Spiced

by Dalia Jurgensen

  “OHIO GOZAIMASU!”

  These words echoed through the restaurant at that time of day, the hour or so before service started when the waiters started to arrive. Good morning was the preferred greeting at Nobu, regardless of arrival time, and I heard the words often while in the thick of preparing the nitty-gritty components of the pastry station: picking mint sprigs, filling and refreshing squeeze bottles, shaving plums, slicing maki.

  “Ohio!”

  My response was instinctive. It was one of only a handful of Japanese words and phrases I had learned, but it was one of my favorites. Ohio! was a sufficient abbreviation for greeting a waiter since we were on the same (theoretical) level. I would use the full phrase to greet the sushi chefs, who were not only older than me but also at the top of the kitchen hierarchy.

  The exchange was repeated over and over again in a singsong way, and it had a strangely soothing effect on me. Maybe it was all the long vowels. Oh-hi-oh. I welcomed its meditative quality. It helped me focus on the simple tasks at hand rather than on the flashes of memory from the night before.

  I knew that Kelly was scheduled to work that day, but I didn’t see her until after service started, when she walked right by my station to drop off a stack of dirty dishes, looking like she always did. Her shortish black hair was neatly combed away from her face, her thin frame, maybe an inch or two taller than mine, was erect with superb posture. Her features were small—dark, narrow eyes, thin lips, petite nose—but framed by heavy, strong cheekbones. She was wearing the regulation waiter’s uniform of khaki pants and navy blue shirt, but all I could see was bare skin, hers and mine, against each other, smooth and soft. In a flash, I remembered the kissing . . . and the touching . . . and the everything.

  I pretended to focus on the dessert orders that had started to trickle in and prayed that my cheeks had not turned visibly red. (I blush way too easily and it is a curse.) She didn’t look me in the eye when she passed me on her way back into the dining room, but I swear I noticed a hairline crack of a smile in her serious but kind face. She was working. I was working. We were too busy to acknowledge last night, but I could not stop thinking about it.

  “Bull-ondie! ” came the welcome distraction from the other end of the kitchen. It was Hisa, one of the sushi chefs, sticking his head into the kitchen from the sushi bar, looking urgently in my direction, his eyebrows raised to the tops of his shaved head.

  The sushi chefs were the proverbial kings of the Nobu mountain (unless, of course, Nobu Matsuhisa himself was in town on one of his monthly visits from California, in which case he was emperor). Though Nobu was known for its cooked food as much as its sushi, the sushi chefs were still the stars, performing in the dining room every night, and they knew it. They demanded full attention and usually got it. And if any of the sushi chefs had bothered to learn my name, it would have been news to me. To them, I was just the blond girl.

  “Bento box, cho dai! ” Hisa insisted loudly, pointing to the shelf above my head. I grabbed the oval box and a lid and sent them down to him. He grabbed it and disappeared.

  Just as I’d begun to feel like more a part of the fabric that made up the restaurant and less like one of its loose threads threatening to unravel at any moment, I succeeded in positioning myself back on the edge of the unknown. For me, the night with Kelly was casual fun, a sort of litmus test to find out if maybe I had been neglecting a huge pool of potential mates. And while I had enjoyed my night with her, there had been no “aha!” moment, no moment of glorious discovery about finally finding what I had been missing all those years. It had been just another hookup. But what had it meant for Kelly? Would she want me to be her girlfriend? Would she feel scorned when she found out my less than serious intentions?

  “Dali-san! ”

  It was Kazu frantically grabbing a ticket off my dupe slide. Or was his name Yoshi? I had trouble remembering all the waiters’ names, despite working with them every night; there were so many of them. It was humiliating and embarrassing.

  “Dali-san!” he said again, smiling. Both my Japanese- and Spanish-speaking coworkers shortened my name to Dali. I guess it was just easier to pronounce.

  “I need Happy Birthday on this dessert.” He circled position 4 on the ticket, a ginger crème brûlée, and scribbled HB at the bottom, as a reminder.

  “No problem, Kazu.” It was Kazu. Of course! I saw his name printed at the bottom of the ticket.

  “Thank you, Dali-san.” He bowed his head quickly and turned away. I loved that the waiters sometimes addressed me with the endearing and familiar suffix of “san,” proof that I had been welcomed into the “family,” as a group of restaurant employees is called. Some friends whom I was closer to, like Kelly, even used “Dalia-chan,” an even more familiar term of endearment. I grabbed a plate and the cornet of chocolate. Following the arc of the round plate, I spelled out the birthday wish in smooth, cursive letters, looping the final y with a decorative flourish. I marveled at how well I was doing with my chocolate writing. I used to panic at the sight of birthday orders, rushing downstairs for Mika to do it for me. No more.

  When I yelled for a pickup, Kazu came quickly, taking the dessert off my hands with a wink. A wink? I looked past him at two other waiters, who were talking quietly in Japanese by the green tea warmer. One of them glanced over at me, then went back to her conversation. Kelly passed by, and they smiled at her, too, though she kept on walking. I tried to listen in on their conversation, straining to hear my name or even haku-jin, which means “white person,” which could mean me, even if there was an entire dining room full of haku-jins. With all my concerns about last night, it hadn’t occurred to me that other people might know about it. But of course they would know, I realized with horror. Everybody would know that the new girl (because three months later I was still the new girl) had hooked up with a waiter. We were a family, and I had committed an act of lesbian incest.

  Thankfully, the nightly stream of orders started rushing in, offering my mind something other than last night (and all of its potential repercussions) to think about. I tried to focus solely on plating the desserts, hoping to replace the flashes of last night in my mind with visions of the plates in front of me. The desserts had become so ingrained in my mind that plating them was almost second nature; I could actually work and obsess over last night at the same time. In between endless scoops of green tea and red bean ice cream, I remembered the lights turning off in Kelly’s tiny bedroom. As I sent chocolate cakes down the hot line to warm, I recalled waking up in the same small bedroom. I ran downstairs to get more maki, and every naked detail came to life. While I was screaming for pickups, torching ginger crème brûlées, and assembling fruit plates, I considered the numerous complications that might result from the night before.

  Suddenly, I realized that something was terribly wrong, without full awareness of what that something was. A split second later I felt it, first the searing heat and then the involuntary snapping of my palm off of the freshly burned crème brûlée. Somewhere between the scooping, the fruit plates, and the replaying of the night before, I’d inadvertently let my palm rest on the still-gooey burnt sugar.

  I’d been lucky up to that point, and any injuries I suffered at work had been minor. I routinely cut my finger while slicing plums paper thin on the mandoline, an oblong rectangle of plastic fitted with a sharp blade at its middle and sadistically embossed with a warning: Watch your fingers! I called it the tool of death. The burns I had gotten so far were superficial, the result of accidentally bumping my hand against a still-hot sheet pan of génoise. That night I crossed into another realm of cuts and burns: I had put my left hand on freshly burnt sugar, which had to have been at least 350 degrees. It was not going to be superficial. I was not going to be able to brush this injury off as I had done the others.

  Instinctively, I rubbed my palm on my pant leg, trying to wipe off the browned sugar, but the relative cool of my body and the air had hardened it. Instead, I shoved my palm into my mouth in ord
er to suck off the crusted sugar. Stunned by what I’d done and frozen by the stinging feeling that I knew would soon be searing pain, I felt like Herman, a line cook, who had simply stared blankly after realizing that he’d spilled smoking hot sesame oil onto the back of his hand. The cooks were used to accruing battle scars on a nightly basis, and they were covered, elbow to fingertip, in red marks of varying intensity. Herman’s blank stare wasn’t indifference, though. It was the anticipation of what he knew would be coming, knowing that it would be worse than any burns he’d gotten before.

  And then I felt it: The pain was acute and searing and not at all limited to the large red amoeba that was forming on the outer third of my left palm. Ice. I needed ice. I grabbed a small tub of ice water and lowered my hand into it. This was a fine system, until I noticed the culprit crème brûlée sitting on my counter. I still had tickets to fill.

  I removed my hand to have a look. It was just beginning to blister, but that was it—no blood, no missing flesh. No one noticed what had happened, and I knew from watching the cooks burn themselves daily that no one would care about my stupid burn. I would have to tough it out, but it was only a matter of seconds before the numbing effect of the ice water wore off and my hand was again searing with pain. With my left hand back in the tub, I filled a clean side towel with ice and awkwardly wrapped it around the burned area, trying to hold it closed with the same hand. At least I’m right-handed.

  I clumsily finished up the rest of the desserts, relieved that the end of the night was near. Jemal, on his way out for the night, stopped and watched me work, my lame clublike hand dripping.

  “You should be more careful,” he said before walking out the door. There is little sympathy for injuries in the kitchen. They are simply occupational hazards, commonplace and forgettable—things to accept and get past.

  When my night was finally over, I left the restaurant quickly, not wanting to have to explain my stupid burn or, worse, talk to anyone, including Kelly, about what happened the night before. Though I could not afford it, I splurged on a cab, taking my bucket of ice water with me.

  SIX

  Icing on the Cake

  Chk! Chk! Chk! Chk! Chk!

  I had barely torn the ticket out of the printer when Nami rounded the corner into the pastry station and grabbed it from my hand. She forcefully scribbled the word Japanese in bold letters at the bottom of the ticket, next to the preprinted VIP notation from the computer. She underlined it multiple times for effect and barely glanced at me before dropping the ticket on my counter and turning to leave the kitchen. Why did she still bother with her act?

  Early on, before I really got the hang of things at Nobu, some people tried to take advantage of me or, worse, even seemed to take pleasure in humiliating me. Haruki, the floor manager, took great pride in pointing out even my tiniest missteps (forgetting a garnish or sending a dessert to the wrong table) in front of the waitstaff. Once he announced, in front of everyone, that a customer had found a blond hair in her food and all but accused me of being unkempt. Jemal assured me that not only was my hygiene more than satisfactory but that Haruki was just an asshole who took pleasure in wielding his tiny amount of power as floor manager to make people feel bad. He had no real influence over my fate as a pastry cook; that honor was Jemal’s. If Haruki had been truly concerned, he would have pulled me aside privately to constructively correct.

  And then there was Bruce, one of the lead line cooks, who reveled in his inappropriate comments. Mmmmm . . . so creamy, he would say lasciviously as I stirred my crème anglaise. He never spoke to me seriously, or even civilly. All I ever got from him were comments and usually when no one else was around: Ooh, you look good when you come out of the freezer, he’d say, nodding at my nipples.

  And then there was Nami.

  Nami was the one waiter who simply refused to accept me. She made no effort to be friendly, took no steps to help me navigate the world in which I was a stranger. Even though the pastry station was under my charge once dinner service began, and I was the one who would be dealing with her special dessert requests, she more often called for Mika, who, once I got a handle on things, spent most of her time tending to more important tasks in the blessed calm of the basement. When she appeared, Nami addressed only Mika and only in Japanese, even when I was standing right there and even long after I’d grown more than capable of handling anything that came my way. I was sure she was complaining about me, worried that a haku-jin newbie like me wouldn’t have the inner know-how to meet the standards of her “special” Japanese customers. And her VIP special customers were always Japanese. To make matters worse, Nami actually complained that I unfairly ate family meal (the communal staff meal that the kitchen made at the end of a shift) twice—once when I came in at two and again at the end of service, around midnight. I rarely ate more than a bowl of rice and some salad—both of which were always in surplus—but that didn’t matter to Nami. I was an easy target. She just had to pick on me: the new white girl, the lowest member on the kitchen totem pole.

  As I got better at my job and adjusted to life in the kitchen, I figured out that Haruki was probably just cranky from dealing with customers and waiters all night, that Bruce, annoying and inappropriate as he was, was harmless, and that Nami was not to be taken seriously. That’s just Nami, Mika had said politely when I finally worried aloud about Nami’s nasty attitude. It was a condemnation swathed in Mika’s inexhaustible civility, but it was enough to bolster my confidence. Enough was enough. After a while, I didn’t let Haruki, Bruce, or Nami get to me anymore. I had gotten better at my job, good, even, and I could handle anything.

  Nami no longer had my newbie Caucasian butt to push around. I knew that true VIPs would be brought to my attention by a manager. I also knew that a customer was not a VIP simply because he or she was Japanese, as Nami’s notations implied. She’d try anything to brownnose a customer into giving her a bigger tip. I filled the order as I would have any other. I started by placing a small aluminum tin of molten chocolate cake onto a sizzle platter.

  “Bento box!” I screamed, standing at the end of the hot line. It was shorthand for Please, garde-manger cook, take this sizzle platter of chocolate cake off my hands and pass it down the line until it reaches the oven where the middleman can slide it in.

  Back at my station I finished the other desserts on Nami’s ticket. I laid five slices of almond maki across a rectangular black slab. Jemal, tired of the chocolate maki, had switched it to almond cake with sesame mousse and blueberries inside. On to the Japanese dessert.

  I had grown to love the strange elements that Mika incorporated into this ever-evolving dessert: sticky pockets made from rice flour, beans cooked in syrup, candied chestnut fillings. And while she was happy and patient to teach me how to make some of them, like a particular kind of mochi—a sticky, gummy dough that was used to wrap all kinds of things—that I loved, she was secretive about others, like her recipe for ogura, a sweet red bean paste. Still, she seemed sincerely pleased that I had taken a true liking to Japanese sweets. I loved the textures most of all and the incredible attention to detail. Sometimes Mika would bring in some wagashi, the traditional Japanese confections that come wrapped up like perfectly designed gifts and are truly an art. We would take a break, and over some hot green tea, she would explain each exquisite dessert.

  I plated that week’s traditional Japanese dessert with confidence: a starchy square of mango kudzu, a small round of Mika’s homemade ogura, and a ball of green tea mochi-wrapped ice cream cut into quarters with a halved raspberry in its center, all arranged simply and eloquently on a Japanese stoneware plate. The aesthetic was all about clean lines and minimal clutter on the plate. I had it down. I grabbed a small oval bento box from the top shelf of the station and removed its lid. The molten chocolate cake had to be ready by that time.

  “Bento, please!”

  In a reverse relay, the hot sizzle platter was handed off back down to me. Seiko, my more experienced daytime counterpar
t who took care of most of the advanced production, had told me earlier that she’d made an especially good batch that morning. By then, I knew what that meant: the molten chocolate cake was bulging up out of its four-ounce tin with the slightest of wiggles still in its center. Perfect. Finally, my internal timer was calibrated and right on target, going off when six or seven minutes had passed. I quickly but carefully and gently inverted the tin into the bento box, letting the fragile cake fall from its container fully intact. If the cake was handled too roughly, it would break open, its chocolate center would prematurely run into a thick pool, and the customer would be robbed of the joy of discovering the cake’s hidden surprise center: a melted pool of pure Vahlrona chocolate. It would not be servable, and I would have to start all over again, completely throwing off my cadence for the night.

  I quickly scooped a quenelle of green tea ice cream and massaged the metal bulge of the scooper in my warm palm to ensure that the quenelle would fall easily from its scoop in a perfectly smooth oval. A squirt of shiso sauce (shiso is often called Japanese mint, but I think it tastes much more like grassy basil) over the cake and a decorative chocolate oval finished the dessert. I replaced the lid on the bento box, pulled Nami’s ticket from the dupe slide, set it on top of the bento box, and started yelling.

  “Dessert pickup!”

  Nami responded quickly to my call. She was efficient, even if she was condescending and unfriendly. She balanced the plate and ceramic slab on one hand and grabbed the bento box with the other, leaving the ticket on my counter.