Beaten, Seared, and Sauced

by Jonathan Dixon

  At 9:20, I presented my food. I’d made two errors: My sauce for the fish was slightly thick. And I overcooked the rice. That last was just a dumb mistake. Mere forgetfulness. I remembered thinking at one point, Take care of the rice in about five more minutes, but the thought didn’t reoccur.

  I got an 84. DiPeri shook my hand and told me I’d done a good job. I went outside for a few minutes to get some air and call Nelly.

  I dialed the number and she picked up on the first ring.

  “Jonathan Dixon.”

  My voice was bright. “Nelly.”

  “You don’t sound like someone who just failed a cooking practical …”

  Later, I was back inside doing my dishes. I stood next to Diego, the student who’d gone after I did.

  “How’d you do?” I asked.

  “I did well. I got a ninety.”

  “Nice.”

  “I was so nervous going in there.”

  “Did you tell yourself, ‘Turn your mind off and cook’?”

  He turned and looked at me. “Yeah. Exactly.” He laughed. “And it worked.”

  13

  THE ESCOFFIER RESTAURANT IS the campus showpiece, a small, ornate temple to classical French cuisine. The menu is pricey—$39 for a ragout of lobster, $32 for sliced duck breast set atop cassoulet—and yet there are few nights when the restaurant isn’t filled by at least two-thirds. It’s an award-winning, Zagat-rated establishment, and it would be our last stop.

  Just before our time at St. Andrew’s had ended, Jessica, our group leader, had met with the teaching assistant to work out who would be going to which station. The group would be splitting up again. Some would be moving to the American Bounty restaurant, on the opposite end of the building from Escoffier, or E-Room, as it was known. The rest would take over the E-Room afternoon shift, with the addition of a few students who’d been working at the Caterina restaurant.

  Jessica wouldn’t tell me whom I’d be working with—“You’ll find out soon enough,” she said—but, one night before dinner service, as she and I sat at a table folding napkins, she let it slip that they had tried to pair strong students with weaker ones. A few moments of silent folding passed until something occurred to me.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I said. Jess looked up. “Answer me honestly: Am I one of the weak ones?” She stared for a second, laughed, shook her head, and went back to folding.

  “I’m serious,” I went on. “It’s okay; it’ll be character building. Just let me know, so I can really figure out how to approach this.”

  “You’re not the weak one. Let’s put it that way. You’ll have two other partners. One of them is also pretty strong. Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

  I watched her for a moment to see if her face betrayed her, but she looked as if she could pass a polygraph.

  “WHO IS GOING TO be the next Ferran Adrià? Who is going to be the next Thomas Keller? The next Ducasse?” Alain De Coster, chef-instructor of the Escoffier Restaurant, paced the front of his classroom on the first day, half an hour before we’d begin cooking for that night’s customers. “Who is going to be the next Girardet? What if it’s you?” He pointed at a student up front. Then to the back: “Or you?”

  De Coster was a Belgian émigré in his fifties. He looked quite a bit like James Ellroy, and he’d spent his professional life training in the old-school way, starting in restaurants as a thirteen-year-old apprentice and working his way up. He was regarded as an encyclopedia of classical cooking; rumor had it he was a soon-to-be candidate for the title of certified master chef; and yet he was renowned at school for never—never—raising his voice.

  De Coster told us first thing that not yelling was a new development in his life, that he had, in fact, been a screamer when he was younger. “I was, if you’ll excuse my language, a real asshole,” he told us. But one day—and he didn’t describe exactly what had happened—he’d had an epiphany and vowed never to lose his cool again. He said that a chef needs to have the loyalty of his staff, and that fear was in no way equivalent to loyalty. Therefore, he didn’t ever want to inspire fear in anyone who worked for him. Which, at this moment, meant us.

  The first day, he lectured in a voice quavering with enthusiasm. “Pay attention to the product, and the product will reward you!” he exclaimed. “Everything you cook should trigger the ‘wow!’ factor for anyone who eats it! Everything at a peak of refinement! Every detail is crucial! No step matters less than another!”

  De Coster talked about the history of French cuisine, from Carême to Escoffier to Fernand Point to the icons of nouvelle cuisine. He spoke about these people and their accomplishments in terms of upheaval and revolution. He made it all wildly exciting.

  “Read! Read! Taste! Learn!” he implored. “How do you help make revolution? How do you make something new? Look at the classics. Look at every single element of a dish—every one—and figure out, What can I do to make each one of those steps contemporary? What can I do to make them new? Make them my own? How much skill and technique and knowledge can I bring to bear on each element?”

  I sat listening, burning with revolutionary fervor, like Bill Ayers in a toque. I wanted to get upstairs in that kitchen, and excel and shine. I wanted to stay glued to De Coster’s side and watch him in action, to learn everything, observe everything I possibly could.

  This was not in the stars for me, though, because it turned out I wouldn’t be cooking any food for customers. The station assignments were called out name by name. I discovered, to my dismay, I had been assigned to the family meal team.

  The family meal team’s job was to cook vast quantities of food in a very short time for a bunch of moaning, grumbling ingrates. Or, put another way, we would be making a nightly dinner for our classmates. We could occasionally order meat and vegetables but needed to use a lot of what we had on hand in the kitchen—that is, stuff from the walk-in refrigerator that was about to turn bad.

  The one thing that made De Coster angry, the one thing that might tempt him to raise his voice, was waste. No matter what it was—an apple core, broccoli stalks, shrimp beginning to throb with rot—there was a use for it.

  We had from 3:00 in the afternoon until 4:50 to prepare an entrée, a starch, a vegetable, and a salad for fifty people, which included our group, the E-Room student waitstaff, any security or buildings and grounds people who wandered in at dinnertime, and any instructors who wanted to eat. The kitchen was tiny. You couldn’t move without bumping into someone else. The temperature routinely got to 110 degrees. We had the most space of anybody—an entire metal worktable for the three of us—Max, Lou, and me.

  Max was about twenty, the son of a Lutheran minister, and shared the same dim view of the world at large that I did. Lou was a pain in the ass—snide, sarcastic, smirking. He was not incredibly industrious, and Max and I didn’t really count him as part of the team. It was the Jonathan and Max Show.

  We had only a vague idea of what we’d be cooking each day. We had come up with menu ideas in advance—spice-rubbed steak one night, yogurt-braised lamb (ripped off directly from Tabla’s menu) on another—but we found out the first two nights that our orders weren’t likely to come in. Jon, the teaching assistant who was in charge of physically placing our orders, had a laissez-faire relationship with accuracy. So our initial menu—steak, roasted potatoes, sautéed broccoli rabe, and a salad of spinach and red onion with raspberry vinaigrette—never came into being. Neither the beef nor the potatoes arrived. The spinach was absent too. Plan B: we found several huge pork loins in the refrigerator, each one on the verge of turning slightly slimy; we found a sack of cornmeal; we discovered a cache of fennel, a bag of Valencia oranges, and a tub of kalamata olives. Max and I trimmed the worst of the pork away, rubbed what was left with a mix of coffee, cayenne, brown sugar, and dried herbs and threw it in the convection oven. We made polenta. We julienned the fennel, sectioned all the oranges, chopped up the olives and mixed everything together with salt, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.
At the last minute, we found some broccoli, hacked it up, boiled it, and tossed it with butter, salt, and pepper. We served dinner five minutes late. And the results were solidly … okay. At least, we thought so.

  Because we had to do some quick tidying after we served everything, we found that the three of us were the last to eat. That first night, we made our way into the dining room where the others were already seated and listened to the comments of “What is this shit?” and “I think I’m going to go hungry tonight” or “This is terrible” from the student waitstaff and maintenance people. This would go on night after night, like something reflexive, no matter how good or bad our results were. Our group was usually a little more polite. But I came to understand that praise meant not hearing the word “shit” in connection with the food.

  I began wondering if De Coster and Jon were messing with the orders intentionally. If it was intentional, they managed a pretty good lesson in improvising and using whatever one had on hand.

  I also discovered a good solution to hiding food we just couldn’t bear to use out of fear for gastrointestinal safety. I asked the vegetable team to give me all their potato peelings and asparagus scraps—things we were allowed to toss—and hoarded them. When I discarded fish that stank like ammonia, or beef tinted green—both things that had lived too long in the walk-in refrigerator—I’d pull the vegetable scraps and dump them on top of whatever I’d just thrown out. De Coster never noticed.

  The decisions we made about our menus weren’t arrived at democratically. I grabbed the reins. And for some reason, Max—and Lou—went along. I wound up finalizing the menus, dividing the labor, and saying things like, “Don’t worry that we don’t have enough milk and cream—just use stock and do a four-to-one ratio of polenta. Cook it in the oven so we don’t have to worry about stirring. We’re going to need to blanch the green beans in about ten minutes because we won’t have the burner space later on. Make sure the pine nuts get browned—don’t let them burn. You should add some orange juice to that vinaigrette—you can get the acid and the sweetness that’s missing all in one.”

  I didn’t intend to become the foreman. I also didn’t intend to get forceful in giving directions, yet at one point, I yelled at Lou for not getting something done on time. It was an uncomfortable moment: I had a sudden and clear insight into why Coyac and Viverito, Ty and Chris and Dwayne, Mullooly, and the other loud chefs raise their voices.

  De Coster asked to see me after class. “So I’ve been watching you the past few evenings. And tonight I heard you. You don’t need to do that, but, given who you were badgering, I understand. Family meal is a tough station. No one realizes it. But you have very little time to get a lot done. A lot of my classes, things don’t get done with that station. But if family meal isn’t satisfying, morale is shot for the entire night. You guys are doing well, and I need you to keep taking a leadership role. Even more so than you have. We need to keep the trains running on time.”

  So I did. It ceased being the Jonathan and Max Show. Max was gracious about it. Our orders began coming in correctly.

  Max and I sat next to each other in De Coster’s preservice lecture, and we’d arrive a few minutes early to confer about that night’s menu. Which meant my menu. I found myself simply telling Max what we’d be doing: “Okay, so tonight we’re making meatball sandwiches. Jon placed the order for ground beef and I watched him do it, so we know it’s in. I’ll make the sauce. We’ll put bread crumbs, Parmesan, onions, and so on, into the meat and bake them in the convection oven. We’ll do the fennel salad thing again. We’ve got the bread, so we won’t need an extra starch. I’ll do the broccoli, too. Lou can take care of shredding the mozzarella. Good?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  Discovering your inner asshole is a strange experience. I kept waiting for Max to tell me to shut the hell up, but he never did. So I became more tyrannical, albeit gently. One day Max made a vinaigrette for our salad from soy sauce, rice vinegar, and honey. I tasted it. “Hey, this is good,” I said. “Nice. But since we have all these oranges, what would you think of adding some of the juice and zest, just so they don’t go to waste?” After the juice and zest was added, I tasted again. “Max!” I exclaimed. “I’ve got it. We can make this perfect if we add some grated ginger and some mirin. Does that sound right?” Max added the ginger and mirin. I considered that maybe I wasn’t truly being an asshole, that maybe, in fact, this was how real kitchens manned by real cooks functioned.

  We roasted thirty-five chickens one day. We grilled forty pounds of flank steak and made potato gratin on another. Near the end of our stint, we made fried chicken for seventy people. We bombed badly with a batch of penne alla vodka.

  De Coster gave Max and me each an A–.

  FROM THE ESCOFFIER RESTAURANT kitchen, we finished the last three weeks of our education in the role of servers. We waited on customers from 6:00 in the evening until about 11:00 at night, when the last of them finished their meals—around two and a half hours for an amuse-bouche, an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert. A bunch of the dishes were prepared tableside; if someone ordered the mustard-crusted rack of lamb or rack of boar, or the dover sole, we’d wheel a cart, or gueridon, to the customer’s table, turn on a heating element, and—taking the sole as an example—debone the fish, plate it, and make a brown butter sauce. We’d spoon the sauce over the fish, add some turned potatoes (also coated with butter) to the plate, and set it down in front of the customer. Several desserts were done tableside too, like crêpes suzette, or strawberry jubilee. At some point during the dessert preparations, we flamed brandy at a presumably safe distance from the customers’ heads, sending up a huge plume of fire. People seemed to love the theater of it.

  After the novelty of solemnly doing all these tableside dishes wore off, we became quite bored. The customers—especially the older ones—loved asking questions about who we were and where we were from, what we’d do afterward, where we’d go. I think we all had our pat answers that we used ad infinitum, but it just reminded us that the end of school was staring us right in the face, and we were pretty anxious to finish up.

  JESSICA GOT A JOB in Chicago. My friend Dan Clawson was going to Nantucket for the summer to work in a restaurant there, then he’d head to New York. He was hoping to wind up at Per Se someday, or Momofuku, or one of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s places. Max was off to a resort in Wyoming, my friend Diego to the Ritz in Miami. Zach was lining something up at a hotel in Vegas.

  I hadn’t had much contact with anyone from my first group, but Adam had let me know he’d gotten a sous-chef job at Spice Market. Lombardi had never returned from his externship; I asked Adam and he couldn’t remember which restaurant it was—some low-key place in Westchester, or maybe Connecticut, Adam thought—but they’d offered him a permanent job and he stayed on. Joe, who’d done his externship at the French Laundry, was moving to San Francisco to help Corey Lee, the French Laundry’s former chef de cuisine, open his own restaurant.

  Brookshire had taken some time off and come back to school a block after I had; I ran into him from time to time and he’d decided to stay on and complete the bachelor’s degree program. A number of people were taking that course; Sitti was staying, as were Margot, Jackie, Rocco, and Gabi.

  Everyone asked me: Where are you going? What are you going to do? Everyone assumed I’d write.

  Almost every graduate moved on to a restaurant kitchen. All of the instructors had taken that path, and the curriculum was built on facilitating it. And I harbored some envy. For two years, virtually every day, I came into school and got to spend hour after hour cooking. Imagine a life just like this, I thought. Imagine doing it day after day, doing what you’ve been trained to do, how fast you’d get, how efficient. You’d start achieving a serious finesse, real refinement.

  Part of me wondered, If I could go back to Tabla now, knowing what I know, would it be a totally different experience?

  And what if I found a restaurant to work in here, upstate
?

  A few days before graduation, I ran into Viverito in the parking lot.

  “So what’s the next step?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m working out the details now.”

  “I’m assuming you’re not restaurant bound?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not for everyone. But there’s a whole world of things to do out there, you know.”

  There is a world out there beyond the walls of a restaurant kitchen. Although most students chose to stay within them, you heard the occasional story around campus of people who made a different choice. One guy wound up cooking for rock bands on tour. Some people became food stylists. Two of the chefs who used to work in the Martha Stewart test kitchen had graduated from the CIA.

  I harbored envy because no matter how great any other situation is, there’s nothing like a restaurant kitchen. But I knew it wasn’t where I really belonged. Just the amount of talking back I did to people who were in charge of keeping the kitchens running—I knew I was too pigheaded to flourish in a situation where ceding control to others was required to truly learn and succeed. If I went back to Tabla now, the results probably wouldn’t be appreciably different. I’d certainly do things differently, learn much more that they had to offer, dive in deeper to the whole culture and experience, but I am who I am, and my focus wasn’t entirely aligned with what they needed from me.

  I thought about all that one night when I was driving home with only a single day left at school. And I thought intently about my future. I knew I was going to be writing about the experience of learning to cook at school, but I also knew that project wasn’t going to sustain the rest of my life.

  I wanted—needed—the physicality of cooking. I loved working with my hands. I loved working with all my senses.

  Dinner parties for me now were a different proposition than they’d been prior to the CIA. I loved having people over now, getting elaborate, knowing I could wow them. I even felt a very vague disappointment when I had to stop cooking, turn off the burners, and take my seat at the table.