by Roy Choi
After breakfast and cigarettes, we loaded up the truck with the Igloos and drove one hour south to Mexicali—or, as some call it, Sexicali—the “other” border town. Filled with some of the best Chinese food on the planet and anything you want at night. In Mexicali, Salvador’s family had a birria (goat stew) restaurant, and we were delivering the meat to prepare the stew.
We crossed the border and arrived at Salvador’s family joint on a small street. I was greeted by warm tortillas and warm, wonderful maternal love. His mom was there, apron on, already cooking; three other members of Salvador’s family also were in the kitchen, cooking away and chopping onions, tomatoes. The radio playing Maná, his mom put me to work: we seasoned the meat with oregano, chili powder, chiles, garlic, cumin, salt, and other spices, building flavor on top of flavor. The meat was seared, aromatics were added, and it was left to braise in the stock with its bones until tender. While it braised, we chopped onions and picked cilantro.
All the knife cuts here were rough, the utensils cheap, the aprons stained and patterned with flowers. The ingredients were thrown together without measurements. There were no drawers of spoons for tasting, only fingers and thumbs. The hands were weathered, the faces wrinkled, the laughter free.
For an anal-retentive young whippersnapper of a wannabe chef like me, someone who was trained to cook ever so carefully by the book, being with Salvador’s family was a revelation. And a reminder. This was cooking from the spirit, from deep-seated instinct. This was dumpling time at Silver Garden.
The birria finished braising, and I dug into a bowl. I felt the energy of the goat transfer into my being. For the first time in my young cooking career, I experienced firsthand the entire circle of life through food, from life to death to life again. I crossed the border a changed man. A more humbled, spiritual man.
A MONTH LATER, Salvador was once again at my doorstep at 5:30 A.M. He had a mug of a Nescafé and his big smile. “¿Listo?”
I was.
“Sí. ¡Vamos!”
I MADE SOME WONDERFUL MEMORIES at La Casa del Zorro, but after about a year it was time for me to move on and go out on my own. I didn’t go too far: I became the executive chef at the de Anza Country Club, a 500-member golf resort in Borrego Springs, making some $30,000 a year. Not too bad for a thirty-year-old desert cook.
In fact, I thought I was more than not too bad. I thought I was really good. After Le Bernardin, after sailing through the CIA, after creating beautiful dishes at La Casa del Zorro and being put in charge of the kitchen at this country club, I thought I knew most everything, or at least enough to be very confident in my skills. But, as proud as I was of myself, the members of the club didn’t really give a shit about my résumé or my skills. They were all retirees about sixty-five years old, who spent half of the year in Canada, the Midwest, or the Northwest, and the other half in Borrego Springs at this club, playing golf and relaxing in the desert. They all paid good money to be members, and they considered the kitchen and the chef to be at their disposal. Especially Mrs. Gates.
Mrs. Gates was the queen bee of the de Anza Country Club. She always came to me with recipes ripped straight out of Good Housekeeping, more torn out of the newspaper, some photocopied from old Betty Crocker books. And with each stack of recipes, she would give me explicit instructions on how I was to cook these dishes for her and the other 499 members of the club. These weren’t terribly fancy dishes—no, they came straight out of nostalgia. Classic American comfort foods lifted from the Norman Rockwell era, the type of food that gave me such a culture shock in Villa Park when I opened up my friends’ wall-sized refrigerators and pantries and found leftover meat loaf and fruit platters. That’s what Mrs. Gates and the rest of the club grew up with, and that’s what they wanted to eat.
Their perspective refreshed mine, and that calmed me and my ego down. After all, they were allowing me, a Korean kid in a town with barely any other Asians, to cook it for them. And that meant something. With my small crew of five—Eduardo, Wayo, Dora, Pablo, Frank, Miguel—we gave Betty Crocker a makeover. It was exhilarating; I had never cooked dishes like that before. Our general manager, John, was a former chef, and he guided me as I learned how to put my own mark on dishes like pot roast and meat loaf. Corn and New England clam chowders. Deviled eggs and tuna salads. Beef Stroganoff and fried chicken. Cornucopia salads and tuna melts. Potatoes au gratin and macaroni casseroles. We experimented with cooking times, used better butter, threw in fresher herbs and new spices to make everything less bland and more exciting. And so the beef Stroganoff had a little more depth of flavor, the pot roast had more herbs and a kick of spice, the garlic for the garlic toast was roasted a little longer than usual. I hoped these dishes would be even better than Mrs. Gates remembered them being. I hoped she would love them.
And she did. They all did. Four nights a week, the 5:00 P.M. rush struck, and we played hit after hit of great American oldies but goodies. I was thanked with fat grandma kisses and big grandpa hugs. As the hot food sparked warm memories, they told me stories of their youth. And that was so special to me, listening to the memories they held so dear, after having lived so much life. The simple things suddenly seemed to matter the most.
Story time usually ended around 7:00, and by 7:30 the place was nothing but crickets. After the season ended in June and most of the club’s members went back home to Canada, the Midwest, or the Pacific Northwest, the crickets started chirping by 5:00. That’s when we packed up the kitchen and cleaned out the closets, using the rest of the summer to get ready for the return of the crowds in September.
It was on one of those lazy summer days cleaning out the closets that I found something special. The manager of de Anza had a bunch of books stored away in that closet, including Jacques Pépin’s La Technique. I picked it up, read it cover to cover, then did so again. And again. Reading Pépin made me realize how little I actually knew about the craft of cooking. The CIA gave us a lot, but it had been a crash course. Jacques Pépin became my Mr. Miyagi as he slowed the process down and showed me that cooking takes time, dedication, and practice, practice, practice. Surrounded by mountains that spoke to me through wind and reflection, I spent the summer in the Zen of the kitchen, relearning all the basics. How to hold a knife. How to julienne. How to make foundational sauces. Practice, practice, practice. Wax on. Wax off.
TWO YEARS INTO MY COOKING great American classics for Mrs. Gates and crew, the Embassy Suites in Lake Tahoe came calling through a friend, Peter Brinckerhoff, who had become its director. For some reason the guys there thought that a chef who had just spent the last few years cooking for retirees in the middle of a desert was the perfect fit to run a resort that catered to young, active tourists in an action-packed town. But I couldn’t turn down the opportunity, even if I may have been in a bit over my head: as much as I loved cooking at the country club, there wasn’t much left for me to do. It was time to move on and explore the world outside the desert.
And so in 2001 I said good-bye to the snowbirds and coyotes and left the sleepy, laid-back desert for the high energy of Lake Tahoe. This is a world 6,500 feet above sea level right on the border of California and Nevada, where the water in the lake is clear as glass, the kids learn how to barrel through a half-pipe about the same time they learn how to ride a bike, people hike on their days off instead of watching TV, and locals eat whatever’s cheap and whatever’s fast—chili bread bowls, wings, pizza—so they can get back to the snow or the water.
And right at the southern tip of the lake is the city of South Lake Tahoe, also known as the South Shore. This is the biggest city in the area, the one you’d hit if you were headed to Heavenly to snowboard or wanted some big-city casino action. And right at South Shore’s tip is the Embassy Suites, a four-star four-diamond resort and my new digs.
Pretty quickly, I realized I had to crank my shit up to eleven. At the desert resorts, I was used to taking care of one or two events a day: a big meeting, maybe, or a banquet. The Embassy Suites, though, was a hu
ge operation; on any given day, I’d have to organize and prep for not only a banquet but also a wedding for 200, a reception for 100, ten business meetings with different breakout session schedules. Plus room service for the 400 suites and service for the two restaurants.
But La Casa del Zorro and de Anza Country Club must have taught me something. As it turns out, I was pretty good at the organization needed for this type of high-volume cooking. With a staff of seventy-five people, my sous-chefs, Sal and Jesse, and I put together buffets and deli boards and pasta bars, sometimes even full plate-ups. Together we cooked thousands of meals for every occasion in that kitchen. Weddings, celebrity golf tournaments, corporate gatherings, family vacations. And at Echo, one of the hotel’s restaurants, we developed a chef-driven menu that reflected Northern California’s natural beauty and bounty: lots of deep stocks, layered flavors, fresh herbs, first-press olive oil, Marcona almonds, braised short ribs, miso-glazed Hawaiian ono topped with coconut milk relish.
We were a hit. In that town of fast slopes and faster food, we slowed things down, set a new pace for the culinary scene, and even won a few awards. And I set a new pace for myself, too: I’d work all day and most of the night, grab a milk shake from a local casino during my breaks, and still find time to teach classes on gastronomy and banquets at the local community college. I was starting to really find my voice on the plate and as a chef. But there was still so much for me to learn and, two years after I joined the Embassy Suites, a fortuitous trip to Japan would teach me how to dig deeper and cook with an eye for even the smallest of details.
IRON CHEF ROKUSABURO MICHIBA is a legend in the Japanese cooking world. A fucking saint, the very first Iron Chef, and the master to Morimoto. Before Michiba, a long tradition of regionalism meant you couldn’t really find regional Japanese dishes outside those specific parts of the country. More than that, chefs mostly used local ingredients; they didn’t really incorporate anything that was found outside their area, and they certainly didn’t mess with traditional foods or experiment with, say, combining flavors from Hokkaido with those from Osaka. Chef Michiba, though, untapped that regional cooking, broke down those borders, and brought it together to Tokyo.
As it happened, Chef Michiba’s daughter had worked for the owner of my hotel some time ago, and they had stayed on friendly terms throughout the years. Friendly enough to ask whether they could send someone—me—to Japan to work alongside her father; this would be both my reward for all of my hard work and a research trip to learn Japanese flavors and technique. My GM, Simeon, and AGM, Stefan, approved. No other American had ever had an opportunity like this to cook in Chef Michiba’s kitchen. I’d be the first. A real honor. The owners also had a connection to the Pan Pacific Hotel in the Yokohama Bay, and I’d be sent there, too, to cook in its renowned banquet hall.
But first, Master Michiba. I landed in Tokyo on his seventy-second birthday. We met at his Ginza restaurant, Kaishoku Michiba. When the master shook my hand, I felt the whole universe shift, as if he had transferred his energy to me in a lightning bolt. From that moment forward, it was all work and no play, but that bolt of lightning lit me up all summer long.
The work started every morning around 6:00 or 7:00. Chef Michiba; the chef de cuisine, Yanai-san; the restaurant manager; my translator, Max, and I would go to the Tsukiji market to pick out fish for the day. Huge slabs of tuna and other fish caught those very mornings were laid out on wooden tables, some sliced open for inspection. Everything clean as a whistle.
Chef Michiba usually walked right through the market and went straight to his purveyors. As he approached, the vendors would scurry around in their knee-high rubber boots and heavy blue aprons, hauling out their very best catches of the morning. Chef had first dibs on everything, so it was always fish no one else had yet seen, and wouldn’t see, unless he passed on them. If he liked something, he got it, but no money was ever exchanged. His vendors billed him later.
Little sushi bars dotted the market. On one of our morning runs, my hosts took me to one of the most famous ones. They had given the heads-up to the chef that they were bringing a “famous” chef from America, the first ever to work in one of Michiba’s kitchens. Great.
The sushi bar was essentially the size of a shoebox, with a small counter barely big enough for fourteen people. There were no plates. No soy sauce. No wasabi. No pickled ginger. No chopsticks. You sat at the counter, you ate with your hands, you drank a cup of hot tea, you got the fuck out.
Our chef that day was the master of the house, about sixty-eight years old. The whole time we were there, he talked with Michiba while setting piece after piece of sushi on the counter. Toro that melted in my mouth. Shiso that was beautiful and pungent. Absolutely amazing seafood, caught just hours before. And all throughout the meal, the old master kept one eye on me. Watching me, scratching his head, then occasionally unleashing a stream of questions in Japanese, which Max translated: “Who are you? Why are you Asian? They said you were American.”
I just smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded. Evidently, that didn’t impress him. He went back to talking to Michiba, shaking his head, looking at me. He couldn’t believe that this Korean dude was the “American” chef everyone was telling him about. I stayed out of it, kept my head down, and ate and ate, one piece at a time, enthralled by the fact that any of this was even happening. Sushi served by a master in the company of Michiba, with food as our only language in common. Who was I indeed?
AFTER OUR MORNING TRIP to the market, the day really began—and it was a long one. I would be working at Kaishoku Michiba, the chef’s main restaurant. It was a small, rectangular space on the eighth floor of an office building across the way from the giant department store Matsuzakaya, on the most celebrated street in Ginza, the highest-rent district of Tokyo. Outside, the city buzzed and bustled, but inside Kaishoku Michiba it was nothing but serene. A long sushi bar with long cutting boards dominated the restaurant; beyond that was the open kitchen that didn’t have much more than reach-in refrigerators along one wall and burners and broilers lining the other. There was no walk-in cooler, no back prep area, no separate space for cutting the fish; instead, Styrofoam coffins of fish and seafood packed in ice, all fresh from the morning market, were at our feet as we prepped and cooked, and what was in those coffins was what was available for the day: when it was gone, it was gone. Overall, the kitchen was small, just big enough to fit ten cooks, yet somehow it never felt very cramped.
We had one marathon shift from 7:00 a.m. to midnight, which covered lunch and dinner. It was a trip to work there: nothing went to waste, ever; nothing got brushed aside; nothing was rushed or done nonchalantly or with broad strokes. Even the simplest tasks—peeling tomatoes, filing away the silverware, cutting fish, picking herbs—were treated with respect, handled with care and deliberation. The cooks at Michiba brought a level of detailed focus to their work far greater than that to which I was accustomed. Compared to them, I was a bumbling, clumsy giant with fat thumbs and two left feet.
With my big thumbs and left feet, I pitched in wherever I was needed. In theory, the kitchen had a brigade system similar to that of Le Bernardin and other French kitchens, where each cook had his own place in the hierarchy. But the Japanese way is teamwork over the self. So, regardless of assigned station or official title, we all worked together and everything blended into one harmonious entity. To prep for the ladies who lunched, I filleted fish, learned to pay attention to the nanoseconds that separated a great dashi from a horrible one, made fresh tofu. I cleaned tomatoes, diced fruits, charred mackerel skin, made beef jelly, poached figs, braised fish. Our family meal came at 4:00 P.M., and all the cooks sat down together for what usually was just a quick lunch of curry rice, oden soup, donburi, chirashi, udon, or sukiyaki.
Dinner was a different experience. It was served kaiseki-style, a multicourse meal with a menu that changed every night. During service, I again helped out where needed, trying to be useful and not fuck things up. I prepped bamboo shoots for
the yuzu broth that started the meal and then prepared the next course of one-bite sushi and fish, arranging them on the plate so they were perfectly equidistant from each other like numbers on a clock. Next up, courses of broiled fish with somen noodles, octopus, a sampler plate of fish and shellfish, Kobe beef with jelly, then figs, then black sesame flan to end the meal.
I could have stayed for a year and not learned everything I wanted to learn from Master Michiba. But after two weeks at Kaishoku Michiba, it was time to pack up my knives and head to the Pan Pacific Hotel to learn the art of the banquet.
Where other five-star hotels in the Yokohama Bay put their big event halls and ballrooms on rooftops overlooking the city, the Pan Pacific Hotel roof was nothing but cement. Their food hall was in the basement. It was the best banquet in the city. It didn’t need a view.
Run by Chef Takayoshi Kawai, a former chef de cuisine for Julian Serrano at Masa in San Francisco, the banquet hall was operated just like an à la carte kitchen, so you could be at a wedding for 300, but the detailed garnishes on each plate made it feel like you were having an intimate dinner for two. And again I picked up on how every flavor, every nuance, every detail was impeccably on point, even in this high-volume setting. Every piece of silverware was organized perfectly in neat drawers, every piece of vegetable seasoned properly. The details were microscopic, and I was just starting to learn how to zoom in.