Spiced
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE - Getting into Nobu
TWO - Seeds of Inspiration
THREE - Melting Point
FOUR - Course Work
FIVE - Extra Virgin
SIX - Icing on the Cake
SEVEN - Salad Days
EIGHT - In the Line of Fire
NINE - Ladies’ Night
TEN - Takeout
ELEVEN - French 101
TWELVE - In the Kitchen with Martha
THIRTEEN - Rising to the Occasion
FOURTEEN - Forbidden Fruit
FIFTEEN - Seeing Stars
SIXTEEN - Check, Please
SEVENTEEN - Table for Two
EIGHTEEN - Reservations
NINETEEN - Reality Bites
TWENTY - Sweet Relief
TWENTY-ONE - More Than Food Alone
TWENTY-TWO - A Matter of Taste
TWENTY-THREE - Rolling with the Punches
TWENTY-FOUR - Fruits and Nuts
TWENTY-FIVE - After Hours
TWENTY-SIX - (Dysfunctional) Family Meal
TWENTY-SEVEN - Just Desserts
Acknowledgements
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2009 by Dalia Jurgensen
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jurgensen, Dalia.
Spiced / Dalia Jurgensen.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-03260-2
1. Jurgensen, Dalia. 2. Cooks—New York (State)—New York—Biography.
3. Pastry—New York (State)—New York. I. Title.
TX649.J97A
641.5092—dc22
[B]
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and
Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes
any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further,
the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Matthew
Spiced is my story, and a work of nonfiction. But, in the interest of privacy, some names and identifying characteristics have been changed or simply left out. I’ve also taken the liberty of compressing time lines and moving a few events out of sequence in order to advance the story. However, all of the nicknames (with the exception of two) and all the other crazy stuff that happens, along with the outrageous things that are said, are absolutely true. Restaurants are full of nutty people who do nutty things, and that’s why I love them.
ONE
Getting into Nobu
Order, fire!” screamed Steven from the window that separated the small, open kitchen from the dining room. He was the middleman, reducing the handwritten orders dropped off by hustling waiters to single key words or phrases—restaurant “shorthand”—that he yelled out to the cooks. Each urgent order spurred them into action, executing the seemingly endless array and combinations of plates. I watched Steven from my spot at the edge of the kitchen as he finished yelling out orders through the window, which also served as a clear dividing line between two worlds: the clean, well-dressed diners enjoying a relaxed meal beneath warm light on one side, the sweat-drenched cooks toiling under the shock of fluorescents to meet their demands on the other.
“Fire! Four hamachi kama, four new-style, three squid pasta, two anticucho, two kobe, and six—six omakase saikyo!”
Almost as though compensating for his short stature, Steven used every cell in his body to get his message across. The veins in his face bulged, and his short, fair hair seemed to stretch farther and farther away from his scalp with every subsequent order he yelled.
It was my first night “trailing” at Nobu, the hottest new restaurant in New York City’s crowded and competitive restaurant scene. Trailing, I had learned, was part of the interviewing process in the restaurant world. I would have an opportunity to see what my potential workplace would be like, and Mika, Nobu’s Japanese pastry chef, who had granted me the trail despite my utter lack of experience, would see firsthand if I fit into my new environment. I still had two weeks left at my day job as a sales and marketing coordinator at a publishing house, and the year-long weekend culinary program I had enrolled in didn’t start for a week after that, but that night marked the start of a career I’d had in the back of my mind since I was a small child, and it was like magic.
I took it all in, every movement, every odor and sound, every single unfamiliar word and food. I studied the cooks, dressed in white double-breasted jackets and ultrabaggy pants designed with colorful underwater fish scenes, who sprang into action as soon as Steven’s words burst into the hot air. They threw pans onto gas burners, seasoned fish, and sprinkled herbs, producing perfectly composed plates of food quickly and efficiently. I stared in awe at their rough grace. Through shouts of “Behind!” “Open oven!” and “Pick up!” I felt the kitchen swell with the cooks’ collective energy. The kitchen was alive. It breathed. It sweat.
A suited and suntanned man with an easy smile stuck his head past Steven and in through the kitchen’s window. His neat, well-groomed figure was incongruous with the down-and-dirty vibe of the kitchen. He looked like one of the customers.
“Woody’s on fifty-three with Soon-Yi,” he notified everyone, causing only the faintest of ripples in the energy. The room acknowledged him with a slight nod, but its overall movement surged on without skipping a beat. “Let’s make them happy!” he finished and was gone.
I turned to Mika, my teacher for the night. She had been showing me how to work the pastry station, patiently explaining how the kitchen functioned.
“He comes in all the time.” She shrugged without dislodging a single black hair of her pin-straight bob, answering the question that my eyebrows had been asking. She continued to organize the many items on the pastry station, which consisted of two waist-high stainless steel refrigerators topped with a six-foot-by-one-foot length of white removable countertop that doubled as a cutting board. The area just behind the cutting board was hollowed out so that a multitude of smaller rectangular stainless steel containers of various sizes cou
ld be nestled into the top of the refrigerators and remain cold throughout the evening. The wall above was lined with two thick stainless steel shelves (stainless steel, the material of choice in the kitchen, gave it an endless number of reflective metallic surfaces) that held various containers of cookies, stacks of plates, and other items whose purpose I didn’t yet understand.
Mika assured me that dessert orders would soon be pouring in and that we would be very busy. She had no time for celebrity sightings. I, on the other hand, was duly impressed. Woody Allen! My night was just getting better and better. Any second thoughts I’d had about rashly quitting my dull office job a few weeks earlier quickly melted away. In the few hours I’d spent in Nobu’s kitchen, my eyes had feasted on more energy and life than in the entire two and a half years I’d spent in my previous job. As far as I could tell, the only priority in the kitchen was to successfully prepare food ordered by the customers. It was task oriented, devoid of any need for sales reports, signature approvals, disingenuous small talk, or distasteful brownnosing. The food had to be prepared with quality, speed, and integrity. It was honest and pure. It was perfect. And I wanted to be a part of it.
I began to feel more at ease in my starched white chef’s jacket. As the dessert orders began to trickle in, Mika methodically showed me how to execute every one, stressing the importance of detail. I concentrated on everything she told me.
“Every plate must be exactly the same,” she said softly with a lilting Japanese accent, her full, round face nodding with every movement. She placed slices of chocolate maki (a chocolate cake filled with ginger mousse that was rolled up and coated in toasted almond flour to mimic a sushi roll) on a black lacquer rectangle. She carefully filled a tiny white bowl with bright orange passion fruit sauce and placed it beside the maki slices. Finally, she slid a pair of chocolate chopsticks flecked with edible gold leaf into a paper sleeve that was printed with the Nobu logo and laid it across the maki. With that, the dessert was ready for the customer.
Mika presented each dessert in this same way, patiently explaining which plate to start out with (plain, white round or heavy, tan-speckled earthenware or shiny black lacquer) and then detailed each component of the dessert and its position on the plate. Soon, though, the area around me became a flurry of small white paper slips, and Mika was forced to switch from teacher mode to super fast production mode. Calm and soothing before, Mika now became a machine. She worked quickly and deftly, treating each component with respect, creating plate after plate of wondrous dessert: chocolate maki, ginger crème brûlée, Asian pear granita, and some things, like mochi ice cream (a small ball of ice cream wrapped in gummy rice flour dough) and ogura (a sweet red bean paste), I’d never seen before. I watched her, trying to keep them all straight in my head, worrying that she might test me later. Soon the orders were coming in even faster. Impossibly, Mika’s speed increased as she moved with a silent fury to complete them.
I stood by feeling helpless, still lacking the skill or knowledge to assist her. I stared at the tickets lined up on the shelf in front of Mika and tried to decipher the many words, some of them profoundly unfamiliar, until I spotted an order for green tea ice cream. Ice cream! I remembered that plate; it was one of the simpler ones. Plus, I had worked in ice cream stores for six years through high school and college, and if there was one thing I did have confidence in, it was my ability to scoop. I grabbed a cold plate from the refrigerator under me and reached for the oval-shaped scoop that sat in a small bin of constantly running water. In a matter of seconds, I’d arranged three ovals—quenelles, Mika had called them—of green tea ice cream on the thick earthenware plate the way she had shown me earlier. I paused, looking at the plate. Something was missing; it was too plain. Without looking up, Mika pointed her nose toward a plastic container of cookies labeled ALMOND TUILES. Right! Almond tuiles. I placed one of the thin, flat, curved, diamond-shaped cookies on top of the ice cream and handed it, along with the ticket that held the corresponding table information, to a passing waiter.
“Pick up?” I asked him. “Please?”
The waiter paused, noticing me, a strange new face in the kitchen, for the first time. After a moment of consideration, he took the ice cream off my hands, dropped the ticket into the trash, and delivered it to the correct table. Mission accomplished. I did it! I turned back to the line of tickets, looking for more ice cream orders. I scooped my little heart out, filling any ice cream and sorbet orders that came in, and handing them off to any waiter that happened to pass by. When there was nothing to be scooped, I used the small boost in my confidence to help Mika in other ways, like filling tiny bowls with passion fruit sauce, tending only to the small details I remembered for certain, those I knew I had no chance of screwing up.
Finally, the tide of white tickets began to ebb. With only a few left on the shelf, I took a breath and noticed that the order for table fifty-three was among the remaining tickets. It listed no desserts and was instead labeled only with the letters VIP. I looked over at Mika, who was preparing a beautiful assortment of desserts on a large white platter. The platter was almost full, with only a single corner left unfilled. Mika looked up at me for the first time in over an hour and handed me a ginger crème brûlée.
“You want to make it?” she asked, smiling at me knowingly. I grabbed the stainless steel shaker of sugar and waved it back and forth over the brûlée, coating the top with a thin, even layer of sugar. I wiped the edge of the ramekin with my index finger to remove any excess sugar, the way Mika had shown me earlier, to prevent any sugar from burning on the ramekin’s white edge, which would make it look sloppy. She nodded approvingly and handed me the tank of propane. With a click of my finger, the torch switched on, and its blue flame came blistering out. It felt serious and a little bit dangerous. Trying to keep my trepidation hidden, I tentatively moved the flaming wand evenly over the sugar, gradually transforming the layer of white grains into a bubbling, deep brown sheet of caramel. I turned off the torch and looked hopefully at Mika.
“Perfect,” she said, placing the crème brûlée on the platter’s empty corner. “It’s ready.”
She stood in the kitchen doorway and grabbed the first waiter she saw, forcibly recruiting him to deliver the VIP dessert. Then she turned back to me.
“You can see him if you stand next to the espresso machine,” Mika said, waving me toward her. “Watch where the waiter goes.”
I took my position and, with my eyes, followed the waiter to the back of the dining room. Waiters and busboys continued to file in and out of the kitchen, but I kept my eyes on that tray of desserts as it traveled through the dining room until it landed on the table where Woody Allen, Soon-Yi, and their tablemates would share the ginger crème brûlée whose edge I had wiped clean with my virgin finger. From where I stood I could just barely catch a glimpse of a silver spoon digging into the dessert, cracking its deep caramel crust, and revealing the silky custard beneath.
I returned to Mika’s side at the dessert station, where she was wiping down the counter and restoring order after the insanity of the night’s dessert rush. She explained that there were no slow nights at Nobu, which had a minimum of 275 reservations for dinner every night, stressing that what I had experienced that night was the norm and that if I worked there I would have to be able to handle it—every night.
“What do you think?” she asked me.
“I like it,” I answered. It was an understatement, but I didn’t want to gush and risk sounding silly or worse, like I wasn’t taking it seriously. I liked the energy, creating the plates of desserts and knowing that when they arrived at a table, people’s faces might light up. The kitchen had been filled with so many unfamiliar things, but at the same time, it felt natural to me. I wanted to be part of it, wearing the baggy fish pants like everyone else, serving up food every night.
“I mean,” I added, “I would like to work here.” I had to make it clear.
“Okay.” She smiled. “I’ll talk to Jemal.”
I stayed until the last dessert order was filled and the station thoroughly cleaned and organized in preparation for lunch the next day. I then returned to the dank, narrow hallway in the basement where I’d left my street clothes hanging on a peg, not far from a tub of Japanese pickles fermenting in the corner. After changing, I dropped my chef’s coat into a bin of dirty clothes, stuffed my pants into my backpack, and, after thanking Mika for the night, walked out through the dining room, where a few straggling customers were lingering over the last of their sake or one more mug of green tea, empty dessert plates still in front of some of them. I helped make that, I wanted to tell them proudly. Though it was after midnight, I briskly walked the fifteen minutes to my train, high from my first night in a restaurant kitchen.
TWO
Seeds of Inspiration
I had always wanted to be a chef. Even still, I had not planned on spontaneously quitting my publishing job that day, a week before I’d even heard about the possibility of trailing at Nobu. I’d enrolled in culinary school a month earlier, but it was a weekend program only, and I’d planned on staying at my office job while in school. Once I’d taken that step into the restaurant world, though, my job began feeling less and less important, even if it did provide a steady paycheck and health insurance. With cooking now firmly in my future, I was eager to escape the small office where I spent my hours staring alternately at the glare of my computer screen and out through my window at the city below. The pile of uncomfortable work shoes I’d stashed beneath my desk (I had no need for them outside of the office) depressed me. They seemed to serve no valuable purpose.
My parents were generally supportive of my decision. Maybe it was their Danish background: They had different and more flexible ideas about career and education, and they saw nothing inherently wrong with my decision to drastically switch careers—my Danish cousins did it all the time. They made no case in favor of the “security” of an office job with a large company. Neither one had exactly followed an orthodox career path. My mother started college at thirty-four and eventually became a computer programmer after being a stay-at-home mom. And my father left home at thirteen after being given an ultimatum by his mother: Go to school or get a job. He went to sea, became a sea captain, and did not retire until he was sixty-six years old. It was my father who ultimately encouraged my step away from office life for good.