by Roy Choi
Deglaze the pot with the white wine and cook to reduce by half. Add the flour, stirring constantly for about a minute, until the liquid thickens up a bit.
Add the chopped clams and their juice, the milks, and the water. Whisk out all the lumps, bring to a very gentle boil, and simmer for 30 minutes. Then add the potatoes and the cream, whisk in the green curry paste, and add the lime juice. Throw in the Manila clams and cover the pot.
As soon as the clams open (in 2 or 3 minutes; toss any clams that don’t open), remove the cover and cook for just a little bit as you season the chowder with salt and pepper.
Finish with chile flakes and herbs to taste.
POUR A BOWL FOR YOURSELF
AND ONE FOR THE HOMIES.
POUNDED PORK SCHNITZEL
* * *
I make a mean schnitzel, and now so can you.
SERVES 4 TO 6
Four to six 5-ounce pieces boneless pork shoulder, pounded between sheets of plastic wrap into steaks about ¼ inch thick
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
About 1 cup vegetable oil
BREADING
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup panko bread crumbs
ARUGULA SALAD
3 cups wild arugula
1 lemon
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Really good extra virgin olive oil
Line a few plates or a cookie sheet with paper towels.
Season the pork steaks with salt and pepper.
Set out the flour, eggs, and panko in three separate shallow bowls, in that order.
Place the pork steaks one by one in the flour, dusting them all over. Then dip them in the eggs (coating them thoroughly), and then in the panko (coating them thoroughly), making sure to pat down the crust. Place the pork on a wire rack on top of a sheet pan and let it rest for a few minutes.
Place a large skillet over medium heat and, while it’s heating up, add enough vegetable oil to the pan to come about a quarter of the way up. When the oil is just under smoking hot, add the schnitzel and then constantly move it around, shaking the pan to swirl the oil over, around, and on top of the pork. This little bit of wrist action will create a perfect crust.
When the pork is golden brown, flip it over and repeat the swirling action. You should see a froth form—a sign you’re on the road to a job well done.
Once lightly browned on all sides, transfer the pork to the paper-towel-lined plates or cookie sheet and season with salt and pepper.
Toss the arugula with a squeeze of the lemon, some salt and pepper, and some olive oil, all to taste.
Move the schnitzels to a large platter and cover with the arugula salad. Drizzle some olive oil all over.
SMILE.
SEARED SCALLOPS WITH CHIVE BEURRE BLANC
* * *
If you can pull this off, then you can start to understand the first step in becoming a French chef. The beurre blanc is an amazing thing, and, although simple, it takes a complete focus and attention to transfer that moment into the spirituality of the sauce. It’s like catching a butterfly. Magic.
SERVES 2
4 large scallops, connective muscle removed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons minced shallot
¼ cup white wine
¼ cup natural rice wine vinegar (not seasoned)
8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold butter, cut into pieces
Splash of heavy cream
Juice of ½ lemon
2 tablespoons minced fresh chives
Season the scallops on both sides with salt and pepper.
Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat and, once it begins to smoke a bit, add the scallops, searing them on each side until a golden crust forms, about 1 minute per side. Remove the scallops from the pan and rest them on a wire rack.
Lower the heat and add the shallot to the same pan. Cook gently, lightly stirring the shallot constantly so it doesn’t color. After about 2 minutes, deglaze the pan with the wine and vinegar and reduce until the liquids have nearly evaporated. Turn off the heat and whisk in one piece of the cold butter until it’s melted. Repeat for the remaining pieces of butter.
Finish by whisking in a tiny splash of cream, the lemon juice, and a sprinkle of the chives. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.
Spoon the sauce onto a plate and place the scallops on top. Garnish with the remaining chives.
DRINK CHAMPAGNE.
CHAPTER 10
THE PROFESSIONAL
Cali. The sunshine, the blue skies, the tacos, the Mexican culture, the jokes, the vibe. The Veronicas and Rafaels and Eduardos and Sergios. The music of Sinaloa and Tijuana. The jalapeños blistering on the grill. The cars taking their time on the open road.
Right after I graduated from the CIA in 1998, I found myself heading to Borrego Springs, a desert town that could hit 120 degrees on the hottest days and drop to the low 40s on the coldest nights. I was lured there by a recruiter at a job fair, who told me about La Casa del Zorro, a beautiful forty-two-acre resort at the edge of the Sonoran desert, thirty minutes west of the Salton Sea and one hour north of Baja Mexico. There, the best chef in San Diego needed a junior sous-chef, a position that would pay a whopping $28,000 a year.
At first I didn’t give it much thought. I was in a groove during my last year of school, absorbing histories and techniques like Neo downloading jujitsu and kung fu in The Matrix. I had good grades, was even picked to be the speaker of my class. And so I thought about taking my transcript to a classic French restaurant in New York like Daniel or one of the hottest spots in the city like Nobu or even to Auberge du Soleil in the Napa Valley. But I had just gotten married to a wonderful woman, someone I felt like I had known forever, and supporting us on a cook’s wage in a big city would be rough. And something about the restless souls whispering in the hot wind spoke to me. The desert pulled me in like a magnet, and I forgot all about those French kitchens.
BORREGO SPRINGS WAS SO SMALL that there weren’t any stoplights and deliveries came in just twice a week. It did, however, have its own small airport, several golf courses, countless hiking trails, and spectacular views. During high season, from November to April, the population spiked from two thousand to ten thousand: the town flooded with golfers, vacationers, bikers, and German tourists escaping the cold to make the desert their winter home or coming to see the fields of blooming wildflowers, gnarly rock formations, and cholla and ocotillo cactus spread across the sand like coral on the ocean floor.
And because the town was accustomed to accommodating all those seasonal guests and workers, La Casa del Zorro had the entire infrastructure set up and ready to go for its new junior sous-chef: a place to stay, electricity and power paid for, sheets and pillows. It was like checking into the military; the only thing that was on my dime was the phone bill.
On my first day of my first job, I walked into the kitchen to meet my “boss.” He was a young guy like me, a tall, slender man with dark eyebrows and a very quiet, but very commanding, professional presence. I realized I recognized him from school. Paul Mooring. As it turned out, the chef—the best one in San Diego, the one the recruiter dangled out like a carrot in front of a horse—had quit just a day earlier, leaving Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to run the joint.
Paul and I were in over our heads; neither of us had any business running a kitchen. But we looked each other dead in the eye and made a pact: we were going to turn this place into a world-class resort with the best food we could possibly dish out. Hell, I was a top grad from the Harvard of culinary schools! I knew how to cook.
Or so I thought.
PAUL AND I WERE IN CHARGE of the food program for about 250 rooms and casitas (small, freestanding guest houses), plus breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the resort restaurant. La Casa del Zorro’s restaurant had a AAA four-diamond rating and was the only high-end restaurant in
town; during the season, then, we were slammed. That’s 300 covers for breakfast, 250 for lunch, and 150 for dinner. Plus room service and bar.
We hit the ground running in late autumn, just as the seasonal workers and snowbirds from Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and the Dakotas were filling the desert with their elbow grease and their cash. We had fifty or so guys on staff, all Latino except for a guy named Mike, a wizard who had worked in every profession known to man. He may very well have been sitting on millions but, like so many drifters and folks in flux, decided to live among the cactus to iron out his soul in solitude. Victor came in the mornings to run breakfast. Rafael was on the line at night. Salvador ran our dish station.
The easiest thing for us to do would have been to bump out what was already on the menu. But it was stuck in the age of surf and turf, salmon with raspberry sauce, pasta primavera. It was old and tired; we were young and fresh. Everything, we decided, had to be made in-house, fresh every day. And so we had seafood delivered overnight directly from Hawaii, bought produce from the Coachella Valley, stacked the club sandwiches with bacon we cured in house, brined and roasted turkeys for turkey sandwiches.
We kept the resort’s famous Kit-Fox Salad with its butter lettuce, dates, grapefruit, goat cheese, pecans, and onions in a tart vinaigrette, but we revamped and updated everything else on the menu. We pulled directly from our culinary school playbook and scoured Art Culinaire to teach ourselves how to cook fancy, then constructed food based on it, minus the stuffiness, using lots of garnishes and colors and trying to outdo ourselves with every plate. So for breakfast, we had chorizo and tortillas; for dinner, there was lobster, sea bass, lamb chops, and filet mignon with farm-fresh vegetables.
But La Casa del Zorro was a resort, not just a restaurant, which meant we also had to create the lineup for banquets, meetings, and events. And so we learned about banquet event order sheets and got proper event menus up and running: omelet bars and breakfast buffets of sticky buns, croissants, bacon, hash browns, eggs Benedict, tropical fruit platters, granola, pancakes, waffles, smoothies, cereals, charcuterie, cheese platters, carved ham. We even did big holidays and events like Thanksgiving and weddings. This is where I must apologize if you had your wedding at La Casa del Zorro during my tenure between 1998 and 1999: we had no idea what we were doing, but we did the best we could.
And in doing the best we could, I thought we were the best in town. Back in school, especially right after my stint at Le Bernardin, I had gotten a bit cocky, “checking” on my classmates, evaluating their work, questioning their cuts. My friends didn’t put up with my bullshit and eventually had to put me in my place. But I still carried some of that big-city swagger to La Casa del Zorro.
This time, though, it was a young, new cook who stopped my swagger in its tracks. It was a busy night. The tickets were stacking up, and we were running low on lamb chops and filets. I instructed a young cook named Kenneth to go to the walk-in and grab a few more chops and filets for service. Kenneth was a half-Filipino, half-white dude with a cinder block for a body, a big beard on a square jaw, bushy eyebrows, glasses, an apron that was always tied up too high, and pants that were always pulled up a bit too short. He had a passion for cooking, but he was still pretty green in the kitchen.
He took off toward the walk-in, but that was the fastest he would move all night. I waited. And waited. The whole kitchen waited. The guests in the dining room were getting antsy. Meanwhile, the orders backed up, the flow of the kitchen was off the rails, and Kenneth was taking fucking forever to find the meats. I yelled and yelled at him across my station, telling him to haul ass so we could get food out the door. The poor guy must have been deep in the walk-in, doing his best, but I should have known better than anyone that when you’re nervous and being hollered at, you freeze up and things become a blur. But I didn’t care. The pile of unfilled tickets was rising and with it my blood pressure. After taking too damn long, he finally came back with lamb. The frozen lamb we used for our stews.
And I lost it. “You fucking idiot!” I screamed.
The kitchen stopped. Dead silence.
“Don’t you even fucking know the difference between lamb chops and lamb leg? That’s a fucking rib-eye, you fucking dumb shit.”
He stood there. Gordon Ramsay had nothing on me.
“Now get me my muthafuckin’ lamb chops and filet now or else you are fucking fired, and I will kick your ass out the door back to Montana!”
He fumbled, said sorry, and ran back to the walk-in. A few others went to help him.
Damn, I felt so strong and powerful. Like a king stepping on his villagers, just because he could.
Finally, he brought the right cuts, and I grabbed them while glaring ferociously. Over the next few hours I threw shit around, yelled at everyone, and basically acted out every single cliché of the out-of-control macho chef. As the night wound down, I went out for a cigarette. Kenneth was outside, apron off, toque on his knee, puffing on a Camel. He saw me light up and asked if we could talk. I figured he was going to apologize. Grovel at my feet; tell me how great I was and how embarrassed he was for fucking up so badly. And I had my response all planned out: I was going to generously forgive him. Say, It’s okay, child. One day, years from now, maybe you will be as great as me . . .
Kenneth’s eyes were red and full of tears when he started talking.
“Chef, I really respect you, but where I’m from, we break people’s knees for far less than what you did to me in there. I think you have a great way of cooking, but that is no way to treat another human being.”
He paused to take a puff.
“You should really look at what you do. Because if you ever do that to me again, you won’t finish your sentence.”
He didn’t lay so much as a finger on me, but I still felt like I had been kicked in the gut. It wasn’t that I was scared of him—I’d been in enough fights back in K-Town to erase my fear of a beatdown. What knocked the wind out of me were his tears and honesty. All that time, I thought being a chef meant the white apron, the soigné sauce on the spoon, putting what I thought was my Midas touch on dishes before they went out. Boy, was I wrong. That night, under the pale moon, on the back dock, sitting next to a trash can, I had my after-school-special moment and realized it wasn’t the pot throwing and the bullying that made a chef a chef. Even on Grove Street, respect came from working hard, supporting your crew, showing love and leadership, and having their back.
Two grown men broke down and cried right then and there. With all forgiven, we made our way back to the kitchen.
KENNETH WASN’T THE ONLY PERSON at La Casa del Zorro who taught me what it really meant to be a chef. Salvador approached me one day to ask if I could help him with his family business. His cousin and uncle weren’t around, and he needed help with a little errand. I’m always down for whatever, so I said yes even though I had no idea what his family business was all about.
At 5:30 the next morning, Salvador was at my door with a smile and a cup of Nescafé. He got behind the wheel in his red pickup, and we headed deep into the Coachella Valley. We drove up to a spot under a grove of date trees where a few guys were hanging out, ready to work out in the fields of dates, grapes, and grapefruit. From there we continued driving, following small cardboard signs marked with crooked arrows and a word written in blocky, uneven letters: chivo. Goat. The arrows pointed the way to a whole field of goats. We chose a goat, paid up, hauled him into the pickup, and headed back to Salvador’s place in Borrego. It was 8:00 A.M. by then, and the morning dew was already evaporating away in the crisp yolky sun.
Salvador had already prepared his backyard with a hangman’s post; a rope was slung over the top and looped into a noose. Nearby, on a small foldout table, were knives, shears, a few empty bottles of Corona, and a saltshaker. We let the goat loose in the yard. Salvador got his utensils ready.
He looked at me. “¿Listo?”
“Sí.” I had no idea what I had just said yes to.
“¡Vamanos!�
�
And we went after the goat like Rocky went after the chicken. The goat ran away from us, as goats do. He stopped, turned, and glared back at us, spitting and breathing heavily. Then he headed directly toward me. Just as I blocked his path, Salvador flew in like a lucha libre, landing on the goat with an oomph, and got him in a headlock. Just as they rolled over, I saw the goat’s eyes. The eyes of fate. He knew what was about to happen.
Salvador and the goat wiggled around on the ground, hugging each other. From there, Salvador told me what to do. He told me to get the rope. I did. He told me to tie the goat’s hind legs. I did. He told me to get the Corona bottle, fill it with the salt, then fill it with water. I did. He fed the goat the saltwater like a mother feeding her baby a bottle. For a split second, they actually looked really cute together. Then that second split.
Salvador carried the goat to the hangman’s post. We looped the noose around the goat’s hind legs and hauled him up. His front legs reached toward the ground, and his horns just cleared the sand. He wriggled a little but was otherwise calm. Salvador went over to the table and grabbed a curved, well-used, but extremely sharp boning knife.
He walked over to the post, looked at me. “¿Listo? ¡Mira!”
Right as he said it, he put the blade to the goat’s neck. The goat’s eyes opened wide, his pupils as large as the sun. Salvador drew the knife across his throat. His neck snapped back. Blood puddled below while Salvador went to work on the belly, sliding the knife from the goat’s groin down his torso, splitting the body in one smooth stroke. The skin separated, allowing the organs to dangle out. He talked to me as he worked.
“La botella de agua y sal.”
The Corona potion cleansed the internal organs, so there was no odor as the organs spilled into the yard. He gestured me over, and I helped him skin the animal. Once we had skinned the goat and removed his organs, we moved him to a table under a shaded trellis, turned up the radio, and broke the animal down into prime and subprime cuts. We sliced in silence, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes not, hands always moving. Cleaning, trimming, cutting. We wrapped the meat in plastic wrap, packed it into Igloo coolers, and covered everything with ice. Cleaned up, had a beer and breakfast. A cigarette. Two. It was 10:00 A.M.