Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  On a Tuesday night in mid-July, right around my thirty-ninth birthday, I finished everything by 5:15. I’d glided through the day at peak efficiency. Everything tasted great; everything looked great. There was no waste of food or effort.

  “I don’t know what got into you this past weekend,” Dwayne said as I checked out for the night. “But your big mistake was showing me you could do it. Now, if you fuck up, I’m really going to be all over your ass.”

  A few weeks passed and my days were getting shorter. I was getting home—not just leaving the restaurant—at 6:30, occasionally six. I could cut a lot of onions quickly. I could manage a stovetop and pair of steam kettles full of different preparations. Chris was leaving me alone. Ty was on vacation. Dwayne had loosened his grip on my neck’s scruff.

  At 3:00 one afternoon, Cardoz asked to see me in his office. His voice was soft, and his face was quiet. He was always that way. He sat me down right across from me, knees almost touching, and asked, “Why are things going so badly for you? Why have you not shown any improvement?”

  “I thought I had shown improvement.” I felt blindsided.

  “You haven’t.”

  “But I’m leaving earlier, I’m getting more done.”

  He waved his hands, dismissing what I was saying. He was quiet for a moment, then changed the subject and asked, “Is the experience what you expected?”

  I instinctively knew what he wanted to hear, and, admittedly, it was true. “It’s more difficult. There’s a big difference between the CIA kitchens and here.”

  “I mentioned that would be the case.”

  I wanted the subject back where we started. “But I thought I was doing—”

  “I wanted to say you really need to start showing improvement.”

  I thought about what he said on my subway ride home that night. Ty and Cardoz both spoke very highly of Dylan, a CIA extern with whose tenure I’d overlapped. Dylan often stayed later, after his morning shift was over, to do extra work or trail Ty. He came in from his home in New Jersey on his day off. He was dedicated to Tabla, or at least dedicated to the experience of learning at Tabla. He launched himself headlong into everything he did at the restaurant. The ways Dylan conducted himself were likely at the root of the improvement Cardoz was talking about. I told myself, if I was Dylan’s age, I’d probably be doing the same things. But I’m almost twice that age, and I have a relationship. I get tired. I need to be with Nelly on my weekends, not in the restaurant. But I knew there was an element of horseshit there; in Viverito’s class, I stayed at school afterward to use the library; I spent hours doing the homework that he never even collected. On some nights after my Americas class, I came home and I cooked, just to test out and reinforce something I learned. I still fit my personal life in. I was stuck in a slightly vicious—and petty—cycle. I refused to be constantly admonished and not respond in kind. But neither side was benefiting in the least that way.

  I TASTED EVERYTHING I made—every chole, every lamb stew—and tasted it multiple times. I dipped a tasting spoon in, blew on it, put it in my mouth, and let the flavors announce themselves, play around, then fade. I auditioned everything to ensure it wasn’t over- or undercooked, and that the seasoning was right. Once I was satisfied, I took it to a sous-chef to taste and he signed off on it. Sometimes Ty tasted things; sometimes, Chris or Dwayne; once or twice, Cardoz. Maybe I’d be told to add a little more salt or a pinch more sugar, but no one ever tasted a dish and grimaced, or said it was bad. Mostly, they just nodded and said, “okay.” One afternoon, I made tomato chutney and took it to Ty. He sampled it and stopped. He tasted it again. He looked shocked. “That’s …” He paused. “Really good.”

  Whether the food was good or not really had little to do with me. Cardoz’s recipes were, as far as quantity of ingredients went, very finely calibrated. All I did was gather and prep the ingredients the way I’d been taught, both at the CIA and at Tabla. There was a point when an onion was cooked, and a point when a chickpea was done. I used my head. I was just a facilitator. If a dish failed, it was my doing. If it succeeded, I had just shepherded it along.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN LATE July, I had a mound of thirty-two red onions in front of me. They needed dicing. I wasn’t exactly rocketing through the task. My mind and energies were visiting other places. My feet hurt. I kept looking down at them and noticing all the smudges and films on my rubber kitchen clogs. Dwayne appeared next to me, muscled his way into my space, moving me so my left shoulder was pressed into the side of the refrigerator, and said as he took out his kitchen knife, “You’ll be here until midnight at this rate.”

  He cut one of the onions in half, stripped away the paper, and laid the halves facedown on the cutting board. His knife became a glinting blur, up and down as fast as a sewing machine, making perfect slices. He turned the onion forty-five degrees, undertook a few deft slices, and the onion fell apart into small dice. I laid my own knife down and stared.

  “That is seriously impressive,” I said. “How the hell do you do that?”

  He just stood silently. After a few seconds, he reached for the other onion half, bumping me, and did it again.

  “Seriously,” I said. “That’s pretty amazing.”

  He laid his knife flat and moved to give me a little more room. “It’s a matter of practice,” he said. “Man, you just do it enough and you get fast like that. Keep it up and you’ll get there. Mostly, it’s a matter of wanting to get the boring shit done as quickly as possible.” His voice was softer, conversational. It was the first time he’d really talked to me. I wanted him to keep going.

  “So where did you do your practicing?”

  “A couple of places around D.C., at first. Then I came here to New York. I worked in a shit Italian place downtown, worked here and there. And I wound up at Tabla. When I started here, I loved it. But I remember, I walked in thinking I was hot shit, pulled my knife out, and cut myself open. I literally hadn’t been here five minutes. Most places, when you cut yourself, they think you’re incompetent. All they said here was, ‘Well, at least we know your knives are sharp.’ That was it. I stayed. I worked every station. Then there was an opportunity and they opened the books. I got the sous-chef position. Here I am, and here you are.”

  I looked around me to see who might be in earshot. We were alone. “What do you think of the food here?”

  His knife was still laid down and he had a tight grip on the handle. He looked around too, and his voice dropped. “It’s good food. Interesting food.” His tone was measured. Then he got more animated. “Is this what I want to be cooking for the rest of my life? No. What I want to do is—I’m a big fan of the Lee brothers. My big huge dream is to do food along those lines. I want to do clean Southern food. I love Southern food. I love it. But Southern food—that food’s not so clean. Boiling the shit out of collard greens until they’re gray mush? Until every damn nutrient is cooked out of it? Do you see any rationale there?

  “Look, I’m going to help you finish this up. Then I need you to help me with family meal. All you have to do is be heating up tortillas on the flattop. Do, I don’t know, about a hundred of them. Use a pair of tongs. I’ve got big, manly hands and I don’t need tongs. You’ve got small, girly hands, so use a pair.”

  From that moment, Dwayne never got visibly pissed at me again. If there was a problem, if I made an error, he took the attitude of Okay, let’s figure out how to fix it and let those mistakes stay quiet.

  I never knew what flipped the switch in his head—maybe it was simply a matter of my having survived the initial hazing—but I started feeling relieved and happy when I’d see Dwayne walk in. I’d ask him what was going on, and he’d tell me about who had gotten drunk at a nearby bar after service ended the night before, or about an encounter he’d had with some freak on the subway home to Rego Park at three in the morning.

  We began talking quite a bit. He taught me how and why spices combined, about building flavors by breaking a recipe down into phases of cooking,
and concentrating on bringing each phase into full and total completion, and all sorts of tips and tricks. He had strident views on pop culture (he did vicious and pretty much unprintable parodies of Patrick and Gina Neely from the Food Network); he had an unsettlingly deep knowledge of horrible ’80s synth-pop bands. He was about to propose to his girlfriend, and we compared notes about our respective relationships.

  As we got to know each other, it dawned on me that he was, hands down, probably the smartest person in the place. He was dedicated to Tabla, but not a disciple. Which was likely the reason he got the continual short end of the stick. His mind did its pinwheels with too much independence, and it seemed to make some of the others uneasy and Dwayne into a lightning rod.

  One morning he walked in and I almost didn’t recognize him. He was wearing a do-rag, a red football jersey, jeans, and unlaced Timberlands, and walked slowly across the kitchen with great resignation. His iPod was blaring. He looked at the prep list for a moment.

  “Shit. Fuck. Dammit,” he said.

  “What?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I shook his arm and asked again.

  He pulled one of his earbuds out; I could hear a soprano singing part of an opera. “Chris was supposed to make lamb haleem yesterday. I knew he was going to dodge that bullet.” He sighed and looked down at the cutting board. “So guess who’s going to help me?” He clapped my shoulder, affixed his earbud, and went to change.

  One day, Dwayne stood next to me, taking up all the space in front of the station. I was cutting onions and had to keep moving around him to place the dice in a bowl and grab new ones to cut. He was staring off into the distance in some existential reverie.

  Two of the Bread Bar cooks ran to him in a panic. Service started in an hour and they couldn’t find the pears they needed for a salad. He said nothing, just kept staring off. They scurried away to continue the search.

  “There’s a twenty-five-pound box of pears in the walk-in,” I volunteered.

  He ignored me, too. Finally he stirred. “Look at them,” he said, “running around in a tizzy, crying out, ‘Lordy, Lordy, we have no pears! We have no pears!’ ”

  In August, I got promoted. It was a dubious promotion, but I remembered Ty telling me that until a person mastered his station, he wasn’t permitted to do anything else. Despite my irritations, I felt a shimmer of pride. I was doing well. I was finishing everything on my prep list by around 4:00. I’d spend my remaining two hours helping Dwayne or Chris with whatever projects they had going, and I got ahead by prepping vegetables for the next day.

  Ty had called me into his office and said that from now on, two nights a week during dinner service (Tuesdays and Thursdays), in addition to my regular Bread Bar cooking, I’d run the amuse-bouche station. My responsibilities included seasoning and serving soup and deep-frying onion rings and squash pakoras to order. It took Nicholas, who usually ran the station, about two and a half hours to prep everything: deal with the soup, make batters for the rings and squash, cut the onions and squash on the slicer, and fill the deep fryer and heat it up. Dinner started at 6:00, but the station was to be set up by 5:30.

  I trained with Nicholas for an evening and he showed me how to get set up and undertake the frying. He also demonstrated how to make samosas, which were hard to do. Ty couldn’t really do them, neither could Chris, and I’d never seen Dwayne try. The dough was made with so much butter that you had to work incredibly fast, or it fell apart on you. I never did quite get the hang of it.

  Also around this time, other cooks began talking to me. I guess I’d passed some kind of test, or just been around long enough. I found myself liking most of them a lot: Sam, the morning garde-manger guy; Akhil, who took over for him at night; Woodrow, the daytime fish cook; Carmine, the pastry chef; Stan, one of the Bread Bar cooks. Sam and I talked music and books; Carmine and I talked about poetry; Akhil, Woodrow, and Stan had all attended the CIA (as had Ty, Sam, and Ross) and we’d swap stories.

  I’d been promoted. I was working well and efficiently cooking for the Bread Bar. I met people I liked. On the day I debuted on the bouche station, I experienced the first day since I’d started that saw me entirely content to be going to Tabla.

  And the debut went well. I worked two areas: next to the deep fryer where I had my batters and coatings for the onion rings and squash, and right up front by the pass, where the soup and a garnish of herbs sat chilling on ice. Not much happened the first half hour, but at around 6:30, Bolivar, one of the waitstaff, appeared and called out an order for onion rings. I made for the deep fryer, reached into a refrigerator for a handful of onions, dipped them into a mix of water and chickpea flour, dredged them in spiced chickpea flour, and lowered them into the oil. For a minute I stood watching the oil bubble fiercely up and over the rings, pushing them around the fryer until they turned brown and the turbulence calmed. I watched them transform, and I listened to what they sounded like as they cooked because the noise changed the longer they were in the oil; I wanted the ability to simply hear what the fryer was doing if my back was turned and know what stage the onion rings were at. The oil, which at first made a small roaring sound, barely murmured as the rings took on a nice brown coloring. When they were done, I turned the rings out onto a rack to let the oil drip off, then mounded them in a bowl and took them up to the pass. A food runner picked up the bowl, showed it to Ty for quality control, then carried it off to the customer.

  For the whole of the dinner service, I bolted between the soup setup and the fryer. Bolivar, the chief food runner, would pop his head around the corner from his position in front of the pass and order, maybe, three soups and two rings. I’d go for the fryer and start a double handful working. While they cooked, I crossed the red tiled floor back to the soup. I put a pinch of cilantro and a few dice of celery hearts into the tiny bowls—they looked like outsized thimbles—then poured in the cold soup. I dusted a sprinkling of crushed fennel seeds on top, arranged all the soups in a line, signaled to Bolivar, and clipped back to the fryer to lift the rings from the oil.

  The evening was busy, but not so busy I ever felt the weeds growing up around my ankles. Busy enough for someone working the station for the first time to need to push themselves a little faster than they normally operated. The area around the fryer looked bollixed up: small pools of spilled batter, drifts of flour, a scattering of rings that had lost their coating or tanned too much. Ty and Chris came by a few times to tell me to get the area tight. But service went smoothly; Ty never asked for anything to be refired, he had no complaints, and didn’t have to wait very long between when the order was called and when the rings went out. At the end of night, he took me aside and, for the first and only time, gave me a compliment. “You did a really nice job tonight,” he said. He clapped my shoulder. “Keep it up.”

  I kept it up. At least, for the most part. One night, I made my onion ring batter too thin, and the rings emerged from the oil denuded of coating, greasy and shriveled. Ty kept asking me to refire them and soon enough, I was way behind. I got sloppy behind the pressure, and the station disintegrated into chaos and litter.

  But I kept it up.

  One afternoon, the cooks pulled all the vessels out of the ice bath, added more ice, and topped it off with water. Someone was leaving Tabla to go work elsewhere, and he was being dunked into the ice bath on his last day. When the departing cook was coming back into the kitchen after family meal, the rest of them pounced. Two people had him by each arm; two had one leg. The other leg flailed as they carried him through the kitchen, knocking a pan onto the floor, kicking utensils across the top of a workstation. They got him to the ice bath and heaved him in. He rose up shrieking, streaming with frigid water, pink skin showing through his soaked white jacket. Everyone laughed and he started laughing too, and someone dunked a bain-marie into the bath, filled it with more water, and upended it over his head.

  Ty and I stood a few feet off, just on the periphery of a puddle of water and ice. Ty asked if I’d ever seen that done bef
ore and I told him I hadn’t.

  “It’s a tradition,” he said. “And it’s a sign of respect. They do this to you when you leave if they respect you.”

  AUGUST FADED TO SEPTEMBER, and the nights began turning cooler. My stint at Tabla was winding down. My samosas were still terrible, but I had a solid handle on the amuse-bouche station and had the Bread Bar prep down to second nature.

  On an early September afternoon, Dwayne was standing next to me while I trimmed tendons from pieces of chicken, trying to explain why football was worth watching. “It’s about the strategy,” he said. “Every player has a function, every player has a purpose and it’s a matter of—”

  “Jonathan,” Cardoz said, stopping as he passed by. “I’d like to see you in my office.” He turned and walked from the kitchen, pausing at one of the steam kettles to check the progress of a saag paneer sauce I had going.

  “Go ahead,” Dwayne said. “I’ll cover this.”

  I pulled the latex gloves off my hands and tossed them in the garbage, untied my apron, and tucked it onto a shelf underneath the work area. I had no idea what he wanted, but figured maybe this was about training someone to take over my spot when I left. I walked up to Cardoz where he stood at the kettle.

  “Okay, come on,” he said, leading me out of the kitchen and signaling Ty as we walked. Ty followed behind.

  Cardoz opened his office door and sat down, motioning for me to take the seat across from him. Ty took the seat nearest the door. His eyes seemed to run over the spines of the cookbooks lining Cardoz’s wall.

  “I had something I wanted to say,” Cardoz began. “I think it’s time for you to consider other career options, because this one is obviously not working out for you.”

  I looked over at Ty, but he didn’t meet my gaze. He stared at his hands. I looked back to Cardoz. His face was neutral and he held eye contact with me.

  I felt dazed.

  “Wow,” I said. I started picking at the cuticle on my index finger. I didn’t look up. I began to experience a sense of foundering, of sinking and shrinking and cracking apart. My stomach began to bleed out small, burning nauseas, and I could perceive my pulse quickening. Cardoz was still looking directly at me. “Wow,” I said again. “I guess there’s no sugarcoating anything for me today.” I laughed a little and looked at my feet. My eyes had a sensation of swelling in their sockets. I could hear the whirring of the fan on the computer and the chair creak as Cardoz repositioned. I looked up and he was still staring. I held my hands out, palms up, and shrugged. I put my hands in my lap and looked back at him, waiting for him to continue. I hoped my eyes weren’t reddening.