by Roy Choi
He started showing me things, but he went too fast. I was overwhelmed and needed to catch a breath, a moment to focus so I could get back into the fight. But he was on me like white on rice, telling me how much I sucked, to pick it up, that shit was whack, that I was weak. All I needed was a damn second, and he wouldn’t give me that space. Finally, I threw in the towel and told him to hold the fuck up. Asked him to take a walk into the walk-in with me to hash it out. Explained to him in so many words that I was new to this shit and if we were going to work together, he had to give me a fucking break. And that that rat-a-tat military drill was not how we rolled in Cali—I’d catch up quick to this New York style, but it was day fucking one!
He listened. Then he laughed. And I laughed. And from that day forward, we became very close friends. As it turned out, we worked well together because he wasn’t as good as he thought he was and I was no good but trying to be better. We would become inseparable.
The vegetable station was responsible not only for all the vegetables and starches in the restaurant but also the family meal. This is the meal we make just for the restaurant staff; served right before service begins, it’s the only time when everyone will stop what they’re doing and sit down to eat together, even if only for half an hour. And because this time was a precious, rare moment of calm before the doors opened and we all busted our asses trying to capture lightning in a bottle on every plate, it couldn’t be something like plain baked potatoes with sour cream on the side. No, it had to be thoughtful and delicious.
Every day, I had two hours to prep all the vegetables for service and to get the family meal on the table. Making it happen was all about timing, and I barely finished every day. Each afternoon at 2:00 P.M. on the dot, I came in and immediately put four or five different pots of stock on the stove to heat or water to boil.
2:05 Assemble, clean, trim, and peel the haricots verts, snow peas, baby carrots, baby turnips, fingerling potatoes, artichokes, spinach, bok choy, asparagus, etc.
2:15 Slice the sweet potatoes very thin and make gaufrettes out of the Idaho potatoes for frying.
2:20 Blanch, shock, and drain the spinach and other vegetables. Roast the portobellos with thyme and garlic.
2:28 Start to prep the family meal with chicken, crustaceans, sides of beef, or whatever was brought in that day. Some days I made couscous or classic chicken fricassee, paella or spaghetti and garlic bread; other days fried rice or chili sambal wings.
3:00 Cut and slice the baby artichoke hearts on a mandoline.
3:10 Slice the marinated artichoke hearts for the hamachi salad. Slice and assemble the portobellos for the portobello tarts or make tomato confit.
3:15 Deep-fry the chips.
3:30 Cook the family meal. Sometimes I fucked up and made something too spicy; I burned couscous once, and the chefs pulled me aside, shaking their heads. You are the first person to ever burn couscous in New York City. Great.
4:00 Pick thyme or another pile of herbs or julienne pounds and pounds of ginger. Finish up the family meal. Clean and set up my station for dinner service: cutting board, salt and pepper, herbs, salad bowls, plates.
4:30 Everything stops. Family time. That station better be clean, and the family meal better be up. Aprons come off, and everyone’s in line, grabbing their plates and heading downstairs to the big room next to the lockers. Captains in black tuxedos who sat on the chairs and ate at the table. Back waiters in their white tuxedos, mostly from Ecuador and with a big roll of cash that they always seemed to be counting right in front of everybody. The cooks and dishwashers and even the chefs, all sprawled out across the floor. Everyone eating, laughing, talking, zoning. Together. Then it was over before it even started, and we were back upstairs at our stations, hands washed, aprons neatly tied.
4:55 Enter Clint Eastwood. Saloon doors. Whistle, tumbleweeds, toothpick. Stare. Uh-oh. Chef Ripert would walk down each station with Chris or the sous-chef for the line check, spoons in hand, ready to taste everything. We cooks all stood back, bodies still, but eyes moving around rapidly, watching one another’s backs to see if anybody had missed anything and, if so, to send signals. Nobody wanted to fail or see their comrades fail. In most cases my station was set, and I shone on the prep side.
5:30 Service begins. 5:30 was when I hit many bumps in the road.
In front of the kitchen was a wall-sized diagram of the dining room. Once a table was seated, the guests were served a complimentary canapé and their table on the diagram was marked with the time. From that exact point forward, everything in the kitchen was set into motion for that table, with dishes timed precisely for each diner, whether the person ordered the chef’s tasting menu or a special $160-per-person black truffle tasting menu. Clockwork. But there were no tickets. Le Bernardin used a French system where the chef calls out an order and the cooks respond with a “Oui, chef!” I just tried to remember what was what, how many did I get, how many more do I have to do? Fuck, what did he say?
Every day for the next eighteen weeks, I sweated my balls off. Whether I was on veg or hot apps or amuse, orders would come in hard and fast: seven tuna truffles, nine portobellos, twelve canapés, six artichokes, four spinach, nine haricots verts, six shrimp pizzas, four scallops Julia Child, the monkfish needed its puree, another station was waiting on my peeled asparagus, the sauté needed his carrots to finish his dish.
Some days I soared and ran the station and the food with the precision of a great commis. I constructed whole dishes like portobello tarts and sent them to the pass without a hiccup, sent perfectly cooked mushrooms and shallots to the fish station to be used as the base for the swordfish or monkfish, got the spinach and potatoes to the saucier to sauce and the chef to garnish. Clockwork. But even though I did have those good moments, I was really just a rank amateur trying to keep up with the professionals on Pebble Beach. At least every other week, the speed and detail of the kitchen would hit me hard, and SHANK, it’d be a crucial 350-cover night and I’d swing and miss. I’d lose my swing for days.
On one really bad night of service, I was on deck for the tuna black truffle salad. The knife cuts and layering had to be perfect. The ingredients and the layering of the phyllo dough had to be perfect. And I was trying to be too perfect, starting over and over and over and over like a video stuck on a loop, layering and relayering and rerelayering. Others—the whole kitchen—waited and waited and waited, the timetable for the guests’ table tick-tick-tocking. Everyone waited patiently until they couldn’t take it anymore and told me to hurry the fuck up. I knew what I had to do; I knew how to finish the plate. But I was a deer in headlights. In the heat of the moment, I froze. Forgot what I was doing. My mental mise en place got bent out of shape. I couldn’t finish what I’d started, and, worse, I had fucked up the flow of the kitchen. Daniel finally just pulled me off my station and sent me back to the fish pass as Juan whistled my swan song and took my place.
The only highlight of that night was sneaking over to the pastry side, stealing a spoonful of ice cream, and then getting chased out by Florian Bollanger.
When service mercifully ended around 1:30 A.M., I was angry, disappointed, and frustrated with myself and my inability to just fucking execute. We all headed downstairs to the lockers, everyone patting me on the back, saying it was going to be okay, but throwing jabs at me to push me to do better. Then Juan started whistling, and someone else started singing, and Angel started dancing as everyone started to change. Then, almost like a Broadway musical, everyone pulled their pants down at the exact same time, and there it was: all the Dominican Republic dudes in tight tight bright bright tiger-striped bikini briefs in a rainbow of fluorescent colors from purple to pink. And me, the odd man out, the Asian guy with modest boxers, laughing away a hard night of service and ready to hit the town with Danny for more.
The end of the shift at the restaurant was just the beginning of our night. If it was payday, Danny and I usually went straight to some seedy twenty-four-hour check-cashing spot on the West Side H
ighway in Hell’s Kitchen, got our cash, and fueled up with 2:00 A.M. grub before hitting the club. Danny had a deep crew in the city. His boy Mike Chernow was a young phenom in the NYC club scene. They both came out of the Fame high school for performing arts and had a crazy group of friends like in the movie Kids. Mike worked the door at Limelight, and we would stroll in, no wait no matter the line. We would get with girls and pound shots, then head off to a rave club called Carbon on 55th and 12th, where we’d do hits of E. We’d stumble out at 5:00 A.M., cloaked in kisses and hugs, and head to a diner for a predawn breakfast of milk shakes, burgers, eggs, spaghetti, soup, pastrami, Greek salad, and falafel.
On more mellow nights, Danny and I would go to the pool hall and play until 4:00 A.M., grabbing a slice or a hot dog in between games. Some nights we’d call a Jamaican car service that picked you up on one block, drove around another, and dropped you off again at the same spot, only you’d exit with weed in hand. And we would chill with all the young homies and sassy girls from Riverdale or the Upper West Side and smoke in an alley or on a back stoop or in one of the girls’ cars.
That was the life. Even with the stress of the line, I was having a blast. The angry ghosts of self-despair that had haunted me in L.A. didn’t follow me to New York. For the first time in a long time, I could smile, just truly smile, and trust the pure, good energy of my environment.
I was becoming a cook in New York City. And it felt fucking great.
POTATOES ANNA BANANA
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This was the first dish I perfected as a culinary student, and when I did, I was fucking amazed. It gave me the confidence to believe that I could cook, and that was significant: sometimes you need that little boost, that little moment when you realize that, Yeah, I can do it. In school, we learned to make this with one, just one, very thin layer of potatoes, cooked very gently. For my version, I switch it up a bit and make it more rustic and a little more clumsy, with way more layers than my teachers would have wanted, so you can do it at home. But it’s still an A+.
SERVES 4 TO 6
4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 medium-size Idaho potatoes (about 8 ounces), peeled, thinly sliced into disks, and held in water
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Couple of sprigs fresh thyme
Couple of garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Place a 10-inch cast-iron skillet over very low heat and add the butter and oil to the pan. When the butter has melted, drain and pat dry the potatoes and begin to layer them in the pan in concentric circles, overlapping them a bit. Generously season the first layer with salt and pepper and continue to layer the potatoes, being sure to season the potatoes between layers. The layers don’t have to be perfect—they can be a little sloppy, even, so long as they cover the bottom of the pan. And it’s okay if the butter and stuff bleeds into everything.
Turn up the heat to medium-high and start to get some action in the skillet. The potatoes on the bottom of the pan will start to brown, and that’s what you want. Cook until they’re nice and crispy, about 10 minutes (check to see how they’re doing by grabbing a spatula and lifting up an edge to take a peek). Then place a plate large enough to cover the pan, or a cookie sheet if you don’t have a plate that’s big enough, over the pan and flip the skillet so the potatoes are crispy side up on the plate. Being careful, slide the potatoes, crispy side up, back into your pan and return it to the heat.
Cook the potatoes just a little more, then place the thyme sprigs and crushed garlic cloves all over the potatoes. Pop it all into the oven for 5 minutes.
Out of the oven, transfer the potatoes to a plate, remove the thyme and garlic, and enjoy with some Jufran (store-bought banana ketchup) or, if you wish, something fancier.
SEARED BEEF MEDALLIONS WITH SAUCE ROBERT
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This just sounded fancy, so I decided to make it for y’all.
SERVES 4
STEAK
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
8 ounces beef tenderloin, cut into 2-ounce steak portions
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon butter
4 sprigs fresh thyme
4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
SAUCE
1 tablespoon butter
¼ white or yellow onion, minced
¼ cup white wine
1 cup demiglace
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of sugar
Sherry vinegar
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In a large ovenproof pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Season the steak on both sides with salt and pepper. When the oil is smoking, add the steak to the pan and sear the beef until it caramelizes, about 2 minutes per side. You’ll know it’s ready when the edges start to brown. Transfer the steaks to a sheet pan with a wire rack on it. The meat will be rare in the middle.
Return the pan to the stove over medium heat to make the sauce. Add the butter and onion and cook until the onion is translucent, about 4 minutes. Deglaze the pan with the white wine, then add the demiglace. Reduce the liquid just a tad, then strain the sauce. Transfer the sauce to a clean pan and heat it over medium heat.
Turning back to the steaks, add a smudge of butter to the top of each medallion and shower them all with thyme and a canopy of garlic. Put the pan in the oven and cook them until they’re medium-rare, about 3 minutes.
While the steaks are cooking, add a splash of water to the sauce, a little mustard, salt, and pepper, and a tiny pinch of sugar, all to taste. Finish with a tiny splash of sherry vinegar. Taste the sauce. It should be bold, acidic, and delicious.
Once the sauce is perfect, pour it over your steaks and SPEAK BROKEN FRENCH.
VEAL STOCK
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Nothing says culinary school more than making stocks and mirepoix, along with knowing your mise en place, practicing your butchery, sharpening your knives. These are all building blocks to cooking, and veal stock is one of the most important bricks in that foundation. Once you master it, you can use it for almost anything that calls for stock, and you can strain and season it with salt, pepper, and a touch of sherry vinegar and turn it into a sauce for any beef dish, like the Hibachi Steak Teppanyaki and the Seared Beef Medallions with Sauce Robert.
MAKES 2 QUARTS
5 pounds veal bones, washed
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
½ onion, roughly chopped
2 stalks celery, roughly chopped
1 carrot, roughly chopped
¼ fennel bulb, chopped
¼ whole leek, white part only, washed and cut into rings
1 tablespoon tomato paste
Splash of red wine
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
½ teaspoon whole cloves
2 bay leaves
Couple of sprigs fresh thyme
Couple of sprigs fresh parsley
Couple of sprigs fresh tarragon
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Place the bones on a large sheet pan and roast them in the oven until they’re brown all over, about 45 minutes.
Heat the oil in a large pot over high heat. Add the vegetables and sauté until they have a deep, dark char. Add the tomato paste and cook, moving everything constantly, for about 3 minutes.
Deglaze the pot with the red wine, then add the veal bones to the pot. Add enough water to cover the bones by a few inches. Add the spices and herbs, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 6 hours, uncovered.
Drain the stock through a sieve and discard the solids. Return the stock to the stove over medium heat and let it simmer for 30 minutes. If you want, you can reduce it by half and make a demiglace, which you can use for any sauce or beef stew.
FREEZE THE LEFTOVERS.
IT’S A WEAPON.
COCONUT CLAM CHOWDER
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There are so many bad clam chowders out there, but clam chowder isn’t just some ubiquitous bowl of sludge in a Crock-Pot at your local market. It should be something otherworldly. More than that, making clam chowder is a lesson in cooking: it teaches you how to build and layer flavors, and it’s a gateway to making different types of cream-based soups. It’s a lesson in enjoying those flavors, too.
SERVES 3 OR 4 AS AN APPETIZER OR 2 OR 3 AS THE MAIN COURSE
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 ounces pancetta, minced
2 tablespoons minced onions
2 tablespoons minced shallots
2 tablespoons finely diced celery
2 tablespoons minced lemongrass
¼ cup white wine
¼ cup all-purpose flour
One 6½-ounce can chopped clams with juice
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup milk
2 cups water
4 ounces Idaho potatoes, peeled, finely diced, and boiled for 4 to 5 minutes, then held in a bowl of ice water
¾ cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons green curry paste
Juice of ½ lime
10 Manila clams in shells, washed
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Red chile flakes
Fresh Thai basil
Fresh rau ram (Vietnamese coriander) or tarragon
In a large pot, heat the oil over medium heat. About 30 seconds after the oil just starts to smoke, add the pancetta. Cook the pancetta until it’s light brown in color and some of its fat has rendered, about 4 minutes. Add the onion, shallot, celery, and lemongrass and sauté until they are nicely cooked but still have integrity, about 1 minute.