Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (29 page)

When I went back upstairs, I passed Ty on the way. He didn’t look at me.

“Ice bath! Ice bath!” people called out as I walked back through the kitchen. I poured some oil into the tilt skillet, and it immediately began to shimmer and dance. I tossed the spices in and stirred them in the oil. When I could smell the spices, I threw in a portion of lamb. Dwayne walked past me, with Ty on his heels.

Ty stopped. “That skillet’s not hot enough.”

I looked in. It was exactly as hot as it had been every time I made the lamb stew.
Fuck this
, I thought.

“It’s
not
hot enough. Take that meat out, dump the oil. Scrub it down and start over. Now.” He moved over to the kalonji. “This is too hot. It’s already starting to burn. Pour it out and put it into the other steam kettle. Scrub out this one. And watch the heat this time.” He walked out of the kitchen.

I turned to Dwayne. He looked shocked.

“What the fuck?” I asked. Dwayne moved over next to me.

“Listen to me: Everything you do today, you need to do perfectly. He is on your ass, and he’s going to make you miserable. Do everything right. Don’t take any shortcuts.”

I turned the skillet off and took out the meat. I poured out the oil into a bucket, put an inch or so of water in the skillet, and let it soak. I moved the kalonji from one kettle to the other. It splattered all over my apron.

It took around twenty minutes for the skillet to cool down enough for me to scrub it. I turned it back on, all the way up, and let it heat. In the meantime, I diced some ginger. After thirty minutes, I poured some oil in. I grabbed a cube of lamb and tossed it in. It jumped and sputtered and began to sear. Dwayne was nearby, meticulously cleaning the tops of some okra. Ty passed and said, “It’s still not hot enough.”

Dwayne looked up and shook his head. I started cutting up tomatoes. The tomatoes were to be put into one of the steam kettles and boiled with a bit of water. I’d strain them later and give the liquid to the Bread Bar. They’d use it to make rice pilaf.

I finished cutting the tomatoes, about seventy of them. My fingers were shriveled from all the liquid, and my cutting board sat in a puddle of it. I put them into a steam kettle, stirred the kalonji, and went back to the skillet. It had been on for an hour.

I tossed the lamb in.

“It’s still not hot enough,” Ty’s voice came from behind me. “Get it out, scrub it down, and start again.” I didn’t turn around. My head hung. My eyes watered a little, out of sheer frustration. I took the lamb out and then looked at the clock. It was around two. I knew there was a meeting between Cardoz, Ty, and the sous-chefs. I waited until I saw Ty and Dwayne and Chris and Ross leave the kitchen, then I put the lamb back in. I finished half an hour later and turned the tilt skillet over to Woodrow, who was waiting to make soup.

At 3:15, everyone had been back for a while. This was when the morning and evening shifts turned over, and usually when the ice bath dunkings occurred, so everyone could participate. But the bath was
full of bains-marie holding sauces and my kalonji. I roasted the okra while I waited to get dunked.

After an hour, the bath was still full. A lot of the morning guys had gone home. Twenty more minutes passed and it was just about time to eat family meal. I would need to stick around until the lamb stew came out of the oven and I could ice it down. I noticed no one was talking to me anymore. I strained the tomatoes and went to eat something.

After dinner, I stood by my workstation, waiting on the lamb. I had packed up most of my stuff. Stan came by and handed me a note. It was from Dwayne.
I need you to deep-fry cashews for salad. Do a week’s worth
.

“Is he kidding?” I asked Stan. This would take a while.

“No, he’s not kidding.”

Every burner on my stove was in use by garde-manger and pastry. It was too close to service to use any of the line stoves. I’d have to wait. It was also, I realized, too close to service for me to get dunked. The ice was still full of sauces.

Ross came by and shook my hand. “I’ve enjoyed your being here,” he said. “You helped us out a lot. I think when you get back to school, it’s going to be nothing. You’ll be running circles around most of your peers.”

“You never got to dunk me,” I said.

He gave me a sort of sad smile. “Yeah, we got a little too busy today. You lucked out.”

No one had seemed any more busy than usual. I saw Ty come into the kitchen, and it hit me why I hadn’t been dunked. I remembered standing next to him a couple of months back, watching someone get tossed in. “They do this to you when you leave if they respect you,” he’d said.

I was actually surprised as I stood at my station how hurt I felt.

At 5:30, I took the lamb out, put it into hotel pans, and iced them down.

At 6:00, service started.

At 6:30, a burner opened up on the stove and I deep-fried the cashews.

At 7:45, I finished changing in the locker room. I put my stuff in a corner and went back into the kitchen. I said good-bye to a few people, but dinner service was in full swing and they couldn’t really engage. I walked to the front and thanked Ty and shook his hand. He wished me luck at school. Cardoz had already gone home.

Downstairs, I went to the Bread Bar and found Dwayne. He thanked me and told me I’d done a good job.

“You’re not going to disappear, right?” he said. “You’re going to let me know how it’s going at school, correct?”

“Of course. I think I’m actually going to miss you.”

“Yeah, I imagine you will.”

“Hey—did Ty tell you guys not to dunk me?”

“I don’t know,” Dwayne said. “I think it was something like that.”

And then I left. I stood outside on Twenty-Fourth Street for a moment, waiting to feel liberation. I just felt exhausted.

There were delays on the trains, and I got into the apartment at 8:45. Nelly was pissed, but when I explained, she softened. “Well …” she said. “You never have to go there again. You never have to put up with that shit again.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t get dunked.” I looked at her. “My feelings are really hurt.”

She rubbed my shoulders. “Do you want to have a beer before we hit the road?”

“No,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

The following week, I sat down at my desk in Saugerties and I e-mailed Ty, Chris, Ross, and Cardoz. I wrote very nice, fawning thank-you notes. I got very nice responses from each of them.

Two more weeks passed. We had our first frost.

A
FTER THREE WEEKS OF
lying around, processing the flow and ebb of the summer, watching the foliage turn luminous and then fall from the branches, it was time for school to start up again. My desire to go back was only moderately stronger than my desire to be given a catheter.

I started Quantity Food Production, twelve days of, basically, cooking food in huge quantities, on November 9, at 3:45 in the morning. I’d be doing the morning shift for six days, then switching over to the dinner shift for six more.

For the first day and the next five afterward, I got up at 1:30 in the morning, usually the time I went to sleep. The school hadn’t revalidated my parking pass, which unlocked the electronic gates of the lots near Roth Hall, so I had to park in the open areas half a mile away. My body shook with exhaustion; I was near delirium. It was turning cold.

The first morning, I arrived at 3:30, fifteen minutes early. I went to the QFP breakfast kitchen and found that class had already started. I looked at my watch and at the time on my cell phone. They were both correct. I walked in, stunned that I had missed something as big as the start time on my first day. I had made a point of arriving
early
on day one.

Chef Joe De Paola, a tall guy about my age, was in midlecture as I came in, and he stopped.

“You must be Jonathan Dixon. Well, I think it’s just a great way
to start this class by being fifteen minutes late. Way to get off on the right foot.”

“I apologize,” I said. “I thought—I was
certain
—that class began at three forty-five. I thought I was early.”

“Your group leader sent out an e-mail the other day announcing class was at three fifteen the first day.”

I was coming back from externship. I had never even met anyone in this new group before. I had no idea who the group leader was. And I hadn’t gotten an e-mail.

“I never got that e-mail,” I said.

“I’m so sick of hearing how people didn’t get an e-mail.”

“I’m really sorry, but I never got it.”

“Well, since you’re here now, you can get this: You fail for the day.”

I sat down. This was beginning to feel too familiar. The mixture of resignation and resentment, of feeling that the flow of things was passing just beyond my reach and comprehension, of feeling
fucked
before I even started—it made me want to cry. I thought about—later—pulling De Paola aside and explaining that being late wasn’t who I was, that I was exactly the opposite, but the persona he was wearing for this class was stern and unblinking. I didn’t see the point.

We started cooking half an hour later; my assignment was to do eggs Benedict. I attempted to poach one hundred eggs, but my water wasn’t hot enough, and I screwed them up; the pot became full of a yellow-gray slush. Someone else had to make my hollandaise for me as I struggled to right my error. Another person split and toasted my English muffins. All that I knew I’d accomplished at Tabla had turned to nothing.

On the ride home I had a thought. Maybe it was time to consider the idea that I just wasn’t a cook.

The thought hung there echoing, and I pulled off the road, into a convenience store parking lot. I sat idling. I turned the music off. Other cars came and went. What if this was true—and a small voice said,
hey, it probably is true
—what do I do? I felt deeply embarrassed and humiliated. Is this another waste of time, like my entire twenties? I felt
embarrassed and humiliated on behalf of my parents, who had been so excited when I made the decision to attend school. I felt embarrassed and humiliated on behalf of Nelly. Did she know the whole time what I was now suspecting, and was too tender to lay it out? All her support and all the sacrifice she’d made while I basically went off hunting unicorns …

Nelly was right then down in the city, teaching. I wanted to call her, but I knew she was in class. I wanted to apologize and make the apology so heartfelt that I’d break down, and maybe in the dismantling, I’d get a glimpse of what the real nature of things was.

I started the engine and drove the rest of the way home. I got back to Saugerties at noon. I’d been up for more than eleven hours, and I’d be going to bed in six. I decided to have a beer, then decided to have several more. At some point, I talked myself back into thinking that I was just having a bad spell of it. But the initial suspicion I’d had on my drive lingered. Like a scar, or a lesion.

On the third morning, I peeled fifty pounds of potatoes and put them into a steam kettle to boil. They’d be turned into home fries later on. I got lost in other activities, and overcooked them until they fell apart.

After the sixth day, we began the evening portion of the class. We’d be making dinner under Chef Eric Schawarock’s tutelage. I was working with a woman from Wisconsin named Aziria, or Azzy for short. Each team had a different entrée assigned to them; there might be a choice of five or six entrées available nightly to each diner. We were to come up with our own recipes for the meatloaf or spaghetti and meatballs or baked sole or roast beef served starting at 5:00 in the afternoon. Schawarock, a New Yorker with hawkish eyes, a head of gray hair, and a thick Long Island accent, threw out our recipes and explained how he expected the dishes to be executed. We were cooking for around two hundred people a night. The second night, Azzy and I were to make sole topped with bread crumbs. It was disastrous. We baked the sole in the convection oven, sprinkled bread crumbs on top, and put the fish under a broiler to quickly toast the crumbs. We underestimated how powerful the convection ovens were, and the fish
lost every bit of moisture. Broiling the bread crumbs just compounded the error. Schawarock’s comments on his grade sheet that night simply read, “All bad.”

Five more days passed, pretty much without incident, but without any progress or triumphs. Thanksgiving came. The beginning of December arrived, and so did L-Block.

D
URING THE SIX WEEKS
of L-Block, there’s no cooking. All the classes—Restaurant Law, Cost Control, Menu Development, Nutrition, Intro to Management—are book based, everything purely academic. I was back in my khakis and polo shirts, arriving most days at 7:00 a.m., downpressed by the frigid winter temperatures, enduring the slack erosion of my time on campus.

“If you divide the cost of sales percentage with operating expense percentage, you get the variable rate for your restaurant.… Determining the break-even point is to divide the occupational expenses by the contribution margin percentage.… Protein contains 4 calories per gram and should make up 10 to 35% of your daily diet.… The fat-soluble vitamins are A, D, E, and K; they occur in foods containing fat and get stored in the liver or fatty tissue until needed.… There are four basic theories of management: scientific, human relations, participative, and humanistic.… Success in leadership means focusing on a ‘return on the individual,’ a philosophy that blends imagination, initiative, improvement, interaction, innovation, and inspiration.… Judy, a caterer, signs a contract for a party with David for $1,500.00 for October 5. The day before the party, David calls Judy and tells her to cancel the party. Judy decides to sue David for the contract price. Judy then finds out David is seventeen years old. Can she still sue?”

To Nelly and me, money was now just a fabled thing that other people had. We were low on oil to heat the house but couldn’t afford more. Nelly had taken on additional teaching, which meant many hours of additional reading and time away from her writing, and her synapses were beginning to smoke.

There was a single bright spot. Raimundo Gaby was a handsome and nattily dressed Brazilian man who taught Menu Development. In a lightly accented voice, he bounced from one side of the room to another, shouting, singing, waving his hands, cracking jokes, always wearing a beautiful suit and wildly colored tie. “Look at this! Look at this menu!” He’d have a picture of the Café Boulud menu projected on the overhead. “Awesome! Excellent! Bringing it! Brrrrrrrrrriiiiinnngggiiinnng it! But then … but then … now, look at this! It breaks your heart!” He switched to a projection of the Balthazar menu. “Not bringing it! Not bringing it! Does your eye know where to go? Mine doesn’t! Off balance! Too crowded! If they just moved this … if they rearranged this …” His hands swooped all over the place. “They’d be bringing it! Three simple changes! Easy, breezy, beautiful, Cover Girl!”