Young cooks who desired to be chefs went to auberges in the countryside of France and slept on cots and worked without pay for sixteen hours a day, six days a week. They did these apprenticeships called “stages,” which I never heard of until well after I’d opened my own restaurant. Of course I had never worked anywhere in my life where young people apprenticed for free in hopes of learning something valuable; The Canal House and The Picnic Basket and Mother’s were the kinds of restaurants where the only thing that mattered to anyone was their paycheck, their tips, and their free shift drink.
People who knew about stage-ing were French boys on the cusp of manhood who lived in France and spoke French, and when they were fourteen and clearly not cut out for the books at their lycèe, would wander down the road to their local two-star inn and tap on the screen door of the kitchen there.
They joined—at the bottom—the ranks of a brigade kitchen and did their little part learning how to be clean, fast, efficient, and perfectly repetitive. They plucked the feathers from partridges that arrived through the back doors of the kitchens, they quickly washed berries picked by local men and women from their own bushes, they scrubbed copper as punishments. I knew nothing of it. Not one detail. I didn’t even know such an apprenticeship existed or that anyone would aspire to such a thing.
I was clearly in no two-star country auberges. The locals—Riton and Andrè and Yannick—all of them strangely cross-eyed, chain-smoking, semi-literate drunks—leaned too many days a week and too many hours a day against that bar where I was understanding for the first time the chasm between coffee ground to order per cupful and what I’d slurped every morning from Dimitri with my egg-on-a-roll, which came out of a stainless steel tank. The patrons and crew of our little sports bar cum crêperie on that gray corner in that drab small town resembled nothing of the fine dining clientele of a two-star Relais and Chateaux inn nor its brigade. Michel, always in street clothes with the same apron used for the whole work week unwashed, smoking while mixing crêpe batter, and Marie Nöelle, nervously sipping her tisanes to calm her ever since Yves had offed himself, and the barmaid Sylvie with her long black hair rarely washed and never pulled back, who seemed to know just the right time to pour a free round and who very warmly received the flirtations of the cross-eyed, toothless, shit-stinking admirers—resembled not one aspect of a tocqued brigade meticulously fluting mushroom caps. Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about the baguette at breakfast, and everyone knew how to prepare a simple roast chicken and a few potatoes cooked in the local heavily salted butter. Everyone casually tipped the last sip of the red wine from their glass into their dish of soup and mopped it all up with the crusty heel left in the bread basket. I was sucking something in. Something unmitigated.
This is the crêpe.
This is the cider.
This is how we live and eat.
This man with bits of straw stuck to his thick blue Breton sweater, leaning up against the bar for a ballon of vin rouge ordinaire with a splash of water in it at eight-thirty in the morning, is the farmer whose milk we have been drinking, whose leeks we have been braising. These are the knotty, wormy, quite small apples from which the cider is made. And here, as a treat to celebrate my last day before continuing on my journey, when we drove to the coast, past fields of shooting asparagus and trees about to burst forth, and we stopped finally at the water’s edge, in St. Malo—here are the platters of shellfish pulled that very morning from the sea—langouste, langoustines, moules, cre-vettes, huîtres, bulots, bigorneaux, coques. These are the pearl-tipped hat pins stuck into a wine bottle cork for pulling out the meats of the sea snails. The tide ran out, and the fishing boats slumped in the mud attached to their slack anchors like leashed dogs sleeping in the yard. The particular smell of sea mud went up our nostrils as we slurped the brine from the shells in front of us, so expertly and neatly arranged on the tiers.
“Cin Cin!” Marino and I saluted each other, celebrating these past few months, and clinked together our glasses of Muscadet sur lie.
I AM AWARE, in hindsight, that no real chef or restaurateur, when signing the thirty-year lease on her first restaurant, thinks back suddenly to the miserable beginnings of her wintry backpacking trip and considers it as part of her business plan. I now fully understand that instead of conjuring peak food moments in my life and trying to analyze what had made them so important, as if that was some kind of legitimate preparation for tackling the famously difficult restaurant business, I really should have been crawling up into the pipe work, noticing the water damage in the basement, and asking hard questions of Eric about the infrastructure of the one-hundred-year-old tenement building. If I had even known what one was, I should have asked about the C of O. While I was dreaming of how I would someday get that Gouda and that warm salted potato into the mouths of future guests, I should have been researching the restaurant’s Certificate of Occupancy, arguably the most basic important document your restaurant will ever need. I’d never heard of due diligence. But there I was, pacing around my apartment, puzzling out how I could harness a hundred pivotal experiences relating to food—including hunger and worry—and translate those experiences into actual plates of food and wondering if eight dollars was too much to charge for a wedge of aged Gouda cheese and a couple of warm, salted boiled potatoes.
Of course it wasn’t a stage; it was not a real education in a real kitchen. It was just a few months of living at the source of something rather than reading about it in a food magazine or learning about it from a chef-instructor in a starched and monogrammed jacket at cooking school, in the lifeless context of stainless steel and insta-read thermometers. I didn’t consider it, at the time, anything pertinent to my future. But I was emboldened to sign that lease, in part because I had learned about buckwheat galettes and white flour crêpes and room temperature lettuce and salted butter and cellared hard cider in a typical Breton crêperie.
And it didn’t end, this inadvertent and unconventional stage, with our kisses on both cheeks on that train platform in Rennes as I said good-bye to Marino and headed on to Paris and then the rest of my life in petit exil as I had initially planned.
There was more than a full year ahead of me—three months in India, seven months in Turkey, one month in Thailand, six months in Greece—during which I came to understand the differences and eventually to even have preferences between the milk from a certain wallah in Delhi and one in Rajasthan, the cooking of eggplant in Turkey over the cooking of eggplant in Greece, the sugar derived from beets in Romania and from cane in Cuba—for example—that would become part of my education as a cook.
There were uncomfortable bus and train rides that lasted for several days and nights, which I relied upon repeatedly—that three-day ticket keeping me sheltered and moving, because it killed two birds with one stone: the cost of travel and the cost of shelter—and so I would find my seat and remain in it, not even peeing or smoking or stepping out onto the platform for a leg stretch for the entire journey from Paris to Athens, from Mahabalipurum to Varanasi, from Bangkok to Chang Mai, from Istanbul to Ankara. And on those journeys, those crossings, I came to know extraordinary and particular hunger.
As my initial twelve hundred dollars in traveler’s checks dwindled down uncomfortably, I stared out the window of that bus or train in three-day increments in a glassy, light-headed state wondering about those women in the fields in the bright headscarves, the acres and acres of lopsided sunflowers all draping over in the same direction as the sun shines, the small stone huts out in the fields, the gray-green dry trees with silvery leaves. Flattened out by the heavy fear of how I would make it with just a few hundred remaining dollars, I did what I always do when I am afraid and went quite still, with a total slackening of will or need, and I thought all of my thoughts, sifted through all of my old nostalgias, while couples fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, bus drivers honked friendly hellos at each other through those panoramic windshields of their buses, little brush fires burned at night on the
sides of the road, and solitary figures rode bikes shakily on the shoulder of the highway.
I starved. And I starved so many times on this repeated three-day bus ride or train journey from somewhere to somewhere else that I came to know every contour of my hunger in precise detail. When I came to be actually holding the keys to my new restaurant, wondering what credentials I possibly possessed for owning and operating such a place, I counted knowing hunger and appetite as one of them. It became such a recurring experience during this period when I was twenty—to be starving and afraid of running out of money—as I wandered from Brussels to Burma and everywhere in between for months on end, that I later came to see it as a part of my training as a cook. I came to see hunger as being as important a part of a stage as knife skills. Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything, to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name every corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and watery, and so on.
This kind of travel, so distinctly prior to ATMs, debit cards, cash advance credit cards, cell phones, Facebook, and international SIM cards is probably not even possible now. And it isn’t right to romanticize it; you, with a feathery mind and a too light body, sitting on your heavy pack without a penny of local currency, down to your last two hundred sixty dollars in traveler’s checks, with not one person on earth able to locate you on a map in any more than the most general terms, and the local American Express office closed until Tuesday because of some local holiday or labor strike.
To be picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became the single most important and convincing food experience I came back to over and over, that sunny afternoon humming around my apartment, wondering how I might translate such an experience into the restaurant I was now sure I was about to open down the block. I so completely understood hospitality and care from a bedraggled recipient’s point of view, that even before I came to understand how garbage removal is billed on square yardage of waste and that a commercial storefront should have a separate water meter from the building’s, I knew I had to somehow get that kind of hospitality into this minor little thirty-seater in the as-yet-ungentrified and still heavily graffitied East Village.
MELISSA HAD GIVEN ME the address and phone number of a man in Athens before I’d left home with my backpack. And at one of those unromantic points, alone in a new country, wasted on the youth hostel experience, down to my last dollars, my expensive camera long since ripped off, I dug up Iannis’s number. These calls were always hard for me. I had developed such an intense deal about self-reliance, I bristled against having to need or want anything or anyone. Ever. But here I was in Greece and I couldn’t even read the alphabet on the signs in this new country. I’d eaten nothing but a raw red onion, a sack of salted pumpkin seeds, and a glass of warm dry vermouth in the previous five days, and so I gulped down all my embarassment about having to ask for help and called ahead to this stranger, Iannis.
He couldn’t have made it easier for me. “Yes! Yes!” he shouted into the phone, speaking excellent Oxford English. “You are most welcome here! I will be at my offices in the afternoon. Can you make your way into Athens from Piraeus or shall I come and retrieve you?” he shouted.
“No! No!” I shouted back. “I can make my way. I will just make my way into the city and call you again, if that is okay with you.”
“Yes!” he shouted back, his welcome palpable. “I will await your call! I will be waiting!”
Iannis, probably twenty years older than me, with a big mustache and laugh lines all around his green eyes, met me in Omonia Square, brought me to his apartment, and without even inquiring, set to work frying in olive oil two eggs with the darkest orange yolks I had ever seen, then sprinkled them with a coarse sea salt and cut a slice from a thick, crusty loaf of bread. In a blender he mixed apple, honey, and milk and set this incredible, refreshing meal in front of me, beaming his huge smile. I was craving salt and starch. Eggs and bread.
In the evening, we were joined by a friend of his, and we walked to a restaurant near to the Acropolis. They knew the waiter by name, and he didn’t even bother keeping track of how many drinks we ordered, he just brought to our table the big bottle of ouzo, put a rubber band around the bottle to mark the level of the contents, and then let us self serve as we wished. However much we depleted from the rubber band mark by the end is what we paid for. Iannis, without wasting a moment on that awkward and tedious conversation that will unhappily precede so many hundreds and hundreds of future restaurant meals in all of our lives—whether to share or not to share and whether or not there are food phobias and dietary restrictions among us—simply ordered food for the table without even consulting a menu, and so set the standard for me for all time of excellent hospitality: Just take care of everything. Is it considered more hospitable to discover your guests’ preferences, their likes and dislikes? Is it rude to deny your guests choice and control over their experience? I don’t know, but I forever want to arrive somewhere hungry and thirsty and tired and be taken care of as Iannis took care of us. I want to be relieved of making possibly poor decisions, to be spared the embarrassing moment when I—the guest—am asked to state my preference for red or white wine, meat or fish, sparkling or still water, when I know that whatever I say will be a decision rendered for the whole table. Delicious food and drink arrived at our table, and it was immediately clear how Iannis hadn’t needed a menu or a survey of our preferences to order because he simply presented a classic, traditional Greek meal. There was saganaki and taramasalata and skordalia to start, some grilled lamb and octopus to follow, a classic salad with feta cheese, and the best part, a couple of raw sardines on a stainless steel plate that we cooked ourselves in pure alcohol set alight, but not before Kostas, roaring with laughter, sent one of them back to be traded in for a female. I could not for my life at that time have discerned between a male and a female sardine, nor the gustatory difference, but I laughed too and felt one hundred months of worry and care lift from my head up up up into the orange-scented Greek night. Iannis said, “Tomorrow we will go to my house on the island. It is small but I hope you will like it.” Kostas smiled his huge smile, the only blue-eyed blond Greek I’d ever met, and said, assuredly, “You will love it!”
Even if you hadn’t been strung out in youth hostels for months, keeping constant paralyzing track of your dwindling dollars, repetitively checking the pouch around your neck that held your passport and your money with a kind of obsessive worry, you would drink up this warmth and this generosity like it was ice cold beer. Iannis was thrilled to show me his city, the food of his country, his house on the island, to give me a frothy glass of apple, milk, and honey to drink in the cool salvation of his terrace, where a small orange tree grew, giving off its perfume.
And Kostas was right. I did love the island. I loved it so much that I stayed for months, and found a job in a well-lit touristy restaurant in the center of the port that paid a thousand drachmas a day where I washed dishes and pots and cleaned all the calamari and made hundreds of koriatiki—the Greek salad with tomatoes and feta. The waiters wore black pants and white polo shirts and smoked a pack of cigarettes in a single shift. I made my home in a little hut I had built on the beach. I showered in the ocean, shat behind the rocks, slept under the stars, and spent those early days in Serifos wandering the mountainside. Chamomile, mint, capers, oregano, thyme, figs, lemons, oranges—these grew so rampantly that when you walked, the herbs crushed underfoot and released their scent into the air. I followed narrow goat paths, and the shiny, black licorice, jelly bean goat poops guided me to hidden fresh water and mountainside gardens tended by their owners who came and went on donkeys. At the top of the world, high up in the mountain away from everything, I would sometimes encounter an old man, a goat herder with his tinkling goats, coming down
the mountain riding his donkey in a wooden saddle as his dog followed. “Xiarete!” I greeted him, and he said back “Iachera.”
And every night when I finished work, I walked to the very end of the port, to the last light before the vast darkness beyond the mountain jutting up out of the sea. There was a restaurant there. A few tables scattered in the yard under the long-needled pine trees where the locals went. Tourists had been swarming the Greek islands for decades of course, and everyone knew of the wild nightlife in Santorini and the party yachts in Mykonos, but Serifos was a world away, a tiny island in the undiscovered Cyclades where only Greeks went, where the oven at the bakery in Livadi was still used communally and town women brought their casseroles to bake in the ashes after the day’s bread had been baked, and Margarita’s little place there at the end of the port will forever be my idea of a perfect restaurant. Her son went out in his boat and fished and whatever he netted and however much of it he caught is what was for dinner. If it ran out at eight p.m., it just ran out, and people ached to see some delicious thing on the next table that they couldn’t also have because there just hadn’t been enough. If you wanted the lamb, it came saucy and ungarnished—alone on a plate. If you also wanted broad beans or potatoes, you ordered them separately and she served them also on separate plates. Margarita, maybe only forty but looking sixty, with sun-hardened skin and thick working hands, rode her donkey, sidesaddle, up into the hillside and got everything she cooked from her garden. I walked there many times in the early mornings, and when you pushed open the little gate fashioned out of branches and bedsprings, there was a rough and casual Eden inside, with olive trees, grapes, fig trees, zucchini and eggplant and tomatoes, and the wild greens called horta that she boiled in salted water to tame drabness and then drowned—delicious death!—in her own olive oil. Her freshwater spring was covered by a heavy wooden lid, and in her shed she stored a few tools, some bags, and large vats of homemade, copper-colored wine. Margarita, like many on the island, made her own wine. There was no menu, no daily special, no appetizers, entrees, and no dessert, ever. You either went into the kitchen and lifted the lids to see what there was or let her come to your little table out in the dry grass and she told you the five or six things she had available.
Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Page 14