn’t remember, right then, the basic ingredients for a whitefish mousseline or the technique for putting it together. I couldn’t recall the essential difference between nitrites and nitrates.

I was the first one done. Kowalski shook my hand and told me if I ever needed anything—any advice, a recommendation, a lesson on how to make guanciale at home—to get in touch. I was slightly sad that I wouldn’t be there the next day listening to the Dead and grinding foie gras for a terrine. Actually, I wouldn’t be back at school at all for a long time. I was way overdue with my externship; five points had already been automatically deducted from my externship grade by that afternoon. I really needed to land a gig.

F
LOYD
C
ARDOZ, THE EXECUTIVE
chef and co-owner of Tabla, sat down across from me at a small round table, saying by way of apology for being twenty minutes late, “Sorry it took me so long. You wouldn’t believe how many retards there are in the Holland Tunnel.”

We sat underneath Tabla’s grand, curving staircase in near darkness. It was mid-May. Sunlight shone through the windows facing Madison Park. A few servers flitted around the tables in the downstairs dining room, arranging napkins and silverware. Mosaic pieces covered the vaulted ceilings—representations of grains, fruits, animals—and a bit of Miles Davis’s
On the Corner
—from the first side, when the sitar kicks in—played over the sound system. Tabla was, in essence, two separate restaurants. The ground floor housed the Bread Bar, the casual, street-food-inspired yin to the finer dining, tasting-menu yang of the upstairs. The Bread Bar’s kitchen was tiny and open, occupying just a corner of the long curving bar area that took up one entire side of the dining room. Anyone sitting at the bar could observe all the cooking being done. I considered that was very likely a nerve-racking proposition.

“Why don’t we get right to it,” Cardoz said. He wore shorts, a polo shirt, and sandals. He didn’t smile much; a look meshing worry and wariness clouded his eyes. He had a defensive posture, hunched over his arms, sitting back and turned slightly away from me. “Why do you want to do your externship at Tabla?”

In the Asia class, we played with spices. I’d never encountered many of them before—asafetida, fenugreek seeds, black cardamom—but each had a role in recipes for
bondas
or
dal sambar
or
massaman
curry that saw them teaming up with other ingredients to become a whole lot more than the individual parts. My interest was piqued then, too, but we’d never really learned how to use them with a confident hand. There was too little time. Tabla, I’d read, had a small room in its pantry devoted entirely to spices. They used dozens of them and spent thousands of dollars every month to keep the supply up. That was one reason I wanted to do my externship at Tabla, and I told this to Cardoz.

I’d studied their menus beforehand, seen the pictures of dishes on their website. Crab cakes on a round of Goan-spiced guacamole with chutney. Naan bread stuffed with house-cured bacon. A sandwich of lamb braised in yogurt, with turmeric mashed potatoes. This was idiosyncratic, vibrant food. It was familiar—we’ve all had crab cakes; we’ve all had lamb stew—but I was captivated by the twist on them, serving the crab with that guacamole, braising
anything
in yogurt. It seemed like fun food. That was another reason, and I told this to Cardoz too.

I really needed to land an externship. Per Se had blown me off—and in retrospect, I’m not even sure what I’d been thinking, given what and where my skills were at the time—Gramercy Tavern had said no, the Modern had said no. The guy from Grocery, in Brooklyn, had been such a prick on the phone that I never bothered to follow up. During my search, I had read an article Cardoz wrote for the
New York Times
about how he views Tabla as a teaching kitchen, a place to really train people, and that he sees the mistakes people make every day as a perfect opportunity to further that training. I’d never had serious experience, so I needed the training. The chances were pretty good that I’d fuck a lot of things up, so I needed the restaurant’s patience. That was a third reason. I kept that one to myself.

But it was something very small that ultimately made me want to go to Tabla. I had Cardoz’s cookbook—
One Spice, Two Spice
—on the shelf at home and the first time I leafed through it, I’d stopped on a recipe
that called for a roux made from chickpea flour. I loved the idea. Tabla had an eye on tradition. But the roux was made from chickpeas. Tabla also bristled against strictures. In my mind, this was the best of two contiguous worlds. So that was the real reason I wanted to be there.

“You use a roux made from chickpea flour,” I answered. “How could I not want in on that kind of thinking? I’ve spent a lot of time looking at your menu, and I really want to eat this food. So if I want to eat it, naturally I’m going to want to know how to make it. You said in that
Times
article that you’ve staffed the kitchen with your employees’ education in mind. You worked with Gray Kunz, and his cookbook is one of my all-time favorites, and then you took that and started this …” I waved at the expanse of the restaurant. “So you and your cooking represent something I think is romantic, interesting, and unique, and I want to learn it.”

The CIA had phoned me just two days prior to ask if I was withdrawing from school or not, because I was so overdue in landing my externship. I had called a friend who knew Cardoz and asked for a favor to get this interview. Cardoz asked me more questions—if I understood the nature of restaurant work, was willing to do it, what I wanted to do after school was over, on and on. He told me they paid $7.25 an hour. He said that he expected externs to pull their weight but understood that this was the very beginning of a culinary education, and he didn’t like expecting
too
much or working his externs like mules.

When we hit a lull, I told him I thought it was really cool that Miles Davis had been playing earlier, and how much I loved the man’s electric music from the ’70s. Cardoz shifted upright in his seat, lost the wariness, and we talked about Davis for a minute. Then, he took me up the staircase, flanked with softly burning votives, through the dining room, which was arranged around an open circle looking down on the Bread Bar, and into the kitchen. It was fucking immense. Immediately inside the door was the pass, and running perpendicular to it were the kitchen’s stoves. The garde-manger station stood next to the pass, and next to that were two enormous steam kettles. A tilt skillet big enough for me to lie in stood near the kettles, right next to a
deep fryer and another even bigger kettle, and in a room beyond that there was a long workspace where vegetables were prepped and meat butchered. The whole thing must have taken up about a quarter of a city block. We stopped at the back of the kitchen, looking toward the door and all the activity going on around the stoves. He told me to show up two days later at ten a.m., and spend the entire day—and night—trailing in the kitchen. He’d make his decision then.

I
SHOWED UP AT
ten on the nose. I was immediately directed to the locker room, where I found a uniform to put on. A guy named Ross—one of Tabla’s four sous-chefs—gave me a whirlwind tour in and out of various storage areas. He explained the Tabla philosophy—American food, Indian spices—and that everything was local and seasonal. I wondered why, in May, there were four cartons of tomatoes on the shelf, but didn’t ask. I was nervous, and I wanted this to go well. I put it out of my mind.

I liked Ross. He was warm and slightly hyperactive, moving quickly through his explanations, but genuinely interested in communicating. He made direct eye contact. He seemed honest.

He introduced me to a few of the cooks and showed me to a table right near the garde-manger station.

“Wait here for a second,” Ross told me, “and we’ll get you started. Did you bring knives?”

“I did indeed,” I said.

“Let’s see.” I pulled out my main knife, a Global
santoku
that I had bought on sale for $80 and that I loved. Ross held it up to the light and tilted it back and forth. He dragged his thumb perpendicular to the edge, held it aloft again, and tilted a few more times.

“Good. Nice. I’ll be right back.” He put the knife down, pivoted, and dashed away, apron billowing, clogs slapping against the floor.

I spent a few seconds observing, trying to take it all in, process it, and use what I could to salve my nerves. I suppose it was natural that my nerves were making a low shriek; the environs of the CIA kitchens
were relatively safe: They were a place for trials, errors, and utter fuckups. The stakes were low. Tabla had been given three stars in the
Times
. It was presumably not a place for trials, errors, or utter fuckups. I wanted some visual clue that what I was would fit here. After a minute I wasn’t any more certain: It was like watching a colony of ants at work. The room was near silent, just the sound of blades against cutting boards. Everyone wore the same uniform and moved through the flow of their prep in a sort of anonymity. I had difficulty telling people apart.

Ross buzzed back in with a metal pan brimming with peeled ginger and told me to follow him. We arrived at a meat slicer.

“You ever use one of these?” he asked.

“Just once,” I said.

“It’s like riding a bike,” Ross said. “To do ginger the way
we
do ginger, you set the slicer to number seven. Put the ginger here. Turn the slicer on here. Pull it back here. Slice it like this. If you hold your hand
here
, the slices will just pile up in your palm. Keep it neat. And for the love of God, please be careful. Come find me when you’re done.”

It took me twenty minutes to slice all the ginger I’d been given, but I was, for the love of God, being really careful.

When I finished, I unplugged the slicer, wiped it down, and brought the many hundred opaque slices of ginger to Ross. He led me to a cutting board and in a single deft move laid out a handful of ginger in an overlapping line, like a single row of fish scales. He took my knife and assaulted the slices, turning the whole pile into tiny filaments. He gave all the filaments a quarter turn and brought the knife down on them again. Now there was a fluffy row of minuscule ginger dice. He gave me my knife back.