I found a spot right by the table where the cooks would be plating their dishes for the judges. The weather around this table was full of coiled activity just about to spring. A small squadron of Certified Master Chefs stood expressionless with clipboards—I recognized them, I’d passed them in the hallways, and oftentimes, before I’d even seen their faces or read the CMC title embroidered on their chefs’ jackets, I could intuit their rank. They walked differently, with a degree more bearing. Something about passing that monster of a test must alter your genetics. Alongside them were a knot of senior chef-instructors, whom I also recognized from the day-to-day traffic in the hallways. A group of students stood there with the CMCs and instructors, dressed in white shirts and ties and black pants, idling with their hands clasped behind their backs. And off a ways, standing behind them, was Sitti with a large camera around his neck. When he eventually looked in my direction, I waved and he picked his way through the islands of people. We stood there with a velvet cordon between us.
“I’m assuming you’re taking photos here?” I asked. “Is this for the personal Sitti collection or is this a job?”
“I was asked to do this. The school paper asked me. I’ve taken 236 photos.”
“Of what?”
“Mostly people just standing around. It’s very boring so far. And people keep telling me I’m in their way, so I’m just trying to find a place to stand.”
“Hey, Sit—do you know how all these commis got the gig?”
“I don’t know. But I do think you have to know someone.”
“I wouldn’t want to do it.”
“I don’t think I’d want to either. Maybe too much pressure.”
Someone came and told Sitti “Fifteen minutes.” Sit nodded and said, “I’ll find you later and show you the pictures.”
Kaysen announced that in a very short time, the first platter of salmon, followed fifteen minutes later by a platter of lamb, would be presented to the judges. Only half the judges would taste the salmon, and the other half would taste the lamb. The first presenter was Jennifer Petrusky, from Charlie Trotter’s restaurant in Chicago. She was in the kitchen closest to where I stood, but from my angle, I couldn’t see inside or see the monitor. There was a small army of cameras trained on her, and Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller stood behind them, watching. After a few minutes, Boulud and Keller strolled back to their seats. Kaysen told the room that Petrusky would be presenting momentarily, and I wondered how she felt offering the debut platter—every eye on her, establishing the tone for the rest of the day, having to face not just the judges, but the snap judgment of everyone in the room, assessing just how high she’s setting the bar.
And then the platter came out, held by a pair of the instructors, gliding down and past the row of assembled judges, moving slowly, steadily, letting everyone take it in. The platter’s silver caught the lights of the room and it turned incandescent. It arrived at one of the tables near where I stood, descended upon by Petrusky and her commis, surrounded by the CMCs and their clipboards, photographed by a dozen different people.
Petrusky, a twenty-three-year-old midwesterner with angled, pretty features, also looked subtly crazy right then. Her eyes were shiny and panicked, but it didn’t show in the purls of her movement, with a small offset spatula in one hand, poised to address the four salmon preparations on the platter: a roulade, confit, cured fillet, and tartar. The platter itself invited a small, momentary reverence; it had a flow and structure to it that made me think of a Japanese rock garden or piece of Buddhist calligraphy.
Then, she had to plate the food for evaluation. The students in their waiter uniforms would carry the plates to the judges’ table. I realized I was wrong: Things were beginning to show in Petrusky’s movements. Her hand trembled, and a very slight sheen of sweat materialized on her brow. She began lifting the first piece of salmon and placed it at a precise spot on a plate. One of the CMCs leaned in and told her she needed to wear gloves. She slumped for a second, bit her lip, and, without a word, reached for latex gloves from a nearby box. Her commis already had them on.
The remonstration broke her moment, and she began having difficulty arranging the plates. So did her commis. Both of their hands had wills of their own; hers seemed to have a temper, darting and snapping, and his were sullen and uncooperative. Carrying a piece of fish to a plate, Petrusky’s commis dropped the fillet awkwardly on the plate. He righted it, leaving a smudge on the pristine white of the china. Petrusky fixed it, murmured something, and the two kept on. When the last plate was done, she left the commis to clean up, and she dashed back to the kitchen to undertake the lamb.
It went like that for an hour. One team replaced by another. One platter of fish or lamb—and a number of the teams, from Petrusky on up, seemed to have been enticed by the idea of using Middle Eastern spices for the lamb—after another, and each of them a beautiful piece of architecture in miniature.
When the final chef presented, there was a break as the kitchens were scrubbed, refurbished, and stocked with the next team’s preparations from the previous night. I wanted to watch the process of its being put together, in all its excitement or mundanity, by a single team. I headed upstairs to the deck and staked out a position at the railing overlooking the kitchens. I could see everything inside them. I looked at the schedule to see who was up next and found that a team from Eleven Madison Park was competing. EMP is a Danny Meyer restaurant and shares space in the same building as Tabla. Not too long after Cardoz had gotten a shin kicking from Frank Bruni, EMP was given a four-star review, which caused a stir and some dismay among the staff at Tabla. But I remembered reading the review and the descriptions of the cuisine—a slow-poached egg with brown butter hollandaise and Parmesan foam, a tomato salad made of liquid spheres—thinking of the elegance, the boldness, and the cleverness, and thinking it was definitely a cut above.
James Kent, a sous-chef at EMP, and his sous-chef for the day, Tom Allan, also from the restaurant, were rifling through their supplies. Kent and Allan, I noticed and remarked to myself, are fucking kids. I’d been seeing it for almost two years on campus: When individuals have just tripped into their twenties, they have an energy that isn’t tamed, like a piece of charcoal before it waxes into an ember. These two had that. They weren’t talking, but they still came off as boisterous. Yet at the same time, anchoring that energy and that silent noise was something I remembered seeing in punk or hardcore musicians whose bands have just taken the stage in a club, when they know they’re really good and are about to unleash. It’s a calm, determined passion, married to confidence and competence. And what they’re about to do is for them as much as it is for you. This is a pretty charismatic blend, and it’s usually mesmerizing to see. Their commis was a guy named Viraj, who came to extern at Tabla just as I was leaving. We compared notes when we next saw each other on campus. He had had a rosier time of it than I did.
Kent had five different timers set up on his station, each programmed to a different countdown. Taped to the walls were photos of each finished component of his platters, taken during one of his practice runs. He had an immersion circulator for sous-vide cooking bubbling and a mound of neatly folded towels close at hand. When he and Allan started cooking, it was like they’d already been cooking for two hours and I’d just happened onto it. There was no hesitation, no building up, just action—purposeful action—taken with an unconscious economy of movement and motion.
Kent’s knife moved over pieces of his salmon, which disintegrated into a pink hash. He picked up a tiny circular mold, like a makeup compact, and filled it with the fish. He made twelve of them. He piped something white and creamy over each mold and, with a tiny spatula smoothed it over. He had a tray of tiny green strips the color of zucchini skin and he wove them on top of the molds into a basket pattern.
The thing that kept my eyes trained was this: it did not have the feeling of a sequence of steps, each with a start and finish. He didn’t stop at any point to evaluate what he did. Eac
h moment of this dish coming together was, instead, a continuum of reactions, a constant metamorphosis. Inevitability.
I had two thoughts: Even from where I stood, which was about twenty feet away and ten feet above the action, those little mounds of salmon look beautiful. I hated salmon, but I’d eat one of them. And then I thought, I’ve never even attempted something like that. But why not? Sure, there were practical considerations. These dishes take time. And, more—they take money. But that’s a load of horseshit.
Nelly once said to me that it wasn’t just failure I was afraid of, but succeeding, too. I didn’t understand it at the time she said it—and I’m not sure I understood it fully while remembering the exchange as I watched the EMP guys—but after she said it, the sentence lay there newly born, glistening with truth. To do something right carries with it a set of demands that you be able to do it again, that you irreversibly elevate your standards. I had no idea why that should be unnerving.
Sitti was suddenly at my elbow with his camera. He angled the camera down and clicked away. He stopped and lowered it slightly and stood watching the EMP team. He laughed to himself.
“I swear, Sit, these guys are going to win. I’ve never seen anything quite like this in a kitchen.”
“They are,” Sitti said slowly, “kind of incredible.” I noticed that the crowd out front had begun to form a knot in front of the EMP kitchen. And I started to notice a feeling of increased heat around me; people were gathering and pressing in up here, too. I looked off to my right and saw Speiss, too, hands in his pockets, glasses perched on his nose, looking down, expressionless but riveted.
Kent and Allan also looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Neither one was grinning, no high fives or anything, but—you could tell—they knew they were doing well, and their expressions and their postures spoke in a cant of confidence and competence. They’d worked for this moment for a long time, even before they ever knew they’d be here.
And in that small realization, that tiny truism, I started sensing something gigantic.
Their platter came together, element by element, exactly as all their work had progressed that day. And then activity just stopped; they stood for a moment, and they turned and looked at each other. It was their turn to present. A team of chefs took the platter from them and paraded it for the judges. I found out later exactly what was on it: roulade with Alaskan King Crab, relish of cucumber and Meyer lemon; chilled mousse with tartare and roe; pickled heirloom beets with crème fraîche, dill, and black pepper.
After a few minutes, they were back to arrange the lamb platter and present it: bacon-wrapped lamb saddle with piquillo peppers and provençale herbes; vol-au-vent of braised lamb with sweetbreads and preserved lemon; zucchini with goat cheese and mint; tart of tomato confit with basil, Niçoise olives, and fromage blanc.
To the right of them, the previous team cleaned up. To their left, another team continued to cook and began to put up their platter. With the motion stilled in the EMP kitchen, momentum and purpose were hanging like phantoms in the air. In a moment they’d dissipate like a scent.
I was thinking again of what I thought before: They’ve worked for this moment for a long time, even before they ever knew they’d be here.
And I started to move away; I was out of the crowd, rounding the corner of the upstairs deck, picking my way along, as far back as I could go. There were chairs there, but no one else was around. I sat down and put my face in my hands. I could feel my eyes pulsing. The hair on my arms stood up. I had gooseflesh. My body was so attentive, so pitched, that I could almost feel the light hitting my skin.
What I’d just seen was a philosophy of life in action. Two guys—two kids—who one day decided they would be excellent; who disciplined themselves, learned everything they could, practiced aggressively, and moved their thinking onto a whole other plane. They might have been musicians; they might have been dancers. In their case, it was about food. And they recognized that at each stage—from the second they set out their equipment through the moment they do their prep to the final assemblage—that there is a best possible way to do everything. Every gesture, no matter how small, was about the individual attempting to be great.
What those guys did—what they do—is attainable. You’ll wind up bleeding to get there, but you can get there. But not me, at least not with the bruises and slights of how I think about myself, with all my hesitations, my timidity, my half-assed methodology of doing what was expected of me but little more.
This is why they yell at you. This is why you’re forced to get up in the morning and go cut fish. This is why they will never give you a compliment. This is why.
And I disagree with so much of how they do it sometimes, the chefs, with their bullying, their brute force. But I understood now the impulse behind it. If you can get rid of all your mental baggage and distractions, all your own doubts and pettiness and bullshit, you can arrive at the clarity of mind with a diamond focus that lets all of a person’s training and skill bloom. Then a person can be great.
I had gotten to see greatness today. Everything that had gone on for me up until now, the exhaustion, the being disciplined, the building angers, the energy of those angers, the nervous, racked nights of the last summer were all leading to watching this today.
I HAD A BETTER understanding of what people meant when they referred to being born again. I looked the same, but my body felt different. My mind had had a bypass done on it. I felt able. I felt electrified. I saw school and everything about it as an opportunity to try and touch perfection, to hone efficiency, to find at every moment a chance to be better, no matter the external pressures.
On our final night of baking, Speiss said that instead of going to dinner, he thought it would be a nice idea to stay in and make our own pizzas. He ordered mozzarella, Parmesan, and ricotta for us, and all sorts of meats and vegetables. “Do whatever you want,” he said. “We’ll all try each other’s wares.” He asked for a volunteer to make a tomato sauce, and he mixed the dough for us as we finished up baking our final loaves of bread and making desserts to take to the faculty lounge and the cafeteria. He cranked up the heat in one of the ovens, gave a quick demonstration on how to stretch out the dough, and then set us loose. It was another moment when our choices spoke loudly about culinary values and interests. Micah, a twenty-year-old from Alaska, tall, thin, with an impish face who had taken to very lightly tickling me whenever he walked by and I was trying to concentrate on something, set about putting herbs into goat cheese and caramelizing fennel. Rocco, a loud, likable kid from New Jersey, who constantly sang, danced, and kissed everyone’s cheeks, covered his dough with sausage, pepperoni, and a little bit of every fresh vegetable Speiss had ordered. I went minimal. I wanted to do a simple margherita pizza. I stretched out my crust so it was thin to the point of tearing. I slicked the dough with a little olive oil and garlic, judiciously applied the sauce—which I had also put through a food mill to avoid any chunks—and laid down uniform slices of fresh mozzarella and a scattering of Parmesan. I tried to deduce where the hottest spot in the oven would be and put the pizza in to bake. I had a little time to think as my pizza cooked.
The world is glutted with mediocre pizza. Most dough is too thick and dense and tastes wet. Most sauces are either too thin and acidic, or too sweet after having been cooked for so long that they become concentrated and sugary. And, further, most mozzarella seems to have been pulled by the handful from an industrial-sized bag of shredded processed cheese sold by Sysco. It’s usually rubbery. You can cheat a little bit by piling all sorts of ingredients on top—garlicky mushrooms, sausage, pepperoni—but if you leave the pizza nude, it’s easy to tell what level your skills were. This was a key point for me. My mind took a sudden turn to a different endeavor, away from pizza and toward chicken.
My tastes often run to the simple. Like a lot of people involved in cooking, my favorite meal is roast chicken, preferably with roasted potatoes. I’ve been making it once a week for years. And I’v
e seen a million variations on it in cookbooks: tamarind glazed; rubbed with Mexican spices or Indian spices; with all manner of things forced under the skin, from a citrus peel and bread-crumb mix to goat cheese and pine nuts to truffles. I’m sure that a lot of these are pretty good. But—I was asking myself as I checked my pizza; the crust had begun showing flecks of gold. I closed the door again—why mess with a naked chicken? Because a lot of people out there haven’t ever really learned how to roast a chicken well. And many of us have always relied on Perdue for the chicken itself. If you simply shove a crappy factory bird in an oven—and do so without the right amount of seasoning, without the right oven temperature, and so on—the results will be bland for certain, and probably awful. It’s almost as if playing with a roast chicken were similar to how spices were used in medieval times: with an ungodly heavy hand, all the better to cover the rank taste of off meat.
But also, I reasoned, simplicity is hard. Really hard.
I recalled that when Fernand Point wanted to judge the skill level of a cook, he’d have the cook fry an egg. Daniel Boulud allegedly asks him or her to make an omelet.
Once, I remembered, while I was working at Martha Stewart, I scoffed at a recipe we were putting online for basic boiled rice.
“Put the freaking rice in a pot,” I had said, dismissive. “Pour in twice the amount of water. Boil it. Boom—you’re done. What state have we reached when we need to spell all this out in recipe form?”
Beaten, Seared, and Sauced Page 25