Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  —

  My family considered my internship a great coup. My mom fretted over my hours while encouraging me to put the recipes she’d taught me on the menu—as if I were a contributor. Grandma Dion, my mom’s mom, wrote to me in loopy cursive asking me how I liked working at “the café.” Aaron knew exactly where I was, and was happy for me, but he was also somewhat fearful of my unbridled enthusiasm: what devotions to this city it might inspire, what long-term commitments would keep us from returning to our house that summer to grow our garden. To my car-dealer dad I simply reported the numbers.

  “It’s all six-day weeks, Dad, thirteen to fourteen hours a day.”

  “Wonderful!” he boomed. He worked a long six-day week himself, so this was not considered excessive.

  “Actually, Dad,” I corrected, “it was eighty-seven hours last week.”

  “Even more wonderful!”

  As the fifth week of my internship slid into its final one, Mario teased me as he watched me herky-jerkily dice some potatoes with my heavy German culinary-school-issued knife. “Ahmy,” he said, gesturing with the blade of his sharp Japanese slicer. “When you going to get a real knife?” The entire kitchen staff was obsessed with a Japanese knife shop within walking distance of the restaurant called Korin. Cooks on their day off regularly stopped by to show off their new knife candy, injecting a spot of cheer to our long days.

  Mario had given me no hope that my tenure there would be anything but temporary. But for some reason I found myself boldly saying, “I’ll get a new knife when you start giving me a paycheck.”

  It was true. I couldn’t afford one.

  He looked at me through eyes slitted for seeing a distance.

  “Okay. You start for real on canapé on Monday. By yourself.”

  I knew the honeymoon was over. My marriage to the fine-dining brigade—which at times felt more like admission to an unfriendly harem—was about to begin.

  —

  I went to Korin and bought a very good Japanese carbon knife, soft and easy to sharpen on a water stone. It’s still the one I use most often, its brand forgotten, its dark charcoal blade swirled with a hot wind of orange rust.

  The guys set about teaching me how to take care of it. Nick ran his knife frantically on the sharpening stone, like an adolescent taking matters of need into his own hands. Kazu did it slower, and taught me to sharpen the first side more than the second and to feel the roll of the burr on the underside before gently whisking it off against the stone. All of them gauged sharpness by reverently slicing against the grain of their arm hairs.

  Not every cook in the kitchen was so neurotic about keeping their edges razor-sharp. Yugi, the young fish cook (nicknamed Eugene by the Americans), smiled and shrugged with Japanese modesty, saying, “My knife is sharp enough.” The Austrians were of the same mind. The other Austrian sous chef named Thomas, whom we called T2, used a heavy German cook’s knife, never sharpened it, and could cut a butternut squash into precise matchsticks in about three minutes, his knife powered not by a razor edge but by intention and sheer confidence. T1 constantly ran his long Japanese slicer against a honing steel, never on the stone, and could do the same.

  I might have learned how to sharpen my knife, and how to cut a sheaf of chives into paper-thin rings, but I was still greener than a fern. And everyone knew it.

  “J. Lo is in the bar! Her ass is on a barstool!” the guys hooted, and they could not believe that in the year 2000, at the height of her rise, I did not know who she was. Jennifer Lopez I might have faintly heard of, but not this bootylicious “J. Lo.” I had literally just spent much of the last three years in the woods, deprived of media.

  In a lot of ways, my innocence saved me. If I had known exactly where I was or who I was knocking shoulders with, I would have been too freaked out to work, because this kitchen was stocked with the highest density of cooks who would go on to cook famously than any other kitchen I’d ever work in again. Gabriel would own three restaurants on Nantucket and appear regularly in food magazines. Harrison would helm a cultish small place in the East Village. Cesar would open Brooklyn’s first Michelin three-star restaurant. King would own a bunch of notable Filipino restaurants. Einat would open a couple of Israeli spots in the city and write a cookbook. Galen, next door at Bouley, would launch multiple restaurants of his own, and Bill, the Bouley pastry chef, would eventually become pastry chef at the White House. There was not a slouch in the bunch. It turned out to be a beautiful thing, that naïveté, because it gave me a blind courage. I’ve been dealing with the sad aftereffects of its erosion ever since.

  I was twenty-four years old, ancient for a European cook, but average for Danube, an experienced kitchen. The head fish guy was in his midthirties and the meat guy was maybe pushing forty, and yet the three Austrians liked to point out how old we were. To their point, our knees were aging fast, scaling the steps between the upstairs serving kitchen and the downstairs prep kitchen at least fifty times a day.

  In cook years, however, I was still a babe in the woods. After eventually moving up from canapés to garde-manger, even my salads were off, and Mario was not afraid to point it out.

  “What are you doing, beating up my salad?” he scoffed, throwing the contents of my mixing bowl into the trash. He started with new greens, squirted them with vinaigrette, and tumbled them with his hands, as one might wash a delicate bra, and then lifted them in an airy heap onto the plate.

  “Never break their ribs,” he said softly, guilting me as effectively as if I’d been breaking their bones.

  We felt someone standing behind us and turned around.

  “My dad is here!” Mario beamed, formally introducing us. “He is making us the goulash today.”

  His father, who had come all the way from Mario’s hometown in rural Austria, smiled widely (for he didn’t speak much English), and motioned for the canister of hot paprika on the shelf above my head.

  He took the paprika and sprinted away. Small and quick. That’s odd, I thought, he seems too young to be Mario’s father.

  “Um, Chef, can I ask? How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four,” Mario said, leaning over into my sink. He slurped up water with his hand, rubbed it all over his face, and casually wiped himself down with a brown C-fold towel as if mopping off from a shower. I thought for a second that he was going to dig out his ears with it.

  “You and I are the same age?” I asked. I was shocked. He was so young and so…good.

  “Yes,” he said, narrowing his eyes and smiling. “We are the same age.” He dropped the smile, tilted his head, and searched my face.

  “Ahmy, you are so old.” Meaning so old to be working garde-manger, the cold appetizer station.

  In any normal narrative, I might easily have spent nine months on that cold station. But as the fairy tale goes, someone quit. I remember that his name was Joel. He was a petite, quiet-spoken, sandy-haired guy, struggling on the line, sliding roughly around the station in an untucked uniform every night. Before that evening’s service Mario clapped his hands above his head and called us in for circle time. With theatrical formality he announced, “Everyone, Joel is leaving us. To become a food writer,” he said with a predatory smile. “His last day will be tomorrow. We wish him the best of luck in his future career.” This grandiose crew meeting was as effective as a snicker, as we never congregated to discuss someone’s leave-taking and certainly not for an early-out. In cases like Joel’s, the guy would usually just shove the contents of his locker into a white takeout bag after service and call the night his last. Joel, with a blanched face, nodded and blinked at the floor.

  Mario came up to me and laid an arm around my shoulders. “You should come and eat in the dining room tomorrow night.” Did he mean I should go there for dinner? We couldn’t afford that. He felt the hesitation in my back.

  “No, you and your boyfriend come to dinner on me. Taste the dishes. Come tomorrow.” He said it politely, but I understood; it was painfully obvious that I need
ed contextualizing, that I needed to eat this food in order to learn how to cook it. It also meant that I would be taking Joel’s place as meat entremetier on the hot line.

  I was thrilled with the chance to bring Aaron into my world. We both dressed up—him in a suit, me forsaking my grungy sports bra for a real one and my clunky work shoes for heels. We walked into the dining room and were struck with instant, simultaneous fear. The lighting was womblike. There was a tiny door behind the bar that led to the kitchen and servers passed through it swiftly, letting out just flickering slivers of its harsh fluorescent light and none of its hot energy. In the dining room, the head servers—called captains—tracked around smoothly as if on rails. The bubbles in the champagne cocktail that Stefan the bartender handed me rolled up serenely on invisible filaments from the bottom to the top. I was shaking with the formality of it, uncomfortable being on the other side of the swinging door. Aaron looked similarly shivery.

  The first glass of wine helped. My glass would be my crutch. First came the amuse-bouches, just as I had been making them: the crispy sardine in potato chips, the sweet-and-sour octopus salad, the little cup of spiced squash soup. They all tasted so much better in the dining room than they did in the kitchen. The second I finished my wine to accompany the first course, Didier the head captain was there to refill my glass. I didn’t realize that with a wine pairing, it was wise to pace yourself. Eric, another captain, smiled broadly.

  “I recognize this smell,” Aaron said, eating the sardine, “from your hair after work.”

  He looked around the room, at the gilded rafters, the glittering Klimt reproductions, the plush velvet banquettes, the grandmotherly fringed lamps. “This place is totally crazy,” he said, absorbing every facet of the room’s excesses with growing admiration, “over the top…” I knew he was thinking of performance and decadence, of David Bowie, of glam rock. The reason he had worn a glittery cape when performing with his band, Aaron America, had everything in common with this dining room. “They got the lighting right, though.” They had. It was soft and luscious, like the food, like my rapidly evaporating sobriety.

  I let my head drop low over the new course and inhaled, rather dramatically. The monkfish with artichokes and black trumpet mushrooms, which had seemed to me the least exciting dish we made, surprised me the most. It expressed something dark: hidden corners and sweet earth and a weird candle-burning spice…that pinch of réglisse, or licorice root powder. In the kitchen I had tasted the sauce alone, droplets from the tip of my spoon, but never with the roasted fish itself. Knit together into one forkful, the monkfish was a soother in a tasting menu of dynamic courses, a low-buzzing romantic dish.

  The captains hovered around our table, spoiling us, circling back to make conversation as I sunk into a loose state of drunkenness. Eric came over and dropped some complaint about Didier, and then Didier came back to pour more wine and bitch about Eric, and then before I knew it they were standing over us, whispering hotly, quietly fighting in the relative cover behind our corner table. I leaned back and smiled at Aaron, my eyes lost inside my high pink cheeks. I belonged. We belonged. My nerves fully unwound, I reached to grab his hand to punctuate whatever it was we were talking about…when my delicious Zweigelt, my chokecherry and plum and moss forest-floor wine, spilled in a moat around his pink lamb chops. The captains broke their huddle and Eric immediately laid a calm hand on Aaron’s plate.

  “Let us replate this for you, Aaron.”

  “Nah!” I bleated, not wanting to be a bother to my fellow cooks in the kitchen. “He’ll just eat it like that.” Aaron glared at me. He didn’t want to eat it like that. That’s when everyone, including me, knew that I was completely toasted. This was not so bright. The next day I was coming in early, to train with T1 on the hot line.

  —

  Thomas Kahl, the first of our two sous chefs named Thomas to arrive from Austria, had a shaved bald head and wore heavy combat boots and an expression of disdain. He bounced ever so slightly at rest, like a lion ready to pounce, which suggested to me that he’d experienced some serious kitchen combat and had exited it triumphant.

  For his first week he hustled around the kitchen muttering a single word: “Bullshit.” Later on his English would kick in, but in the beginning the hot, uncovered braised beef cheeks steaming on the lower shelf of the walk-in were bullshit. The dregs of Dijon mustard in the jar next to the newly opened one were bullshit. My bloody cutting board, smeared with the guts of so many badly butchered sardines, was really bullshit.

  When Thomas Myer arrived, with a more sensitive demeanor, wearing loafers, his plaid pants tucked into his socks, smacking of the rural Michelin-starred auberge he’d just come from, we called the first Thomas T1 and him T2 (and sometimes Terminator 1 and 2). They both regularly pulled sixteen-hour shifts, keeping long hours on the bullshit patrol. Both Thomases and Mario spoke devoutly of their former kitchens in Europe, mostly of the restaurant they had all worked at together, Chef Hans Haas’s Tantris in Munich, which led the charge in Europe for contemporary Austrian cuisine. They spoke of Hans Haas with deep-bass-note reverence, much like the Jedi. Tan-tris. I imagined a shadowy dining room draped in black.

  I knew that the Austrians clearly thought that we Americans all pretty much sucked, so I was curious as to why the newbie me had been plucked from the garde-manger and chosen to work the entremet. I asked T1, “Why me instead of one of the other guys?”

  “None of you are that good, but your mom made the spaetzle, right?”

  I blushed, caught gushing about my mother’s home cooking to this international crew. “Yeah, and noodles.”

  “In brown butter, I know,” he said. “But let’s go, hey. Big list today.”

  I crouched in front of the low-boy refrigerators below the station, expecting to see a menagerie of station prep but finding nothing but a quart of picked parsley leaves and a tub of plum jam. I fell back on my heels. Joel had left me nothing?

  T1 smiled at me from above, tapping his knife on the board, keeping his beat.

  “I threw it all in the garbagio. No fucking bueno.” This phrase was his new “bullshit,” more fitting to the Spanish patois of our kitchen. He motioned for me to grab an empty bus tub and hurtled down the stairs to the vegetable walk-in refrigerator.

  In the cool walk-in he started loading down the tub: twelve endive, a vanilla bean, fourteen carrots, a bunch of celery, a bunch of chives, some thyme, rosemary, a handful of fresh bay leaves—“the Turkish bay leaves, like this,” he grabbed the fatter ones, “not the California ones, too much perfume”—two celeriac roots, a head of red cabbage, a few anchovies, ten lemons. “You get the micro greens. Just for garnish. Kohlrabi and beet only.” I reached up on tiptoe and opened the plastic lid to a dizzying array of plug trays of baby spouts. Kohlrabi, I knew that one. And there was the red-stemmed beet. Cool. I scooped them into two corners of a metal prep container.

  He handed me another and gestured to a plastic tub in the corner. “Fill this with crème fraîche.”

  As I was scooping up the white goo, he said, “Hey, Amy,” kicking off a routine that he would repeat every chance he got for the rest of my time there. “We need horseradish, too.” I turned around to find T1 waiting with an enormous rough-skinned horseradish root hanging from his fly, its rhizome top forked into two knobs. Horseradish schlong: so infantile and yet so absurdly apt I had to crack a smile. His head nodded with silent laughter. Real sexism in the kitchen I would later learn to recognize—it was a lot more underhanded and more insidious—but this obvious shit I found amusing.

  Back upstairs, I tried to shake the image out of my head and get down to business.

  “Let’s start with the purees,” he said. The vegetable purees, the backbone of the meat garnish station, were the down pillows of the plate. I dragged a rondeau to a hot spot on the wide steel flat-top, lobbed in a chunk of butter, and hastily rustled together the heap of flat parsnip coins between my hands.

  “No, no, wait. You salt the ve
getable first on the cutting board, so it can start to sweat.” He misted fine sea salt over the parsnips and muddled them with his hands. Almost instantly a mist of perspiration beaded up on each slice. “Now when you cook them in the butter, they’ll taste more like themselves.” He tapped his spoon on the metal piano—the outer ledge of the stovetop’s apron—and continued: “Use a lot of fat. Cook them all the way soft. If you add the stock now, when the vegetable is half-done, you’re not making a puree, you’re making soup.”

  It seemed I did everything wrong. I oversalted everything that shrank upon contact with heat: mushrooms, spinach. He made a sour face and wordlessly threw the entire pan into the dish tub. I cooked the schnitzel too slow and it came out looking soggy. “Limp, like an old man.” I cooked it too hot so that its crust puffed properly into a toffee-colored balloon, but it wore bedsores of blackness on its bottom. He threw those out, too. Mostly, though, I was just too slow.

  I reserved most of my attention for the more glamorous things I’d never seen before: foie gras cooked medium, fleshy pink at the center like liver putty; cherries braised in balsamic; endive cooked into a marmalade; wild mushroom confit; truffle sauce made with a quart of reduced veal stock, a bottle of fine Madeira, and a fifty-dollar jar of truffle pieces. I babied the truffle sauce, ignoring my potato stock boiling away on the flat-top.

  “Hey.” He nodded toward the stock, which was going berserk. “Not so bueno.”

  I quickly whipped my pot to the cool side of the stove, where its violent bubbles sputtered out.

  His voice sharpened. “You know, this is not about the truf-fles and the fwaah,” he said with a forced American accent. “Good cooking is potatoes and onions.”

  Danube’s kitchen didn’t look like one that ran on potatoes and onions. From what I could tell, it looked to be pretty well fueled by the foie, the engorged liver of a force-fed duck; we went through so much of it. But while flurries of truffles rained down on shiny butter-poached lobster claws, I saw that T1 was right. Many sauces relied on the potato stock for their base: an emerald-green chive sauce to accompany pan-seared scallops, a honey-colored horseradish sauce for beef.