Heat (5 page)

Elisa was routinely greeting chefs-in-training at seven in the morning and telling them how her kitchen worked. Every three months or so, that’s what she did. They needed her, to complete their studies, and she, I was starting to learn, needed them to complete all the things she had to do in a day. The difference between them and me was obvious and accounted for my continuing testing time. She kept thinking of me as someone who should know what he was doing. One morning, she instructed me to run to the basement for twenty-five oranges and fifty lemons. “Use your apron,” she said, and then, noting my confused look, sighed and gathered the two corners of hers like a hammock, by way of illustration. When I returned, she held up a zester. It’s the thing you use to peel a citrus fruit. “You
do
know how to use a zester?” she asked with such poorly disguised irritation that I understood her to be saying, “Don’t tell me you’re so ignorant you don’t know what this is.” I then became very reluctant to admit that the zester she gave me wasn’t zesting—it was so dull it was mauling the fruit—until my cutting board was a sticky battlefield of maimed oranges and lemons, and I hesitantly suggested that maybe this zester wasn’t one of the kitchen’s better zesters.

The trickiness of my role was confirmed one Friday, always a long, stressful day because you’re preparing food for not only that evening but the whole weekend. I was in the walk-in, trying to find a place for a tray of morel mushrooms. There was no place. Elisa was on the floor, transferring chicken stock from a twenty-quart container into a twelve-quart container, because she needed a twenty-quart container and none was to be found. (Chicken stock was the only acceptable meat stock—one made from anything else would be too French—and every morning a pot was filled with the feet and water and boiled for hours. Chicken feet are a vivid sight—like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly—and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many people, clawing at the churning water, trying to climb out, the bubbling pot a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the hottest place.)

Andy was in the walk-in as well, devising what he called a “walk-in special,” a feature of the weekends, to clear out an ingredient that wasn’t selling before it went off. “Crispy branzino” was a walk-in special, because “we’ve bought enough branzino for twenty a night but have been doing only nine, and it’s nearly Sunday, so we’ve got to move it or toss it, and there’s some porcini, which hasn’t been moving either, I don’t know why, and there’s always pancetta, so let’s reinvent our fish dish with porcini and crunchy pancetta on top and sell the hell out of it.”

Gina DePalma was in the walk-in, too, and she was the problem. Gina was the pastry chef—an executive role, like Elisa’s—and the two women ran the morning kitchen. Elisa arrived at six and started on a long list of foods that needed preparing for the evening. Gina got in two hours later and made the desserts. Although they had many things in common—both had grown up with big Sunday lunches with their Italian grandparents, for instance—they couldn’t have been more different.

Elisa was thin and sporty. On her days off, she trained for marathons and sometimes ran to work in the dawn, about six miles. (“There’s no point in arriving clean and fresh, is there?”) Her hair was graying, and she had a narrow, high-cheekboned face. Gina didn’t exercise. She had thick black hair, and was distinctly rounder, as you’d expect her to be, tasting syrups, chocolates, and creamy batters all day. She was the only person with a cell phone—in the kitchen, private calls were forbidden—partly because she looked after her own ingredients and did her own ordering, but also because she didn’t want to cross the kitchen to use the phone located on a wall where Elisa works. (The issue wasn’t the distance but the company she’d have to keep when she got there.) Besides, Gina was a talker and couldn’t be without a phone.

Elisa wasn’t chatty. Mornings would pass without her saying a word. Everything—her manner, the efficiency of her movements, her face, with its firm, no-nonsense look—said purposefulness. She was capable of sulkiness (“When she’s in one of her moods, the whole kitchen knows about it,” Gina complained), but you never learned why: you didn’t know much about Elisa’s private life. You knew too much about Gina’s. You knew when, last year, she’d had a date, and what had happened, and what his name was, and then she’d wonder aloud if she’d ever date again.

“Don’t you have a flight to catch?” Gina asked me. She knew this from the morning’s chitchatty exchanges. “You should leave. I mean,
really,
the way we treat our externs: it’s not as if you’re getting paid.”

I nodded sympathetically, wanting to make nice, a little confused, because I didn’t yet understand the extern concept. (Externs answer to Elisa, I now understand, and the real issue for Gina was her belief that Elisa was a dour, unfriendly slave driver. Or maybe Gina was jealous that she didn’t have any slaves of her own.)

Gina continued to stare at me. I stood dumbly with my tray of morels.

“Really, you need to go.
Now.
”

She shrugged and walked out. Andy, satisfied by his branzino count, followed her. It was just me and Elisa.

“You do
not
answer to that woman,” Elisa said in a low, angry voice. She was still on the floor; I was still holding my tray of morels. “Do you understand me? You leave when I say you can leave. I am your boss. I tell you when you can go. Have I made myself clear?”

I stuttered pathetically. It was four o’clock—when the prep kitchen is normally finished—but I could see there was still a lot to do.

I returned to the kitchen, bearing my tray of morels, and thought about what had taken place. The outburst had surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: I was familiar with what I regarded as the shoulder-rubbing edginess of the kitchen. I’d seen it between Elisa and Memo Trevino. Memo was one of the two sous-chefs—a big man with a disproportionately big head of wiry black hair, and, at twenty-eight, emphatically in possession of an authority of someone many years older. If Memo accidentally knocked you, the blow came from the torso, not because his belly was so big but because he always led with the groin. More than once a picture popped in my head—no idea from where—of Memo with a spear and headdress. His was the swagger of a tribal chief.

I’d been in the prep kitchen three weeks when Memo took me aside, wanting to know what I thought of Elisa’s cooking. I was so unprepared for anyone’s soliciting my opinion I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“It’s not exactly perfect, is it?”

“What’s not perfect?” I asked.

“The food.”

I didn’t understand.

“Ever notice how much food she burns?” He was whispering.

No, I hadn’t noticed, although, it was true, there’d been a tray of burnt beef cheeks.

“Precisely. It’s unacceptable. Ever notice the dullness of her knife?”

I pondered the question. Actually, I’d experienced her knife firsthand and had not found it dull.

“Let me put it this way. Ever notice her sharpening it?”

“Sure,” I said. “A few times.” By then I knew the knife rituals. Frank Langello was especially proud of his. Frankie was the other sous-chef. He was about the same age as Memo, an Italian American, with wavy black hair, preternaturally long eyelashes, and the skinny good looks of one of those crooners from the forties and fifties, like a young Sinatra in the Hoboken years. Frankie and Memo had worked together at Le Cirque, a four-star restaurant then run by the famously fanatical Sottha Khunn, and they both felt they were among the few people at Babbo who understood the importance of kitchen discipline, which, evidently, included knife care. Frankie used only cheap ones, because he whipped them so ruthlessly against a sharpening steel that the blades wore out. Every now and then he used a whetstone, for even more edge: he tested the sharpness by shaving his forearms. (“When the hair grows back, I get out the whetstone again.”)

Memo was shaking his head. “That’s my point—a
few
times. You’ve seen Elisa sharpen her knife a
few
times. Trust me. Her knife is a stick. The problem is this—she lacks the dedicated, serious approach. Great chefs,” he explained, “are born, not made. It’s in your blood, or it’s not: the
passion.
”

I didn’t know what to say. It was a pretty small space for such strong positions. Memo didn’t like Elisa because she wasn’t serious enough. Gina didn’t like her because she was too serious. And Elisa didn’t like Gina because
she
wasn’t serious enough. (“Most restaurants have pastry chefs who actually work,” Elisa said most mornings when Gina was chirpily chatting on her cell phone.)

The walk-in episode was illuminating in another way.

When I’d started, I’d jokingly referred to myself as a kitchen slave. Now I had a new understanding. I
was
a kitchen slave. That was the role: morning kitchen slave. In effect, I had entered into a contract: I was indentured. In the mornings, I gave Elisa my time, and she gave me instruction, and the instruction was precious enough that it entitled her to my time, exclusively, and the Ginas of the kitchen had better watch how they talked to me.

Others showed me how to do things as well. (“I am a great teacher,” Memo told me after showing me how to bone a wild boar shoulder, “and people always tell me this is what I should do, teach, but I have one problem—impatience.”) But most of my instruction was from Elisa. To my astonishment, she took me seriously. I was a project; I was being educated in how to be a cook.

The truth is, I was grateful for the run-in in the walk-in, Gina and Elisa squabbling over me: there was so much work that even
I
was needed. I wanted to be needed. I longed for a day when my presence would make a difference. Ever since that first kitchen meeting, I’d imagined my putting in so much time that I’d be trusted to cook on the line—maybe to cover for someone in an emergency or during an unexpected crunch. I didn’t share these thoughts with Mario or Elisa or Memo, if only because I was still the guy who didn’t know how to cut an onion without slicing into the palm of his hand. And yet I was being taken seriously: I wasn’t allowed to leave.

Or maybe the truth was much simpler: Elisa needed help, and instead she had me.

S
OMETIMES
E
LISA
startled me. I’d be working at top speed, nervously waiting for her to appear and ask if I’d finished the five things she’d asked me to do so she could give me something else (and, invariably—and I
mean
“invariably”—I was still at work on the first one), when, out of nowhere, she’d give me a cup of hot chocolate or a piece of meat. “Wow! Thank you!” If she was preparing skirt steak for the evening—the cheap cut from the belly or “skirt” of the cow, needing to be cut thin and cooked hot and fast—she might keep back a few strips, season them aggressively, throw them onto the flattop, and put them out on a platter. (A flattop is a flat piece of steel that sits atop the gas burners of an oven—welded on, so little heat escapes: you can crowd more things onto a flattop than a conventional stove, and it gets very hot—a skirt steak cooks in seconds.) Once she boned a turkey and rolled it up with dandelion greens and goat cheese. Her dishes were high in protein and very salty. When making them, she got a slightly distracted look, as if a tune were playing in her head. These moments seemed important and were the only times Elisa relaxed. She didn’t smile—she never got that comfortable—but you could tell that she was thinking of smiling.

Making food seemed to be something everyone needed to do: not for the restaurant, but for the kitchen. There was the family meal, of course—bountifully served around four in the afternoon—but food was almost always being made by someone at some time all day long. The practice seemed to illustrate a principle I was always hearing referred to as “cooking with love.” A dish was a failure because it hadn’t been cooked with love. A dish was a success because the love was so obvious. If you’re cooking with love, every plate is a unique event—you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it: your food, made with your hands, arranged with your fingers, tasted with your tongue.

One Saturday, when neither Andy nor Elisa was around, Memo took me aside again. “Let me show you how to cook with love.” He suddenly wanted to make an impromptu family supper. He’d found some beef tongues in the walk-in, which I suspect had been intended for a special: no matter, they were his now. He poached them, grilled them, and sliced them, then mixed the meat in a bowl with his own spicy hot sauce. “
This
is how you make tacos,” he said, assembling his concoction on a platter: tortillas stacked on top of tortillas, along with several pounds of tongue and great quantities of tomato and lemon zest. It was my first five-story taco. It bore no resemblance to any taco I’d seen before—in fact, towering so, with gobs of cream cheese spread along the side, it looked more like a wedding cake—but it remains the best taco I’ve eaten.

You can’t really cook like this when you’re in a busy kitchen, but somehow everyone, at some point, made the time to prepare something intimate. It seemed to be at the heart of why you were a cook. Elisa once told me that in her ideal life, she would “cook only at home, with my friends at my table.” Gina put it more forcefully: “I invite you to my house, spend all day preparing your meal, watch your face as you eat it, bite by bite, and you tell me I’m wonderful? Whoa! That’s awesome!”

One morning Gina came up with a new dessert. “Does that have too much almond in it?” she asked, feeding it to me by hand.

I thought: she’s not interested in my opinion. “No, Gina, it’s perfect.”

“Does this have too much almond?” she asked a guy delivering artichokes, putting a slice in his mouth, while he stood awkwardly, unable to use his hands, while Gina brushed a crumb off his lower lip.

“Hmm…“ he said, talking through the food, “this is delicious.”

“Does this have too much almond?” she asked Andy, seconds after he showed up just after noon. Andy waited for Gina to put the piece in his mouth, leaning forward, his lips puckered as though for a kiss.