Spiced

by Dalia Jurgensen

  The new pastry chef quickly began changing the enormous dessert menu. There were twelve items in all, and since the restaurant was prix fixe, everyone got dessert, which meant we were very busy. But, though his technical abilities were clearly exceptional, I was disappointed in his aesthetic, which seemed dated and stale. Worst of all, his desserts just weren’t things I’d want to eat. I cringed every time I had to plate his warm apple tarte Tatin with green apple sorbet. Sorbet on a warm dessert? I imagined the sorbet melting into a watery pool as it arrived at the table, rendering the dessert a soggy, one-note, green apple mess—disgusting. And I hated the monstrously large vanilla tuiles I made to go with his vacherin (a classic French dessert consisting of baked meringue, ice cream, and whipped cream). The grossly jagged triangles stood nearly eight inches high and often sagged in the summer humidity, if the awkward cookies didn’t break first. It was as though he designed desserts using only his head, without giving enough thought to what they actually tasted like or how they would be received by the average diner. It was a sad realization: Even highly skilled people can have bad taste. I really had become a dessert snob.

  Most of all, though, I was disappointed by the pastry chef ’s lack of enthusiasm. He went through the motions of being a pastry chef, as if it were routine and rote. I was eager to learn, and he, it seemed, just wanted to pick up his paycheck.

  When I had time at night, after the pastry chef had gone home, I would stand at the edge of the savory kitchen upstairs, watching Chef, the legendary owner and a forty-plus-year veteran of cooking, at the reins of his team of unwieldy line cooks. Two canard, asshole, two!! Three chicken! He would bellow out the orders into a microphone, and the cooks would move, as fast and furiously as they could, to meet his demands and avoid his wrath. Chef deemed cooks and waiters “assholes” when they’d done something wrong; the rest of the time, he simply referred to them generically as “François.” All of them François, regardless of their given names or position. Still, I envied the excitement up there, their devotion to the craft. Where was my leader? My teacher?

  Hope arrived when I learned that the pastry chef had also failed to impress Chef. The silver-haired Chef occasionally noticed me standing enviously on the sidelines of his kitchen, and one night he came over to me. Don’t worry, ma petite, he said, I’m going to find a new chef de pâtisserie. He took the black Sharpie marker tucked into my collar and drew a heart just below my left shoulder. Just be patient. As he replaced the marker in my collar I saw one of the cooks roll his eyes. Chef had been yelling at them all night, calling them “asshole,” and here he was drawing hearts on my chef’s coat while I just stood there doing nothing.

  Encouraged by Chef’s promise of a new pastry chef, I tried to be patient. Every day when I came to work, the familiar smell of raw meat, vegetable scraps, and leaking garbage juices hit me as soon as I was buzzed in through the service entrance. Halfway down the hall, I prepared myself for a distinct shift in odor while passing a small room that consisted of a single, yellow-stained urinal containing an ineffective puck of disinfectant floating in a permanent puddle of unflushed pee, and a small stall guarded by a door that didn’t shut properly: the employee bathroom. I tried to ignore the brown-smudged toilet paper snowballs that continued to litter the floor despite desperate handwritten notices: Put your paper in the toilet and flush them after you wipe your ass!

  Then, it was on to the uniform shelf, where I began my futile search for a pair of regulation black-and-white-checked pants that would fit me. Having the restaurant supply our uniform was meant to be a perk that relieved us of the cost of buying our own sets and of laundering them: jackets (expensive on a cook’s salary) can be worn only one time before being washed, and cooks have no desire to spend their precious time off doing extra laundry. Accordingly, pants might be stretched to last two or three days. If I was lucky, I would find a size thirty and only have to roll the waist over once in order to keep them from falling down, but I was only this lucky about half of the time. I wished I could wear the colorful, elastic-waist pants I’d worn at Nobu, but La Côte Basque was old school, and everyone wore the standard issue man-pants. I didn’t want to draw any additional attention to myself; I was already the only woman in the kitchen. I quietly resigned myself to the oversized pants and jackets.

  I changed in a dusty storage room that was cluttered with everything from roasting pans to boxes of doilies to cases of cooking wine. It also doubled as the preferred break room for a group of butchers and prep guys, the only group, in fact, that actually took proper breaks every day at precisely the same time I started my shift. Like a high school clique, they stuck together, and they took up any remaining space in my “locker room,” using sacks of dirty linen as beanbag chairs.

  “Hola, blanquita!” They always greeted me this way.

  It was bad enough that they didn’t use (or even know) my real name, but did they have to call me White Girl? And with such gusto? It was the only time they talked to me at all.

  “Hola,” I answered indifferently. Sometimes, I would notice an open bottle of cooking wine stashed behind one of their beanbags.

  “Are you guys almost finished?” I would ask. “You know I have to change.”

  They might look at each other with amusement, but nobody would move. My five foot, two inch, 110-pound female frame did little to intimidate them. God forbid they do me the slightest of favors for fear of appearing to have given in to the authority of a woman.

  I would grab my clogs from my locker, a makeshift wooden cubby, and head to a musty back corner of the room, where I would quickly rearrange some paper towel boxes and a few stacks of sauté pans. Then I would drape an extra chef ’s coat over a spare coatrack so I would be partially protected from their view or at least my midsection would. The illusion of privacy was better than none.

  In La Côte Basque I found the stereotypical restaurant I’d been warned about in culinary school. It was dominated by men, and for most of my time there, I was the only woman on the premises, aside from a coat-check woman who was relegated to a closet upstairs beside the dining room. I had been warned about chauvinism in the restaurant world, but, call me naïve, call me a product of my Danish parents’ egalitarian upbringing, it had not actually occurred to me that I might one day have to face it.

  The masculine and outsized uniforms I had to wear and the daily ignoring of my simple request for privacy while changing were just the beginning. Sexist comments became so frequent that it was almost comical. There was the new, older cook in his forties who, after his first night working in the kitchen, declared, Man, that kitchen is hot! There’s no way a chick could take that heat . . . unless maybe she’s a dyke. I didn’t bother telling him about the bunny-hopping hot line at Layla. He, of course, didn’t last more than a few weeks. (Sad but true, most cooks who start later than their twenties simply don’t make it.) Then there was the prep cook who cornered me any time he could to rasp lasciviously, Tienes novio? My lies about my long-term, very big boyfriend did little to dissuade him.

  The waiters turned out to be the worst offenders. Mostly well into their late fifties and even sixties, they “innocently” offered me stays at their summerhouses, while they nonchalantly curled an arm around my twenty-six-year-old figure. The younger ones were even worse, reprimanding my every bite of chocolate, bread and butter, or candy: Don’t get fa-at! they would condescend in a singsong voice. If I ever talked back to them or, worse, ordered them to please not eat the petits fours off the already assembled plates, their response was always the same: What’s the matter? Got your period? Even the local labor union that represented the restaurant workers (weren’t they supposed to maintain respect for and protect the equality of those in the workplace?) let me down. Dear Sir, the letter began. That a woman might work in the kitchen simply didn’t occur to them, I guess.

  If I learned anything from working in a sea of men who had little regard or respect for the job I did, it was that I had no recourse. Reasoning was futil
e. Had I expressed my indignation, I would have been regarded as “typical,” or, even worse, I would have been labeled a “bitch.” Making enemies would only have made my daily life, already barely tolerable, that much more difficult. I would never be physically stronger than they were, nor did I have any chance of growing a penis or beating them at their own game. No, the only way I could win—or even just tie—was to not be beaten, to not allow them to prevent me from doing my job. I could work harder and faster and better. In the meantime, I crossed my fingers for a new pastry chef.

  Glen came in like a whirlwind, fresh from an extended trip working in France and ready to take control of La Côte Basque’s pastry department. He was mid-thirties at most, tall and lean, with a face much younger than his years, and a boyish haircut to match. Most important, he was supremely dedicated to the success of his desserts and his career. He brought with him a red metal toolbox on wheels that stood as high as my shoulders and required two guys to carry down the stairs. Each drawer was filled with different pastry tools: one with spatulas, one with stencils, one with knives, another with decorating combs. One drawer held different sets of recipes (creams, cakes, petits fours), a lot of them from his recent stint in France. Most chefs I’d known up to that point kept their tools in toolboxes but the variety with a single handle and a tray, with some storage underneath. Glen’s box was incredible, and, from the looks of it, brand new. That toolbox made quite an impression.

  Eager to show off his talent and ability, and determined to prove himself, Glen jumped right in, changing much of the menu at once. He was disgusted to find that the menu’s Seasonal Fruit Tart, a mainstay of the restaurant, was a ten-inch tart sliced to order. What is this? A diner? He immediately mandated thoroughly modern-looking individual fruit tarts, assembled with seasonal fruit and pastry cream, made fresh every day by Sega, a pastry cook, and served with grapefruit sorbet made from juice we squeezed ourselves. And when he saw the apple tarte Tatin with green apple sorbet, he was as horrified as I’d been. His mantra, which he bellowed forcefully and often, was: It’s all about the flavor. Taste it! he’d urge, pushing a new item in my face. It’s all about the flavor.

  I was instantly intrigued by his style and techniques, especially with chocolate. He made hundreds of chocolate bonbons at a time, layering colored cocoa butter and different kinds of chocolate to create miniature edible pieces of art. He even turned the most ordinary dessert—ice cream—into a visual masterpiece by using chocolate garnishes: four small round scoops of ice cream or sorbet rested on a hovering painter’s palette made out of chocolate that he’d given a wood-grain effect. The plate was complete with chocolate paintbrushes and a small easel that displayed individual modern artwork, all made out of chocolate. He was just the pastry chef I’d been hoping for. I even forgave him for reinstating the six-day work week with no increase in my pay. But getting used to the new desserts proved easier than getting used to Glen’s big personality.

  I learned to judge his mood upon my arrival. If he was feeling calm, it might be a great shift: He’d have the patience to teach me things and answer my questions. Maybe he’d be excited about some new ingredient he discovered or a new brand of chocolate. He often shoved things in my face. I don’t care if you don’t like white chocolate, he’d say, just eat it! Let it melt in your mouth. . . . Amazing, right? Not too sweet. At his worst, Glen could be grumpy and agitated, set off by the tiniest thing. He once hollered at me for having the hiccups. Would you stop that fucking racket! I can’t fucking take it anymore! On those days I tried to stay out of his way.

  Regardless of his mood, Glen littered our conversation, which became more social over time with his sometimes sketchy comments on current events and detailed personal stories that were not interesting to anyone but him.

  “Hey,” he said one day as I started work. He didn’t look up from the paint sprayer he was cleaning. I could tell by the protective black garbage bags still draped in the corner that he’d just finished spraying the chocolate mousse domes he’d recently added to the menu. Every time we lined the corner with the black shiny bags, Glen said it reminded him of a porn set.

  “You’ll never believe what happened to me this morning,” he said.

  “Tell me,” I said noncommittally. As if he needed encouragement.

  “Unbelievable! ” He put down the sprayer and looked at me. “I was walking to work this morning, and you know how windy it was, right?”

  He didn’t wait for my affirmation.

  “So windy! And there was this hot girl waiting for the bus. She was wearing a skirt, you know, the flouncy kind. Just standing there. And this big gust of wind comes in and whoosh! ” He flung his arms up in the air over his head. “Her skirt flies up to her neck!”

  “That’s really exciting, Glen,” I said.

  “No, you don’t get it. That’s not all.” He paused and looked at me urgently, making sure I understood the significance of what he was about to say. “She was wearing a thong !” he yelled with all the triumph of a twelve-year-old boy. “Her whole ass was completely bare!”

  “Wow,” I said flatly. “You’re really lucky.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I know.”

  I didn’t really mind Glen’s stories; in fact, I usually found them kind of funny. Actually what was really funny was his telling them to me. The idea that getting a sneak peek of a stranger’s butt could excite him so much was far more laughable than the story itself. I could handle a few stupid stories and inappropriate comments; at least he respected the job I was doing. Plus, his desserts were amazing, and he was willing to teach me everything. With Glen’s help, I grew by leaps and bounds.

  Glen showed me how to melt together the right proportions of cocoa butter and chocolate (a ratio of 1:1) to get a liquid that would spew evenly out of the paint sprayer. Sprayed onto something cold, like frozen chocolate mousse domes, the spray would instantly bead up upon hitting the cold surfaces, giving them a rough, sandpaperlike look. Used on something room temperature, the spray remained glossy and smooth, like paint.

  It was Glen who turned me onto secret centers—surprise flavors and textures hidden at the center of a dessert. Each chocolate mousse dome had a miniature crème brûlée hiding in its middle. And instead of saucing the plate for his fromage blanc mousse cake, he froze the raspberry sauce into small discs and then stuffed them inside the cakes before the mousse was fully set. Diners would discover the now-melted sauce, trapped inside the cheesecake, upon digging into the dessert.

  He had fun with his aesthetic, too. His cheesecake was wrapped in a thin band of dense sponge cake that was decorated with bright, swirling colors, each one reminiscent of a wild, other-worldly sunset. He piped chocolate sorbet into small tubular molds that he then froze overnight so that each of his orange crème brûlée tarts had a cylinder of sorbet next to it, standing tall, rather than just a plain old scoop. Over time, his personality grew on me, too.

  He seemed to enjoy my absolute disinterest in any of his attempts to astonish or impress me. Had we not ended up in the same kitchen, we would surely never have had the occasion even to speak to each other, our personalities were so different. Nevertheless, we became unlikely partners in pastry with a vaguely symbiotic relationship: I needed (and wanted) his expertise; he needed me to tolerate his prepubescent stories, political harangues, and moods. He depended on me to help him run the pastry department, too.

  But after almost a year of working for Glen, I began to feel the familiar twinges of burnout. Maybe it was the six-day work week and long hours. Maybe it was Glen’s erratic personality or his seemingly endless amounts of energy that I simply couldn’t match. Or a combination of all these things, I suppose.

  A friend, Robyn, had been getting steady work with Martha Stewart Living, both the magazine and television show, decorating cakes, developing recipes and ideas, and generally helping out in the test kitchen. I practically drooled when she told me her day rate. In three days she made nearly what I earned working s
ix at La Côte Basque, minus the insulting and sexist comments, I was sure. Maybe it was the path for me. Joey had said I had a good eye. Robyn recommended me for a trail, and on my one day off, I took a train to Westport, Connecticut.

  TWELVE

  In the Kitchen with Martha

  I had not been a stalwart follower of Martha (like Oprah, she needed only one name), but I recognized her signature style the moment I walked into Martha Stewart Living Television for my trail. Everything looked effortlessly organized and decorated, from the walls and desks to the well-groomed and varied grounds, with most things painted in colors that had become associated with Martha. Even the light was soft and flattering.

  But nothing could beat the test kitchen. It was equipped with a full-size walk-in refrigerator, deep stainless steel sinks, a wall of tall Sub-Zero freezers and restaurant-quality stoves, and standard stainless steel prep tables. At the same time, the kitchen looked like someone’s (presumably Martha’s) home kitchen. The walls were lined with white shelves, cupboards, and drawers, each one impeccably organized and marked with laser-printed black-and-white labels: knives, serving spoons, measuring spoons, bowls. Touches of trademark pale green peeked out between various drawers and shelves. Every single thing had its place and a label—a near impossibility in a restaurant, where equipment is more often shoved into a bin in a tangle of wire whisks, spatulas, and ladles.