Yes, Chef (12 page)

“We’ve got to go,” he said, stacking his plate, glass, and coffee cup onto his tray.

I followed Jan at a pace most people would consider a jog. When we got to the kitchen, it was already in full action mode—chefs running around this way and that. Then I heard the loudest scream I had ever heard in my life.

“Scheisse!”
Shit!

“Mr. Blom,” Jan whispered. “The
sous-chef
.”

Blom was yelling at one of the cooks for messing up an order of eggs, then, with an exasperated look, threw up his hands and turned. In our direction.

“Look busy,” Jan instructed, so I ducked into the nearest walk-in and began to order the vegetables. After a few minutes, I peeked out. Even more people were in the kitchen now, and they’d started to gather under a large bulletin board that had a schedule grid at its center. All conversations came to an abrupt halt when the door to the executive chef’s office opened. Herrn Stocker entered the room, stopped just under the schedule, and addressed us.

“The new
commis
group, please.”

We lined up and one by one stepped forward, said our names, got our assignments, and dropped back into formation. So much for avoiding the army, I thought, as the guys before me took their turns.

Blom, the
sous-chef
, announced our stations as Stocker stood and watched.

The kid before me, Johannes, got posted with the
saucier
, more or less the most desirable station in any kitchen, the one with the most prestige, the one that gets credited with taking any dish from competent to transcendent.

When my turn came, I stepped forward.

“Marcus Samuelsson,” I said, somehow getting the words out without choking.

Blom consulted the clipboard in his right hand.
“Kräutergarten,”
he announced.

Herb garden? I might as well have been sent to Siberia. I said nothing and stepped back into the line.

Victoria’s garden was a plot about three times the size of a large
home garden, and at least a third of it was dedicated to herbs. The rows were neatly divided by wood-chipped paths, and at the end of each row, a metal marker bore the name of what was planted. My chef’s whites stood out against the bright morning sun, but also against the green coveralls of the four permanent gardeners I worked alongside. I saw the other gardeners weeding, so I bent down and pulled up weeds, too, until the head gardener, Herrn Banholzer, appeared. Banholzer, a wiry man in his late fifties whose sun-soaked, leathery skin reminded me of Uncle Torsten and other men I knew who lived more outside than inside, gathered us around a row of empty service trolleys.

“Here is what we’ll need today,” he began, reading from a pocketsize notepad. Each gardener had to fill a trolley or two and each trolley had a specific destination: for room service; for the main kitchen; for the smaller kitchens of the cocktail lounge and the spa; and for any special off-site events.

In less than a minute, I was literally and figuratively in the weeds. It wasn’t that Banholzer’s accent was hard to understand, but he spoke quickly and with a flatness that made it hard to build a context in cases where I didn’t know the word.

“Samuelsson, you will prepare the trolley for the
entremetier
,” he said. “
Kartoffeln
. Two boxes …”

Not a problem to understand that
kartoffeln
was potatoes, thanks to my grandmother’s tendency to sprinkle German words into her speech. Nor was
rhabarber
a problem, since it sounded so much like the Swedish word for rhubarb,
rabarber
. But
erdbeeren
? What the hell was that?

I pulled a scrap of paper out of my back pocket, the stub of a train ticket, and started to take notes. This new word I wrote out phonetically and circled it. By the time Banholzer finished with me and walked off, I had about ten words circled. I could have asked him to translate as he went along, but that went against the universal rule of kitchen work: Stay invisible unless you’re going to shine. This was not a shining moment.

Fritz, the youngest of the gardeners, patiently helped me decipher the mystery words. When we got to
erdbeeren
, he laughed.

“Look down,” he said, and there was a patch of strawberries at my feet.

“Erdbeeren,”
he said.

The garden wasn’t where I wanted to be—in fact, I would have died if the guys at Belle Avenue knew I was out picking fruit instead of cooking—but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the work. I snapped off the outer rhubarb stalks from their plants, dug up the potatoes and carrots, and snipped off the freshest, leafiest stems of the herbs: sage, thyme, rosemary, mint. To pick the fava beans, I reached through the gray green leaves on the plants’ bushy stalks to snap off the pods. The weather was beautiful and everything smelled good, including the dirt.

After harvesting, I washed off the loot in one of three outdoor sinks and arranged it all carefully on the top tray of my trolley. Following Fritz’s lead, I wheeled my full trolley to the door of Banholzer’s office, a little room next to the toolshed, with big windows and a door that looked out over the beds. Banholzer had a pair of half glasses that he wore on a chain around his neck. To inspect my trolley, he balanced the glasses on the end of his long nose and went box by box, shelf by shelf.

“One more box of potatoes,” he instructed, when he’d finished giving my work the once-over. “And then take it inside.”

During that afternoon’s break, I sat in the Chatterbox with Fritz and had a coffee. I told him I’d messed up by not picking enough potatoes.

“No way Banholzer could have let you go without criticizing something,” Fritz said. “But he didn’t
reject
anything you’d picked? He didn’t throw anything out? That’s unheard of.” I beamed. I may have been relegated to being a garden gnome, but I was going to be the best damn garden gnome that they’d ever seen.

I must have been doing well enough, because after one week, Blom announced at our morning huddle that I would switch to Herrn
Thoner, the
entremetier
. The
entremetier
station prepared cooked vegetables, soups, eggs, and nonmeat entrées.

I was finally back on the front lines.

O
NE OF MY GOOD FRIENDS
in the Jungfrau kitchen turned out to be an Irishman named Gary Hallinan. Like so many of the Irish men and women I would meet in restaurant kitchens over my career, he was friendly and generous and easy to get along with. Gary—who had jetblack hair, pale skin, and a smile that cut deep dimples into his cheeks—never let the stress get to him. In fact, just exchanging a few words with him had the invaluable effect of bringing my blood pressure down. He was from a hotel family, had earned a degree in hotel management, had already worked at Dublin’s posh Shelbourne Hotel, and would eventually go on to a very successful career in San Francisco, but the truth was that he wasn’t much of a cook. At Victoria, his time in the kitchen was just a part of learning the ropes, and he approached it sportingly. One day, while trying to sharpen his knife against a long steel, Gary slipped and cut his arm pretty deeply.

The first-aid station was right outside Stocker’s office, so Gary walked over and sat down on the floor in front of the office door as he waited for treatment.

Eventually Mr. Stocker came along, and as he came up to this injured man, blood everywhere, Gary looked up at him, and in the middle of what was probably true shock, still managed to keep the hierarchy front and foremost.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stocker,” he said. And then he passed out.

Stocker stepped over Gary, saying nothing, and went into his office, shutting the door behind him.

Which is not to say that Stocker wouldn’t get vocal when he saw a screw-up in process. In another kitchen disaster, not long after Gary, a kid named Otto was put in charge of grinding meat for the day’s meat loaves. Otto was German, so he had no problem understanding instructions, but he was distracted by the pressure, and in what would
turn out to be his last day, he took a shortcut: He piled cubes of raw meat into the feeder tray that sat on top of the grinder. Normally, you would use a wooden dowel-like pusher to force the meat down the neck of the machine, where it would make contact with a spiraling auger that caught and cut the meat, forcing it out a side tube. Otto didn’t have a pusher within reach, so he picked up the nearest substitute, a metal ladle. At first it worked well enough, but on one pass, he pushed the ladle too far down into the neck and the auger blade caught it. Otto didn’t let go fast enough, and his arm was stuck in the machine, twisting his hand downward toward the pulverizing auger. The second that Otto realized he couldn’t retract his arm, he let out a howl. Out of nowhere, it seemed, Stocker showed up and slammed off the power, two seconds before Otto’s hand was ground into mincemeat. Stocker and a couple of others untwisted Otto’s arm from the machine, and the whole while, Stocker never once asked if Otto was OK, he just berated him.

“Why the hell are you using the wrong tool?” he screamed. “What were you
thinking
? You were
this close
to losing your arm! Are you trying to get our department in trouble? Trying to get me fired?” While Stocker yelled, the few women who worked in the kitchen sobbed in the background. I simply turned my back and got to stirring a veal stock, wondering how Stocker could get onto the scene so fast. I came to learn that a great chef kept an extra eye on the lightweights, the lazy, and the nervous.

They were all dangerous, to themselves and to others, and Stocker couldn’t afford to let them screw up. You don’t lose your arm in a typical office job. And because of that, his
sous-chefs
were given the power to fire anyone they found wanting. Often, this was the druggies, the guys who spent all their time off up in Zurich—the best place to get drugs—and who showed up for the morning shift in sunglasses. No hard evidence was required, but the
sous-chefs
must have had some eyes and ears in the dorms, because in all my time there, when they picked someone to dismiss, they were never wrong. And when people got fired, they were erased. No one reminisced about them openly. No one even said their names.

Another way of weeding out the weak links was through on-the-spot tests. You might be going along in your shift, and suddenly Stocker would stop at your station and instruct you to perform a task.

“Chiffonade of basil,” he’d bark, arms crossed.
“Sauce beurre blanc.”

If you didn’t respond fast enough or well enough, you were put on notice. If your game didn’t shape up immediately, you were gone.

I took away lifelong lessons about staff management from Stocker, but I also learned about fairness. Stocker rewarded the hardworking crew in ways that mattered. If you did your job well, he made sure that your days off would be scheduled consecutively, so you could take advantage of Interlaken’s central locale and take the night train to Paris or make the two-hour trip to Milan. If you didn’t, he made sure you never got advance notice of your free days, which never came more than one by one.

The key, I realized, was to do the work and keep your mouth shut. This was easy for me on both fronts. I loved the work and I could barely speak the language.

I
WASN’T A
B
OY
S
COUT
. Like everyone else at Victoria, I went out at night once the dinner shift ended, and definitely had my share of fun. Because I spoke English well, I had an edge with the backpacking Yankee girls who were passing through as part of their summer adventure between college terms and who liked European guys who would buy them beer. But no matter how late I’d been out, I showed up at work the next morning an hour early.

The kitchen at dawn reminded me of a soccer field before a big match. The grass is perfectly mowed; the field is empty of people but full of anticipation. It was the calm before the day’s storm, and I used that time to get a jump on my tasks but also to study the menus and notices posted outside of Stocker’s office. The menus were in French, Italian, and German, so I brought along my pocket dictionaries and my journal and I copied each one down, from appetizers to desserts, looking up whatever I didn’t understand. I didn’t want Stocker to see
me, not that there was anything wrong with what I was doing. It was just that the less you put yourself in his line of vision, the better.

Just as I had stayed late working at Belle Avenue, I put in extra hours before and after my shifts, doing advance prep work in the mornings and meticulous cleanup at night. All I had to offer was my labor and my attention, and I was willing to give both. The only time I skipped out was for what had become, since my arrival, a daily ritual: throwing up. Every morning, I came into work and felt the familiar knot tie itself in my stomach. The knot would soon be followed by bile filling the back of my throat, and it was only a matter of time before I’d have to bolt to the bathroom. I’d experienced the problem now and then at my Göteborg jobs when the stress got too high, but now that I was completely without that hometown comfort zone, the frequency of the nausea ratcheted up to coincide with the increased pressures of the job.

For the most part, I was able to keep my nerves under wraps, doing my business quietly and then going right back to work. Until they installed a new key card entry system, and on the day the system went into effect, my card for the kitchen’s exit door demagnetized at the least opportune time. I panicked, and then I spewed. As the spilled contents of my stomach dripped down the face of the door, three
sauciers
came along, deftly stepping past while nodding at me and saying only, “
Guten tag. Wie gehts
, Mr. Samuelsson.” Take it easy.

As soon as I felt the first wave of queasiness each day, I looked for an opportunity to leave my station. I didn’t want to be noticed, which meant I couldn’t be away for more than five or six minutes. Health codes dictated that we leave our aprons in the kitchen so that we wouldn’t get any bacteria on them in the bathroom. But if I put mine on a peg, it was like a red flag showing I was gone. So I wore it to the bathroom and left it outside the door.