Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  I spent that day and the next training, during which I followed first Nicole, whom I’d be replacing, then Chris, another of the sous-chefs, as they performed various tasks on the list. I took notes and annotated my sheaf of recipes. Today—the third day—I was on my own.

  I got to my station and put my things down. I grabbed two bains-marie, one for garbage, one for my equipment. I got a cutting board. I got out my knives. Then I reached for the clipboard. My prep list read: make cucumber raita, make spicy yogurt, make lamb marinade, marinate lamb top round, cut asparagus, soak beans for sprouting, sprout already soaked beans, make foogoth base, make mushroom korma, make lamb stew, make chole, make green sauce for halibut seviche.

  My stomach pitched as I read the list. This was a lot of work. I crosschecked some of the tasks with the recipes. Just the chole, a dish of chickpeas served to customers like a stew, for instance, required the following: simmer five pounds of the chickpeas until done. Make a small dice of ten onions, slice forty-five cloves of garlic on the mandoline, small dice twenty tomatoes, and julienne a 9-pan (a vessel holding about three cups) of ginger. Toast spices for a mix: cumin, coriander, green and black cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks. Grind all of them, along with fifteen dry red chiles. The onions needed caramelization, the ginger and garlic had to be sweated, and the tomatoes cooked until they “broke down.” Everything got mixed into a steam kettle, and cooked for twenty more minutes. The stew was finished with a 9-pan of tamarind paste and some mango powder. Upon completion, it was decanted into a large hotel pan, put on ice, cooled, and put away.

  Line cooks were moving quickly and steadily past, and one of them bumped me. I dropped the clipboard and picked it back up.

  I felt a pulse or two of desperation. I wanted to succeed. Cardoz walked by and said hello. He asked what I was working on and I told him I was about to start the chole. He nodded, looked around at my equipment, and left.

  I poured the chickpeas into one of the steam kettles, filled the kettle with water, and turned on the heat. I stood over the peas, watching the water start to bubble, and reminded myself that I’d need to get the lamb seared for the stew. I had no idea how long it would take, but I knew that it needed to braise for at least four hours. I had the tomatoes and onions to dice, the spices to toast and grind, fingerlings to cook. And there was much more coming after that.

  I discovered that as soon as water boils on chickpeas, a thick scum of starch forms and comes together on the water’s surface. It needs to be skimmed constantly. As soon as one layer of scum disappears, a new one appears immediately. The steam kettle with my peas stood about twenty-five feet away from my station.

  While they cooked, I turned on the tilt skillet to heat up, diced the onions, then the tomatoes. First Ty, then Cardoz, then Chris walked by the kettle and had a tiny conniption about whatever starch was presently at the top of the peas.

  I’d been told to waste nothing. When an onion is diced, there’s always some waste; there’s the base of the onion that acts as support while you’re actually doing the dicing, and a few scraps always turn out to be too long or too big. I worked with large yellow onions, cutting them in half, carefully making several horizontal slices, cutting—very deliberately—fifteen or so perpendicular slices, then making the whole thing into chopped dice. I did this with a number of them, the fumes rising up, stinging my eyes, making them weep. I chopped the waste into the approximate size of the dice and mixed it in. This stuff would be cooked down to translucency, and then cooked some more. Exactitude of shape, I reasoned, wasn’t a primary concern.

  Chris arrived, leaned in past me, and ran his fingers through the bowl of dice. He found some of the imperfect pieces, announced they were “unacceptable” and told me to go through and cull them out. I dumped my onions onto a sheet tray and plucked the offending pieces away. After a few minutes, Cardoz arrived, dismayed by the several tablespoons of onion I was about to get rid of, and told me to incorporate them back in.

  Ty shouted that the peas needed more skimming—right that second. I dashed over. Cardoz kept inspecting the onions and then moved on. From somewhere out of sight, Chris wondered aloud—fervently—why the lamb wasn’t being seared.

  I retrieved twenty-five pounds of cubed lamb from the meat refrigerator, poured oil into the tilt skillet, tossed a cube in to test it, and, when it spit and sizzled with a violence, dumped about a third of the meat in and spread it around.

  Ty stood by the peas, telling me to skim again, and after I walked over to start skimming, he went to the tilt skillet. “Whoa! Whoa!” he shouted. “That is way, way too much lamb!” He began poking at the pieces, many of which had taken on a nice brown color. The meat sizzled very loudly. “You’re never going to get any color on it. It’s not going to sear, it’s going to steam. And listen to that—you shouldn’t be able to hear me speak right now because this pan should be that loud. You just completely wrecked this meat. Maybe we can salvage it. I don’t know. Dammit.”

  He scooped a healthy amount of the meat out and with a great flamboyance plopped it into a perforated pan I’d set up so the oil could drain away from the cooked pieces.

  “Ideally,” Ty said, looming up in front of me, “we’d sear one piece of meat at a time. But obviously we’re on a schedule.” He surveyed the meat. “Well, we were on a schedule.” He walked away. He walked back. “You know, the speed you’re operating at is not acceptable. You shouldn’t be walking anywhere. You should be at a full sprint. And I shouldn’t have to tell you those peas need skimming. I shouldn’t have to tell you that you put too much meat in the skillet. And you haven’t even started caramelizing the onions. This is three-star dining. Three-star dining. This isn’t the CIA. Got it?” Away he went. I started caramelizing the onions as the peas continued simmering and foaming and the lamb kept searing.

  A few minutes passed by and then so did Cardoz. He stopped by the tilt skillet and looked incredulous. “Jonathan—what are you doing?” He put his hands on his hips.

  I’d been at Tabla for about one hundred minutes that day and while I was being upbraided—the whole time—my mind had been curiously blank. I’d felt very little. I’d acted on whatever orders were given with an almost reptilian detachment. But deep in my head, a small black node began to pulse with the first faint stirring urges of violence.

  “Do you know how long it’s going to take you at this rate? Look at this—why do you have so little lamb in here? This job should take you thirty-five minutes from start to finish. It’s going to take you three hours.” He dumped the lamb Ty had removed back in. “Don’t throw the fat away. There’s a lot of flavor there. When you cook down the garlic and ginger and yogurt, emulsify the fat back in. We can skim it after it’s been braised.” He went away.

  A few minutes later, Chris appeared next to me at the skillet. He wore what I was beginning to understand as Tabla’s default posture: a look of incredulity.

  “Listen to me, and listen really carefully. You better start doing exactly what you’re told. If I tell you I don’t want you doing something, don’t do it. And I told you about the onion scraps.

  My arms fell dangling by my sides and my hands shook. I enunciated every syllable: “Chef Cardoz told me to put them into that pot.” Chris said nothing, then walked off.

  Later, Ty intervened as I mixed the lamb fat back into the garlic, ginger, and yogurt, asking, “What are you thinking?”

  And later still, Chris handed me a tray with ten bunches of asparagus. He pulled a stalk free. “You hold on to the tip here,” he said. “And you hold the very end of the stem. Bend it. It’ll naturally break where it’s tender. The rest is too woody to use.” He snapped the asparagus and it broke a little more than halfway up the stalk; what had been eight inches measured about three and a half. “Toss the rest—we can’t do anything with it.”

  I went through all ten bunches, breaking the stems, turning long stalks into short ones. I was supposed to begin slicing the stalks on a severe bias, but I went to the ba
throom first. I had almost gotten through the kitchen door when Cardoz’s voice—full of crisis—boomed across the room, calling out, “JONATHAN!”

  He and Ty stood over the kitchen’s blue bin, positioned right near my table, where all the food waste went. Cardoz looked as if he was on the verge of tears and also like he might want to kill me. He held a few of the spent stalks in his hand. Ty stood behind him, face impassive.

  A dam broke in Cardoz’s throat and the deluge poured out: “Why would you waste asparagus like this? Do you have any idea—any idea—what this stuff costs? How could you just throw it away? How could you do that? What the hell? We cannot afford to work like this—we cannot—cannot—afford to make waste like this. What were you thinking?”

  Ty had his arms crossed over his chest, shaking his head.

  I told them this was how I was shown. I didn’t mention Chris’s name. Their expressions said I was an idiot. Cardoz demonstrated how I should cut with a knife—not break with a snap—right at the point where the stem turns from tan to green. They left me alone.

  Ty came back ten minutes later. I was slicing asparagus on a severe bias, my cutting board full of bright green scraps, working three or four stalks at a time.

  “No,” he said. “Nope. Uh-uh. You don’t do it like that. You need to do one stalk at a time to be sure they come out perfectly even. And you need to do it right now. They’ll need the asparagus at the Bread Bar in a few minutes.” Ty went back to the pass, but Cardoz showed up to inspect. “You’re going to be here all night that way,” he said. He grouped four or five stalks together and sliced them on the bias, all at once. Chris ambled over a few minutes afterward. “I heard Ty telling you to do that one stalk at a time. You need to start listening.”

  For every end result, there are a dozen different ways to get there. Everyone in the kitchen had their preferred method to attack any given task. My problem was that I wasn’t fast enough to cross the finish line before anyone and everyone had the chance to comment on the method.

  My first week ended, my second began. The days melted together.

  Tabla was a lonely place. I arrived, started prepping from the list, got reprimanded and lectured, finished the list, and went home. I had no expectations of my shifts being filled with hugs and lollipops, but I thought it strange that after two weeks, no one had asked a single personal question.

  “No one laughs here,” I told Nelly on the phone. I usually called her the second I was out of Tabla’s door.

  My behavior at home took a ritualistic bent. Each evening, starting from that first day I worked on my own, I’d come back to Brooklyn, sit at the apartment window, drink beer, and watch traffic. I’d eat Trader Joe’s Mini-Chicken Tacos with a side of sautéed snow peas. I’d watch reruns of The West Wing. I’d fall asleep on the couch, fully clothed, with the lights on listening to Lou Reed’s Street Hassle on repeat. I’d wake up during the noisy parts, coming to and hearing Lou bellowing, “Gimme, gimme, gimme some good times …” The clock would tell me I had to be up in four more hours and I’d turn the lights out, pushing my face into the cushions. I did this night after night without deviating. Starting on my third week, when I woke up in the morning, my stomach was in knots.

  According to Ty and Chris, and Cardoz himself, I was slow, slow, slow, slow. According to Ty and Chris, I verged on incompetent. I didn’t—and possibly couldn’t—think. I didn’t understand the basic nature of food. I didn’t listen. Other people had applied for the externship spot, been turned down, and deserved it much more than I did.

  “It isn’t until someone knows their station inside and out that we let them try another one,” Ty said to me. “But it’s pretty unlikely that will be of any concern to you.”

  “I think they’re trying to motivate me,” I said to Nelly on the phone. She was always sympathetic. “Like the army: break ’em down, build ’em up. It’s exhausting. What they’re really doing is making me not give a shit.”

  I had, admittedly, some pretty bad habits. I was slow, slower than I should have been. And I was a slob. My cutting board—my whole station—looked like the beach at low tide, covered with detritus and scraps. Everyone was on me to speed up and clean up. But at the end of that third week, no one was on me more than Dwayne Motley, one of the sous-chefs who had just returned from some time off. Since Dwayne ran the Bread Bar, I’d be spending most of my time with him.

  Dwayne was tall and broad, wore his hair in tight cornrows, and seemed perpetually pissed off. He walked slowly, deliberately, as if he hurried for no one. If Barry White had a handsome younger brother without the girth, he would look like Dwayne.

  On his first day back, he approached my station and put his tools away on a nearby shelf. He didn’t acknowledge me; he just slowly arranged his things.

  “I’m Jonathan,” I said, offering my hand. He turned and looked at my hand. Then he gave it a perfunctory shake.

  “Yeah, I know who you are.” He picked up the prep list and read it. He put the list down and looked around my area at the stove, at the steam kettles, into the tilt skillet.

  “What time did you get here today?” he asked. His size and his presence filled a lot of the small space, and I took a step back.

  “Around ten,” I answered.

  And then he blew up. “What the fuck?” he yelled. “You’ve been here for an hour today and all you’ve gotten done is some boiled potatoes and some chickpeas? What about the mushroom korma? What about the saag paneer sauce? You even start that? You haven’t started the kalonji, either, have you? This is not fucking right. This is un-fucking-believable. You need to get all that started now!” He snarled the last word. “You need to get it all done—all of it, all of it done—right now because I’ve got things to do and I’m not going to help your lazy ass.”

  I stood stunned. I tried recalling the last time I’d been spoken to like this, in that tone, with that language. I couldn’t remember. Maybe by a bully when I was twelve. And an anger similar to what I’d felt at twelve—a brooding helplessness mixed with outrage, crossed with indignation—stoked up and metastasized into a feeling my whole body experienced as bitter.

  My head said to me, There is nothing here in the world of this restaurant for you. Or in the restaurant world, period. Fuck school. Get out. Fuck your obligations. Go, now. Leave.

  But I didn’t walk out. I stayed and finished the day. I hurled myself—every bit of myself—into all those delinquent jobs. And I felt a strange mix of things while pureeing tomatoes with a giant stick blender, and sweating garlic and shallots in butter with twenty spices: like a martyr, like a fuckup, like a marathoner with twenty-five miles to go. Like an asshole for not being able to hold my own. I felt ridiculous, too, for the brief flash of wanting to get the fuck out of there: everyone who ever started at the bottom in a restaurant does this, has this done to them, and what makes me think I had the privilege of being any different?

  By 7:00, I had all the jobs done. I checked them off one by one and, at day’s end, handed my prep sheet—stained with droplets of oil, streaks of pureed tomato—to Dwayne. He read it, handed it back to me, and said, “Fine. Go home.” I spent the rest of the night wondering what, if anything—and I assumed there must have been something—I’d done wrong or forgotten about that I’d answer for tomorrow.

  The next morning, I saw Dwayne, standing in a cloud of steam. He was boiling corn in the stock kettle next to the deep fryer. He skimmed off all the silk floating at the top and had a grapefruit-sized pile on the head of the strainer. Someone called his name and he turned; he tilted the strainer too far and all the silk fell onto the floor. It lay there puddled and steaming. He looked at me.

  “Pick that up,” he said, and turned his back.

  I picked it up.

  “I keep playing these movies in my head,” I told Nelly on the phone. “Snuff films, really. I have a baseball bat and there’s Dwayne and I keep beating him until I don’t feel angry anymore.”

  “You always have these extreme
reactions to people,” she said. “You hate them, then you wind up loving them. Look at Viverito.”

  “Viverito was acting. I think Dwayne has a cellular-level sadism.”

  Later that night I put Led Zeppelin on the stereo, and played “When the Levee Breaks” five sequential times. I imagined that each beat of John Bonham’s kick drum was a mallet pounding the heads of everyone in Tabla’s kitchen. But especially Dwayne.

  My weekends—Sundays and Mondays—were paradisical. I’d arrive at Tabla Saturday mornings with a suitcase and catch a train back upstate as soon as my shift ended. Nelly would pick me up at the station and we’d both forget all the angst, all the irritations, both of my own and hers at being alone upstate. Nelly would read to me from the novella she’d started, set in the world of her childhood dollhouse, about Barbie and Ken as underworld vigilantes trying to rescue two young mice kidnapped by the Sunshine Family.

  I’d gotten very interested in Mexican food, bought a copy of Rick Bayless’s Authentic Mexican, and was cooking my way through it. I had great successes with the moles. On Sundays, Nelly and I went to farmers’ markets and bought ingredients. We went hiking, or just drove around the Hudson Valley, knocked out by the sharp pitch of the mountains as they rose up verdant all around us. We’d cook dinner, relax, and try to forget that Monday’s time was limited, that I’d need to catch a train back.

  The drives to the train were like driving to the dentist when you knew something painful would occur on arrival. The distance closed up too fast.

  On Tuesday mornings, I’d be back at Tabla, covering the two blocks from subway to restaurant with forlorn steps.