“Arigato goazaimas! ” I said cheerfully as she left the kitchen. She hated it when I spoke Japanese, even if it was just to say thank you.
I followed her path to the edge of the dining room. It was late enough that I had completely finished setting up the dessert station but still early enough that not many dessert orders were coming in yet. It was the calm before the storm, and until the small printer started spitting out its crushing mountain of orders, I had a few moments of precious downtime during which I could enjoy the view into the dining room.
As usual, we had a full night of reservations (in almost a year that I spent at Nobu, I can’t remember a night on which we did fewer than 275 covers, or people, which meant the restaurant was packed for the entire night) and both the front and back rooms were full. According to our roster of reservations, we would be serving a multitude of VIPs of varying importance that night: rock stars, industry professionals, movie stars, investors, movie stars/investors. Their reservations were noted on the VIP list before service so that everyone would know that they were to be paid special attention. At the very least, they would receive an extra dessert, on the house. I learned that dessert was the “freebie” of choice most of the time. Desserts were low-cost items, as their ingredients were invariably inexpensive (how much do flour, sugar, even chocolate, cost compared to meat, fish, and specialty produce?), and were often thought of as special treats, bonuses that customers might otherwise forgo.
From my post at the edge of the kitchen, I could see into the other half of the restaurant, the front of the house, which was a sensory contrast to the kitchen in every way. The lights were soft and flattering, large windows looked out onto the Tribeca streets, modern “trees” made from stained planks of wood adorned various corners, the tablecloth-free wooden tabletops—everything about the room, save the excitement of the customers and the insistence of the waiters, felt calm and relaxed.
I could see Robert De Niro (famous movie star/investor #1) already seated at his favored table in the back corner of the back room, chatting over sushi with Harvey Keitel (famous movie star #2). They were both regulars. Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow would be arriving later on. The restaurant was so popular with the rich and famous, so regularly inundated with notable names, that I grew accustomed to the constant influx of celebrity. I never actually met any of the stars, unlike the star sushi chefs. They actually worked in the dining room, and could have conversations with them if it seemed appropriate. Morimoto once left his post, ran downstairs, and changed into his street clothes just so he could say hello to Ralph Lauren while wearing his head-to-toe Ralph Lauren ensemble. Then he changed back and returned to work. I once bumped into Bill Murray, when we both happened to exit the restrooms at the same time. He complimented me on a job well done, and went back to his table. After so many months of serving celebrities, I was more impressed with his height than anything else. Outside of that, my relationship with celebrity—with all customers, really—was that of servant-master: they demanded, I served. We communicated via computer-generated tickets or anxious waiter. Mel Gibson wanted to send Rene Russo an “obscene” dessert as a joke? I did my best and cut a long rod of maki, stood it on a plate like a tower, set two balls of mochi ice cream at its base, and spooned some crème anglaise around it. I liked to think that no matter how famous or important the VIPs were, they still needed me if they wanted dessert. I could do something they couldn’t.
Chk! Chk! Chk! Chk! Chk!
The sound pulled me out of the dining room and back to my post with Pavlovian force as the printer began its nightly crescendo and jettisoned its white paper tongue: six tables at once. Time to focus. I tallied the dessert totals: three almond maki, five bento boxes, two fruit plates (damn the time-consuming fruit plates! Why couldn’t people just throw caution to the wind, live a little, and order a real dessert?), one ginger crème brûlée, and one kotaishi maki. Kotaishi maki was Jemal’s latest addition to the menu. Unlike the almond maki, the kotaishi maki was actually two tall cylinders of striped green tea and almond cake, cut on the bias and filled with mango-chocolate mousse, and served with coconut-ginger broth. It was the first dessert to appear on the menu that I actually didn’t like, mostly because of the thin broth that pooled around the towers. After tasting it for the first time, I’d swallowed quietly and just nodded, afraid to tell the truth while being absolutely incapable of lying (another curse I live with). Not that it mattered, since Jemal’s confidence was unwavering and seemingly indestructible. I wondered if I’d ever be so self-assured.
I made all twelve desserts at once. I learned long ago that it is just as easy, and faster, to make five bento boxes at once (or maki or brûlées) as it is to make one. I lined my narrow counter with their respective plates and loaded two sizzle platters with molten chocolate cakes. The bento box was quickly becoming Nobu’s signature dessert.
“Bento boxes for the oven!” I bellowed from the end of the line, no longer shy about yelling in the kitchen.
For the next two hours or so, until the printer finally slowed down, I was a whirlwind of measured movement: assessing tickets as they came in, timing the molten cakes, decoratively cutting fruit. In between, I rapidly replenished sauce bottles, sliced maki for backup, and moved stacks of warm just-washed plates into the cooler so they would be chilled in time for plating. Ice cream on a warm plate turns into a soupy mess, and if I forgot to refill my stack in the refrigerator, I ended up wasting valuable time chilling plates with ice and towel-drying them. I did not have that kind of time. I finally understood what Linda had meant: Work in the kitchen was all about timing, using every moment as efficiently as possible, not wasting a single second.
I responded to urgent calls of “Dali-san!” from frantic waiters who had forgotten to punch in their dessert orders and who needed them five minutes earlier. Those tickets got prioritized to the front of the line, as did those tickets with a single quickly plated dessert unfortunately caught between a bevy of large tables. A customer should not have to wait fifteen minutes for a single crème brûlée just because he or she ordered right after two time-consuming large tables. The waiters and I worked in tandem to ensure that the customers enjoyed their final course, that their last moments in the restaurant were as exceptional as those that led up to them. The better the waiters did their job (ordering concisely and efficiently, noting special requests legibly and as early as possible), the better I was at satisfying their requests and vice versa.
The crush, as usual, lasted a full two hours, and when the tide of orders finally began to recede, I made a quick assessment of the station. I refilled squeeze bottles, shaved more plum into the remaining pool of ginger syrup, removed any broken, unusable pieces from the container of tuiles. Now that it was later in the evening, I would have more time between orders, so I didn’t bother cutting any more fruit. Instead, I started consolidating and cleaning out nearly empty vessels, deciding what could be saved for tomorrow’s lunch service and what leftovers should be given to the family at end of the night. Waiters are always more than happy to eat dessert scraps.
Jemal, who had been working downstairs, came bounding into the kitchen. He preferred working at night, when he could enjoy the quiet solitude of the empty basement since the rest of us were upstairs. That month, his hair was electric blue, like a Smurf.
“Here.” He handed me a small, diamond-shaped piece of dark chocolate.
“Yuzu,” he said. “I just made them.”
The chocolate was dark and shiny, with two thin stripes of white chocolate decorating its top. He often made hand-molded chocolates as a treat for VIP customers. It was a delight to watch him temper simple slabs of chocolate or boxes of pistoles (chocolate that came in small drops) and turn them into beautifully shiny miniature works of edible art. Tempering the chocolate (melting it down and then re-emulsifying the fats and sugars) made it easier to work with and gave it a more appetizing shiny surface. He would gently heat the chocolate to around 118 degrees, then cool it down by adding unmelted chocol
ate, stirring until it reached around 92 degrees, depending on how high the cocoa content was. It’s like magic! I told him the first time I had watched. No, Dalia, he said, sternly holding my stare. Pastry is magic.
Jemal always judged the temperature of melted chocolate by lifting his rubber spatula directly from the chocolate to his lower lip, feeling the temperature. He scoffed at any notion that this was unsanitary, and started testing me on my temperature-judging abilities. I always thought it was cool enough when it was actually still at least 10 degrees too warm. Keep practicing, Dalia, he told me, Repetition . . . repetition.
He loved working with chocolate, though he complained that neither the customers nor the waiters amply appreciated his work. At first I thought that he was just being a prima donna, that no amount of appreciation would ever be enough. When someone accidentally (or, more likely, carelessly) unplugged his small refrigerator, set at the perfect temperature to keep the chocolates shiny (temperatures too hot or too cold cause chocolate to “bloom,” turn cloudy or spotted on its surface), Jemal was rightfully angered and demoralized by the waste of all his time, but the rest of the kitchen barely shrugged, let alone apologized. Sadly, I learned that it was true what they’d told me long ago: Cooks just don’t care about pastry.
Jemal believed that everyone, especially pastry people, should eat at least one piece of chocolate every day. But, after being given a license early on to eat whatever I wanted from the pastry station, I’d quickly made myself ill from green tea mochi, dessert maki, and mini fig tarts. He knew that chocolate was the last thing I wanted to eat, even if it was filled with yuzu, one of my favorite new Japanese flavors, which tastes a lot like a more complex, super Meyer lemon crossed with mandarin orange with a tiny hint of salt.
I took the chocolate, but as he turned to fill an earthenware mug with green tea (we all drank a lot of green tea at Nobu) I nonchalantly dropped the chocolate into the trash, hoping it would take cover beneath a paper towel. I kept my mouth shut, ignoring Jemal.
He headed back downstairs, paused to look into the trash, then looked at me, determined.
“I’ll bring you another one, since you dropped that,” he said definitively.
Itaru, a sushi chef, caught my eye from the end of the line. Holding a small bento box of his own, he offered it to me with a nod of his head and sent it down the line to me. It was a game we sometimes played at the end of night, a mutual reward for busy service.
Itaru was the sixth sushi chief, an appendage to the set of five who already performed nightly at the sushi bar, a stage that was only large enough for five. He was instead placed at a tiny scrap of counter space at the end of the kitchen line directly outside the doorway between the hot line and the sushi bar. He was an “extra” chef, handing out various pieces of sushi, sashimi, and other garnishes to the other sushi chefs. He was a quiet, efficient chef and, unlike most of the other sushi chefs, incredibly friendly. He also had an insatiable sweet tooth that he satisfied by way of trade with me. I returned his nod and made my way down the line to receive the bento box.
I removed the lid to the small lacquer box to find a small piece of dark, coral-colored salmon sushi; a piece of hamachi, yellowtail in the palest of lavender hues; and three thick, square slabs of tomago, the slightly sweet chilled omelet that I especially liked to snack on. My interest in sushi had been slow in coming; I’d never even eaten it before working at Nobu. Mika eased me into it, laughing gently at my request to not try anything too fishy. It sounded ridiculous to her; it was fish, after all! But like much of my experience at Nobu, once I got it, I got it. My gift from Itaru was the perfect late-night nosh to enjoy while waiting for the final dessert orders to come in, after which I could finally close down my station and head home or go out for a drink. Happy hour for me, for anyone in the restaurant business, started at midnight. Until then, though, I was at the mercy of those final customers who wanted to linger over the last of their sake, completely unaware that while they put off their decision to have dessert, I could be missing the next train home or the shared taxi to the bar across town.
After finishing my sushi snack, I cleaned out the box; filled it with slices of chocolate maki, mochi ice cream, some green tea tuiles, and the second yuzu chocolate that Jemal had forced on me; and returned it to Itaru. He smiled broadly when he opened the box back at his end of the kitchen.
Ten months earlier I was burning cakes and pots, dropping stacks of plates, doing virtually everything wrong. I used to live in constant fear that I would be fired at any moment. I struggled with adapting to my new lifestyle: the late hours, the social hierarchy, the physicality, the injuries. It had been a slow progression—at times a torturous one—but one I had managed to figure out and even master.
In two weeks, though, my culinary school program would come to an end, and I would begin my search for a part-time culinary externship, the last step in my formal culinary education, after which I would finally leave Nobu for a cooking job. I would miss Itaro and our exchange game, green tea, yuzu, wagashi breaks, bento boxes, unfamiliar tastes, and the now familiar sound of Japanese. Mika and Jemal had always known the time would come, that my time in pastry was temporary. It seemed sad that just as I had really gotten the hang of things, it was time to move on. I would have to start all over again.
SEVEN
Salad Days
Most of the people in my culinary program began their search for an externship by looking over the long list of restaurants and corporate dining rooms that participated with the school’s externship program. Some students jumped eagerly at the tiny number that actually offered a small pittance of payment; others went for those that offered the shortest commute. After working for almost a year at a three-star restaurant, I wanted quality. I also needed to keep my full-time job at Nobu at least until I completed my externship so I could continue paying my rent, so I needed something that would fit into my work schedule.
At first, I was set on advancing my cooking career while getting closer to my Danish background, but a trail at Aquavit, New York’s only three-star Scandinavian restaurant, left me feeling uninspired. Though the food was innovative (smoked avocado, espresso mustard, goat cheese sorbet), delicious, and meticulously executed, the kitchen vibe just didn’t feel right. Maybe I’d grown too accustomed to Mika’s gentle guidance and Jemal’s genuine interest in teaching. When Steven, one of the senior managers at Nobu, suggested I do my externship at Layla, a restaurant owned by the same restaurant group as Nobu and just a block away, it made sense. I’d get to extern two days a week at a great restaurant (the recently opened Layla had just received a glowing two-star review from the New York Times), and Nobu would be flexible with my schedule. Steven walked me over himself.
“Here she is, Joey,” Steven said, handing me off to Layla’s chef.
Layla was a large corner restaurant with enormous windows, hanging lantern-style lights, and lots of colorful tiles. As we sat in one of the booths, Joey gave me a brief overview of his style. He’d trained both in New York and Paris, so his food was rooted in traditional cooking methods, but he favored the flavors of the Mediterranean, including Italian, which was his heritage. Layla’s food spanned both Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East, so he incorporated many of the flavors and ingredients of the region—zaatar, couscous, sumac, phyllo—in a way that seemed completely natural.
As I sat listening to Joey, I tried to get a feeling for the place (after all, a “feeling” had turned me off to Aquavit and another “feeling” had motivated me to enroll in cooking school). The dining room was full of natural light that bled into the completely open kitchen which extended out from the long, curved bar. I could hear music, Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova,” playing in the kitchen. The cooks were smiling, and they seemed calm. One of them was a woman.
“We got nice people working here,” Joey said, “but we work hard and we make good food.”
“Okay,” I said. My decision was made.
For the next month, I sp
ent my two days off as well as a few of my mornings at Layla, arriving at nine a.m. and staying well into the evening for service. Most of the time I served as an extra pair of hands and did whatever little task anyone needed (or, more often, hated doing themselves): brunoising sticky, dried apricots for the bastiya, juicing zucchini for the Israeli couscous, plucking pomegranate seeds. I became the phyllo flower “queen.” Jessica, the sauté cook, hated making the ruffled phyllo flower garnish for her bastiya, but I, apparently, was good at it. The flowers became part of my routine there, and she was happy not to have to deal with them. When you’re here, she said, complimenting me, my whole stress level just drops.
My pastry experience often landed me at the pastry station during service. Though it was the one place I felt confident (plating desserts was second nature by that point), it also made me slightly uncomfortable. I just didn’t think the desserts at Layla were as good as those at Nobu. All the plates looked the same: something plopped in the middle of the plate and surrounded by sauce. The chocolate cake was thick and dense, not airy and oozing like the bento box cake, and in my opinion they used an inferior brand of chocolate. I felt guilty for being such a snob after hardly a year in the business, so I kept quiet and did whatever they asked.
I’d been externing for about a month when, rather suspiciously, the cooks started dropping hints. You’d fit in great here, Juan, the bread station cook, told me in the privacy of the walk-in refrigerator. He manned the brick oven that bulged into the dining room. Joey’s a great chef, and he’s a nice guy. You’ll really be able to learn at a place like this, Jessica quietly advised. Even Chris, the rough and burly daytime sous-chef, put in his two cents: We got a real good crew here, he announced. By the time Joey sat me down and officially offered me the position of garde-manger, all of their “subtle” encouragement had worked its magic. I took the job.
It was the last time for a long while that Joey talked to me for more than two minutes at a time. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that all the women at Layla had crushes on Joey. I was far too intimidated by him to consider him in any role other than that of chef. I made no attempt to be his friend, I just wanted to do a good job. In any case, he barely spoke to me, and when he did, I was usually flummoxed. He once asked me if I’d been “one of the smart kids” in high school. Not knowing the correct answer, I just shrugged. It’s the smart ones you gotta worry about, Dolly, he said cryptically and without context, and walked away, leaving me panicked. Didn’t he think I was smart enough to make it? Or, was I too smart to succeed in the virtually nonintellectual arena of the kitchen? He was a mystery to me. Far more worrisome, though, were his oblique comments related to my position in his kitchen.
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