Spiced

by Dalia Jurgensen

  I carried the bowl of chocolate to the pastry station at the end of the line, then went back to the pot where the rest of the cooks had gathered to witness the seemingly impossible.

  “It’s ruined,” someone said, stating the obvious. Someone else whistled in disbelief. It was as if all the cooks, who until that point had tolerated the new girl, the girl with no experience who had to be taught everything, even how to speak up, were suddenly saying We knew it. I was frozen with humiliation. I was a tiny speck of dust on the filthy kitchen floor, where discarded scraps got swept aside and stepped on. Worse, I was going to be fired.

  Not all my days had been that bad. Sure, I made lots of mistakes, most of them small, like forgetting to chiffonade the shiso leaf, one of the garnishes for the pastry station, or not slicing the Asian pears uniformly. Mika and Jemal had been patient, assuring me that with time, practice, and repetition I would be unable not to improve. And I was pretty good at doing service, quickly composing plates of already completed pastry items for anxious diners. My fruit plates still needed a fair amount of work, as did my chocolate writing, but by then, I was yelling at waiters—some of them by name, even—and getting them to pick up their orders. I still had some trouble with the more advanced production tasks (obviously) and with timing. But burning a hole through a pot? This might cancel out whatever minute strides I’d made. The dangerously thin ice I’d been on that day might have just cracked.

  Mika appeared upstairs, noticed the circle of activity around the pot, and came to inspect the scene.

  “You made a hole?” she said, looking at the pot, eyebrows raised in disbelief. Her accent made it sometimes difficult to discern the meaning of her tone. Was she amused? Accusing? Infuriated? I braced myself and nodded, waiting for the inevitable: my invitation to the door.

  But then she began to laugh. She grabbed the pot with a side towel, brought it to the pot sink, and ran cold water over it before dropping it into the trash. She giggled quietly, shoulders shaking the entire time.

  “I’ll pay for it,” I said sheepishly, finally looking her in the eye. She shook her head and let out a full laugh.

  “You know,” she said smilingly, ignoring my offer, “everybody does something.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. I certainly had done something.

  “When they start,” she explained. “Everybody does something. Makes some mistake.”

  I just stared at her.

  “It’s okay,” she assured me. She looked at her watch. “You finish setting up the station for service.” She set her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll tell Jemal. Don’t worry.” She took the bowl of ruined chocolate downstairs.

  Still wary of the security of my position in the restaurant but thankful, so thankful, for the encouraging and ever-supportive Mika, I returned to the pastry station, which contained nothing I could burn or overcook. I finished cutting the pineapple I’d left sitting in a juicy pool, then picked through a bouquet of mint, plucking out the small, perfect sprigs for garnish—two tasks I could perform with relative confidence.

  Even though I was the lowest member of the kitchen staff and felt like a complete failure, I reminded myself that I was working, unbelievable as it seemed, in one of New York City’s best restaurants. Even the really bad days, and they couldn’t possibly get any worse than today, were worth all the humiliation and failure.

  Once the station was set up completely and I’d triple-checked everything, I made a small cornet out of parchment paper and filled it with melted chocolate. After folding over the top edges of the paper cone to seal its wide opening, I snipped a small hole at the bottom and spent the next fifteen minutes practicing my chocolate writing so that I’d be able to write “Happy Birthday” and other messages that customers sometimes requested with their desserts. Holding the cornet about an inch above a sheet of parchment, I tried to apply even pressure as I wrote the alphabet in cursive as a single continuous word: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. I needed to get used to the feel of the chocolate, the way it flowed and responded to the movement of my hand—the key to good chocolate writing, according to Jemal. Repetition breeds improvement. Over and over I practiced, waiting for the small printer on my station to spit out dessert orders.

  It was Friday, and I looked forward to a two-day break, determined to return on Monday revitalized, more focused, more capable. I looked forward, as well, to my weekend at culinary school, where, after only a month, I had been comforted to find that I was one of the better students in the class and one of the very few working in a high-end restaurant, already gaining real experience. It was a small consolation.

  FOUR

  Course Work

  After nearly a lifetime of wanting to become a chef, I’d like to say that I spent weeks researching all the different New York City culinary schools, comparing programs, checking the instructors’ pedigrees, evaluating their job placement programs. But I didn’t. I simply called the number I saw on a television commercial that emphasized career change and made an appointment with the New York Restaurant School. After acing a ridiculously easy basic math skills test, all I had to do was fill out some student loan forms, sign some papers, and I was in.

  The majority of my fellow students were also career changers, though most were younger than me. Most were men, and at least one was rumored to have been recently incarcerated and to have enrolled in the school as part of a job rehabilitation program. Some students had worked in kitchens, mostly in hotels or catering halls, and came to school with the hopes of improving their skills or at least gaining a leg up via a diploma. The majority of these students (predominantly the men) thought they knew more than the rest of us and were eager to show off their superiority. I kept my job at Nobu to myself for quite a while, not wanting to risk sounding arrogant. I’d already learned that working in a restaurant, even a highly regarded one, didn’t necessarily mean you knew what you were doing.

  Our classroom was set up to mimic a restaurant kitchen, with four stations, each with a set of burners, an oven, an overhead broiler, a grill, and a fryer. We sat attentively at four long stainless steel tables, each one of us in identical standard issue black-and-white-checked pants, starched chef ’s coat with our name, thick-soled black work shoes, and white socks. It was mandatory that we wear toques, the tall pleated paper hat that, to my mind, served no purpose but to get in the way. At Nobu, however, the cooks wore baseball caps or even just kerchiefs wrapped around their heads. We pastry people simply tied our hair back.

  “You have chosen a difficult career,” Chef Fenton, our teacher, greeted us on our first day. He was short, with a protruding belly and thinning hair, and bore a profound resemblance to Homer Simpson. He shuffled around the classroom, dressed like us but with black pants instead of our black-and-white-checked. He made it clear that the nine-month, part-time course in which we had enrolled was meant for serious students working toward a career in the culinary arts, not for weekend hobbyists, and we would be treated accordingly.

  “If you think you’re going to get out of school and make a lot of money, you are wrong.” He paused, waiting for disappointment. We just sat there. “You will work fifty, sixty, seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week and be on your feet the entire time. You will do the same thing every day. The. Same. Thing. Every. Day. You will be yelled at.”

  Pause.

  “If you do not love cooking—absolutely love it—then you should leave now while you can still get most of your money back, because there is no other reason to go into this business. No. Other. Reason.”

  Some people shifted on their stools; others stared back at him blankly. I waited, eager to move on to the actual learning part: the cooking. Enough with the intimidation.

  He gave each of us a thick, black vinyl roll filled with tools: an eight-inch chef ’s knife, a three-inch paring knife, a boning knife, a tourneau knife, a whisk, wooden spoon, slotted spoon, rubber spatula, a set of measuring cups and spoons, and an eight-ounce ladle.

  We had to learn abo
ut our tools before we could use them. We spent hours just on the knives: stainless steel versus carbon versus a hybrid, the virtues of a full tang (the metal of the blade extends into the full length of the handle, making it stronger), boning versus serrated versus tourneau (one with a short, curved blade ideal for “turning” vegetables, shaping them into small football shapes). I took notes as Chef Fenton went methodically through the rest of the tool kit, smirking when he got to the large kitchen spoons. He told us that slotted and nonslotted spoons were sometimes called female and male. It’s easy to remember, he explained; the female ones have the holes.

  Did he just say that? I looked around for someone to commiserate with. A couple of the younger guys snickered knowingly at his little joke. Was he kidding? Or just preparing us for the rumored sexism of kitchens? Marina, my only real friend in the class, an African-American woman fifteen years older than me, rolled her eyes in commiseration. We thought he was ridiculous.

  We got used to his inappropriate remarks. They were easy to ignore, and coming from Homer Simpson, they hardly threatened us. When Chef Fenton failed to appear one day and was subsequently replaced by a series of rotating teachers, we simply assumed he’d finally offended the wrong person.

  Once familiar with our tools, we were allowed to use them and spent an inordinate amount of time on knife skills: how quickly and effectively we could use our new knives to chop, cut, slice. We brunoised (chopped into tiny 2-millimeter squares) carrots; we diced (cut into ⅛- to ½-inch squares) potatoes; and we chiffonaded (sliced into very thin strips) leafy herbs, making sure the entire time that we remembered all the new vocabulary as well as how to perform the skills they referred to because both would appear on our test. If we practiced, we were promised, our muscles would eventually “remember” how to get the vegetables and herbs to cooperate.

  Once we’d gotten the basics down, we did eventually move on to actual cooking, though with only nine months of weekend classes, we had to breeze through the culinary canon: a single day each was allotted to sautéing, frying, broiling, and roasting of meats; two to sauces; two to butchering (we did fish and shellfish one day, meat and poultry the next); a day to pasta; a day to Chinese cooking (I could have learned more going out to eat in nearby Chinatown); and so on until we were done. Though the classes were always hands-on, and our tests were practical exams in which we had to reproduce particular food items (pesto, a medium-rare burger, shrimp bisque), they were overviews nonetheless, and little of the actual information I’d been so intent on learning there really sank in.

  Despite the brevity with which we covered each topic, I loved class. I loved learning the techniques behind the endless cookbooks I’d pored over since childhood, and I loved impressing my roommates, friends, and family with my ability. I had my job at Nobu to keep me grounded. I knew with absolute certainty that, contrary to what some culinary students believe (especially those who go through prestigious two-year culinary programs), culinary school is simply a step on the way to becoming a chef. No one, absolutely no one, walks out of school ready to be a chef. Cooking as a trade simply involves too densely packed a skill set to be picked up over a few months (or even years) within the walls of a protective classroom. Experience—real experience—is everything.

  FIVE

  Extra Virgin

  For months after starting at Nobu, I was so consumed with the work details of my new job (and with school on the weekends) that I didn’t—couldn’t—consider the consequences my new job that I didn‘t—couldn’t—consider the consequences my new job would have on my social life. Slowly, though, as I became better versed in my daily responsibilities and my new environment, I came up for air and began to notice the toll it was taking. I hadn’t seen my roommates (and two closest friends) forever. We began to communicate via scribbled notes. Phone bill due . . . Drinks on Sunday . . . Drinks ever? By the time I got home from work, they were both in bed, and when I woke up late the next morning, they were long gone. Nearly every single friend from my former life (as I was beginning to think of it) was in the same nine-to-five boat. I feared I was destined to a personal life consisting of solo breakfasts and lonely late-night subway rides. I realized that if I was going to have any social life at all, I needed to fully embrace my new hours, my new coworkers, my new lifestyle.

  After I’d been at Nobu just over two months, we received a three-star review from the New York Times. I didn’t yet understand the enormous importance of such an event and what exactly it meant for the restaurant, but the accolade was cause for great celebration and many congratulations. Every employee received a letter of thanks for his or her contribution to the success of the restaurant (my contribution!), and our sister restaurant hosted a post-shift party in our honor.

  The party was my first chance to socialize with my coworkers away from the ticking printer. Outside of the nervous, urgent energy of the kitchen, the waiters became individual people rather than anonymous waiter drones, and they, in turn, discovered that I actually knew words other than pick and up. Even the cooks relaxed a little and treated me less like an annoying little sister they had to keep an eye on and more like just another member of the kitchen. I happily joined the party, clinking glasses, downing beer, making small talk. I was finally experiencing my first taste of a long-standing restaurant world tradition: the after-work drink.

  After that party, the cooks lost their icy edge but remained uninterested in relaxing with me over a drink after work. And who could blame them? They worked doubles and had to be back at work the following morning by ten a.m. But the waiters were a different story, and waiters, in all honesty, were much more interesting to hang out with. They were, after all, mostly artists, writers, dancers, or actors, and much more like my other friends than the cooks. The waiters were almost always up for a drink or a late-night snack. And in New York City, the city that never sleeps, there was no shortage of bars or restaurants to accommodate us.

  Like most of the waitstaff at Nobu, Kelly was Japanese. Early on, I knew her only as one more waiter whizzing through the kitchen, dropping off dirty dishes, and picking up freshly plated desserts. Over time, though, as my comfort level at Nobu grew, so did my friendships. Kelly gradually became part of my small circle of friends, and we often ended up in the same place for drinks or late-night meals. She’d given herself an American name (for simplicity’s sake, I guess) that was easier to remember than the rest of what were to me very exotic names. Her first choice had been Kiki, but someone else had told her it sounded too much like the name of a stripper.

  After a while, our mutual friend, Misa, began dropping hints that Kelly liked me, which was great, since I liked her, too; she was easy to be with and eternally welcoming. But the hints continued, and Misa started relaying cryptic messages, even when Kelly was sitting right next to me: She hopes this candy will be like a magic, she said suggestively to me one late night after we’d just stuffed ourselves at a twenty-four-hour restaurant in Chinatown. Then she handed me a small candy that Kelly had given her. The two of them sat there smiling at me and then said something in Japanese. Magic? Magic love candy? I never knew if I was completely understanding correctly, or if something was getting lost in translation. I felt uncomfortable about coming right out and asking Kelly if she was flirting with me; I just ate the candy.

  It wasn’t a complete surprise to find Kelly still in the dining room when I returned upstairs in my street clothes after finishing work one night. But this time, it was just her—no Misa, Hiroko, Jun, or Sunny. Just Kelly. We agreed to go for a drink.

  “I only know girl bars,” she said, feigning apology, though I took it as a message, loud and clear. She had been flirting with me, and I had a decision to make. Do I put an end to the harmless flirting, or do I go through the door she was clearly holding open for me?

  I’d always had boyfriends up to that point and had, in fact, just broken up with one, a casualty of my new hours and job focus. Outside of idle fantasy, I had never really considered the possibility o
f a girlfriend. Then again, I had never ruled it out, either. In fact, I prided myself on trying new things. As my mother was fond of saying when I was growing up, Wouldn’t it be boring if we were all the same? And since quitting my office job, my entire life was feeling full of possibility and exciting new experiences. Leaving that old uninspiring job and embarking on this new career had been scary and at times humiliating, but it had been nothing if not exhilarating and freeing. My old parameters had been blown apart, along with my barometer of social acceptability. Experience and adventure are good for the soul, I thought. I could—and should—try anything.

  “That’s okay,” I answered nonchalantly, as if lesbian bars were old hat. As if. It was just a drink, after all. I wondered how long I would be able to keep my cool.

  Once we were at a small table at Henrietta Hudson having drinks, though, everything seemed more difficult and magnified. We no longer had the comfort of a group: no Misa to send secret messages, no Hiroko to fill uncomfortable silences. Conversation suddenly felt like a pretense, a necessary prelude to the business at hand. Or maybe I was just nervous?

  “What actors do you like?” she asked.

  “Jodie Foster,” I offered, the first name that came to mind. Stupid! I do like Jodie Foster, but why couldn’t I think of someone, anyone, who isn’t gay? I racked my brain. Ellen DeGeneres . . . Melissa Etheridge . . . I didn’t even like Melissa Etheridge! She’s not even an actor! It was useless. I stopped talking, and when I did, I received confirmation that we were not there for a friendly chat about movie stars; Kelly leaned in to kiss me, and I reciprocated. Easy as pie.

  After the kiss, we had a few more drinks, and then she asked if I wanted to “see her apartment.” Of course I did. Once there, she offered me a massage (cliché of clichés), which I gladly accepted—I had been on my feet all night, after all. Before long and with the alcohol diluting any anxiety regarding the repercussions of doing that with a coworker, our clothes were off.