Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  But I had a very hard time interacting with our clientele—the students. On the first few nights, some of them were very pleasant. They asked questions not about the menu, but about the program, about my experiences at the school, which instructors they should be hoping to get for their Skills or Asia or Mediterranean class. But that was only some of them.

  My threshold for rudeness is low. Rudeness is an entirely unnecessary mode of socializing. Being polite is effortless. And what made it difficult for me—the demands for another glass of chocolate milk, the absence of please and thank you in our exchanges, telling me, “This table needs more bread. Now.”—was that it seemed like it never would have occurred to a lot of these kids to ask nicely for something and say thank you when they got it.

  And, for culinary students, they were pretty unadventurous. Served a rack of lamb done to a very nice medium-rare, one table of guests looked horrified when Gabi and I placed their plates in front of them.

  “It’s raw!” they marveled, incredulous.

  One young woman pushed the plate away. “I don’t eat raw food.” Her expression indicated we were the worst sort of morons for trying to slide this incompetence past her. She looked at her dining companions and snorted derisively.

  I tried diplomacy. “No, no—it’s not raw. This is when it’s at its best. Also, this is how you guys are going to be cooking this stuff in class. Try it. That’s why they have you coming here. This is your future you’re tasting now.”

  “Well, this isn’t how I cook lamb.” Then she told me, “You can serve your other tables now.”

  Gabi’s face looked as if she wanted to laugh. She kept looking from me to the students and back. I wanted to tip this girl’s plate into her lap. I said nothing.

  Leaving the table, I passed Eichelberger. “I weep for our future,” I said.

  “Oh, Jonathan.” He ruefully shook his head. “You have no idea.”

  Eichelberger walked up to me on the sixth night. “Jonathan, I’ve been wanting to tell you all week that I haven’t had as much fun in a long time as I’ve had watching you try and keep your composure with the students. It’s been just hilarious. Thank you for that. And this is definitely not the career path you should be choosing.”

  We finally moved into the kitchen, which had been placed under the charge of Paul Sartory. This was the last class he’d be teaching at the Hyde Park campus. He’d been transferred to the San Antonio branch of the CIA and couldn’t have been more excited.

  “So this is a permanent move?” I asked.

  “Man, I hope so,” Sartory said.

  He hadn’t changed at all since Americas. He was still unflappable and relentlessly calm. The first day, there was some confusion about which menu we were following and, so, which recipes to use and I made the wrong sauce to accompany the beef tenderloin for dinner.

  “Huh,” Sartory pondered. “Well, Jon, I’ll tell you what—there’s no reason to do it over. Why don’t we just go with what you’ve got. I should have been more clear. No big deal. The kids won’t know the difference.”

  We also never gave him much reason to become flappable or get upset. It wasn’t that dissimilar to Perillo’s class: We knew what we were doing and we did it. We had our instructions and we followed them. The food came out well.

  The third day passed, then the fourth and fifth. On the fifth day, before class got started, I was unpacking my knives and equipment in front of the same window I’d stood on the other side of my first day of school. And a young guy—he was maybe seventeen or eighteen—stood looking back at me. I raised my eyebrows and smiled at him, and thought, You poor fucker; you have no idea what you’re in for …

  IF YOU ASKED ANYONE who’d taken the wine course what parts of the textbook you really needed to know, they simply told you, “All of it.”

  Wines class—officially designated as Wines and Beverages—ran for three weeks, from 2:00 in the afternoon until 8:00 at night. It had the highest failure rate—30 percent—of any class in the CIA curriculum. The textbook took you from country to country, region to region, vineyard to vineyard around the world: the United States, Chile, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal. It numbered more than eight hundred pages.

  For the tests on the United States (also including Mexico and Canada) and France and Italy, you needed to memorize all the major growing regions (or appellations) and the major vineyards. You were allowed to use the book—and any notes you could manage to fit inside the cover and frontispieces—for the final, which a lot of people still failed. You needed to know which wines were produced in a given region, which grapes went into those wines, how to read a French wine label as opposed to an Italian or American label, and have a good working knowledge of how all these wines were produced, fermented, and aged.

  It was a deluge of information.

  The evening class was taught by Steven Kolpan, a man Eichelberger described as “brilliant.” He knew, Eichelberger said, everything there was to know about wines and could also discourse knowledgeably on literature, art, and music.

  When we arrived for the first class, Kolpan was seated behind a podium down on the floor of the lecture room, which was ringed by tiers of seats attached to long tables. He said nothing to anyone until the precise stroke of 2:00. He gave a few introductory remarks about the class, the necessity—and he gave the word necessity a very dire cast—of studying, of reading everything and of reading ahead. He stressed that one of the class’s main components would be the pairing of foods and wine. Wine, he said, could not be fully enjoyed without food. He stood up at that point. He was a large guy who looked as if he’d put his philosophy of wine and food to the test. He spent a little while orienting us to the world of viniculture, giving us basic definitions of concepts like fermentation and the influence of weather on a wine grape. He kept us on the edge of the vat for a few more minutes, letting us test the temperature with our big toes, and then he pushed us in. He turned on an overhead projector, and a map of Northern California appeared on the screen.

  “California has three major regions: the North Coast, Central Coast, and the Interior/Central Valley. You only need to worry about the North and Central coasts. Let’s look at the North Coast first. You’ll need to know about Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino. The Napa AVA, or American Viticultural Area, is divided into fourteen sub-AVAs. The most important are Oakville, Rutherford, Stags’ Leap, and Los Carneros. Now, the important vineyards in the Oakville sub-AVA are …”

  He lectured for four hours, until 6:00, limning out the history of California wine growing, the importance of the cabernet sauvignon grape, which wines were made by which vineyards, who had the best chardonnays and why.

  I sat in the front row next to Zach and Sabrina, and I took down as much as I could. By six, my hand was cramping and moaning from writing so much. We took a forty-five-minute dinner break, and when we returned, several students were dispatched to pick up racks of tasting glasses. A bunch more were ordered to open bottles of wine. Eight of the glasses were put in rows in front of each seat, and tasting portions of wines poured into them.

  “Okay, wine number one,” Kolpan said. “Sauvignon blanc, from the Honig vineyard, from Napa, from 2007. What do you get by way of the wine’s nose? Anyone? No one?”

  We all had our faces jammed into the tops of our glass. It smelled like wine. White wine. Kolpan paused. He got a slightly weary look on his face.

  “Okay. How about citrus? Does anyone smell citrus?”

  We all agreed that, yes, come to mention it, we smelled citrus.

  “What about green apple?”

  Yes, indeed, green apple.

  “How about something a little less pleasant?”

  We continued sniffing. It still only smelled of citrus and apple.

  “Does anyone get a hint of cat pee?”

  I sniffed deeply. There actually was that hint. “Wow,” I exclaimed. “I actually do get a little bit of cat piss.”

  “Okay, good, good. But let’s refer to
it as ‘cat pee,’ just to keep it civilized in here. Now let’s taste it. Acidic, fruity. A long finish. What do I mean by finish? How long do you keep tasting it after you’ve swallowed? That’s the finish. Most of the wines we taste in here will have a long finish. It’s been twenty seconds and I’m still tasting this one. What foods do you think this would go with? If you said seafood, you’re right. If you said goat cheese, you’re right too.”

  So he led us, wine by wine, day after day, into a working vocabulary of tasting. An Anderson Valley gewürztraminer had a lychee nut/cream soda nose, and a honey, hops, and cardamom flavor. A chardonnay from the Russian River Valley gave up a horseradish nose with buttery, tannic, almost potatolike flavors. We moved into red wines, from California and the Hudson Valley and Finger Lakes region of New York. Onward to Washington State, up into Canada. We got hints of plums, pepper, leather, blackberries.

  On test day, before he lectured, Kolpan gave us our first exam. Fifty questions, multiple choice, on a sheet where we filled in the little circles with a number two pencil. I barreled through it and all the queries about which vineyard grew exemplary chardonnay grapes, which wine would go best with goat cheese tortellini and lamb jus, or lobster, or fried calamari.

  During dinner, Kolpan fed the Scantrons through the computer and gave us our tests back after the break. I got mine and read the score: a 70. I began attending tutoring sessions.

  The score notwithstanding, a friend of mine e-mailed me, saying his parents were in town and he was cooking lamb that coming Sunday; did I have any wine suggestions, since I’d been taking this class. I wrote back: “Okay, keeping in mind we’ve only done wines from California, try something with a lot of tannins in it—try a cabernet sauvignon from the Napa Valley (look for St. Helena, Stags’ Leap, Mount Veeder, Rutherford, or Oakville) or a syrah. We had a really amazing syrah tonight that retails for about eighteen or nineteen bucks called Syrah ‘Le Posseur’ from the Bonny Doon winery. It was better than any one of the wines that was three times the price.”

  After sojourns in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, and South Africa, we arrived in France.

  “France and Italy,” the tutor told us, “are ridiculously hard.”

  She didn’t lie. We studied the wines of the Loire Valley—the western, central, and eastern parts—and its muscadets, the Pouilly-Fumés, the Sancerres; on to the Champagne region and then to Bourdeaux. Bourdeaux got really complex; yes, it was primarily known for dry reds—mainly cabernet sauvignon—but you needed to know that Château Latour, Château Lafite Rothschild, and Château Mouton Rothschild all came from the Pauillac commune in the Left Bank of Bordeaux. There were eight other communes to know, each with their Châteaus, plus Bordeaux had a Right Bank, and another section—Entre Deux Mers—to contend with. Then we went to Burgundy, to Alsace, and the Rhône Valley.

  We tasted wines from all these places, Kolpan leading us in figuring out what we were detecting as far as flavors went, and how to talk about them. There was, at no point, a single question he wasn’t able to answer at length—what type of oak an obscure vineyard in Alsace used to age its wines, how the different vineyards all varied from one another as far as weather went, which vineyard had more chalk in its soil than another. We all liked him because he obviously knew what he was talking about. He was, in fact, as brilliant as Eichelberger had told us. And he seemed to really enjoy hearing what we had to say, at least, once we had the words to say it.

  We moved on to Italy: Tuscany, Piedmont, Campagnia, Sicily, Sardinia, Venice, Lombardi. Dozens of grapes, innumerable vineyards, infinite wines.

  On the second test, covering France and Italy both, I studied until my brain foamed and my eyes ran with glycerin and blood. I got a 75.

  “I’m not stupid,” I told Nelly. “Shit, I don’t know. I really studied.”

  “Honey, you manage to forget what you’re going to the supermarket for. Plus, I honestly believe when you’re younger, doing rote memorization is a lot easier. I don’t know that I could memorize all this stuff.”

  I ran into Eichelberger in the hallway the day after the test and he stopped to talk. He asked me how I liked wines class.

  “Kolpan is everything you said he was. He’s kind of awe inspiring. There’s nothing he doesn’t know. But I have the same problem with this class that I’ve had with meat and fish: You’re given an insane amount of information to memorize in a very short time. And it’s good information, it’s useful information. But we’re cramming all of it in there, and we’re just going to forget most of it because we’ll be on to the next class.”

  I used to go into wine stores and buy according to price. It didn’t matter what I was planning on drinking the wine with, I knew two things: I wanted red wine, and I wanted to spend about $10. All the names and terms and abbreviations on the label might as well have been in Hittite. But now I had begun understanding what those labels meant. I could look at a zinfandel, see where it was grown and bottled—which appellation, which sub-AVA—and make an educated guess. I was pretty broke, so I wasn’t buying much wine, but within a stretch of two weeks, I got three bottles, mainly because I wanted to flex my knowledge. I was on the money with two, dead wrong with the third.

  By the time the final rolled around, we had tasted almost 150 wines. We had two days off between our last class and the last test. I’d been to all the tutoring sessions. I spent hours copying my lecture notes and tasting notes into any blank space I could find in the textbook. I had Nelly quiz me using flash cards.

  On test day, those who looked nauseated and dyspeptic were screwed. Some of those who looked at ease and confident were probably screwed too. I figured the rest of us who fell somewhere in between might have a fighting chance. A handful of the group—and we numbered around fifty or so—was taking the class for the second time. One woman was on her third attempt. There were more than one hundred questions. I went through and answered every question I didn’t need to look up first; that left me with around seventy questions to go. I had tagged various sections in the book based on region, so I could flip right to whatever information I needed. But the questions weren’t always black and white: Given two different regions, which one would most likely have the best merlot? What about the best gamay? They might both produce those wines, but which one had the edge? The book wasn’t always clear, and you had to read carefully to get a hint and answer the question. We had two and a half hours, and I used up almost all the time.

  I got a 75 on the final, and a 79 for the class, the lowest grade I’d gotten so far in school. And I felt lucky.

  FOR THE FINAL THREE months of the program, the CIA used to send each of the students through each of the four restaurants on campus that were open to the public: Caterina D’Medici, the Italian restaurant; American Bounty, which specialized in regional American food; St. Andrew’s, which had started out as a health-food restaurant but changed its focus to serving locally sourced and sustainable foods; and the Escoffier Room, which served old-school, classic French cuisine inspired by its namesake. Every student did a short stint as a cook and a short stint as a waiter in each place.

  Our group was the first to see this policy changed. Now we would choose two restaurants and spend three weeks in the kitchen of each, followed by three weeks serving its customers. We were assigned a randomly generated number—mine was thirty-six—and on the appointed day, we chose in order according to our numbers. Even with a relatively good number, I still didn’t get what I wanted. I chose Caterina and Escoffier; I got into Escoffier, but Caterina was full. I’d be going to St. Andrew’s instead.

  For most of us, it was beginning to sink in that things were just about over, that graduation was coming up fast. People were beginning to put feelers out for jobs. Some had already lined up work; a few were returning to their externship sites; others had interviewed at restaurants in New York City, Boston, Yellowstone Park, and Nantucket and were set to begin in just a few weeks. The future was arriving and it felt wide open.

  B
ut there was an edge of weariness, too. It sprang, I think, from a sense of impending emancipation. The weight of the rules and regulations, of the chefs’ shouting and reprimands, suddenly felt a lot heavier. We were sick of being yelled at. And since we were now cooking for the public—for actual paying customers—I suspected there might be some more yelling to come.

  Some of the people I’d been with since Baking were still in the group—Dan, Jessica, Bruce, Stephen, Gabi—others, like Jeff, who was now the group leader, were familiar faces, but I was meeting them for the first time. Leo, Zach, Rocco, and Micah had all gone to Caterina, and I was sorry to see them go.

  On our first day we met in a classroom underneath St. Andrew’s. The kitchen was run by Chef Robert Mullooly, who had only been at the CIA for a couple of years. I had asked Viverito what he thought of Mullooly and he’d said, “He’s a really nice guy. He’s very well received by everyone who works with him. I think you’ll have a good time.”

  Mullooly was a forty-year-old Long Islander who stood about six foot five and had about him the air of someone who had lived pretty intensely when he was younger. He smiled a lot, but as he talked, sometimes you weren’t certain what he was smiling about. Occasionally, he’d trail off in midsentence, as if he were stopping to read a postcard his mind sent him from some trip of his youth. He also told us that he’d been working double shifts for a few weeks. I couldn’t tell which accounted for the lapses, but I did instinctively like the guy.

  I was paired up with someone I’d never met before—Laura—and we were put on Sauté 2, which meant we’d be cooking panfried trout with grain salad and an apple–brown butter sauce, and a pork dish—the exact preparation changed every few days—with asparagus and a pork jus.

  I still had never done any line cooking before, and I was about to make my debut. No fanfare, no training—just tossed onto the line and expected to perform. It made me uneasy.