And that’s how it ended.
I walked up the stairs, said so long to Mattia, gave a brief goodbye to the others and an even briefer goodbye to the wife. No mention of my money, my fucking money. I was in the right, but it stung like crazy. I’d wanted to split but didn’t know how to without being unfair, and here I was, out. Outside, in fact, just a few steps from the entrance. I checked the calls I’d received and found the only one with the 055 area code. Yes, Orlando still needed me, plus another chef. “I know a guy,” I told him, “his name’s Michele.”
As soon as I got home, I began packing for my job interview in Tuscany. I tried on a shirt, changed my mind, and put on the T-shirt that Valeria had brought me back from Brazil, the one that said NO STRESS, and hoped that the message was clear.
26.
Michel Foucault said that people may know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do. However, what they don’t know is what what they do does. The larvae of certain cicadas live underground for seventeen years before reaching adulthood. Then they die within the space of a single summer. What we recognize as a cicada is only the last, fleeting phase of a very different life. The seeds of many plants remain dormant for even longer periods of time until the right conditions arrive for them to germinate. Trees continue to bear fruit years and years after the people who planted them are six feet under.
A while ago I was reading that you can still pick pears from a tree in Massachusetts that was planted in 1630 by a Puritan. When Henry David Thoreau’s books were published, no one read them. At home he had shelves full of his unsold books. Then an Indian lawyer went to work in South Africa, his name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He discovered Thoreau and read his essays on civil disobedience and became Mahatma Gandhi. Later on, Martin Luther King Jr.’s battles were influenced by both Thoreau and Gandhi, while a young Nelson Mandela was inspired by Thoreau, Gandhi, and King in his struggle against apartheid.
Often, cause and effect are separated by long stretches of time.
Orlando was six foot two and had a mop of wavy hair. Big hands, powerful shoulders and arms, and a sparkle in his eye when he talked. And he talked a lot.
There was nothing in the least unusual about his rise through the culinary ranks. He’d run away from his parents’ home in Perugia, attended a cheerless culinary course in Florence at a community college run by the city council, where he made his first contacts in the business, worked his ass off, and ended up in the finest fish restaurant around. He’d gone on to work in catering all over Europe and moved to London, spending six months on a culinary intership with Gianfranco Vissani, where he slept on the floor next to sacks of potatoes between shifts. Now he’d just finished a two-year stint at Boccanegra, a Florentine institution. They’d invited him to become the head chef at this new restaurant attached to an enormous club, newly built, in San Pietro di Sieve, not far from the Barberino di Mugello exit on the Florence–Bologna highway.
When his brother told him, “Leo’s good, give him a ring,” Orlando called me. He was keen for a change, wanted to earn more money, make a name for himself, and quickly set up a kitchen brigade that was ready to go. He dreamed of opening his own restaurant sooner or later. Long-term project. I signed up because I needed to get away from the kicks in the teeth that Rome had been dishing out to me, and earn some money at least until the end of summer. Short-term project.
With me was Longo Longo. I’d never quite understood what plans he had. Heightwise, I was dwarfed by both Michele and Orlando. I’d never even heard of San Pietro a Sieve, a speck on the map, and I knew where Barberino was only because they’re always talking about this section of the highway on the radio: It carries more than twice the traffic it was designed for and has one of the highest accident rates in Italy.
The interview was over in a flash. The managing director introduced himself as Giustini, and was always referred to only by his surname. Short and stocky, he was sixty years old and wore a white shirt with the buttons open to his chest, under a leather vest. His eyes were two slits, and he sported a skinny ponytail, his hair slicked back with gel. It transpired that he had managed a number of successful clubs in locations between Florence and Livorno. That was an area I wasn’t familiar with, and I’d never been to a club in my entire life. But according to Orlando, there was loads of money floating around. Money is the magic word for short-term plans, long-term plans, and any plans in between.
“Orlando, whaddaya want me to say? I’ve never even set foot in a kitchen, you’re the one who’s gotta decide who you want to work with,” Giustini had said.
And Orlando had decided. All that remained was to talk to Giustini about the terms and conditions of his hiring us. Once again, no one asked to see a résumé and I was happy to not have to proffer mine, which was hardly worth writing home about. Upshot, an open-ended contract, an official wage of €750 plus €1,050 under the table, for a grand total of €1,800 a month. The business was just starting up. The club could hold up to three thousand people; there was an oversize bar at the entrance (plus two more inside the club) and a restaurant that could seat more than two hundred people. We shook hands. We’d have two weeks to move into lodgings rented for us and paid for by the owners.
We entered the kitchen at San Pietro a Sieve on June 3, 2004. I turned on the convection oven of the station I had chosen for myself, the one where the main courses would be prepared.
“First things first, we’ll clean some meat and use the bones to make a fond brun,” Orlando said.
I nodded obediently, even though I’d never made brown stock from scratch; I’d always used the ready-made version. I did know how to make it, at least in theory.
Orlando started deboning while we cleaned and trimmed. Then he put the bones in the oven at over 460°. When it was time to get the bones out — well browned before going into the stockpot — I looked around, utterly bewildered. I stood on the tips of my toes, searching above, beside, and below the oven, went into the storeroom and rummaged around among some dish towels. I didn’t want to have to ask — I am a fucking chef, after all, I can work things out for myself. But I was stumped, so I approached Orlando.
“Excuse me, but where are the oven mitts?”
“The what?” he asked, with a deliberately puzzled expression on his face.
“The oven mitts, to get the trays out of the oven, I can’t find them …”
“Excuse me, but what exactly do you have hanging from your apron?”
“What, you mean this cloth?”
“First of all, it’s called a torchon, Leo, or maybe a side towel, and second, I have never heard of a chef looking for oven mitts in a kitchen, ever. I swear, this is the first time.”
He removed his side towel, folded it in two, and used it to take the tray out of the oven. I looked at Michele, and then at the hot tray on the stainless steel counter. Well, this was the first clear sign that Longo Longo and I were two first-rate dickheads. And that I had no place acting like a smart-ass.
Luckily, we had Pietro at the stove with us. Besides being a dickhead himself, he was a hypochondriac and way too old to be starting a career as a chef. He had to be, give or take a year, at least fifteen years older than me. A native of Rome, he looked lost and his hands shook. He was forty, which was a heavy burden to be carrying at this stage of his new calling as a chef. He painstakingly, albeit sometimes argumentatively, followed every little rule, was overly cautious, kindhearted, and entirely ineffectual. Michele was the same as he had been at the Verve — wordlessly going about his business, weary in his own distinctive way, biologically out of sync. My strange and sensitive buddy, my kitchen- and roommate, and the only person I could share secrets with. At the sink, washing dishes, was an Albanian grunt. The cleaners were two Russian girls with eyes the color of Lake Bilancino. Both extremely young, but they had lived far beyond their years and had a child each. The maître d’, also around forty, had the face of someone who had gone a few rounds with Lady Luck and come out the wo
rse for wear. He was Calabrian and had mentioned a wife and son in Argentina. It was clear that he and Orlando didn’t get along. Maybe it had to do with their age and the pressure to be top dog. Orlando spoke down to him, and the maître d’ didn’t like it.
The big bar at the entrance had a manager, and so did the bars in the club, with an assortment of girls working shifts and a crowd of other staff I never had time to talk to.
It was just me, my knives, and my blacks — which Orlando found objectionable — facing a mountain of meat I had absolutely no idea how to handle. I had never seen anything remotely like it: entire quarters of cows, dozens of rabbits, fresh truffles, crates of porcini mushrooms, exotic fruit, bags and bags of different flours, and all sorts of dairy products. At the Verve I was in charge of the broiler, a big one, but the steaks came already butchered and the skewers already assembled and needing only to be defrosted. I realized that my notion of a “skilled” and “capable” chef was a far cry from what it meant in the real world, and that all I knew were the basics. I wondered whether Orlando, the pompous chef, might be a little to blame for my incompetence suddenly becoming so evident. His condescension was seasoned with a large pinch of disdain.
The best times were when Michele and I got home at night. Our apartment was a stone’s throw from the off-ramp of the highway. On the same floor as us lived a Romanian hooker working in Italy to pay for her daughter’s schooling back home, where she had left her with the grandparents. And also to buy a home and a little store in Romania. “Life isn’t so bad,” she said, “and I don’t have anyone making decisions for me. I’m happy.” She actually seemed happier than we were.
Michele didn’t mind us getting chewed out in the kitchen, it didn’t bother him the way it did me. Yes, he was tired of it, but he didn’t feel like he had his back to the wall. He said Orlando reminded him of his father, and he was used to that kind of crap.
“All we have to do is memorize the menu, Leo.”
“It’s not a question of memory, it’s all about technique.”
Maybe Michele was just better than me, or maybe his short-lived and menial role in a serious restaurant with its high-class menu was standing him in good stead and highlighting the gap between our two careers. My résumé listed only five places, two of which were to be avoided at all costs, and one that in all likelihood had shut down. Either his approach to this place was wide of the mark, or he had some aces up his sleeve that I was unaware of, but I was embarrassingly inadequate. Can you think of anything more pathetic than a guy who’s always comparing himself to his coworkers to gauge his own worth, and gets a kick out of knowing there is at least one person sorrier than he is? No, neither can I. Luckily there was Pietro; otherwise I would have quit on my fourth day.
So far no one had called my bluff, and I had always blatantly bluffed. I arrived like a big shot joining a team of rookies. But here was this twenty-six-year-old with major balls, who’s handed me half a cow and wants me to turn it into Bistecca alla Fiorentina — Steak Florentine — cooked to perfection. This was putting your cards on the table, and you needed a winning hand. No bluffing. Not only had I never butchered a cow, I’d never cooked a “Bistecca” in my entire life. I’d never even eaten one. In the kitchens I’d worked in, you grabbed trays from the oven with oven mitts, because that’s what you did at home. And logic would suggest that in a bigger kitchen, you would just use bigger mitts. Here, either you knew how to do things or you didn’t. And when it became painfully obvious that I didn’t, Orlando put me under the gun. No damn bluffing.
While I was sweating bullets, up to my armpits in poultry and boar, Michele was daintily designing patterns on plates with sauces. When it was my turn to decorate the dishes, my red and yellow reductions looked like a snail trail, and I was scared. Scared I wasn’t up to the task. Scared shitless. Even my hands started to shake like Pietro’s when it came to plating, especially under Orlando’s icy stare. Shuddering, it felt like I was the only one Orlando was bawling out, ignoring Pietro because he was useless and Michele because he was smart. He kept saying we were bone fucking lazy, and that the real work was yet to start, but in the meantime we were serving thirty, forty people, nearly all of whom were friends, or friends of friends, of the owners, with everyone ordering different dishes with different cooking times, wanting to put the kitchen to the test, and deliberately making life difficult for us.
“C’mon, Leo, isn’t it ready yet?!” That damn scream of Orlando’s amplified my lack of ability at every service. Without pausing to breathe, my answer was invariably, “Right, Chef, three minutes and it’s on the pass.” And that was inevitably three minutes too late, because Orlando would rush over, rearrange the orders on the pass, grab the tongs out of my hands, turn the meat, turn up the gas under a pan, tweak the sauce, and plate.
27.
Something gets me thinking about the kitchen and its occupants, and how it’s just not possible that all of a sudden I’ve become the only misfit. It’s not an altogether unfamiliar sensation, though. When I started working at Sessanta, my first restaurant, I genuinely believed that I needed the job only to pay for a shrink. The paranoia eventually tapered off, and those first paychecks went toward the rent and books instead. Hard work was my medicine. Nothing new there. My grandma used to say that during the war, people were too hungry to be depressed. But this time hard work wasn’t doing it for me, and I needed some new wonder drug to allay my obsessions.
Through the wall I shared with the apartment next door, I could hear the groans of the latest in a steady flow of truck drivers. This one was Speedy Gonzales. I used to have fun calculating how long the johns would last with the Romanian hooker: It was rarely more than ten minutes. Then they’d go and catch some shut-eye in their cabs parked below.
I was on my own because Michele had gone back to Rome and I’d needed to stay this week. The arrangement with Giustini was that we’d be open from Wednesday through Sunday, with two whole days off a week. Piece of cake, if you think about it. So I was all alone, trying to unscramble causes and effects, and the myriad experiences that had led me to this room. I was the Cincinnati Kid facing off Lancey Howard’s queen-high straight flush. With a bad beat of three aces. A smart gambler never changes his bets and never leaves the table on a losing streak. If he loses everything, it just means he’s not as smart as he thought he was. Of course, the temptation to hightail it to Rome and hole up somewhere was powerful. But I had to keep going. There was no other option, friends couldn’t help, I just had to become better, and not simply by memorizing the menu. I wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“Do you mind if I spend the next couple of days sorting a few things out in the kitchen while we’re closed?” I mulled over the question before texting it to Orlando, then I hit Send and turned off the light. As I was about to fall asleep, my cell pinged.
“Okay, whatever. I’ll let you in. But only tomorrow. I’m away Tuesday, and the day after all hell breaks loose.”
Monday morning I made sure I was standing at the back door that led directly to the kitchen. Orlando arrived right on time, said hello, and went into the office to write up the weekly orders.
So far the restaurant hadn’t been under too much pressure (although to me it felt like a grueling obstacle course), but the club was opening now and the celebrations included dinner for a bunch of special guests. It was time to rock and roll. You could tell that Orlando was fretting. He’d quarreled with just about everyone, starting with the maître d’ and his beaten-up face. Stupid squabbles that could easily have been avoided, about the salad for staff meals using the end slices of the tomatoes, the sequence that the orders arrived in, what to do with leftover unfinished bottles of mineral water, and which wine to use for cooking.
Even the head chef had started showing some chinks in his armor, flaring up more often than usual over minor hiccups. He must be a tad paranoid too. And Pietro kept firing off questions and getting in the way. Michele was the only one who remained as cool as a cuc
umber. Way too cool, in fact, which left me wondering how long he’d get away with being so aloof. Maybe he didn’t realize it, I thought, or maybe he felt that he was all set. Admittedly, his freshly made pasta, his ricotta gnudi, his stylishly smeared sauces were in a league of their own, leaving us eating his dust. A commercial kitchen, like any finely tuned machine, can function only when all of its cogs move in unison, and when one cog starts going it alone, and in slow motion, to boot, it is a bad, bad thing. You can’t work in isolation. Michele could no longer be my go-to person, not the way he’d been at the Verve.
I tied my apron around my waist, grabbed a clean side towel and folded it over the string at my hip, and got down to work. Starting with the mise en place.
Orlando had been on my back for days, moving my things around and bellowing when anything was out of place at my station. I could do the mise en place with my eyes closed; it was an extension of my nervous system. I had it down pat, or so I thought, because by the end of every service I was a filthy, disorganized mess, rummaging through the fridges, groping for stuff, like a blind man without a guide dog or a white stick, in need of a familiar landmark or a helping hand.
Deep breath. I cleared everything away and picked up the menu. First I wrote a list of ingredients — the ones I needed and the ones I might need. A few kitchen tools, knives, cloths, a lighter, a scourer, and some containers for scraps and food. I glanced at Orlando’s station. When he was on duty it looked like an operating room. Nothing out of place, it was his temple, his religion. And don’t even think of touching anything. Number one, because it’s unnecessary, and number two, because you touch something at another chef’s station — especially the head chef’s — only if you’ve been repeatedly asked to do so.
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