So here we go: fine and coarse sea salt, Maldon crystal salt for the steaks, guesstimating the amount I’ll need for service, plus a little extra. Whole black and green peppercorns, pink pepper berries, ground pepper. A large container for salt and pepper mixed together in the exact ratio. Butter cut into cubes, all the same size and placed in a gastronorm, ready for prepping and softened by the time service starts. Enough big sheets of absorbent paper under the fryer. Curls of tomato skin for frying as garnishes. Lava rock char broiler all set up. Day-old bread sliced thinly on the slicing machine for pressing into muffin tins and turning into crunchy bread cups. Layers of grated Parmesan cheese on Silpat baking mats to be melted in the microwave and laid over wafer-thin broiled beef “rags.” Preparations stashed in the fridge in the correct order: first, containers of chopped parsley; followed by leafy aromatics prepared daily and immersed in iced water; tomato sauce, plain and seasoned; caramelized apples; shallots braised in butter; peeled garlic cloves; baby sage leaves on layers of damp kitchen towels; and roasted garlic pureed with oil in the food processor. Everything I’d need, and every spare cranny filled with empty containers to fill as required. Sauces, precooked brunoise-cut vegetables, bases. Clean cloths stacked in a neat pile for my sole use during service, kept in what I decide will be their secret hiding place because clean cloths are a precious resource. I open the sliding doors of the cupboard above my head and arrange its contents from left to right. First the coarse breadcrumbs, then the fine, the olive oil delivered straight from the press for the carpaccio; an oil and red wine vinegar mixture; white wine behind the red; juniper berries; apple cider vinegar; dried capers; ruby paprika for decoration; brandy, balsamic, and Lambrusco reductions; dried habanero chilies; a sheaf of white paper for orders and prep lists; a caddy full of pens that all write; and an empty tin for my tobacco and papers.
On the workbench I sort out my favorite ladles and lay them out beside the long grilling tongs and the spaghetti tongs. Two small copper pans for sauces (copper is a better conductor of heat than any other metal, and it heats everything more quickly and evenly). Small stainless steel trays for resting grilled meat in the oven and locking in the juices. Spoons of two different lengths, a meat fork, stainless steel spatulas for the grill, and a cleaning brush. A thick-bottomed stainless steel braising pot to keep at my station, and an assortment of aluminum pans (aluminum being almost as good as copper for conducting heat).
From the pot cupboard I select a cast-iron casserole pan and place it on the shelf under my grill. From now on that will be its home. The casserole pan, unlike other cook pots and pans, has to be made of a material that is a low conductor of heat, to maintain a barrier between the exterior — in an oven or on a cooktop — and the interior at approximately 212° Fahrenheit, the temperature at which water slowly comes to the boil. There are two in the kitchen. I take the one with the heavier lid for myself; it will stay perfectly sealed during cooking.
Then I enter the cool room where the meat is hanging. I trim the cuts, removing only the darkest bits, and arrange the fillets from the oldest to the freshest, wrapping them in a clean cloth — carefully choosing only the ones that don’t smell of fabric softener (there’s nothing worse than meat that smells of Marseille soap) — and wiping them thoroughly.
Leaving the cool room, I sharpen my knives one at a time. A dull blade is the biggest humiliation for a chef.
Does an orderly kitchen make for an orderly life? Yes, it certainly does, both while you’re cooking and when you knock off at the end of service. I shut my eyes and feel where everything is, and move a few containers around, making it easier for me to reach the ones at the back. Then I do it again, and again, until every piece is within easy reach. In my defense, I don’t want to waste time thinking or looking for things. I’m fanatical about my mise en place, which is strictly off-limits to everyone, including Orlando.
Then I roll myself a joint and go outside to smoke it in the garden behind the kitchen. Back inside, I take out my cell phone, set up the stopwatch, and grab a chicken from the cool room. I start the timer on the phone and insert my knife into the flesh, running the blade between muscle, ligament, cartilage, and bone. I try to visualize the bird’s anatomy so as to prise it open without tearing the meat, damaging the skin, or leaving any good bits on the bones. At the end, staring back at me, is a chicken that seems to have been mauled by a hungry half-crazed lion, and a time of eighteen minutes, twenty-seven seconds, and forty-three hundredths of a second.
I wrap the mangled bird carefully in cling film and start on the second one. Then the third. At this point Orlando comes in to tell me it’s time to go and I’d better clear up the kitchen. His gaze turns to the knife smeared in chicken fat and the bird splayed out on the cutting board.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m getting ahead with my work, I’m preparing the chickens for Wednesday …”
“Have you lost your mind? First of all, the chickens are for Thursday, and second, do you know what happens to chicken meat if you debone it now?”
“But … I’m putting it straight in the fridge, it’s all sealed …”
“Sealed, my ass, Leo. After you take meat off the bone, it gets exposed to air, at room temperature, and the heat from your hands, and in the meantime bacteria start multiplying. By the time Thursday swings around, all you’ll have left is a fucking old chicken. I told you yesterday: Only remove the giblets. Otherwise I would have got you to stay on and clean them all. I’m not afraid to, you know. There are three of you in here working full time and doing half the work of a very middling chef. I’d have no qualms at all about telling you to stay behind to do more. If I didn’t, it’s simply because it’s a bad idea. Put that poor thing away this minute, you dickhead. You told me you wanted to set things up, not start prepping!”
I head back to the apartment overlooking the exit ramp on foot. Maybe I need a Moleskine notebook to write down all the things I still don’t know. Just as I enter a stationer’s, I get a text message, which I expected would be from Orlando, but it wasn’t.
“Howzit goin’, Leo?”
Shit. It’s Matteo.
“Real tough, only going to get worse.”
“Women?”
“Nope. You?”
“Maddalena might move into our place. With me. What do you think?”
“Better chained to a kitchen than a chick. Cheers.”
28.
I lost track of time as the days flew by. From time to time we’d chill out and fool around, of course. We listened to music from a whacked-out radio that had seen better days. Orlando let me wear my black uniform; at least he stopped giving me a hard time over that. I gradually got my mojo back and felt more in control.
My orders were getting picked up and taken to the dining room quickly; now the one lagging behind was Michele. I did not help him. I’d put my dishes on the pass and complain loudly when his weren’t ready — there was no way my Steak Tagliata was going to dry out while the fucking pasta was still being tossed around in the pan! I was ready and didn’t mind everyone knowing it. Later on I’d realize how wrong I was. That for a machine to run smoothly, the cogs have to mesh together perfectly, and if one is running slower, then the faster one is going to have problems too.
Pietro chatted nervously as he went about his business, dripping with sweat, his hands always shaking, and when he plated I had to wipe beads of perspiration from the edges with a clean cloth.
I laid a chicken on its side, tossed the carcass into the food scrap bucket, and pressed the timer on my cell phone with my greasy hands: eight minutes, six seconds, and seventy-four hundredths of a second.
Now I could bring my CD player into the kitchen and listen to Amália Rodrigues, while Orlando preferred the Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André. Our respective roles became more sharply defined, day after day, hour after hour. Michele was still trailing behind. As I gained ground, he lost it. Longo was happy to be the straight man, the sidekick
, the unwitting tension breaker. I was the jester, the king-size fool. Orlando was the chief, the brains and the hands of the operation, whereas Pietro was meek, mild, and modest in every way, yet he managed to keep Michele and me on an even keel, easing tensions before I lashed out against my old head chef.
In an average life, extraordinary events, positive or negative, are rare and usually involve extraordinary people. We who are not extraordinary tend to believe that any old garbage that happens to us is extraordinary. And if people aren’t interested in our fantastic stories, we feel cheated, which makes us competitive and mean. Orlando’s rivalry was catching. Day after day I soaked up his arrogance, along with his speed and stubbornness.
I watched his every move, and even though it pissed me off, I had to admit that, yes, he really was extraordinary, but while he didn’t need to be so aggressive, I did. And I became more and more of a bully. Especially toward Pietro. His relentless blabbering drove me nuts, his clumsiness, his miserable outlook on life, his guileless expression, and his foul-smelling armpits. We were both losers learning a trade we had fallen into more by chance than by choice. Only he was a forty-year-old loser.
“I’m free, Leo, can I give you a hand?”
I was juggling ten orders including a roast still in the oven that was taking longer than usual, and Pietro kept bugging me, asking if he could help. Not just once, at least a dozen times.
“Leo, I’m here if you need me, just tell me what I can do for you …”
He couldn’t do anything for me. Nothing at all. I was in the trenches returning fire, engaging the enemy, shot after shot. Mentally ticking off cooking times actually fired me up, pumped blood to my brain. I was in my element.
“Leo, do you want me to keep an eye on the meat? I think it’s time to turn it …”
Do not touch that damn meat. I know when it’s time to turn it. If he so much as touches that meat, I swear, he’ll end up with a knife between his shoulder blades.
“Leo, c’mon, don’t be afraid to ask, if there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all …”
I stopped in my tracks and looked at him, his uniform sticking to his damp skin, burns all over his hands, two gigantic stains on his apron, three different cloths hanging from his belt, a tray in one hand and a pot in the other. I turned on a great big smile.
“Hey, Pietro, you know, my balls have been itching for the last ten minutes but I can’t scratch them ’cause my hands are full. If you want, you could give my nuts a real going over, it’d be such a relief.”
Pietro’s eyeballs nearly popped out of his head. I turned around to place orders on the pass and call the maître d’ — “Go with number 5! One minute for 14 and I’ll get it out!” — to find Orlando shrieking with laughter, and not even Michele could keep the grin off his face, however hard he tried.
“No, I won’t put up with that. Not that. Not from a fucking twenty-year-old, no, that’s just too much.”
I heard some grumbling but didn’t pay him any attention. Service came to an end and I dumped the last plate on the pass, then I drew a black line through the last order slip. That’s it. I’m done. I spiked it on the docket spindle and stretched my neck and back until I felt them cracking. Once the kitchen was cleaned up, I realized that Pietro had already left. He’d scrubbed down the dessert station and disappeared without a word. His letter of resignation arrived in the mail, and we never saw hide nor hair of him again.
July was nearly over in San Pietro a Sieve, the girls stripped down to sunbathe on the pebbly lakefront beach, sometimes to their bikini bottoms. The weather was warm, the dining room fairly full … and something snapped. If you leave meat in the fridge too long it will eventually rot, and so will relationships if you don’t nurture them. Precarious at the best of times, the delicate balance between Michele and me disintegrated. I was an asshole, therefore I was becoming a better chef.
Michele was struggling to endure life in this godforsaken village. The more Orlando and I mingled with the coke dealers in the club, ending every damn night drinking booze and playing poker in the empty bar, the more withdrawn and melancholy he became. We started playing cards into the early morning hours, with the exception of Saturdays and Sundays. On weekends the club stayed open until dawn, with thousands of kids inside, and us, the staff, reigning supreme. No part of the venue was off-limits to any of the staff: The cooks could go into the private club room just off the dance floor, and behind the bar, and the bartenders could come into the kitchen for snacks or to heat up coke in the microwave. We’d all end up in the huge cocktail bar, which was closed on weekends, to catch our breath before throwing ourselves back into the club mix. But not Michele, who was generally asleep by the time we came clattering and crashing back home at seven in the morning.
I continued timing how long it took me to debone a rabbit, and I was getting faster; there was dried blood under my nails and bits of meat stuck to the cuticles. I discovered that calves have the same dislocated shoulder joints as rabbits and that a boar’s ligaments are damned tough. By now I could debone a chicken with my eyes closed. Beef carcasses still posed a few problems, but I was learning how to deal with them too.
My personal best for skinning a whole rabbit was four minutes and forty-seven seconds, without so much as a tear in the back skin. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and you don’t understand how difficult it is, just try deboning a rabbit yourself. It’s extremely tricky — the skin is thin and with very little fat.
When I started out I didn’t even know how to grill a tagliata properly. Now I was placing and checking orders to suppliers together with Orlando, putting the screws on Michele during service so our dishes came out together, and taking care of tour bus menus. Eventually I left Michele behind. Worse than that, I’d thrown him off a moving train, as if there wasn’t room for the two of us and that was reason enough to demolish him. After a month and a half, there was no fucking doubt: I was the chef supremo, the smartest, slickest, sharpest chef there had ever been, and I had Michele in the crosshairs.
The best medicine to treat a bad case of exhaustion and paranoia is egotism. I snorted coke until I was blue in the face, smoked more and more pot, and wrecked my four-cylinder Suzuki when I swerved off the road halfway between the restaurant and home. Three weeks after buying it secondhand for €2,000, but I didn’t give a shit. I took it to a repair shop in San Pietro a Sieve. “Fix it,” I told the mechanic without another word. I was earning more than I could spend and hadn’t hurt myself, although I’d lost a shoe down the escarpment. Leaving the club, I’d taken the second curve way too fast, lost control, smashed into a tree, then rolled fifteen, twenty feet down the slope, hitting the only boulder for miles around. I was so pissed off and so stoned that I turned the ignition back on and dragged the bike up to the road, pushing the handlebars as I put it into first gear, minus one shoe and with prickly twigs sticking to my sock. Exactly one week later, right where it happened, construction started on an outlet mall — Europe’s biggest, according to Orlando — and they cut down the tree and removed the boulder, leaving in their place a mound of soft, upturned soil. For some reason, the irony of it all put me in a good mood.
29.
My approach to food began to change, the forces of randomness no longer dictated whether my dishes were a hit or a miss, and I liberated my food from the shackles of recipes.
It’s like when you move to a new city and you progress from having to check the street directory all the time, to learning a few familiar routes, to having the whole city mapped out in your head and coming up with clever shortcuts or choosing scenic routes. I learned from what was happening at my station and from Orlando’s unrelenting stream of explanations. Food’s mysteries unfolded before my eyes like coils of collagen molecules in the connective tissue of muscle that heating at a constant temperature transforms from a tough, stringy mass into soft, pliable gelatin. Leftovers? Not scraps, but rather interesting elements to repurpose and recombine, combinations to tease
apart and reunite; I learned all manner of devilry for transmuting random bits and pieces into dishes of unimaginable perfection.
Techniques, temperatures, and the most effective ratios between fat and protein were all entered meticulously into my Moleskine notebook. Unexpectedly, a bond began forming between Orlando and me. But not between Orlando and Michele. It was Michele’s turn to be the dickhead. And Orlando decided that the maître d’ was the bad guy.
Before long cracks began to appear. Not in terms of numbers but in terms of quality. Orlando’s creative streak was at odds with the reality of this place: We were filling the bellies of a pack of kids whose only interest was to ogle the asses of the pole dancers, drink themselves into oblivion, and boast about whom they’d screwed. Every now and again I’d get to work late. Summer was nearly over and I was a cocky Mohammed Ali dancing around George Foreman before knocking him out, hammerfists low and smelling blood.
The maître d’ and Orlando had declared open war on each other, and it all seemed so utterly pointless that I’d often stop for a chat with the maître d’ and listen to yarns about his adventurous past, and sympathize when he let off steam. I was vying with Orlando to be the top dog, not openly, but it was pretty obvious. I took certain liberties without asking and dissed him in front of the others.
It’s nine o’clock on the dot. I should be in the kitchen, but Veronica has just drawn a towel across her breasts and seems fairly willing to remove it, together with everything else, if we retire to a room somewhere. The sound of waves gently rippling over the lake and the warmth of the pebbly beach are far more tempting than a room, let alone a kitchen. But I leave her my cell phone number, hop on my bike, and get to the restaurant at ten past nine. Michele’s in the locker room getting changed, and Orlando is at my workstation peeling apples for the sauce to go with the pork.
When you get to work and find the head chef at your workstation, the message is crystal clear. No one responds to my hello. I get changed. Fuck it, I say to myself — my line is all in order, in two hours tops I’ll have everything ready. As I open the cold room, I start telling Orlando about Veronica. In my mind I’m dancing around in my boxing boots, delivering swift, low jabs — I’m invulnerable.
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