“Only the cute ones!” He grinned.
In the university program where I was supposed to be emancipating myself from the kitchen, preparing myself to go back to New York having at least answered the question of my own potential, the novelty and thrill had thoroughly worn off. I could not find the fun or the urgency in the eventless and physically idle academic life. It was so lethargic and impractical and luxurious. I adored reading and writing and having my brain crushed; but those soft ghostly people lounging around the lounge in agony over their “texts,” endlessly theorizing over experiences they would never have, made me ache to get out of the leather chairs, to put my shoes and socks back on, and get back into the kitchen, which I increasingly found practical and satisfying. The work may not have held much meaning and purpose, but I was gunning the motor of my car to get off campus and get to it each day.
To tackle a prep list at eight a.m. and have it knocked out by four p.m., black Sharpie line crossing out each item on the To-Do list:
felt so manageable and tactile and useful. I could wake up and tackle that in a way that I would never be able to wake up and take a crack at certain literary pursuits, like, for example, illuminating the fog surrounding the human condition. This is not to suggest that I accepted this understanding about myself gladly, with just a sneering dismissal of the pursuit in the first place. Human condition. It’s a blow to have to admit to yourself that you are not quite cut out for something that matters so much to you. More than a blow—it’s a knockout. I had to lie down on the floor of my apartment for a very long time letting that one sink in. Did I have something more to offer, any other talent than a strong work ethic? Did I have something in me other than dishwasher?
As it turns out, I did not.
To stand at the prep table with other cooks who were just doing mundane things like fixing the car over the weekend, cleaning the house, and shuttling their kids to doctor’s appointments felt newly satisfying and meaningful enough. I liked these people and their lives. But more to the point, I came to understand that I liked People and Life. After sitting around for too long in those leather chairs, I welcomed the intense pressure of getting a dinner for two hundred plated quickly, and came to see that there was a rush and a method in that that I hadn’t quite known to what extent I liked and needed in my life. And I will admit, spending that chilly hour cleaning out a cluttered walk-in and putting impeccable order to it is still, thirty years later, my favorite part of kitchen life. I bring my mother’s compulsion for concrete order with me wherever I go.
My resolve to start a new kitchen-free life was further weakening in the direct warmth of Misty’s home style of cooking, her bumpy, misshapen tomatoes ripening on the back steps, her cabbages shredded and broken down with salt and vinegar, her hunks of pork swimming in smoky, deep, earthy juices. Unwittingly, she was untethering me from my ten-pound knife kit, propane torches, and ring molds and showing me that what I had been doing these past twenty years—and what I had come to think of as cooking—was just the impressive fourteen-ring string of a twelve-year-old exhaling her first lungfuls of a Marlboro. Nothing more than the tricks of the trade. She was waking me, in her nearly monosyllabic way, out of a dark and decades-long amnesia.
But then, without telling me and worse, without taking me, Misty worked her last day at the catering company and went across town to pursue an opportunity to open a restaurant. Misty, without letting on in the slightest, was in the early stages of opening a restaurant across town, with her brother as co-chef, and because she would never behave in such poor form as to poach cooks from the catering company, she did not offer jobs to anyone there. She just left. Her spot across from me at the prep island remained empty as we continued to cook the old familiar menus on autopilot. We watched as the owner apprehensively auditioned new chefs. One chef came, and then another, and one more still, and I stuck it out at the catering company for a few more months. The last chef I worked for introduced his signature dish in the first week or two—a pounded veal breast with a blueberry-Frangelico sauce topped with prosciutto, Parmesan, and pine nuts—and I clocked out on that dish and ran to Misty. I begged her for a job. Decent, timid catering food was one thing, but blueberry-Frangelico sauce …
They were planning a pan-tropical place, which allowed her to cook dishes from countries around the equator. I could feel and see her excitement and fresh energy not only to be in a new place, after eight years in the old one, with permission from the owners to really open up, but also to get her hands on new ingredients, and to read incessantly about unfamiliar dishes and cultures. The giant pile of books on her desk was heavily marked with yellow sticky memo tabs. The whole experience gave her demeanor a brightness that made the stained V-neck T-shirts that she still wore seem almost clean. Within weeks, she was happily exhausted rather than hopelessly worn down; she was almost talkative. For the first time I had picadillo, the slightly sweet ground meat hash popular in Spanish and Latin countries; and chimichurri, the green Argentinean sauce with chopped herbs; and asafoetida, the pungent, sulfuric Indian flavoring. Reluctantly, I tried Malibu coconut rum in cocktails, and they worked. She made pho, lemongrass ice cream, macadamia nut tartlets with lime curds, coconut creams, and passion fruit syrups. It was legitimate and well-prepared and delicious. We tested dishes over and over until we got them right, and they seemed, in spite of their Vietnamese origins, not out of place there on State Street across from the university. She found a local tortilla maker in Detroit, and she persuaded the famous Michigan store Zingerman’s to make chipotle challah for her rock shrimp club sandwich. She found fresh kefir lime leaves. She went through cases of nuoc mam. And enough galangal to fill a boat at the Bangkok floating market.
I saw fresh turmeric for the first time in her new kitchen and so learned—a bit late in my cooking life, I thought, for someone who thought for sure she knew everything—the difference between a root and a rhizome. Misty was able to distinguish between an Indonesian, a Chinese, a Vietnamese, and a Thai ground shrimp paste. It was the first time I heard a chef say, “I don’t know, let me look it up.” It was the first time I saw a chef solicit the opinion or experience of her staff. She was willing—always—to learn from any source. If the dishwasher’s mother had made posole for twenty years at every family reunion, Misty would ask him about it. If not to learn something that she didn’t already know, at least to benchmark her own experience against it.
It was a good kitchen. She ran it well.
It was the first time I saw a chef ask relevant questions of job seekers at their interviews. How long is your commute? Your fiance lives in Chicago? This is your third DUI? Between jail and TGI Friday’s you worked salads at Bombay Bicycle Lounge for how long? She knew well that the cooking end of things would be apparent in these applicants as soon as they entered the kitchen, and that it was a waste of interview time to ask them about their kitchen skills, which everybody lies about anyway. She was keen to discover if the rest of the package existed—the part where you need your crew to be somewhat sane, logical, and reliable. I learned from Misty that when a cook tells you that his girlfriend is moving to L.A. to break into movies, you had better start preparing for the departure of the boyfriend, as well.
When I had my final reading for my thesis, she knew well, and I knew that she knew, that my own move back to New York was not far behind. “And the lovebird? Is she going, too?” she asked, referring to my Michigan girlfriend.
“So it appears,” I said. “She’s packing her boxes. But I’m going to have to teach her how to drive faster and to give people the finger or she’ll be eaten alive.”
Misty chuckled.
“Well, I guess I’m going to have to come visit.”
Once during that miserable school year with our mother in Vermont, my seventh grade class took a school trip to New York City and visited the famous sculptor Claes Oldenburg’s studio in Soho. When we entered, there was a large white horizontal plank in the center of the room. And he had put a peephole i
n the center—exactly like the fish-eye peephole in every New York City apartment door. When you bent over and peered through it, you saw the back of your own head where you would have expected to have seen your own feet. It was so disorienting that it actually took several moments for you to understand what you were seeing. Some people took a long time figuring out what they were looking at. It’s not as assured and graceful as you might think to recognize the back of your own head when you see it. Especially when it is not where you expect to find it.
I had been staring right at Misty across that prep table and didn’t even recognize her for what she would come to be. It took me a long time to figure out what this woman in a dirty T-shirt grilling chicken breasts was teaching me. Or to even admit that I had learned something from her. One does not fend entirely for herself starting at puberty, and then gladly and easily turn around and credit just anyone who happens to come along later in life with having helped out. These kinds of admissions are careful. Gradual. Delayed. To call Misty my mentor isn’t accurate. I suspect it makes us both kind of uncomfortable—the implied intimacy of it for her and the fealty of it for me—and yet, if you squint with one eye, and look through that peephole, that is what she, for a certain important period, became.
8
I WAS NOT LOOKING TO OPEN A RESTAURANT. THAT WAS NEVER ON MY mind.
I was just dashing out to park the car one spring morning, when I ran into my neighbor Eric, a guy I knew only peripherally from years of living on the same block. I didn’t even know his last name, but we often saw each other during that hectic morning ritual of alternate side parking that New Yorkers, or at least East Villagers, seem to barely accomplish in time to beat the meter maid. It’s a twice a week early morning ritual, Mondays and Thursdays or Tuesdays and Fridays, depending on which side of the street you’re on, in which everyone on the block with a car comes rushing out of their building to move their machines, still wearing their pajamas and with pillow creases still marking their faces. Eric was sitting on the stoop in front of a long-shuttered restaurant space mid-block, and as I zoomed by in my sweatpants and hastily slipped-on clogs, we waved. He said, “You still cooking?”
I was, technically. I had taken an interim chef job at one of those huge West Side Highway catering companies where I had formerly been a freelancer while they performed a thorough talent search to find their real next chef. I was just a three-month placeholder, during the dead season, which is why I felt fine taking the job. I reasoned that it was a moderate way for me to make some money while I continued to write and to resolve my last lingering uncertainties about my place in a kitchen.
“I am, sort of,” I said.
“Wanna take a look at this space?”
I was off that day, with big plans to sit on my couch procrastinating the writing of my novel-in-progress.
“Sure. I’ll take a look. Why not.”
There was a faded yellow typewritten letter in the window from the former tenant—a French guy who had run a bistro that thrived for a brief but bright couple of years—advising customers that the restaurant would just be closing for a two-week vacation and renovation. They looked forward to seeing you soon! Bonnes Vacances! Two weeks had turned into two years, and I could see, from the second we stepped inside, that there had been no vacation planned at all.
“Bankruptcy,” Eric said.
It looked like the restaurant had desperately done business right up until 12:01 a.m., when the city marshal came and padlocked the place, leaving the coolers full of lamb shanks, dairy, and crème brûlées. There were racks of dirty dishes sitting outside the machine, which sat ajar, as if the dishwasher had just run downstairs for a few more clean towels and a gallon of pink liquid before running his next load. The pot sink was packed with dirty sauté pans. The pastry station had black shriveled pastry in the coolers, and the espresso machine had hard, spent pucks of powder fossilized into the ports. Next to the machine sat a stainless steel pitcher with long spoons in it, as if a café machiatto was in the works just as the city’s assessor walked in the door with his huge ring of keys. There were cigarette butts in the ashtray, as if the early waiter had already sat down and begun his paperwork and tip sorting at the end of his shift.
Eric, who owned a couple of units upstairs in the coop and who was now putting some effort into sorting out the mess of the abandoned storefront, showed me around the restaurant as I held my T-shirt pressed over my nose and mouth. The place was putrid. The floors grabbed the soles of my shoes with every step. So much rat shit had melted in the summer heat and commingled with the rat urine over the two years that the space had sat there idle that it was like walking on old glue traps. I had to run outside for gulps of fresh air after several minutes in the restaurant.
The electricity, oddly, had not been cut off but the light bulbs had died, and most egregiously, the freon had run out in coolers that still had running fans. When I opened a door on the sauté station reach-in refrigerator, I was hit by a blast of fetid warm air coming from decomposed lamb shanks and chicken carcasses. There were legions of living cockroaches. The basement was very dark. Only one tube of a fluorescent flickered overhead. It was impossible not to jump out of your skin with the creeps with every brush of your own hair on your own neck. In the walk-in, by the dim light of a weak flashlight, I stupidly opened a full case of apples only to have a gray, sooty cloud of spores—like a swarm of gnats—fly up into my nostrils and eyelashes. Twenty-five pounds of apples had rotted away to black dust.
And yet, even with the cockroaches crawling over bread baskets and sticky bottles of Pernod, I could see that the place had immense charm. There was an antique zinc bar with just four seats that had been salvaged from a bistro in France and shipped over. There were gorgeous antique mirrors everywhere, making the tiny space seem bigger than it was, and an old wooden banquette, and wrought-iron table bases. The floor, under all that sticky rat excreta, was laid with the exact same tiny hexagonal tiles that had been on the floor of a crêperie in Brittany where I had worked for a brief period in my early twenties. Even when gulping the comparatively fresh New York City air once back on the sidewalk, thinking I might have been poisoned in some way, I knew the space was exactly “me.” There were ten sturdy burners. Just two ovens. And fewer than thirty seats. I could cook by hand, from stove to table, never let a propane brûlée torch near a piece of food, and if it came down to it, I could just reach over the pass and deliver the food myself. I knew exactly what and how to cook in that kind of space, I knew exactly what kind of fork we should have, I knew right away how the menu should read and how it would look handwritten, and I knew immediately, even, what to call it.
“Any interest?” Eric asked.
A thin blue line of electricity was running through my body.
“Maybe,” I bluffed.
I had no idea how to open a restaurant. I had that work ethic and that nearly strange mania for cleaning and organizing kitchens to forever re-create my own mother’s. And I had just spent a few good long years understanding my relationship to kitchen work itself and could, with a certain calmness, claim to have put the question to bed; the greener pastures I had been straining my neck to gaze at all those years were not, predictably, as sweet and filled with clover as I had always imagined. But in all the most pertinent ways, I had nothing. For starters, I had never been the chef of a restaurant. I had never even been the sous chef of a restaurant. I had never cut a check for more than a thousand dollars or balanced a checkbook that ever had more in it than a thousand and fifteen. All I knew about a walk-in refrigerator was how to tidy it up and the most I knew about an oven was how to turn it on and roast a brined turkey in it. The only lawyer I’d ever retained was the one who’d bailed me out of my grand larceny charges as a seventeen-year-old. To imagine that a newly jogged memory about the few dishes and food experiences I had managed to collect at my mother’s apron strings would be enough to sustain a restaurant would be naive. And to open a restaurant with nothing more than an i
dea for a menu, a clean kitchen, and an apt name would have been certain failure.
As we parted on the sidewalk, I said to Eric with a distinct doubtfulness, “I’ll think about it. Let’s talk again later.” But once back in my apartment, I felt very nearly combustible with something I could not tamp down with any blanket of reason or logic I threw in front of it. I doodled menus. Pulled some plates down from my own stack and set a mock table. I opened the windows to the new spring weather and cranked the stereo with songs I fantasized would bust out of the speakers at my new restaurant. To try and disrupt this electric hum of “rightness” that had taken hold in my gut and was now spreading through my being, I recited, at length, my lack of restaurant experience. I punctuated every thought with that famous statistic that 80 percent of new businesses go under in the first year. I pointed out to myself that I had never fired anyone. And noted that I certainly had never been involved in the even more complex parts of boss-hood that crop up in between the beginning and the end of an employee’s tenure, like issuing a W-2, understanding FICA taxes, and articulating a sexual harassment policy.
In spite of my efforts to be rational, the birds and the sunshine were in concert outside, as if egging me on, and while I told myself over and over that I couldn’t possibly open a restaurant in New York City, the most critical and sophisticated place on earth where I would be eaten alive by some restaurant reviewer within the first fifteen minutes of unlocking the doors, I nonetheless merrily pulled out all of my wooden salad bowls and wooden cutting boards and wondered if it would be a health code violation to use them in my restaurant instead of the heavy white plastic ones. As I reminded myself of my total lack of credentials, not to mention my total lack of one thin dime, let alone the fifty large I would need to put toward such a venture to play “serious,” I simultaneously fantasized ripping out the fluorescents and replacing them with incandescents. While anyone who actually knew what they were doing would have come right home and crunched some numbers involving square footage, check average, and an ROI for her backers, I sprawled on the couch in my bare feet, staring into the middle distance, and wondered how I might serve walnuts from the Perigord and a small perfect tangerine so that the restaurant patrons could also sit at their table after the meal and squeeze the citrus peel into the candle flame to make fragrant blue and yellow sparks as I had done on my mother’s lap as a child. By dusk that same evening, I called Eric and said, “I’d like to take another, closer look.”
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