Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (38 page)

I began wondering if De Coster and Jon were messing with the orders intentionally. If it was intentional, they managed a pretty good lesson in improvising and using whatever one had on hand.

I also discovered a good solution to hiding food we just couldn’t bear to use out of fear for gastrointestinal safety. I asked the vegetable team to give me all their potato peelings and asparagus scraps—things we were allowed to toss—and hoarded them. When I discarded fish that stank like ammonia, or beef tinted green—both things that had lived too long in the walk-in refrigerator—I’d pull the vegetable scraps and dump them on top of whatever I’d just thrown out. De Coster never noticed.

The decisions we made about our menus weren’t arrived at democratically. I grabbed the reins. And for some reason, Max—and Lou—went along. I wound up finalizing the menus, dividing the labor, and saying things like, “Don’t worry that we don’t have enough milk and cream—just use stock and do a four-to-one ratio of polenta. Cook it in the oven so we don’t have to worry about stirring. We’re going to need to blanch the green beans in about ten minutes because we won’t have the burner space later on. Make sure the pine nuts get browned—don’t let them burn. You should add some orange juice to that vinaigrette—you can get the acid and the sweetness that’s missing all in one.”

I didn’t intend to become the foreman. I also didn’t intend to get forceful in giving directions, yet at one point, I yelled at Lou for not getting something done on time. It was an uncomfortable moment: I had a sudden and clear insight into why Coyac and Viverito, Ty and Chris and Dwayne, Mullooly, and the other loud chefs raise their voices.

De Coster asked to see me after class. “So I’ve been watching you the past few evenings. And tonight I
heard
you. You don’t need to do
that, but, given who you were badgering, I understand. Family meal is a tough station. No one realizes it. But you have very little time to get a lot done. A lot of my classes, things don’t get done with that station. But if family meal isn’t satisfying, morale is shot for the entire night. You guys are doing well, and I need you to keep taking a leadership role. Even more so than you have. We need to keep the trains running on time.”

So I did. It ceased being the Jonathan and Max Show. Max was gracious about it. Our orders began coming in correctly.

Max and I sat next to each other in De Coster’s preservice lecture, and we’d arrive a few minutes early to confer about that night’s menu. Which meant
my
menu. I found myself simply telling Max what we’d be doing: “Okay, so tonight we’re making meatball sandwiches. Jon placed the order for ground beef and I watched him do it, so we know it’s in. I’ll make the sauce. We’ll put bread crumbs, Parmesan, onions, and so on, into the meat and bake them in the convection oven. We’ll do the fennel salad thing again. We’ve got the bread, so we won’t need an extra starch. I’ll do the broccoli, too. Lou can take care of shredding the mozzarella. Good?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

Discovering your inner asshole is a strange experience. I kept waiting for Max to tell me to shut the hell up, but he never did. So I became more tyrannical, albeit gently. One day Max made a vinaigrette for our salad from soy sauce, rice vinegar, and honey. I tasted it. “Hey, this is good,” I said. “Nice. But since we have all these oranges, what would you think of adding some of the juice and zest, just so they don’t go to waste?” After the juice and zest was added, I tasted again. “Max!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got it. We can make this perfect if we add some grated ginger and some mirin. Does that sound right?” Max added the ginger and mirin. I considered that maybe I wasn’t truly being an asshole, that maybe, in fact, this was how real kitchens manned by real cooks functioned.

We roasted thirty-five chickens one day. We grilled forty pounds of flank steak and made potato gratin on another. Near the end of our
stint, we made fried chicken for seventy people. We bombed badly with a batch of penne alla vodka.

De Coster gave Max and me each an A–.

F
ROM THE
E
SCOFFIER
R
ESTAURANT
kitchen, we finished the last three weeks of our education in the role of servers. We waited on customers from 6:00 in the evening until about 11:00 at night, when the last of them finished their meals—around two and a half hours for an amuse-bouche, an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert. A bunch of the dishes were prepared tableside; if someone ordered the mustard-crusted rack of lamb or rack of boar, or the dover sole, we’d wheel a cart, or gueridon, to the customer’s table, turn on a heating element, and—taking the sole as an example—debone the fish, plate it, and make a brown butter sauce. We’d spoon the sauce over the fish, add some turned potatoes (also coated with butter) to the plate, and set it down in front of the customer. Several desserts were done tableside too, like crêpes suzette, or strawberry jubilee. At some point during the dessert preparations, we flamed brandy at a presumably safe distance from the customers’ heads, sending up a huge plume of fire. People seemed to love the theater of it.

After the novelty of solemnly doing all these tableside dishes wore off, we became quite bored. The customers—especially the older ones—loved asking questions about who we were and where we were from, what we’d do afterward, where we’d go. I think we all had our pat answers that we used ad infinitum, but it just reminded us that the end of school was staring us right in the face, and we were pretty anxious to finish up.

J
ESSICA GOT A JOB
in Chicago. My friend Dan Clawson was going to Nantucket for the summer to work in a restaurant there, then he’d head to New York. He was hoping to wind up at Per Se someday, or Momofuku, or one of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s places. Max was off
to a resort in Wyoming, my friend Diego to the Ritz in Miami. Zach was lining something up at a hotel in Vegas.

I hadn’t had much contact with anyone from my first group, but Adam had let me know he’d gotten a sous-chef job at Spice Market. Lombardi had never returned from his externship; I asked Adam and he couldn’t remember which restaurant it was—some low-key place in Westchester, or maybe Connecticut, Adam thought—but they’d offered him a permanent job and he stayed on. Joe, who’d done his externship at the French Laundry, was moving to San Francisco to help Corey Lee, the French Laundry’s former chef de cuisine, open his own restaurant.

Brookshire had taken some time off and come back to school a block after I had; I ran into him from time to time and he’d decided to stay on and complete the bachelor’s degree program. A number of people were taking that course; Sitti was staying, as were Margot, Jackie, Rocco, and Gabi.

Everyone asked me:
Where are you going? What are you going to do?
Everyone assumed I’d write.

Almost every graduate moved on to a restaurant kitchen. All of the instructors had taken that path, and the curriculum was built on facilitating it. And I harbored some envy. For two years, virtually every day, I came into school and got to spend hour after hour cooking.
Imagine a life just like this
, I thought.
Imagine doing it day after day, doing what you’ve been trained to do, how fast you’d get, how efficient. You’d start achieving a serious finesse, real refinement
.

Part of me wondered,
If I could go back to Tabla now, knowing what I know, would it be a totally different experience?

And what if I found a restaurant to work in here, upstate?

A few days before graduation, I ran into Viverito in the parking lot.

“So what’s the next step?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m working out the details now.”

“I’m assuming you’re not restaurant bound?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s not for everyone. But there’s a whole world of things to do out there, you know.”

There
is
a world out there beyond the walls of a restaurant kitchen. Although most students chose to stay within them, you heard the occasional story around campus of people who made a different choice. One guy wound up cooking for rock bands on tour. Some people became food stylists. Two of the chefs who used to work in the Martha Stewart test kitchen had graduated from the CIA.

I harbored envy because no matter how great any other situation is, there’s nothing like a restaurant kitchen. But I knew it wasn’t where I really belonged. Just the amount of talking back I did to people who were in charge of keeping the kitchens running—I knew I was too pigheaded to flourish in a situation where ceding control to others was required to truly learn and succeed. If I went back to Tabla now, the results probably wouldn’t be appreciably different. I’d certainly do things differently, learn much more that they had to offer, dive in deeper to the whole culture and experience, but I am who I am, and my focus wasn’t entirely aligned with what they needed from me.

I thought about all that one night when I was driving home with only a single day left at school. And I thought intently about my future. I knew I was going to be writing about the experience of learning to cook at school, but I also knew that project wasn’t going to sustain the rest of my life.

I wanted—
needed
—the physicality of cooking. I loved working with my hands. I loved working with all my senses.

Dinner parties for me now were a different proposition than they’d been prior to the CIA. I loved having people over now, getting elaborate, knowing I could wow them. I even felt a very vague disappointment when I had to stop cooking, turn off the burners, and take my seat at the table.

In the rare moments when Nelly and I felt a little flush, we’d occasionally go out to eat, but more often we’d splurge on really good ingredients and do something for ourselves at home.

Since being in school a lot of my friends and family would ask me to prepare dinner when we’d visit. I never said no. I loved bringing in my equipment, unpacking it, setting myself up, and cooking for all of us.
There’s nothing like a restaurant kitchen, but watching people enjoy food I’d cooked never lost its thrill.

I recalled years ago, when the notion of culinary school was barely germinating, being at a party in an acquaintance’s Brooklyn apartment. They’d hired caterers to do Indian food for the guests, and I found myself standing off to the side of the apartment’s kitchen for half an hour, nursing a beer, watching the caterers at work, and wishing I was working with them.

And as I drove across the bridge, over the Hudson River, the realization was as much right there in front of me as the swollen moon and its light on the water:
Those caterers weren’t conjured up from the ether. They go to people’s homes—all the time—and feed them
.

Most catered food is something consumed with weary resignation, to stave off pangs or act like a sponge for cocktails. But I remembered that Indian food being pretty good.

And I asked myself,
Does it really work like that? Can you really do something like that on your own terms?

One voice answered,
No
.

Another voice countered with,
Why the hell not?

I liked the second voice much better. Seriously—why the hell not? Now that I thought of it, I’d been at more than a few parties over the years like that one in Brooklyn. And I’d gotten pretty good at the stove. Sometimes when I’d make us dinner, Nelly paid me what I thought of as the ultimate compliment: “If I was served this in a restaurant, I’d be completely happy.”

Right then I knew that this idea embodied the best of both worlds for me. It was exhilarating to think about. After I got home, I was up until very late at the dining room table, piles of my cookbooks around me, playing with ideas, planning sample menus. Planning the rest of my life.

I
MADE THE DRIVE
to school one last time. Graduation began at 10:00 a.m. in the Student Rec Center, where I’d watched the Bocuse d’Or
five months prior. From where all the students sat on a dais, I could see my parents and Nelly in their seats. It took about forty-five minutes, from the opening invocation to the moment when Tim Ryan called us each up to a podium where he draped a medal around our necks and shook our hands. At 10:45, he announced, “Consider yourselves graduated.”

Later, I guided my parents and Nelly around Roth Hall, taking a last look at the kitchens. I said good-bye to Viverito. I said good-bye to Perillo. I said good-bye to my classmates.

When there were no other places to revisit, no more people to say good-bye to, Nelly and I went to the parking lot and got into my truck. I couldn’t bring myself to start it. I turned around in my seat and looked out the back window. I sat once again staring at the buildings. Delivery trucks were pulling in and driving away. Students in uniform were walking to, or home from, their classes. I saw some students in their waitstaff uniforms walking toward Roth Hall. Three weeks from now, it would be their turn. Another minute passed.

Nelly put a hand on my knee. “Let’s go home, honey,” she said.

“Yeah.” I started the truck and drove out of the parking lot.

After we all got back to the house and changed, Nelly, my parents, and I sat at the kitchen table.

“So what do we do about dinner tonight? Is there a restaurant you’d like to go to and celebrate?” my mother asked.

“Any place you want,” my father added.

“Let’s go hit some of the farm stands, instead. Storey Farm in Catskill has great corn. Sauer Farm has been doing really nice okra. We can go to the market in Kingston and get some good, local meat. I was thinking, why don’t we do buttermilk chicken crusted with cornmeal, and some succotash, and a tarragon jus?”

I thought my parents would really enjoy that—and, in the future, other people might too.