Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  “Carlos, I swear—you are slower than a fucking crippled mule.” I started grabbing eggplant and breading it. He stopped what he was doing and stared at me. I raised my voice. “Hey, can you maybe get the oil heated up so we can fry these?” Carlos went away and heated the oil. When I was done breading, I just came out and ordered Carlos to start frying them and walked away to do other things.

  I was slicing fresh mozzarella when Adam walked up to me and grabbed my arm. “Hey—you better go check on your eggplant; Carlos is burning the shit out of it.” I rushed over, and at least half the pieces he’d cooked were unusable. The oil in one of the two pans was discolored and filled with burnt-to-black crumbs. Time was becoming an issue; we’d need to serve this stuff in about forty minutes. “Check on the sauce,” I said, and bumped him out of my way. I kept frying in one pan, heated up new oil in the other. When I finished, Carlos and I assembled the individual dishes of eggplant Parmesan—and one big dish, meant for our group dinner—to go into the oven. We put them in at almost 500 degrees.

  Most oven racks have a curve on the edges to prevent tipping when you pull them from the heat. Ours did not. As I pulled, a tray of ten individual eggplants in small casserole dishes, and one giant panful, tipped at an impossible angle and slid. I leaped backward out of the way, and the mess spilled and shattered on the tiles.

  I bellowed obscenities; Carlos yelled, “What did you just do? What did you just do!” The kitchen was at a standstill. Sartory was at my back. He put his hands on my shoulders and shook.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, hey, hey—listen to me: it’s just food. Did you get burned? No? Okay, let’s solve this. How much did you lose? Okay, that’s okay. It was an accident. Shit happens. We’ve got ten servings left? Then that’s what we have to offer. You guys finish up a little earlier is all. Tomorrow, you make it again, and use a different oven. So let’s get this cleaned up, and we’ll go from there. Accidents happen, accidents happen.” I don’t know if we got marked down or not, but I loved Sartory right then. He got down on his knees with the two of us and helped clean up.

  THAT WEEKEND, NELLY AND I went to the local supermarket. There was a parking space right by the front door and as we were pulling into it, someone else immediately to our right was getting out of his car. It was Viverito. He was heading into the store as Nelly and I got out.

  “Who are you looking at?” she asked.

  “See that guy? That’s Viverito.” Nelly turned to see.

  “Oh!” she said loudly. “He’s handsome.” I ducked out of sight. As we walked in, she said, “Are you going to say hello?”

  “Nah, the guy’s off-duty. I’ll leave him alone.”

  “Oh, come on, Jonathan Dixon. That’s ridiculous. You should say hi.” When we walked in, he was standing over a crate of broccoli right inside the door. He looked strange to me in jeans and hiking boots. He glanced up and I saw a flash of recognition.

  “Chef Viverito, how are you?” I held my hand out. “Don’t know if you remember, but I was in your fish class.”

  “Jonathan, right? Yeah, I remember.” He looked at Nelly. I wasn’t sure how to introduce him, but he saved me the trouble. “Hi, I’m Gerard.” They shook. He turned to me. “How are your classes? You must be getting close to your externship, right?”

  Nelly said good-bye and wandered off.

  “Yeah, I’m close, but I’m really not certain where to go.”

  “You haven’t applied yet?” He looked surprised. “You better get going, man.”

  “I’m at a loss. It has to be in New York City, but … I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m skilled enough for Per Se, which is”—I couldn’t believe I was admitting this—“where I really want to go. I just don’t have a ton of experience yet.”

  “Well, Jonathan Benno is pretty damn amazing. But, yeah, that’d be a pretty high-pressure place. Where else have you thought of?”

  I mentioned another place.

  “Now that will be high pressure. If you’re prepared for a lot of abuse, then, hey—go to it. But, you know, I got to a certain point where I just thought to myself, ‘Man, I’m tired of working for screamers. I don’t want that anymore.’ Guys our age”—and here he gave me a pointed look—“are maybe not as eager to put up with that. That’s stuff you suffer through when you’re a kid.”

  “I looked at Daniel Boulud’s places but, get this—the description on the database says you’d be working ninety hours a week.”

  He looked outraged. “What?? Ninety hours a week? Are you kidding me?”

  “If I were fifteen years younger and not in a relationship, I’d consider it.”

  “Ninety hours? No way. That’s insane.” He started walking away. He stopped. “Do you need a recommendation?”

  “Yeah, that would be … great.”

  “Come by the fish room Tuesday morning. Bring your list of potential sites.”

  I made up a list that night: Gramercy Tavern, Tabla, the Modern, Per Se, San Domenico. I’d start with those. The next day, I was early for class and ran into Perillo in the hallway. I was glad to see him. We talked for a few minutes and the subject of the externship came up. Since he was from the city, I showed him my list. Perillo read it silently. “Huh,” he said, handing it back. “Per Se? I don’t know, Jonathan …” He trailed off and I felt a little foolish.

  “I think you might need …” he continued.

  “Yeah, I know—more experience.”

  Perillo nodded. “San Domenico—that’s a good one. Odette Fada is great. But, you know—you’re more mature than your classmates.”

  “ ‘Mature’? That’s a great euphemism, Chef. Thank you.”

  “No, I mean it literally, in this case—you’re older, you’re more mature. I don’t think at this point you want to go anyplace where you’re going to get screamed at.”

  “What about Tabla?”

  He shrugged.

  “Gramercy Tavern?”

  “Michael Anthony is amazing. Just amazing. You’d learn a ton. But, if you had asked me without the benefit of having this list, where you should go, I would have told you the Modern. It’s classical; it’s contemporary; Gabriel Kreuther is brilliant. It’s a calm kitchen. You should be there. It’s exactly where you should be.”

  On Tuesday, I returned to the fish room. Viverito was hunched over his computer. I knocked.

  “Here’s my list,” I said.

  He read it. After a few moments, he said, “You know where you should go? The Modern. I think that’d be a great place for you. What do you think?”

  “You’re the second person within twenty-four hours who’s told me that. I say okay.”

  “I’ll do one recommendation for Kreuther, and then another with a generic ‘To whom it may concern.’ ”

  I began, for the first time, to feel excited about the externship.

  SARTORY MIXED THE ROSTER up a little bit one night, possibly in an attempt to save us from one another, and I was working with Brookshire on a dish of black beans and sautéed snapper. We burned our beans because we weren’t paying attention. We doctored them with half a pound of butter to make them semiedible. When it came time to cook the snapper, someone had accidentally turned our oven off. We were supposed to have started the snapper in a pan on the burners and finish it in the oven. So in the middle of service, none of our fish was cooking, and the line waiting for it grew and grew.

  Another team’s guava-glazed ribs had been cooked to dust, and some of the students eating them had complained. I’d tried the curried goat and it was tooth-meltingly spicy—a miscalculation of measurement on someone’s part.

  Sartory stood by his desk looking grim and a little sad. He’d put out the fires where he could but, in all, we’d had a pretty poor showing. He let us sink under the weight of our own carelessness.

  Brookshire and I finally got the late orders of the snapper out. No one spoke; all you could hear was the small clatter of pans on the burners, ovens opening and closing, meat on the grill. The
n, above it all, I heard Tara start to yell.

  “Shut up! Shut up! I don’t want to hear anything from you! Anything! You have no right to tell me shit! You do not have the right!”

  I stepped around the corner and Tara was wet eyed and red in the face. She stood screaming at Adam, who was making gestures to calm her down. Sartory looked over and then made himself busy with his computer. Tara strode right out of the room, and Adam went back to his station. I could see her knife kit on the table next to Adam’s and I realized they must have been partners.

  Adam called a group meeting that night. I was there. Gio was there. Brookshire, too. A couple of others. But most everyone else declined to show up.

  Adam canceled the meeting and he and I walked together to the parking lot.

  “Well, Captain Bligh,” I said, “looks like you had a mutiny.”

  He was much more upset than I thought. “I keep trying! I don’t know what people want from me. I’m really, really making the effort to be a good leader.”

  “I understand that. But Thanksgiving is a few days away. We’ve got the Asia cooking class, then Christmas, and then it’s pretty much time for externship. I think you have a bunch of people who are just a little burned out and they just want to get through it. I know I’m feeling burned out. All you can do—all you really should do—is just try to make sure people communicate if they need help. But otherwise … most of these cats are just delirious with ego and hormones anyway, and unless you’re a faculty member, I’m not sure they’re going to recognize you as an authority figure.”

  “I have more experience. That’s all I’m trying to do: pass it on.”

  “Yes, and I have no problem with that. I’ll take whatever guidance I can get. Not everyone is like that, though. Just keep that in mind.”

  I LOOKED AT THE syllabus one afternoon and saw that two days later, Sean and I were partnered up to make roasted ducks in a port-raspberry sauce. When I read this, I stood upright. I remembered being apoplectic when I’d eaten this duck months ago, gnawing at the dried and nasty flesh, declaiming that the duck had died in vain.

  On duck day, I arrived early. The night before, I’d made a meticulous list of all the necessary ingredients for the duck, the port-wine sauce, scalloped potatoes, roasted carrots, and broccoli. I gathered every ingredient and all the pans I thought I’d need. I cranked up the convection oven to 475. I got out the duck stock that two students had made the night before.

  Sean was late—forty minutes late. I was pissed, but as far as I was concerned, my only true partner was the spirit of the departed duck.

  “Hi,” he said. I didn’t answer. He shuffled. Then cleared his throat. “Okay, then. I’ll start on the duck. Do you want to get the potatoes peeled?”

  I leaped in front of him. “No. No. No. I’m doing the duck. No one else is touching it. I’m sorry. I know that sounded bad. But this is personal.”

  He just stared at me, utterly perplexed. From behind him, Lombardi said, “It’s probably better not to get between Jonathan and those ducks.”

  “All right … how about I start the sauce, then?”

  “No,” I said right away. “The sauce is part of the duck.”

  There was a lengthy silence.

  “Right. Yeah. Okay. Ummm … why don’t I start peeling and cutting up the carrots? Those aren’t part of the duck, correct?”

  “That’s true,” I conceded.

  “And the potatoes? Is it okay if I touch those?”

  “Yes. Yes, that would be acceptable.” He walked away. I addressed myself to the ducks. I arranged them on racks in two giant roasting pans. I patted the skin and the cavity dry. I ran my fingers over the chilled skin. I laid my palm on one of them. I started massaging the bird.

  A voice to my left asked, “What are you doing, Grandpa?” It was Dan. I felt a sudden sort of disgrace, like I’d been caught leaving the bathroom without washing my hands or something. “Uhhh …,” I started to say. “Well, I guess I’m massaging the bird.” I took my hand away.

  “Of course you are. Hey, why don’t you come back to Earth? Come rejoin us.” He walked off. I felt too embarrassed to continue massaging. I seasoned the birds instead. When the oven reached the right temperature, I opened the doors and put the birds in. I watched for a few seconds through the door glass. Then I went ahead with preparations for the sauce.

  The sauce started out as two gallons of stock. It would need to be reduced to a couple of quarts. I got it boiling away. I kept veering between the oven and the pot, back and forth, constantly monitoring. I’d watched Sean fabricate the carrots and get the potatoes put together and under the heat. I saw him at the stove with a small pan and some raspberries, which were part of the sauce.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “Chef Sartory told me to make a gastrique and add it to the sauce.” He was boiling the raspberries in vinegar and sugar and reducing it all down to a syrupy consistency. This was messing with my goal of being the sole caretaker of the birds. But he was operating under orders. And I recognized I was getting a little out of hand with all this. I nodded and walked back to the ovens.

  An hour after the birds were in, they had browned pretty nicely; the convection ovens cook things quickly. I called Sartory over and asked what he thought. He prodded and pressed the skin. I followed suit. He squeezed the meat on the leg. So did I. “Take ’em out of there,” he said. And I did. The ducks began to rest.

  I focused completely on the sauce, which wasn’t reducing the way I wanted. I got the biggest rondeau in the kitchen and dumped the stock into it, with all its aromatics and now the gastrique, and turned the heat to high.

  And after a little bit, that was done, too. I remembered reading in The French Laundry Cookbook how Thomas Keller instructed the staff to strain everything through a chinois fifteen or so times. If that was what was done at the French Laundry, then I’d do it here. The duck deserved no less. Each time I strained the sauce, the amount of sediment in the bottom of the chinois was lessening. On the sixth none was there. I swirled in butter. I picked up a spoon and tasted it. It was exquisite. I could have done shots of the stuff. Rich, with a hint of sour from the gastrique, and the flavor of raspberries throughout.

  We carved the ducks, which had now rested for thirty minutes. The skin was crisp. My hand feeling weighty with trepidation, I pulled a large scrap of meat off the bones. I put it in my mouth. It was moist and tender. The potatoes and carrots came out. We plated the meals and served them. We sold out of the duck within about twelve minutes.

  9

  CHEF DAVID SMYTHE WAS running a couple minutes late, but it was an early Christmas in the hallway outside his Cusines of Asia kitchen. A hand truck sat weighted with ingredients for that day’s cooking. Adam and Brookshire, Dan and Sean were buzzing around it like hummingbirds, darting their hands in, pulling out packages of lily buds and dried mushrooms, four or five bottles of different soy sauces, a bag of Chinese long beans, a trio of various rice wines that looked like the real thing, covered with bright calligraphy and import stamps, not packaged under the familiar Kikkoman aegis.

  It felt like a particularly good time of year to be a culinary student. Christmas was three weeks off, followed by a two-and-a-half-week break. In the interim, we’d be studying the fundamentals of Asian cuisine, with a few days each spent in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. The schedule had an edge of impossibility to it; every one of those countries had a long, complex, and well-developed cuisine—way more long and intricate than France or Italy or America—and the idea that two days here and two days there would be anything more than a dilettante’s layover was absurd. But—and I’d used the analogy just recently with Nelly when we were talking about my three days with Sartory and the cooking of Mexico—this was learning a few chords from our scales, and it was up to us to figure out how to make rudimentary, then more advanced, music from it later on.

  We each had different reasons why we were more
excited for this class than we’d been for any other, except maybe Skills, when we first felt a stove’s heat on our faces. Adam, for one, was obsessed with the happy meeting of French or American food with Asian food, though he refused to call it fusion because the word had connotations of badly imagined food pairings, like taco pizza or something. He idolized Jean-Georges Vongerichten (who was living out Adam’s dream), had spent time in Thailand, Japan, and Vietnam, and saw these three weeks as an opportunity to let some seeds that had already been planted start germinating.

  I myself suffered from a lot of misapprehensions about Asian cooking that I wanted to diffuse. I couldn’t figure out why every one of my stir-fries tasted fundamentally the same, or why the wok I used at home didn’t transform ingredients so they tasted like dishes in Chinese restaurants. I understood that adding lime leaves and coconut milk to a dish made it taste vaguely of Thailand, but very little beyond that. Once in a great while, I’d open one of the two Asian cookbooks I owned and make an attempt. But not often; I didn’t have many of those ingredients on my shelf. To make the dish, I’d have to trek to Chinatown or Jackson Heights in Queens, drop a small pile of money, and then bring them back home, where the volume of new and unfamiliar ingredients felt intimidating. I’d learned enough so far at school to look back and know why: You didn’t just toss ingredients together. You had to finesse them, build with them. You didn’t mix flour and stock together, crank the heat under it until it got thick, and call it gravy. There were a lot of intricacies involved. I wanted to see those intricacies performed by expert hands. Plus, I loved korma. Any type of korma. No matter how bad, how greasy. When I paged through my recipe packet, I saw the dish on the menu during the Indian portion of the class and got really excited.

  A few of the people in the group were still so young and unexposed to much beyond the small towns in Georgia and Texas and Florida where they’d grown up that this was truly an exotic new world, one that had nothing to do with the moo goo gai pans and lo meins on the standard green-and-red-printed take-out menus from strip mall restaurants.