Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  10

  FLOYD CARDOZ, THE EXECUTIVE chef and co-owner of Tabla, sat down across from me at a small round table, saying by way of apology for being twenty minutes late, “Sorry it took me so long. You wouldn’t believe how many retards there are in the Holland Tunnel.”

  We sat underneath Tabla’s grand, curving staircase in near darkness. It was mid-May. Sunlight shone through the windows facing Madison Park. A few servers flitted around the tables in the downstairs dining room, arranging napkins and silverware. Mosaic pieces covered the vaulted ceilings—representations of grains, fruits, animals—and a bit of Miles Davis’s On the Corner—from the first side, when the sitar kicks in—played over the sound system. Tabla was, in essence, two separate restaurants. The ground floor housed the Bread Bar, the casual, street-food-inspired yin to the finer dining, tasting-menu yang of the upstairs. The Bread Bar’s kitchen was tiny and open, occupying just a corner of the long curving bar area that took up one entire side of the dining room. Anyone sitting at the bar could observe all the cooking being done. I considered that was very likely a nerve-racking proposition.

  “Why don’t we get right to it,” Cardoz said. He wore shorts, a polo shirt, and sandals. He didn’t smile much; a look meshing worry and wariness clouded his eyes. He had a defensive posture, hunched over his arms, sitting back and turned slightly away from me. “Why do you want to do your externship at Tabla?”

  In the Asia class, we played with spices. I’d never encountered many of them before—asafetida, fenugreek seeds, black cardamom—but each had a role in recipes for bondas or dal sambar or massaman curry that saw them teaming up with other ingredients to become a whole lot more than the individual parts. My interest was piqued then, too, but we’d never really learned how to use them with a confident hand. There was too little time. Tabla, I’d read, had a small room in its pantry devoted entirely to spices. They used dozens of them and spent thousands of dollars every month to keep the supply up. That was one reason I wanted to do my externship at Tabla, and I told this to Cardoz.

  I’d studied their menus beforehand, seen the pictures of dishes on their website. Crab cakes on a round of Goan-spiced guacamole with chutney. Naan bread stuffed with house-cured bacon. A sandwich of lamb braised in yogurt, with turmeric mashed potatoes. This was idiosyncratic, vibrant food. It was familiar—we’ve all had crab cakes; we’ve all had lamb stew—but I was captivated by the twist on them, serving the crab with that guacamole, braising anything in yogurt. It seemed like fun food. That was another reason, and I told this to Cardoz too.

  I really needed to land an externship. Per Se had blown me off—and in retrospect, I’m not even sure what I’d been thinking, given what and where my skills were at the time—Gramercy Tavern had said no, the Modern had said no. The guy from Grocery, in Brooklyn, had been such a prick on the phone that I never bothered to follow up. During my search, I had read an article Cardoz wrote for the New York Times about how he views Tabla as a teaching kitchen, a place to really train people, and that he sees the mistakes people make every day as a perfect opportunity to further that training. I’d never had serious experience, so I needed the training. The chances were pretty good that I’d fuck a lot of things up, so I needed the restaurant’s patience. That was a third reason. I kept that one to myself.

  But it was something very small that ultimately made me want to go to Tabla. I had Cardoz’s cookbook—One Spice, Two Spice—on the shelf at home and the first time I leafed through it, I’d stopped on a recipe that called for a roux made from chickpea flour. I loved the idea. Tabla had an eye on tradition. But the roux was made from chickpeas. Tabla also bristled against strictures. In my mind, this was the best of two contiguous worlds. So that was the real reason I wanted to be there.

  “You use a roux made from chickpea flour,” I answered. “How could I not want in on that kind of thinking? I’ve spent a lot of time looking at your menu, and I really want to eat this food. So if I want to eat it, naturally I’m going to want to know how to make it. You said in that Times article that you’ve staffed the kitchen with your employees’ education in mind. You worked with Gray Kunz, and his cookbook is one of my all-time favorites, and then you took that and started this …” I waved at the expanse of the restaurant. “So you and your cooking represent something I think is romantic, interesting, and unique, and I want to learn it.”

  The CIA had phoned me just two days prior to ask if I was withdrawing from school or not, because I was so overdue in landing my externship. I had called a friend who knew Cardoz and asked for a favor to get this interview. Cardoz asked me more questions—if I understood the nature of restaurant work, was willing to do it, what I wanted to do after school was over, on and on. He told me they paid $7.25 an hour. He said that he expected externs to pull their weight but understood that this was the very beginning of a culinary education, and he didn’t like expecting too much or working his externs like mules.

  When we hit a lull, I told him I thought it was really cool that Miles Davis had been playing earlier, and how much I loved the man’s electric music from the ’70s. Cardoz shifted upright in his seat, lost the wariness, and we talked about Davis for a minute. Then, he took me up the staircase, flanked with softly burning votives, through the dining room, which was arranged around an open circle looking down on the Bread Bar, and into the kitchen. It was fucking immense. Immediately inside the door was the pass, and running perpendicular to it were the kitchen’s stoves. The garde-manger station stood next to the pass, and next to that were two enormous steam kettles. A tilt skillet big enough for me to lie in stood near the kettles, right next to a deep fryer and another even bigger kettle, and in a room beyond that there was a long workspace where vegetables were prepped and meat butchered. The whole thing must have taken up about a quarter of a city block. We stopped at the back of the kitchen, looking toward the door and all the activity going on around the stoves. He told me to show up two days later at ten a.m., and spend the entire day—and night—trailing in the kitchen. He’d make his decision then.

  I SHOWED UP AT ten on the nose. I was immediately directed to the locker room, where I found a uniform to put on. A guy named Ross—one of Tabla’s four sous-chefs—gave me a whirlwind tour in and out of various storage areas. He explained the Tabla philosophy—American food, Indian spices—and that everything was local and seasonal. I wondered why, in May, there were four cartons of tomatoes on the shelf, but didn’t ask. I was nervous, and I wanted this to go well. I put it out of my mind.

  I liked Ross. He was warm and slightly hyperactive, moving quickly through his explanations, but genuinely interested in communicating. He made direct eye contact. He seemed honest.

  He introduced me to a few of the cooks and showed me to a table right near the garde-manger station.

  “Wait here for a second,” Ross told me, “and we’ll get you started. Did you bring knives?”

  “I did indeed,” I said.

  “Let’s see.” I pulled out my main knife, a Global santoku that I had bought on sale for $80 and that I loved. Ross held it up to the light and tilted it back and forth. He dragged his thumb perpendicular to the edge, held it aloft again, and tilted a few more times.

  “Good. Nice. I’ll be right back.” He put the knife down, pivoted, and dashed away, apron billowing, clogs slapping against the floor.

  I spent a few seconds observing, trying to take it all in, process it, and use what I could to salve my nerves. I suppose it was natural that my nerves were making a low shriek; the environs of the CIA kitchens were relatively safe: They were a place for trials, errors, and utter fuckups. The stakes were low. Tabla had been given three stars in the Times. It was presumably not a place for trials, errors, or utter fuckups. I wanted some visual clue that what I was would fit here. After a minute I wasn’t any more certain: It was like watching a colony of ants at work. The room was near silent, just the sound of blades against cutting boards. Everyone wore the same uniform and moved through the flow of
their prep in a sort of anonymity. I had difficulty telling people apart.

  Ross buzzed back in with a metal pan brimming with peeled ginger and told me to follow him. We arrived at a meat slicer.

  “You ever use one of these?” he asked.

  “Just once,” I said.

  “It’s like riding a bike,” Ross said. “To do ginger the way we do ginger, you set the slicer to number seven. Put the ginger here. Turn the slicer on here. Pull it back here. Slice it like this. If you hold your hand here, the slices will just pile up in your palm. Keep it neat. And for the love of God, please be careful. Come find me when you’re done.”

  It took me twenty minutes to slice all the ginger I’d been given, but I was, for the love of God, being really careful.

  When I finished, I unplugged the slicer, wiped it down, and brought the many hundred opaque slices of ginger to Ross. He led me to a cutting board and in a single deft move laid out a handful of ginger in an overlapping line, like a single row of fish scales. He took my knife and assaulted the slices, turning the whole pile into tiny filaments. He gave all the filaments a quarter turn and brought the knife down on them again. Now there was a fluffy row of minuscule ginger dice. He gave me my knife back.

  “So do that”—he looked at the pan of slices—“a few dozen more times. And come find me.”

  And so I chopped, and chopped, and chopped some more. I chopped methodically. I was after precision and exactitude, two qualities that were taking me close to fucking forever to approach. Many, many minutes passed. The pile of ginger slices eroded very, very slowly. Behind and all around me, lunch service was in full swing. I smelled spices and melting butter and grilling meat. I heard a gnarled aria of sizzles and clattering pans and Ross’s persistent voice calling out phrases like, “Ordering one skate, fire one lamb.” I’d turn and look and all the cooks stood in one place, rocking maniacally back and forth, reaching for ingredients, pushing and shaking their pans, laying food on plates, garnishing, handing off the plate, and starting the processes over again—a tight and orchestrated freak-out.

  Afternoon arrived. I’d completed the ginger. The cooks who’d been there when I arrived were replaced by the evening shift. All the frenetic prep work started anew. I spent some time cutting up lemons for chutney. I sliced cucumbers lengthwise on a mandoline. I ran back and forth to the various walk-ins fetching meats, fish, and produce for others. And then I ran into Ty.

  Ty was tall, thin, and in his midthirties. He served as Tabla’s chef de cuisine, which meant he was the Waylon Smithers to Cardoz’s Mr. Burns. Cardoz had told me that if he was out of the kitchen before dinner service, Ty would run the show. He came off as affable and welcoming. It was a pleasure to meet me, he said, and he’d heard from “everybody” that I was holding my own so far that day.

  I was pleased to hear it. “I’m trying to be more asset than liability,” I said. But I was still nervous.

  “Well, how about you knock off for a bit? I want you to hang back and observe. Go from station to station and see what people are doing. Take notes. If anyone needs help, just do whatever they need.”

  For the next ninety minutes, I drifted around the kitchen. Tabla’s lunch menu was mostly à la carte, but dinner featured two tasting menus. They constituted the majority of the nighttime orders. In addition, a whole crew of cooks and one dedicated prep person worked on getting the Bread Bar set for the night. The Bread Bar would typically sell its chicken tikka, naan breads, and lamb sandwiches to some two hundred fifty people on a bustling night.

  It wasn’t solely that dinner service is usually more intense than lunch, just in terms of sheer volume. There was something else in the air that I couldn’t quantify or qualify. The vibe of the room seemed a little more shrill than the morning. Motions were a little more frenzied, a touch more deranged. A tension had settled like a slight chill over the kitchen; I noticed that Ty used a brusquer voice.

  Most of Tabla’s press had been favorable over the years. Ruth Reichl had awarded them those three stars in the New York Times. But they were undoubtedly rankled by a subsequent Times review in which William Grimes rabbit-punched the place, stating, “It’s getting harder to remember what all the fuss was about.” And just recently Cardoz had been slapped a little bit by the Times’s Frank Bruni for his taquería at the newly opened Citi Field.

  These knocks were small scale, really, and Tabla had mounds of adoring press beyond those, but I wondered if every dinner service at Tabla felt like an audition or competition.

  Ty worked the pass, where the food moves from the line cooks to the food runners, who take it to the tables. He expedited—or managed—all the orders, firing this table’s order, then that one, and gave the once-over to every plate leaving the kitchen, garnishing with microgreens and salt. The spice room stood next to the pass, and Ty told me to stand there in the doorway and to watch for the duration of the service. It was 7:00. The kitchen would pull the plug at about eleven, which meant I’d be standing and watching for a long time.

  And it was a long time. By eight, I’d been in the Tabla kitchen for nine hours, in all the whirls of motion and heat, and hadn’t eaten anything for eleven hours. I was exceptionally thirsty. It’s more physically difficult to stand in one place, immobile, than to keep moving. My back bitched at me, and the bones of my feet murmured obscenities. But the orders started coming steadily at 8:00, first in small bursts announced by the ticket printer in staccato coughs, then in a quick steady stream. Ty was calling out, “Picking up one crab cake, picking up a watermelon salad. Fire another bass. Ordering one vegetarian tasting,” functioning as a conductor, and each station like a string section or brass section or percussion section, operating apart and joining together, at a precise moment to see six different plates arrive simultaneously at the pass.

  I observed a lot of moments of harmony between the stations, but I benefited from any mistakes. If anything sat under the heat lamp for too long, Ty explained, it usually got discarded and cooked again. Instead, tonight they came to me. I ate a samosa, spicy skate, a cheese-stuffed naan bread, a small, ever-so-slightly overcooked piece of lamb, a too-brown crab cake, and a really good layered vegetarian entrée of rice, sautéed greens, spices, and nuts. I’d later calculate that I’d eaten around $120 worth of food.

  While I was watching frenetic action by the fish station, Ty appeared in front of me. “We don’t stand like that in the kitchen.”

  I was puzzled. “I thought you told me to stay here. Should I go somewhere else?”

  “I did tell you to stand here. But we don’t stand like that.” He motioned toward my feet. I had crossed one foot over the other.

  “Okay,” I said. I uncrossed my foot.

  “If you stand like that, you’re off balance. If I bump you you’re going to fall. I might trip over you if you fall, and what if I was carrying something?”

  “Okay, got it,” I said.

  “You need to stand with both feet firmly on the floor.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like this …” He demonstrated what both feet firmly on the floor looked like.

  “This way, if I bump you”—Ty went ahead and bumped me—“this way, you’re not going down.” He bumped me again.

  “Right,” I said. “Okay.”

  At eleven, Ty informed the kitchen that all the orders were in, and it was time to clean up. He gestured to get my attention. “Okay—interview time. Let’s chat.” I followed him to an office that was only marginally bigger than an elevator.

  We squeezed in and sat down. The questions started, many of them and with much rapidity. I knew it probably wasn’t prudent to indicate from the jump that I had no designs on a restaurant career. Otherwise I told the truth. I acknowledged that, yes, I was older, but argued that only underscored the seriousness I had about learning—this wasn’t a dilettante thing. I admitted that, yes, I was a writer and would always write and while I planned to document my experiences at Tabla, I wasn’t here to write. I said that my focus h
ere was on cooking. Eleven became eleven forty.

  At midnight, he told me to go change, that I was done for the night. What had to happen next, he said, was that, tonight, he needed to do some serious thinking. Depending on what he decided—and, he informed me, he was really on the fence—I’d have to come in and trail one, probably two more times. Then, he and Cardoz would make a decision. After I changed, he led me to the exit and said good night.

  As I walked to the subway, I asked the phantom of Ty in my head, One, probably two more times? Are you serious? Are you fucking kidding?

  I went back upstate and waited to hear something from Cardoz. A week went by, and I started approaching restaurants in the Hudson Valley about externships. The farms and farmers’ markets were in full swing, and I targeted a few places that sourced their food from them. I figured doing an externship someplace that was closely allied with the food sources would be a real education. Another week went by, and I received word that the position at Tabla was mine and I’d start five days later.

  I’d spend Tuesdays through Saturdays at Tabla and venture back to Saugerties on Sundays. Nelly wasn’t thrilled with the schedule. She’d really liked the idea of my working upstate. “All I get with you is about an hour a day. I already feel like I’ve been single for a year now. I had really been hoping we’d have this great summer together. Well, now I’m definitely going to be living like a hermit for four months.”

  On Tuesday, June 9, at 10:45 a.m., I presented myself at Tabla to start my externship.

  Ross was cutting up skate at the pass when I walked in. He looked up, smiled broadly, greeted me, stripped the latex gloves off his hands, and took me past the garde-manger station, to a steel worktable standing next to a large bank of refrigerators and directly across from the tilt skillet. This was my station for the next four and a half months. I was, he said, to be the prep cook for the Bread Bar. He told me that each morning I’d get a checklist of some thirty-seven possible dishes and tasks to undertake and I could expect to do about a third of them. Some of the tasks were simple: julienne green papaya, or boil fingerling potatoes. Others, as I saw from the book of recipes he issued to me, required a bit of work, like the chickpea chole or eggplant bartha.