When Tommy showed up in my kitchen a few days later, he pretty much looked like what I'd expected him to when he left the confines of his counter.
Except for one thing. On his left arm was a device: a tan colored cuff of sorts around his wrist, with opaque plastic appendages that stretched under and around his knuckles. On his forearm was a lever; whenever he wanted to open or close his fist, he had to crank the lever to manipulate his hand.
If you had a GI Joe with action grip as a kid, then you get the idea.
I took one look at that device and felt terrible. This kid had left his job for me and I was pretty sure that I had screwed him up bad. Surely, he could never work in a professional kitchen.
"Tommy, I don't know what to say. There's no way you can work here, man."
Tommy had obviously been down this road before: "Listen, boss," he said. "Don't worry about it."
He went on to explain that he had gotten trashed on beer one night and fallen asleep on his arm, cutting off the circulation for hours. As a result, he had "put my nerves to sleep."
He continued, with sunny optimism, to explain that "the doctor said I was really lucky. A few more hours and they would've had to amputate it." Twice a week he was going to a Queens clinic for therapy, but it obviously wasn't doing any good.
I subsequently learned that this injury presents itself in drunks and junkies all the time. Not that Tommy was either.
To convince me of his physical dexterity, he began grabbing, lifting, then putting down a series of pans and utensils. Even though he had to crank the lever each time he picked something up and again to release it when he put it down, he had such a rhythm about it that he was, it seemed to me, faster and quicker than most guys in my kitchen.
Okay, I thought, let's give the kid a shot.
It turned out that Tommy was exactly what I had hoped he would be: a great executor. All you had to do was show him how to make a dish—explain what the signs of doneness were, what to look and sniff for, and how to plate it—and he was good to go.
And he had great instincts. For example, many young cooks who aren't blessed with natural finesse miss the center of the plate, by which I mean they will put down the protein, the starch, and the vegetable, and when all is said and done, there'll be a big white portion of plate showing through in the middle. Tommy didn't have that problem; he naturally filled out the center, making it that much easier to train him.
Over the next few months, he worked the saute station, then the fry station.
One Sunday, we were grinding our way through a typically long, grueling brunch. The kitchen was hot—so hot that we all wore shorts in the summer—and Tommy was flowing to his own unique rhythm, a series of traditional kitchen movements punctuated by his emphatic, though strangely silent cranking of the hand lever.
As if brunch weren't enough of a circus, we had to keep producing a ridiculous amount of toast to go out with the entrees. As a result, we had a line of five or six toasters lined up along the lowboy—a waist-high stainless-steel shelf—and periodically when they were all going at once, they would overload the outlet. I'd have to stop everything and run over and play around with the cables, or reset the breaker, until they came back on.
As I was making my way over for the umpteenth time, Tommy said, "Chef, if you want, I'll come over there and fix that for you."
I told him to just stay where the hell he was and do his job. What was he, crazy? How could he tackle an electrical problem with that crazy contraption on his hand?
Tommy pulled a New York City Electrical Union worker's card out of his wallet and flashed it at me.
"Chef, I'm an electrician. I can fix that."
As always, Tommy was full of surprises.
I handed him my needle-nose pliers and stood aside. He hopped up on the lowboy, his exposed knees on the steel, and went to work on the socket.
"Tommy," I said. "You're the electrician, but that thing's hot. There's two hundred twenty volts running through it."
"Don't worry, Chef, I—"
And right there, right where it's supposed to say "know what I'm doing," a deafening boom rocked the room and the kitchen went pitch black.
A few seconds later the emergency lights came on and washed the room in their B-movie glare.
All of the cooks were standing around, rattled. But Tommy had vanished.
Then I heard a noise from the ground, like the crying of a sick baby goat. I looked down and saw Tommy in a heap, a crumpled bundle with a little pile of red hair on top. He had been blasted right off the lowboy.
"Omigod, Tommy. Are you all right?"
Not a word. Just more wounded groaning.
I dispatched one of the line cooks to call EMS and knelt down beside the kid.
"Tommy! Are you okay?"
He began to nod unconvincingly.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah."
"What's your name?"
"Tom . . . Tom . . . Tommy."
"Let's try to get you up."
I hooked my arms under Tommy's armpits and helped lift him up off the ground. He put his arms out, one against the lowboy and one against the door to the walk-in.
Suddenly, he snapped into consciousness, his eyes locked on the door.
No, not the door.
His left hand.
It was open, and as he stood up on his own two feet, he held his hand out before him, like an infant just discovering that it was attached to his arm. He opened and closed his fist . . . without the aid of the lever.
"Chef! My hand. It's fixed. It's fixed."
He continued opening and closing his palm with delight. Laughing.
"I can't believe it! It's fixed!"
He took off the device and threw it in the garbage can, flexing his hand again and again, faster and faster.
"It's totally back to normal!"
Of course it was. Because, Tommy later told me, his biweekly therapy consisted of a technician attaching electrodes to his hand and forearm and zapping them with little bursts of electricity. If only they had turned it up to a near-lethal dose, he might've been spared all those months with a semiprosthetic hand.
His paralysis cured, Tommy got back on the line and went back to work. He was a little thrown at first—not having to crank that lever threw off the rhythm he had established over the past few months. But Tommy was a great cook, an intrepid professional, and he adjusted soon enough, pumping out dish after dish just the way I always knew he could.
The Blob
CLAUDIA FLEMING
A native of Long Island, New York, Claudia Fleming originally moved to Manhattan to become a dancer. To support herself, she worked in the dining rooms at Jams and Union Square Cafe, and eventually decided to pursue a career in the kitchen, studying at Peter Kump's New York Cooking School, then working at Montrachet, Tribeca Grill, and Luxe, as well as Fauchon in Paris. She rose to fame at Gramercy Tavern in 1994. Her numerous accolades include the James Beard Foundation's Hawaiian Vintage Outstanding Pastry Chef for 2000. Pastry Art & Design magazine named her one of their 10 Best Pastry Chefs in 2000 and 2001. She is the author ofThe Last Course: Desserts from Gramercy Tavern.
THEY CALLED IT the Sugar Tower.
That was the name the cooks downstairs had for the pastry kitchen on the second floor of Tribeca Grill, the Drew Nieporent-Robert DeNiro partnership in what would soon become the Tribeca Film Center in Lower Manhattan.
I was the assistant pastry chef, which means I was the daytime pastry cook, the one in charge of production, who'd get all the food prepped so the nighttime pastry team, led by Pastry Chef Gerry Hayden—also the restaurant's sous-chef—would be ready to roll come the dinner hour.
This was in 1990, before Tribeca Grill began serving lunch, and long before I had anything remotely resembling a clue.
Oh, I knew the basics. I had attended Peter Kump's New York Cooking School, and worked in a kitchen or two. But I was given this job more for my spunk than my experience: I had served my
culinary externship at Montrachet, one of Drew's
other restaurants, and in my spare time, I'd make myself useful by polishing glass and silverware. Drew, himself a service veteran before he became one of the most successful restaurateurs in the country, took note of my work ethic and when Tribeca was set to open, he rang me up and offered me a job. Just like that.
Having had a previous career—as a dancer—I came to cooking late, and was an old lady by kitchen standards. I was thirty-three, and the prep guys and line cooks wanted nothing to do with me. I guess I didn't want anything to do with them, either.
So I spent my mornings alone in the spookily empty restaurant, up in the Sugar Tower, a small self-contained kitchen with a counter along two walls and a big mixer in the corner, not seeing much of anyone else even after they started showing up around lunchtime.
Not that I had the time to socialize. There were cakes, ice creams, sauces, and garnishes to be made, and I was so new to all of it and so overwhelmed that I was working at a manic pace, racing frantically to keep up. I didn't even have time to enjoy or take note of the buzz the restaurant was generating. I'm told that it was frequented by celebrities galore, but I never saw them. One night, Nelson Mandela had a party there, and I didn't even know it was happening.
I was so unconnected with anything else going on at Tribeca Grill that one morning, when I ventured down into the empty dining room, and I spotted an old guy who had found his way into the restaurant and was wandering around aimlessly, pushing his bicycle, I barked, "Who are you and what do you want!"
"Umbobbyere," he mumbled.
"What! Speak up."
"Is Bobby here?"
"There's no Bobby here. Bobby who?"
"Bobby DeNiro. I'm his dad."
Turns out that not only was this guy with the bicycle the father of our superstar owner, he was also the artist whose paintings graced the walls of the dining room in which we were standing.
Whoops.
That's what it was like for me in those days. And this kind of mind-set can take a toll on you. In time, the amount of things you don't know erodes your confidence in what you actually do know.
Case in point: when you're a relatively newly minted cook, you look for ways to cut corners and do things your own way, and so one day, I decided to save time and get ahead of schedule with my production of meringue, the whipped-egg-white- and-sugar mixture. Rather than starting with one quart of egg whites, I would begin with about eight quarts. I dumped them in the 40-quart bowl and switched on the industrial mixer.
Then I turned to some other work, heating a pan of sugar and using a pair of pliers to pull antennaelike wands from it, setting them aside to cool.
As the mixer continued to whirr away, making the meringue, I strolled downstairs to the ladies' room.
When I returned, I was shocked to see that the whites had whipped into a giant sudsy beehive, a frothy mass that was currently peaking two feet over the top of the enormous stainless-steel bowl.
I gasped—and the sound, a quick little inhalation, seemed to be more than enough to cause the ensuing egg-white avalanche. With a plop, the beehive toppled over the sides of the bowl and ran down the sides of the counter.
My hands flew to my mouth. I stood frozen, in horror, as the blob continued to grow, sliding down to the floor and then, upon making contact, beginning a slow but steady path right for me.
This was just meringue, mind you, but my mental faculties were so shot that I was actually terrified of it. Indeed, visions of what this blob might do next filled my head. I imagined it flowing without end, making its way out the door, bulging into the private party space, and slithering down the stairs into the kitchen, where it—and by it, I mean "I"—would become the source of jokes for years to come.
I spun around and ran for help.
"Gerry, Gerry," I cried, to anyone within earshot, all those young cooks with their baseball caps on backward who never talked to me.
They must have thought someone was injured because they responded with genuine concern.
"What's wrong?"
In my panic, I didn't think these wet-nosed kids could help me. Only a seasoned pro like Gerry would know how to stop the dreaded meringue from continuing its march.
"Gerry. Gerry. Where's Gerry?"
"In the dining room."
I ran out into the dining room and found Gerry having an impromptu meeting with one of his cooks.
"Gerry! Gerry!"
"What?"
Breathlessly, I described the situation: "I put too many egg whites in the machine." Deep breath. "And it came up over the top." Deep breath. "And it's running down the sides and across the room." Deep breath. "And it's almost out the door and, and—"
"What?"
I was at the end of my rope. "What do I do?" I screamed.
He could not have been calmer or more matter of fact: "Turn off the mixer."
Oh, right. Turn off the mixer. I guess I knew all along, back in some regrettably overlooked recess of my mind—in the same vicinity where I stored the fact that egg whites left to whip without end will multiply up to eight times in volume—that if you turn off the mixer, they will stop volumizing.
Duh.
Without a word, I ran up the stairs, back to the Sugar Tower. I stepped over the blob and approached the machine. With a defiant look at the fluffy white beast, I shut off the mixer, abruptly halting its march.
A moment later, Gerry came charging into the room with two line cooks in tow, and when they saw me huffing and puffing and nearly in tears, standing over a mountain of meringue, they burst out laughing.
I joined them. At least, I had regained my senses enough to recognize that this was funny.
Years later, after we had gone our separate ways, Gerry and I reconnected at the James Beard Awards. One thing led to another, and we fell in love and got married.
We're still laughing today.
The Blind Line Cook
GABRIELLE HAMILTON
Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef-owner of Prune, which she opened in New York City's East Village in October 1999. Prune was named in Time Out New York's 2000 Top 100 and Gael Greene's "Where to Eat in the New Millennium" in New York magazine, and also featured in Saveur 100 in 2001. She has written for the New Yorker, Saveur magazine, and Food &: Wine and had the eight-week Chefs Column in the New York Times. Her work has been anthologized in Best Food Writing 2001, 2002, and 2003.
A COUPLE YEARS AGO I placed an ad for a line cook. And there was a guy who, according to his resume, should have been right up my alley. He held a grill position in a busy seafood joint at the shore; he had studied philosophy and political science; and he had about four years of experience in the industry. I was looking forward to meeting this guy from my own home state, with whom an after-work conversation over beers might be possible, and who had just enough years in the industry to still have something to learn, but not so few that he would need to be taught everything. I called him up and we had a pleasant phone exchange. I liked his voice, his manner; he was intelligent and articulate. I invited him in for an interview the following day.
The first thing I noticed when he arrived was that he was blind. His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby. We managed a handshake and sat at the bar. I asked him about his responsibilities as a lunch chef at the busy seafood restaurant and he answered entirely reasonably. He understood the language I used and spoke it back to me: the sort of shorthand code that people who work in kitchens speak.
I said, "How many covers for lunch?"
And he said, "Eighty-five to one ten."
I said, "What kind of mis is there in a fried seafood place?"
And he laughed and said, "Yeah, it's all lemon wedges and tartar sauce."
We talked a bit about his education in political philosophy: he was a Hegel fan. Finally, I showed him our menu. He held it up to his face as if to breathe in its written contents, to discover by inhaling what it
said in plain print. I felt more certain than ever when I observed this that he was blind, but naturally doubted myself because obviously the guy had worked in restaurants, which—though we may joke—really can't and shouldn't be done. And in spite of the proximity of the menu to his face, I thought maybe I was making some despicable assumptions about the "sight impaired" and needed to get my politics up to date.
So I booked him for a trail.
I went right downstairs and unpinned the schedule from the cork board and penciled him into the grill station the next night. He wrote his new phone number on the top of his resume in large unwieldy script and even managed, more or less, to locate and cross out the old number. I looked at him as directly in the eyes as one could, thinking maybe I should ask about what seemed obvious but instead I said, "Well, you seem average in build—we have pants and jackets in the general human range so you don't need to bring your own whites. And you'll just need a chef knife, a utility, and a paring knife. No need to bring your 40-pound kit tomorrow." He nodded, without returning my gaze.
"Is there anything else you can think of?" I asked, hopefully. He said only that he'd like to keep the menu if I didn't mind so he could study it a bit before his trail. Done deal. We shook hands again, miraculously.
For the rest of the day I thought maybe he wasn't blind, and that just because his eyes rolled around didn't mean he couldn't make out shape and color. But then I thought shape shmape and color schmolor, how is this guy going to dice a white onion on a white cutting board? I thought maybe I was an ignorant asshole who didn't realize how far the blind had come. Maybe he had worked out some kind of system to compensate. I took a mental inventory of famous accomplished blind people. Could playing the piano be anything like grilling fish over open flame, in the midst of hot fryer fat, sharp knives, macho line cooks, and slippery floors? What was the preferred term for blind these days, anyway, I wondered.
By the morning of his trail, I had talked myself into the certainty that though blind, he was obviously "sighted" in some other way. I felt sure that I was behind the times for thinking just because someone was blind that they couldn't work a job as a line cook in a busy restaurant. I knew, vaguely, that when a person lost one sense, the others kicked in expertly to compensate. I assured myself that he had developed a system by which he heard the food, or felt the food, or smelled which plate was used for which entree. I became convinced that he, in fact, had evolved into such a higher species of line cook that we would learn greatness from him. I got so "on board" with the whole blind-line-cook thing that I was plainly righteous when asked by my incredulous—and slightly unnerved—line cooks why I had booked a trail with a blind guy. I practically had indignation in my tone. "What? You think just because the guy is 'visually challenged' that he can't cook in a restaurant?"
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