Sandro wanted a chef who would liven the place up and let him take care of the admin side of the business. But he got really antsy whenever he saw a gastronorm out of place. He said he preferred to be in the front of the house and look after the guests, but when the restaurant filled up, he’d make a panic-stricken dive for the cookers and mess up my work flow, creating more problems. Sandro took pandemonium in stride, and despite claiming that he wanted to revolutionize everything, it was clear that the pandemonium calmed him down. Because he knew his way around it.
I returned to Sessanta because I needed to get away from the Verve before it went belly up and because returning to the place where I had started out as a dishwasher was an irresistible temptation. But I truly believed I could leave my mark there. Eventually realizing that all this was just talk and that I’d fallen for it — yet again — during my first few weeks there angered and disappointed me. For me the kitchen is a place for experimentation, but experimentation with ironclad rules. It’s where you keep everything under control but never forget to have a good time, where you never let customers get the better of you. Where you scrap a little food every night to guarantee impeccable service and nothing but the freshest ingredients. I hate throwing things together at the last minute, and I hate dashing to the supermarket only when the restaurant is fully booked, keeping leftover prep to save food, and the thoughtless management of meat and fish. A few years had passed and I’d changed, but Sandro was still the same. At the first opportunity, I emptied the fridge and got the place set up my way. Pointless to even discuss it. Far better to present Sandro with a fait accompli and let him draw his own conclusions.
“What do you know about the restaurant business, Leo?”
He was forty-two years old and had spent twenty-two of them cooking. For me, life as a chef was what I had experienced at San Pietro a Sieve, the stories Orlando had told me, the stuff I’d read about in food magazines like Gambero Rosso, and what I had learned firsthand bouncing around from one place to another. It was the condescending way you talked to people, as if the fact that they had less than no idea how to prepare a demi-glace sauce meant that they had less than no idea about life in general. Sandro had left Matera at the age of eighteen without a cent to his name and had become a half-decent cook, but an apprenticeship with Paul Bocuse had hoisted him into the rarefied world of real chefs. He’d run a number of restaurants into the ground but had managed to save enough money to take over Sessanta from the same owners who had once kicked him out. Perhaps more out of revenge than any real desire to have a restaurant of his own. He’d managed places for years, but I was convinced that his success derived exclusively from a flair for making commonsense, snap decisions, a flair that I had too, only in spades.
“I know everything I need to know,” I said to him.
“But you’ve never lasted more than a year in the same place,” he countered.
“So what?”
Sandro looked at me the way a loving granddad looks at his favorite grandson, alternating affectionate hugs with the odd sharp rebuke, when required. He placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered, ever so sweetly, “If only you weren’t so full of shit, you could become a great chef.”
36.
My second time around at Sessanta started out a little shakily. I reorganized some of the prep work, which got Sandro screaming that it wasn’t the right way to cook his recipes. I put my own spin on the mise en place and ticket flow so that the dishes were picked up and the tables were managed my way, which he tried hard to undo and keep his way. Some things I’d prefry, and some I’d blanch, claiming that all the best restaurants did it, and his answer was that he couldn’t bear food that wasn’t freshly prepared every time, listing all the organoleptic properties of healthy, traditional, made-to-order food.
Every so often I’d roll in late, as was my usual, and he rapped me over the knuckles for disregarding the rules. Moral of the story: I got used to cooking everything to order but managed to sneak in some simple tricks of the trade that didn’t give away what I had precooked, and tried to follow Sandro’s recipes to the letter. He got used to my coming in late occasionally and to a few other displays of what he regarded as my sloppiness, and the day he walked into a totally overhauled kitchen, he wasn’t too fazed. He even seemed to genuinely like many of my own dishes and added them to the menu. We learned to respect each other, on top of the real affection we felt, mainly because both of us had started working at a young age to earn a living and neither believed the world owed us anything.
Soon our agreements reflected how things were actually being run and were according to our personal, rather than professional, expectations: I worked five nights a week and took two days off, whichever two I wanted. When I was off, he ran the kitchen; that way he didn’t feel left out and I could catch up on things that needed attending to. If Sandro wanted to take a few days off, he knew that the restaurant was in good hands and I covered for him whenever he was away. Finally, I had the security of a permanent job that wasn’t at odds with living a normal life. And I really liked it that the food at Sessanta was honest and somehow respected for what it was. This was where Sandro and I found ourselves on common ground. No contrived presentations (like ring molds or other such things), but unpretentious, well-put-together dishes; no pointless concoctions involving herbs or oils infused and pigmented with parsley or bell peppers, and no tricks to plump up food. The garnishes were basic and always edible, and the food had an appeal all its own even without them. Everything was straightforward without being austere.
And the sore points? Until I started moving things around, the menu had not changed in six years, and the kitchen was neither spotless nor well organized. I craved working in a pristine uniform, without any pressure, whipping up risottos, emulsifying sauces, coating vegetables in batter for a massive mixed vegetarian platter, following my three, four, five orders all at the same time with smoothly mechanical movements, quickly tasting sauces and perfecting flavors and getting the dishes out in the correct sequence and with perfect timing. None of this was achievable in Sandro’s kitchen. Every time he stepped in, he’d leave a trail of scraps, pots and pans used and discarded for no reason, cutting boards stacked one on top of the other, and prep ingredients cluttering up the pass. I got used to it and tried to stop food bombs from exploding all over the kitchen, at least on the nights he wasn’t around. Adriano was a great help. He was a young guy from Sicily who was working with us to pay his way through university to become a chiropractor. He also kept an eye on me, to stop me nibbling on leftovers. Adriano alternated with Sandro’s nephew as commis chef.
Italy won the soccer World Cup in 2006, the Italian politician Luca Coscioni and champion of freedom for scientific research died of ALS, and Piergiorgio Welby chose assisted suicide — both dying with the dignity they demanded and deserved. Marches were held to protest overaggressive medical treatments. At last I started living the life I wanted — or at least that’s what it seemed — without undue aggravation.
In January 2007 I traveled to India and spent forty days there. In December I headed off to Puerto Rico for a month. Every morning I went for a run with my cousin, I swam twice a week, and I hit the gym every other day. Payday was Saturday, my wages coming directly out of the night’s takings. As far as Italy was concerned, I was an unemployment statistic, and that didn’t worry me a bit. No bank would lend me money to buy an apartment, but I still managed to squirrel away a sizable amount of money. In 2008, after working at Sandro’s for nearly two years, I smashed my personal best for duration of employment in the same restaurant, and things had never been better.
It was nearly three in the morning. I was riding my bike home, still buzzing from the adrenaline high and the hits of coke we did every weekend at Sessanta. From outside I could see the living room lights on, so Matteo must still be awake. I climbed the stairs, opened the door, and took off my shoes.
“Hey!”
“Hi, Leo. How’s it going?”
&n
bsp; “Good. Tonight we served up garbage. Literally.”
“What?”
“Well, the restaurant was packed, Sandro was off his head as usual, and I ran out of spelt penne, so I put a stop on orders for the oven-baked stuffed eggplant. But it was too late and there was still one more order for a table that had been waiting for ages.”
“So you used a different type of pasta.”
“Nope. I saw the waitress throwing out a portion of spelt penne with sauce that some kid hadn’t finished that had just come back to the kitchen.”
“Who, Jessica? That girl you brought back home the other night?”
“Yeah, her.”
“So?”
“Well, it was a split-second decision. I grabbed the penne, picked out the chewed bits, got Adriano to rinse them, and I added the eggplant sauce and provolone, filled the hollow eggplant halves, and tossed them into the oven, with heaps of grated pecorino cheese on top. And buon appetito!”
“That’s the worst thing you have ever told me. Absolutely revolting.”
“I know. And it makes me feel good. It’s nice to know I’ll never stoop this low again in a professional kitchen.”
But as it happened I went on to stoop even lower, but that’s another story. In any case, life was good at Sessanta. I was happy, Adriano was happy, and Sandro’s nephew was happy, although he had absolutely no interests, no passions, no girlfriends. His life revolved around Sessanta, the small apartment he rented sixty-five feet away from the restaurant’s front door, and cocaine. He was a cokehead. Adriano and I had a passing appreciation for it, and Sandro joined in from time to time. There was a bunch of guys from the Basilicata region who hung around the restaurant and could get you anything. No one had a bad word to say about working at Sessanta, we all had our own personal expectations and balanced our existences inside and outside the restaurant. Even the waitresses were happy. There were two of them, and both had slept, at least once, at my place. When they left, another one arrived, a new girl I liked a lot. She’d slept at my place too, but in Matteo’s room. I thought it was someone else (I didn’t even know Matteo had met her), so I called out another girl’s name from behind the closed door, and when she poked her head out, I must have looked like an idiot. Adriano left Sessanta and became a personal trainer in a gym and made quite a name for himself.
I had no real reason to leave, but then one of those days came along when you’re drinking your coffee, and it’s no different from any other coffee you’ve ever drunk, but that day it tastes wrong. And you can’t get that taste out of your mouth. From then on the slow-moving pace of the restaurant and Sandro’s hissy fits started to bug me. The bad taste would not go away, and I became unbearable to be around. So when Sandro overreacted to some piddling little thing like someone taking the cooked clams he wanted to do something with, I just lost it and hurled a pan against the wall. Enraged, I strode outside to smoke a cigarette, gripping my cell phone tightly. By the time I went back inside, I’d made an appointment to meet the following day with the owners of the restaurant Michele was working in, and I set a new record: quitting one job and finding a new one in three minutes. Sandro didn’t put up a fight. I’d always known that one of our problems was that he wanted to take over his kitchen again, and I was the obstacle between the idea and the courage to do it.
37.
Being back with Michele, Sampath, and Gaby Baby had a familiar feel about it, like that distinctive hint of vanilla in the bouquet of a Brunello di Montalcino, or the blackcurrant nose in a Valpolicella Amarone. The arrangement was that I would work the same hours as at Sessanta. The money was the same too, and as usual there was no sign of a contract. In Italy some things never change: It was just another restaurant with a few added responsibilities in exchange for a few different privileges, but everything else remained the same.
Michele hoped that my presence in his kitchen would make him look good, and all I wanted to do was mind my own fucking business and grab some of the spotlight by making up for his shortcomings.
I was not the head chef, but I behaved like one.
A new guy arrived and introduced himself as Perewa. He was forty-eight and said he’d been a financial consultant and lived like a prince surrounded by Porsches and fancy restaurants, which he left behind to follow an irrepressible urge to keep it real. The only thing that wasn’t real, that I could make out, were the stories he told. It sounded like yet another clumsy attempt to camouflage defeat as a courageous choice by someone who’s suddenly changed his life. As if you change your life for any other reason than being forced to. I can’t stand people who go around calling themselves by their nickname, let alone a nickname like that. From day one I called him Whatshisname. I hadn’t singled out an enemy at Quadraro until he came along, on a silver platter.
Whatshisname had three main qualities. One: Nothing excited him. He saw the kitchen only as a source of suffering and fatigue. His behavior in the kitchen was that of an unwilling robot, always ready to abuse any foolhardy waiter who asked him to serve the last three diners one minute after the official closing time, even on a really quiet night. Two: He turned the simplest concepts into really complicated ones. If new apprentices turned up in the kitchen, he’d never teach them or just leave them alone to peel potatoes. No way. He would continually berate them for their lack of a detailed existential project, because it’s not the technical errors that must be corrected, but the strategic ones. Three: He spewed out a never-ending flow of verbal diarrhea, no matter what he was doing. Especially if he had to explain something to you, which he did all the time. Humor and brevity annoyed him; all that mattered were productivity, numbers, and sweat. Cheffy flair didn’t impress him. But serving two hundred covers with a ton of meat flung on the grill with meticulous skill and repetitiveness did.
Whatshisname’s life was peppered with bizarre concepts such as “the philosophical kitchen,” “a percentage approach to the production of food,” and “the geometry of the pantry.”
He discoursed relentlessly and at length about the proxemics of the spatial separation between cookware and chefs, and the chemical reactions between different foods and the alkalinity of the environment. Anything out of place threw him into a tizzy. He wanted all the jellied fruits to be weighed. One by one. Otherwise he got frazzled. Of himself, he said he was the superhero of tidiness and just like Superman he had his kryptonite: talent — a concept he associated with disorder, shamelessly denying its importance. In his opinion, Maradona’s big mistake in the controversial match against England in ’86 was to hog the ball and dribble it along way too randomly. The only monument worthy of worship was technique — the futile and idiotic technique he’d read about in some book and learned in a six-month course that cost as much as my whole year’s wages. He got a real kick out of repeating “I was right” and “I told you so.”
Whatshisname transferred to the kitchen values and ways of doing things that belonged to another world and had nothing to do with the reality, sensuousness, and extravagance needed to survive in a professional kitchen. In short, he was a bigmouth, know-it-all, boring old fart. This would have been a bearable and normal part of the absurd interaction that exists between cooks, except … he didn’t understand a fucking thing about cooking, and if you didn’t keep a watchful eye over him, he’d screw things up. So I decided he had to go. Whatshisname fawned over Michele, and the two hit it off immediately. One day I asked him to prepare the head cheese. He asked me how far up he had to fill the glass jars. I told him more or less up to here, and placed my index finger just under the top. He stiffened and told me that he needed to know the exact amount, otherwise the job wouldn’t be done correctly. I stopped what I was doing, picked up a glass jar, filled it with the head cheese nearly to the top, weighed it, and told him that it was two point five ounces. I waited until he had filled about fifty jars, then I approached him and started weighing the jars. This one is two point four ounces, I said, and poured the contents into a gastronorm. This one is not qu
ite two point three ounces, and I emptied another. I continued until I had emptied a dozen or so jars. Then I told him to empty all the jars, because not a single jar was exactly two point five ounces. He grumbled and muttered something to Michele, who didn’t say a word but gave me a dirty look, and started emptying all the jars. Being nasty is a great way to calm your nerves. When you’re not too secure in your job, you take it out on those who are even less secure than you. When you take it out on someone, you don’t think about his problems, or about the consequences. Thinking about other people’s problems doesn’t calm your nerves. Mine was a solitary battle that I relished one day at a time.
38.
In January 2009 Michele married the green-eyed American girl. She had a twinkle in her eye that didn’t bode well. Everyone thought it but no one said it out loud. I tried, without much conviction, and as expected I failed to convince him. Angelo, an old friend of mine, in the meantime had got his degree in anthropology and left for Brazil to work on a project for international cooperation. I was tired of the same old routine, and in February I decided to visit him. I talked about it with Michele and the owners. I’d be away for more than a month, but I wouldn’t leave until everything was sorted out in the kitchen. Both Michele and the owners said that it wouldn’t be a problem. Perewa couldn’t cover my station on his own, so he would be flanked by Fabrizio, a young guy and a massive heavy-metal fan, who had dropped off his résumé a few weeks earlier.
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