Mincemeat

by Leonardo Lucarelli

  I continued to study with sporadic confidence, met some people, and moved to Via Placido Zurla, in Rome’s not-yet-hip Pigneto quarter, renting an apartment on the same floor as my aunt. Matteo moved in with me. Before even buying a mattress, I stocked the fridge and started cooking for two days straight, inviting over everyone I knew. My identity revolved around food, cooking, and good company. It was my passport, and I needed it to get by in Rome. I needed money too. My scholarship didn’t cover even my basic expenses, so I went to the first restaurant I heard about that was looking for a waiter. Its name was Sessanta. Sandro was the chef and Giovanna worked front of house. Only as many days as I need to pay the rent, I thought. Yeah, sure, I mused, without much conviction. Two weeks later, the sous chef had a fight with Sandro and stomped out in the middle of service, leaving him in the lurch with a French knife and an overflowing pass. There were three of us servers in the dining room. I cracked open the black door that led to the kitchen, stuck my head in, and piped up, “I know how to cook a little.” That evening I crossed the threshold into the kitchen. And I’ve never looked back.

  4.

  Sandro met Giovanna in Paris in the early ’90s. At that time, he was as thin as a rail. He sported a Mohawk and was heavily into punk rock. He wore a tattered uniform with his favorite knife dangling from his apron strings. Giovanna fell madly in love with him. She was studying languages and had been living in Montmartre for a while, making ends meet working as a waitress. Sandro had been in Paris for a year in a rented loft in Pigalle and had just entered the kitchen of Paul Bocuse. When I met them in Rome, ten years had passed since their first meeting and Sandro was sporting a prominent beer belly and had lost the tough-guy look he said he once had, but they were still together. All he ever wanted to do was enjoy himself cooking at the expense of the owners. As far as everything else was concerned, he didn’t give a shit. When the fresh yellowtail arrived, the first thing we’d do was make a beautiful carpaccio or tartare and gorge ourselves on it, nothing but the best parts. Then we’d freeze what was left. Sandro ordered cheeses that cost an arm and a leg and were impossible to sell (leaving us feeling obliged to cut some sizable wedges for ourselves, just to taste them), and bought a mountain of top-of-the-line kitchen utensils with all the bells and whistles, and silver platters to serve them on, the likes of which I had never seen before. His menus were outrageously extravagant, and his techniques were imaginative as well as precise. Not that I was in any way involved; I was the lowly pantry chef in charge of making salads.

  Sandro carried on as if he were still in the snobbish Parisian culinary school he taught at before returning to Italy. Sessanta was a fun and useful stopgap, but it couldn’t go on for much longer, we all knew that, even Sandro. The financial drain perpetrated with clinical precision by the chef exasperated the owners, and the self-congratulatory attitude of Sandro and Giovanna was always one short step away from reality. I took a few exams at school without attending any classes, mainly to keep my grant. I spent weekends working, but even though I learned a great deal from Sandro, I was looking for more than a career making salads. I left the restaurant in June 2001.

  In July, they caught Sandro with his fingers in the till and fired him, charging him with theft. He got so mad that one night he punctured all four tires of the car of one of the owners. Except it was the wrong car, and someone saw him, and so Sandro and his beer belly ended up spending a night in the slammer. He asked his friends for help, but when you’re in hot water, your so-called friends are the first to disappear. Giovanna apparently returned to Paris and hooked up with someone else. The thing that pissed off Sandro the most was the fact that this someone else was a dull, middle-aged sales assistant. A sales assistant? Che cosa? After experiencing the ecstasy of an artist like him? I lost sight of Sandro for a while, but his cooking was way too good to keep him down. And if Giovanna is still with that other guy, then that’s her bad luck.

  My only satisfaction at this stage of my life came from the fantastic dinner parties I threw at home. I was living well above my means and engaging in a certain level of culinary experimentation. When I went into a supermarket, I’d switch on my Walkman, put on my headphones, and turn the volume up to the maximum, but without putting in a cassette. When passing by the cash registers, if I heard the white noise change from zzzzz to zzZZZZzz, that meant the shoplifting alarm was on, otherwise it was there only as a deterrent and was probably either fake or off. That day I didn’t hear anything.

  I did my shopping, adroitly slipping the most expensive items into my backpack: a bottle of Barolo, a slab of Scottona beef, pine nuts, French cheeses, Venezuelan chocolate. This enabled me to play around with cuisine that was worthy of the name. A steady stream of friends and acquaintances came over and stuffed themselves at my dinner parties, these events being anything but commonplace in cash-strapped student circles. Word got around that you’d always get a great meal at Leonardo and Matteo’s place.

  I started calling myself a chef — and allowing myself to be called one — much, much sooner than I should have. But other people’s confidence defines you (at least I’ve always let it define me), and context is the measure of everything.

  5.

  In July 2001, I returned from Genoa, where there had been violent clashes between antiglobalization protesters and police during the G8 summit, my head bursting with ludicrous journalistic ambition and countless photos of the riots, a few of which were purchased by Italy’s moderately left-wing daily La Repubblica and a couple by the way more left-leaning Il Manifesto. No one paid for them or even suggested my sending any more. What else could I do but get back into a kitchen? But this time around I needed a plan. Giulio’s restaurant in Rome’s colorful Trastevere quarter was looking for a station chef, and I diligently put together my résumé: detailed and jam-packed with blatant lies. I listed working in real restaurants that I had never set foot in, plus a brilliant but entirely phony five-year career that started in Umbria and saw me excel as both a cook and sous chef. Giulio, who had given his name to the place, didn’t make a single phone call — they seldom bother to check out résumés. “That looks fine, great, you’re hired.”

  He showed me around the kitchen, told me his plans and ambitions, how his restaurant was state-of-the-art, and what he demanded of his kitchen staff: coordination, consistency, and courage — his three Cs. Plus a fourth, cunt, which he definitely was.

  The chef was a young guy brimful of coke and debts, with a ginormous ego. He personified the innate human drive to create, combined with a massive degree of assertiveness and more than a slight proneness to snap. Skillful, for sure, compared to me. The other chef was a Japanese woman with a teenage son living in Tokyo. For a year after her divorce, she had survived on a booze-only, no-food diet. Her exact words. She had survived, no question about that, but not without consequences. If her skin was anything to go by, I would have put her anywhere between twenty-five and fifty-five, not to mention her belly, bloated with sorrow. Her saving grace was a distinctively exotic touch that she gave to both menus and sauces. Not much, really, but as far as I was concerned, a flair worth its weight in gold.

  I would work one day with her and the next day with the other chef, after fessing up to both of them about my phony résumé. You might be able to dupe the owner, but you can’t fake it with chefs, even total imbeciles. You can recognize right away the ones who know their way around a kitchen, from the way they clean and put the cutting board away after using it, to how they carry a knife, always back to front, with the blade along their forearm to avoid stabbing anyone. If you handle knives tentatively, you’re not a chef. If you handle them carelessly, you’re absolutely not a chef.

  So I came clean about my past as a lowly salad maker and my ambition. I put up with anything. I was the first to arrive and the last to leave after soaping down the pass and giving the dishwasher some help with the dirty dishes and the floors. Blind-drunk chefs, deranged owners, bullying, quarrels that defied comprehension or even c
lassification — literally any working conditions. All I asked for was that they didn’t unmask me to Giulio and that they give me the chance to finally really learn something. They agreed with unexpected enthusiasm, and I very quickly understood why: They hated each other profoundly. They never missed an opportunity to discredit each other even though their paths rarely crossed in the kitchen.

  He was engaged to one of the waitresses, who, like the majority of waitresses in Rome, was an aspiring actress who moonlighted as Giulio’s in-house spy, pointing out to him all the Japanese chef’s shortcomings. The Japanese chef always wore the weary expression of someone called on to clean up other people’s messes. She would drink just about anything that came her way, and by the end of the dinner service was totally wasted. One time she sneezed so loudly and with such force, swaying uncontrollably, that she hit her head against the counter and fell to the floor unconscious. We were all extremely concerned, especially Giulio, partly because she was working there illegally, like me, the kitchen hand, and most of the waitstaff. Coke was readily available and stashed all over the place. I, however, stayed away from the stuff. I knew I needed to concentrate on becoming good at what I was doing. Not that I was on a whiz-bang career path, but just so I would not feel uncomfortable there or in any of the other places I would end up in, at least until I graduated from the university. Becoming good at something boosts your confidence, no matter what it is. I had met only a few chefs, but the thing that surprised me the most in all of them was their chutzpah, their bravado, and their self-confidence in dealing with things. In dealing with everything.

  At that time, I didn’t even smoke cigarettes on the job. I had two days off a week and I spent them with my girlfriend, Valeria, taking capoeira classes at the local gym and cooking special dinners at home. Valeria was determined to get ahead at school, and we had just started dating. Like any other guy in his late teens with a still unformed personality, I was vaguely in love and wanted to better myself, as if I owed it to her belief in me. Sure, I’d learned a few things, but only a very, very few.

  6.

  The evening of the Incident, the Japanese chef had been off work recovering from her fall. In the dining room there was a new girl from Venice, Lucia, with whom I would later connect very closely. Her knees were double-jointed and she had already had two abortions. She had just told me she was pregnant again but didn’t seem to give much importance to it. However, that wasn’t what was on my mind. Rather, it was the fact that the young-dude chef had suddenly decided to reward me by elevating me to the rank of sous chef, hoping, in so doing, to rid himself once and for all of the Japanese chef.

  “Tonight I’m not going to do a thing. I want to see how you cope managing the dishes going out,” he said.

  Thinking back, I shouldn’t have been so nervous, but being a bug under the microscope does that to you. Giulio was dashing in and out of the kitchen, creating more havoc than anything else during a dinner service that was already frenzied. The dishes weren’t complicated, but the plating was quite detailed, some I had barely glanced at being prepared, and the baked sea bream with cherry tomatoes and thyme in a potato crust was one of them. I could have cooked the dish my way, of course, but that evening I was the clone of the young-dude chef and had to perform every movement exactly as he would. I knew I had to respect the hierarchy that exists in every restaurant kitchen (no chef wants a helper taking the initiative; all they want is people to do as they’re told), but I also wanted to win his trust and maybe a little more independence. The young-dude chef was standing there with his arms folded firing away orders and correcting me the whole time. Basically, he wanted to get away with doing as little as he possibly could.

  “Have you checked that the sea bream fillets are properly deboned?”

  I was pulling the fish from the fridge to rinse it under running water and dry it, and looking at the long line of tickets on the rail above my head.

  “Yes, Chef, I deboned them yesterday.”

  “Have you sliced the potatoes?”

  I was already reaching for the gastronorm full of julienned potatoes that had been left to soak in water.

  “Here they are, Chef, I prepared them fresh as soon as I arrived.”

  “Careful with the pan, if the heat’s too high the oil will burn.”

  I took the pan off the heat although I had barely lit the gas and was just pouring in the olive oil.

  “And the cherry tomatoes?”

  “All ready, Chef. Cut in half and draining on the wire rack.” Out came the tomatoes from the fridge.

  I added butter to the spaghetti with bottarga fish roe and stock to the surf-and-turf risotto that a table of ten of Giulio’s friends had ordered quite a while before. I was screaming at the kitchen hand for the appetizers because he was taking too long threading the shrimp and bacon onto the skewers.

  “Careful with the skin. It must not come off and it’s got to be crisp.”

  “Of course, Chef, crisp.”

  “But don’t overcook the fish.”

  “No, Chef.”

  “Is the oven hot enough?”

  I leaned over to look in the oven; it was always on during service and therefore obviously hot.

  “Three sixty-five degrees, Chef.”

  “Put it up to three ninety.”

  I turned the temperature dial up just a fraction, to 390°. “All done, Chef.”

  I was still calling for the appetizers, the risotto was ready, the spaghetti was done, and the four baked pasta dishes needed to be pulled out of the oven before they started to burn. Everything had to go out at the same time. I lifted the sea bream with a silicone spatula, gave the potatoes a shake in the other pan to crisp up and brown them a little.

  “Go, go, go! Get that bream into the oven, you’re falling behind, shit, you’re in the weeds!”

  “All good to go, Chef.”

  I took the fish off the heat with the tomatoes, a handful of capers, some grated lemon rind, a pinch of thyme, and a dusting of salt, then laid the potatoes over the top and shaped them quickly with my hands. I licked a finger to taste for salt, then put the pan in the oven and started plating the other dishes. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the kitchen hand was still behind with those fucking appetizers. I was ringing the bell like a lunatic to call Lucia.

  “Hey, Luci, start taking out the baked pastas and the spaghetti and then come back here and I’ll give you the others.”

  As Lucia called Giulio for help, I ran to the appetizer station to pull the shrimp broth out of the fridge, pour it into a bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and put it into the microwave.

  “Grab the kamut croutons!” I shouted to the kitchen hand, who finally seemed to have stirred from his listless torpor and was scattering croutons over dishes on the pass, and drizzling them with parsley-infused olive oil.

  “Come on, Leo, get a fucking move on, the bream is browning, come on, it all has to go out together!”

  I could see the wrap balloon over the soup in the microwave. It wasn’t supposed to get too hot. I was screaming at the kitchen hand to load it on the pass with the skewers, the sauces, and the two salads. I grabbed the pot holder above the oven and pulled out the pan with the bream, placed it back on the burner to crisp the skin, stretched over the counter to get a serving plate, and started to decorate it with two thin lines of mayonnaise, some aromatic herbs, and ruby paprika. I couldn’t find the carrot curls.

  “Where are the carrot curls?” I asked. “Where are they? Hasn’t anyone prepared them?” Damn it, it was me who hadn’t prepared them.

  “I’m sorry, Chef, I forgot them! Can I plate the dish without them?”

  “Come on, come on, move! Of course you need the carrot curls, but it’s too late now … just get on with it!”

  I looked over at the pass: The plates were still all sitting there, Lucia was at the door waiting for the bream, the young-dude chef had finally stopped breathing down my neck and was getting the toasted sesame seeds to sprinkle o
ver the salads. I turned off the gas and bent down to grab the pan out of the oven. Without a pot holder. A searing pain split my brain in two like an apple, leaving nothing but the big red numbers on the temperature display: 390°. I lifted the pan from the oven as the heat burned through every layer of skin right down to the bone, and from there to my eyes, setting off a powerful spasm, but I managed to place the pan on the pass near the serving dish that was waiting for it. My right palm was shiny and dry like a pane of glass. But I used it to pick up the steel palette, delicately remove the fish from the aluminum pan, and place it in the middle of the dish. I cleaned the edges of the dish with great care using the cloth I kept tucked in my apron strings and drizzled a few drops of smoked oil over the top. I glanced over the dishes confidently and then, finally, uttered the magic words: “Take it out!”

  “In here, I’m the one who decides what goes out.”

  “Sorry, Chef.”

  “Take it out!”

  Lucia left carrying three plates, followed by Giulio with the other two. I inched back toward the ice machine, plunged my entire right arm into it, grasped a handful of ice cubes and lifted it out, keeping my arm behind my back. I could barely distinguish between hot and cold. I could hear the water dripping onto the floor but did not utter a sound, not wanting to appear the complete dickhead I genuinely was. Then I got some butter and rubbed my hands with it, like it was some kind of miraculous medication. Nobody realized what had happened. I finished service wearing rubber gloves, my hand throbbing as if it had a heart of its own in a state of permanent fibrillation. The dishes had to go out and they had to be perfect, immaculately presented, and all at the same time. That was how it had to be and that was all that mattered.