Spiced

by Dalia Jurgensen

  “Dolly!” yelled Meany and Jessie in unison. Was it time already?

  Tongs in one hand, sauté pan of bulgur wheat in the other, I glanced over at them. They had only four plates to pick up between them compared to my fourteen. They were staring absurdly at me, raising their arms and hands above their heads over and over again, grinning. What the hell?

  “We’re giving you the wave!” explained Jessie.

  “You got a full grill, Dolly!” Meany added. “You get the wave.” Sopping with sweat, sauté pan in hand surrounded by a cloud of smoke, I giggled uncontrollably. Instantly, the tension was broken, so that a moment later when it was time to put up the food, I was fully prepared and at ease. Jessie and Meany helped me with my plates, and we three worked together while waiters lined up to pick up the finished plates after we passed them off to Joey.

  The rush continued, but more evenly divided among our stations, until it began to dissipate. Finally, we got a brief reprieve as the flow of orders ebbed and the music came on. The wobbly Middle Eastern music filled the restaurant, and from the completely open kitchen we saw the delight of anticipation on the diners’ faces. She came at the same time every night, entering just as most of the tables were relaxing into their entrées: the belly dancer.

  She glided into the room, finger cymbals clinking to the music, filmy costume flowing around her, framing her bare belly and barely clad, full, shaking hips. When it was a Friday or Saturday night, it was only a matter of time before our two-star restaurant started to feel more like a bachelor party. Men in suits and ties suddenly felt compelled to stuff dollar bills into the belly dancer’s skirt as they awkwardly tried to match her moves shimmy for shimmy, while she danced away, sword balanced on top of her head.

  Jessie, Meany, and I looked at one another. We realized a long time ago that the rhythm of this particular music resembled the beat of another well-known dance. We got in line, one in front of the other. We stepped twice to the right. Twice to the left. Once forward. Once backward. Hop. Hop. Hop. Dressed in our dirty, baggy uniforms, robust sweat beads, and arms riddled with scars and blisters, we went unnoticed by the diners, the women who made the food they were enjoying, as we bunny hopped down our line. No one noticed, that is, except for Joey, who could not hide his smile.

  After work, we changed back into our street clothes after trying in vain to wash some of the dirt and smell and grease off at least our hands and forearms. As was our routine, we headed over to the Rat Bar. If it had a real name, we didn’t know it. It was not unusual to see rats running around in front of it, hence, the Rat Bar or, simply, the Rat. It was the closest bar, just a block away, with a bartender who knew us by name and was always happy to buy us a round.

  Even more than I had at Nobu, I wholeheartedly embraced the late-night social scene. Cooking was more physically exhausting than plating desserts and, as a result, left me more wired. After a shift, we were worked up, and all we wanted was a drink, lots of drinks. After a few hours, maybe we’d want a snack, too, but mostly we wanted to drink.

  Hunched around a small table at the Rat, we’d talk about the only thing all of us really had in common: cooking. More often than not, we’d rehash the ups and downs of that night’s service: Oh my God, Dolly, your grill was soooo jamming! HIGH FIVE! . . . Did you see that asshole trying to dirty-dance with the belly dancer? LOSER! . . . Juan, I never saw you roll dough so fast. Your face was covered in flour! HIGH FIVE! We did a lot of high-fiving. Occasionally Joey joined us for an after-work drink. He was the king of high fives and would stand up from his chair and reach across the table just to make contact with someone on the other side.

  Although all the various cooks at Layla (aside from Sprout, that is) got along, we were all insanely different people, and, for the most part, had we not been thrown together in that kitchen, I doubt that we would ever have spoken to one another, let alone become friends who spent every night hanging out. Kitchens have a funny way of forcing people, as different as they may be, to get along.

  Juan was around my age—mid-twenties—from Puerto Rico, as gay as the day is long, and just as eager to talk about it, especially around anyone who would feel uncomfortable. Chris, he would say, as he snuggled up to the daytime sous-chef, a macho he-man type from New Jersey. Chris, who had a checkered past that included jail, drugs, and fights, liked women. He probably picked fights with people like Juan when he was a kid. Chris, you won’t believe it, but I had the best fist-fuck of my life last night, Juan would taunt. At first, Chris would become visibly incensed, though he would keep his temper in check. After a while, he just laughed it off, and eventually they became friends—sort of. Don’t tell him this, Chris told us, but I’d kill anyone who tried to mess with Juan.

  When Sheila started, there was a lot of snickering and rumors that she was (gasp!) a lesbian. She was, but after a few weeks no one cared or snickered. Meany was born and raised in Queens, New York, and could be a tough Spanish-speaking grunt one minute and a lip-glossed sophisticated food person the next. Soft-spoken and subtle Jessie, who came from Virginia, had a silly sense of humor (she would hold a long, stiff, translucent sheet of dried salmon skin under her nose as a mustache or under her chin as a bow tie). And then there was me, a Jersey girl fresh out of culinary school. I had so badly wanted to be a chef, but after a year cooking at Layla, I was, quite sadly, realizing that maybe I had been wrong.

  There was so much I loved: the chopping, the preparing, the actual cooking. I even loved the heat and the sweat of it all. I loved the camaraderie, the way we all worked together, and how each one of us brought something, literally and figuratively, to the table. But it was hard. We worked six days a week, for ten or more hours a day. Getting two days off in a row was a possibility, but it meant working thirteen days straight. The restaurant never closed, ever. In that year I rarely saw my family or any friends from my former life. I was unable to see friends that came into town, support friends’ performances in bands or plays, even go out to dinner, unless it happened after midnight. Even if I could take an extra day off, it would be unpaid, and earning only $425 a week, a mere $25 more than I’d made at Nobu, I simply could not afford any extra days off. I was still paying for my own health insurance because, of course, the restaurant did not provide it for their nonmanagement employees (cooks and waiters). And because of the nature of restaurants (one person per station per night), calling in sick was next to impossible; who would grill my chicken if I didn’t come in? Everyone else would be busy doing something else. Personal days? Yeah, right.

  None of these frustrations were considered valid grounds for complaint, because though restaurant kitchens allow people to be themselves, whatever form that may take (and it is still my overwhelmingly favorite thing about restaurant kitchens), they do not allow for complaints of any kind. Joey, fair as he was with his staff, was of the school that considered the long hours, poor pay, and lack of health insurance simply part of the job. If you couldn’t take it, well, then you were weak and in the wrong business. After a year, I began to feel like maybe I couldn’t take it. Maybe I was weak.

  My time at Layla also gave me the opportunity to see what being a chef is really all about. It wasn’t the actual cooking—the seasoning, the techniques, the knowledge—that intimidated me; I felt pretty confident that I could eventually master all of those things. It was all the other stuff I hadn’t thought about; being able to cook good food was only half of the job. Joey had to oversee not only a staff of cooks but also dishwashers and prep cooks, and he had to be on top of all the waiters as well. He was a master at handling the endless variety of personalities that end up in a restaurant and getting everyone to do as he wanted the way that he wanted. He had to discipline anyone who stepped out of line or slacked off, and he had to make sure the purveyors weren’t cheating him. He had to be in charge (of personnel, of food, of budgets) while simultaneously charming the press, the customers, sometimes even Heavy D. Joey was supremely confident and commanded ultimate authority, two charact
eristics that had just not made it into my DNA.

  But maybe I was just down on myself. Maybe over time I would develop these skills. Maybe all I needed, really, was a break.

  TEN

  Takeout

  Joey wasn’t that surprised when I gave him my notice.

  “I think I just need a break,” I told him. What else could I say? It wasn’t like I’d found another job. I wasn’t actually sure what I was going to do.

  “Well, Doll,” he said. “I’m sorry to see you go, but I know you haven’t been too happy recently.”

  “It’s not that I’m not happy . . .” I wanted to explain, but I feared that anything I said would offend him and I definitely didn’t want to offend Joey.

  “So, what are you gonna do?” he asked, ignoring my lame response.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. It was true, but why did I always feel like such an idiot talking to Joey? It was easier to communicate over order-fires; he told me what to do and I did it. “Maybe try food styling?” As if he would remember a comment he’d made almost a year ago.

  “Well,” he went on, ignoring my attempt at a half joke, “I know a guy who has a catering business. He could probably use you a few days a week, here and there. Pays pretty good. Tell him I sent you.”

  After a brief phone conversation, Joey’s friend Bob gave me an address on Twenty-fourth Street and told me to meet him on the eleventh floor, wearing chef ’s pants.

  The address was the service entrance to an office building. I walked out of the elevator into a gray hallway, where two guys in chef ’s coats and black-and-white-checked pants were hunched over a long table.

  Bob looked up. “Dolly?” I couldn’t believe Joey actually told him my name was Dolly.

  At the end of the table, there was a waist-high metal cart filled with sheet pans, each one lined with food, some of it bite-sized, some of it still needing to be cut. The table was set up with cutting boards and littered with knives, crumbs, and silver trays. People dressed in black pants and white shirts randomly opened the door to the hallway, letting in the hum of office party chatter, to pick up a tray filled with hors d’oeuvres. Cater waiters.

  “So,” Bob explained, handing me a chef’s coat. “We’ve got about twenty different hors d’oeuvres here for this party, some sort of work anniversary or something. Joey said you had pastry experience.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s excellent. I’m gonna have you cut this napoleon.” He pointed to a large rectangle: three sheets of puff pastry layered with smoked salmon mousse and chive goat cheese. He handed me a long serrated knife. “Just cut them into bite-sized squares, like this.” He pointed to a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Then you can arrange them on a silver tray.”

  I cut the napoleon into small, even squares, then moved on to some of the other, less messy hors d’oeuvres. The top shelf of the metal cart was reserved for hot hors d’oeuvres, which we heated with cans of Sterno lit just below it. Mini crab cakes, mini goat cheesecakes crusted with almonds, marinated shrimp, all had been cooked back at the caterer’s kitchen, and we just warmed them up, adding a garnish before sending them out.

  I treated the area just as I would any kitchen station. I organized everything as efficiently and neatly as possible. At the end of the party, we cleaned off the table, threw out any leftover food, and restocked the rolling cart with dirty stuff to bring back to the catering kitchen.

  “So,” Bob said as we loaded everything back into his van on the street. “I’d like to use you again. We pay seventeen dollars an hour, and you can work as many or as few days as you’d like.”

  Seventeen dollars an hour! I quickly calculated that I could work just fewer than thirty hours a week and make the same money I made at Layla. And from what I could tell, it wasn’t that difficult a job. No flaming grills, no one yelling for ten plates at a time. I began my stint as a freelance catering cook.

  On my next day of work, I helped prepare the food for an upcoming event and arrived ready to scoop out hundreds of crab cakes or peel piles of carrots. Kevin, the head chef of the company, showed me around the kitchen, which had most of the same equipment as any restaurant but with lots more preparation and storage space.

  “You have pastry experience, right?” he asked. Again with the pastry experience. I didn’t yet realize what a commodity it was.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Excellent,” he told me. “You can start by rolling out these sheets of puff pastry. We need them about double the size they are now, about an eighth of an inch thick.”

  “Okay,” I said, looking at the two boxes full of puff pastry sheets. Rolling out puff pastry was tricky, mostly because it had to be partially frozen, or at least quite cold, while rolling. If it got too warm, it would just snap back to its smaller size. And it had to be rolled evenly, otherwise it wouldn’t puff properly when baked. It was a tedious task and, I was sure, a test. If I passed (rolled out the dough adequately and quickly enough, and didn’t complain), I would be given better tasks and be asked to work more often.

  For six months I lived the life of a freelance caterer. Just as Bob had promised, I was able to work as much or as little as I wanted. If I wanted to go to a friend’s party one Friday night, I simply told Bob I was unavailable, and, without asking questions or giving me any guilt, he simply found someone else. If I wanted to make a little extra cash, I signed up for as many parties as possible, of which there was rarely a shortage.

  We did small private parties in people’s homes, which more often than not left me envious. I could not believe the size and utter grandeur of some of these New York City apartments. This other half always had the most amazing kitchens in their homes, yet they got little use, except for when we arrived, drooling over the multitude of All-Clad pots and pans, the high-end machinery and refrigeration. The irony was always lost on the client.

  We did a lot of business events, too: cocktail parties, fund-raisers, corporate promotions, sit-down dinners, sometimes for up to fifteen hundred guests. I learned how to plate food for hundreds of guests at a time and to “cook” food with nothing more than small tubs of the glowing gelatinous goo called Sterno.

  Soon, I was able to “run” small parties (usually in private homes), which meant being the head kitchen person, taking full responsibility for all the food, and earning $25 an hour. It also meant dealing with the client/host, and although some of them were sincerely thankful for my efforts, others treated me more like a servant than a trained professional.

  My fellow cooks were always rotating and represented a wide range of cooking backgrounds. Some, like me, had come from high-end restaurants and just needed a break or were simply between jobs; others made virtual careers out of freelancing and even did small side jobs on their own. Kevin, the head chef of the catering company, had already been a chef in his own right but left the restaurant world in search of a more sane lifestyle, one with less pressure, fewer hours, and more money. He planned on returning to restaurants one day and resented the oft-heard sentiment that cooks who trade in the restaurant world for jobs in catering, private clubs, or corporate dining are cooks who simply can’t hack it in the restaurant world.

  I liked the freedom, the money, even the variety of the foods we prepared—for a while, but where was I going? I didn’t have enough experience to become a head catering chef. My life as a freelance cook didn’t offer much in the way of stability, either. I realized that, as much as it had worn me out, restaurant life offered a steady camaraderie and an environment in which I learned something, really learned something, because I had to do it over and over and over again, every day. Every task I did at Layla and Nobu—every dish, every vinaigrette, cookie, and sauce—I remembered. They had seeped into my skin. And in restaurants, I had worked closely with a chef, almost as an apprentice, and I missed that kind of guidance.

  When a fellow catering cook mentioned he had a friend who was looking for pastry people, my interest was piqued. When he told me the restaurant was
La Côte Basque, a venerable three-star restaurant practically legendary for the large number of ultimately famous chefs who had passed through its kitchens, I was even more interested. If I was going to return to restaurants, it had to be to a respected one. And I didn’t mind that it was a pastry job; if I had learned anything from working in catering, it was that having pastry experience was a commodity, something that a lot of chefs and cooks either didn’t know that much about or simply didn’t have that much interest in. And, unlike a savory chef, pastry chefs have smaller staffs, smaller menus, and fewer budgetary concerns. With more experience under my belt and a different perspective because of it, pastry chef started to seem like it might be a good fit, definitely a path worth looking into. My six-month catering stint had given me just the break I needed.

  ELEVEN

  French 101

  I should have known that something was a bit off when the new pastry chef of La Côte Basque chose a bar on Sixth Avenue for our first meeting and interview. He had not officially started work at the restaurant yet and had to find an alternative meeting place. At least that’s what he said. He told me to just look for a guy wearing a French soccer shirt. He bought me a beer, and I gave him my résumé, a fair trade, I guess, for my time, though he barely glanced at my résumé.

  “The job is five days a week,” he said in a mild French accent, “and pays six hundred and fifty dollars a week.”

  He must have been in his early forties. His dirty-blond hair was longish and beginning to thin—not a good combination. He had worked in plenty of restaurants I had heard of though never eaten at and had trained and worked extensively in France before coming to New York. I knew that French training was rigorous and exceptional; he had to know his stuff. He hardly asked me any questions at all and didn’t even ask me to trail before offering me the job. I thought I’d hit the restaurant job jackpot.

  The pastry kitchen at La Côte Basque was amazing (pastry had its own mini kitchen, not just a table squished into a crowded room like at Nobu and Layla). We were segregated (in the best possible sense) into a corner of the large basement prep area, with our own set of double-decker convection ovens, a six-top burner, a total of ten reach-in refrigerators, and five reach-in freezers. One of our six-foot prep tables was covered in a thick slab of marble, the perfect cool surface for working with doughs and chocolate. We had three industrial mixers, from a twelve-quart all the way up to one with a bowl so enormous I could easily have bathed in it. There was even a sheeter, a machine that quickly rolls out dough to exact thicknesses.