Cooking as Fast as I Can

by Cat Cora

  The inn and restaurant were housed in an eighteenth-century Georgian colonial manor, and the kitchen was as tiny as any you’d find in Manhattan. For a solid year Melissa and I worked shoulder to shoulder, like two oxen yoked together, plowing the fields. After I started feeling the stirrings of ambition, however, things changed. Melissa, like any good executive chef, commanded her kitchen like an army general. Sous means under in French, and they don’t call it sous chef for nothing. I was eager to be the one creating the menu and plate design, evolving the concept of the restaurant, and in general not having to take orders from anyone else. I wanted to be the one who came up with an idea for a new dish at midnight, called for a quick meeting of my staff, and saw customers order and enjoy it the next night. I wanted to be in charge. And I’m not afraid to admit it: I wanted the fame. I wanted to be a star.

  Hannah and I, and our two Greyhound rescue dogs, barely survived the historic blizzard of 1996, months after we arrived in Old Chatham. We’d never witnessed such a thing, fifty-mile-an-hour wind gusts, barns and grocery store roofs collapsing under the weight of many feet of snow, people stranded in buses for hours and days, the government shuttered for a week. A year later, on the first day the temperature dipped below zero, we looked at each other over our morning coffee and agreed: this is completely insane. We could see our breath in the bathroom of our little rental house, and the dogs shivered in their sleep, even on top of the heat vent. Every day I looked forward to the infernal heat of the kitchen, something that as a Mississippi girl born and raised I could tolerate with relative ease.

  Then, sometime in early 1997, the offer I’d been waiting for finally landed. Restaurants fail in record numbers every year. In the time it’s taken you to read this chapter, I’m sure another one has shut its doors forever. The Sheepherding Co. was exceptional. All the national coverage had the culinary world buzzing, and somewhere in the buzz, my name had come to the attention of Donna and Giovanni Scala, owners of Bistro Don Giovanni in California’s Napa Valley.

  Donna Scala called and offered me the position of chef de cuisine, or executive chef. I weighed their offer for a good ninety seconds before saying hell yes.

  Melissa Kelly’s fame and general bad-assery would continue. In 1999 she would win a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the Northeast, a huge honor, since her competition included the powerhouse chefs of every three-star restaurant in New York. A few months later, in August of that same year, both Melissa and her pastry chef, Price Kushner, would resign from the Sheepherding Co. in order to open Primo, in Rockland, Maine. Even though Melissa claimed she was replaceable, the Clarks, perhaps feeling stressed from the pressure, both financial and personal, of running a nationally renowned inn and restaurant, closed their doors.

  thirteen

  I had never been west of east Texas, and when Hannah and I arrived in California that spring we were stupid with joy. It was green and balmy, with sunny days and crisp, starry nights. I was reminded of Mougins, that same soft air tinged with lavender, that lemony light. The vibe in Napa was vastly different from any place I’d ever known. Everything grew so easily there. For the first few months, whenever I’d see oranges or lemons hanging from a tree, my first thought was they must be fake. And however cool and happening Melissa’s farm-to-table vision had been at Old Chatham, California in the mid-nineties was on the leading edge of American cuisine. The French Laundry, which Ruth Reichl had just called “the most exciting restaurant in America,” Thomas Keller’s homage to the three-star country restaurants of France, with a California spin, was just down the road. A mere thirty-eight miles to the south, in Berkeley, Queen Alice held court at Chez Panisse, acknowledged by many as the birthplace of California cuisine.

  I connected immediately with my new boss, Donna Scala. She was a southern girl, from Virginia, and had also staged in some famous kitchens in the south of France. In the early eighties she opened an Italian and French gourmet specialty shop in Sausalito, and then with her husband, Giovanni, opened Piatti Ristorante in Yountville.

  Don Giovanni had been open for four years when I came on board. The restaurant was charming and funky, with French doors, terra-cotta tiles, and a lush forest of potted plants that grew without much care that I could see. You could sit outdoors beneath sturdy pergolas shaded by wisteria and strung with tiny white lights. Donna was a madwoman on the subject of decorating, and closed the place down for a month every other year to paint and replace the chairs. She was crazy on the subject of her chairs.

  Donna was warm and maternal, and I was immediately attracted to her dark Mediterranean looks. She wasn’t very tall, slim when we first met, and hardly looked forty. I was impressed with her pearls, which she wore with her chef’s jacket.

  I learned a lot from Donna, including how to make a first-class ciabatta and the proper way to caramelize Brussels sprouts. She impressed upon me more than anyone the power and necessity of tasting your food constantly. The concept wasn’t new to me, obviously. All along the way, in classes at the Culinary, at my internships in France, and at Old Chatham, I watched while chefs tasted their food. But it had looked more like a habit than the best weapon in your arsenal; Donna taught me otherwise.

  I was excited to the point of insomnia about the chance to make my mark. The first thing I noticed upon my arrival was the big laminated ten-page menu. For a second I thought I was back at The Continental in Jackson. That simply wouldn’t do. We were closing in on the end of the century. After the Sheepherding Co., who knew better than me the power and appeal of the single-page menu? How easy it would be to draw up a new one each day in Napa, where the local farmers cruised by every morning and allowed me to choose produce straight off the back of their trucks. Heirloom peppers, beautiful emerald-green kale, butter lettuce the size of your head. Valencia oranges and beautiful yellow-fleshed Sugar Time peaches. Anything I could imagine pretty much presented itself most mornings.

  I convinced Donna and Giovanni to get rid of the tome, institute a one-page menu, and lose some of the heavier pastas. I suggested we feature more traditional Mediterranean fare, including whole fish (which, I’m proud to say and if memory serves, we were the first to do in the valley), food not unlike what I grew up on, minus the grits and tamales.

  One morning on my way to work I noticed the driveway was littered with olives. When I walked back down that night at the end of dinner service, in the moonlight I looked down and saw beautiful plump olives that had been crushed to a pulp beneath the tires of the BMWs and Mercedes driven by our customers. I’d had one of a cook’s hard golden rules—never waste a thing—seared into my brain that first day at Georges Blanc. Standing in the driveway, staring down at all those crushed olives, I saw precious olive oil going to waste. It wasn’t as if I imagined Bistro Don Giovanni going into the olive oil production business (although, as it would turn out, they would end up bottling enough to sell at the restaurant). I just thought it would be a nice draw to use oil from our own olives in our dishes. We weren’t going to get a huge amount of oil from these trees, but we could create an olive oil that was ours alone. Donna’s first response was negative. She thought it would be too much work, but over time I convinced her, and that fall, during olive harvest season, with the help of a guy named Jean-Pierre, a friend of a friend who knew about such things, I harvested Don Giovanni’s olives and drove them to Frantoio, an Italian restaurant in Mill Valley, at the time the only place in the country with a state-of-the-art olive oil production facility. They made their own olive oil, and also made their press available to other olive growers.

  Jean-Pierre and I hit it off immediately. He was very tall for a Frenchman, maybe six four, and had that swashbuckling look—shaved head, goatee, and an earring. We were friends, but occasionally a man comes along about whom I think, I don’t like men, but if I did, I could certainly like you. We bonded over my olive oil scheme, creating a delicious thick, nutty extra virgin that elevated all of our dishes and drew raves from our customers.

&nbs
p; Word got around that Bistro Don Giovanni had a new executive chef who was shaking things up, introducing a new style of fresh, light Mediterranean cuisine, and we began to attract some luminaries. Lovely Barbara Tropp, of China Moon Cafe fame in San Francisco, came in one day and asked to see me after her meal. She said she loved the food, and put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re taking care of yourself, right? Making sure your life is balanced?” I smiled and thanked her for her kind concern, even though we both knew “balance” and “executive chef” are two mutually exclusive terms.

  Robert Mondavi and his wife were big customers. Napa Valley wines are world famous, and they have Robert to thank. He built the first winery in Napa back in the sixties and turned the entire industry on its ear, categorizing a wine by variety of grape rather than purpose (Pinot Noir rather than red table wine). He was warm and a big hugger. He would always come back into the kitchen and say, “Cat, Cat, what’s the whole fish tonight?”

  One afternoon as we were prepping for dinner service, Robert walked in the front door with one of my heroes, Jacques Pépin. He explained that Jacques was in town on a book tour and he wanted to try out the new chef in town, the girl cooking over at Bistro Don Giovanni. Donna had already gone home for the day and I was alone in the back of the house and my nerves started tingling, my mind started racing. What on earth does someone cook for Jacques Pépin? Just do what you do best, I told myself. You do the whole fish. You do some beautiful sides. You don’t need to be anyone but yourself. I put my head down, felt the peace descend, and got to work.

  Jacques loved it, squeezed my hand, and told me it was the best meal he’d had on the road. Part of me supposed he could have said that to all the chefs, but I believed he was genuine. His sincerity was confirmed when two weeks later I received a copy of a letter he’d sent to the James Beard Foundation, saying that while on tour he’d eaten at many top restaurants throughout the Bay Area, but the best meal he’d had was mine at Bistro Don Giovanni, and that they should invite me to do a dinner at the James Beard House.

  There were downsides working for Donna. Up and down the Napa Valley, she was legendary for her fiery temper. She may have been the owner-chef of Giovanni’s, but by hiring me she was giving up control of the kitchen so that she could focus on running the business. She found herself in a common restaurant world predicament: she hired an executive chef because she saw she couldn’t do it all, but came to feel—once I’d relieved her of the responsibility of expediting every night and the eyeball-popping, migraine-inducing pressure of getting out the food had been relieved—that perhaps she actually could do it all, and what was I doing, taking up space, asserting myself, and collecting a paycheck for the privilege.

  Every executive chef worth his salt learns early to handle orders. I was accustomed to chefs screaming in my face, so close I’d be blurry-eyed from their spittle. I could “Yes, Chef!” with the best of them. I did not complain. It was part of my training, and the inner warrior I’d forged at the Culinary and in France allowed me not to take things personally and to pay attention to the work.

  But Donna’s orders came with a pinch of salt in the wound, meant to make me feel as if I was neither a good cook nor a good leader. When I didn’t season the mashed potatoes to her liking and she roared that I didn’t have the commitment to be a first-rate chef, I took it hard. I’d come to the job confident and full of spirit, and I was quickly losing both.

  Once, on one of my rare days off, my phone rang at the crack of dawn, waking me from a deep sleep. I was barely awake, and I knew it could only be a death in the family or Donna. She was a little hysterical. “Why is this vinaigrette broken? Why didn’t you fix it before you left? What am I supposed to do with it now?”

  “Donna, it’s always going to break overnight. In the morning you always have to reseason it and remix. It’s always that way.” I was surprised, given how much she knew about more complicated aspects of cooking, that she didn’t seem to remember that a vinaigrette is doomed to break, that after a few hours it will always revert to its original incompatible state, vinegar on the bottom, oil on top.

  “This is unacceptable. It needs to be perfect and ready to go when I walk in,” she said.

  “It’s my day off, Donna,” I said.

  Early on, it was clear that we were both attracted to one another and rubbed each other the wrong way. In some ways I was the daughter she never had; in other ways she saw someone young and passionate about her life and career, which stimulated feelings of fear or resentment. For me, she was glamorous, worldly, and sexy in her mercurial way, and also an older sister or mother figure.

  Our days in the kitchen could go from fun and companionable to insane within an hour. She’d hired me to replace her, but she’d worked with the same brigade for ten years. Once, I was teaching them some aspect of a new dish and it was clear they weren’t really listening. I found Donna in the dining room folding napkins.

  “John and Raoul weren’t listening in there just now,” I said.

  “They know what they’re doing, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “We’re going over the new risotto and they need to listen up.”

  “Cat, they’ve been cooking risotto for me for ten years. They don’t need a lecture from you.”

  That night at dinner service, she stormed into the kitchen with a return, slamming the dish so hard on the counter the mound of undercooked risotto hopped off the plate and onto the floor. “If you hadn’t been spending so much time out in the dining room, Cat, we wouldn’t be having these issues! Now learn how to make some fucking risotto, please.”

  A fishmonger in San Francisco would make the hundred-mile round-trip to Napa to bring his fish to everyone in the valley. He was well respected, also a friend. Donna was notorious for being seized with inspiration, summoning him on a day that was not his regularly scheduled day. He would make the extra trip and she’d carefully inspect each piece, oohing and ahhing, This salmon is perfect, look at this color, really a nice orange, really fresh. Then suddenly she would come upon a piece that she felt was inferior, and she would begin to rant. Look at this terrible cut! Terrible, terrible cut! And the dealer would raise his voice, defending his fish, and they would go at it, as if this was an ancient, open-air market in Naples, not an upscale fine-dining establishment in Napa. I would look back and forth between Donna and the fishmonger and try to offer my opinion, which mattered not in the least. As they argued on past the point of amusement and ridiculousness, I would reflect on how Donna drove everyone mad, how her diva dramas were what made her both beloved and infamous.

  While my relationship with Melissa had been all business, with her the captain and me the first mate of our tiny ship, with Donna it was complicated, operatic. She said I was a diamond in the rough. I could cook my ass off, but was still naive when it came to the finer things in life. Despite my culinary degree, internship in France, and experience at Old Chatham, I was still a plain-talking girl of modest means from Mississippi. It escaped me, for example, that driving Alma’s hand-me-down Honda might give the impression that I wasn’t making enough at Don Giovanni to afford a decent set of wheels. Donna, eager for the culinary crowd to see she was paying her new executive chef well, pulled some strings and helped me get a good deal on a leased Range Rover. She helped Hannah and me find the right sort of apartment, then furnished it. Later, after Hannah and I split, she helped me furnish and decorate my new apartment and get back on my feet. Donna could be extremely generous.

  I was working the usual sixteen-hour days, changing the menu, hatching my olive oil scheme, and overseeing dinner service and the family meal. Everything was coming at me fast. I was the boss of the kitchen, I kept telling myself in some poorly lit corner of my mind. I saw that Donna was determined to groom me, and I tried to will myself to accept the occasional dysfunction that came along with that. I liked California, saw that this was a place where I could set down some roots, but nevertheless felt unmoored, perhaps the natural outcome of packing up m
y suitcase one too many times.

  The only other person I knew in Napa aside from Hannah and my brigade was Donna, and when we would hang out after dinner service, I found myself confiding to her about my problems with Hannah, which seemed minor, but underscored larger issues. Hannah and I were mutually obsessed with Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. We always had a pint in the freezer. I liked to stand in front of the fridge and pick out the cherries and fudge chunks. It drove Hannah mad. If she caught me at it, she would completely lose her shit, yelling that I was ruining perfectly good ice cream, and by the way not inexpensive ice cream, by doing that.

  Donna worked days and her husband, Giovanni, worked nights. On one of my days off she invited me over for dinner. Afterward, she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. She placed it on the table in front of me and said, “I don’t care if you pick out the cherries and chunks. With me, you can do whatever you want.”

  She liked to invite me over to dinner on our nights off. Giovanni would be working at the restaurant, and it would just be the two of us. I never saw her eat a lot, but she loved to cook for me. She would grill up a nice New York steak, sprinkle it with sea salt, then sit and watch me eat it. She liked to smoke a little pot at night, and favored small, perfectly rolled little joints, which she held between her fingers like a cigarette, very sexy. She sipped her red wine and smoked and I ate, and for a moment it would be just lovely. I bought into her fawning. I wanted Donna’s approval, which she gave and took away on a daily basis.

  After I’d been at Giovanni’s for a year or so, my mom came to visit. She witnessed the phone calls at all hours. I would pull the receiver away from my ear and she could hear Donna shouting on the other end. My mom is low-key, an experienced geriatric nurse who’s spent most of her life coping with people who were off their nut. Not much fazed her. But upon hearing Donna rant she said, “Cathy, honey, I’m worried for you. I don’t think this is good for you.”