Eleven minutes,” Matty says, checking the steel-bodied German dive watch clipped through the top buttonhole of his chef’s coat.29
Bird’s advice had been exactly right. Matty and I had done just what he’d said we should that day: cleaning up our stations in the industrial kitchen for the last time, packing away our stuff, piling into Matty’s car with a load of supplies that needed to be delivered, driving over to the new kitchen and just not leaving. We’d moved in, taken our spots on the line, and that was that.
“Total?” I ask from the other end of the line, turning to make a bare-handed grab out of the salamander, counting one-one-thousand-two in my head as I set a searing hot platter on the stovetop rail. Me, shaking my hand out of habit—not in pain, because I know I could’ve held the thing through three-one-thousand before the calluses on my hand, as thick now as bomber-jacket leather, began to burn. “Total, or since the last time we checked?”
“Total,” says Matty.
Me, nodding: “Give it a couple more minutes.”
We’re making risotto—our experiment being carried out in the middle of a busy dinner service, bubbling merrily away in its pot as we spin finished plates down the pass, fighting to get ahead of the printer. So rigorously French-trained, so up-from-nothing hash-slingers, neither of us had ever made risotto before. Never been asked to.
Like truffles, like rubbery slabs of handmade glace de viande and the powerful Black Sea salt we’d been taught to covet like the dust of diamonds, we understand that risotto is something special, something deserving of respect, but have no idea why. Thus, we have come to it almost reverentially, and not without a measure of fear—poking, cringing, sniffing, tasting, curious and cautious both.
Still, it’s going onto the menu as a special soon, on orders from one of the owners, a whim. We need a rice dish, maybe a risotto . . .
So okay, now all we have to do is figure out how to cook it. Now. Tonight. Right this minute.
“How long now?” My head is in the oven, fingertips running over the wrinkling skins of chickens going through their first par-cooking, feeling the way the flesh is puckering, crumpling around the joints.
“Thirteen minutes.”
“Okay.”
Ours is a sense-heavy kitchen. We have no spike thermometers, no portion scales, no measuring cups. Matty’s watch is the only timer allowed on the line. But we’re pretty finely tuned instruments ourselves, and we know that things are done when they look done, are right when they smell right—that oil is hot enough when it takes on a vaguely popcorny aroma, that a thick steak is medium-going-medium-well when it has the same spring as the fat knob of muscle between the thumb and first finger. So now, we converge on the pot like dogs, leading with our noses, bending over the rice, sinking our faces into the steam.
We’d toasted the rice in our best olive oil, left it to simmer in a pot of stock, allowed it to cook down until it was almost dry. There are no recipes here, only instinct. All of our amounts were guesses, measurements based on other rice we’d dealt with, other cooking methods, lore, rumor, half-remembered cooking shows on PBS. Now the arborio rice is creamy, pale gold. Gorgeous, I’m thinking. Until we taste it.
Matty makes a face. “Not right. Just not right.”
I concur. The swinging doors swing, each flutter of them marked by a wave of noise from the dining room, a waft of air. Plates go out. Plates come back. Out of the corner of my eye I can see one of the Mexican dishwashers scraping a mostly uneaten entrée into the trash, trying to block my view with his body because I take that very personally. ¿Qwé es esto? ¿Motherfucker, porqué no comer?
“What now?” Matty asks.
“Stock,” I say, and Matty goes for the chicken stock, adding it to the pot one saucier’s ladle at a time. And we watch, transfixed, as the grains plump, greedily drinking up the hot liquid. I stir—lifting and gently folding the sticky grains from the bottom of the pot into the top, treating the stuff like a meringue, like an egg-fluffed mousse in imminent danger of collapse. Amazed, we watch the risotto come together, tasting it a grain at a time, plucking them out and laying them on our tongues while, behind us, the printer chews through paper—spools of it curling, tumbling off the pass.
We ignore it. This is magic. We’re children watching the man in the shiny suit make the milk disappear from a tube of newspaper, pull a rabbit out of his shit-smelling top hat. The simple tricks are always the best the first time you see them.
First time seeing porn. First time laying a speedometer down past a hundred. First time your child falls asleep in your arms. First time making a woman come, you feel like Superman (or Superwoman, depending). I remember thinking I deserved a Nobel Prize or something. If only I could’ve remembered how I’d done it...
First time getting plastered on serious wine. Mine was accidental, a bottle of boutique South African red. Several bottles, in fact, shared among Matty and me and the kitchen crew. We thought we were drinking up the dregs of the tasting that’d gone on that night—getting rid of the swill that regularly got passed off on the rubes, the yuppie bait we used to get the gold-card crowd through the doors on a Monday night. Come to find, we’d actually gotten into a case that our wine buyer had brought back special from a purchasing trip: a couple hundred bucks per bottle, intended for a party she had scheduled for the following weekend.
And we drank them all. When they were gone, we drank whatever else we could get our hands on. A party erupted when some of the other crews from the surrounding restaurants saw that our lights were still on, heard the Pogues rattling the plate glass, saw us all smoking cigarettes and slumping around the bar. I remember the first couple glasses and thinking to myself, “Wow . . . This is . . . Just wow.” Speechless, which, for me, is really saying something.
Heavy and smooth and purple-black, spicy like fresh-ground pepper, fruity like Amarena cherries steeped in sherry. After putting down the equivalent of a bottle, it wasn’t even like being drunk, it was like being high. And then we all went into the alley and got high, so it was like being double high. And then we drank some more and turned the radio up and I attempted to cook some snackies for that portion of the crowd that was still maintaining verticality and accidentally lit myself on fire—flames from one of the burners climbing the pilled cables of the sweater I’d thrown on over my T-shirt like water running in reverse.
To put myself out, I fell down. Once I’d fallen down, there was just no way I was getting back up. I napped for a time on the floor of the line, and when I woke up, I saw Matty and the hostess from one of the restaurants down the street. He had her lifted up onto the cutting board in front of one of the cold tables, her skirt hiked up around her waist, his head between her knees. I lurched to my feet angrily—not offended by what they were doing or that they were doing it essentially right above my head, but that they were doing it on my station, on my cutting board. Matty stood up. The girl bounced down to her feet, giggling—cute in a hammered-cheerleader kind of way. I was in no mood. Scowling, I popped my board up off of its pegs, tucked it under my arm, and went to sleep in front of the garde-manger station. I kept the cutting board with me just in case. I’d like to say it smelled like her, but honestly I just don’t recall.
FIRST TIME GETTING A MUSSEL RIGHT: standing in my broken-soled work boots, black bandanna tied around my head in place of a toque, misfit whites, filthy checks, bad teeth, bruised knuckles—a fucking mess with tears in my eyes and my mouth hanging slack. How many mussels had I cooked? A thousand? Ten thousand? Twenty? I’d never once done it right. I’d tasted them done right, sure. I’d had them done right for me by other cooks, other chefs, so I knew what right tasted like. I’d been chasing right for so long I couldn’t even count the time.
Such a simple thing, moules et frites. Even more classic (among cooks, anyway) than steak-frites, than soupe l’oignon, than cassoulet (which has as many different recipes as there are chefs working) or coq au vin. Moules et frites may as well be the definition of all that is perf
ect and beautiful about French brasserie cuisine—a three-ingredient sauce (white wine, butter, shallots), a squeeze of lemon, an animal that is alive until the minute it is thrown into the cooking liquid; killed by the double fistful for every order. Get it wrong and it’s still pretty good, but get it right and it’s an epiphany.
And now, here, I finally get it—capturing a flavor, a depth, and a balance I’d only ever tasted before coming from someone else’s hand. The smell of it done right is enough to unlock my knees, a drop of sauce licked off the tip of my pinkie rewires whole neighborhoods of my brain. Actually reaching into the bowl and eating one of the mussels? Pure sex, a beurre-blanc lightning strike right in the savage-animal pleasure center, like growing a second, tiny lemon tongue.
Those who go in for Zen archery have a spiel about how the man who draws the bow a hundred times knows a little something about drawing a bow, how the man who draws the bow a thousand times knows a little something about loosing an arrow, and how the man who is fortunate enough to have drawn the bow ten thousand times no longer has to concern himself with either the bow or the arrow because he’s the one who knows a little something about bull’s-eyes. Every arrow the lucky man fires will inexorably find its mark, so he no longer even needs the bow or the arrow because the bull’s-eye is a foregone conclusion.
I always thought that was such total crap.
Not so much after my thing with the mussel, though. All it took was 9,999 tries. But for me, every mussel after number ten thousand was a foregone conclusion. I was now the guy who knew a little something about bull’s-eyes, and until I got there, I hadn’t even realized how hard I was trying.
Standing in front of my stove tasting number ten thousand? Those were tears of relief.
FIRST TIME IN COMMAND. First time cooking for other chefs—for guys who would come in specifically to eat the food that Matty and I were making, the ultimate compliment from one’s peers.
First time cooking escargot. Those fuckers explode sometimes. No one had told me that. And when they pop, the garlicky snail goo goes unerringly for the eyes and genitals like a final vengeance.
First time knowing true calm and competency and sweetness in the kitchen. I’ve told so many hard, mean stories here already, described so many brutal moments or cruel or funny or ridiculous ones. But most nights on the line were none of these things. They were just nights at work. And I think that anyone who finds himself finally in a place where he truly belongs must, at some point, also look up and recognize the long train of quiet, occasionally beautiful hours that have led him to that place. The first time I was able to glance back and see my own boxcars of time stacked up behind me was at La Cité, on one of those countless, interchangeable, unmemorable nights when nothing was exploding, nothing was terrible, nothing was collapsing, and everything just was. And there was nothing more to it than looking up and knowing that I was living in a best moment—one that I would probably not specifically remember because of its softness and cool, but would recall forever as a feeling of fragile, almost painful rightness.
LA CITÉ HAD GONE LIVE on a Friday night. The wait at the door was three hours. We’d stayed open and served two hours past closing time just to get everyone fed. It was, needless to say, a smashing success.
And after that? A blur. I can remember only moments.
I remember the smell of Ivan the Russian’s fresh bread in the morning, waking to it on occasion after sleeping in the basement or just coming in from out of the cold for the start of morning prep and being enveloped in the nutty, soft, sweet scent of hundreds of boules, all sitting on the racks, most destined to become bread crumbs or crostini or whatever because this was still Buffalo, after all, not Paris, and people here bought their bread at the grocery store.
I remember the night I nipped off the tip of my finger while slicing shallots. The injury was not as memorable as peeing the pool of blood that bloomed like a rose in a nature documentary, seeing a small piece of myself severed and set free, cut adrift on the expanse of my cutting board. Not so memorable as the feeling brought on by my bright idea that dipping the offended digit in a bowl of high-octane cooking vodka would sterilize it. The pain—so swift and awesome—knocked me out cold.
I remember Amy, one of the waitresses, running down the stairs into the basement where I was slicing prosciutto, pounding down the steps, frantic, scratching madly at her crotch. Amy didn’t see me, didn’t even hear the clattering, whirring old rotary slicer running, until she’d itched for a good ten seconds. Then she looked up and dissolved into laughter.
“I just shaved,” she said. “It itches like hell.”
“I can only imagine,” I said.
“Want to see?”
I remember the way the kitchen was arranged—in the round, European-style. There was the service door, then the dishwasher to the right, my station to the immediate left. Our pass was a shelf that rose from the middle of the kitchen: grill, broiler, six-top and four-top ranges, ovens and fryer on one side, everything cold on the other. At the end of the pass, nearest the door, was a small, rickety, stainless steel prep table that, during service, became the expo station.
Heat lamps hung over the center pass. On the first night of actual service Matty and I broke them beyond all hope of repair. Heat lamps were a crutch. If we were doing our job well, they would never be required. We were right. We started accidentally dropping any plate that wasn’t white. A couple months in, Matty stole all of the lovely little salt and pepper shakers from the tables in the dining room, tossed them into a garbage bag and threw them away. If we were doing our job right, no one would need salt and pepper. He was right about that, too, even if the servers, the owners and the customers didn’t see it his way.
I remember the night Andy, our garde-manger man, showed up bent out of his head on opium, claiming he’d eaten it (accidentally) on a salad in the park.
“Who eats salad from a stranger in the park?” we asked. The answer: Andy did. We tried to send him home. He wouldn’t go, insisting that he was fine to stand his station. For the rest of the night, we’d call an order for a simple salad and would be handed a pepper mill. We’d ask for rillettes, for a double-garden-on-the-side, and Andy would look across the pass with his eyes blown out, staring into some distant O-space, and start fiddling. We’d get half heads of lettuce dressed in skordalia, white plates doodled with sauce, completely imaginary salads: one plate, set with a fork and a squeeze bottle. Andy was inventing dadaist cuisine on the spot, and for a while we were having so much fun waiting to see what he’d come up with next that we forgot that someone needed to back him up and actually do the job.
That task fell to Al, our emergency-backup, all-hope-is-lost dishwasher and prep guy. He was a friend of Matty’s, lived (sometimes) in the house with him, was supposed to be going to school to be a dentist. No matter when Matty put in the call, Al would show up. He was absolutely dependable in that way, even if his condition upon arrival was always a cause for wild speculation. He was a regular abuser of strong chemicals—heroin, mostly—but in the psychoactive hierarchy of kitchen work, a functioning junkie was preferable to a onetime opium eater.
When Al arrived, Andy was out in the alley having a conversation with the chain-link fence.
“What’s up with him?” Al asked.
Al was talking to the dish machine, but at least he was inside.
• • •
OUT ONE NIGHT DRINKING at Faherty’s down the street with the guys. It’s two in the morning, maybe three. The whole place is full of white jackets, some still in uniform, sauce- and blood-spattered. There’s waitresses and hostesses, food-service groupies. The music is numbingly loud, the smoke thick as weather systems. We’re upstairs, shooting pool—team cutthroat against the crew from one of the other restaurants downtown, knocking the balls around for money, beers and pride.
And I’m drunk. Just completely hammered. When my turn at the table comes up, I grab the cue, set myself without thinking, and make an impossible jump
-shot over the eight—sinking a ball that I could never have done sober, that I’ve never been able to do since.
The ball drops. My guys go wild. I throw the cue onto the floor, point at the cooks from the other house, say, “That’s just to prove that we’re better than you at everything.”
I stride off then, headed for the bar to claim my drink on the other guys’ tab, and promptly fall down the stairs.
This is not the same night I show my junk to the cocktail waitress. This is not the same night Matty’s girlfriend left him and we commandeered the jukebox to play nothing but his favorite songs until closing time, having to fight off a rush of enraged line cooks the fifth or tenth time a particular Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tune came around. This was just another night, but they may as well all be the same night—one long last call, one night that never ended.
I REMEMBER MY BIRTHDAY: number twenty-three or twenty-four. I’d spent most of the night working in a funk, pissed off, throwing pans and snapping at anyone who came near me. I hadn’t told anyone my birthday was coming; I didn’t care if they knew.
But Sam . . . I’d gotten it in my head that Sam had forgotten my birthday, and it bothered me. I hadn’t actually seen her in a few days. She was working as a management troubleshooter for a chain of mom-and-pop health-food shops, going from store to store and explaining to the hippies how to merchandise the wheat germ, artfully front the tiny bottles of calendula oil and ayurvedic dandruff treatments. She worked a more or less normal schedule, from sometime in the morning until sometime in the evening. Then she’d go out with her friends, my friends, people from work—like a regular grown-up.
I was working from about nine in the morning until one in the morning on an ordinary day—one that didn’t require me to be in earlier (in which case I’d sleep at the restaurant or at Matty’s place) or stay later (in which case I’d also just sleep at the restaurant or at Matty’s place or on the floor wherever I collapsed). When work was done, I’d go out for a few drinks to chase those I’d already put down while cleaning, the others I’d been knocking back all day while working, the little bit of weed in the alley to cut the jitters, the pills I’d been swallowing and gallons of coffee. At the bar, I could unwind, relax. It was better than going home, because at home I’d only be up, pacing the living room, chain-smoking, trying to work off all the leftover adrenaline from the shift, worrying about all the things that needed to be done for tomorrow.
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