Yes, Chef (20 page)

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I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
, I was surrounded by people who were on their way somewhere. I wanted to be on my way, too, but it turned out that the rest of the New York cooking world wasn’t quite as easy to crack as Aquavit had been. While I was still waiting to hear from places I’d written to in France, it seemed silly not to explore some American options while I was in the country. I aimed high. Jean-Georges Vongerichten was at Lafayette and Daniel Boulud was at Le Cirque, and while they were clearly geniuses, they were not at center stage. Center stage, at that moment, belonged to David Bouley, a chef from Connecticut who had made his mark in the city when he ran the kitchen at Montrachet, a TriBeCa restaurant owned by the then fledgling restaurateur Drew Nieporent. Bouley won raves for stuffing cabbage rolls with foie gras one night and pairing red snapper with a tomato-and-coriander pasta the next. Both Bouley and Nieporent were about to build food dynasties, but due to mismatched temperaments, not together. In 1987, Bouley opened his own restaurant—Bouley—on West Broadway and Duane, practically around the corner from Montrachet. He knocked it out of the park, too, earning four stars from
The New York Times
, repeatedly coming in at number one in the reader-driven
Zagat Survey
, and winning awards from the industry’s benchmark-setting James Beard Foundation. Customers reserved months in advance to taste Bouley’s locally sourced fingerling potatoes or his roasted wild salmon with sesame seeds in tomato water.

I wanted to work for David Bouley.

I took the subway down to Canal Street one afternoon to see if I could secure a
stage
with him. I was fairly sure Christer Larsson would let me off for a couple of weeks; it was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement among chefs to let your hard workers train with someone else when the opportunity arose.

The first thing I noticed about the restaurant was a crate of fresh apples sitting out on the sidewalk, waiting to be taken inside. I made
my way back to the kitchen and recognized in every detail—the decor of the dining room, the freshness of the herbs that an intensely focused
commis
was chopping, the quiet seriousness of the staff—the same level of commitment I had known at Victoria Jungfrau. I found the
sous-chef
, a German guy who would go on to have his own successful restaurant in the West Village some years later. I told him my history and asked if they’d let me
stage
.

“No,” he said, and I realized that his gaze had stopped short of actually focusing on me, that he wasn’t putting any effort into seeing beyond an instantaneous judgment he’d made that I was not worth his time. It was the look. I’d seen it everywhere from Gburg to Nice. “I don’t think so.”

“You could let me do a tryout before you decide,” I suggested, feeling emboldened by my recent successes at Aquavit. I was offering a couple of weeks of free, skilled labor. If they let me work just one shift, they’d see what I could do.

“I don’t think so,” he repeated, and turned his back.

Had they ever had a black cook in that kitchen? Would they ever?

It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that black people were almost by design not part of the conversation about fine dining. In New York, I’d only heard of one black man to pull a chair up to that table, and that was Patrick Clark, a second-generation chef from Canarsie, Brooklyn. In 1980, when he was only twenty-five, Clark brought nouvelle cuisine to TriBeCa via the Odeon, and
The New York Times
gave him two stars in its very first review of the place. Clark would go on to do stints in LA and DC, he’d turn down an invitation to become the White House chef for the Clinton administration, and he’d eventually be named executive chef for Central Park’s iconic Tavern on the Green restaurant.

Sometimes, when Christer Larsson took me along to swanky cooking events, I would see Clark there. He seemed like a nice guy with a big personality, built like a boxer. A well-fed boxer. He was always, without fail, the only black man among his peers, but he seemed at ease in any environment, confident that he deserved to be in the
room, on equal footing with other food-world luminaries who left me starstruck, like Park Avenue Café’s David Burke and Aureole’s Charlie Palmer. Clark always seemed to be accompanied by people of color, people who probably would never have gotten into the room without him.

Back then, as a black man in the world of fine dining, Patrick Clark was truly the exception to the rule. His food was solid and well-executed, his passion and personality were larger than life, and yet he would never get more than two stars. I wanted more. I wanted four stars. The upper echelon among chefs was still reserved for white men, but I knew, in my heart, that that could change. I was the Lion of Judah, as Ethiopians sometimes referred to themselves, born into one of the oldest, proudest civilizations on the planet. And I was raised with the truth of equality, by white parents who lived out their belief in racial equality through their love and protection and support. I believed in myself as a chef. I just needed to get through the door. The key, I knew, was to have the one credential that still mattered above and beyond anything else: France. If I could get to France, then even a jerk-off
sous-chef
couldn’t afford to ignore me.

I
HAD TO GET TO
F
RANCE
. A
NYONE WHO WANTED TO KNOW GREATNESS
had to go to France. Yeah, I found French food too heavy and rigid and fussy sometimes, with technique overshadowing flavor, but there was no question that it embodied excellence, history, and craft—three qualities that appealed to me. Plus, I needed that pedigree in my pocket.

Starting at Belle Avenue and then whenever I went home between jobs, I’d go to the library to look up French restaurants. I didn’t even know enough French to write the letters, asking for work; I had to find someone to help me translate. Plenty of places didn’t bother to respond at all, many said no, and the first one that wrote back with
possibilities was the Paris branch of a Swiss hotel chain, no doubt impressed by my time at Victoria Jungfrau.

“Take the job,” my father said, a firm believer in going with the bird in hand. I was holding out for a place that had earned top honors, which meant three stars in the Michelin guide.

“No way I’m taking that,” I said.

“Marcus,” he said, in a tone that meant he was trying to appeal to my sense of reason. “Even if it’s a one star or a zero star, just take the job. At least you’ll be in
France
.”

He had a point, but I wanted to hold out. If I kept working hard, there would be a payoff.

In the summer of 1993, two events conspired to catapult my cooking to a new level. First, after thirty polite rejections to the letters I’d sent to three-star restaurants in France, one finally said yes. The family-owned Georges Blanc restaurant in Vonnas, halfway between Dijon and Lyon, offered to take me as an intern the following May, and if everything worked out, I would be allowed to stay for nine months. They would cover room and board, but as was always the case in restaurant apprenticeships, the higher the level, the less you got paid. At Georges Blanc, I’d get squat. I’d have to save up for my transportation and living expenses, which might have been possible if I hadn’t had to make the monthly payments for my daughter.

The second event, which ended up being a kind of solution to the challenges of the first, happened on a hot August day during the break between lunch and dinner services, when Paul Giggs walked through the doors of Aquavit. My old boss from Victoria Jungfrau had left Switzerland and gone back to working for cruise ships, this time a highly rated Norwegian cruise line. His ship had docked in New York, and he decided to look me up. He was sitting at the bar when I came out of the kitchen, and I did a double take at seeing him perched on a barstool. He had come to visit, but he also happened to be looking for a cook. Was I interested?

“It’s hard work,” he warned. “There’s no such thing as a day off.”

Paul’s timing couldn’t have been better. My contract at Aquavit
was almost up and cruise ship work paid incredibly well, many times over what I’d ever earned. I agreed to sign on for a four-month stint, a run that would take me from Fort Lauderdale to South America. This was the adventure Mannfred and I had talked about so many times back in Interlaken. Going through with it would be a kind of tribute to my lost friend.

I ended up doing two stints for Paul, back to back, filling the months between New York and France and wiring my earnings to my mother to bank for me. I made enough to finally pay off what I’d borrowed from my parents, salt away six months of child support payments for Zoe, and pile up a good chunk of change for France. I also got to see the world, albeit in four- and five-hour doses when we docked in ports from Venezuela to Saint Petersburg.

In a creative sense, work on the ship wasn’t that challenging or rewarding. Paul was giving customers what they wanted: nothing too complicated. We’d make crab cakes on a “haystack” of fried leeks, minute steaks, and lemon garlic roasted chicken, day in and day out. What mattered was consistency and service, pleasing the passengers who had paid a thousand dollars a day to be on that ship. It was a little like being an actor in a Broadway show, having to be on time and do your best six days a week, except we did it for seven. Every day, we had two hundred guests to feed and we cooked them breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I learned how to bang it out, and I remember thinking that if I ever had to do pre-theater dinners again, I’d be able to do them with my eyes closed.

Guests usually came aboard for one week, and they rated the food at the end of their trip: Paul went apeshit if we got anything less than top marks. Fortunately, we rarely did.

He was fair and he rewarded talent, but if you messed up, he was not nice. My worst moment on the ship was near Acapulco. I’d recently gotten Paul to hire my buddy Susan, a Swede I’d worked with at Aquavit.

“I don’t know about bringing women onto the boat,” he said, but I vouched for Susan and she worked so hard and was so talented that
Paul accepted her instantly. Unfortunately, from swimming or eating something ashore, Susan fell horribly sick. Either we had to cover for her, or she had to go home.

“No problem, we’ll pick up her slack,” I promised, but taking over a second person’s station in an eight-person kitchen turned out to be too much. I was handling her fish station
and
the grill, and I started to lose track. Was that lamb order rare or medium rare? How many tenderloins was that again? It was too much. I was going down. Marcel, a Swiss cook who was in charge of the
entremetier
station, had to step in on fish while I dug myself out on the grill. I started screaming out orders, totally out of control, and when Paul saw how lost I was, he screamed louder, berating me all through service.

“You ugly fucking piece of shit,” he’d say every time a well-done steak came back from a customer who’d asked for rare.

Service that night felt like it went on forever, although I’m sure it was just as short or as long as it always was. Afterward, I got off the ship as soon as I could and went into an Acapulco bar for a drink. I sat on a terrace overlooking the wide curve of the bay, nursing my beer and alternately feeling sorry for myself—I was just trying to help out a friend—and cursing Giggs for being such an unforgiving hard-ass. Like one New Year’s Eve at Victoria Jungfrau, I’d messed up big time, ruining a ton of dinners and throwing off the entire kitchen’s rhythm in the process. I decided I could quit first or let Paul fire me, but if I quit, then I was letting him win. I wasn’t going to be the one to buckle first.

I’m not sure why Paul didn’t fire me. Maybe in the scheme of things, I took my mistake more seriously than he did. Maybe he kept me on because Susan came back to work the next day and he knew I wouldn’t be in a position to fuck up again. He carried on; I carried on.

For me, the privacy of the single berth on the ship was all about putting on my headphones and listening to French language lessons. Georges Blanc wasn’t going to be like Victoria Jungfrau, where I’d had a kind of grace period to get up to speed with my German. I needed to hit the ground running. I also continued to dream on the
page, in my journals. In order to progress, I felt that I had to develop new dishes, to take all I was seeing and tasting and make it into something that was
mine
. As committed to excellence as Paul was, I never saw him putting energy into developing his own cuisine. He seemed to have the attitude of, basically, Fuck it, I’m just going to make Italian food for the Italian customer. He had become an extended arm of the clientele.

I didn’t want to do that. I knew I wouldn’t be good at it, other guys would be better, and I had zero interest in it. I was interested in chasing flavors. I wanted to shake things up and see what happened. What if I took this piece of turbot, put Parmesan on top, put it in the salamander to speed-melt the cheese, then finished it with an orange chutney? I didn’t know if mixing French fish, Italian cheese, and Indian Caribbean flavors would be good, but I wanted to try it.

Those were the ideas I’d write in my journal, everything I’d tasted or wanted to try. I’d write down an idea and if it didn’t even work on the page, I’d let it go. I was my own gatekeeper; I had to fall in love with an idea before I would take twenty minutes and try to make it. First of all, twenty minutes was a precious amount of time in any kitchen, but especially on the cruise ship. Weeks might pass between chances to experiment, but you did it when you could because you never knew when the chance would come again.

“OK,” Paul might say during a morning planning meeting. “I need another entrée for tonight.”

“I got it,” I’d say, and offer up one of my latest inventions, one I’d already tested on the page and in the kitchen. After a while, when Paul needed to fill in a gap in his menu, he automatically turned to me.