Best Food Writing 2014 (40 page)

And yet there was, I guess, a reason that I didn't even know what he looked like. He ran the kitchen at Daniel with seemingly no sense of ego. He didn't seek out reporters to give interviews, rarely even went into the dining room. Daniel did that; Daniel mastered that. Alex stayed with the cooks. And then, ten years later, he was gone: decamped back to Long Island, to run the kitchen of a country club, to grow vegetables, to be with his family. When I called him to tell him I wanted to write a story about him, he said, “I love talking about food, so if there's anything I can tell you about, I'm happy to help you out.” I wanted to say to him, “No, man, the story isn't about food; it's about you.” In a world where we cover and cover and cover chefs—who's hot this morning and who's hotter this afternoon, plywood reports and blogs shedding each other's blood to get the scoop on someone's off-duty eating habits—he's like a ghost.

Glen Oaks is the kind of country club where members decide in the morning whether they feel like coming in for some golf or just to play the day's round on their own personal courses. Its dining rooms rival anything in Manhattan for grand comfort: rich woods and clean lines, hushing upholstery, and light that makes everything
glow slightly gold. If a member would like, Alex will prepare a tasting menu—seasonal, refined, lovely—but the club's kitchen is strictly big-kitchenesque: a cook fed heads of cabbage into a buffalo chopper, shooting ribbons of coleslaw-to-be into a massive bowl set in a garbage can. Dozens of chickens sat brining in tubs big enough to bathe triplets, and a few feet away was a rack of sweets, an orgy of pies on stainless steel, ready for Summer Sunday Barbecue Night on the veranda.

Sitting amidst all this was a cart of vegetables, arranged with obvious affection: the tomatoes gently pressing on one another, the yellows and greens of squashes peeking from their crates, eggplants so plump they seemed to be smiling, a bouquet of sunflowers. It was like a cartoon of a farm stand, a postcard of the good country life.

Alex Lee was cutting tomatoes. I walked over to him, reintroducing myself. “I was just making a dish for you,” he said, as if that's the normal way bare acquaintances greet each other. I glanced at the plate he was working on: a perfect rectangle of twelve tiles of tomato, every one different—one the lusty pink of ripe watermelon, one striped white and green, one cooked-carrot orange, one so dark it looked like dried blood . . . and then I was stunned with a sudden recollection: I once read that when Ruth Reichl came into Daniel, Alex made her a mosaic of his tomatoes. That was how he greeted the queen of the VIPs, and I flashed through four feelings: flattered to be in that company, thrilled to taste what that life is like, nostalgic for a time in a restaurant I never lived through, and then worried that I might be too entranced by Alex's past. At some point, you have to let the quarterback be more than the touchdown he threw in high school, right?

He put down his knife and came to shake my hand, walking with rigidity, an ex-boxer's gait. “I don't know what you want to talk about, but I can talk anyone's ear off about food,” he said. We decided to sit down in his office, to affect something like a formal interview, and for the next hour, I went tubing on a stream-of-consciousness exaltation of country cooking (“I love country cooking . . . how do you capture the flavors of country cooking? . . . We need to preserve country cooking . . . Ducasse was so great about concentrated flavors, country flavors . . . ”); gardening (“I've had gardens since I'm thirteen. If I wasn't a chef, I would have wanted to be a farmer, but boy, do
they work hard”);
Desserts Traditionnels de France
by Gaston Lenôtre (“I love that book, because he's this amazing pastry chef, but the book is all about country pastry”); his management style (“Believe me, I was very tough in the kitchen. But I always thought I could get people to work harder for me than anyone else. I guess because I also always made time for them; I always showed my interest in them”); and his favorite Haitian restaurant (“I've learned so much about food from cabbies”). He talked about his grandmother, how he remembered being in the kitchen with her while she made four shrimp stretch to feed six. “She was frugal, and she was a magician. I don't want to sound cheesy, but that was her greatest joy. That type of nurturing became important to me. I love to feed people.”

During a pause, he decided to show me a Japanese cucumber he grew. “Let me get some salt,” he said, but then stopped himself and instead grabbed a pair of scissors.

I followed him to his herb garden, right outside the kitchen, and there the random-access memories he'd been calling up began to take a kind of shape, a logic. He saw the lemon verbena—
la vervaine
, en français—and started telling me about arriving in his first French kitchen and being made to break stock bones for seven hours, then cleaning seven cases of squid the size of your fingertip. “But the cooks were so polished. They had so much reverence. Believe me, I could watch the staff set the tables for an hour. Everything was such a ballet,” he said. We got to the basil, and he told me about working in Italy, at Dal Pescatore, where the chef, Bruna, would wake him up, open a book on the traditional cooking of the region, and show him what they would cook that day. “Then her son would go out fishing and bring back what we'd need,” he said. “It was the most moving experience.” For him, every ingredient carries stories, and just laying eyes on one calls them up. The entire time we talked, he never referred to them as “product,” the way all chefs do. They were always “ingredients,” they were always individual and real, not abstracted and at arm's length.

A group of Hispanic men suddenly stopped their golf cart beside us. One got out to get a closer look at the garden, and then sheepishly pointed toward the patch of chilies. Alex spoke with them in Spanish; they were on a golf course maintenance crew brought in to work for a few weeks. They'd love a few peppers for their dinner,
and, as soon as they said that, Alex sprang into the plants. He snipped from three varieties of peppers, and came out with his hands full for them.

They drove off, a million Scoville units richer, and Alex pointed to a plant he was now standing next to. “This is a Kyoto eggplant,” he said. “Traditionally, they would take off the top, broil them, and punch holes in them for the moisture to escape. They they'd finish them with some miso and broil them again, and it would get so soft, you'd just eat it out of the skin, like a custard.” I wanted that, more than I'd ever wanted an eggplant before. “I love to grow specific varieties of vegetables and find out where they come from, what people did with them,” he said. “I think you have to know the history of a food when you make a dish with it.”

Eventually, we got to a tiny calamansi tree, taking some for our cucumber back in the office, its fate held hostage to another hour of downloading Alex's food brain. He talked about the floral acidity of calamansi, when he might use it in place of lime in a marinade. Then his eye caught a small pot of young bay leaves, more fragile than I'd ever seen. I said they smelled a little like vervaine. Alex smiled: yes, exactly. He looked intently at them for a moment. “I could imagine these in a delicate custard, very simple, just to show that aroma,” he said. His brain is always putting flavors into form.

Finally we returned to the office and tasted the cucumber. It was quietly astonishing—sweet and grassy, with an almost melon-like scent. It crunched with integrity, like a radish. It was the proudest cucumber I have ever had. Then it was back to his station in the kitchen, where the tomatoes waited, and Alex pointed to one of his cooks, a strapping dude who looked like a cover model from a grocery-store romance novel, wrapped in what seemed like a child-sized apron that didn't quite reach his knees. “The chicken he makes is tremendous. Fried chicken, barbecued chicken. They call him the Chicken Man. And the ladies love him. Believe me.” I imagined his face embossed on a paperback:
The Farmer's Daughter and the Chicken Man—A lust created by nature, forbidden by men.

Alex piled a full sturgeon generation's worth of caviar on his cutting board. He formed it quickly into a thick row, then laid it down the center of the tomato mosaic. It was the exact right length, the gunmetal eggs cropped close to the tomatoes, as if they'd been cut
from the same stroke. On each tile he placed a touch of herb: a small burst of fennel flowers for this one, that one a tip of spearmint, two splinters of chive for another.

“The caviar brings out the nuances of the tomato,” he said plainly. I took my time eating it, every bite different from the others: this one sweet like fruit, the next savory and deep. The unexpected cool of mint brushing up against the brine of caviar, red tomato tartness cruising overhead. Butter, nuts, seaweed. Licorice candy and peaches. Raw meat and fish belly. It looked like the most no-brainer of a dish you'd ever seen, but it went in a hundred directions. I'd like to say that the dish was an education in the flavors a tomato can take, but honestly, I was so knocked over by what was going on that the lesson washed over me. My palate wasn't worthy of Alex Lee's version of a tomato salad. I wondered if that's how Ruth felt when she had it at Daniel's gastronomic temple on 65th Street. I wondered if this is something his guests now enjoy, smelling of sunblock after a round of golf, a glass of iced tea sweating onto the table, a platter of the Chicken Man's chicken on the way.

Over lunch—he made us the greatest diner-style Spanish omelet in history, with square yellow cheese because “nothing melts like American, man”—he told me how he came back to New York after his time in Europe. He'd been working, like an ox, at Alain Ducasse's Louis XV. “They put me up in the Hotel de Paris—an amazing, beautiful place!—and one day Ducasse knocked on my door, saying, ‘There's someone here to see you.' So I went out to the lobby, and Daniel was sitting there. He wanted to talk about his new restaurant.” I chewed on my omelet. “And then the next day, Ducasse knocked again. ‘There's someone here to see you.' And it was Sirio. He wanted me to come back to Le Cirque.”

Did it really go down that way? Did the greatest chef of his generation come to Monte Carlo to recruit Alex one day, and did the greatest restaurateur of his generation come the next? I almost didn't even want to write that down. Origin myths are not meant to be fact checked.

Alex wanted to take me to see where our omelets' tomatoes and peppers came from, and ten minutes later, we pulled into the Rottkamp Brothers Farm. It's a fourth-generation farm, sixty-five years in the game, on property someone would probably kill to turn
into a stand of mansions. Instead, it's a cornucopia laid out on dusty earth: green beans, watermelons, half a dozen kinds of eggplants, and the full family tree of tomato varieties. Squashes, pumpkins, and a football field of callaloo, grown for Caribbean markets in the city. An unreal row of beets, as if staged for a photo shoot: their leaves proud, rigid, and deep green, their single red vein diving down into perfectly round roots, gently nestled in the soil.

Alex put his feet in the dirt and beamed.

“If I see you serving a tomato from a thousand miles away when this is right in your backyard,” he said, “I just don't see why I would need to ever come back to your restaurant again.”

Anne Marie, one of the owners, rushed over to greet him. He spoke with her in French, and they caught up: she's well, and her husband—one of the namesake brothers—is out cutting the callaloo. It's been a good season; the tomatoes have been fantastic, haven't they? The corn is coming to the end, but it's been a great year for it too.

She turned to me, saying, “You know, when Alex calls, they all go into the field and pick whatever he wants. We could be so busy, but everyone will run out, and they all say, ‘But it's for Alex!' He has such a great heart. They all love him.” He looks a little bit away, into the fields, as if to avoid hearing.

Anne Marie took us through her crops, and Alex pointed out patches of purslane she didn't even know she had. He talked about Ducasse's favorite stuffed zucchini, with
poulet roti
, truffle, and parmesan. He recalled three preparations of every vegetable we walked past, every herb from every dish. It's like he remembers everything he's ever cooked, everything he's ever eaten, and it needs to come out. The herb garden was one thing, but walking through an actual farm with Alex Lee was a little like staring at the sun.

But then we got to one of the barns, and Alex was stunned silent. There was a gray, ancient tractor, a Ford, from 1952. Richard, one of the Rottkamp brothers, found it abandoned in a stand of shrubs. It had the round, bulging nose of old cars from that era, a kind of warm muscularity. “He fixed it up himself! He looks so happy when he rides on it,” Alex said. “I love asking him about it, because he's so proud of it. But his life is so hard. These people, they work so hard.”

It occurred to me that Alex talks about hard work almost as much
as he talks about country cooking. I watched him chat with Anne Marie and Richard. He offered to cook them some of that callaloo, which they've only grown, never eaten. I thought about what he'd told me earlier, about making time for the people who worked so hard for him. At first it sounded like a strategy, something you put in a best-practices guide for business managers. But seeing the way Alex swelled with a kind of pride looking at this farmer's fixed-up tractor, I don't think it's a tactic. I think it's just him.

We said goodbye to the Rottkamps. Driving back to the club, I asked Alex how he came to his job there. It wasn't exactly the question I was supposed to ask, I guess—the question anyone would want to ask of the guy who spent ten years building one of the best restaurants in New York, one of the best restaurants in the world: “Why did you leave the game?” I didn't want to ask that question. I didn't want to ask this man something that would sound like I was questioning his honor or his commitment. But that might have been the question he heard anyway.