Yes, Chef (11 page)

P
OLITICAL BOUNDARIES
between one country and another are artificial divisions, of course, and in Europe, they have shifted more times than
anyone can count. But almost the moment the train crossed from the small town of Padborg, Denmark, into the slightly larger town of Harrislee, Germany, something broke open inside of me. I felt like I was at the beginning of a new path, one I’d forged by myself. This was a job
I’d
gotten, that
I’d
earned, and for the first time in my life, I recognized the weight of adult responsibility and welcomed it. By the time I changed trains in the Hamburg station, the comforts of Scandinavia seemed fully behind me.

When I finally felt hungry enough to get food, I walked to the café car and came back with a large, buttery soft pretzel and a fat pink wurst on a bun, swimming in sauerkraut and sweet brown mustard. I conducted the transaction in German, but it wasn’t pretty: Every time I opened my mouth I wished I’d practiced more, instead of goofing off with Mats during the three years of German I’d had in school. German was the language of business at Victoria Jungfrau, Tony had told me, and in order to keep up, I’d need to get fluent fast.

Our route took a fairly direct path south, and every couple of hours, we’d stop in a town big enough that I recognized the name: Hannover, then Göttingen, then Darmstadt. The closer we got to Munich, the more languages I heard, and I recognized many of the tongues of my
blatte
GAIS teammates. Poles and Slavs boarded, and when I switched trains again, this time in Munich, my seatmates were a Greek family who had brought a multicourse picnic with them. They spread paper napkins across their laps and ate olives and pita bread they dipped in garlicky eggplant spread or covered with slices of feta they cut from a block with a pocketknife. I tried not to stare, but the mother must have seen me sneaking glances. She put two dark dolma rolls on a napkin and handed them to me, smiling and nodding as she pressed them into my palm.

“Efkharistó,”
I said, using the one Greek word I’d learned from hanging out at my friend Tomas’s apartment. Thank you.

The mother laughed. I’d probably butchered the word, but she seemed pleased that I would even try. I bit into the soft, fat finger of the stuffed grape leaf. I had tasted these once or twice before at a café
in Gburg, but they’d always seemed too dense to me, the rice packed too tight and with little flavor beyond the tang of the leaf. These dolmas, though, were different. They were lighter. They had currants and pine nuts mixed in with the rice, a hint of fresh tomato sauce and lemon juice. They were also warm, as if they had been made that very morning. I closed my eyes and smiled to show how much I liked what I was eating, and from that point on she fed me as if I were another one of her children.

Beyond Munich, it wasn’t only the passengers who were different. The landscape had grown progressively greener—June in central Germany was certainly further along than June in Denmark, but now we were heading southwest and into the Alps. As soon as we crossed into Switzerland, the train started to climb and the mountains exploded all around us. My mother would love this, I thought. They looked just like the ones in
The Sound of Music
, one of her favorite films.

My last transfer was in Bern, where I moved from a sleek, modern train to its older, clunkier cousin, its smaller cars better equipped to make the tight turns and bends of the last twenty-five miles we had to cover in order to reach Interlaken. Once again, a new crop of people boarded the train with me. These people spoke only German, and they seemed more reserved; they were quieter and more formal in their interactions with each other, even when they were obviously family. There were still picnics here and there, but now it was wine, cured meats, and hard cheeses. People spoke quietly. No one offered food to strangers.

I tried to nap, to catch as much rest as I could, not knowing what the situation would be when I arrived, whether I would be expected to work the dinner shift on the day of my arrival. But sleep was impossible. I was so close now that I felt like everything I saw through the window belonged to my new life—each chalet, each cow, each distant peak. I would see these again, I thought. Soon I would know these places. I would learn them as I was starting to learn each new world I entered. Through food.

———

E
VERYTHING ABOUT
Victoria Jungfrau signaled grandeur. The sprawling rectangular building, long and white, had a massive central tower with a slate-roofed dome. Wrought-iron balconies covered its facade and overlooked a perfectly trimmed green at the center of town. A man wearing a white jumpsuit clipped away at the hedges in front of the hotel.

In my broken German, I asked for the staff entrance, and the man pointed his clippers toward the back.

The rear of the building had been updated to make it into a modern, highly functioning point of entry, with cement loading docks and corrugated steel ramps for all the food trolleys that came and went. In the office inside, a young woman in a dark suit rose from her desk and put out her hand.

“Hello, Herrn Samuelsson,” she said. “I am Simone.
Wie gehts es Ihnen?
” How are you?

She gathered up a handful of the other new guys who’d been waiting in the conference room and led us on a tour of Victoria at breakneck speed, mixing German and English the entire time. She took us to the staff dormitory, a separate building, so that we could drop our bags in our rooms. Mine was small and immaculate, and outfitted with a single bed, a clothes cupboard, and a sink. A single window cast a ray of afternoon light onto a cracked mirror above the dresser, and the walls showed the scuffmarks of interns who’d come before me. I loved it.

We reconvened in the hall and walked back to the main building. More than two hundred guest rooms and suites spread across three stories and, below them, a lobby floor that was nothing short of palatial. I took note of the stained-glass windows, gold-framed mirrors, fountains, atriums, and elaborately carved moldings I wasn’t likely to see again. Finally, we passed a dining room far more opulent than Belle Avenue’s, with upholstered chairs and coffered ceilings, sparkling chandeliers, and columns carved from marble. Suddenly, I saw
Belle Avenue for what it was, a hotel restaurant wedged in off to the side of a lobby, rather than a grand space intended for its purpose from the start.

“You’ll see the kitchen soon enough,” Simone said, “but now we go to the staff cafeteria, where you can wait until Chef Stocker is ready for you. It will be twenty-five minutes.” Simone left us with a brisk good-bye and good luck.
“Auf Wiedersehen. Viel Glück.”

The staff cafeteria was called the Chatterbox and its food line reminded me of elementary school, with trays at the start and a shelf to push them along as you picked out your meal. A mix of round and rectangular tables, eight-tops and six-tops, filled the dining area. Picture windows and French doors led to an outdoor terrace with additional seating.

The other newcomers walked around the Chatterbox, then drifted out onto the terrace to smoke. I bought an apple and ate it while scanning the bulletin board. One corner was dedicated to staff-to-staff messages, people looking to sell cars and skis or to find roommates for apartments in town. But most of the notices came from management. Praise for beating the forecasted number of room reservations that week. Warning that breakage was up. Employee of the month. Polaroids from the latest hotel team soccer match. Articles about the World Cup surrounded by flags from the countries of staff members whose teams had made it to the finals.

When I’d covered every inch of the board, I walked over to the tables, where one guy was sitting by himself, kicking back with a magazine.

“Can I sit here?” I asked in English.

“Of course,” he said with a wide, welcoming smile.

I liked Mannfred right away. He was from a town just on the other side of Lake Thun, where his father had a small restaurant that served traditional Swiss food. While Mannfred was tall and blond and just as polite as every Swiss person I had met, he had a warmth that made him stand out from the rest. He was happy to speak to me in English, thanks to having spent a year as an exchange student in Australia,
and we chatted easily. To me, Mannfred was a veteran—he’d been at the hotel a full month already, and he was willing to explain everything I needed to know, from where the bathroom was to which chefs had the biggest tempers. We all got the
Zimmer stunde
, the room hour, he explained, and the one chance each day to fit in all of your life—laundry, letter writing, and, if you’d been out the night before, sleep—between shifts. By the end of that first conversation, he’d invited me to go mountain biking with him. I’m going to like it here, I thought, even as I turned him down.

“I don’t have a bike,” I said.

“We can always get you a bike to borrow,” he said. That was Mannfred; he was a problem solver.

After precisely twenty-five minutes, Simone returned to round up the newbies. She led us to the kitchen, which was bigger than any I’d ever seen and gleaming with sleek, pristine equipment. Tony at Belle Avenue had given me a heads-up about the Swiss and their machines before I left. “Just look at their watches,” he had said. “They’re like that about everything. Perfectly engineered and machined. Nothing’s ever more than a couple of years old. You’ll see.”

I saw. We were there in the lull between lunch and dinner service, so everything had just been wiped down, but even when it got busy later, you weren’t going to find anyone smoking over the pasta pot, the way they did at La Toscana, a family-style Italian joint in Gburg I had worked in while I was still a student. More striking still was that I couldn’t smell anything except for the faintest odor of detergent and bleach. Nothing. How could they possibly have produced hundreds of meals a couple of hours earlier with not one hint of garlic or lemon or butter lingering in the air?

We stood in a cluster filling the central aisle of the kitchen. A door opened, and in walked a man trailed by a half-dozen cooks. Never mind that underneath the skyscraper-high chef’s hat, he was shorter and older than the others, slightly stooped and walking with a trace of a limp: He was in charge. You could tell from his bearing, the way he set the pace and the others fell in behind him, the way he
stopped short knowing that they were keyed to his every move. He wore a spotless white apron, its strings crossed and brought around to the front, where they were tied in a bow above his thick midsection. His chef’s coat and knife-creased black pants were perfectly clean and pressed, and he wore a pair of black Doc Martens boots. His name was embroidered on the left side of his jacket, Herrn Stocker, and sticking out from the breast pocket was the bowl of a small gold spoon.

Simone spoke. “This is Herrn Stocker, everyone. Chef?”

Herrn Stocker gave Simone a nod—gratitude and dismissal combined in one quick tuck of the chin—and silently looked over the lot of us. Once he got to the end of our line, he gave a second nod of dismissal. Somehow, all of us knew not to move. Instead, we waited as Stocker made a quarter turn and continued down the main aisle of the kitchen and back out the door, his pack of chefs silently falling in behind.

I
SLEPT FITFULLY IN MY NEW QUARTERS
, relieved when the alarm clock began ringing at six the next morning and my day could finally begin. At the end of my hall, two
commis
were lined up ahead of me, waiting for the shower. Each was in and out in less than five minutes. I followed their lead and was dressed and ready in no time. The formality of my new home had started to sink in, and as I crossed the back courtyard between the dorm and the cafeteria, I looked down and gave silent thanks to my mother for her obsession with ironing. My chef’s coat and pants barely showed the wear of the thirty-hour road trip they’d just been through. On the other hand, the turquoise Converse sneakers, one of two pairs I’d brought along, looked a lot less cool than they had in the Belle Avenue kitchen.

Thirty minutes before my shift began, I walked into the Chatterbox for breakfast. Unlike my first visit, the cafeteria was jammed with people and the tables had self-selected into tribes. The dining-room waiters, decked out in black suits and ties, sat with their backs straight and their cutlery properly lined up next to their plates. The
Portuguese dishwashers and cleaners sat together, their language an easy singsong compared to the harsh, guttural staccato of German that surrounded them. Busboys sat with busboys. Cooks sat with cooks, never more than a couple of stations above or below their own.

The only free agents in the room were the so-called international students, in from Mumbai and Tokyo and Buenos Aires. These were either hospitality junior execs sent by their companies to learn from Switzerland’s renowned hospitality industry, or rich kids whose parents were indulging a whim or desperately investing in something to keep Junior occupied. Members of this group didn’t observe the hierarchy; they sat wherever they wanted.

The food in the cafeteria line looked good—not the sloppy-seconds kitchen staff often got—but I could already feel my stomach tensing so I grabbed a coffee. I took my cup to a table where a guy wearing a cook’s uniform was sitting. He looked to be only a few years older, so he couldn’t be too high up on the food chain.

“Grüezi,”
he said, offering up the Swiss-German version of “good day.” His greeting was formal, not the
hoi
I had already heard buddies our age calling to each other, but he was welcoming when I asked if I could join him. Jan came from the town of Thun, thirty minutes to the northwest, at the opposite end of the lake of the same name, and he’d been at Victoria for about eight weeks. I asked what the kitchen here was like, and his bottom line was a warning.

“If you work hard and stay out of trouble, he’ll leave you alone.”

“Who?”

“The boss,” he said. “Mr. Stocker.”

“Mr. Stocker?”

“Shhh,” he whispered. “Not so loud. Don’t say his name.” Jan looked over at the wall clocks hanging above the newspaper rack. Four identical clocks were mounted beside each other, each displaying a different time. Each had an engraved plaque below it.
Paris. Moscow. New York. Interlaken
. The last clock read 6:45.