So I looked around and without undue effort found myself in this shabby dump of a place with a half-decent reputation, located just outside the city walls. The owner was your usual maverick restaurateur with a shady past, a few fleeting moments of financial good fortune, a rap sheet that included a couple of months in the slammer, and a tidy sum that had survived along with him and that he had wisely decided to invest — imagine that! — in the gold-plated world of restaurants. Anything but reliable but, all things considered, manageable. The pay was reasonable: €90 a day, payable weekly so as not to be owed too much money in one shot, all of it cash in hand, and with the usual fictitious on-call contract. At the end of the month I’d receive a semblance of an official wage that I’d deduct from the following week’s pay.
For the first few months in Bologna, doubts continued to gnaw at me, but although I was working lunches and dinners seven days a week in an outlandish place, I could cook up beef fillet with myrtle sauce, deboned guinea fowl with lemon, steak tartare with artisanal sauces, breaded and fried egg yolk, handmade spaghetti aglio e olio (the same as the star-rated restaurant, but it cost just €9 here), and grouper carpaccio with horseradish, among much else.
And this made a difference. Whenever I wondered where the hell I was and what the hell I was doing, I’d remember Orlando’s advice — close your eyes, take a deep breath, and visualize the nearly €3,000 a month you’re earning — and the jitters would fade away. I managed to take myself seriously even amid neon lights, paper napkins, and blue plastic tables that matched the sky in the monstrously hideous painting that dominated the dining area.
Getting into that dump convinced me that if I had choices here, I’d have them just about anywhere, and this luxury meant I could continue regarding everyone else as assholes.
In the kitchen with me, but mornings only, was the owner’s mom, a sprightly seventy-year-old who sneaked a smoke when her son wasn’t looking, called him “that idiot” behind his back, and always made me laugh out loud. We’d have deep and meaningful conversations from time to time and really got to like each other. Thanks to her, I learned how to make tortellini. I had never been friends with anyone seventy years of age, and this meant something too.
The president of one of the biggest multistakeholder social cooperatives in the Emilia-Romagna region had his office only a street away and soon became a regular at the restaurant. When we first met, he told me about the various activities and professional development programs they conducted for “the disadvantaged” (his words), and I told him about my work as a chef and my degree in anthropology. The co-op also ran a “restaurant” and two cafés, he added. We immediately locked eyes with interest. He told me bluntly that he wanted the cooperative’s slapdash eatery to become a fully fledged restaurant and not just a black hole that gobbled up nearly €60,000 of European structural funds and local taxpayer money every year.
There were several good reasons for wanting to work with him, but foremost was to have free rein and show off my talents which, according to the president, no one else in the cooperative seemed to have. I ticked off all the other reasons, but kept this one to myself. When two people meet for the first time and each thinks he stands to gain something from the other, what usually happens is that they give each other a big smile and an agreement is entered into, whether it’s a job or a marriage. Ours would be only a theoretical agreement, however, until the local authorities signed the necessary permits et cetera, so for the time being we just smiled.
Meanwhile, Giuliana was offered the residency in Asiago, so I left Bologna and went to work at the restaurant in Thiene, and things went the way they went. In any event, it took me two weeks to find a job as chef de partie in a hotel on the Asiago plateau and to convince myself that, all in all, I could cope with living in a tiny mountain village. Leaving Rome helped me realize that being a chef was a prerogative that belonged to me alone and not to the skills I had acquired in the kitchens of the Eternal City.
I wasn’t tied to any particular place to bring home the bacon, and I had more freedom and power than I could have imagined. But when Giuliana received a telegram informing her that she had won another competitive exam, this time at a hospital in L’Aquila, and was happy to move again, I had just been offered a chef’s position at a hotel up north in the Trentino region and I was sick of relocating. For a while our paths diverged, and although the house we were renting in Asiago was still our home, we were just not living in it together. I thoroughly enjoyed that isolated winter, high up in the Alps, though sometimes I even felt the cold in my dreams. Giuliana and I caught up with each other three times: The first time I went south to see her in Abruzzo; the second time she came up north to Trentino; and the third time we met in the middle, in Rome. She was a month late, and just before I left, in the restroom of a coffee shop near Termini station, we discovered she was pregnant. While making my way back north on the train, trying to figure out what to do next, the president of the cooperative in Emilia-Romagna called me. All the permits had come through from the local council for the restaurant we had discussed, and he wanted to know if I was still interested, even though nearly two years had passed. I accepted the offer on the spot. Sometimes my mouth knows the answer long before my brain does.
In reality, this particular answer was an easy one. Giuliana would be off work during her pregnancy, and moving in together down in L’Aquila would mean my starting from scratch, looking for a job in the city that had been flattened by the 2009 earthquake. The prospect of grilling pork chops in some mom-and-pop joint was far less appealing than setting up a new restaurant that would welcome me with open arms in Bologna. It would be for only a limited time, and our life in Abruzzo would just go on the back burner. But then again, I’d never imagined settling down in one place forever, and even a baby on the way was no reason to start now. Plus we both loved the vibrant Emilia-Romagna region.
So here I was, part chef, part coach, part consultant, and part teacher. Writing menus, forming robust working relationships with suppliers, and arranging schedules. Teaching the members of the cooperative who had managed it for years with little success how to run a restaurant, and teaching people assigned to the cooperative by social services to learn a trade. Put like that it seems complicated, but it really wasn’t.
I started my new job by organizing a month-long cooking course for a very motley crew: Beatriz, a former Cuban hooker; Giorgio, autistic; Alessia, a platinum blonde with obsessive-compulsive disorder, permanently attached to her iPhone; Silvio, schizophrenic; Claudio, heart disease; Simone, deeply depressed after losing first his job and then his wife, Serena, who’d been bipolar; and finally Marco. Marco was allergic to questions and black pepper. He was ten years older than me, with an unfathomable gaze and the values of a Boy Scout. Sometimes his eyes were as clear as a mountain lake, other times they were burning embers. He gained confidence little by little. He was always spotlessly clean and pleasant smelling, tackled every task with dogged determination, and tended to fumble his way through problems. I told him it wasn’t always good enough to just make do; you also needed technique, and lack of technique was a huge shortcoming. He looked at me blankly, but he was a fast learner. He never backed down from a challenge and exchanged sweet nothings with his wife on Facebook. He had the hide of a rhinoceros and the sensitivity of a child. And every night, when he finished, he would return to his prison cell.
My ragtag band stumbled and screwed up every now and again, but they forged ahead. There were some warmhearted moments, and nobody went off the deep end, which was the main thing. And by the end of the course, their bread, homemade pasta, roasts, and cookies were … not bad. Better than anyone expected. When you cook good food, you win a small battle with the world around you, and somehow the world knows it. When you feel satisfied with yourself, you tend to step up your game, and I believe that’s powerful medicine.
Marco overcomplicated things and had a somewhat limited approach to cooking, but he was passionate. And he re
cognized good food. When you’ve got passion, mastering technique is relatively simple — all you need is time. The restaurant was small and stopped just short of hospitable. The big bare windows looked onto a parking lot and the fluorescent lights were harsh, but the carved wooden tables and chairs were quite splendid. The problem was the desserts.
The pastry chef’s name was Denisa, and she did her best, which was not much. She knew how to make no-bake Chocolate Salami with broken biscuits, Tiramisù, and Torta Tenerina, a chocolate cake traditionally made in the city of Ferrara. Three desserts, all chocolate. Denisa had worked in the kitchen for a few years. Before that she’d only made sandwiches and salads, after fleeing her homeland of Romania and a violent husband, together with her three daughters. Her missing teeth embarrassed her, but not enough to stop her from smiling. She didn’t bat an eye when asked to come in an hour early or leave an hour late, or to serve forty meals single-handed. She was convinced that just getting the job done meant the job was well done, but that’s beside the point. She did not, however, dodge difficulties, and after swearing like a sailor and taking the Lord’s name in vain a couple of times, managed to see the funny side of them. So Denisa deservedly joined the army of potential cooks and people I unconditionally admired.
Life never asks people like Denisa for their opinion before dumping stuff on them; therefore, she never felt obliged to say thank you. She didn’t have a clue about pastry making and did not recognize good food. She was too busy trying to recognize good people, and everything else was a waste of time. She was as stubborn as a mule and uninterested in learning technique. Technique without taste is as good as the fish they throw to trained seals, and a restaurant without a decent assortment of desserts will never make anyone’s wish list.
My first step was to recommend hiring Marco, taking advantage of the prisoner employment program, for a total cost to the company of a few hundred euros a month. My second was to turn Marco into a pastry chef.
I don’t know whether the size of the dream is proportional to the happiness you feel when it comes true, or whether Ferran Adrià’s emotions exceed those of Grom’s employee of the month. If you’ve just begun working in a gelateria like Grom and they name you employee of the month, you probably feel on top of the world. If you’ve been a chef for the better part of fifteen years, and even thumbed your nose at a star-rated restaurant, and now, for the first time in your life, they’ve given you carte blanche to turn a restaurant around and teach people how to manage it, you might not be on top of the world, but you can say you’re happy. Of course, you don’t have a restaurant of your own, your face doesn’t grace the pages of a fancy food magazine or anything like that. A wage of €1,360 a month wasn’t a fortune, but they let me choose my own hours, I could do some of my work from home, and I showed up in the kitchen only when I needed to. Yep, it was just what I wanted. I felt fine and that’s all that mattered. Anyhow, most people’s pipe dreams are fast forgotten, and then they focus on realizing the dreams that are within their reach, and I am no exception.
Debora was the president’s chief assistant. She hardly ever went out for a meal, and when she did, it was usually pizza. She was mostly vegetarian and uninterested in spending money on food. Before I arrived, she and Denisa, both embarrassingly naïve, pieced together the menus, picking up ideas from cheap magazines or trawling through Web sites for housewives. Does this remind you of students who, the day before their exams, put together cheat sheets, copying a few lines here and there of the basic stuff they haven’t studied? As if it’s easy to understand the basics. The notion that you can build a menu by grabbing a few dishes here and there without the slightest attempt at coherency — and without ever even having tried or tasted the dishes — revealed an unscrupulous and contemptible perception of what it means to be a chef and, if I have to be honest, is downright offensive. I’m not saying that inspired creativity or an artistic streak or business acumen is essential in this profession. I am talking about the fundamental principle of cooking, which is pleasure. You have to believe you are a genius. You are an idiot if you think you can make it big as a chef without delighting in the flavor of what you produce. I leaf through food magazines too. But I’ve been there, done that, seen it being prepared, tasted it on various occasions, including every variation in taste and consistency, and I distinctly remember what it felt like when I came across the version I liked the best. In other words, I know what good food tastes like. I was taught it. When I read a recipe, even one by Benedetta Parodi, Italy’s Rachael Ray, instinct kicks in. There are different ways of remembering things, and this is difficult to teach, but I believe it goes by the name of experience. Debora enjoyed my cooking and the type of restaurant I was setting up, but she insisted on having the final say on the menus and phoned me constantly.
The president of the cooperative looked like a gray-haired hippie, with his jeans, leather sandals, and velvet jackets. But he was only the president of a cooperative, and had never really understood how Debora put the menus together or how Denisa cooked the dishes. When he came for lunch, I tried to teach Denisa a few things, like how to take advantage of the situation. If the owners are sitting at a table, serve them first and better than everyone else. I know, when I was twenty-five I thought it sucked too. But when you’re just starting out, you’ve still got a lot to learn, and then you grow up and all you want to do is live a peaceful life.
I began seeing dishes come out of the kitchen with a decorative flourish that followed some sort of logic rather than a few ham-fisted squirts of balsamic reduction. Denisa was beginning to pick up some of the butcher’s best-kept secrets, no longer attempting recipes destined to fail miserably, showed greater respect for food and its safe storage, and had stopped guesstimating cooking times and service times. All this put my conscience at ease and told me I was achieving my goals. I received huge smiles from the president every time he saw me in the kitchen. Not one of the ragtag crew we were assigned would ever be chefs, except perhaps Marco, but here at least they knew they were capable of doing an outstanding job, and that’s all that matters.
45.
Some things never change in a professional kitchen: Marco, Denisa, and I drew closer, although each continued living in solitude.
We knew a lot about one another: the way we like our coffee, the days we are unapproachable, the cruel things that make us laugh and the ones we can’t stand to hear, the minor details that piss us off, how much we love to cook pasta, the untidiness we need and the tidiness we like. Sports, cars, clothes, shoes, ingredients, mom, children, politics, films, singers, zodiac signs, Denisa’s tits and teeth, her baby granddaughter, my receding hairline, Marco’s wedding anniversary, and the cities we’ve lived in. We acknowledged one another’s habits, likes and dislikes, shortcomings and good qualities. We learned when to shut up and when to raise our voices. But in actual fact we remained strangers. Strangers who knew each other really well, but strangers nonetheless. We were a real kitchen crew.
I loved my role and I liked the connection that was forming between Denisa and Marco. But I missed the life in the trenches that I was used to, where drugs, booze, immorality, and nihilism are the common ground on which we join forces to kick a stupid and hypocritical world in the ass with our talent.
In here I had to be a bit of a hypocrite, and sharing how I felt with someone else would be a real weight off my shoulders. Stockholm syndrome was the only explanation for my relationship with the kitchen. The abuse I had been subjected to, the endless toil, the need to have my wits about me to avoid getting steamrolled, the pervasive illegality of the employment scene — all this and I had fallen in love with my torturer, forged an alliance between me and my executioner, and now I missed those things like crazy. It was less fun even though my life was arguably more peaceful. We were a functioning restaurant with clients, and that’s why I’d been hired, but it was actually social work. People with serious problems were part of the program and alcohol was forbidden. Showing off about one’s
depraved and dissolute past was frowned upon, and it was imperative to conduct oneself responsibly and respect the sensitivity of others. Sexual innuendo was out of the question. In all the other places I had worked I merely had to look like the boy next door with the owners and churn out dish after dish during peak times, but here I really needed to be alert and level-headed.
Debora and the president went to Mass every Sunday and had way too much faith in the benefit of meetings. With them I could let my guard down, but a boxer’s preferred stance is with his fists raised at nose-eye level. After Floyd Patterson landed the most beautiful jab in the history of boxing, he ran to assist his opponent, who gave no signs of getting up. He said, “They said I was the fighter who got knocked down the most, but I also got up the most.”
Sonny Liston was from Arkansas, born into a sharecropping family who farmed cotton, and ended up knocking out thirteen contenders for the heavyweight title. Patterson would have gladly avoided getting into the ring with that fighting machine, but the day always comes when a man has to face his fears. On September 25, 1962, Frank Sinatra and nearly nineteen thousand other boxing fans gathered to watch the fight that was over in the blink of an eye. After two minutes and ten seconds, the son of slaves had knocked out his opponent and the world had a new heavyweight champion. Patterson lost by a knockout but was still on his feet. Before that match Liston had said, “In the films the good guy always wins, but this is one bad guy who ain’t gonna lose.” When I put on my black cap and tie my apron around my waist, I think I’d like to be Sonny, though I wouldn’t mind being Floyd. Neither Debora nor the president had ever watched a boxing match. They didn’t want a boxer; they wanted lots of meetings to work out how to turn a bunch of screwed-up people into a proper restaurant brigade.
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